Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film

by Sulgi Lie, Daniel Fairfax (Translator)

Overview

Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of suture, whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of suture-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789462983632
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/03/2020
Series:	Film Culture in Transition
Edition description:	1
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sulgi Lie teaches in the Division of Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has co-edited a German anthology of Jacques Rancière’s film writings and has recently completed a book on comedy and critical theory with the title Gehend kommen. Adornos Slapstick (Come Walking: Adorno’s Slap stick) to be published in early 2021 by Vorwerk 8 press. Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and an editor of the online film journal Senses of Cinema.

Table of Contents

New Preface to the English Edition, Preface, Part I: The Absent Cause of Film: On the Theory of Enunciation and Suture, Introduction, 1. On Enunciation in Apparatus Theory, 1.1 Imaginary Enunciation, or the Place of the Spectator: Christian Metz (1), 1.2 Voyeuristic Enunciation, or the Place of the Author: Raymond Bellour, 1.3 The Double Énoncé, or the Division of the Filmic Image: World Projection as Rear-projection in Marnie, 2. On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture, 2.1 Negative Enunciation, or the Place of the Absent One: Jean-Pierre Oudart, 2.2 Masked Enunciation, the Place of the Apparatus: Daniel Dayan, 2.3 The Schizoid Suture, or the Division of Body and Voice: Acousmatics as Schismatics in Psycho, 3. On the Pragmatics of Enunciation, 3.1 Deictic Enunciation, or Film as Speech Act: Francesco Casetti, 3.2 Impersonal Enunciation, or Film as Writing: Christian Metz (2), 3.3 Looking at the Camera, or the Theatricalization of Film: Jean-Luc Godard, 4. On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture, 4.1 External Enunciation, or the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye: Jacques Lacan/Kaja Silverman, 4.2 Extimate Enunciation, or the Gaze as Bodiless Organ: Joan Copjec/Slavoj Žižek, 4.3 From the Hors-champ to the Hors-lieu, or the Transsubjective Point of View: The Unrepresentable in Rossellini and Antonioni, 5. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of the Repressed: Caché, Part II: Allegories of Totality: Fredric Jameson's Political Film Aesthetics,Introduction, 6. The Dialectics of Mass Culture 6.1 Reification and Utopia: Jaws and The Godfather, 6.2 Class and Allegory: Dog Day Afternoon, 6.3 The Political Unconscious, 7. Cartographies of the Postmodern, 7.1 Nostalgia und Historicism, 7.2 The Totalization of Totality: Cognitive Mapping, 7.3 The Implosion of the Referent: Blow-Up, 8. Geopolitical Aesthetics, 8.1 Totality as Conspiracy, 8.2 Conspirational Enunciation, or the Acousmatics of the Paranoia Film, 8.3 Digital Cinema in the Age of Globalization: Miami Vice, 9. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining, Filmography, Bibliography, Index.

Editorial Reviews

Delivered in a crisp translation, this ambitious book's clarifying distance from the lasting accomplishments of apparatus theory goes far toward erasing any trace of oxymoron in its title. And in the emphasis of its subtitle — with the camera variously recognized as severed from the spaces it preserves only by rearticulating — cinema's narrative inside emerges as the material effect of its outside: not just technically but culturally. Synthesized as never before across a deep field of previous theorization, the conditioning surround of the screen image, in politics as well as production, is studied rigorously by Lie, and often brilliantly, from the inside out — in powerful extrapolations earned across nimble readings of celluloid and digital cinematography from rear projection in Marnie to pixel tessellations in Miami Vice.,- Garrett Stewart, author of Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method (2020),

Lie's book Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema fulfills the title's promise by re-reading and re-viewing theories and films to engender indeed a political aesthetics. Avoiding the sheer application of political theories on cinema Lie challenges some of the paradigms of modern film theory for their relevance for an aesthetic of cinema. In Lie's powerful understanding of cinema the off screen space in cinematic shots becomes a complex membrane between world and fiction. Intense shot analyses are the bearers of the argument that political aesthetics of cinema are based in the ways films are framing and deframing the world.,- Gertrud Koch

From the Publisher