A Particular Incoherence: Some Films by Vivienne Dick (original) (raw)
Related papers
A particular incoherence: some films of Vivienne Dick
2009
A Particular Incoherence: Some works of Vivienne Dick Notably, the early work of Vivienne Dick is prescient in its visualization of the tropes and processes of globalization and in the use of the fragment to offer an experiential rendering of life. Most of the existing writing firmly situates her work within the 'No Wave' filmmakers of New York in the early 1980s or within the framework of an emergent Irish film avant-garde. I will be building on those writings that situate the films although I am not concerned with precedents or definition particularly 1 .
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2007
Who would expect that during these three days, from the small, picturesque town of St. Andrews in Scotland, one would be able to travel, with the power of words and moving images, to such places as Iran, Japan, New Zealand, the Middle East, Canada, Denmark and so on, to all these places that might be considered to be at the periphery of the world? But what is the periphery? And what is the centre? This question was frequently raised throughout the discussions although no definite, clear answer was reached. The centre assumes we already know it, as John Caughie put it, the periphery always explains itself to the centre. The borders are always shifting and this division tends to be only a schema; a dangerous schema as Bill Marshall maintains, but one that has sparked some heated debates. The first thing that comes to mind when we speak of peripheral cinema is minor cinemas and small nations (such as Denmark, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand), indigenous cinemas (the cinema of the Maori in New Zealand, of the aboriginals in Australia), non-Western cinemas and those that subvert traditions. Broadly speaking American cinema, and Hollywood cinema in particular, is situated at the centre because it dominates the market, while the periphery struggles to maintain itself through cultural policies to increase production and audience attendance. (Kristian Fielgeson highlighted the policies implemented by European countries in order to protect their film industries while Duncan Petrie mentioned the example of the Film Commission in New Zealand.) But the periphery is not confined to national borders. Collaboration between small nations that have a feeling of shared culture is a recent phenomenon, defined by Mette Hjort as 'homophilic trasnationalism' that permits competition with larger and stronger cinemas while allowing a greater sense of freedom from production constraints and less risk in experimentation. Furthermore, even within the national, a term that perhaps indicates the centre, we can find the peripheral, internal peripheries, undercurrents in the image system, as Rod Stoneman argues in relation to Irish cinema. The use of digital technology (video) and the Internet have facilitated this. Contributor details Fani Golemi is a Ph.D. student at the University of Bristol. The subject of her research is Iranian Cinema seen through a socio-political and psychoanalytic perspective. Contact: Fani Golemi, (From October 07
Geopolitics, 2005
Jameson's notion of the geopolitical aesthetic through an analysis of Jameson's now classic reading of The Perfumed Nightmare; this film is central to his concept of the utopic character of film more generally and, moreover, to his argument on the embeddedness of Third World representations within a global, capitalist system. We suggest that, although Jameson acknowledges the underlying constructed and relational character of ontological categories such as film (despite their reification under capitalism), his theory of historical materialism demands that they also be understood as formed with regard to a socio-economic totality. And, because the recognition of a totality requires a master narrative within which all can be understood and framed within a logic of equivalence, Jameson must by default conceive of epistemology as fundamentally divided between a true and a false consciousness. Taking our own cue from recent developments in anti-essentialist thought, we conceive of such cultural forms as the temporarily fixed embodiment of broader-scale discourses that continually construct and deconstruct the world as we know it, including our understandings of the 'real' as well as the 'economic', the 'political' and the 'cultural'. In our own re-imagining of The Perfumed Nightmare, we provide a partial response to this, noting how these realms are constituted from the temporary 'fixing' of a series of people-and place-based identities, such as those constituted under the rubric The Perilous Place of Third Cinema 291 of 'gender'. Accordingly, we re-work the term 'cognitive mapping' as the attempt to outline the web of significations within which objects are embedded as well as the concomitant lines of fracture and contradiction that allow for such objects to become meaningful in a host of other contexts.
Geopolitics, Vol. 10, pp. 290-315. Reprinted in Cinema and Popular Geopolitics, M. Power and Andrew Crampton (eds.). 2007. New York: Routledge, pp. 95-120.
Jameson's notion of the geopolitical aesthetic through an analysis of Jameson's now classic reading of The Perfumed Nightmare; this film is central to his concept of the utopic character of film more generally and, moreover, to his argument on the embeddedness of Third World representations within a global, capitalist system. We suggest that, although Jameson acknowledges the underlying constructed and relational character of ontological categories such as film (despite their reification under capitalism), his theory of historical materialism demands that they also be understood as formed with regard to a socio-economic totality. And, because the recognition of a totality requires a master narrative within which all can be understood and framed within a logic of equivalence, Jameson must by default conceive of epistemology as fundamentally divided between a true and a false consciousness. Taking our own cue from recent developments in anti-essentialist thought, we conceive of such cultural forms as the temporarily fixed embodiment of broader-scale discourses that continually construct and deconstruct the world as we know it, including our understandings of the 'real' as well as the 'economic', the 'political' and the 'cultural'. In our own re-imagining of The Perfumed Nightmare, we provide a partial response to this, noting how these realms are constituted from the temporary 'fixing' of a series of people-and place-based identities, such as those constituted under the rubric The Perilous Place of Third Cinema 291 of 'gender'. Accordingly, we re-work the term 'cognitive mapping' as the attempt to outline the web of significations within which objects are embedded as well as the concomitant lines of fracture and contradiction that allow for such objects to become meaningful in a host of other contexts.
This chapter suggests that one way of dislodging film (studies) from its ‘Western’ hegemonic locations is to put ‘the body’, and questions of embodiment, at the centre of inquiry, in order to challenge the taken-for-granted orientations, perspectives and (embodied) points of view of traditionally ‘Western’ film (criticism). This includes the bodies in film, the bodies of film, as well as the bodies ‘behind’, ‘in front’ and ‘around’ film that constitute the embodied contexts for its production, consumption and theorisation. The critique of the ‘Western’ standpoint and orientation of much contemporary film theory and criticism presented here, makes use of phenomenological debates around subjectivity as embodied and lived, as well as of queer critiques of traditional phenomenology, in order to begin to unpack the ways in which ‘Western’, white, heterosexual, male subjectivity has been the structuring norm that film (theory) has been orientated ‘around’ (Ahmed 2006: 115).