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Ideologies of the Anesthetic:: Acupuncture, Photography, and the Material Image

Eric Hayot

in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, modernity, and Chinese Pain

This chapter begins by reading the controversy of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1974 documentary film, China and Pearl S. Buck's China: Past and Present (1972). Moving from Antonioni's filming of a ... More

This chapter begins by reading the controversy of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1974 documentary film, China and Pearl S. Buck's China: Past and Present (1972). Moving from Antonioni's filming of a surgical operation performed under acupuncture anesthesia to Susan Sontag's discussion of just such an operation in On Photography (1977), the chapter argues that part of what was at stake in China's public performance of such operations in the early 1970s was nothing other than the nature of modernity itself. But how, given such a theorization of the photograph, are we to understand the photographs of Chinese torture that circulated in the West in the early twentieth century? Images of Chinese lingchi, the “death of a thousand cuts,” terrified and titillated Western viewers as lingchi became an emblem of the enormous cultural gulf separating the West from China. The chapter closes by reading a photograph famously owned and reproduced by the French philosopher Georges Bataille. Bataille's relation to the photograph, the chapter argues, must be rethought inside the framework of China's relation to modernity, and to the identificatory and sympathetic claims made by the photographic subject's shocking and transformative pain.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

Antonioni’s America: Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, and the Making of a New Hollywood

Jon Lewis

in When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited

In January 1967 executives from MGM contracted with European New-Wave icon Michelangelo Antonioni to distribute his Palm d’Or-winning picture Blow-Up in the United States. With the commercial success ... More

In January 1967 executives from MGM contracted with European New-Wave icon Michelangelo Antonioni to distribute his Palm d’Or-winning picture Blow-Up in the United States. With the commercial success of that picture, MGM entered into a second contract with Antonioni giving him carte blanche to make an American studio movie about the youth counterculture eventually titled, Zabriskie Point. This chapter evaluates the MGM-Antonioni interlude, emphasizing its historical importance as an early and fraught attempt at an American studio auteur picture revealing an industry on the verge of some very big changes.Less

The Tender Lives of Vitti/Vittoria

Timothy C. Campbell

in The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life

In this final chapter, the Italian actress Monica Vitti is read as the generous form of life par excellance in three of Antonioni’s most important films: L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse. The ... More

In this final chapter, the Italian actress Monica Vitti is read as the generous form of life par excellance in three of Antonioni’s most important films: L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse. The generosity she evinces is registered in the way that Antonioni shows her repeatedly grasping and releasing objects such that a distinction between possession as grasping and non-possession as release emerges. That same distinction appears later as a strategy that Vitti adopts in playfully evading her capture by Antonioni’s apparatus.Less

The Scene of the Crime

in The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film

This chapter examines the depiction of the crime scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's films Blow-Up and The Passenger. It explains that the subversive use of perspective in these films lead the ... More

This chapter examines the depiction of the crime scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's films Blow-Up and The Passenger. It explains that the subversive use of perspective in these films lead the spectators to see death not as a fact but as a possibility and that the crime scene in both films is organized according to the rules of perspective. This chapter also argues that Antonioni's spatial arrangements coincide with forms of convoluted time, configuration where the present cannot be isolated from the past and the future and where death cannot be relegated to a single temporal dimension.Less

Genre in Modern Cinema

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

Narrative techniques frequently used in modern cinema became fashionable not as self-contained play with the form. They are the most appropriate tools for telling specific stories. Modern art cinema ... More

Narrative techniques frequently used in modern cinema became fashionable not as self-contained play with the form. They are the most appropriate tools for telling specific stories. Modern art cinema tells stories about the “individual” who has lost his or her contact with the surrounding world. Stories about the lonely, alienated, or suppressed individual are endless, but the forms in which these stories can be made intelligible are not. These forms are the essential genres of modernism. Modern films, just like modern narrative in general, are said to transgress the limits of narrative genres and conventions. In the works of early-period modern auteurs, the roots of traditional genres are easily discernible. Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini start out of Italian neorealist-style melodrama. This chapter describes the most frequent genres and plot patterns in modern films, and examines Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of nothingness and Antonioni's 1962 film Eclipse. It then discusses six elements or forms as most characteristic of modern genres: investigation, wandering, mental journey, closed-situation drama, reflexive genre parody, and the film essay.Less

Styles of Modernism

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

This chapter looks at four main styles representing the most important trends that influenced art filmmakers during the late modern period. Not all these tendencies were equally strong or influential ... More

This chapter looks at four main styles representing the most important trends that influenced art filmmakers during the late modern period. Not all these tendencies were equally strong or influential in all periods during late modern cinema. Some of the general forms are not late modern inventions. Minimalism, for example, appeared already in the early modern period. Some of the forms discussed in the chapter may also characterize classical films, such as theatrical stylization. What makes the styles genuine ingredients of modernism is their specific manner of depicting the main aesthetic formal principles: abstraction, subjectivity, and reflexivity. The chapter also discusses three main trends within modern minimalist form. The first is metonymic minimalism, epitomized by Robert Bresson's films. The second is analytical minimalism, represented by Michelangelo Antonioni's films between 1957 and 1966. The third is expressive minimalism, and its main representative is Ingmar Bergman in his films made between 1961 and 1972.Less

An Alternative to the Classical Form: Neorealism and Modernism

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

If film noir can be regarded as a deviation from the classical narrative, Italian neorealism offered other elements for a real alternative to it. Italian neorealism was a complex cultural phenomenon ... More

