This article revisits Jean-Louis Comolli's “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much” in the spirit of film-philosophy's various efforts to reassess the field's seminal texts, and it recasts Comolli's attentive analyses of film acting in terms of the original interpretations they produce. In short, I look to “A Body Too Much’ for its subtle disclosure of an underappreciated substratum of hermeneutics in so called “1970s film theory.” Comolli's study of the discord between actor and referent, I argue, is surprisingly consistent with (...) Paul Ricoeur's pioneering contemporaneous work on metaphor and interpretation, and it leads him to understand the meaningful deployment of film actors in very particular ways. I provide an extended analysis of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York to further demonstrate how the distinctive utilization of actors constitutes both a redescription of the historical past and a spur to interpretation. When critically apprehended as a solution to the broadly construed problems of creating historical fictions, the calculated deployment of film actors can reveal a manner of thinking about the historical past – simply put, it can tell us what a film is thinking and how it regards its historical characters and events. In the final analysis, I claim, our attention to – and critical interpretation of – the embodiment of such filmic thinking permits us to grasp the imaginative form of historical knowledge on view in such films. (shrink)

Jean-Louis Schefer's newly translated The Ordinary Man of Cinema, originally published in 1980, proposes a singular account of the experience of cinema which departs from the principal tendencies of film theory. It has nevertheless had a profound if somewhat invisible influence in film philosophy and theory since its publication, notably in the work of Gilles Deleuze. This essay proposes a synthetic discussion of Schefer's work on film up to The Ordinary Man, arguing that Schefer's work, which draws on his earlier (...) work on painting, construes film as radically non-representational, and as bringing into being, in the spectator, a virtual affectivity corresponding to the distorted and disproportionate bodies and aberrant movements that it presents. I argue that in its recurrent emphasis on the “inchoate” elements in film, and on the “inceptions” of movements that it provokes, Schefer's thought draws implicitly on the Bataillean notion of the informe. This return to an impossibility of thought at the heart of thought is among the fundamental insights which Deleuze draws from Schefer in Cinema 2: The Time-image. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 69-94.

By virtue of an extended consideration of problems and possibilities in the discipline of film studies toward the goal of constructing an Objectivist aesthetics of cinema, this article examines some of the most pressing issues facing contemporary art criticism. Opposing tenets of an Aristotelian aesthetic tradition against tenets of a Kantian aesthetic tradition, the author attempts to resolve a number of long-standing aporias in the Objectivist aesthetics and in the philosophy of art more broadly in the hopes of charting a (...) fruitful path for the future of art criticism. (shrink)

Referring to Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity”, this paper aims to discuss the new film theory that has emerged from the digitalization of cinema. The concepts of perceptual reality and elastic reality constitute the two most important parts of the theory. Bauman argues that contemporary modern societies are “liquid” because of their dynamic character. Although contemporary societies are in constant movement, he indicates that they lack certainty and borders, and flexibility and uncertainty become prominent instead. The digital cinema that Belton (...) has defined as “a false revolution” is nothing but 1’s and 0’s. The key concept here is CGI. Manovich points out that we have arrived at a digitally transformable reality that depends on computer programs and which is beyond photographic reality due to the digitalization of cinema: This is elastic reality. The second concept in the theoretical discussion of digital cinema through visual effects is brought by Prince : "Perceptual realism". This paper opens a theoretical debate through CGI examples and is based on the argument that Bauman's concept of “liquid” constitutes a social and cultural background for digital theory. (shrink)