Search results
In formulating a notion of filmic reality, this book offers a novel way of understanding our relationship with cinema. It argues that cinema need not be understood in terms of its capacities to refer to, reproduce or represent reality, but should be understood in terms of the kinds of realities it has the ability to create. The book investigates filmic reality by way of six key film theorists: André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. In doing so, it provides comprehensive introductions to each of these thinkers, while also debunking many myths and misconceptions about them. Along the way, a notion of filmic reality is formed that radically reconfigures our understanding of cinema.
logics in which their allegedly sexist spectacles are embedded. For reasons that will become clear in the course of my argument, I will consider the three films in counter-chronological order. Regardingthe gaze Voyeurism and fetishism are concepts with considerable critical currency in film studies. In 1975, Christian Metz theorized that film, in contradistinction to theatre, which admits of the
‘irréductiblement étranger au cinéma qui l’a suivi’. 8 But by examining Méliès’s films in the light of a structural model of narrative analysis designed with modern films in mind, we can begin to erode the entirely artificial dichotomy between early and modern cinema. Christian Metz developed the grande syntagmatique in order to break film down into discrete units of meaning, each of which could be analyzed in relation
3 The imaginary as filmic reality 5 Over the rainbow: the imaginary of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) I f ‘filmic reality’ for Bazin was a matter of authenticity and the establishment of ‘social’ forms of reality, as I argued in the preceding chapter, in what ways might Christian Metz provide a theory of ‘filmic reality’? At first sight, ‘reality’ would appear to be a concept quite alien to Metz’s conception of cinema. Certainly, he did once write an essay on the ‘impression of reality’ in the cinema (Metz 1974b), but impressions are precisely what
Contemporary film theory has been indelibly marked by the political upheaval in France during 1968. Comprising filmmakers, technicians and critics, it provided an institutional platform for the articulation of two questions that would dominate film theory thereafter, and that would call on very considerable conceptual resources for their answers. The absence of anything analogous to interpellation occasioned a divide within post-structuralist film theory. The broad shift of film theory from structuralism to post-structuralism occasioned fewer differences and discontinuities than might be supposed. Despite the shift in conceptual terminology, the emphasis remained theoretical; and despite the eclipse of Marxism and the rise of the new politics, there was a continued commitment to oppositional politics. Nevertheless, by the mid-l 970s, in the light of the film theory developments associated with structuralism, many women felt a growing dissatisfaction with the assumptions on which much of feminist film theory proceeded. The first, structuralist theoretical moment in feminist film criticism has more recently been superseded, as it became apparent that the promise of overarching theory was unfulfillable. The influence of Althusser, in particular, was short-lived. Althusserian theory had never enjoyed the authority in the women's movement that it had elsewhere. Put schematically, gender and class appeared to be two quite different axes of exploitation and oppression, with the former no less important than the latter. It was in fact in rethinking and re-evaluating the concept of difference, specifically sexual difference, that the post-structuralist disposition was most evident.
This book introduces some of the key ideas which have their roots in what has become known as 'second wave feminism', the ideas and practices associated with the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While it might seem unnecessary to turn back to this period of feminist struggle, there are a number of important reasons for doing so. A major concern of the book is the ways in which popular culture and femininities need to be studied historically. For this reason, it is also necessary to understand feminist identities as the product of specific historical contexts. The book explores some themes in the history of second-wave feminism and has inevitably sacrificed complexity in the interests of brevity by placing greater emphasis on feminisms in the US. It discusses one form of feminism which sees femininity as inferior to masculinity: that is, that equality between men and women might be achieved if women rejected feminine values and behaviour in favour of masculine values and behaviour. The book also demonstrates that understanding of popular culture has been central to many feminists whose work has been informed by cultural studies. One of the main arguments and themes throughout the book is that what it means to be a woman is not something fixed for all time but is subject to transformation, contestation and change.
This book primarily explores the workings of both dreams and dream-interpretation, and investigates the nature of the mental apparatus which not only produces dreams but seems to require them for its effective functioning. Freud's theories postulated two central theses: first, that dreams have a meaning accessible to interpretation; and second, that they have a function. Dreams are 'compromise formations', expressions of wishes and of defenses against those wishes. The book uses an interpretative methodology to explore and expose the various disguises and concealments entailed in the transformation from dreamwish to dream-scene, interpreting or undisguising dreams along associative paths. It leads us into the 'dark continent' of mental processes. As Freud's interpretation of the dream unfolds, fragment by fragment, the dream begins to cohere around a number of themes: professional responsibility and medical incompetence; women's secrecy or 'recalcitrance'; organic versus hysterical illness; self-recrimination and self-justification. The apparent 'triumph' of self-justification in the dream is also the means by which the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams, and hence the central thesis of Freud's dream book, is validated. The dream of Irma's injection could be read as Freud's wishful dream of the birth of psychoanalysis emerging from his relationship with Fliess, and of the overcoming of female 'resistance'. Freud's dream book is widely agreed to be not only his most important work, but the one which resonates most strikingly with a whole range of intellectual and experiential preoccupations, from his own time to ours, and undoubtedly beyond.
and coded meanings which lie within the text. Pioneered by Christian Metz in the 1960s, such work in breaking down the filmic language and seeking to understand how meaning is communicated through visual and auditory representation can help us explore the deeper textual meanings being played out on screen.2 Unlike semiotics, which draws on linguistics and language, the discipline of history – along with politics, media studies and sociology – approaches film in a different way, foregrounding the importance of film as a cultural object and emphasising the importance
instrument rather than a scribal tool, and yet sound remains a material substance that can be crafted into acoustical structures, which rival the materially adorned artefacts that produced them. Christian Metz and Georgia Gurrieri define the concept of the ‘aural object’ in order to readdress ‘the conception of sound as an attribute, as a non-object, and therefore the tendency to neglect its own characteristics in favour of those of its corresponding “substance”, which in this case is the visible object, which has emitted the sound’. 43 We can read the material and
from multiple perspectives but from a centred, single viewpoint: the eye of the beholder. According to apparatus theorists like Christian Metz, Jean Baudry and Daniel Dayan, and media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, the single eye of the Renaissance viewer is in traditional cinema emulated in the subject-position of the spectator, following the ‘eye’ of the camera. 10 This encourages fantasies of