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Caravaggio (1986), Derek Jarman's portrait of the Italian Baroque
artist, shows the painter at work with models drawn from Rome's
homeless and prostitutes, and his relationship with two very
different lovers: Ranuccio, played by Sean Bean, and Lena, played
by Tilda Swinton. It is probably the closest Derek Jarman came to a
mainstream film. And yet the film is a uniquely complex and lucid
treatment of Jarman's major concerns: violence, history,
homosexuality, and the relation between film and painting. In
particular, according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio
is unlike Jarman's other work in avoiding a sentimentalising of gay
relationships and in making no neat distinction between the
exercise and the suffering of violence. Film-making involves a
coercive power which, for Bersani and Dutoit, Jarman may, without
admitting it to himself, have found deeply seductive. But in
Caravaggio this power is renounced, and the result is Jarman's most
profound, unsettling and astonishing reflection on sexuality and
identity.
In each of the films discussed in this book--"Le Mepris" (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1963), "All About My Mother" (Pedro Almodovar, 1999), "The
Thin Red Line" (Terrence Malick, 1998) --something extraordinary is
proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and
more powerful means than narrative or argument.
It is a matter in every case of re-imagining the relationship
between subjectivity and the world.
At the end of "Le Mepris" a conventional account of doomed and
tragic love is displaced by images of nature as just a space of
almost blank appearances, which are beyond all human desire and
psychological entanglements.
"All About My Mother "veers away from imprisoning forms of
identity, family and gender. It begins, hesitantly, to depict other
kinds of sociability--more fluid ones that do not rely on coercion
or obligation.
Most remarkably, "The Thin Red Line" moves to eradicate discourse
itself--to approach the world and the beings in it with a neutral
gaze, without presupposing a hierarchy of relationships. In its use
of close-ups and in its patterns of visual correspondence between
human and non-human life, The "Thin Red Line" becomes abstract and
startlingly indifferent to its violent subject-matter--as if,
according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, an impassive, wholly
receptive looking were the most appropriate, the most ethically
justifiable, the least enraged and possessive way to appreciate the
possibilities of existing in a world which is, beyond the conflict
that is brought into it, not at war with its inhabitants.
The close analyses (supported by numerous illustrations) in "Forms
of Being" are groundbreakingly original and compelling, suggesting
newways of approaching cinema as visual art. Together they further
develop the authors' longstanding project to redefine the ways in
which subjectivity, sexuality, relationality and aesthetics can be
understood and transformed.
Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage
us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why
immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will?
Why, Leo Bersnai and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged
masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and
inhospitable to an audience? This book shows how such crippling
moves may signal a profoundly original - and profoundly
anti-modernist - renunciation of art's authority. Our culture,
while paying little attention to art, puts great faith in its
edifying and enlightening value. Yet Beckett's threadbare plays
"Company" and "Worstword Ho", so insistent on their poverty of
meaning; Rothko's nearly monochromatic paintings in the Houston
Chapel; Resnais' intensly self-contained, self-referential films
"Night and Fog" and "Muriel" all seem to say "I have little to show
you, little to tell you, nothing to teach you." Bersnai and Dutoit
consider these works as acts of resistance; by inhibiting our
movement toward them, they purposely frustrate our faith in art as
a way of appropriating and ultimately mastering reality. As this
book demonstrates, these artists train us in new modes of mobility,
which differ from the moves of an appropriating consciousness. As a
form of cultural resistance, a rejection of a view of reality -
both objects and human subjects - as simply there for the taking,
this training may even give birth to a new kind of political power,
one paradoxically consistent with the renunciation of authority.
In each of the films discussed in this book--"Le Mepris" (Jean-Luc
Godard, 1963), "All About My Mother" (Pedro Almodovar, 1999), "The
Thin Red Line" (Terrence Malick, 1998) --something extraordinary is
proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and
more powerful means than narrative or argument.
It is a matter in every case of re-imagining the relationship
between subjectivity and the world.
At the end of "Le Mepris" a conventional account of doomed and
tragic love is displaced by images of nature as just a space of
almost blank appearances, which are beyond all human desire and
psychological entanglements.
"All About My Mother "veers away from imprisoning forms of
identity, family and gender. It begins, hesitantly, to depict other
kinds of sociability--more fluid ones that do not rely on coercion
or obligation.
Most remarkably, "The Thin Red Line" moves to eradicate discourse
itself--to approach the world and the beings in it with a neutral
gaze, without presupposing a hierarchy of relationships. In its use
of close-ups and in its patterns of visual correspondence between
human and non-human life, The "Thin Red Line" becomes abstract and
startlingly indifferent to its violent subject-matter--as if,
according to Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, an impassive, wholly
receptive looking were the most appropriate, the most ethically
justifiable, the least enraged and possessive way to appreciate the
possibilities of existing in a world which is, beyond the conflict
that is brought into it, not at war with its inhabitants.
The close analyses (supported by numerous illustrations) in "Forms
of Being" are groundbreakingly original and compelling, suggesting
newways of approaching cinema as visual art. Together they further
develop the authors' longstanding project to redefine the ways in
which subjectivity, sexuality, relationality and aesthetics can be
understood and transformed.
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