In Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 2, Sartre analyzes a boxing match in light of a typology of violence. He suggests that individual conflicts incarnate broader forces of structural violence. He ...distinguishes between incidents of incarnating violence in terms of their broader social effects, as either alienated--commoditized or "mystified" and rendered illicit--or emancipatory--embedded in a collectively willed political project. This conceptualization is used to analyze two films, Aronofsky's The Wrestler and McQueen's Hunger. The Wrestler is an excellent meditation on the ways in which the violence of the oppressed is alienated in contemporary U.S. culture, whereas Hunger gestures toward the possibility of emancipatory violence. The article finally considers the act of watching these films as a Sartrean incarnation of violence.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, proposes reparative reading and the ongoing necessity for marginalized subjects to connect meaningfully and perhaps unexpectedly with problematic cultural ...phenomena. In a similar vein, C. Namwali Serpell has suggested the numerous (and pleasurable) critical possibilities in something as debased and thrilling as the cliché. 1 Yet we often continue to relate to culture with a paranoid expectation that there must be more than pleasure, indeed a space that refutes the pleasurable as a mere superficial layer to be peeled back for a truer cross-section of the film's deconstructive musculature. With Widows, the pleasure manifests in McQueen's enjoyment of the original ITV series as a young person, and certainly the pleasure of being able to remake that youthful attachment into something else, something his own. Or is it enjoyment that elicits fear or discomfort by looping, cycling, re-building, and rehearsing, as with the homage to Buster Keaton in Deadpan (UK, 1997), the sarcastic preciousness of Queen and Country (UK, 2007–2009), the simultaneously tragic and matter-of-fact Ashes (UK, 1997), or the discomfiting loop of Static (UK, 2009)? 12 Years a Slave (UK/USA, 2013) is likewise part of a discomfiting history of adaptations, each deeply painful in their own way, which tragically Click to view image in larger frame.
Guided in part by how this continued interest in antebellum society shapes cultural production more broadly, several Louisiana politicians and members of its local entertainment industry have ...embraced and perpetuated the state’s moniker as“Hollywood South,” resulting in the passage of legislative efforts to entice production companies to film on location there. In what might be understood as a neo-plantation economy, then,these physical sites as well as the history of the antebellum period and its most lucrative institution–slavery–remain profitable. To counter the troubling aspects of this contemporary plantation speculation, productions such as SteveMcQueen’s12 Years a Slave(2013) and the unprecedented, progressive-minded plantation script at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace,Louisiana, have actively promoted alternative accounts about antebellum life by focusing on the interior lives of enslaved persons and rejecting the dominant, sanitized narratives that gloss over the brutality of the era. The author examines the post-civil rights era cultural trend in which African Americans (and more recently, their white allies) began demanding an accounting for, and, later, the centering of black life in historical narratives about slavery throughout the US South to challenge and revise persistent Southern mythologies that regale in the excesses of the antebellum, thereby forcing more authentic confrontations with the violent horrors of the peculiar institution and its afterlives in a public fashion. Such efforts to modulate the rhetoric about and the visual representations of slavery in media depictions and plantation tours strive to demystify the “plantation romance” narrative that prevails throughout the former slaveholding region, including at the properties that surround the Whitney Plantation. This commitment to radically revising master narratives,though not always executed properly, opens the possibility for a more liberated existence for the descendants of enslaved persons.
