Search Results

This chapter discusses Solaris and its three film adaptations by Boris Nirenburg (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), and Steven Soderbergh (2002). Flawed as they are in different ways, each casts light on Stanislaw Lem’s original as well as on one another, illuminating the fact that a successful adaptation from a single-track medium like a novel to a multi-track medium like a film often requires major changes regardless of authorial intentions.

It is not easy to make a distinction in the 1970s between films belonging to political modernism's mythical trend and those already transcending the modernist paradigm. It is easier to see the difference between the two categories through films that are distant enough in time from one another, but political modernism in the mid-1970s was just the transitional period where many elements of the postmodern were already present. This is true especially in some films of new cinema in Germany, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst Eats the Soul and Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass. Two basic principles of modernism are homogeneity of style and a sense of “objective reality,” both of which are closely related with the central role attributed to the “auteur.” This chapter examines the disappearance of the auteur in European modern cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and films made by Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. It also discusses Tarkovsky's use of serial composition in Andrei Rublev and the disappearance of nothingness in films such as Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982).

The director’s relationship to his actors, and how that collaboration works within the framework of self-projection. Attention is paid to personal relationships between actors and directors (familial, sexual, hostile), with a special focus on the striking frequency with which art cinema authors employ their mothers as actors in their films. This section works toward a new theory of film acting.

Fernando Zalamea begins with an emphatic argument that from mathematics to its plastic influence, Grothendieck topoi are used to understand the human and the nonhuman creativity in three variously relevant and yet different disciplines; that of cinema through the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, architecture through the work of Frank Gehry and art through the work of Anselm Hiefer. The chapter starts by introducing the work of Alexandre Grothendieck from a conceptual standpoint, focusing on his topos theory (1962), a general setting which encompasses both arithmetic (number) and geometry (space) under a common abstract perspective (sheaves: a far-reaching tool which helps to glue the local and the global). Grothendieck's revolution, wider than Einstein's interlacing of space and time, has radically changed mathematics, but its plastic influence beyond the specialty has yet to be developed.

The year 1966 was an important year in the history of modern cinema because it represents simultaneously a summit and a turning point. It was a summit because many of the most important films of modernism appeared in the period 1965–1966, and a turning point because many new trends or new periods started after this year. All the important filmmaking countries made their modernist turn by 1965, or at least attempts were made in this direction, such as in the case of West Germany. The second wave of modernist directors making their debuts before 1963 were already through their second films, while the first wave of modern directors were already regarded as “classical” masters. The filmmaker-auteur had achieved total autonomy over the film, and yet he remained alone. It was just this feeling of loneliness that provided the productive force to push on. The loneliness of the filmmaker-auteur appears as the central topic in three major films produced in 1966 by three great modern auteurs: Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up.

Examination of directorial self-representation in two related genres: documentaries on the making of films and narrative films about directing, in which the director plays a fictional film director. Discussion of how these practices figure into the larger notion of self-projection, with the director performing self-consciously as author or artist.

A look at the historical and theoretical underpinnings of art cinema, examining how viewers are conditioned to recognize an author’s presence in fictional cinematic narrative. Discussion of autobiographical impulses in fictional films by the directors of this study, introduction of the term “self-projection.” Brief discussion of cinematic self-projection and gender.

This chapter introduces the reader to Tony Harrison’s audiovisual poetry, composed for and broadcast on British television through the late 1980s and 1990s. Harrison has to date made twelve full documentary film-poems, and one film-poem feature, entitled Prometheus (1998). They all brim with the darker side of European history, current affairs and class politics, and explore what limits of what poetry might do, and how it might do it, in the televisual age. The chapter sets Harrison’s film poetry in its cultural context by paying attention to the poet’s major influences in the experimental medium (John Grierson’s GPO film unit and early Soviet filmmaking), before homing in on his 1992 film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon as a species of social psychotherapy. The act of gazing at the Medusa-like and thus usually petrifying image of twentieth-century atrocity is offered here not as a ‘dope’ to mankind, but a stimulant towards its cure. The film-poem draws explicitly on Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Dionysiac art’ and Simone Weil’s pacifist notion of ‘force’, and Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and the holocaust. Harrison’s hugely ambitious and uniquely accessible film-poems are currently publically unavailable. Are they the ‘missing link’ in the evolution of contemporary film and video poetry?

Using its final movement, Postludio, as an anchor, the book’s final chapter discusses the Soviet reception of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1. It focuses on the comparisons the music evoked with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker and the 1986 postapocalyptic Soviet film Letters from a Dead Man (Pisʹma mertvogo cheloveka, dir. Konstantin Lopushansky). The chapter also traces Schnittke’s life and works into the 1980s and 1990s, with emphasis on his later compositions that continued the trail marked by the Concerto Grosso no. 1, particularly the sequence of six concerti grossi he wrote until the end of his life. The chapter concludes by examining the reception of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 in the recent past, when it was allied with the Holocaust, zombies, and the macabre.

Here the appearance of various attributes of the cinematic apparatus (projector, screen, photographic film frames) are linked to various parts of the filmmaker’s body and sensory apparatus, making the point, as early filmmakers do, that cinema creates a new kind of body (partly organic, partly technological) and thus a new way to conceive selfhood.

The filmmakers discussed in earlier chapters attempted to construct long-form works whose phenomenological intensity was tied to their status as integral temporal experiences that could open up new affective possibilities for the spectator. The mode of viewing required by these works contrasts starkly with the mobile spectatorship engendered by contemporary multimedia projects that attempt to apply the principles of the Gesamtkunstwerk within a multiroom gallery setting. It also differs significantly from the type of intermittent viewing engendered by more recent long-form works, which, made entirely with inexpensive digital equipment, are no longer conceived as continuous units and are instead intended to be viewed in pieces, with the audience members encouraged to come and go as they please. What is most important for the filmmakers studied in this book is a conception of art as mystery, as spiritual elevation, as something that, like a cathedral, could “protect time.”

A brief conclusion that goes back over the major points of the study’s discussions and thinks about the implications of digital filmmaking. In the end, the imagined relationship between the spectator and the director is brought to the fore as the most significant moment in self-projection.

Analysis of the appearance of cinematic authors within their own fictional narratives and how this relates to self-projection. Theories of embodied spectatorship related to a discussion of embodied authorship. Particular focus on Woody Allen and self-caricature, François Truffaut’s roles, Ingmar Bergman’s voice, Pedro Almodóvar’s interest in gendered embodiment.