If film noir can be regarded as a deviation from the classical narrative, Italian neorealism offered other elements for a real alternative to it. Italian neorealism was a complex cultural phenomenon in postwar Italy integrating literature, journalism, and cinema. One of neorealism's main contributions to modernism was its suppression of the hierarchy between the narrative background and the narrative foreground, which thereby loosened up the narrative structure. There are two essential traits of neorealism that make it an antecedent to, rather than a part of, modernism. One is its fundamental social, sometimes clearly political, commitment; modernism instead focuses on abstract, universalistic concerns. The other trait is neorealism's total lack of subjectivity and reflexivity, both of which belong to modernism's major aesthetic strategies. This chapter, which examines neorealism and modernism in modern cinema, looks at modernism in Michelangelo Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair (1950) as well as neorealism in Roberto Rossellini's films.Less

The Year 1966

András Bálint Kovács

in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980

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 ... More

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.Less

The Catastrophe of Success

Frank Noack

in Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker

This chapter deals with the world premiere of Jud Süss at the Venice Film Festival in 1940, where it is praised by the young critic Michelangelo Antonioni, and its subsequent box-office success in ... More

This chapter deals with the world premiere of Jud Süss at the Venice Film Festival in 1940, where it is praised by the young critic Michelangelo Antonioni, and its subsequent box-office success in Nazi-occupied Europe. Several factors behind its success are analyzed, such as an ingenious publicity campaign aimed separately at men and women and Harlan’s use of genre motifs such as illicit love between a curious virgin and a seductive villain. Jud Süss raises questions about the seductive quality of films because various SS members would later claim, when put on trial, that the film influenced them negatively. Harlan follows Jud Süss with another historical epic, Der grosse König (The great king, 1942), and has to endure the mutilation and limited release of a more personal project, the Western comedy-drama Pedro soll hängen (Pedro must hang, 1941).Less

Generative Apogee and Elegiac Expansion: European Film Modernism from Antonioni to Angelopoulos

Hamish Ford

in The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos

This chapter situates Theo Angelopoulos within the compositional context of European post-war cinematic modernism, and more specifically in relation to fellow filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. ... More

This chapter situates Theo Angelopoulos within the compositional context of European post-war cinematic modernism, and more specifically in relation to fellow filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni's early 1960s cinema has long been recognised as one of the key influences on Angelopoulos' filmmaking. Angelopoulos himself has described Antonioni's L'avventura (1960) as a seminal moment in his development, reportedly watching it thirteen times while a student in Paris during the early 1960s. The chapter examines the complex development of European modernist cinema in the postwar period through the work of Angelopoulos and Antonioni. The chapter shows that Angelopoulos' films present time and history in the form of a co-present or multi-layered textuality. It also considers reflexivity, composition and the gaze in the films of Angelopoulos and Antonioni before concluding with a discussion of Angelopoulos' films in relation to modernity.Less

Love in the World

Reidar Due

in Love in Motion: Erotic Relationships in Film

This chapter presents different depictions of love from filmmakers of different traditions. The two greatest filmmakers of love are Josef von Sternberg and Eric Rohmer, the latter of whom analyses ... More

This chapter presents different depictions of love from filmmakers of different traditions. The two greatest filmmakers of love are Josef von Sternberg and Eric Rohmer, the latter of whom analyses the amorous ego as a psychological and social fact that can be observed from the outside. Michelangelo Antonioni's films exhibit ambivalence between sympathy and critical distance. At the center of Maurice Pialat's films is always a series of complex interactions and relationships that release composed feelings of aggression and tenderness in the characters involved in these relationships. The cinema of Wong Kar-Wai seeks to include society, sex, emotion, historical conditions, and personal character traits within the phenomenon of love. Examples of films that depict love negatively against the background of social obstacles include Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Pablo Trapero's El Buonarense, and Paolo Sorrentino's Le Consequenze dell'amore.Less

Mixing It Up: The Hybridity of the Sino-French

Michelle E. Bloom

in Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas: Absent Fathers, Banned Books, and Red Balloons

A form of transnational cinema, the Sino-French provides a paradigm for other hybrid conjugations and has room to expand. Oft banned mainlander Lou Ye’s Love & Bruises (2013), funded by the French, ... More

A form of transnational cinema, the Sino-French provides a paradigm for other hybrid conjugations and has room to expand. Oft banned mainlander Lou Ye’s Love & Bruises (2013), funded by the French, takes baby steps toward connecting with the Francophone by portraying the outskirts of Paris and even “province.” Lou casts Franco-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim as the male lead, albeit without defining the character as Arab. The Sino-French should become the Sino-Francophone, reaching out past a Paris defined by occidentalist clichés and beyond metropolitan France. In the meantime, contemporary transnational works such as Children of Men and Snowpiercer combine multiple national traditions. Historical and national context is nevertheless crucial to understanding crosscultural films including Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cultural Revolution era documentary, Chungkuo/Cine. Finally, whereas Sino-French literature already receives scholarly attention, future research should consider the other arts, including cuisine, the graphic novel, fashion, painting and their convergences.Less

Pier Paolo Pasolini and “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’”

P. Adams Sitney

in The Cinema of Poetry

The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the ... More

The chapter recovers the context of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critical and theoretical formulation of “free indirect point-of-view” and shows how that apparatus allowed Pasolini to break down the conventional distinction between the self-conscious avant-garde cinema and the European realist cinema. The work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jean-Luc Godard serve as crucial examples of this separation and provide firm ground for Pasolini’s evolving ideas on poetry and free indirect point of view.Less