To challenge the increasing tendency to read Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre autobiographically, this article analyses two documentaries on the filmmaker. It theorizes the effects of the increasingly frequent appearance of the filmmaker on screen in such documentaries and in her own films by reviewing both tendencies through the classic debates about authorship. Noting and critiquing the way in which the documentary filmmakers attempt to mimic ‘Akerman’ filmmaking, the article argues that their attempts betray the codes that constitute ‘Akerman’ cinema by reproducing the modes against which her cinema worked. ‘Akerman’ names a cinematic journey towards the formulation of an aesthetic language of space, shot, frame and temporality through which to make visible the unseen and make audible the unspoken that constituted both the conditions and the imperative for a cinematic intervention from a historically situated post-war, post-Shoah ‘Polish Jewish family in Brussels’. This article proposes the term filmworking (drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s post-traumatic concept of artworking) to reveal how Akerman queered cinema. This effect emerges only from close analysis of each instance of filmworking and not from the closed tropes of a retrospective narrative of the life of the filmmaker, who, being repeatedly interviewed, herself contributed to such extra-cinematic explanations and closures of her own work.
{"title":"‘Akerman’ on-screen: Chantal Akerman behind and before the camera, and after cinema","authors":"G. Pollock","doi":"10.1386/miraj_00002_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00002_1","url":null,"abstract":"To challenge the increasing tendency to read Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre autobiographically, this article analyses two documentaries on the filmmaker. It theorizes the effects of the increasingly frequent appearance of the filmmaker on screen in such documentaries and in her own\u0000 films by reviewing both tendencies through the classic debates about authorship. Noting and critiquing the way in which the documentary filmmakers attempt to mimic ‘Akerman’ filmmaking, the article argues that their attempts betray the codes that constitute ‘Akerman’\u0000 cinema by reproducing the modes against which her cinema worked. ‘Akerman’ names a cinematic journey towards the formulation of an aesthetic language of space, shot, frame and temporality through which to make visible the unseen and make audible the unspoken that constituted both\u0000 the conditions and the imperative for a cinematic intervention from a historically situated post-war, post-Shoah ‘Polish Jewish family in Brussels’. This article proposes the term filmworking (drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s post-traumatic concept of artworking) to reveal how\u0000 Akerman queered cinema. This effect emerges only from close analysis of each instance of filmworking and not from the closed tropes of a retrospective narrative of the life of the filmmaker, who, being repeatedly interviewed, herself contributed to such extra-cinematic explanations and closures\u0000 of her own work.","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43379243","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}
{"title":"Shadowing the image archive: In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays, Mieke Bal (2016)","authors":"R. Sawhney","doi":"10.1386/miraj.7.2.324_4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj.7.2.324_4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44263225","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}
{"title":"Emergence lab/history as cinema-in-the-museum: The Tah-Satah exhibition, Jaipur, January–March 2017","authors":"K. Bhaumik","doi":"10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.312_4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.312_4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47609076","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}
{"title":"Experimenta; instigating a counter-cultural film platform in Bangalore: Shai Heredia in conversation with Rashmi Sawhney","authors":"Shai Heredia, R. Sawhney","doi":"10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.286_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.286_7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45193485","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}
Idhi Katha Matramena /Is this just a story? (1983) is one of three short films made by the feminist film collective, Yugantar (1980-83). Through a collaborative process with members of the activist and research collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, the film developed into an improvised fiction. The collective’s self-reflective debates, or activist ‘study’ (Harney and Moten 2013) on the manifold layers and subtlety of physical and emotional violence within the family, including their own hitherto unspoken experiences, brought forth novel aesthetic vocabularies affording new female subjectivities on-screen. Those in turn offered a new political language that entered the autonomous women’s movement in India, off-screen. I argue for the political as constituted in the interstices between activism, research and the creative collective process of film-making, rather than political film as either advocacy for a set political agenda or a position of autonomous creative/artistic practice and thought. I particularly stress legacies of feminist fiction’s ‘passionate constructions’ (Haraway 1988: 585), i.e. experimental film practice that is specifically cultivated out of collective study and the complexities of feminist friendship, forging a process of collective imagination as speculative politics. Thinking from Yugantar’s contextually situated practice as an expansion of the possible, I join arguments for fiction and speculation as modes of feminist intervention in South Asian film, activism and discourse. Rather than stressing an authentically Indian legacy of feminist film, however, this exploration of Idhi Katha Matramena highlights collective aesthetic practices that build solidarities within the context of India, and through speculative cinematic friendships across space/time localities of radical change. The text thus probes Yugantar’s past practice as a pertinent spectre for our present future.
