What is Philosophy?, the third volume of the series of books that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote on “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, presents us with a rather unusual idea, but one that is essential to understanding contemporary philosophical thought: the notion that philosophy is a concept-creating machine that must be connected to other machines, such as the arts and the sciences. Philosophy, science, and art are three distinct forms of reliable thinking. Given the heterogeneity of thinking, in what sense can (...) the three distinct forms of thinking answer the problem of creating concepts and using the machine as an allegory? This essay aims to analyse philosophy’s role in its relation to artistic and scientific practices by examining Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Moving Camera. It will focus on three guiding principles: creation is not exclusive to art and the sensible; philosophy mediates the relation between art and the sciences; and this mediation aims to keep their discord alive, not to solve it. (shrink)

The entire work of Dziga Vertov can be read as a continuous attempt to transform cinema from a visual art to an antivisual art, an art ontologically iconoclast. In this essay I will try to develop this underestimated key of reading Vertov’s oeuvre. His iconoclasm is developed in two lines, the first one is technical and the second one is theoretical. In this essay we will deepen these two lines, starting from Vertov’s writings and from is best-known (...) film, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). (shrink)

The entire work of Dziga Vertov can be read as a continuous attempt to transform cinema from a visual art to an antivisual art, an art ontologically iconoclast. In this essay I will try to develop this underestimated key of reading Vertov’s oeuvre. His iconoclasm is developed in two lines, the first one is technical and the second one is theoretical. In this essay we will deepen these two lines, starting from Vertov’s writings and from is best-known (...) film, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). (shrink)

This book offers an original approach to avant-garde art and its transformative force. Presenting an alternative to the approaches to art developed in postmodern theory or cultural studies, Ziarek sees art's significance in its critique of power and the increasing technologization of social relations. Re-examining avant-garde art and literature, from Italian and Russian Futurism and Dadaism, to Language poetry, video and projection art, as well as transgenic and Internet art, this book argues that art's importance today cannot be explained simply (...) in aesthetic or cultural terms but has to take into consideration how artworks question the technological character of modern power. To emphasize the transformative character of art, the book redefines art as a force field, in which forces drawn from historical and social reality come be to formed into an alternative relationality. Through discussions of such key avant-garde figures as Marinetti, Duchamp, Khlebnikov, and Vertov, and innovative contemporary artists like Viola, Wodiczko and Kac, The Force of Art counters the pessimism about art's social function by recovering and redefining art's transformative role in modernity. (shrink)

The talk of post-truth dominates the current discussion concerning the alleged objectivity of news-coverage via audio-visual mass media. An examination of the problems raised by post-truth, however, is nothing new but rather has been discussed in many ways by traditional and contemporary documentary film-theories. This article makes a case for revitalizing the term of post-truth with the help of those theories (as well as cinematic productions) by Vertov, Grierson, Balàzs, Buñuel and Niney.

1. Cine y vanguardias : el cine como promesa estético-política desde Dziga Vertov y Jean Epstein -- 2. Deleuze y las potencias del cine : el acontecimiento de lo inorgánico -- 3. De la vida inorgánica a la vida histórica : recuperación del carácter narrativo del cine a partir de Jacques Ranciere.

In una fase della teoria del cinema e dei media, come quella attuale, che appare segnata da un dibattito sempre più intenso sul significato e sulla portata di nozioni come quelle di medium e dispositivo, riprendere l’opera di autori come Dziga Vertov e Sergei M. Ejzenštejn, Siegfried Kracauer e Walter Benjamin, può risultare una via produttiva non solo nel tentativo di situare in una prospettiva storica il dibattito contemporaneo, ma anche di trovare nuove modi di pensare le nozioni citate (...) di medium e di dispositivo. Nel presente studio, l’autore esamina la riflessione di Ejzenštejn riguardo al dispositivo cinematografico come assemblage – flessibile, dinamico e in evoluzione – di tecniche, spazi e operazioni, concentrandosi su due momenti cruciali della sua lunga e complessa carriera: la conferenza The Dynamic Square tenuta a Hollywood nel 1930, e il progetto per film rimasto incompiuto e intitolato Glass House, presentato quello stesso anno alla Paramount. In entrambi i casi, Ejzenštejn considera lo schermo – una delle componenti cruciali del dispositivo cinematografico – come allo stesso tempo condizione senza la quale le immagini proiettate non possono essere visualizzate, come superfice di dimensioni e forme variabili, e come luogo di una serie di sperimentazioni sul montaggio e sullo spazio cinematografico, che in Glass House mette in luce le implicazioni estetiche e sociali di uno spazio completamente trasparente. (shrink)

This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard’s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard’s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard’s investigations (...) on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director’s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard’s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat to Adieu au langage, the author brings attention to Godard’s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement. (shrink)

Die Rede vom Postfaktischen bestimmt die aktuelle Diskussion zur vermeintlichen Objektivität der Berichterstattung audiovisueller Massenmedien. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Problemen, die durch das Postfaktische aufgeworfen werden, ist jedoch nicht neu, sondern bereits auf vielfältige Weise in klassischen und aktuellen Theorien des Dokumentarfilms diskutiert worden. Der Artikel plädiert dafür, den Begriff des Postfaktischen unter Hinzuziehung dieser Theorien (und auch filmischer Produktionen) von Vertov, Grierson, Balàzs, Buñuel und Niney fruchtbar zu machen. The talk of post-truth dominates the current discussion concerning the (...) alleged objectivity of news-coverage via audio-visual mass media. An examination of the problems raised by post-truth, however, is nothing new but rather has been discussed in many ways by traditional and contemporary documentary film-theories. This article makes a case for revitalizing the term of post-truth with the help of those theories (as well as cinematic productions) by Vertov, Grierson, Balàzs, Buñuel and Niney. (shrink)

A comienzos de la década de los 80, el filósofo Gilles Deleuze aplicó la teoría de la imagen de Bergson expuesta en Materia y Memoria (1896) a la imagen cinematográfica con la intención de desarrollar nuevas herramientas conceptuales que, a través de un análisis de la historia del cine, permitieran poder delinear mejor tanto la relación cognoscitiva más allá de los presupuestos de sujeto-objeto, como una teoría de la comunicación pre-verbal no estructuralizada fonéticamente que superara definitivamente la concepción lacaniana del (...) lenguaje. Si bien dichos análisis pueden ser vistos también como el establecimiento de unos principios alternativos a las teorías del montaje tanto de Vertov como de Eizenshtéin, el interés primario de nuestro paper se centrará en la redefinición de las categorías espacio-temporales que conlleva esta nueva teoría del cine esgrimida por Deleuze. Concretamente analizaremos cómo la nueva tecnología cinematográfica, especialmente en su desarrollo europeo de la segunda postguerra (Godard, Fellini, Syberberg, Tarkovski) supone una comprensión temporal por completo ajena a cualquier comprensión de causalidad lineal, teleológica o no, de corte cronológico. En su lugar, el cine en tanto que medio de comunicación propio del mundo metropolitano contemporáneo emplea unas categorías temporales más cercanas a conceptos como “acontecimiento” o “haecceitas”, que en algunos puntos lo acercan a la concepción del tiempo desarrollada por Walter Benjamin, pero que por otro lo relacionan directamente con formas aiónicas del mismo ya estudiadas por Deleuze en la década de los 60, y aplicadas al estudio del dadaísmo en la de los 70. (shrink)