Search Results

Camera and Canvas: Emmer, Storck, Resnais and the Post-war Art Film

Steven Jacobs

in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts

Referring to contemporaneous writings by Kracauer, Bazin and Malraux among others, the first chapter discusses the ‘Golden Age’ of the art documentary in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Supported by ... More

Referring to contemporaneous writings by Kracauer, Bazin and Malraux among others, the first chapter discusses the ‘Golden Age’ of the art documentary in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Supported by international institutions such as UNESCO and FIAF, a film d'art movement developed, which offered experimental filmmakers a platform to reflect on the relations between art and cinema. Focusing on films made by Emmer in Italy, Storck and Haesaerts in Belgium and Resnais in France, this chapter demonstrates how these filmmakers saw the genre of the art documentary as a means to investigate the boundaries of film by juxtaposing movement versus stasis, narrative versus iconic images, and cinematic space versus pictorial surface.Less

Alain Resnais and the Mise en Scène of Two

Alex Ling

in Badiou and Cinema

This chapter examines the artistic cinema of Alain Resnais, focusing on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad, and proposes something of a novel approach for the analysis of the questions of ... More

This chapter examines the artistic cinema of Alain Resnais, focusing on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year in Marienbad, and proposes something of a novel approach for the analysis of the questions of time and love as they are thought in the cinema of Resnais. It shows that Resnais's cinema is at one and the same time an ethical cinema, one which presents the ideas of love and of time, and a cinema that effectively rethinks the concept of the event.Less

Walking in the City

James Tweedie

in The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization

This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often ... More

This chapter is organized around a specific scene and action performed repeatedly in French new wave cinema: characters walking through the city. These emblematic rambles through urban space often unfold without apparent aim or direction, as getting somewhere becomes a secondary consideration and the film concentrates instead on the urban context and the act of walking itself. The films focus on the youthful body in a city undergoing its own process of demolition and renewal, and these scenes stage that interaction between people and the urban environment. Individual cases studies include Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the documentary and fiction filmmaking of Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 Less

Introduction: Where Film Meets Philosophy

Hunter Vaughan

in Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking

This introductory chapter outlines the notion of “film-philosophy”, the belief that the visual medium can challenge modes of thought using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and ... More

This introductory chapter outlines the notion of “film-philosophy”, the belief that the visual medium can challenge modes of thought using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy. It tackles the question of how is the medium of film philosophical by examining the works of filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, which transform and shift the medium's sensory focus between the auditory and visual. This attribute of “flexible malleability” can be reduced to shifting dynamics in subject-object relations. The chapter argues that film can be seen as the site of intersection of both diegetic and extradiegetic “voices” and “gazes” and distributes them according to sets of formal relations. This intersection is referred to as the immanent field of the film image.Less

A Woman of Paris: Geraldine Chaplin across French cinema

Steven Rybin

in Geraldine Chaplin: The Gift of Film Performance

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on ... More

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on his work. Early in her career, Geraldine Chaplin inherited her father’s Parisian legacy, in both discourse on her public life in France (where she lived and worked early in her career) and also across a number of French films in which she played a central role. This chapter examines Geraldine’s work in France for filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Michel Deville in the context of French film culture’s fascination with her father, showing how Geraldine herself intervened in and redirected this critical legacy through her own performances.Less

Patterns of Modern Forms

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

Referring to Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima, Eric Rohmer provided a particularly concise and general formula about how he understood modernism in the cinema. Rohmer's formula is a particularly ... More

Referring to Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima, Eric Rohmer provided a particularly concise and general formula about how he understood modernism in the cinema. Rohmer's formula is a particularly accurate summary of all the important basic principles of the form of modern film: modernist art has a fragmented view of reality; the modern artist uses general and abstract principles of composition to reconstruct the coherence of reality; the foundation of this reconstruction is always in its composition an abstract idea; the ultimate source of the form of modern art is its own abstract principles rather than empirical reality. This chapter describes the main tendencies of modern cinema using some general traits related to modernist principles of formal composition. The first distinction is made between styles based on radically continuous constructions and those based on radically fragmented ones. The chapter discusses continuity and discontinuity in a film, imaginary time in Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, the fragmented form according to Jean-Luc Godard, and the link between serialism and the structural composition of the film.Less

