Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics (eBook)

Robert Stam (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
9781118340592 (ISBN)

Infos

Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. He has authored, co-authored and edited 17 books on film, cultural theory, national cinema, and postcolonial studies. His books include Francois Truffaut and Friends (2006), Literature through Film (2005), Film Theory: An Introduction (2000), and Tropical Multiculturalism (1997). He is co-author, with Ella Shohat, of Race in Translation (2012), Flagging Patriotism (2006), and Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994).
Richard Porton is the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999) and editor of Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (2009). One of the editors of Cineaste magazine, his work on film has appeared in Cinema Scope, Sight & Sound, and The Daily Beast. 
Leo Goldsmith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the Film Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 An Aesthetics of the Commons 29

The Aesthetic Commons 30

From Columbus to Indigenous Media 32

First Peoples, First Features 37

The Storytelling Commons 42

Revisionist Adaptation and the Literary Commons 47

Cultural Indigenization 53

The Archival Commons and the Ab?]original Musical 58

2 The Upside?]Down World of the Carnivalesque 68

The People's Second Life 68

Sacred Parody 72

Festive?]Revolutionary Practices 76

Unruly Women 79

Polymorphous Celebrations 83

Stand?]up Comedy and Nuclear Catastrophe 86

Contemporary Fools 90

Pedagogic Humor and Provocation 94

Tropes of Social Inversion 98

Offside Cinema 100

3 Political Modernism and Its Discontents 107

The Two Avant?]Gardes 108

The Brechtian Legacy 110

Beyond Brecht 120

The Affective?]Corporeal Turn 126

The Rediscovery of Pleasure 133

The Legacy of the V?]Effect 136

Political Cinema in the Age of the Posts 139

4 The Transmogrification of the Negative 145

An Aesthetic of Mistakes 146

Third Cinema: From Hunger to Garbage 148

Sublime Detritus 154

The Recombinant Sublime 158

Anthropophagic Modernism 161

Situationist Détournement 165

Culture Jamming 168

Neo?]Situationism and the Aesthetics of Failure 171

Media Jujitsu 175

The New Kino?]Eye: Vision Machines 178

5 Hybrid Variations on a Documentary Theme 185

The Fiction-Documentary Continuum 185

Murderous Reenactments 189

The Mediatic Spectrum 193

From Representation to Self?]Presentation 199

The Strategic Advantages of Hybridization 206

Performative Films 211

The Essay Film and Mockumentaries 215

6 Hollywood Aristotelianism, the Fractured Chronotope, and the Musicalization of Cinema 225

Hollywood Aristotelianism: the Orthodox Chronotope 225

Alternatives to Aristotle: the Menippean Strain 233

Pop Culture Anachronism and the Chronotope of the Road 239

Baroque Modernism and the Marvelous American Real 244

Trance?]Modernism 246

Contrapuntal Variations 251

Transformative Becomings 258

The Shape?]Shiftings of Popular Culture 266

Metaphysical Cine?]Poetry 268

7 Aesthetic/Political Innovation in the Digital Era 276

Beyond Accelerationism: Digital Montage and Duration 282

Tools of Engagement: Interactivity and Digital Détournement 285

IRL Subversions: Tactical Media and Digital Materialism 288

In Guise of a Conclusion 292

Index 298

Rezensionen

"Keywords is no list of PC jargon, but rather an almost Borgesian carnival of concepts that inspires something akin to hope. Flipping through these pages is like being at a party where the brightest, most passionate thinkers and dreamers have gathered to celebrate the role of the critical imagination as a tool for genuine social change."
James Schamus, Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Professor, Columbia University

"Keywords offers a scintillating coffee-house style conversation about radical aesthetics and film. With seemingly effortless erudition, the book leads the reader through hundreds of illuminating concepts and filmic examples that crisscross the usual geographic and disciplinary boundaries, in an intellectual experience both enjoyable and informative. A subversive tour de force."
Stephen Duncombe, Associate Professor, New York University

"The thrillingly expansive field of vision of this astonishing book synthetically gathers up multiple media, cultures and historical eras as part of an energizing project whose ultimate objective is nothing less than profound social transformation through art and culture."
Girish Shambu, film blogger and Associate Professor, Canisius College

