Category Archive for: ‘Issue 43 – Dossier: Materialising Absence in Film and Media’

Absence (noun) 1 The state of being away from a place or person. 1.1 An occasion or period of being away from a place or person. 1.2 The non-existence or lack of. If absence is a noun, who or what does it name in film and media studies? If absence designates who or what is lacking, what happens if we …

Abjection preserves … the immemorial violence with which one body becomes separated from another body in order to be. — Julia Kristeva Imaging Absence The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) relates, via retrospective and acousmatic voiceover, the story of the Lisbon sisters. During the 1970s, the five Lisbon girls are born and raised in a strict Catholic household in suburban …

The poet of fire, of water, or of earth does not convey the same inspiration as the poet of air. — Gaston Bachelard Much has been written about the painful allure of distant horizons on an infinite expanse of ocean, the magic of the open road, the mysterious call of alien shores. But to show the demonic power of such …

Can a camera sense what a human eye cannot? This question was of great concern to early film theorists. It has since been rejuvenated by recent trends in contemporary cinema that present the photographic lens as transcending the limitations of human vision. In this article, I propose that camera-centric vision offers us particular ways of seeing the world. More particularly, …

Seeing/Believing In pornography – a genre that Linda Williams has defined as “obsessed with visible proof” – bodies are spectacles, displayed and dissected by the camera in pursuit of pleasure’s physiological truths. [1] In Naomi Uman’s Removed (1999), the sexualised feminine form is obscured, interrupting pornography’s attempts to quantify and authenticate female pleasure. Uman’s film can also be situated in …

Award-winning Indian artist Nalini Malani has been making socially and politically engaged art for nearly five decades. Since the beginning of the twenty first century, she has produced videos and video/shadow plays that centre on rotating, reverse-painted Mylar cylinders. These works include: Hamletmachine (2000), Transgressions (2001), Unity in Diversity (2003), Game Pieces (2003/2009), Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of …

We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages. — Angela Davis Among the most celebrated of essay films made by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah is Handsworth Songs (1986). In this film, the narrator describes a black woman who is confronted with the remains of …

In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia/Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011), a deceptively simple plot – the search for a murder victim in the Anatolian steppes – serves as the foundation for an investigation into the malleability of archives and the representation of mnemonic processes, as well as mortality itself. Early in the film, the character of Doctor …

October 29, 1977 In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean? —Roland Barthes The artist is the one who liberates a life, a powerful life, a life that’s more than personal, it’s more than his/her life. —Gilles Deleuze Tell me, why are you filming me like that? Because …

During a key sequence in Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition (2013), we hear stifled noises, breaths and whispers as the lead protagonist – a performance artist known only as ‘D’ (Viv Albertine) – navigates the physical and psychical parameters of her beloved, modernist house in London. On the threshold of a new stage in her career and the sale of her marital …

We are familiar with the illusions in which we believe that we see something which only our imagination supplies. – Hugo Münsterberg Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. – Robert Bresson O what wonder to look at what one cannot see. – Jean-Luc Godard …