Film-Philosophy
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Undoing the Image: Film Theory and Psychoanalysis
No full textThe primary aim of this article is to point up an essential attitude, an anxiety even, that has inflected – and perhaps inhibited - our engagement with film. Film theory has been marked by a ‘refusal to see, a looking away’ (Mulvey & Wollen 1976, 36), and my suggestion is that this has achieved its fullest expression in those strands of film theory heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. These, in turn, have remained within a gendered conceptual framework whereby the discursive or the narrative is associated with the masculine, and the image or spectacle is aligned with the feminine. This is not to reject these applications out of hand but rather to revisit this area with its blind spots in mind and to consider aspects that are perhaps at once obvious but often overlooked
Chew on This: Disgust, Delay, and the Documentary Image in Food, Inc.
No full textIn comparison to activist films with an “in your face†aesthetic, Food, Inc. seems positively tame. Rather than shock viewers with direct images of distasteful, disgusting, immoral, and outrageous practices in the food industry, it provokes and performs physical and moral disgust by its paradoxical (and perhaps quintessentially documentary) combination of proximity and immediacy with distance and delay. This close textual analysis reveals the film’s use of images to defer, deflect, and dodge, in such a way as to emphasize the temporal ‘lag time’ that Sara Ahmed argues is intrinsic to disgust and that connects as well to what Malin Wahlberg calls ‘documentary time.â€
Dissonance Rising: Subversive Sound in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern
No full textThis article presents an analysis of visual-acoustic dissonance in Raise The Red Lantern (Dà Hóng DÄ“nglóng GÄogÄo Guà , Zhang Yimou, 1991). Drawing upon Michel Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon, this study argues that the camera in this film represents a panoptic entity whose subversion can only be achieved by means outside the visual economy. Sound is that means; the aural regime works consistently to unhinge the balance of the optical machinery on both a thematic and cinematographic level. By coding the optical as a totalising and oppressive force, and subverting that force through various forms of visual-acoustic dissonance, Raise The Red Lantern unseats the traditionally dominant camera-image dyad, and presents a powerful rejection of the camera as the only life-giving force in an artistic medium that so privileges the visual
Something Against Nature: Sweet Movie, 4, and Disgust
No full textThis article explores the controversial film, Sweet Movie, made in 1974 by Yugoslav writer-director, Dusan Makavejev, and the equally controversial film, 4, released in Russia in 2005, written by Vladimir Sorokin and directed by Ilya Krzhanovsky. Both films schocked and disturbed audiences with their confronting nakedness, dark visions of human achievement in history, and their presentation of unconventional, uncivilized behaviour. Unclassifiable genre-wise, both are highly physical, sensuous, and visceral films, dealing with what we commonly regard as disgusting. However, with the help of Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell and William Blake, I argue that we consider in tandem with the films what is truly worthy of our critical-reflective disgust
Watching, Wounded: Avant-Garde Psychodrama and Aversion in Luther Price’s Meat
No full textThis essay looks at psychodrama as a method of (re)performance in Luther Price’s avant-garde feature, Meat. The 60-minute silent film assembles surgical instructional footage, scarred self-portraiture and hand-rendered mars to the Super8 emulsion to replicate an event in the filmmaker’s life where he was shot at close range on a study abroad program in Nicaragua. Price employs aversive tactics of disgust to involve the bodies of spectators in the cinematic experience, creating a cinematic pathos born of distance. The moribund imagery, abjected film stock and distancing cinematic format of Meat conspire to stress the viewer’s tolerance and threshold, allowing cinematic tactics to profoundly replicate the film’s caustic topic
