The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Cinematic Ontology (original) (raw)
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Studies in European Cinema, 2022
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.
"What is Postsecular Cinema?: An Introduction"
2018
This is the opening chapter of our edited volume: Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier (SUNY Press, 2018). See link below for the PDF. The question of belief is central to the work of the three most important inspirations for the development of what has come to be known as film-philosophy: André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, and Stanley Cavell. Nowhere is this question more pressing and evident than in the genre that we call here 'postsecular cinema.' The notion of postsecular cinema is quite elastic. The term captures the work of those filmmakers whose films explicitly hover over that grey zone that dissolves the strict boundaries that are often established between belief and unbelief. Terrence Malick and Lars von Trier in this sense are truly exemplary. Other critically acclaimed filmmakers who have consistently staked out this region include Dietrich Brüggemann, the Dardenne brothers, Amos Gitai, Carlos Reygadas, Abbas Kiarostami, Bruno Dumont, Ulrich Seidl, Albert Serra, Béla Tarr, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time
From the back cover: "‘Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' represents an advanced, sophisticated, extremely well informed and challenging contribution to the rapidly growing area of film-philosophy scholarship. It will become an important moment in (re)establishing the philosophical significance of cinema (and film studies’ efforts in addressing this) well before the current trend in Anglo-American Philosophy’s 'discovering' of film emerged. . . . Ford draws on a wide range of research across film, modernist cultural and aesthetic theory and continental philosophical terrains. The work engages both with more recent film-philosophy scholarship and the disciplinary resources of film studies work on the movements and individual filmmakers in question. A successful and important contribution to scholarship on these films, their historical and aesthetic significance and their capacity to 'do' philosophy." — Patrick Crogan, University of the West of England, UK "Often, work in this area is far too devoted to a particular theoretical corpus and tends to lose originality; alternatively it falls into being a merely impressionistic mention of philosophy to make otherwise unremarkable claims. Hamish Ford’s book is remarkable for its engagement with the deepest problems of modernist aesthetics and the presentation of time. He works closely with cinema, philosophy and criticism while always maintaining his own argumentative position." — Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USA "Hamish Ford’s energetic and erudite work is both theoretically and historically engaged and highly accessible to a broad readership. He is ideally positioned to contribute significantly to the discussion of post-war European cinema through this important book." — Adrian Danks, RMIT University, Australia, co-editor of Senses of Cinema 'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' is a unique study of four feature films chosen as emblematic works of 1960s modernist cinema. 'Persona' (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her' (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) are explored through the theme of negativity, while 'L’eclisse' (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) and 'Last Year in Marienbad' (Alain Resnais, 1961) are examined for their violent rendering of time. The book argues that these films exemplify film modernism at its peak of philosophical interest, substance and significance. Its focused analysis of four emblematic works selectively draws on the work of German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Adorno, in particular his account of negativity, and French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of temporality in post-war cinema, amongst other theoretical and critical sources. Grounding this study is a close consideration of the critical and aesthetically remarkable gaze these particular films cast upon their immediate social real and modernities as presented on screen. But rather than a strictly historical analysis, the book suggests that such complex and profoundly ambivalent renderings of the modern world have much to say to us today via what amounts to a genuinely challenging return in digital form, the films' remarkable aesthetic surfaces and layers looking even more properly science fiction-like than ever. 'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' will appeal both to an academic audience, from upper-level undergraduate through to career researcher level, and a wider readership attracted by the book’s extensive analysis and appreciation of films that have countless and increasing admirers the world over." Published review: Michael Godard, Senses of Cinema, July 2016, Issue 79, online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/book-reviews/post-war-modernist-cinema-and-philosophy/
‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
In the 1960s and 1970s the Clement Greenberg’s Modernist ideology of ‘purity’ played a central role in the definition of ‘avant-garde cinema’ as a serious, major genre of film. This transfer between ‘fine art’ and ‘avant-garde film’ was articulated as ‘structural film’ by P. Adams Sitney. This heritage shapes contemporary debates over ‘postcinema’ as digital technology undermines the ontology and dispositive of historical cinema. Its discussion here is not meant to reanimate old debates, but to move past them. Article received: March 12, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Betancourt, Michael. "‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 55−67. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.254
The death of postmodernism? Post-postmodernism and Contemporary Film
The death of postmodernism? Post-postmodernism and Contemporary Film, 2023
As more and more researchers remark that a wave of recent films does not seem to fit Jameson’s definition of postmodernism, many new terms have been introduced: the post-cinematic (Steven Shaviro), the post-filmic (Garret Stewart), the supercinema (Wiliam Brown), the new new Hollywood (Thomas Elsaesser) and finally, the post- postmodern (Linda Hutcheon). As Marcia Tiemy Morita Kawamoto summarises, what this new cinema is, is still hard to define, yet a common influence is that of the digital as post-postmodern film often incorporates “digitalization, media, internet and video-games into their narratives” (20). Additionally, this essay discusses the influence of a ‘New Sincerity’ in this new cinema aesthetic, as literature professor Adam Kelly describes as displacing “metaphysics while retaining a love of truth, a truth now associated with the possibility of a reconceived, and renewed, sincerity” (146).
Fragmentations of Histoire(s) du Cinéma. From Cinema to Post-cinema
Okno na przeszłość. Szkice z historii wizualnej, t. 4, 2022
The article aims to retrace the fragmentary form of the project Histoire(s) du Cinéma in the light of the dialectical tensions in-between the pictures. Several critical commentaries starting a dialogue with visual arts, i. e, those of Ranciére, Château, Witt, Didi-Huberman will be discussed. The assumption of the “death of cinema” which addresses the shift from cinema to post-cinema in a double helix spread between the insight into the history of the cinema and its reference to visual culture is also advanced. It is congruent with the ideas of Le Musée imaginaire by André Malraux and Musé de Cinéma by Henri Langlois. Godard’s discussion constructs a genealogy of seeing, image-making as historically- determined and philosophically-oriented. In pursuing the above, the author makes also an epistemological diagnosis to render multifarious problems such as the disintegration of the unity of one image by superposition, juxtaposing, overriding, name-dropping, and audiovisual reverberation