Film Aesthetics

"Paranoid Hermeneutics as Queer Cinematic Vernacular"

by Catherine Grant

A 6-minute video presentation I made for the "Queer Cinema and the Politics of the Global" symposium last weekend at the University of Sussex. In it, I talk about the intersection of "queer rights" discourses and contemporary "queer thrillers", with particular reference to recent Argentine cinema. 

The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema

by Giorgio Bertellini

italian culture, Vol. xxx No. 1, March, 2012, 38–50

The essay discusses contemporary Italian fi lmmakers’ sustained interest in
the representation of national... more The essay discusses contemporary Italian fi lmmakers’ sustained interest in
the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as
revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony.
Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodramas,
Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s
Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial
and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations
of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto
Saviano and Salvatore Settis.

Su Dracula di Bram Stoker di F.F. Coppola ( ovvero Dracula, Gesù e la Sincerità)

by Ruggero Barberi

CFP: International Film and Media Studies Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

by Ágnes Pethő

The International, peer-reviewed, open access journal of the Sapientia University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) invites the submission of original, previously unpublished articles written in English. Articles in all areas of film and media studies are welcome. Deadline for the next issue: June 15, 2012. Previous issue available online here: http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/, and here: http://issuu.com/actauniversitatissapientiae/docs/film4_2011

The Rules of the World: Japanese Ecocinema and Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Tim Palmer

Aesthetic and Emotional Constructs within Cinematic Realism

by Hunter Snyder

"Tensional Differences": The Anxiety of Re-Mediation in Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave Films

by Ágnes Pethő

Essay in the recently re-launched Vertigo Magazine, a special issue dedicated to the provocative cinema of Jean-Luc Godard.

This essay discusses the way in which Godard, in his films made during the period of the Nouvelle Vague, addresses the... more This essay discusses the way in which Godard, in his films made during the period of the Nouvelle Vague, addresses the issues regarding the rivalry between the emerging modern cinema and the other arts and media.

Rudolf Arnheim: Over de geluidsfilm

by Maarten Coëgnarts

Esthetische polyfonie in Prénom Carmen: De uiteenrafeling van perceptuele eenheid via multimodale dissonanten

by Maarten Coëgnarts

'Driving into the Void: Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry'

by Hamish Ford

Journal of Humanistics and Social Sciences, Vol 1 (1), 2012, pp. 1- 27.
<http://www.jhss.eu/article/view/10327/pdf&gt;

This article explores Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry (1996) as arguably the most problematic of the... more This article explores Abbas Kiarostami’s Ta'm e guilass/Taste of Cherry (1996) as arguably the most problematic of the director’s films for dominant Western, particularly Anglophone, accounts of his cinema. First introducing the special challenges brought about by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker’s distinct formal devices, the article’s select analysis of Taste of Cherry begins by considering its heightened use of the car as both a perceptually destabilising space and ethically slippery cinematic mechanism. I then home in on the crucial and rarely addressed construction-site sequence, notably its expansion of space and stretched temporality, and explore how this aesthetic centerpiece (or epicentre) of the film fundamentally impacts an understanding of the subsequent and much more commonly quoted ‘taste of cherries’ monologue. Finally I approach the famous ending, with reference to prominent critical readings, before offering an alternative description and emphasis on the movement from celluloid through sheer black and into pixilated analogue video, highlighting how this extraordinary transformation affects our experience of an already, if thus far subtly, reflexive work. Often dominated by discussion of its final minutes, multiple published accounts of the film describe a hopeful, religious, or utopian vision of social-political reconciliation and/or cinema’s redemptive power. I offer Taste of Cherry as one of the most subtly and confronting negativity-engaging films produced over the last four decades.

Cinema and Embodied Affect

by Anne Rutherford

‘What Makes a Film Tick?’: Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation.

by Anne Rutherford

Monograph. Bern: Peter Lang. 2011. PhD thesis publication.

