1,720,976 research outputs found
In Search of Lost Time: La Notte and the Time-Image
No full textMost analyses of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films have emphasized themes of alienation, but these interpretations have ignored postwar attempts to address issues of ethical responsibility. As much as Antonioni’s films are about individuation and isolation, individuation as alterity becomes a way to talk about altruism and compassion. In my paper, I examine the implications of Deleuze’s time-image, which point to a past, diachronic time that never emerges on screen in La Notte. The time-image relies on visual, audio, and tactile details to draw the spectator’s attention to time as an abstract concept, and Antonioni’s time-image cinema allows for a merging of exterior and internal space. I place La Notte both in context with other postwar neorealist films and recent theoretical discussions of Deleuze. At the same time, I argue that Antonioni’s interest in ethical responsibility, which begins with an acknowledgment of the self’s limitations, parallels Levinas’s philosophical formulations about the proximity of the other. In the context of postwar concerns, Levinas radically argues that ethical behavior begins with a recognition of alterity between individuals
Beyond Ontology: Levinas and the Ethical Frame in Film
No full textFrom its beginning, film set forth a new scene for ethical and moral engagement. For more than a century, film’s frame and image have opened fresh space for enacting ethical and moral conflicts and dilemmas. To scholars and critics such as André Bazin, it became apparent that in film matters of aesthetics influence ethical and moral questions (Bazin 2005, 39–40). As Dudley Andrew says: ‘In cinema, aesthetic issues lead immediately to moral ones ’ (Andrew 2005, xxi). Today, the connection between aesthetic and ethical issues in film acquires new meaning from the relationship between time and ethics as described so differently by Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas. While only Deleuze directly addresses and discusses cinema, the work of all three on the relationship of time and ethics to a variety of issues – movement, space, otherness, identity, selfhood, and narrative – also pertains to and informs the interaction between aesthetic and ethical issues in film. Indeed, Deleuze and Ricoeur contrive compelling theories, concepts, and operations concerning time, movement and narrative that facilitate film’s participation in ethical discourse. From a Levinasian perspective, their work provides tools and means for relating film and Levinasian ethical language to each other. Individually and collectively, Deleuze, Ricoeur, and Levinas seek a discordant and disruptive temporal order for re-engaging ethical and moral exigencies and investing new ideas and fresh imagination in a revivified ethical debate. In this debate, aesthetic issues and ethical issues in film continue the process of mutual regeneration
A Poetics of the American Idea: The Jewish Writer and America
No full textThe history of the Jews in America is to a considerable extent the history of an idea. It is the story of how Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America and how, in turn, Jewish writers, intellectuals, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea. While it altered the modern Jewish experience, Jewish thinkers often led in the effort to make the idea of America relevant to the needs of an urban, industrial, and even postindustrial age. The work of such writers and thinkers served to keep the American idea meaningful in a time of competing authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies.</jats:p
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