The place of breath in cinema Quinlivan, Davina; Quinlivan, Davina
2012., 20120516, 2012, 2012-05-16, 20120101
eBook
An exploration of the figuring of absence in film. How can the cinema articulate the interstices between visibility and invisibility, and how are such notions of absence and the unseen implicated in ...the film experience? This study considers the locus of the breathing body in the film experience and its implications for the study of embodiment in film and sensuous spectatorship. Quinlivan puts forward a mode of critical engagement with film shaped by the foregrounding of the human body in the filmic diegesis and the viewing experience. The book's foregrounding of the human body as an, importantly, breathing body in film, coupled with its fresh engagement with continental philosophy, Post-Structuralist Film Theory and Contemporary Western Cinema, makes a unique and valuable contribution to the field.
The point of departure is a film by Lars von Trier,
The House That Jack Built
(2018). The most striking aspect of this film is that Jack has grounds for his actions. By committing a serial murder he ...is creating a work of art. He has his own primitive philosophy and affirms two theses: firstly,that art is the highest type of human activity and, secondly, that to be moral means to belong to the human herd. In spite of the primitiveness of these theses it is hard to disprove them. The common thesis in the Enlightenment was formulated by Diderot, Shaftesbury, and Winckelmann who claimed that aesthetic education favours morality. Schiller in his work,
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
(1795), espouses the same view but tries to ground the position in philosophy, showing that beauty is a balance between reality and form. We can explain modern art. If a painter is only interested in the formal aspects, he is producing abstract art and not engaged in the moral aspects at all. Then I turn to Kant’s
Critique of the Power of Judgment
and reformulate his categorical imperative from the point of view of aesthetics:
Create only according to the principle that the result of your creation will have universal acceptance!
We can agree that it will not be achievable because the most important element for every artist is the freedom of creation. I insist that the most appropriate way is to analysegenius as the unifying form of human creative action.
How do filmmakers work with pre-existing music? To answer this question, I conducted interviews with the musicians, composers, editors, sound designers, and music researchers for Lars von Trier's ...films. This article combines previously unpublished insider information with an original analytical methodology to clarify the working processes of contemporary filmmakers who utilize pre-existing music. I build on Ian Macdonald's production-situated conception of the ‘Screen Idea Work Group’ to posit the ‘Musical Idea Work Group’, a notional framework emerging from the teams who develop film-musical ideas. While previous film music research tends to analyse artists (persons) or music (products), here I focus on contrasting descriptions of highly collaborative working processes with the prescriptive mechanisms of film reception. In this way, I demonstrate a more holistic understanding of filmic authorship while accounting for previous constructions of Trier as an ‘auteur mélomane’ based on critical perceptions of how he utilizes music.
Ward discusses three films which themselves hover in the interstices between art and horror, exposition and exploitation, serious reception and dismissive reaction. Lars von Trier's Europa, Volker ...Schlondorff's The Ogre, and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds deal with--in reverse chronological order--the first postwar year in the American occupation zone, East Prussia from 1940 through the last months of the war in 1945, and German-occupied France on the eve of the Normandy landings in 1944. Representing the Third Reich on film with any degree of esthetic flair or historical invention poses obvious risks; neither critical nor audience approval is guaranteed. None of the three films was received with universal critical approbation, which might serve as a caution for any filmmaker who considers approaching the twentieth century's most toxic historical waste dump with anything other than the mandated definitions separating good from evil and villains from victims.
This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of ...Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer's print Melencolia I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume's contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists.
Danish director Lars von Trier has produced more than 20 films since his first appearance with The Elements of Crime in 1984. One of the most acknowledged - and most controversial - film directors of ...our time, Trier's films often escape the representational production of meaning. In Lars von Trier's Renewal of Film 1984-2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram scholar Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen offers a comprehensive discussion of Lars von Trier's collected works. Examining Trier's experiments with narrative forms, genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones, she shows how Trier's unique ethically involving style activates the viewer's entire perception apparatus. In understanding this affective involvement, the author frames the discussion around concepts from Gilles Deleuze, Alois Riegl, Brian Massumi and others on the haptic image, the diagram, affect and the signaletic material.
The paper is a discussion of film expressions of environmental emotions, in particular of eco-anger. It discusses several distinctions within the notion of anger (in particular that of honour-related ...vs. justice-related anger) and argues that eco-anger can take accordingly varied forms. As an expression of honour-related eco-anger, the film Don't Look Up and its cinematic tools are analysed. This film is contrasted with justice-related forms of eco-anger (as embodied in the movement of Fridays for Future), and, further, with Lars von Trier's Melancholia. While Melancholia has (probably) no authorial environmentalist intention, its plot (strongly reminiscent of that of Don't Look Up) invites environmentalist readings: as a lucidly pessimist film, fully free of any condescension or a tendency to take artistic vengeance on the deniers of the upcoming catastrophe.
Scandinavia's foremost living auteur and the catalyst of the Dogme95 movement, Lars von Trier is arguably world cinema's most confrontational and polarizing figure. Willfully devastating audiences, ...Trier has cultivated an insistently transnational cinema, taking inspiration from sources that range from the European avant-garde to American genre films. This volume provides a stimulating overview of Trier's career while focusing on his more recent work, including the controversial Gold Heart Trilogy ( Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark ), the as-yet unfinished USA Trilogy ( Dogville and Manderlay ), and individual projects such as the comedy The Boss of It All and the incendiary horror psychodrama Antichrist.
Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film ...critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book’s three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.
El episodio de la orgía de Los idiotas (Dogme #2. Idioterne, Lars von Trier, 1998) acaparó gran parte de las polémicas que suscitó la película. Lejos de suponer una mera provocación, la escena ...desempeña un papel sustancial en la cinta. El presente artículo se propone desplegar la poliédrica reivindicación del cuerpo que el pasaje exhibe y que resulta extrapolable al conjunto del film. Para ello, el análisis textual del fragmento será engarzado con los planteamientos de Cavell y Deleuze sobre el sujeto y cine encarnados. La atención a aspectos temáticos revelará cómo el pasaje apunta al cuerpo como vía de expresión de la comuna idiota y ejerce de punto de inflexión clave en la historia. Por otra parte, la fijación de la cámara por los cuerpos y el comportamiento somático de esta se presentarán como las dos maneras con las que el film efectúa su reivindicación formal de la corporeidad.
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