This article discusses the artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin’s “revisioning” of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) to consider how the poetic encounter between two artists from different generations exemplifies the relational praxis that Lorde pursued throughout her life. In revealing the ways in which Lorde opens acoustic sensory spaces for contemporary readers and listeners of her work, I specifically focus on the political and aesthetic dynamic of recitation in Lin’s experimental documentary The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). I trace how recitation becomes a coalitional practice of feminist chorus through which readers and listeners embody the sonorous space they co-create through and with Lorde. The article further looks into the ways Lin pairs recitation performance with visceral images of body parts on the screen to argue that the film’s visuals dwell in and extend the form of the chorus; which is to say, the film expands the meaning and practice of chorus beyond the realm of the sonic. The bodies on the screen extend the chorus, immersing the audience in a participatory rethinking of the experience of cancer (particularly breast cancer) not merely as an individual misfortune or an aesthetic concern. In adjoining textual, visual, and acoustic elements, Lin’s film provides a powerful transformative sensory environment, reverberating through the reciters and the audience.
{"title":"(Re)sounding Audre Lorde: Queer Crip Chorus in Lana Lin’s Experimental Documentary","authors":"Hyunjung Kim","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0241","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin’s “revisioning” of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) to consider how the poetic encounter between two artists from different generations exemplifies the relational praxis that Lorde pursued throughout her life. In revealing the ways in which Lorde opens acoustic sensory spaces for contemporary readers and listeners of her work, I specifically focus on the political and aesthetic dynamic of recitation in Lin’s experimental documentary The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). I trace how recitation becomes a coalitional practice of feminist chorus through which readers and listeners embody the sonorous space they co-create through and with Lorde. The article further looks into the ways Lin pairs recitation performance with visceral images of body parts on the screen to argue that the film’s visuals dwell in and extend the form of the chorus; which is to say, the film expands the meaning and practice of chorus beyond the realm of the sonic. The bodies on the screen extend the chorus, immersing the audience in a participatory rethinking of the experience of cancer (particularly breast cancer) not merely as an individual misfortune or an aesthetic concern. In adjoining textual, visual, and acoustic elements, Lin’s film provides a powerful transformative sensory environment, reverberating through the reciters and the audience.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135661812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra (2020) <i>The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience</i>","authors":"Tirna Chatterjee","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0250","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135663316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mario Slugan (2020) Fiction and imagination in early cinema: A philosophical approach to film history","authors":"İ. A. D. Flannagan","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0235","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45739158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The indexicality of film and sound recordings remains an unresolved problem in contemporary documentary theory. The prevailing conceptualisation of the documentary assigns it the status of a sober discourse, a framing in which history is modelled as absent cause and the unqualified distinction between fiction and non-fiction is considered sacrosanct. The denotative literalism characteristic of indexical media, however, confounds this conceptualisation, which in turn encourages the devaluing of documentary aesthetics; the documentary is not a medium of art, it is said, but of argument. In this article, I examine how philosopher Jacques Rancière offers an alternative account of the documentary grounded on aesthetics rather than sobriety. I show how, in rethinking the absent cause model of history as well as the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, Rancière's aesthetic approach resolves the conceptual problem posed by indexicality and brings clarity to the value and function of indexical media with respect to the documentary.
{"title":"Documentary Fictions: Jacques Rancière and the Problem of Indexical Media","authors":"K. Koutras","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0229","url":null,"abstract":"The indexicality of film and sound recordings remains an unresolved problem in contemporary documentary theory. The prevailing conceptualisation of the documentary assigns it the status of a sober discourse, a framing in which history is modelled as absent cause and the unqualified distinction between fiction and non-fiction is considered sacrosanct. The denotative literalism characteristic of indexical media, however, confounds this conceptualisation, which in turn encourages the devaluing of documentary aesthetics; the documentary is not a medium of art, it is said, but of argument. In this article, I examine how philosopher Jacques Rancière offers an alternative account of the documentary grounded on aesthetics rather than sobriety. I show how, in rethinking the absent cause model of history as well as the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, Rancière's aesthetic approach resolves the conceptual problem posed by indexicality and brings clarity to the value and function of indexical media with respect to the documentary.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41855826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article draws upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and W.E.B. Du Bois in order to propose that film-philosophy has historically not paid due attention to race. Drawing upon the former’s concept of “the sociogenic principle”, as well as the latter’s theories of “the colour line” and “double-consciousness”, the article argues that modernity has been constructed coterminously with whiteness, as well as a “photographic/cinematographic” logic whereby Blackness is cast into a “negative” realm. That is, while modernity might be white, more specifically it is antiblack. For film-philosophy ethically to evolve, then, it must not just pursue a dewesternising turn to the global, as suggested by various scholars, but it must also reckon with antiblackness and the role that cinema has played in constructing and reaffirming a white (and therefore antiblack) world. By this token, recent engagements with objects and animals similarly do not often consider race as a structuring concept of and for the human, in distinction to which both objects and animals supposedly exist. Indeed, one might even construe the contemporary emphasis on objects and animals among primarily white western scholars as a refusal to consider race with the critical rigour that it merits. This article goes some way towards introducing such critical rigour as developed among scholars in critical race theory, in particular Black Studies, especially Du Bois and Wynter; and it proposes that the application of such work to film will radically alter how we consider the medium. In this way, the article draws out the (white) colour of film-philosophy, and argues for a racially conscious/conscientious film-philosophy that will thus be worthy of the name.
