Projections 2017 - Review by Irina Leimbacher for FILM COMMENT (original) (raw)

PROJECTIONS : PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES ON FILM

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION The second edition of Projections has been substantially expanded with the inclusion of four new chapters: on Natural Born Killers, Dead Poets Society, Wag the dog and Kieslowski's marvellous cinematic trilogy, Three Colours Blue, White and Red. The opportunity to enlarge this edition has been afforded by the (to me surprising) fact that the first edition of 1996 has been sold out. I hope it would not be premature to see in this an indication that the philosophical interest in film is alive and well in South Africa. The new chapters are written in the same philosophical mode as the earlier ones, namely that of critical, cultural-philosophical reflection on the themes, as well as the cinematic modes of presentation of these themes, as they are addressed in the films in question. As readers will notice, this is done in such a way as to make the relevant themes as accessible as possible, in the hope that the films dealt with here may gain greater meaning in the light of these philosophical interpretations. Have a good read!

Hven: "Cinema and Narrative Complexity", Amsterdam UP, Series: 'Film Culture in Transition', 2017

Since the mid-1990s, a number of films from international filmmakers have experimented with increasingly complicated narrative strategies-including such hits as Run, Lola, Run, 21 Grams, and Memento. This book sets those films and others in context with earlier works that tried new narrative approaches, including Stage Fright and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to show how they reveal the limitations of most of our usual tools for analysing film. In light of that, Steffen Hven argues for the deployment of an 'embodied' reconfiguration of the cinematic experience, one that allows us to rethink such core constituents of narrative understanding as cognition, emotion, and affect.

FilmForum 2017 XV MAGIS Film Studies Spring School 29 March – 2 April, Gorizia

Nostalgic trends in contemporary TV series. One of the most effective insights of postmodern theory of narrative was that “nostalgia for the present” defined by Jameson in Postmodernism. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In the narrative arts there was a trend of works based on “list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities”; in the field of cinematographic productions, Jameson called this kind of movie “nostalgia film”, citing American Graffiti and Chinatown as exemplary cases of movies set in another era, as historical films, but that cannot be confused with them because the “nostalgia film” focuses on “imaginary style of real past”. In this trend there were also movies which connect past and present (Body Heat, Blue Velvet, Something Wild), showing “a collective unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own present at the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, which seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various stereotypes of the past”. Three decades away from these insights we start again to talk about nostalgia as the hallmark of many contemporary narrative works, especially in the field of television series in which some scholars actually find a strong trend towards the nostalgic. Katherina Niemeyer and Daniela Wentz assert this kind of nostalgia consists of: “reconstructing and reimagining the past visually, discursively and historically by portraying and referring to the key political, social, economic and aesthetic elements of former times”. We can find examples of that sort both in American and European series such as Stranger Things, Mad Men, Narcos, Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey, Deutschland 83, Aquarius, 1992, The Get-Down, Manhattan and many others. This trend also includes television series set in the present or in the future, because these narratives display a vast amount of time, and try to establish the narrative world’s present on a complex backstory: Daredevil has a vast amount the time to go back and develop the relationship of the hero as a child with his father; Luke Cage can use an entire episode to narrate the origin of the superpowers of Luke. So rethink the postmodernism can mean exploring some intuitions and tools, pondering the topical relation between media and nostalgia.