Cinema and Sensation
French Film and the Art of Transgression
Publication | Table des matières | Critiques
Résumé
This book looks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the re-emergence of filmmaking practices – and, by extension, of theoretical approaches – that give precedence to cinema as the medium of sensation. France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the work of a group of filmmakers bent on exploring cinema’s unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually.
Though extremely diverse, the films of Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Vincent Dieutre, Bruno Dumont, Bertrand Bonello, Philippe Grandrieux, Pascal Ferrand and Nicolas Klotz, to name but a few, demonstrate a characteristic awareness of cinema’s sensory impact and transgressive nature. In effect, with its interweaving of theoretical enquiry and film analysis, and its emphasis on the materiality of film, Cinema and Sensation’s approach could also apply to the work of comparable filmmakers like David Lynch, Abel Ferrara or Wong Kar-Wai.
Cinema and Sensation draws on the writings of Antonin Artaud, George Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, whilst also responding to the continuing interest in theories of haptic visuality (Laura Marks) and embodied spectatorship (Vivian Sobchack) inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.Explored as forms of embodied thought, the films are shown to offer alternative ways of approaching key existential and socio-cultural questions: desire, violence and abjection as well as the growing supremacy of technology, globalisation, exile and exclusion – these are the themes and issues that appear embedded here in the very texture of images and sounds.
Table des matières
Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- Beginnings
- Chapter 1 A ‘Third Path’
- Chapter 2 The Aesthetics of Sensation
- Chapter 3 Film Bodies (Becomings and Embodiment)
- Epilogue
Bibliography
Selected Filmography
Index
Critiques
- “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK - “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course