Of Bodies, Changed to Different Bodies, Changed to Other Forms (original) (raw)
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Editorial: Cinema, the Body and Embodiment
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2012
The third issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image takes up the theme of embodiment and the body, its relationship to Cinema’s history (theory and practice), and its reawakening in a recent body of research which is attentive, not only to film, but also to new media practices. It encompasses the dismantling of one of the foundational theoretical perspectives of film studies for over a century — the metaphor of the disembodied eye — and focuses on a groundbreaking field which as been attempting to integrate the body in conceptual models for understanding art and cinematic spectatorship. It aims to be a contribution to the approaches which have been recently trying to show the fallacy of the distinction between the physical and the mental, focusing on the concept of embodiment taken, either as phenomenological encounter immersed in everyday practices, or as a material and physical process made of fluids, energies and forces. In both cases, the quest for understanding Cinema entails acknowledging its inherent sensuous qualities and recognizing that the intellectual, mental and cognitive activities must be reinterpreted as embodied and carnal. This new understanding of cinema’s spectatorship, which integrates the spectator’s body in the process of his/her emotional and mental encounter with images, has been accompanied by an ongoing development of the moving image’s sensuous and haptic qualities in contemporary world, media practices and artistic scene.
‘What is Body, What is Space?: Performance and the Cinematic Body in a Non-anthropocentric Cinema’
Arts, 2017
The assumption of a clear demarcation and hierarchy between figure and ground has long informed key approaches in film studies to bodies and space. However, many filmmakers working in both animation and live cinema have confounded this hierarchy, working with an integration of figure and ground on equal terms to explore the full performative potential of the ‘cinematic body’. In the animation work of Einar Baldvin, this strategy is an expressionist one, blurring the boundaries between figure and ground in order to project affective and psychic states onto the space around the body. In Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, this blurring of boundaries between figure and ground eschews an expressionist mode, working instead to render in aesthetic form a biophilosophy that emphasizes the continuity between bodies and environment to explore the possibilities of non-anthropocentric cinematic modes. An experimental writing style here serves to trace the energetic unfolding of these strategies across both films in order to frame the question, ‘what is body here, what is space’, and to ask how we as viewers engage with this embodied mode. http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/6/4/19/htm
The Body as Is: The Copula of the (Cinematic) Body
Signs, 2008
This paper examines the body in cinema as a type of copula between the narrative of the film and the act of spectating. The cinematic body is seen as a type of hinge between what is represented (with its narrative force) and the processes of becoming a spectator of a film. Part of the analysis involves a comparison between the semiotic and philosophical ideas of CS Peirce with the works of Freud and Lacan. The paper examines how we might use a combination of these theories to compose a new theory of the cinematic body. Examples are drawn from the films of Malick, and Lynch, and the paper concludes with some of the implications of Bergson and Deleuze for these issues.
THE CINEMATIC BODY REDUX I wrote The Cinematic Body more than fifteen years ago. It is hard for me today even to remember or reconstruct the mindset, and the wider intellectual climate, that went into the writing of that book. I think that I was trying to negotiate between my rampant cinephilia -something that I still wallow in, unapologetically, today --and an equally compulsive intellectualizing drive: a need to theorize, to abstract, and at the limit to reduce the messy particulars of experience to their ultimate metaphysical roots. The way that I found to reconcile these two imperatives was to theorize the inadequacy of theory, to transform the resistance of the cinematic object to its metaphysical reduction into something that in its own right became a basic metaphysical principle. In this sense, I "proved" my thesis only, and precisely, to the extent that I showed, inadvertently, how a drive towards metaphysical speculation is itself as irreducible, as unavoidable, as the demands of what Cronenberg calls the "uncontrollable flesh."
The Body in John Cassavete's Filmmaking and its Consideration for the Performance
2020
The present paper intends to investigate the body in John Cassavetes' filmmaking under the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and identify its contribution to the craft of the contemporary actor. Considering the craft of acting as a fundamental factor in a piece of art, this work attempts to rethink the affective potentialities of the body, especially, in the cinematographic structure conceived by Deleuze as time-image, in which Cassavetes' work would be part of. Within these boundaries, Brecht's concept of gestus will allow us to find a new meaning for the body in a cinematographic work, surpassing fixed or disciplined social postures and presenting itself in a latent state, where the gestus exceeds the individual and reaches the collective. In this sense, the actor's body will be seen as a generator of fundamental instants for the development of a piece of work, regardless of the character, but what this character and this body can achieve. The pregnant moment will be painted by the actor's gestus, which pulses life and poetry.
Ontology and the Aesthetics of Cinematographic Bodies
2018
If it is true, as Bergson claimed, that the universe is the sum of images (less than “objective” things but more than “subjective” representations), and if it is correct, as Deleuze said, that this hypothesis bears direct consequences for our understanding of the cinematographic art, then the analysis of cinematographic images and, especially, of the cinematographic images of the body (this living part of matter, this incarnated form of consciousness) can provide not only interesting aesthetic comments about specific directors and films, but also a philosophical understanding of the diverse modes of the sensible incarnation of human bodies. Interestingly enough, the more we believe in the truth of aesthetic images, the more we believe in the ontological reality of the body, that is, the more does ontological reality become, essentially, “imaginal.”