Textauszug

Introduction

Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics offers a conversational journey through the overlapping terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics, a journey with many watering holes and rest stops and off-ramps where travelers can take stock, catch their breath, and plot their own course through the contents. The book’s somewhat unusual hybrid format combines a book-length essay on politics and aesthetics with an embedded lexicon of definitions, explications, and illustrations of almost a thousand concepts bearing on radical aesthetic strategies in film and the media. It foregrounds aesthetic interventions that generate an intellectual surprise or shock of social recognition by shifting the parameters of commonsense by interrogating regimes of power and privilege. These strategies offer an intellectual jolt, what Deleuze calls an intellectual “shock” or “vibration,” in synaptic thrills that challenge the reigning order and thus catalyze a sense of social possibility.

This book combines various kinds of concepts and terms: (1) terms already well consecrated in relation to cinema (Brechtian distantiation, situationist détournement); (2) less-known film-related terms that deserve wider circulation (cinematrix, surrealismo); (3) terms drawn from other arts, disciplines, and movements (audiotopia, anthropophagy), and, finally, (4) a substantial portion of coinages and neologisms such as our own candomblé feminism and potlatch strategy. (To facilitate understanding, the initial entry concerning a given concept or strategy will appear in bold, with all subsequent mentions in italics.)

The volume aims to provide a theoretical toolkit for strategies germane to the analysis and even the practice of radical art. The book can be approached in at least five ways: (1) read straight through as a narrative essay advancing a larger argument; (2) read selectively by chapter, each of which is devoted to a specific stream of radical aesthetics; (3) read in a more focused way using the subheadings as signposts for specific themes; (4) dipped into as a lexicon of concepts, with the index of terms as a guide; or (5) sampled for more in-depth analyses of films such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), Les stances à Sophie (1971), Even the Rain (2010), Offside (2006), Shortbus (2006), Nostalgia for the Light (“Nostalgia de la Luz,” 2010), The Act of Killing (2012), and so forth. Readers are encouraged to swan in and out of the text, to graze from concept to concept, to make their own intellectual leaps and pirouettes.

The volume will adhere to a few fundamental principles. First, the approach will be pan-artistic, that is, it will draw on all the arts, on the assumption that cinema has been endlessly enriched by its dialogue with the other arts. Second, the approach will be pan-mediatic, with examples taken from the widest possible spectrum of audio, visual, and digital arts and media: fiction film, documentary, television, music video, filmed performance, cable TV satire, sketch comedy, Internet parodies, and social network activism. Defying essentialist definitions, cinema’s famed “specificity” consists precisely in its being non-specific and hospitable to the most alien and heterogeneous materials. The word “film” here serves as a synecdoche for the whole spectrum, what Jung Bong Choi calls the “cinematrix,” a term which locates cinema within broader industrial, geopolitical, and socioeconomic matrices whereby the production, distribution, and reception of texts produces social-artistic meaning.1 The cinematrix has less to do with cinematic specificity than with interfaces and connectivities moving across various arts, media, and nations.

Rather than privilege feature films as the ontological quintessence of the “real film,” Keywords regards all audio-visual moving-image materials as legitimate platforms for subversive art. The book expands the definition and range of “radical political film” in a digital age where the feature fiction film has become a “bit” in a larger mediatic stream. “Political film” today might mean not a feature fiction or a documentary but rather a music video such as “Somos todos Ilegales,” a Colbert performance at the White House, a quickie YouTube protest spot, a web-based interactive site such as Eyal Sivan’s Montage Interdit, or an open-access user-generated database such as Actipedia. And, now that virtually everything ends up being filmed, almost any text can be reconfigured and remediated to become a political film. The Internet brings tremendous advantages for both creation and dissemination. While 20 years ago most of the kinds of films mentioned in this book could have been seen only at art cinemas or film festivals, or in cinema studies courses, many are now available at the click of a mouse.