This PhD explores questions of cinematic affect and its relationship to mimetic experience. Through an examination of... more This PhD explores questions of cinematic affect and its relationship to mimetic experience. Through an examination of cinematic materiality, it argues that film must be inscribed across the sensorium if it is to arouse affective experience for the spectator. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the thesis argues that cinematic affect can most productively be understood in film as a process of mimetic innervation.
The thesis is comprised of seven published essays and an overarching chapter. The introductory chapter, ‘A Paradigm Shift in Film Studies’, situates the published essays in the context of recent debates about embodied spectatorship and affect, arguing the need for a revision of key paradigms of film theory.
The first series of essays argues the centrality of embodied affect to cinema spectatorship, and proposes a nexus between mimetic visuality, affect and mise en scène, linking the analysis of mise en scène to Kracauer’s discussions of cinematic materiality. The essays extend this nexus to rethink genre through the lens of affective mimetic experience, arguing that both genre and visual style work mimetically. The arguments are explored through studies of the work of Mizoguchi Kenji, Theodorus Angelopoulos and Lee Myung-Se.
The second series examines spectatorship in documentary cinema, raising questions about historiography, embodied knowledge, inter-cultural dialogue, and the affective elements of cultural specificity. The essays interrogate the universalist claims of conventional documentary form, and its assumptions of a disembodied spectator. They contest the assumed opposition in documentary theory between affect and signification and draw affect and mimetic experience into the core conceptualisation of documentary film. The studies explore an Australian television documentary series, an Indonesian political docudrama and three hybrid documentaries—two Indian and one French.
Through these studies, the thesis argues that affective embodied mimetic experience is at the core of cinema spectatorship.

‘Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise en Scene and the Senses in Angelopoulos' Balkans epic.'

by Anne Rutherford

First published in Art and the Performance of Memory: Sounds and Gestures of Recollection. Ed. Richard Candida Smith. New York & London: Routledge, ‘Memory and Narrative’ series. Also published in Senses of Cinema 31 (2004).

Ten Canoes and the Ethnographic Photographs of Donald Thomson: ‘Animate Thought’ and ‘the Light of the World’

by Anne Rutherford

Published in Cultural Studies Review, Vol 18, No 1 (2012)

This article explores the genesis of the film Ten Canoes in the photographs taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson, in... more This article explores the genesis of the film Ten Canoes in the photographs taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson, in Arnhem Land, in the 1930s.  Thomson’s images profoundly informed the look and content of the film, and the paper traces this genealogy in order to identify a ‘cultural imaginary’ at work in the film. I argue that a close study of Thomson’s original photographs reveals an approach to photography and to culture that dramatically exceeds the boundaries of the detached anthropological/scientific gaze. Thomson’s vision is a highly tactile one. His images are as much an encounter with the light of the world as they are a document of a time, an environment and a culture; his lens is as much an organ of touch as an instrument of observation. In a remarkable example of what Tim Ingold has called ‘animate thought’, Thomson uses the materiality of photography to make manifest a life-world in which reeds, water and sky are as animate as human figures. Not easily accessible to established criteria for analysing ethnographic images, such as questions of self-reflexivity, Thomson’s polycentric images profoundly challenge the humanist assumptions of many contemporary approaches to reading images. This insight raises new questions about both ethnographic photography and the relationship between the photographs and Ten Canoes.

Exotic Aesthetics: Long Take Style and Staging in the Films of Mizoguchi and von Sternberg

by Tim Palmer

La marionnette et la ligne mélodique : figures de l’intervalle dans La Double vie de Véronique de Kieslowski

by Marguerite Chabrol

in La Vie filmique des marionnettes, dir. Laurence Schifano, Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2008, pp. 139-153

L'imaginaire découpé de Mon oncle de Jacques Tati

by Marguerite Chabrol

Cahiers Louis-Lumière n°5, Coupe, découpe, découpage, juin 2008, pp. 25-31

Le personnage bifrons dans le cinéma contemporain (Lynch, Cronenberg, Ruiz)

by Marguerite Chabrol

in La Fabrique du personnage, dir. Françoise Lavocat, Claude Murcia, Régis Salado, éd. Champion, 2007, pp. 521-533.

"Représentation de la composition musicale dans Amadeus : l'héritage de la peinture du XVIIIe siècle

by Marguerite Chabrol

PEINTURE ET CINEMA, P.-L. Thivat (dir.), LIGEIA N° 77-78-79-80, juillet-décembre 2007

Vis-à-vis the Glaneuse

by Sylwia Chrostowska

published in Angelaki