Domietta Torlasco
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758024
- eISBN:
- 9780804786775
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758024.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's ...
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This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scene—the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated. By pushing the detective story to its extreme limits, they articulate forms of time that defy any clear-cut distinction between past, present, and future—presenting an uncertain temporality which can be made visible but not calculated, and challenging notions of visual mastery and social control. If the detective story proper begins with a death that has already taken place, the death which seems to count the most in these films is the one that is yet to occur—the investigator's own death. In a time of relentless anticipation, what appears in front of the investigator's eyes is not the past as it was, but the past as it will have been in relation to the time of his or her search.Less
This book interrogates the relationship between time and vision as it emerges in five Italian films from the 1960s and 1970s: Antonioni's Blow-Up and The Passenger, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. The center around which these films revolve is the image of the crime scene—the spatial and temporal configuration in which a crime is committed, witnessed, and investigated. By pushing the detective story to its extreme limits, they articulate forms of time that defy any clear-cut distinction between past, present, and future—presenting an uncertain temporality which can be made visible but not calculated, and challenging notions of visual mastery and social control. If the detective story proper begins with a death that has already taken place, the death which seems to count the most in these films is the one that is yet to occur—the investigator's own death. In a time of relentless anticipation, what appears in front of the investigator's eyes is not the past as it was, but the past as it will have been in relation to the time of his or her search.
Elissa Marder
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823240555
- eISBN:
- 9780823240593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240555.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the relationship between humans and androids in Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner by looking at how the film reflects on its own status as a film and the role that ...
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This chapter examines the relationship between humans and androids in Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner by looking at how the film reflects on its own status as a film and the role that photographs play in it. In the film, humans rely on technological supplements in order to lay false claim to the moral certainties of being human. The chapter analyzes several pivotal scenes in which photographs become the locus of a meditation on what it means to be human. These scenes include a cinematic quotation and reworking of Antonioni's Blow-Up in which a mechanically enhanced photograph provides evidence for a future murder, and a scene in which the replicant Rachel attempts to prove that she is human by producing a photograph of herself as a child with her mother. In the sequence analysed, the photographic image of the mother appears to become strangely animated, thereby indicating that neither the “mother” nor “photography” provides a stable ground for the category of the human.Less
This chapter examines the relationship between humans and androids in Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner by looking at how the film reflects on its own status as a film and the role that photographs play in it. In the film, humans rely on technological supplements in order to lay false claim to the moral certainties of being human. The chapter analyzes several pivotal scenes in which photographs become the locus of a meditation on what it means to be human. These scenes include a cinematic quotation and reworking of Antonioni's Blow-Up in which a mechanically enhanced photograph provides evidence for a future murder, and a scene in which the replicant Rachel attempts to prove that she is human by producing a photograph of herself as a child with her mother. In the sequence analysed, the photographic image of the mother appears to become strangely animated, thereby indicating that neither the “mother” nor “photography” provides a stable ground for the category of the human.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758024
- eISBN:
- 9780804786775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758024.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about crime in Italian films in the early 1960s and late 1970s. It explores the phenomenology and provides a psychoanalysis of ...
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This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about crime in Italian films in the early 1960s and late 1970s. It explores the phenomenology and provides a psychoanalysis of the films Blow-Up and The Passenger directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, The Night Porter directed by Liliana Cavani, Oedipus Rex directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and The Spider's Stratagem directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. These films revolve around the image of the crime scene and present a crime to be “seen” in the folds of the landscape as well as on the faces of people and things. This volume discusses the vicissitudes of cinematic vision through an intermingling of media and proposes a writing of spectatorship that attempts to retrace the patterns and rhythms through which each film says or shows that something “will have been.”Less
This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about crime in Italian films in the early 1960s and late 1970s. It explores the phenomenology and provides a psychoanalysis of the films Blow-Up and The Passenger directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, The Night Porter directed by Liliana Cavani, Oedipus Rex directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and The Spider's Stratagem directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. These films revolve around the image of the crime scene and present a crime to be “seen” in the folds of the landscape as well as on the faces of people and things. This volume discusses the vicissitudes of cinematic vision through an intermingling of media and proposes a writing of spectatorship that attempts to retrace the patterns and rhythms through which each film says or shows that something “will have been.”
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758024
- eISBN:
- 9780804786775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758024.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
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 ...
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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
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.
András Bálint Kovács
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226451633
- eISBN:
- 9780226451664
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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 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.
