Category Archive for: ‘Issue 37 – Aesthetic Issues in World Cinema’

Cinema and World ‘World Cinema’, to a French eye, is a very welcoming notion that could mean several different, even contradictory things. Among these, I will evoke three meanings: Because of its predecessor World Music, which means the ethnic music re-arranged with electronic instruments to please Western consumers, World Cinema could function as a seductive formula for acculturation – after …

There has been a renewed interest in film and video performance over the last decade, evident in the emergence of the VJ (Video Jockey) and VJing as real-time visual performance. Groups such as 242.pilots, for example, have been described as a real-time video ensemble, improvising and re-animating, live with images, what the jazz band has traditionally executed through sound. The …

In the opening moments of Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (A Lake, 2008), we hear the sharp, rhythmic thwack of an axe. The arms swinging it fly across the screen. Behind the heaving red shape, stretching across the back left corner of the frame, are some hazy, grey-green trees, their trunks blurred at the edges, smoothed into the pale sky. A …

In Passing In Parables for the Virtual (2002), Brian Massumi argues that movement and sensation are integral to the body. Massumi describes the body in motion as in relation to its potential; that is, in relation to its variations, rather than being a coherent or consistent entity. The body in motion reverberates with its own potential in process. This potential …

… if my films have a common link, maybe it’s being a foreigner – it’s common for people who are born abroad – they don’t know so well where they belong. It’s not the kind of thing you find in literature, music or photography – being from abroad makes you look different. – Claire Denis [1] Having grown up in …

Is it a texture, or a fold of the soul, of thought? – Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Those familiar with the work of contemporary French director Claire Denis will be well aware of her cinematic appeals to the body. Together with her long-running cinematographer, Agnès Godard, Denis is known for eschewing dialogue, character psychology and linear …

-1- A small cinema, new and well equipped. In the foreground, an attendant in a white laboratory coat leans over a figure seated in the front row, fussing over him and obscuring him from the spectator’s view. The attendant stands upright, revealing the object of his attentions. It is a young man, his arms immobilised by a straitjacket, his body …

Is it possible for an emotionless psychopath such as Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford (played by Casey Affleck), the mild-mannered murderer in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010), to experience empathy? [1] This article analyses the interface between the spectator and the screen in this potent film, a crime thriller adapted from Jim Thompson’s brutal novel of the same title (1952). [2] It tests …

Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms. – Borges, “The South” [1] I think that human beings are not in a place from the beginning of humanity. We have always been travelling. Maybe we were born in the centre of Africa and we left Africa to go to Europe, to Asia, to America and so on. I think that …

When the moon hits the eye Like a big pizza pie – That’s amore. – Dean Martin Everything is somewhere. Even Corsica is somewhere. – Nurit (age six) The concept of World Cinema emerges in a moment when cinema, as defined by film theory and as understood in film culture, appears to be in crisis. This crisis may be described …