Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226413907
- eISBN:
- 9780226414232
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226414232.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects ...
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In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects can be attuned or entangled. In Bresson’s films, an aesthetic principle thus becomes an ethical instrument to carve out an ontology in which the truth of categorical fixities is menaced. The Bond of the Furthest Apart argues that Bresson’s visionary rethinkings run parallel to suppositions about individuality, ontology, and the demystification of human privilege in the philosophical fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The bond of the book’s title refers to the counterpoint and antinomy within particular works and beneath the strains of these literary and cinematic works which are kindred in their revelation of things that lure us toward them in the absence of an orienting perspective that would make what is seen precisely recognizable.Less
In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects can be attuned or entangled. In Bresson’s films, an aesthetic principle thus becomes an ethical instrument to carve out an ontology in which the truth of categorical fixities is menaced. The Bond of the Furthest Apart argues that Bresson’s visionary rethinkings run parallel to suppositions about individuality, ontology, and the demystification of human privilege in the philosophical fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The bond of the book’s title refers to the counterpoint and antinomy within particular works and beneath the strains of these literary and cinematic works which are kindred in their revelation of things that lure us toward them in the absence of an orienting perspective that would make what is seen precisely recognizable.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), has long been ...
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The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), has long been thought of as a transcendental filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination and little interested in the problems of the social world. This book is the first to view Bresson’s work in an altogether different context. Rather than a religious—or spiritual—filmmaker, Bresson is revealed as an artist steeped in radical, revolutionary politics. Situating Bresson in radical and aesthetic political contexts, from surrealism to situationism, this book shows how his early style was a model for social resistance. We then see how, after May 1968, his films were in fact a series of reflections on the failure of revolution in France—especially as “failure” is understood in relation to Bresson’s chosen literary precursors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Russian revolutionary culture of the nineteenth century.Less
The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), has long been thought of as a transcendental filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination and little interested in the problems of the social world. This book is the first to view Bresson’s work in an altogether different context. Rather than a religious—or spiritual—filmmaker, Bresson is revealed as an artist steeped in radical, revolutionary politics. Situating Bresson in radical and aesthetic political contexts, from surrealism to situationism, this book shows how his early style was a model for social resistance. We then see how, after May 1968, his films were in fact a series of reflections on the failure of revolution in France—especially as “failure” is understood in relation to Bresson’s chosen literary precursors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Russian revolutionary culture of the nineteenth century.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter suggests that the transcendental tradition of Bresson criticism has been too much concerned with the theological implications of cells and too little concerned with the crimes ...
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This chapter suggests that the transcendental tradition of Bresson criticism has been too much concerned with the theological implications of cells and too little concerned with the crimes themselves. In Bresson’s early work, crime is considered not as the predicate to a confinement that leads to the acceptance of grace, but as a form of social liberation, as a necessary form of revolt against the dominant social formation and the reeducative function of the prison described so well by Michel Foucault. In the criminal dimension of A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, crime is not a prelude to religious conversion, but the beginning of a revolutionary conception of crime presented in the most incendiary of all forms.Less
This chapter suggests that the transcendental tradition of Bresson criticism has been too much concerned with the theological implications of cells and too little concerned with the crimes themselves. In Bresson’s early work, crime is considered not as the predicate to a confinement that leads to the acceptance of grace, but as a form of social liberation, as a necessary form of revolt against the dominant social formation and the reeducative function of the prison described so well by Michel Foucault. In the criminal dimension of A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, crime is not a prelude to religious conversion, but the beginning of a revolutionary conception of crime presented in the most incendiary of all forms.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226413907
- eISBN:
- 9780226414232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226414232.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This essay examines Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar in which, through the filmic congruence of animal and human bodies, we are made to rethink the meaningfulness of the distinction that separates ...
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This essay examines Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar in which, through the filmic congruence of animal and human bodies, we are made to rethink the meaningfulness of the distinction that separates animal and human forms of embodiment—specifically, we are asked to rethink the roles of reason and will in making us who we are, a reconception that owes a debt to “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” For Montaigne animal communication, which does not depend on speech or even voice, has a human equivalent in involuntary gesture and posture.Less
This essay examines Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar in which, through the filmic congruence of animal and human bodies, we are made to rethink the meaningfulness of the distinction that separates animal and human forms of embodiment—specifically, we are asked to rethink the roles of reason and will in making us who we are, a reconception that owes a debt to “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” For Montaigne animal communication, which does not depend on speech or even voice, has a human equivalent in involuntary gesture and posture.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226413907
- eISBN:
- 9780226414232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226414232.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This essay engages two strains of Tolstoy’s writing. In the first, the sight of death is the foundation of ethical understanding; in the second, if ethical understanding is practiced, there is no ...
