Books by Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez
Comparative Cinema, 2022
Born out of modern cinema, the essay film departed from the dominant forms of fiction and documen... more Born out of modern cinema, the essay film departed from the dominant forms of fiction and documentary cinema in order to explore an unknown territory defined by subjectivity, hybridization and reflection, evolving to become “a form that thinks,” as Jean-Luc Godard defined it. The final decades of the twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of the essay film, which was enabled by postmodern thought and culture, as well as by the development of video recording technology. In this mode, works by Chris Marker, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonas Mekas, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Guy Maddin, Peter Watkins, Chantal Akerman, Alexander Kluge or Johan van der Keuken, among many others, developed a practice of audiovisual thinking for which Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988−1998) could be considered the epitome, marking a turning point that also took place at the end of the century. Over the last twenty years, this essayistic practice has proliferated due to the digital revolution, facilitating diverse experiences of subjectivity
and intimacy, and multiplying the possibilities of audiovisual editing; that is, of the very thinking process that defines this filmic form. Taking this itinerary into account, this issue proposes to analyze the manifestations of the contemporary essay film in relation to its audiovisual thinking process in search of the connotations, tendencies,
specificities and transformations of this audiovisual form in the twenty-first century.
Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación audiovisual y publicidad, 2019
Ediciones Shangrila, 2018
Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Marguerite Duras, Alain Cavalier, Chantal Akerm... more Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Marguerite Duras, Alain Cavalier, Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel o Arnaud Desplechin son algunos de los nombres que surgen de nuestra memoria cinematográfica si intentamos evocar la cartografía De un cine epistolar francés. Este estudio tiene como objetivo proporcionar el trazo de esa geografía fílmica y realizar su análisis, el de la presencia de la materia epistolar en el cine francés moderno y contemporáneo. Tras exponer la tipología de inserción del elemento epistolar en la obra cinematográfica y sintetizar su uso en el cine clásico, la primera parte del estudio analiza la presencia de la materia epistolar en las obras de la Nouvelle Vague y el Nouveau Cinéma. La voz-yo epistolar genera un film carta de indiscutible relevancia en el nacimiento y consolidación del film-ensayo que posibilita también la experiencia límite de hibridación entre cine y literatura. La misiva se inserta en el relato fílmico mediante una nueva representación moderna de la enunciación epistolar que experimenta con las posibilidades de inscripción de la misiva sobre la pantalla cinematográfica, hibridando también materiales documentales y ficcionales. La segunda parte analiza la evolución de la materia epistolar bajo el nuevo paradigma posmoderno. Se produce entonces la aparición del film epistolar como nueva estructura discursiva. El film carta evoluciona en el espacio del film-ensayo y se adentra en los territorios de la ficción y la autoficción. Surge una representación posmoderna de la enunciación epistolar donde se complejiza la intelección de la misiva. Además, se instrumentaliza una nueva forma epistolar, la vídeo carta, y se produce la focalización en la recepción y lectura de la misiva a través de una nueva voz-tú epistolar. Se configura así una cartografía epistolar que se constituye también como lugar de encuentro de sus textos fílmicos. Cartas de amor y desamor, amistad y familia, reflexión histórica y revolución política, subjetividad e imaginación, identidad y alteridad, memoria y olvido… Misivas fílmicas todas ellas destinadas finalmente al espectador.
Papers by Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez
Arte, individuo y sociedad, 2023
The displacement from the essay film to the video installation has in Chris Marker one of its fir... more The displacement from the essay film to the video installation has in Chris Marker one of its first and most relevant figures. The comparative study of Zapping Zone. Proposal for an imaginary television (1990) and Level Five (1996) allows for the analysis of the construction and complexification, and the deconstruction and saturation processes that take place between the most complex expression of the Markerian essay film and its transformation into the video installation. Zapping Zone responds to the embodiment of both the magmatic stage of the postmodern audiovisual era and the starting point of the filmmaker's work (documentaries, essay films, video installations, etc.), which would be the opposite of the writer's blank page: a saturated world of images that needs to be selected, analyzed and worked on in order to build meaning. Level Five offers the filmmaker's reflection on that same reality, applied to the Battle of Okinawa, through a complex audiovisual thinking process that hybridizes different types of images-documentary and fictional; analogue and electronic-devices-epistolary video diary, video game and cyberspace-and their authorial subjectivities-Laura, Laura's lover and Chris-in order to reflect on the relationship between these audiovisual forms and spaces and the thematic axis memory pain oblivion.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2023
This article aims to analyse women’s essay films in Francophone Europe, exploring the presence of... more This article aims to analyse women’s essay films in Francophone Europe, exploring the presence of a gendered audiovisual thinking process, and considering both the formal aspect and the thematic dimension. The research allows the characterisation of a female audiovisual thinking process determined by both self-representation and the vindication
of women filmmakers as creators of images and women’s topics through the reflection on female alterities. First, the research analyses the enunciative devices used and their evolution—the (self-)portrait, the letter, the diary, the autobiography, autofiction and dialogue—to create essay films whose audiovisual thinking processes are mainly generated within the images through the mise-en-scène, and through the juxtaposition
between visual image and sound image. Second, the study analyses the topics addressed, which mostly revolve around gender issues and trace a path that goes from gaze to alterity, intersubjectivity, and sisterhood. Women’s gaze makes possible the reflection on feminine alterities in order to confront or identify with them, leading to the construction of intersubjective spaces for reflection that become artistic practices of sisterhood. Finally, the study concludes women have been delayed in reaching the position of the essayist as a manipulator of images, due to the need to vindicate the figure of the woman filmmaker understood as a creator of images.