Kaisary examines Steve McQueen's 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and determines whether filmic aesthetics can adequately represent the lived experience of ...slavery as conveyed in the slave narrative. He does not argue that faithfulness to Northup's original narrative is required for a successful film adaptation, nor that the lack thereof is a liability, but seeks to determine what might be lost or gained as the slave narrative is adapted to film. Kaisary claims that the emotional and personal drama of Northup's text is legible in McQueen's adaptation, but that it also fails to capture the profound systemic effects of slavery, draining Northup's narrative of its politics and specificity. Indeed, the film's illegibility about slavery, black lives, and black suffering is unfortunate given that it is likely to become a cultural touchstone about slavery for many years to come.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS BATTEN, WAYNE
Canadian journal of film studies,
10/2018, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
L’accessibilité des images graphiques et la facilité avec laquelle elles peuvent être remixées grâce aux médias numériques nous invitent à repenser les distinctions entre les genres traditionnels, ...dont la tragédie et la pornographie. En se servant de l’analyse fondamentale de la tragédie que propose Aristote et d’une définition de travail de la pornographie, l’auteur en réexamine les caractéristiques génériques à la lumière des travaux ultérieurs de théoriciens comme Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault et George Steiner. Il illustre les résultats des efforts de croisement des genres de diverses façons en explicitant trois films récents : The New Behind the Green Door (2013), Intimité (Intimacy — 2001) et Shame (2011). La première de ces œuvres est une tragédie franchement pornographique ; dans la deuxième, l’exhibition de sexualité explicite se limite à une seule scène ; tandis que dans la troisième, les limites et les attraits de la pornographie sont explorés tant par le truchement du protagoniste consommateur de pornographie que par la récurrence des images de sexualité explicite dans le film lui-même. Une fois soumise aux contraintes morales du récit tragique, la pornographie peut se révéler un puissant agent de revitalisation.
Ready access to graphic images and the ease of remixing them, made possible by digital media, invite a reconsideration of the distinctions between traditional genres, including tragedy and pornography. Using Aristotle’s fundamental analysis of tragedy and a working definition of pornography, this article re-examines generic traits in light of subsequent theorists, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and George Steiner. The consequences of efforts in genre-crossing are variously exemplified by explications of three recent films: The New Behind the Green Door (2013), Intimacy (2001), and Shame (2011). The first of these works is a fully pornographic tragedy; the second confines the hard-core spectacle to a single scene, while the third explores the limitations and attractions of pornography through both the porn-consuming protagonist and the repeated verging upon hard-core spectacle in the film itself. Once subjected to the moral constraints of tragic narrative, pornography may prove to be a potent agent of revitalization.
Months before Django premiered to movie audiences, Washington became the first black woman leading actor in a television drama series in nearly forty years when she starred as Olivia Pope on ABC's ...Scandal....a black woman-led show like HBO's Insecure (starring Issa Rae, which owes its success to forerunners like Rhimes) has parodied these dynamics by conflating the romance of Scandal with another television show-the now canceled Underground, based on fugitive slaves-in Due North, a show within a show that sends up the nation's established romanticized cultural imagination of slavery, as well as that imagination's continuing, if questionable, appeal to black audiences.The Obama administration enabled the completion of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016, and facilitated the establishment of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Park, which opened in 2017....thanks to Annette GordonReed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (1997), DNA testing in 1998 linking one of Hemings' children to Jefferson, and various films and television shows dramatizing their relationship, Hemings is now included and even centered in our national narratives-even if we do not quite fully grasp the raced and gendered power dynamics informing her enslaved relationship, which began in her adolescence, with the third president of the United States.
Small Monuments Vogt, Naomi
Third text,
05/2015, Letnik:
29, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The notion of memory is key to understanding the practice of artist and film-maker Steve McQueen. McQueen's work has often been examined as either politically active or focused on body dynamics. Yet ...the manner in which he resorts to the theme of disappearance and addresses historical events that barely surface in popular Western narratives is comparable to the construction of monuments, wherein body and politics become inalienable from each other. Monuments are understood here as phenomena susceptible to eliciting memory and as material but mutable manifestations of past events. This article argues that certain works by McQueen constitute inquiries into possible ‘sites of memory’, as defined by Pierre Nora, but in this case concerning marginalised and minority histories. Articulated between documentary and fiction, from video installation to cinema, these works do not invent an interior life for the historical figures they depict. As such, they conform to what Saidiya Hartman has called ‘narrative restraint’, understood here as an ethics of both memorialising and film-making.
This essay examines the anti-producing human body in its limit case of public self-induced starvation, as figured in Franz Kafka's short story 'A Hunger Artist' and Steve McQueen's film
Hunger
. Both ...works represent the fasting body as hollowed out, a resistance to capitalist-spectator capture that spatialises itself as a smoothing, a relative reconfiguration of parts to whole through the evacuation of flows. In both works the human body becomes a local body without organs, paradoxically disarticulated from the more complex assemblages that constitute it while recording potential circuits of disturbance or resonance predicated upon the porousness of bodily boundaries.
