History of Cinema
Laura Marcus: How Newness Enters the World: the
Birth of Cinema and the Origins of Man
The essay looks at ways in which, in the
writings about film of the first three decades of the 20th century, "cinema
history" overlapped with broader models of historical development. The focus is
on looking at the ways in which writers on the cinema negotiated the question of
the emergence of cinema as a new form of representation and perception, and at the
ways some of the models and fantasies of time, history and consciousness
developed on the back of the terms of "newness", "emergence", and "coming into being".
Luc Vancheri: The extended
history of cinema or the history of extended cinema?
In
the article the French author studies questions dealing with contemporary films.
His train of thoughts stems from the esthetic consequences of a 2006 exhibition
at the Pompidou Center in Paris. The exhibition entitled "Le mouvement des
images" (The movement of images) treated the influence of film on the fine art
of the 20th century and exhibited the collection of the museum
accordingly. In turn, it categorized the displayed works of art according to
the different constituents of the movie apparatus (succession, montage,
projection and narration). The author compares two aesthetic viewpoints: the
opinion of the curator of the exhibition, Philippe-Alain Michaud, to that of
Hollis Frampton, American experimental film director. Vancheri is looking for
the answer to the question of how the concept of film can be conceptualized in
the era of digital pictures, exhibited cinema, and the increasingly influential
mixture of different branches of art. One approach, represented by Michaud,
relies on the concept of movement, while the other emphasizes the materialistic
nature of film.
Muriel Andrin: Petrified cinema. Reflections on the
arrangement of filmic works displayed as exhibits.
Muriel Andrin raises the question regarding the change
of cinema's identity and the change of the audience's positions in case of
filmic works displayed as exhibits. Rather than attributing it to film, museum
exhibitions of cinematic images attribute movement to the audience wandering in
the exhibition space of the museum.
Oliver Fahle: The "visibility" of
the world. Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and the cinema
Olivier Fahle examines the relevance of Gilles
Deleuze's works to film theory, film history, and philosophy. The aim of the
undertaking is to reveal the ways Deleuze's analyses of the visible space
contributed to a radical rearrangement of his philosophical investigations
regarding the art of the cinema, and the ways these analyses can be connected
to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theories.
Michael P.
Steinberg - Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg: Fascism and the Operatic Unconscious
The article starts out from the interpretation
of the relationship between Italian opera and the formation of the Italian
national consciousness, examining the way Verdi's opera became the canonical
representation of Risorgimento, and the way this operatic form became gradually
empty, and finally the way in which the return of the late Puccini to
monumentality and the exotic made opera into an easily exploitable tool by
fascism. According to the argument, however, fascist aesthetics had a rather
ambivalent relationship to opera, and managed to integrate opera into its own
ideology to the extent fascist aesthetics reduced the operatic to the spectacular.
The main thread of the argument is woven through the analysis of two films: Sense by Visconti and The Spider's Strategy by Bertolucci,
examining the way these works confront operas with the burden of their own
history.
Materialism and Signification
Peter
Wollen: "Ontology" and "materialism" in Film
The article
presents the perspectives of poststructuralist film semiotics. The first target
of its critical attitude is the realist school characterized by the work of André
Bazin, and the second is the material essentialism of the cinematic avant-garde,
presented as self-reflexive. Wollen considers both approaches as unreflected
and ontologizing, according to which in the given discourse canonical trends
represent (different aspects of) reality in an unproblematic way. These trends
are based, according to Wollen, on a critical attitude that starts from the criticism
of creating illusions and forgets about the language aspect of film, and becomes
ontologizing and essentialistic. This is why Wollen regard both trends as
modern, partly based on their utopist faith in the possibilities of
technological media. According to Wollen the alternative opposed to these
approaches may be based on a Brechtian attitude: stressing the semiotic
constructedness of referentiality, without the negation of referentiality. Thus
instead of film-representation or film-object the focus of attention becomes
the film-text.
Pascal
Bonitzer: What is the plan?
The
starting point of Bonitzer's study is the double meaning of the French term plan (plane or frame, and shot as a
temporal element, a segment of a film). Although
the plan is considered as the basic unit of the
language of cinema, it is defined differently by theoreticians (Bazin, Mitry), and
filmmakers. Bonitzer shows the change in understanding the ontology of cinema
following the change in the understanding of the plan from Griffith's close-up to Godard's inserts.
Gyöngyi Pál: Icon and index or symbol? Where has the meaning of the photograph gone?
A theoretical gap and a major problem have
appeared in the definition of photography since digital photography has spread
all over the world. Some theorists even speak of the death of the medium. This
essay looks at some aspects of this theoretical confusion, mainly based on
French literature. Since the invention of the medium, theoretical writings have
always focused on the problem of the relationship between the image and
reality. The capacity of photography of capturing and showing reality has
revolutionized all other tools of representation. On the other hand, the easy
manipulation of digital photography has cast some doubt on the previously
evident meaning of pictures, and on the legitimacy of documentary photography. French
photography theories try to explain the always changing nature of signs with
terms such as the "trace" and the so-called "dispositif". The limits of
photography have thus extended beyond its physical manifestation.
Student's Workshop
Péter
Juhász: Representation of cultural foreignness as the common challenge of the
ethnographic text and the moving image
The paper analyses some problems of the filmic
representation of cultural foreignness. It makes an attempt to prove that the
culturally different cinematic representation and the anthropological and
ethnographic representation of foreigners are similar, and suffer to meet
similar challenges. The aim of the paper is to draw attention to these
parallels, and to offer points of view to the development of a system into
which both filmic and ethnographic representations of foreigners may be
interpreted.
Zsóka Berta: Serial thinking in Wong
Kar-wai's oeuvre
Wong Kar-wai's first film (As Tears Go By, 1988) was widely acknowledged by Hongkong viewers
and critics alike, and his second work, Days
of being wild gained international fame. His unique perspective, the
characteristic atmosphere of his films, and the thought-provoking topics he
chooses and that are detectable in his oeuvre add up to a unique corpus. The
article analyses the way Wong's serial thinking creates a web-like oeuvre, in
which each film can be regarded as a whole in itself, but the individual works
are connected to each other in a way that they call for being treated as parts
within a system.
Tamás
Bodroghalmi: Narrowing circles - Cult, Hitchcock and Cary Grant. Rise and fall
of stars
The first half of the paper offers an
explanation of the reasons and the possible mechanisms of the creation of
cults, stressing specifically the European trend and its initial differences
rooting in its cultural and historic heritage - which may offer an explanation
to the ambiguous relationship of Alfred Hitchcock with stars. Hitchcock's views
regarding acting and his attitude towards the challenges of the American market
are addressed, as well as the ways his stars became tools in communication with
the audience. Finally, the oeuvre of Cary Grant, one of Hitchcock's emblematic
figures is evoked through different eras of his career. The argument addresses
the question of Grant as a cultic figure of both the audience and the director.
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