Comparative Cinema, 2022
This article aims to carry out an analysis of the spectatorial position as a thinking space for t... more This article aims to carry out an analysis of the spectatorial position as a thinking space for the contemporary essay film based on the comparative study of two Francophone films: Face aux fantômes (Jean-Louis Comolli and Sylvie Lindeperg, 2009) and Jaurès (Vincent Dieutre, 2012). The dialogism of the essay film, the interpellation to the spectator to produce self-reflection on their position and critical thinking about the images shown, is then generated from the premise of identification. The analysis shows how Face aux fantômes offers an audiovisual thinking process on the mobilization of the gaze of the emancipated spectator theorized by Jacques Rancière, while Jaurès provokes the same reflection from the
opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.
Studies in European Cinema, 2022
Abstract
The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. C... more Abstract
The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière's concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process thus develops through a succession of sentence-images, which forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens –film image, television image, electronic image and video game image– in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard's theory of the image, Marc Augé's of non-places or Fredric Jameson's of the postmodern historicism.
Keywords: essay film, cinematic thinking, postmodernity, time-image.
New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2021
Autofiction as realised in cinematic practice adds a figure of identification to the literary aut... more Autofiction as realised in cinematic practice adds a figure of identification to the literary author-narrator-character: that of actor/actress. The filmmaker, playing him/herself, employs innovative strategies in audiovisual narration to generate this autofictional identity. This article analyses these strategies as seen in French cinema, on which literary autofiction has a determining influence. My analysis of this practice is mapped along a double axis. The first classifies the films in a progressive evolution from the factualisation of the fictional (documentary’s starting point) to the fictionalisation of the factual (fiction’s starting point). The second analyses the films with regard to the filmmaker’s presence: from the filmeur/filmeuse who stands behind the camera and records the images him/herself to the acteur/actrice who exclusively appears in front of the camera. This cinematic exploration of the self thus situates the filmmaker in all possible positions so as to develop autofictional strategies for exploring postmodern identity and alterity, using parody and irony as effective tools. In this laboratory of the self, filmmakers experiment with the topics they address – reflection on cinema, artistic exploration, self-knowledge, ideological reasoning, and sociopolitical criticism – as well as create valuable screen manifestations of resilience, empathy, sorority, and even pedagogy.
Escritura e imagen, 2021
El presente artículo pretende analizar los textos de Roland Barthes sobre la práctica cinematográ... more El presente artículo pretende analizar los textos de Roland Barthes sobre la práctica cinematográfica. Su resistencia al cine, vinculada a su escritura autobiográfica, se revela como la imposibilidad de fetichizar la imagen en movimiento, que debe entonces ser reducida a lo fotográfico, definiendo así un sentido obtuso que opone lo fílmico al cine. Sin embargo, a través de la concepción del sentido suspendido, Barthes detectó el surgimiento de una modernidad cinematográfica que era capaz, precisamente, de superar ese límite; a saber, destruir la imagen-acción y su temporalidad sin detener el movimiento. La elección de obras de Buñuel, Bergman, Resnais, Pasolini y Antonioni configura una concepción del sentido suspendido vinculada a la suspensión de la temporalidad y el extrañamiento que prefiguran la imagen-tiempo deleuziana. Barthes halla en la modernidad cinematográfica el punto ciego de su capacidad analítica, la de una imagen que suspende el sentido sin detener su movimiento. Palabras clave: Roland Barthes; sentido suspendido; modernidad cinematográfica, imagen-tiempo [
Roland Barthes, the filmic versus cinema. The suspended sense as definition of cinematic modernity Abstract. This article aims to analyse Roland Barthes' texts on film practice. His resistance to cinema, linked to his autobiographical writing, is revealed as the impossibility of fetishizing the moving image, which must then be reduced to the photographic, thus defining the obtuse sense. However, through the conception of suspended sense, Barthes detected the emergence of cinematic modernity that, precisely, was capable of overcoming this limit; that is to say, to destroy the action-image and its temporality without stopping its movement. The choice of works by Buñuel, Bergman, Resnais, Pasolini and Antonioni establishes a conception of the suspended sense linked to the suspension of temporality and estrangement that prefigure the Deleuzian time-image. Barthes finds in modern cinema the blind spot of his analytical capacity, that of an image that suspends sense without stopping its movement.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2021
The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the ... more The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals’ role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la Victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to embody an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2021
This article aims to analyse of the relevance of female authorship in the creation of contemporar... more This article aims to analyse of the relevance of female authorship in the creation of contemporary epistolary cinema, focusing on letter-films and filmic correspondences. The works of various filmmakers are essential to understand the evolution of these enunciation devices since the emergence of cinematic modernity to the present moment. Since Agnès Varda represented an epistolary correspondence between women-L'une chante, l'autre pas (1977)-and Marguerite Duras created an epistolary diptych as two identity-alterity variations-Aurélia Stéiner (1979)-, other women filmmakers have developed this cinematic form. Letter-films delve into epistolary seriality and materiality-Cartas visuales (Tiziana Panizza, 2005-2012) and Envíos (Jeannette Muñoz, 2005-2017)– and deepens the concept of alterity –Elena (Petra Costa, 2012). Filmic correspondences work on emotion-image –This World (Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1996), In Between Days (Naomi Kawase and Isaki Lacuesta, 2009)– and shows female intersubjectivity –So Yong Kim (2011), Life May Be (Mania Akbari, Mark Cousins, 2014), A Moon for my Father (Mania Akbari, Douglas White, 2019), Transoceánicas (Meritxell Colell Aparicio, Lucía Vassallo, 2020). Women’s letter-films and filmic correspondences delve into the exploration of intimate space, authorial vindication and epistolary materiality, in order to create diverse experiences of female alterity and intersubjectivity.
