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.
Sex as Evacuation Giffney, Noreen
Studies in gender and sexuality,
04/2015, Letnik:
16, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article focuses on the representation of sexual activity in the film Shame, directed by Steve McQueen (2011). I concentrate on the sexual encounters of the film's male protagonist Brandon within ...the broader context of his relationship with his sister Sissy. I consider how psychoanalytic understandings of the paranoid-schizoid position can help us to think about how Brandon is represented in the film and, by extension, what a Kleinian psychoanalytic approach might contribute to clinical discussions about sex addiction. I argue that the film presents a man incapable of experiencing psychic pain. Instead, he concretizes it, splits it off, and projects it onto and into those around him. His bodily activities serve, unconsciously, as desperate attempts to stave off thinking and feeling through action.
Depicting workers installing a Duane Hanson installation at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, these images represent, on one hand, the institutional frames that contain cultural and ...artistic value and, on the other, the coterminous architectural frames wherein the labour that underlies these sites of cultural production remains obscure. ...as art handlers camouflage into Duane Hanson's hyper-realistic tableau of construction workers, Lunch Break Installation overlays the representation and reality of everyday physical work so as to expose the differential value of art and labour within the gallery. ...the inner spaces of labour often remain obscured by the outer space of leisure where, Farocki indicates, the life of the individual seems to begin.18 Therefore, the factory-as-frame serves to delineate the visibility of the spaces and subjects of industrial production, abstracting not only the labour but also the subjectivity of the modern worker that the factory produces. ...the language of structural film assists Lockhart in foregrounding a critical self-reflexivity of the image, but without allowing the film's structure to marginalize the content of its subject matter: unlike Serene Velocity, for instance, where the depth of the hallway is mirrored in the formal repetition of the hall's shape, Lunch Break's employees do not mirror any pre-given internal form; rather, they draw attention to the space between the inside and outside of the film's frame as they, like the girls in Coshogaoka, move through it. ...Hunger presents a loosely organized yet acutely precise depiction of the Irish HM Prison Maze in 1981 - a time at which republican-loyalist tensions were at a fever pitch and at which this prison housed numerous IRA members, including Bobby Sands, who famously led a series of hunger strikes there.
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.
Illustrating a point of intersection between music (as represented in a film soundtrack) and psychoanalytic theory, the author contrasts two uses of silence: the silence of a deadening, collapsing ..."no thing" (Bion, 1962) and that of an unformulated, experiential "boredom" in which desire crystallizes (Phillips, 1993). The silences and sounds of Steve McQueen's (2011) film Shame are described with respect to the development of these musical and psychical phenomena with an emphasis on sexualized suffering as a result of an impaired capacity to tolerate and use silences generatively. The film's soundtrack and narrative, as well as links to the clinical situation, are discussed with respect to the dialectical tension between these expulsive and potentiating uses of silence.