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This essay engages two strains of Tolstoy’s writing. In the first, the sight of death is the foundation of ethical understanding; in the second, if ethical understanding is practiced, there is no death of any consequence. The latter half of the essay turns to Bresson’s L’Argent, a filmic adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon” which transforms Tolstoy’s gospelized ethics to an immanent ethics, raising the question of whether ethics is phenomenal and embodied (as in Levinas and Derrida) or whether it is evental (as in Badiou). An examination of aspects of Wittgenstein’s writing on ethics, T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, and Tolstoy’s fable “Alyosha Gorshok” sharpen the consideration of whether ethics is natural or supernatural.Less
This essay engages two strains of Tolstoy’s writing. In the first, the sight of death is the foundation of ethical understanding; in the second, if ethical understanding is practiced, there is no death of any consequence. The latter half of the essay turns to Bresson’s L’Argent, a filmic adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon” which transforms Tolstoy’s gospelized ethics to an immanent ethics, raising the question of whether ethics is phenomenal and embodied (as in Levinas and Derrida) or whether it is evental (as in Badiou). An examination of aspects of Wittgenstein’s writing on ethics, T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, and Tolstoy’s fable “Alyosha Gorshok” sharpen the consideration of whether ethics is natural or supernatural.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226413907
- eISBN:
- 9780226414232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226414232.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This essay examines how Bresson’s cinematography captures phenomena outside a situating placement, specifically the ways in which The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette, and A Man Escaped dismantle ...
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This essay examines how Bresson’s cinematography captures phenomena outside a situating placement, specifically the ways in which The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette, and A Man Escaped dismantle characterlogical, ideological, and taxonomic understandings of the essence of a thing. Deleuze’s concept of the abstract face and Eisenstein’s theory of “pathos” (the ecstatic leap whereby a thing exceeds its ordinary conditions, as well as the leap out of the self experienced by the spectator when he witnesses such a breakthrough) illuminate the terms in which in Bresson’s films phenomena must be identified in relation to what lies beyond their ostensible boundaries.Less
This essay examines how Bresson’s cinematography captures phenomena outside a situating placement, specifically the ways in which The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette, and A Man Escaped dismantle characterlogical, ideological, and taxonomic understandings of the essence of a thing. Deleuze’s concept of the abstract face and Eisenstein’s theory of “pathos” (the ecstatic leap whereby a thing exceeds its ordinary conditions, as well as the leap out of the self experienced by the spectator when he witnesses such a breakthrough) illuminate the terms in which in Bresson’s films phenomena must be identified in relation to what lies beyond their ostensible boundaries.
Hugh McDonnell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781383025
- eISBN:
- 9781781384060
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781383025.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Chapter 8 considers the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and how Europe was represented or interpreted in his work. It looks at the contradictions, problems and capacities of the photographic ...
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Chapter 8 considers the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and how Europe was represented or interpreted in his work. It looks at the contradictions, problems and capacities of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s political, social, and aesthetic commitments. To this end it examines three spaces and their reception by their Paris audiences: first, his exhibition at the Musée des arts décoratifs in the Louvre (1955), which displayed his work from both Europe and the non-European world. Second, it looks at Cartier-Bresson’s record of the culmination of the Chinese Civil War and its subsequent presentation in a collection of 1954–D’une Chine à l’autre. This is contextualised in terms of the representation of Europe in terms of its Others. Third, it analyses his 1955 work Les Européens in which Cartier-Bresson’s impressions of his European travels were presented.Less
Chapter 8 considers the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and how Europe was represented or interpreted in his work. It looks at the contradictions, problems and capacities of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s political, social, and aesthetic commitments. To this end it examines three spaces and their reception by their Paris audiences: first, his exhibition at the Musée des arts décoratifs in the Louvre (1955), which displayed his work from both Europe and the non-European world. Second, it looks at Cartier-Bresson’s record of the culmination of the Chinese Civil War and its subsequent presentation in a collection of 1954–D’une Chine à l’autre. This is contextualised in terms of the representation of Europe in terms of its Others. Third, it analyses his 1955 work Les Européens in which Cartier-Bresson’s impressions of his European travels were presented.