In a globalized age, meanwhile, the identity of the enemy is no longer quite so clear. Given the disenchantment with political movements based on the capture of state power, the word “revolution” has lost some of its charismatic power. While on one level contemporary struggles are against visible, or at least visualizable, abuses—wars of aggression, police brutality, sexual harassment, and so forth, on another level they are against the algorithmic features of an economic system. The enemy today is less likely to be a concrete, identifiable figure such as a factory boss, à la They Don’t Wear Black Tie (1981) or Tout va bien (1972), or a colonial army, as in The Battle of Algiers (1966). The enemy now takes a more diffuse, abstract, and quasi-ungraspable form, encapsulated by words such as “privatization,” “neo-liberalism,” or “financial capitalism.” With the digital revolution, meanwhile, it is difficult to see beyond the infinite riches offered to the Internet’s consumers, in order to discern the underlying power hierarchies, the ownership structures, that possess and profit from the platforms and channels that constitute its infrastructure.

Third, Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics takes on board the history of theorization of the relation between aesthetics and politics developed by a wide array of writers. Against the longer backdrop of the theories of canonical figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, we will invoke some familiar names such as Bertolt Brecht, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Louis Comolli, Herbert Marcuse, Teresa de Lauretis, David James, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Ismail Xavier, Henri Lefebvre, Nicole Brenez, Édouard Glissant, and David Graeber. But, rather than offer potted summaries of their thought, the book mobilizes (and sometimes amplifies or criticizes) their concepts in conjunction with our own concepts, using filmic examples as trampolines for our conceptualizations of emancipatory artistic possibilities.

Fourth, this book eschews the tyranny of the present by showing that the “new” often remediates the old. Although not a work of history per se, the book integrates historical understanding in its overall structure, in its individual chapters, and in the elaboration of specific concepts. It traces carnivalesque “social inversions” back to Greek Dionysianism, for example, and Kubrick’s satire in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964) to Juvenal and Jonathan Swift via early 1960s “sick comics” such as Tom Lehrer. Fifth, the book deprovincializes the discussion in disciplinary terms by drawing on philosophy, literary theory, political theory, performance theory, and other relevant disciplines. Sixth, it deprovincializes debate in cultural-geographical terms through a polycentric approach which envisions an egalitarian restructuring of intercultural relations within and beyond the nation-state.2 Within a polycentric vision, the world of cinema has many dynamic fields of power, energy, and struggle, with many possible vantage points. Therefore Keywords draws on theories and strategies not only from Europe and the United States but also from Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the indigenous world. Rather than starting from the center and venturing out into the periphery, we begin in the first chapter from what Faye Ginsburg calls the periphery’s periphery, that is, the films of putatively “primitive” aboriginal people.3

In its option for the polycentric and the marginalized, Keywords distances itself from Eurocentrism, that is, the view that enshrines the hierarchical stratifications inherited from Western colonial domination, assumed to be inevitable and even “progressive.”4 Eurocentrism does not refer to Europe in its literal sense as a continent or a geopolitical unit but rather to an intellectual orientation rooted in colonial power, an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes, that perceives Europe (and the neo-Europes around the world) as universally normative. Eurocentrism could equally well...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.7.2015
• Co-Autor: Richard Porton, Leo Goldsmith
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Kommunikationswissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Communication & Media Studies • Cultural Studies • Filmtheorie • Film theory • Kommunikation u. Medienforschung • Kulturwissenschaften • Massenmedien u. Gesellschaft • Mass Media & Society • Media aesthetics, radical film strategies, media,The Aesthetics of Garbage, The Aesthetics of Hunger, Anarchist Pedagogy, Blasphemy, Brechtian Alienation-Effect, Brechtian Distanciation, Brechtian Separation of the Elements, Camcorder Activism, Carnivalesque Inversion, Celluloid Pscychogeography, Coena Cipriani, Anti-Miltarism, Cyber-minimalism, decolonizing the Classics, Media Deconstruction, Hybrid Authorship, Imperfect Cinema, Internet Mashups, Inverted Stereotype, The Lower Bodily Stratum, Magic Realism • popular culture • Trance-Brechtianism, Visceral Spectatorship • Volkskultur
• ISBN-13: 9781118340592 / 9781118340592