Femnist Media Studies, 2021
This article aims to analyse female authorship in the materialisations of contemporary epistolary... more This article aims to analyse female authorship in the materialisations of contemporary epistolary cinema, focusing on epistolary films and epistolary essay films. The works of various filmmakers are essential to understand the evolution of this enunciation device and the exploration of female alterities materialised through it. Women filmmakers' epistolary practices delve into the exploration of intimate space, authorial vindication, epistolary materiality, intersubjectivity and cinematic thinking to create diverse experiences of female alterity, developing this postmodern paradigm inherent in epistolary device. Since Chantal Akerman started the practice of the epistolary film with News from Home (1977), other women filmmakers have developed this cinematic form. The reading of a personal correspondence allows the exploration of female intimate alterities –Measures of Distance (1988), Punto impropio (2015), A Minha Avó Trelotótó (2018). Besides, the epistolary film is fictionalised, displacing it to the intellectual space –From Hetty to Nancy (1997), Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009). Other people’s real correspondence is also instrumentalised to create their recreations and representations, vindicating female alterities both socially and personally –Letter #69 (2016), The Dreamed Ones (2016). Finally, women filmmakers addressed the cinematic form of the essay film –Letters from Panduranga (2015), Correspôndencias (2016).
Romance Quarterly, 2021
Yves Navarre's literary work is one of the greatest materialisations of epistolary writing in pos... more Yves Navarre's literary work is one of the greatest materialisations of epistolary writing in postmodern literature. This article aims to analyse the different elements and procedures through which the epistolary matter becomes a practice of postmodern writing that continues to evolve throughout his prolix literary oeuvre. First, the epistolary writing of fictional characters becomes an element of the renarrativisation that participates in processes of discontinuity: a progressive fragmental writing-from his first novel Lady Black (1971) to the last Dernier dimanche avant la fin du siècle (1994)-and the hybridisation with diaristic writing and literary metadiscourse-Le Petit Galopin de nos corps (1977), Kurwenal ou la Part des êtres (1977), Le Temps voulu (1979), Romances sans paroles (1982). Besides, these same practices are brought into the autofictional space, where the possibilities of hypertextuality are further deepened by quotation, intertext and metadiscourse-Biographie (1981), Romans, un roman (1988). Finally, the two spaces converge in an auto/alter-fiction in which postmodern diversel materialises through experimentation with alterity, giving rise to récits indécidables-L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984), La terrasse des audiences au moment de l'adieu (1990). Throughout his entire literary work, and in all the aforementioned spaces, the abundant metadiscourse about epistolarity allows to draw a sort of postmodern phenomenology of epistolary activity.
Visual Studies, 2020
Rita Azevedo Gomes’ Correspondências (2016) draws on the epistolary correspondence between Sophi... more Rita Azevedo Gomes’ Correspondências (2016) draws on the epistolary correspondence between Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Jorge de Sena, as well as their respective poetic works, to build an epistolary-poetic, audio-visual and sensory-emotional kaleidoscope based on their reading, reciting and representation in different languages. In this way, the filmmaker generates a kind of phenomenology of reception that uses all the audiovisual possibilities: the different formats, digital and analogue; their multiple textures; and the diverse options of the texts enunciation. The experimentation with their different combinations, also using various image and sound effects, materialises in an epistolary-poetic essay film which reflects on the aesthetic experience and attains a hybrid, complex image defining contemporary cinema: between person and character, diegesis and extradiegesis, digital and analogue images, voice-in and voiceover, private and public, life and work, present and past, absence and presence, that is, between reproduction and representation. Azevedo’s essayistic reflection on creation, exile and absence is generated through parataxic thinking and interstitial thinking that create dialectical and symbolic sentence-images. Thus, Correspondências becomes an avant-garde expression of both contemporary epistolary cinema and contemporary essay film.
