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.

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.