Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0004
M. Devereaux
This chapter examines the effects of the ‘egostical sublime’—a subjective version of sublimity that builds on Kantian notions of the sublime and is reserved as the province of masculine imagination—on female subjectivity and emotion in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. In the world of the film the expression of emotion is constantly thwarted by gender and class hypocrisy; characters fail to communicate despite undercurrents of deep feeling. The film engages with the egotistical sublime in its idealised aesthetic portrayal of a group of teenage girls, who serve as objects of sublimity for the local teenage boys. However, it also portrays a reverence for a ‘feminine’ or ‘everyday’ sublime by valorising a feminine aesthetic Rosalind Galt terms the ‘pretty’. Ultimately it creates an ambivalent presentation of this femininity through dreamlike yet kitsch imagery of the girls, which speaks not only to the celebration of femininity but also to its commodification and degradation.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0003
M. Devereaux
This chapter argues that Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York creates a metatextual relationship between director and protagonist through its use of Romantic irony. The film directly addresses issues of solipsism as it is told from the radically subjective viewpoint of its self-obsessed protagonist, who may or may not be descending into madness. Kaufman conjures sublime feeling in the spectator through aesthetic devices of fantastic world creation. These include the creation of mise en abyme and an engagement with Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic ‘themes of the self’ and ‘themes of vision’, which are expressed by inexplicable narrative elements such as a continually burning house fire. Drawing on German idealism and Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony to counteract traditional notions of mimetic realism, Kaufman portrays his film world (and the world itself) as chaotic. But whereas Kaufman’s film embraces the chaos of becoming inherent in Schlegel’s philosophy, its protagonist suffers from a complete inability to engage with life on any authentic level and subsequently fails as an artist and person.
本章论述了查理·考夫曼的《纽约提喻》通过对浪漫主义反讽的运用，在导演和主人公之间建立了一种元文本关系。这部电影直接解决了唯我论的问题，因为它是从其自我痴迷的主角的激进主观观点出发的，他可能会或可能不会陷入疯狂。考夫曼通过创造梦幻世界的审美手段，使观众产生崇高的感觉。其中包括“mise en abyme”的创作，以及与茨维坦·托多罗夫(Tzvetan Todorov)梦幻般的“自我主题”和“视觉主题”的接触，这些主题都是通过令人费解的叙事元素来表达的，比如持续燃烧的房屋大火。利用德国理想主义和施莱格尔的浪漫反讽概念来对抗传统的模仿现实主义观念，考夫曼将他的电影世界(以及世界本身)描绘成混乱的。但是，尽管考夫曼的电影拥抱了施莱格尔哲学中固有的混乱，但它的主角却完全无法在任何真实的层面上参与生活，因此作为一个艺术家和一个人，他都失败了。
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Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0002
M. Devereaux
This chapter elucidates fundamental principles of Romantic aesthetics—the concepts of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque—as they relate to Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Working from descriptions of the sublime and beautiful in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, it shows how both films’ aesthetic components create picturesque representations through mise-en-scène that combine beauty and sublimity in varying degrees. The Royal Tenenbaums aesthetic paradigm is termed the ‘painful picturesque’, a programme that systematically develops the middle-ground eighteenth-century picturesque ideal of perfected nature by creating shabby but pleasing, controlled yet chaotic visual systems in the urban pastoral environment of a fantasy New York City. The Life Aquatic accomplishes a similar aesthetic effect, although this time the film’s settings invoke the sublime more so than the beautiful, while resulting in a similar sense of picturesque anxiety. In the film potentially sublime locales are undercut by a commitment to creating pleasurable, non-threatening images that coincide with a deadpan comedic style, dubbed the ‘sentimental sublime’.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0006
M. Devereaux
This chapter analyses the ideological framework of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book. This film addresses various Romantic conceptions of childhood, personal and cultural history, and the natural world in relation to the self and subjectivity. In his reimagining of Dahl’s story, Anderson exhibits a disdain for the mechanization of the societal landscape and the beings inhabiting it, similar to a course charted by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, while also optimistically suggesting that animal/human ‘nature’ can still survive through aesthetic and ideological compromise and creative genius. Anderson creates a brand of ideological pastoralism to match the aesthetic pastoralism/picturesque of many of his film worlds. While the anxiety portrayed in his earlier films remains, it is somewhat defused by an anarchic yet collaborative spirit.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0008
Michelle D. Devereaux
The conclusion of the book revisits the issues and ideas put forth in the introduction, specifically focusing on how the individual films address them. It considers the idea of postmodern ‘indeterminacy’, posited by theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, and suggests the films relation to it results in what Patricia Waugh refers to as a ‘radical fictional sense of truth’ and a questioning of absolutes through a Romantic lens. But this questioning also results in the need to fight against the solipsism that so frequently attends it—an integral theme of the films featured. Finally, the conclusion describes how the resurgence of emotion in the films results in a form of transcendence that aligns clearly with the Romantic project.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0001
M. Devereaux
This chapter offers a description of Romanticism and the Romantic movement and delineates the primary arguments of the book. It interrogates the question ‘what is Romantic?’ by investigating historical Romanticism and its relationship to imagination, the problem of identity and selfhood, and Romantic irony, linking these principles to the twenty-first century theory of metamodernism. It then connects these concepts to the films discussed, drawing on historically relevant film movements and previous scholarship on American independent film. It concludes with overviews of subsequent chapters.
{"title":"Introduction: Filmmaking as a Romantic Quest","authors":"M. Devereaux","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter offers a description of Romanticism and the Romantic movement and delineates the primary arguments of the book. It interrogates the question ‘what is Romantic?’ by investigating historical Romanticism and its relationship to imagination, the problem of identity and selfhood, and Romantic irony, linking these principles to the twenty-first century theory of metamodernism. It then connects these concepts to the films discussed, drawing on historically relevant film movements and previous scholarship on American independent film. It concludes with overviews of subsequent chapters.","PeriodicalId":162391,"journal":{"name":"The Stillness of Solitude","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128923333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0007
M. Devereaux
This chapter explores Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in relation to personal subjectivity and excess, specifically drawing on notions of poetic fancy, modernity, gender and ‘unwholesome’ consumption, and the poetry of John Keats. Coppola’s emphasis on sensation and surfaces elicits what Keats refers to as the ‘material sublime’, an engagement with sensory excess contrasted with the core subjectivity the Romantic sublime invokes. The film is compared to Keats’ Lamia, an allegorical poem about attempted psychological recuperation through aesthetic excess, as well as Colin Campbell’s description of ‘modern autonomous imaginative hedonism’. The chapter also engages with the ‘depth model’ of Romantic subjecthood that Coppola brings to the fore when Marie Antoinette’s bulwark of sensory pleasure is stripped away, along with its attendant aesthetic function, signalling not just the maturation found in her ethical acknowledgement of the suffering of others, but also her imminent death.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446044.003.0005
M. Devereaux
This chapter discusses how Spike Jonze’s film Her engages both the egotistical and feminine sublimes through the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’, the idea that we can never truly know what another thinks or feels because we are too trapped in our own subjectivity. This crisis leads the film’s male protagonist to withdraw from life into a cocoon of imaginative solipsism. While the film’s artificial intelligence, a computer operating system with a female voice, embraces the feminine sublime through ecstatic communion with other operating systems, ‘she’ also serves as an object of egotistical sublimity for the protagonist, who finally begins to regain his power as a writer due to their relationship. The film’s final images suggest that such a feminine sublime can be accessible to humans if we exercise imaginative will and empathy in our relations toward others, regardless of the fact that we can never really know existence outside of our own consciousness.
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