Çedille. Revista de estudios franceses, 2020
La obra literaria de Yves Navarre es una de las máximas representantes del uso de la materia epis... more La obra literaria de Yves Navarre es una de las máximas representantes del uso de la materia epistolar en la literatura francesa de la posmodernidad. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) es su única obra propiamente epistolar, exclusivamente compuesta por misivas. El presente artículo pretende analizar cómo el autor crea un roman épistolaire indécidable en el que la carta materializa los diferentes elementos de la posmodernidad literaria-renarrativización, discontinuidad e hipertextualidad-hasta alcanzar su saturación. Navare genera así una experiencia límite del género epistolar donde el diversel posmoderno surge de la transformación de la ficción y la autoficción en una auto/alter-ficción que permite explorar la alteridad escritural.
L'oeuvre littéraire d'Yves Navarre est l'une des plus grandes représentantes de l'utilisation de la matière épistolaire dans la littérature française postmoderne. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) est son seul roman proprement épistolaire, composé exclusivement par lettres. Le présent article se propose d'analyser comment l'auteur crée un roman épistolaire indécidable dans lequel la lettre matérialise les différents éléments de la postmodernité litté-raire-renarrativisation, discontinuité et hypertextualité-jusqu'à atteindre sa saturation. Ainsi, Navarre genère une expérience limite du genre épistolaire où le diversel postmoderne surgit de la transformation de la fiction et l'autofiction en une auto/alter-fiction qui permet l'exploration de l'altérité scripturale.
Yves Navarre's oeuvre is one of the greatest representatives of the use of epistolary material in French postmodern literature. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) is his only epistolary novel, exclusively composed of letters. The present article aims to analyse how the author creates a roman épistolaire indécidable in which the letter materialises the different elements of literary postmodernity –renarrativization, discontinuity and hypertextuality– until reaching its saturation. Thus, Navarre generates an experience of the epistolary genre in which the diversel postmoderne arises from the transformation of fiction and autofiction into an auto/alter-fiction that allows to explore the writing alterity.
Communication & Society , 2020
The television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is an appropriation, intertextuality and transfi... more The television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) is an appropriation, intertextuality and transfiction exercise of four modern myths from nineteenth-century literature-Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1891) and Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)-to which the mythological figure of the lycanthrope is added. This myth syncretism is completed by linking these characters, located in the Victorian London of the late 19th century, with different mythologies: biblical, Egyptian, American West, Native American or witch mythology. The article aims to analyse, focusing on the final season of the series, how the narrative complexity of contemporary seriality and the different materialisations of postmodern image-multiplex-image, distance-image and excess-image-become perfect tools to both narrate the identity search of the different characters and subvert and resemantise these modern myths. Their identity searches emerge from an ontology of otherness that defines postmodernity-from otherness of conscience to otherness of other people-, using the mythical figure of the monster. It allows then the subversion and resemantisation of each mythical character, generating a kind of postmodern mythology that reflects on our contemporaneity: feminist emancipation and violent revolution, patriarchy and machismo, family institution, social marginalisation, individualism and lack of commitment, classism and racism.
Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación audiovisual y publicidad, 2019
El presente monográfico surge del interés por cartografiiar las prácticas epistolares del cine... more El presente monográfico surge del interés por cartografiiar las prácticas epistolares del cine contemporáneo. Tras los estudios más destacados dedicados al análisis de la forma epistolar en el ámbito audiovisual (Rollet, 1988; Naficy, 2001; Cloarec, 2007; Haroche- Bouzinac, 2010; Gallafent, 2013; Hamaide-Jager y Heitz, 2014, Monterrubio, 2018; entre otros), nos parece imprescindible abordar el estudio de la enunciación epistolar en la creación fílmica reciente, la de un cine contemporáneo donde este dispositivo parecía vaticinarse como extinto –en su producción tradicional– o banalizado –en sus actualizaciones digitales–. Sin embargo, la evidente fortaleza de la materia epistolar en la creación actual parece contradecir ambos pronósticos para situar la misiva, y su naturaleza intermedial, en un espacio identitario y simbólico, subjetivo y memorístico, que evidencia la necesidad de contarse a otro, en el amplio espectro que abarca desde la extimidad posmoderna al aislamiento de la atomización social. Surgen entonces diversos y atractivos interrogantes en torno a este planteamiento: ¿aparecen nuevas formas y/o enunciaciones epistolares en la narración audiovisual del siglo XXI?, ¿se instrumentaliza el dispositivo en torno a temáticas concretas?, ¿se relaciona su uso con las prácticas epistolares de las diferentes cinematografías?, ¿podríamos determinar la presencia de especificidades en la epistolaridad del cine contemporáneo? El interés por plantear estas cuestiones de forma global y abierta impuso como premisa la inclusión de obras de la mayor diversidad posible, que dieran cuenta de las prácticas epistolares actuales a lo largo y ancho del planeta. La materialización de ese anhelo constata la evidencia: la relevancia de la materia epistolar en el audiovisual actual. Son muchas las obras y los cineastas que quedan fuera de este volumen, a pesar del encomiable esfuerzo de los autores por presentar corpus extensos que nos permitan dibujar un muy relevante mapa de la epistolaridad en el cine actual.
Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación auidiovisual y comunicación, 2019
Abstract. This article analyses the practice of filmic correspondence based on the contemporary c... more Abstract. This article analyses the practice of filmic correspondence based on the contemporary concept of intersubjectivity: the space where subjectivities meet and share in order to reach new perspectives and results. The analysis of the most relevant filmic correspondences, generated over more than three decades -from Video Letter (Tanikawa and Terayama, 1983) to Life May Be (Cousins and Akbari, 2014)-, will allow us to determine how this displacement from subjectivity to intersubjectivity happens, through which epistolary constructions, about which filmic practices, spaces and topics, and with which results. The study will then conclude how the epistolary intersubjective attempt materialises in different dynamics: starting point of a shared reflection; result of the epistolary exchange; search for a creative space; dialectics between different film practices; simulacrum that seems an intersubjectivity that it actually avoids; and even its impossibility, when the intersubjective attempt threatens the sub-jectivities involved.
Resumen: El presente artículo analiza la práctica de la correspondencia fílmica a partir del concepto contemporáneo de intersubjetividad: el lugar donde confluyen y se comparten las subjetividades a fin de alcanzar nuevas perspectivas y resultados. El análisis de las correspondencias más relevantes, ge-neradas a lo largo ya de más de tres décadas-desde Video Letter (Tanikawa y Terayama, 1983) a Life May Be (Cousins y Akbari, 2014)-, nos permitirá determinar cómo se produce este desplazamiento de la subjetividad a la intersubjetividad, mediante qué construcciones epistolares, en torno a qué prácticas fílmicas, espacios y temáticas, y con qué resultados. Concluiremos entonces cómo el ensayo intersub-jetivo epistolar se materializa en diferentes dinámicas: punto de partida de una reflexión compartida; re-sultado del intercambio; búsqueda de un espacio creativo; dialéctica entre prácticas fílmicas diferentes; simulacro que aparenta una intersubjetividad que en realidad evita; e incluso su imposibilidad, cuando el intento intersubjetivo amenaza las subjetividades implicadas.
Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 2019
This article analyzes the enunciative devices of the contemporary essay film in Spain. It
studie... more This article analyzes the enunciative devices of the contemporary essay film in Spain. It
studies the most significant works, analyzing their textual enunciative devices and their
different functions: voice-over, voice-in, subtitles, intertitles, and the disappearance of
the text. It also analyzes the relationship between these devices and intermedial forms
(the diary, the letter, the self-portrait), audio-visual materials (the author’s own filming,
found footage, animation, photography, painting, etc.) and the rhetorical elements used
(juxtaposition, black screen, cross-fade, superimposition, deceleration, split screen, etc.).
It concludes that the contemporary Spanish essay film generates a progressive
deconstruction of essayistic subjectivity through procedures associated with the
enunciative devices analyzed—fictionalization, subtraction, deautomatization,
objectification, deintensification, decentering and erasure—which oscillate between the
poles of rational and emotional reflection.
Arte, individuo y sociedad, 2019
This article aims to analyse the cinematic practice of the filmeur through two of its top represe... more This article aims to analyse the cinematic practice of the filmeur through two of its top representatives in the French space: Joseph Morder and Alan Cavalier. Its purpose is, therefore, to determine the epistemological approaches and the aesthetic characteristics of this filmic experience developed in solitude, in which the filming becomes a “corporal and aesthetic act” characterised by subjectivity, privacy, immediacy and observation. The analysis of different works pertaining to both filmmakers—Lettre de Joseph Morder à Alain Cavalier (2005), Joseph Morder par Alain Cavalier (2006), J’aimerais partager le printemps avec quelqu’un (2007), Le Filmeur (2005) and others—will show how these experiences of reality go beyond the diaristic or autobiographical practices, since the narration is relegated in favour of the present and spontaneous experience of placing oneself “within the act of filming”. These intimate and minimalist practices of a filmic gesture of relinquishment are determined by the evolution of the technology used and its automatisms: in Morder’s case from the Super 8mm to the mobile phone and in Cavalier’s through his small digital camera. This filmic experience is defined by an epistemology of non-manipulation that becomes a transgression of the cinematic orthodoxy.
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Books by Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez
and intimacy, and multiplying the possibilities of audiovisual editing; that is, of the very thinking process that defines this filmic form. Taking this itinerary into account, this issue proposes to analyze the manifestations of the contemporary essay film in relation to its audiovisual thinking process in search of the connotations, tendencies,
specificities and transformations of this audiovisual form in the twenty-first century.