{"title":"Is this just a story? Friendships and fictions for speculative alliances. The Yugantar film collective (1980–83)","authors":"N. Wolf","doi":"10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.252_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.252_1","url":null,"abstract":"Idhi Katha Matramena /Is this just a story? (1983) is one of three short films made by the feminist film collective, Yugantar (1980-83). Through a collaborative process with members of the activist and research collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, the film developed into an improvised fiction. The collective’s self-reflective debates, or activist ‘study’ (Harney and Moten 2013) on the manifold layers and subtlety of physical and emotional violence within the family, including their own hitherto unspoken experiences, brought forth novel aesthetic vocabularies affording new female subjectivities on-screen. Those in turn offered a new political language that entered the autonomous women’s movement in India, off-screen. I argue for the political as constituted in the interstices between activism, research and the creative collective process of film-making, rather than political film as either advocacy for a set political agenda or a position of autonomous creative/artistic practice and thought. I particularly stress legacies of feminist fiction’s ‘passionate constructions’ (Haraway 1988: 585), i.e. experimental film practice that is specifically cultivated out of collective study and the complexities of feminist friendship, forging a process of collective imagination as speculative politics. Thinking from Yugantar’s contextually situated practice as an expansion of the possible, I join arguments for fiction and speculation as modes of feminist intervention in South Asian film, activism and discourse. Rather than stressing an authentically Indian legacy of feminist film, however, this exploration of Idhi Katha Matramena highlights collective aesthetic practices that build solidarities within the context of India, and through speculative cinematic friendships across space/time localities of radical change. The text thus probes Yugantar’s past practice as a pertinent spectre for our present future.","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49561176","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}
{"title":"‘you’ve told me that three times now’: Propaganda/anti-propaganda in the Films Division India documentary, 1965–75","authors":"Avijit Mukul Kishore","doi":"10.1386/miraj.7.2.222_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj.7.2.222_1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/miraj.7.2.222_1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49550391","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}
{"title":"Taking control of the narrative: Shahzia Sikander in conversation with Behroze Gandhy","authors":"Shahzia Sikander, Behroze Gandhy","doi":"10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.298_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.298_7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41490103","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}
Is it still possible to think of some contemporary art as belonging to a religious or a secular world, where ‘world’ is understood in Wittgenstein’s sense as all that is the case? What purchase can these powerful concepts have on today’s art, especially in the realm of video and photography with their peculiar relations to reality and subjectivity? Echoing Talal Asad’s question ‘[i]s there a secular body?’, I ask whether there is a ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ gaze that belongs to this body, how it describes its own boundaries and what lies outside it. Looking at Pakistani art allows me to investigate the longer duration of culture from which some recent video practices have emerged and found a place in globalised art circuits. I claim that Bani Abidi’s video art, and specifically The Distance From Here (2010) can be seen as a sustained exploration of heterogeneous temporalities and subjective positions that are as yet not entirely taken up by their international presentation, audience and circulation, and derive from a space that is not understandable as simply divided between the secular and the religious. This remainder or intractability might indicate the possibility of encounters with forms of life that unsettle existing conceptual divisions between the secular and the religious or the local and the global. Seeing Abidi’s work in relation to a powerful tradition of allegory and of narrative deriving from the philosophy of Ibn Sina, I argue that these currents persist in popular culture and in local literary or artistic forms, even when they are not explicitly referred to. This allows me to make a case for seeing Abidi’s work in a context that is not restricted to the history of (Euro-American) art and its philosophies.
{"title":"The frame as borderland: Secular gazes and believing bodies in Bani Abidi’s The Distance From Here (2010)","authors":"A. Madani","doi":"10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.236_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.236_1","url":null,"abstract":"Is it still possible to think of some contemporary art as belonging to a religious or a secular world, where ‘world’ is understood in Wittgenstein’s sense as all that is the case? What purchase can these powerful concepts have on today’s art, especially in the realm of video and photography with their peculiar relations to reality and subjectivity? Echoing Talal Asad’s question ‘[i]s there a secular body?’, I ask whether there is a ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ gaze that belongs to this body, how it describes its own boundaries and what lies outside it. Looking at Pakistani art allows me to investigate the longer duration of culture from which some recent video practices have emerged and found a place in globalised art circuits. I claim that Bani Abidi’s video art, and specifically The Distance From Here (2010) can be seen as a sustained exploration of heterogeneous temporalities and subjective positions that are as yet not entirely taken up by their international presentation, audience and circulation, and derive from a space that is not understandable as simply divided between the secular and the religious. This remainder or intractability might indicate the possibility of encounters with forms of life that unsettle existing conceptual divisions between the secular and the religious or the local and the global. Seeing Abidi’s work in relation to a powerful tradition of allegory and of narrative deriving from the philosophy of Ibn Sina, I argue that these currents persist in popular culture and in local literary or artistic forms, even when they are not explicitly referred to. This allows me to make a case for seeing Abidi’s work in a context that is not restricted to the history of (Euro-American) art and its philosophies.","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.236_1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44316915","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}
{"title":"Moving towards the epicentre: The void and the image in the film-making of R.V. Ramani","authors":"Lucia King","doi":"10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.268_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/MIRAJ.7.2.268_1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36761,"journal":{"name":"Moving Image Review and Art Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46043992","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}
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