Dennis Rothermel
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474422734
- eISBN:
- 9781474434959
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422734.003.0014
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
This chapter connects distinctive animal territories to specific uses of film language through a series of case studies, most notably Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Michelangelo ...
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This chapter connects distinctive animal territories to specific uses of film language through a series of case studies, most notably Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012). Significantly, becoming-animal cannot be represented by conventional point-of-view and shot-reverse-shot editing (the structural mainstay of filmic suture), because it ties the animal to the conventional (and thus delimiting) human vectorial space of Deleuze’s action-image. Instead, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seminal essay, ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, the chapter notes that all four filmmakers resort to a form of free-indirect discourse, whereby animality fills up the film from the inside as formative of the representation rather than rendering the subject within the structure of representation. Not unlike T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, where the character’s subjectivity is presented objectively in and through the mise-en-scène as well as individual focalisation (in this case the character is also on-screen), animal perception is able to be expressed by a form of camera self-consciousness, what Deleuze calls ‘cinema a special kind of cinema where the camera makes itself felt.Less
This chapter connects distinctive animal territories to specific uses of film language through a series of case studies, most notably Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012). Significantly, becoming-animal cannot be represented by conventional point-of-view and shot-reverse-shot editing (the structural mainstay of filmic suture), because it ties the animal to the conventional (and thus delimiting) human vectorial space of Deleuze’s action-image. Instead, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seminal essay, ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, the chapter notes that all four filmmakers resort to a form of free-indirect discourse, whereby animality fills up the film from the inside as formative of the representation rather than rendering the subject within the structure of representation. Not unlike T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, where the character’s subjectivity is presented objectively in and through the mise-en-scène as well as individual focalisation (in this case the character is also on-screen), animal perception is able to be expressed by a form of camera self-consciousness, what Deleuze calls ‘cinema a special kind of cinema where the camera makes itself felt.
Alison Taylor
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474415224
- eISBN:
- 9781474434829
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415224.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and ...
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Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.Less
Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.
Ronald Meyer
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474411424
- eISBN:
- 9781474418454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411424.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explores four versions of Dostoevskii’s 1848 story “White Nights,” whose nameless protagonist, referred to as the Dreamer, inspired many directors to transpose this early Dostoevskian ...
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This chapter explores four versions of Dostoevskii’s 1848 story “White Nights,” whose nameless protagonist, referred to as the Dreamer, inspired many directors to transpose this early Dostoevskian short work into film. The focus is on four directors: Luchino Visconti, Robert Bresson, Sanjay Bhansali, and José Luis Guerín. As is argued in the chapter, each director takes a different approach to recontextualizing the first-person narrative in various locations, times, and cinematic traditions, ranging from Italian neo-realism and post-1968 Paris to Bollywood and Strasbourg. The author argues that the contemporary directors, Bhansali and Guerín take not only Dostoevskii’s story, but also, respectively, the earlier adaptations by Visconti and Bresson as their subtexts, thus forming a complex chain of intertextual connections.Less
This chapter explores four versions of Dostoevskii’s 1848 story “White Nights,” whose nameless protagonist, referred to as the Dreamer, inspired many directors to transpose this early Dostoevskian short work into film. The focus is on four directors: Luchino Visconti, Robert Bresson, Sanjay Bhansali, and José Luis Guerín. As is argued in the chapter, each director takes a different approach to recontextualizing the first-person narrative in various locations, times, and cinematic traditions, ranging from Italian neo-realism and post-1968 Paris to Bollywood and Strasbourg. The author argues that the contemporary directors, Bhansali and Guerín take not only Dostoevskii’s story, but also, respectively, the earlier adaptations by Visconti and Bresson as their subtexts, thus forming a complex chain of intertextual connections.
Olga Peters Hasty
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474411424
- eISBN:
- 9781474418454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411424.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on ...
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This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.Less
This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.
S. Ceilidh Orr
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474411424
- eISBN:
- 9781474418454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411424.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Noting the difficulty of interpreting Bresson’s use of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in The Pickpocket as an adaptation per se, this chapter argues that the director takes part in the generic ...
