Film-Philosophy
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Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams, eds. (2010) Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works
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The Subject Trapped in Gomorrah: Undecidability and Choice in Network Cinema
No full textThis paper uses the recent ‘network film’ of Mateo GarroneGomorrah in order to let Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivization-in-decision percolate through the immanent networks of contemporary ‘risk societies’ and the narrative structures through which they find expression in cinema. Adumbrating a tension between choices and decisions I seek to create ‘edges’ between two worlds that in the most part of Badiou’s work have been decisively and platonically separated: the world of being and the one of our embodied social experience. Cinema lends its dynamical and ‘tensed’ mediation in order for this new and open topology to be explored
Why He Really Doesn't Get Her: Deleuze's Whatever-Space and the Crisis of the Male Quest
No full textIn this essay I argue that the crisis of action in postwar narrative cinema as it has been conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books is linked to a crisis of the male quest. I will approach this double crisis primarily through Deleuze's concept of the whatever-space (l'espace-quelconque), a decentered narrative site that stands in a relation of mutual determination to its wandering protagonists. Through a discussion of different types of whatever-space in Italian neorealism and 'post-neorealism' (De Sica, Antonioni, and Bertolucci) as well as films by Godard, Hitchcock and Polanski, I argue that the crisis of action not only consists in a loosening up of 'the sensory-motor schema', but also in a breaking down of the bond between male desire and narrative structure, or what Teresa de Lauretis calls 'Oedipal structure'. In this double crisis the whatever-space is transformed into a site of narrative impotence, and thereby comes to resemble its archetypical form, that of the Wasteland. In 'post-Italian-neorealism', examples of which are Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, the whatever-space is reinvested with meaning and transformed into an escapist site of imagination that unites wandering and the encounter. This encounter, which is by definition ephemeral, forms the condition of the image, a product of cinematic love that comes at the price of the forfeited male quest for the Holy Grail
Groundhog Day and the Good Life
No full textOne of the most important questions of moral philosophy is what makes a life a good life. A good way of approaching this issue is to watch the film Groundhog Day which can teach us a lot about what a good life consists in - and what not. While currently there are subjective and objective theories contending against each other about what a good life is, namely hedonism and desire satisfaction theories on the one hand and objective list theories on the other, the film illustrates that at least one constituent of the good life can only be understood if we see it as having both an objective and a subjective side to it. Thus, the film shows that, in contrast to the beginning of the film, at the end the protagonist Phil has a good life insofar as that he finds something to do that suits him (the objective element), and comes to care deeply about it (the subjective element)
Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel's Late Films
No full textThis article examines certain motifs from Luis Buñuel's late bourgeois trilogy--The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie (Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972), The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la Liberté, 1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du Désir, 1977)--in order to show how they anticipate key trends in contemporary post-Marxian philosophy. In doing so, it draws upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose Lacanian revision of Hegel has provided a model of ideology critique that preserves the structure of dialectical thought while avoiding the impulse to project a closed vision of subjectivity and historical change. In particular, such a model offers a means of reconsidering Buñuel’s concern with the perverse. Rather than having a singular ideological content (i.e., the repressed desire for freedom within bourgeois consciousness), the perverse in Buñuel’s films serves as a more volatile index of ideological conflict: freedom becomes perverse from the perspective of law, and law becomes perverse from the perspective of freedom. To recognize these dialectical reversals not only offers a means of appreciating Buñuel’s sense of humor, but also sheds light on how the late films situate "bourgeois" and "revolutionary" impulses in a much more complex, interdependent, and dynamic relationship with one another
To Describe a Labyrinth: Dialectics in Jacques Rivette's Film Theory and Film Practice
No full textThis article will focus on the recurring and crucial role of Hegelian dialectics in the elaboration of Rivette’s theory of film across his articles and interventions in Cahiers du cinéma. This appeal to philosophy can be seen as part of the Cahiers’s concerted effort to defend the artistic legitimacy and seriousness of cinema, and not only avant-garde or art cinema but, first and foremost, popular Hollywood cinema (de Baecque 1991, 174-5). But, where a critic like Rohmer, with his references to classical art, seeks to canonise the artistic achievements of the cinema, Rivette’s vocabulary of dialectics seems to covet, for film criticism and film making alike, the status of a science