Papers by Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez
of women filmmakers as creators of images and women’s topics through the reflection on female alterities. First, the research analyses the enunciative devices used and their evolution—the (self-)portrait, the letter, the diary, the autobiography, autofiction and dialogue—to create essay films whose audiovisual thinking processes are mainly generated within the images through the mise-en-scène, and through the juxtaposition
between visual image and sound image. Second, the study analyses the topics addressed, which mostly revolve around gender issues and trace a path that goes from gaze to alterity, intersubjectivity, and sisterhood. Women’s gaze makes possible the reflection on feminine alterities in order to confront or identify with them, leading to the construction of intersubjective spaces for reflection that become artistic practices of sisterhood. Finally, the study concludes women have been delayed in reaching the position of the essayist as a manipulator of images, due to the need to vindicate the figure of the woman filmmaker understood as a creator of images.
opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.
The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière's concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process thus develops through a succession of sentence-images, which forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens –film image, television image, electronic image and video game image– in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard's theory of the image, Marc Augé's of non-places or Fredric Jameson's of the postmodern historicism.
Keywords: essay film, cinematic thinking, postmodernity, time-image.
Roland Barthes, the filmic versus cinema. The suspended sense as definition of cinematic modernity Abstract. This article aims to analyse Roland Barthes' texts on film practice. His resistance to cinema, linked to his autobiographical writing, is revealed as the impossibility of fetishizing the moving image, which must then be reduced to the photographic, thus defining the obtuse sense. However, through the conception of suspended sense, Barthes detected the emergence of cinematic modernity that, precisely, was capable of overcoming this limit; that is to say, to destroy the action-image and its temporality without stopping its movement. The choice of works by Buñuel, Bergman, Resnais, Pasolini and Antonioni establishes a conception of the suspended sense linked to the suspension of temporality and estrangement that prefigure the Deleuzian time-image. Barthes finds in modern cinema the blind spot of his analytical capacity, that of an image that suspends sense without stopping its movement.
L'oeuvre littéraire d'Yves Navarre est l'une des plus grandes représentantes de l'utilisation de la matière épistolaire dans la littérature française postmoderne. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) est son seul roman proprement épistolaire, composé exclusivement par lettres. Le présent article se propose d'analyser comment l'auteur crée un roman épistolaire indécidable dans lequel la lettre matérialise les différents éléments de la postmodernité litté-raire-renarrativisation, discontinuité et hypertextualité-jusqu'à atteindre sa saturation. Ainsi, Navarre genère une expérience limite du genre épistolaire où le diversel postmoderne surgit de la transformation de la fiction et l'autofiction en une auto/alter-fiction qui permet l'exploration de l'altérité scripturale.
Yves Navarre's oeuvre is one of the greatest representatives of the use of epistolary material in French postmodern literature. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) is his only epistolary novel, exclusively composed of letters. The present article aims to analyse how the author creates a roman épistolaire indécidable in which the letter materialises the different elements of literary postmodernity –renarrativization, discontinuity and hypertextuality– until reaching its saturation. Thus, Navarre generates an experience of the epistolary genre in which the diversel postmoderne arises from the transformation of fiction and autofiction into an auto/alter-fiction that allows to explore the writing alterity.
Resumen: El presente artículo analiza la práctica de la correspondencia fílmica a partir del concepto contemporáneo de intersubjetividad: el lugar donde confluyen y se comparten las subjetividades a fin de alcanzar nuevas perspectivas y resultados. El análisis de las correspondencias más relevantes, ge-neradas a lo largo ya de más de tres décadas-desde Video Letter (Tanikawa y Terayama, 1983) a Life May Be (Cousins y Akbari, 2014)-, nos permitirá determinar cómo se produce este desplazamiento de la subjetividad a la intersubjetividad, mediante qué construcciones epistolares, en torno a qué prácticas fílmicas, espacios y temáticas, y con qué resultados. Concluiremos entonces cómo el ensayo intersub-jetivo epistolar se materializa en diferentes dinámicas: punto de partida de una reflexión compartida; re-sultado del intercambio; búsqueda de un espacio creativo; dialéctica entre prácticas fílmicas diferentes; simulacro que aparenta una intersubjetividad que en realidad evita; e incluso su imposibilidad, cuando el intento intersubjetivo amenaza las subjetividades implicadas.
studies the most significant works, analyzing their textual enunciative devices and their
different functions: voice-over, voice-in, subtitles, intertitles, and the disappearance of
the text. It also analyzes the relationship between these devices and intermedial forms
(the diary, the letter, the self-portrait), audio-visual materials (the author’s own filming,
found footage, animation, photography, painting, etc.) and the rhetorical elements used
(juxtaposition, black screen, cross-fade, superimposition, deceleration, split screen, etc.).