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Noting the difficulty of interpreting Bresson’s use of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in The Pickpocket as an adaptation per se, this chapter argues that the director takes part in the generic tradition of confession. Pickpocketing becomes not just a crime but also, through Bresson’s disruption of the psychological cause and effect that the viewer expects, a repeated attempt at confession. Because of Bresson’s hero’s inability to explain the motivation for his crime, he resembles not only Dostoevskii’s hero Raskolnikov, but also Meursault of Camus’s The Stranger. By creating these gaps, Bresson forces viewers to negotiate the borders not only between genres but between disconnected acts.Less
Noting the difficulty of interpreting Bresson’s use of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in The Pickpocket as an adaptation per se, this chapter argues that the director takes part in the generic tradition of confession. Pickpocketing becomes not just a crime but also, through Bresson’s disruption of the psychological cause and effect that the viewer expects, a repeated attempt at confession. Because of Bresson’s hero’s inability to explain the motivation for his crime, he resembles not only Dostoevskii’s hero Raskolnikov, but also Meursault of Camus’s The Stranger. By creating these gaps, Bresson forces viewers to negotiate the borders not only between genres but between disconnected acts.
András Bálint Kovács
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226451633
- eISBN:
- 9780226451664
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Casting light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Robert Bresson, and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, ...
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Casting light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Robert Bresson, and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, this book is a comprehensive study of European art cinema's postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, it argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, the book begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. It then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, the book provides a history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism's origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, it ultimately lays out new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.Less
Casting light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Robert Bresson, and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, this book is a comprehensive study of European art cinema's postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, it argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, the book begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. It then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, the book provides a history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism's origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, it ultimately lays out new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.
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/9780226451664.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This introductory chapter presents an aspect of Robert Bresson’s production that portrays him as an engaged, militant filmmaker, indicating the political discourse that emerged around his work. ...
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This introductory chapter presents an aspect of Robert Bresson’s production that portrays him as an engaged, militant filmmaker, indicating the political discourse that emerged around his work. Bresson’s films provoked a political response precisely because of their incendiary, revolutionary character. The book then offers an understanding of the revolutionary character of the cinema of Robert Bresson. It argues that Bresson’s works has been engaged with questions of revolutionary practice and radical politics from the very beginning, and says that part of the radical character of Bresson’s work issues from his interest in understanding the political dimension of religious life and religious law.Less
This introductory chapter presents an aspect of Robert Bresson’s production that portrays him as an engaged, militant filmmaker, indicating the political discourse that emerged around his work. Bresson’s films provoked a political response precisely because of their incendiary, revolutionary character. The book then offers an understanding of the revolutionary character of the cinema of Robert Bresson. It argues that Bresson’s works has been engaged with questions of revolutionary practice and radical politics from the very beginning, and says that part of the radical character of Bresson’s work issues from his interest in understanding the political dimension of religious life and religious law.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines Michel Estève’s differentiation of Luis Buñuel’s Nazarin and Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. The differences between these films is said to reside in Buñuel’s tendency to ...
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This chapter examines Michel Estève’s differentiation of Luis Buñuel’s Nazarin and Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. The differences between these films is said to reside in Buñuel’s tendency to describe the dominant effect of social alienation as a turn to the erotic. The chapter then focuses on the work words do in Bresson’s early films, and what the obvious attention to the materiality of the signifier and his propensity for citation suggests. It deals with the possibility of monstration, and how an attention to language itself shares this revolutionary ambition.Less
This chapter examines Michel Estève’s differentiation of Luis Buñuel’s Nazarin and Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. The differences between these films is said to reside in Buñuel’s tendency to describe the dominant effect of social alienation as a turn to the erotic. The chapter then focuses on the work words do in Bresson’s early films, and what the obvious attention to the materiality of the signifier and his propensity for citation suggests. It deals with the possibility of monstration, and how an attention to language itself shares this revolutionary ambition.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines Bresson’s first adaptation of Dostoevsky, Une femme douce, which initiates his transition to color filmmaking. According to Keith Reader, Bresson’s transition to color leads to ...