{"title":"The Colour of Film-Philosophy","authors":"William Brown","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0226","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and W.E.B. Du Bois in order to propose that film-philosophy has historically not paid due attention to race. Drawing upon the former’s concept of “the sociogenic principle”, as well as the latter’s theories of “the colour line” and “double-consciousness”, the article argues that modernity has been constructed coterminously with whiteness, as well as a “photographic/cinematographic” logic whereby Blackness is cast into a “negative” realm. That is, while modernity might be white, more specifically it is antiblack. For film-philosophy ethically to evolve, then, it must not just pursue a dewesternising turn to the global, as suggested by various scholars, but it must also reckon with antiblackness and the role that cinema has played in constructing and reaffirming a white (and therefore antiblack) world. By this token, recent engagements with objects and animals similarly do not often consider race as a structuring concept of and for the human, in distinction to which both objects and animals supposedly exist. Indeed, one might even construe the contemporary emphasis on objects and animals among primarily white western scholars as a refusal to consider race with the critical rigour that it merits. This article goes some way towards introducing such critical rigour as developed among scholars in critical race theory, in particular Black Studies, especially Du Bois and Wynter; and it proposes that the application of such work to film will radically alter how we consider the medium. In this way, the article draws out the (white) colour of film-philosophy, and argues for a racially conscious/conscientious film-philosophy that will thus be worthy of the name.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44454866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that Werner Herzog's 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams both enacts and undermines a desire for origins that was characteristic of 20th century modernist discourse. I argue that the aim of the film is literally to embody the origin of cinema, as figured in the recurring motif of projected light playing across the darkened walls of Chauvet Cave, the earliest known site of prehistoric painting. Drawing on texts by Wilson Harris, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, this article demonstrates that the phenomenology of the film's cave scenes and of its archaeological reconstructions produces not a straightforward self-presence at the scene of origins, but rather an “anachronic” or split temporality that links an imagined state of primordiality to the contemporary moment in a way that eludes the problematic modernist criterion of psychological authenticity. By failing to produce an immersive illusion of prehistoricity, the film is constantly thrown back onto its own simple act of “monstration”, or showing, without any transcendental ground. Instead of revealing a moment of origin, then, Cave of Forgotten Dreams plays the shifting role of what I describe, following the art historian Whitney Davis, as an ever-displaced “Figure 1” in an imaginary history of cinema.
{"title":"The Prehistoricity of Cinema: Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams","authors":"Daniel Spaulding","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0230","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Werner Herzog's 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams both enacts and undermines a desire for origins that was characteristic of 20th century modernist discourse. I argue that the aim of the film is literally to embody the origin of cinema, as figured in the recurring motif of projected light playing across the darkened walls of Chauvet Cave, the earliest known site of prehistoric painting. Drawing on texts by Wilson Harris, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, this article demonstrates that the phenomenology of the film's cave scenes and of its archaeological reconstructions produces not a straightforward self-presence at the scene of origins, but rather an “anachronic” or split temporality that links an imagined state of primordiality to the contemporary moment in a way that eludes the problematic modernist criterion of psychological authenticity. By failing to produce an immersive illusion of prehistoricity, the film is constantly thrown back onto its own simple act of “monstration”, or showing, without any transcendental ground. Instead of revealing a moment of origin, then, Cave of Forgotten Dreams plays the shifting role of what I describe, following the art historian Whitney Davis, as an ever-displaced “Figure 1” in an imaginary history of cinema.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43065009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the pedagogic vision of audiovisual archives in Ici et ailleurs ( Here and Elsewhere, 1974/1978) (shot by Sonimage and drawn from the abandoned project Jusqu’à la Victoire [1970]) in terms of the stratification of images and sounds. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Tom Conley writes that a diagram that depends upon the division between the visible and the enunciable may be comprehended in terms of a map and as a line of forces. Such strata can act as signposts for diverse and multilateral readings of film, as viewers “read” cinematic landscapes and time-images. In Ici et ailleurs, stratigraphic shots juxtapose the Western, static home life of a family in France with the nomadic life of Fedayeen troops in Jordan and Palestine. This article argues that Sonimage’s narrative specificity relies upon an “in-between” method that defines an inter-space between semantic orders.
