Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn aesthetics. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn aesthetics. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Thứ Hai, 5 tháng 11, 2012

Belén Vidal's book, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic

Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures - the house, the tableau and the letter - structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.

Film Studies For Free had a very pleasant surprise, today, when it discovered that Belén Vidal's remarkable book is the latest Amsterdam University Press publication to be distributed as an Open Access ebook. The table of contents is given below.

This truly excellent volume has been added to FSFF's permanent listing of free Film Studies ebooks. Please support its generous publisher and author by ordering a copy for your university library!

Introduction – Period Film and the Mannerist Moment - Fragments and Figures - An International Genre - Mannerism: The Possibilities of a Conservative Aesthetic

Chapter 1 – A Poetics of Figuration - The Belated Moment of Mannerism - Pastiche and the Reality Effect - From the Figurative to the Figural - Classical/Post-classical: Adaptation, Film Writing and the Technological Narrative - Credits Roll: The Figure as Threshold

Chapter 2 – Present in the Past: The House - Nostalgia Interrupted: The House and its Ghosts - Home and (Dis)Inheritance: Howards End -The Collector and the House-Museum: The Golden Bowl and End of Period - Melodrama and the Descriptive Mode: The Age of Innocence -Fidelity to the Past and the Melancholic Imagination: Woman as Ghost - The House of Mirth or, Time and Woman

Chapter 3 – Time and the Image: The Tableau - Still Images/Moving Narratives: The Tableau Effect - The Shot-Tableau: From Pregnant Moment to Hieroglyph -The Portrait as Fetish - Portraits and Tableaux in the Feminist Imagination - Deframings: The Portrait of a Lady - Double-Framing the Mythologies of the Female Artist: Artemisia - Vision, Blindness and the Displacement of Trauma - The Governess or, the Woman in Camera

Chapter 4 – The Scene of Writing: The Letter - Textual Erotics: Reading the Letter as Object and Figure - The Letter that Arrives Too Late: Figuration and Melodramatic Temporality - Letters and Spatial Displacement - The Love Letter and the Queer Encounter: Onegin - Imaginary Landscapes of Loss: To Those Who Love - Truncated Narratives, Textual Possibilities: Atonement and the Interrupted Histories of the European Period Film.

Conclusion – Second Sight: Reviewing the Past, Figuring the Present - Notes - Bibliography - Index of Film Titles - Index of Names and Subjects
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Thứ Ba, 21 tháng 12, 2010

Film Studies and Aesthetics video and audio resources from the University of Kent

Image of a domestic interior in A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954). Listen to John David Rhodes's talk on the encounter between cinema and modernist American domestic architecture, in relation to this film and others.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you glad tidings of the very high quality, audio and video, Film Studies research resources that have been generously shared through the University of Kent website.  

As FSFF's author well knows, having been fortunate enough to work there for a decade, Kent is one of the largest and best university centres in Europe dedicated to Film Studies. Film research there, in both theory and practice (faculty include the world-leading scholars Murray Smith and Elizabeth Cowie, as well as the award-winning film-makers Clio Barnard and  Sarah Turner), is currently centred in four broad areas: national cinemas – form and history: North American, European, Latin American, Asian; the digital in film; the  documentary film; and, especially, film aesthetics, the latter often in collaboration with the interdisciplinary ‘Aesthetics Research Group’.

Some of these interests, and plenty more besides, are beautifully reflected in the amazing wealth of recordings of conferences, symposia and seminars directly linked to below. Just feast your eyes and ears on them.

Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image

Audio Resources

  • "The Art of Not Playing to Pictures’ in British Cinemas, 1908-1914" Dr Jon Burrows (University of Warwick) Recent scholarship on musical practices in the silent era argues that by the end of the 1900s and throughout the 1910s the typical cinema musician was a lone pianist who occupied a subordinate position in relation to the projected image and provided forms of accompaniment which ignored traditional musical logic and obediently responded instead to the dictates of narrative logic. Using a variety of evidential sources available in the UK (cinema licensing records, police inspection files, trade paper debates) my paper will argue the contrary: that miniature orchestras were extremely common in British cinemas before the First World War, and that, well into the feature film era, careful synchronisation of music and image was probably the exception rather than the rule. Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "Theory and Practice in British Film Schools" Prof Duncan Petrie (University of York) Film and media education in the UK has long been characterised by a fundamental polarisation between theory and practice. This is most clearly manifest in the widespread separation between academic study and hands-on production training within University and College departments and programmes...Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "Easy Living: The Modernist House and Cinematic Space“ Dr John David Rhodes (University of Sussex) In this paper I will look at a series of encounters—both real and imaginary—between cinema and modernist American domestic architecture. The paper moves from the sets of A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954), to the short experimental film House (1954)...Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
  • "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" Prof Lucia Nagib (University of Leeds) This paper will address world cinema through an unusual theoretical model, based on an ethics of realism. The juxtaposition of the terms ‘world cinema’, ‘ethics’ and ‘realism’ creates a tension intended to offer a productive alternative to traditional oppositional binaries such as popular vs art cinemas, fiction vs documentary films, Hollywood vs world cinema... Listen to the lecture here (mp3)
University of Kent Aesthetics Research Group
Audio and video resources:
Kendall Walton and The Aesthetics of Photography and Film (2007)
Jerrold Levinson: Key Concepts in Aesthetics (2008-09)
Research Seminars (ongoing)
Art, Aesthetics and the Sexual (2009)
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Thứ Bảy, 13 tháng 3, 2010

Deleuzian film studies in memory of David Vilaseca

Image of Ingrid Bergman as Karin in Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
Read 'Eruptions of God. Roberto Rossellini. Stromboli' by Corry Shores
For [French philosopher Henri] Bergson, the brain does not produce a representation of what it perceives. Perception is the mutual influence of images upon one another, of which the brain is only another image—it does not “produce” anything, but filters impulses into actions or non-actions. The implications for film are two-fold. By addressing the perceiving subject as one image among the world of images, Bergson steps outside models that locate perception and memory within the mind of the subject. I would further suggest, following [Gilles] Deleuze, that Bergson’s theory of matter allows us to see film not as a fixed representation, a concrete image of a “real” object, but as an image in its own right, with its own duration and axes of movement. What we might call the film-image thus occurs in the gap between subject and object, through the collision of affective images.
Deleuze’s formulation of the film-image as a mobile assemblage (sometimes a frame, sometimes a shot, a sound, or the film as a whole) lends itself to this reading. It refuses to reduce the physical image on the screen to a mere reproduction of an assumed “real” object it represents. Such a formulation similarly reevaluates the relationship between the concrete optical and sonic images that comprise the film. Rather than conceiving of each component as a “building block,” it allows for the shifting conglomerations of elements which are themselves dynamic and mobile. A film cannot be distilled to a structure that originates from outside itself. Instead, each film-image is contingent, particular, and evolving.
The distinction between the time- and movement-images becomes more clear in this context. Rather than a question of either content or form, the difference lies in their affective power, whether they are bent toward action, in the case of the movement image, or if they open into different temporal modalities. It is in this second case that the time-image falls, and it is here that Deleuze locates the creative potential of film. This potential does not exist solely within the physical image itself, however, but is contained as well in the modes of perception and thinking that it triggers. Much like the time-image, the mental faculty most attuned to the openness of time, according to Bergson, is that of intuition.
Amy Herzog, 'Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory', in Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds),Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, No. 49
Film Studies For Free lovingly presents its long list of links to online and openly accessible film-studies resources of note pertaining to the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like lots of continental theorists invoked in Film Studies, 'Deleuze' has been somewhat of a moveable feast, but, as the links below testify, in recent years this particular feast has been a highly nourishing one for a variety of approaches to this discipline.

This FSFF entry is one of two posts to be dedicated to the fond memory of David Vilaseca, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Professor Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010. His achievements in life were many, as this touching obituary written by his good friend and mentor Professor Paul Julian Smith eloquently sets out. Both in person and in his writing he was an inspiration. He will be much missed.

FSFF's author had met David Vilaseca on a number of occasions over the years and is a keen follower of his brilliant work on queer, Catalan, and Hispanic culture. She wishes to express her sincere condolences to David's family, friends, and colleagues.

David Vilaseca had a particular interest in Deleuzian philosophy as well as in the critique of Deleuze's work by fellow French philosopher Alain Badiou. Three of his related essays are linked to below, and interested FSFF readers should also look out for his third book Negotiating the Event: Post-deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Literature and Film, to be published this Autumn, which will undoubtedly explore further the pertinence of Deleuze and Badiou's work for film studies.

Good Film and Cultural Studies-related Deleuzian websites:
          Deleuzian film studies:
          • Kara Keeling, 'Deleuze and Cinema', Critical Commons, 2010 ("The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California")
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