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This chapter examines Bresson’s first adaptation of Dostoevsky, Une femme douce, which initiates his transition to color filmmaking. According to Keith Reader, Bresson’s transition to color leads to a softening of the modernist intensity of his black-and-white work, improving the film fragment by camouflaging it in the colors of the phenomenal world. Bresson’s turn to color is conceptually consistent with his concern with logocentrism and nomination, with the violence that follows the authority of the word. While his earlier films all pose models for understanding the reversibility of law and morality, his later work takes on a more analytical quality, examining the problems of the dominant social formation in the aftermath of a perceived failure at revolution by way of varying color strategies.Less
This chapter examines Bresson’s first adaptation of Dostoevsky, Une femme douce, which initiates his transition to color filmmaking. According to Keith Reader, Bresson’s transition to color leads to a softening of the modernist intensity of his black-and-white work, improving the film fragment by camouflaging it in the colors of the phenomenal world. Bresson’s turn to color is conceptually consistent with his concern with logocentrism and nomination, with the violence that follows the authority of the word. While his earlier films all pose models for understanding the reversibility of law and morality, his later work takes on a more analytical quality, examining the problems of the dominant social formation in the aftermath of a perceived failure at revolution by way of varying color strategies.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter reviews Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, in which he remains concerned with the problem of revolution in the aftermath of its perceived failure. His turn to Arthurian legend in 1974 makes ...
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This chapter reviews Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, in which he remains concerned with the problem of revolution in the aftermath of its perceived failure. His turn to Arthurian legend in 1974 makes explicit the concerns of his late work. In Lancelot du Lac, color traces a process of social disintegration, describing the obstructions to collectivity at a moment in French life where every effort at unification is monitored and disrupted by a newly fortified state of surveillance. The film records the change and variety of human experience in an effort to understand pressures and problems of enacting a revolution in contemporary France.Less
This chapter reviews Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, in which he remains concerned with the problem of revolution in the aftermath of its perceived failure. His turn to Arthurian legend in 1974 makes explicit the concerns of his late work. In Lancelot du Lac, color traces a process of social disintegration, describing the obstructions to collectivity at a moment in French life where every effort at unification is monitored and disrupted by a newly fortified state of surveillance. The film records the change and variety of human experience in an effort to understand pressures and problems of enacting a revolution in contemporary France.
Brian Price
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816654611
- eISBN:
- 9781452946177
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816654611.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines Robert Bresson’s last film of his career, L’Argent, in which he makes the turn from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. This turn is an evidence of Bresson’s sensitivity to a relation ...
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This chapter examines Robert Bresson’s last film of his career, L’Argent, in which he makes the turn from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. This turn is an evidence of Bresson’s sensitivity to a relation between film form and the world. Of all of Bresson’s late work, L’Argent is especially direct in its political address. In L’Argent, characters’ reflections on their situation and place in the world or with each other are kept to a minimum, which allows Bresson to make a systematic argument, representing the chain of exploitation at work in a capitalist economy as opposed to how various members of that chain feel about it.Less
This chapter examines Robert Bresson’s last film of his career, L’Argent, in which he makes the turn from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. This turn is an evidence of Bresson’s sensitivity to a relation between film form and the world. Of all of Bresson’s late work, L’Argent is especially direct in its political address. In L’Argent, characters’ reflections on their situation and place in the world or with each other are kept to a minimum, which allows Bresson to make a systematic argument, representing the chain of exploitation at work in a capitalist economy as opposed to how various members of that chain feel about it.
Richard I. Suchenski
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190274108
- eISBN:
- 9780190274139
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190274108.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In the Histoire(s) du cinéma project, Jean-Luc Godard takes the historical friction created by his matrix of cross-references to the threshold of legibility, reviving the strategies of ...
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In the Histoire(s) du cinéma project, Jean-Luc Godard takes the historical friction created by his matrix of cross-references to the threshold of legibility, reviving the strategies of superimposition used by earlier avant-gardists (like Abel Gance and Gregory Markopoulos) to visually layer different periods and to make contrapuntal use of citations from the histories of film, painting, music, and literature. A four-and-a-half-hour video work that is deeply concerned with the impact of the projected image and elegiacally posits the death of cinema, Histoire(s) du cinéma gives new meaning to an aesthetics of fragments, using a dense network of associations to meditate on the end of the twentieth century and its dominant medium.Less
In the Histoire(s) du cinéma project, Jean-Luc Godard takes the historical friction created by his matrix of cross-references to the threshold of legibility, reviving the strategies of superimposition used by earlier avant-gardists (like Abel Gance and Gregory Markopoulos) to visually layer different periods and to make contrapuntal use of citations from the histories of film, painting, music, and literature. A four-and-a-half-hour video work that is deeply concerned with the impact of the projected image and elegiacally posits the death of cinema, Histoire(s) du cinéma gives new meaning to an aesthetics of fragments, using a dense network of associations to meditate on the end of the twentieth century and its dominant medium.