本文从图像和声音的分层角度考察了《我和你》(Here and别处,1974/1978)(由Sonimage拍摄,取材于已废弃的Jusqu ' la Victoire[1970]项目)中视听档案的教学视角。汤姆·康利借鉴了吉尔·德勒兹和米歇尔·福柯的观点,他写道,一个依赖于可见和不可表达之间的划分的图表可以被理解为一张地图和一条力量线。当观众“阅读”电影景观和时间图像时,这些层次可以作为电影多样化和多边阅读的路标。在《我和你》中,地层镜头将法国一个家庭的西方静态家庭生活与约旦和巴勒斯坦的敢死队的游牧生活并列。本文认为Sonimage的叙事特殊性依赖于一种“中间”方法,该方法定义了语义顺序之间的间隔空间。
{"title":"Strata, Narrative, and Space in Ici et ailleurs","authors":"Kamil Lipiński","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0225","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the pedagogic vision of audiovisual archives in Ici et ailleurs ( Here and Elsewhere, 1974/1978) (shot by Sonimage and drawn from the abandoned project Jusqu’à la Victoire [1970]) in terms of the stratification of images and sounds. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Tom Conley writes that a diagram that depends upon the division between the visible and the enunciable may be comprehended in terms of a map and as a line of forces. Such strata can act as signposts for diverse and multilateral readings of film, as viewers “read” cinematic landscapes and time-images. In Ici et ailleurs, stratigraphic shots juxtapose the Western, static home life of a family in France with the nomadic life of Fedayeen troops in Jordan and Palestine. This article argues that Sonimage’s narrative specificity relies upon an “in-between” method that defines an inter-space between semantic orders.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41591896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I examine Peter Morgan's TV series The Crown (2016–present) through the lens of Sartrean and Beauvoirian existentialism. I argue that the character of Queen Elizabeth II holds a special place in the royal family, as the monarch who demonstrates the compatibility of duty and tradition with existential freedom and authenticity. I also demonstrate the series’ commitment to breaking the illusion of inhumanity that the royal family tries to maintain, by showing that the royals are not out-of-reach ideals, but humans who struggle to transcend their exceptionally binding facticity. As portrayed in The Crown, Queen Elizabeth's lucidity on her situation leads to honest introspection, which dispels any attempt at self-deception, and therefore prevents her from slipping into bad faith.
{"title":"Freedom and the Weight of the Crown: Sartrean and Beauvoirian Existentialism in Peter Morgan's The Crown","authors":"Gabrielle Pozzo di Borgo","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0232","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine Peter Morgan's TV series The Crown (2016–present) through the lens of Sartrean and Beauvoirian existentialism. I argue that the character of Queen Elizabeth II holds a special place in the royal family, as the monarch who demonstrates the compatibility of duty and tradition with existential freedom and authenticity. I also demonstrate the series’ commitment to breaking the illusion of inhumanity that the royal family tries to maintain, by showing that the royals are not out-of-reach ideals, but humans who struggle to transcend their exceptionally binding facticity. As portrayed in The Crown, Queen Elizabeth's lucidity on her situation leads to honest introspection, which dispels any attempt at self-deception, and therefore prevents her from slipping into bad faith.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49313093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beller, Jonathan (2018) The message is murder: The substrates of computational capital Beller, Jonathan (2021) The world computer: Derivative conditions of racial capitalism","authors":"D. Fleming","doi":"10.3366/film.2023.0234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2023.0234","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49393917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}