Joseph Losey and Michelangelo Antonioni: the expatriate eye and the parallax view

John Orr

in Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema

The 1960s was the start of a new cinema in Britain, a neo-modern remake of 1920s modernism for the sound era: 1963 with the release of The Servant was as momentous as 1929, and the expatriate eye was ... More

The 1960s was the start of a new cinema in Britain, a neo-modern remake of 1920s modernism for the sound era: 1963 with the release of The Servant was as momentous as 1929, and the expatriate eye was an integral part of modernism's second wave, the aesthetic dominant in the rise of the British neo-modern an aesthetic which can be called the aesthetics of the parallax view. In general, the writing is native, and the fusion of expatriate eye and insider's text counts for so much — John and Penelope Mortimer with Otto Ludwig Preminger, Harold Pinter with Joseph Losey, Edward Bond and Mark Peploe with Michelangelo Antonioni, Anthony Burgess freely providing his brilliant novel for Stanley Kubrick, Martin Ritt and Sidney Lumet with Paul Dehn adapting John Le Carré. This chapter examines Joseph Losey's films The Servant and Accident; Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, The Passenger, and Profession: Reporter; Alain Resnais's Providence; and Chris Petit's Radio On.Less

Figures of Life

Nadine Boljkovac

in Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema

‘Figures of Life’ examines time and death via Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of power, freedom, figure, sensation and counter-actualisation or productive re-enactment. Through an ostensibly shocking ... More

‘Figures of Life’ examines time and death via Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of power, freedom, figure, sensation and counter-actualisation or productive re-enactment. Through an ostensibly shocking contention, this chapter contends that Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard creates and even affirms life and movement through series of audio-visual images that testify not only to the Event of the Holocaust but also to the virtual remains, the lingering affects and events of fear, sadness and hope that pervade each image, archive, stone and artefact. Deleuze’s concept of counter-actualisation is explained and conceived as a redoubling of a past actual wound for a ‘revolutionary becoming’, man’s only hope of response, as claims Deleuze, to human shame in the face of the intolerable. This chapter is the most demanding of the book with respect to an affirmative ethics and philosophy of life as it most directly confronts the interstice between personal and impersonal life and death through the Holocaust Event and its challenge to art, thought and survival.Less

Levinas: Love, Justice and Responsibility

Linnell Secomb

in Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture

This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of love along with a reading of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, mon amour. Hiroshima, mon amour affixes Levinas' ethics. Levinas recognizes the ... More

This chapter explores Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of love along with a reading of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, mon amour. Hiroshima, mon amour affixes Levinas' ethics. Levinas recognizes the significance of erotic love for the subject and ultimately for inter-human relations. His description of erotic love indicates an interlacing of egoistic pleasure and selfless engagement with the other in the sexual relation. In Alain Resnais' and Duras' film, Hiroshima, mon amour, it is the experience of passionate, obsessional, devoted love for a particular other that grounds and informs the selfless ethical love of every other. It has become clear that the feminine other of the erotic relation (in Time and the Other) offers a model or a prototype for the alterity of the other of the ethical relation (in Totality and Infinity).Less

From Depths and Ashes

Nadine Boljkovac

in Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema

‘From Depths and Ashes’ focuses upon ‘virtual series’ that exist in relation to the actual and that are revealed through a woman and man, a coupling that invokes the doubling of virtual-actual time, ... More