It concludes that the contemporary Spanish essay film generates a progressive
deconstruction of essayistic subjectivity through procedures associated with the
enunciative devices analyzed—fictionalization, subtraction, deautomatization,
objectification, deintensification, decentering and erasure—which oscillate between the
poles of rational and emotional reflection.
and intimacy, and multiplying the possibilities of audiovisual editing; that is, of the very thinking process that defines this filmic form. Taking this itinerary into account, this issue proposes to analyze the manifestations of the contemporary essay film in relation to its audiovisual thinking process in search of the connotations, tendencies,
specificities and transformations of this audiovisual form in the twenty-first century.
of women filmmakers as creators of images and women’s topics through the reflection on female alterities. First, the research analyses the enunciative devices used and their evolution—the (self-)portrait, the letter, the diary, the autobiography, autofiction and dialogue—to create essay films whose audiovisual thinking processes are mainly generated within the images through the mise-en-scène, and through the juxtaposition
between visual image and sound image. Second, the study analyses the topics addressed, which mostly revolve around gender issues and trace a path that goes from gaze to alterity, intersubjectivity, and sisterhood. Women’s gaze makes possible the reflection on feminine alterities in order to confront or identify with them, leading to the construction of intersubjective spaces for reflection that become artistic practices of sisterhood. Finally, the study concludes women have been delayed in reaching the position of the essayist as a manipulator of images, due to the need to vindicate the figure of the woman filmmaker understood as a creator of images.
opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.
The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière's concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process thus develops through a succession of sentence-images, which forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens –film image, television image, electronic image and video game image– in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard's theory of the image, Marc Augé's of non-places or Fredric Jameson's of the postmodern historicism.
Keywords: essay film, cinematic thinking, postmodernity, time-image.
Roland Barthes, the filmic versus cinema. The suspended sense as definition of cinematic modernity Abstract. This article aims to analyse Roland Barthes' texts on film practice. His resistance to cinema, linked to his autobiographical writing, is revealed as the impossibility of fetishizing the moving image, which must then be reduced to the photographic, thus defining the obtuse sense. However, through the conception of suspended sense, Barthes detected the emergence of cinematic modernity that, precisely, was capable of overcoming this limit; that is to say, to destroy the action-image and its temporality without stopping its movement. The choice of works by Buñuel, Bergman, Resnais, Pasolini and Antonioni establishes a conception of the suspended sense linked to the suspension of temporality and estrangement that prefigure the Deleuzian time-image. Barthes finds in modern cinema the blind spot of his analytical capacity, that of an image that suspends sense without stopping its movement.
L'oeuvre littéraire d'Yves Navarre est l'une des plus grandes représentantes de l'utilisation de la matière épistolaire dans la littérature française postmoderne. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) est son seul roman proprement épistolaire, composé exclusivement par lettres. Le présent article se propose d'analyser comment l'auteur crée un roman épistolaire indécidable dans lequel la lettre matérialise les différents éléments de la postmodernité litté-raire-renarrativisation, discontinuité et hypertextualité-jusqu'à atteindre sa saturation. Ainsi, Navarre genère une expérience limite du genre épistolaire où le diversel postmoderne surgit de la transformation de la fiction et l'autofiction en une auto/alter-fiction qui permet l'exploration de l'altérité scripturale.
Yves Navarre's oeuvre is one of the greatest representatives of the use of epistolary material in French postmodern literature. L'Espérance de beaux voyages (1984) is his only epistolary novel, exclusively composed of letters. The present article aims to analyse how the author creates a roman épistolaire indécidable in which the letter materialises the different elements of literary postmodernity –renarrativization, discontinuity and hypertextuality– until reaching its saturation. Thus, Navarre generates an experience of the epistolary genre in which the diversel postmoderne arises from the transformation of fiction and autofiction into an auto/alter-fiction that allows to explore the writing alterity.
Resumen: El presente artículo analiza la práctica de la correspondencia fílmica a partir del concepto contemporáneo de intersubjetividad: el lugar donde confluyen y se comparten las subjetividades a fin de alcanzar nuevas perspectivas y resultados. El análisis de las correspondencias más relevantes, ge-neradas a lo largo ya de más de tres décadas-desde Video Letter (Tanikawa y Terayama, 1983) a Life May Be (Cousins y Akbari, 2014)-, nos permitirá determinar cómo se produce este desplazamiento de la subjetividad a la intersubjetividad, mediante qué construcciones epistolares, en torno a qué prácticas fílmicas, espacios y temáticas, y con qué resultados. Concluiremos entonces cómo el ensayo intersub-jetivo epistolar se materializa en diferentes dinámicas: punto de partida de una reflexión compartida; re-sultado del intercambio; búsqueda de un espacio creativo; dialéctica entre prácticas fílmicas diferentes; simulacro que aparenta una intersubjetividad que en realidad evita; e incluso su imposibilidad, cuando el intento intersubjetivo amenaza las subjetividades implicadas.
studies the most significant works, analyzing their textual enunciative devices and their
different functions: voice-over, voice-in, subtitles, intertitles, and the disappearance of
the text. It also analyzes the relationship between these devices and intermedial forms
(the diary, the letter, the self-portrait), audio-visual materials (the author’s own filming,
found footage, animation, photography, painting, etc.) and the rhetorical elements used
(juxtaposition, black screen, cross-fade, superimposition, deceleration, split screen, etc.).
It concludes that the contemporary Spanish essay film generates a progressive
deconstruction of essayistic subjectivity through procedures associated with the
enunciative devices analyzed—fictionalization, subtraction, deautomatization,
objectification, deintensification, decentering and erasure—which oscillate between the
poles of rational and emotional reflection.
Le présent article vise à analyser la présence de la matière épistolaire dans le rénouvellement littéraire matérialisé par les pratiques scripturales du Nouveau Roman et du Nouveau Théâtre. L’analyse de différents ouvrages –La Dernière Bande (1959) de Samuel Beckett, Le Fiston et Lettre morte (1959) de Robert Pinget, Histoire (1967) de Claude Simon, Correspondance et Réflexions (1968) de Louis Palomb, Aurélia Steiner (1979) de Marguerite Duras– nous permettra de déterminer comment leurs auteurs instrumentalisent la matière épistolaire pour montrer l›impossibilité de sa réalisation. Le dispositif épistolaire devient alors un outil des pratiques de rupture de ces nouvelles expériences littéraires, provoquant une métamorphose de la lettre essentielle pour son évolution dans l’espace littéraire et théâtral. La lettre est générée comme une expression radicale de la subjectivité et comme une négation de ses caractéristiques communicatives et de ses possibilités d’auto-objectivation ; elle montre une crise identitaire qui se matérialise dans l’incapacité de l’être humain à raconter et se raconter, à communiquer.
foundational experiences in a new contemporary cinema that challenged
the postmodern audiovisual hegemony of the early nineties:
Close-Up (1990) and Dream of Light (1992). To this end, my starting
point is the definition offered by Victor Erice of his way of understanding
the cinematic experience, which I also consider to be the
defining feature of this contemporary cinema: the fraternity between
reality and fiction. The analysis of the different elements of this fraternity
between documentary and fiction shows how both filmmakers
establish a new gaze that makes the film a poetic and self-reflexive
work. These cinematic experiences achieve a synthesis between
early cinema and cinematic modernity capable of problematising the
notion of realism in a quest for the revelation of a certain truth, contained
in reality, which only cinema can attain.
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Universidad Complutense de Madrid.15th -26th October
Complutense University of Madrid. 25th-27th October
La introducción del estudio presenta, en primer lugar, la definición del elemento epistolar –la carta personal– y su caracterización como práctica discursiva y como espacio de expresión psicológica. En segundo lugar, se expone el procedimiento de la investigación, que consta de dos entradas clasificatorias simultáneas: la tipología de inserción del elemento epistolar en la obra artística, tanto literaria como cinematográfica, y el estudio cronológico del periodo histórico propuesto a través de su división y emparejamiento en tres binomios literatura-cine. Tres binomios cronológicos que evidencian la evolución del uso de la materia epistolar en ambas disciplinas artísticas, a partir de la tipología definida, y que permiten analizar las relaciones entre literatura y cine en cada uno de ellos. De este modo, el estudio se desarrolla en tres capítulos que se corresponden con los tres binomios establecidos.
El primer binomio enfrenta la Modernidad literaria del s. XVIII con el Clasicismo cinematográfico de la primera mitad del s. XX. Esta confrontación nos permite abordar dos cuestiones preliminares de la investigación: la enunciación del elemento epistolar en la narración fílmica clásica y la adaptación cinematográfica de la novela epistolar en el espacio de clasicismo francés en su evolución desde el Réalisme poétique a la Tradition de la Qualité. A continuación, el segundo binomio compara la crisis de la Modernidad literaria que supone la aparición del Nouveau Roman y el Nouveau Théâtre con la irrupción de la Modernidad cinematográfica materializada en la Nouvelle Vague y el Nouveau Cinéma. El análisis comparado de los corpora literario y cinematográfico revela cómo se produce en este espacio la máxima colaboración entre ambas disciplinas artísticas, donde la materia epistolar tendrá una indiscutible relevancia. Finalmente, el tercer binomio aborda las práctica literarias y fílmicas pertenecientes a la Posmodernidad surgida a finales del s. XX y a su evolución a lo largo de este inicio del s. XXI. Un periodo en el que, si bien los lazos entre literatura y cine se destruyen en gran medida, ambas disciplinas presentan una evidente proliferación y evolución de la presencia de la materia epistolar. De este modo, la independencia de la literatura y el cine franceses en este periodo implica un uso de la materia epistolar focalizada en las especificidades discursivas de cada uno de sus lenguajes.
Completado el estudio de los tres binomios a través del análisis textual comparado de las diferentes obras que conforman los corpora literario y fílmico, éste permite exponer en las conclusiones finales una detallada descripción de la presencia de la materia epistolar y de su evolución en la literatura y el cine franceses del s. XX y XXI y la relevancia de las relaciones entre ambas disciplinas artísticas en las mismas.