‘From Depths and Ashes’ focuses upon ‘virtual series’ that exist in relation to the actual and that are revealed through a woman and man, a coupling that invokes the doubling of virtual-actual time, life and death. Through an exploration of affirmative life forces and intensities in relation to events shameful and intolerable, this chapter maintains that film can expose a confrontation with identity, time and death. By way of a becoming-imperceptible or apersonal becoming through a shattering of transcendent illusions, a transformation that realises a woman’s counter-actualisation or creative replaying of her wounds, the chapter argues through Deleuze’s examinations of depth and surface that Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour releases intensities which are expressed through the film’s own ‘depths’ of bodies and ‘singular surfaces’ of skins. This chapter continues to explore relations between actual, tangible individuals as it also examines the violent and destructive mixtures of bodies that effect the sensations and affects that comprise and potentially fracture a human ‘self’. Finally, the chapter contends that Resnais’s art reveals means for moving beyond personal dimensions towards an impersonal, ‘pure’ evocation of affect and association.Less

Of Scars, Smiles and Past-Future Signs

Nadine Boljkovac

in Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema

‘Of Scars, Smiles and Past-Future Signs’ argues that death itself can be conceived via Deleuze’s philosophy as both ‘our’ fatal end and a new ‘singular’ life. To do so, this chapter analyses how ... More

‘Of Scars, Smiles and Past-Future Signs’ argues that death itself can be conceived via Deleuze’s philosophy as both ‘our’ fatal end and a new ‘singular’ life. To do so, this chapter analyses how select works of French filmmakers Alain Resnais and Chris Marker embody becomings and processes of counter-actualisation and dramatization through signs, faciality, repetition, temporal synthesis, depth and surface. The chapter returns, as do intertextual sequences within Marker’s Chats Perchés, to Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and more broadly to the notion of virtual-actual violence and death itself.Less

Conclusion: Blind Chance and Possible Futures

David Martin-Jones

in Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts

The films discussed in this book are contemporary manifestations of a tradition that can be traced back to directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard – those same ... More

The films discussed in this book are contemporary manifestations of a tradition that can be traced back to directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard – those same directors that Gilles Deleuze drew on in constructing his taxonomy of images. The appearance of a labyrinthine model of time in many of these films is particularly indebted to Alain Resnais' oeuvre, which includes such films as Providence (1977) and Smoking/No Smoking (1993). Moreover, Run Lola Run and Peppermint Candy both self-consciously acknowledge their debt to Krzystof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981). This book has shown, through a specific focus on particular nations, the historical shifts and resulting transformations of national identity that these films negotiate. It is no longer enough to simply posit the time-image as the European other of the American movement-image. Rather, a global picture must be considered in which these films engage with issues of national identity for both local and international markets. As a final example that illustrates the need for this localised analysis, this chapter discusses Blind Chance.Less

‘Expression of Thought in Film’1

in Lukácsian film theory and cinema: A study of Georg Lukács’ writings on film, 1913-71

This chapter presents the responses of Georg Lukács to Yvette Biró's questions on his thoughts about Diecimila soli', a film by Ferenc Kósa (1967), and La Guerra è finita [The War Is Over (1966)], by ... More

This chapter presents the responses of Georg Lukács to Yvette Biró's questions on his thoughts about Diecimila soli', a film by Ferenc Kósa (1967), and La Guerra è finita [The War Is Over (1966)], by Alain Resnais and Jorge Semprun.Less

Art’s Resistance

Nadine Boljkovac

in Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema

‘Art’s resistance’ argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s ethical and affirmative method of schizoanalysis can counter death with life and art as it discovers possibilities for survival and creation ... More

‘Art’s resistance’ argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s ethical and affirmative method of schizoanalysis can counter death with life and art as it discovers possibilities for survival and creation beyond theories of victimization. Deleuze insists that thought and art must do violence to reactive forces that beget violence through a power of ressentiment, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘double suicide’ and ‘a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death’, a line of pure destruction and abolition. The concept of the untimely, or that which is ever-new, is introduced as an experiential, sensory force through Nietzsche. This chapter further explains this force as an ‘eternal repetition of the different’ that recreates and re-experiences the past while simultaneously transforming the future to suggest a doubling of ‘virtual-actual’ worlds.Less