Books on the topic 'Films suspendus'

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The ‘tensive motifs’ of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of ‘Neurofilmology’—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology attempts to grasp media in the making. It delves into the underbelly of cinema in order to explore how images circulate and apparatus crystallize across different material formations. The indisciplinary experience of curators and projectionists provides a means to suspend traditional film studies and engage with the medium as it happens, as a continuing, self-differing mess. From contemporary art exhibitions to pirate screenings, research and practice come together in a vibrant form of media scholarship, built from the angle of cinema’s functionaries — a call to reinvent the medium from within.

This chapter examines both the history of the tableau vivant as an art form and its remarkable revival in the cinema of the late twentieth century. At once a quotation of an existing work of art and an always imperfect copy, the tableau vivant recognizes the persistent power of the original but transforms or parodies its source, creating something new even when it returns to old and familiar models. The chapter charts the development of a cinema of painters in the late twentieth century and identifies the tableau as one of its key strategies precisely because it exists at the threshold between citation and innovation. Focusing on the work of Jean-Luc Godard and especially Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio, it emphasizes the archaeological and social possibilities of this return to painting, as filmmakers confront both the aging of cinema and the necessity of radical historical models in a moment of political retrenchment.

This comprehensive study reconstructs the production history of The Blue Angel (1930), showing how director Josef von Sternberg's virtuoso visual style was amply supported by an immensely talented team of actors and technicians. It also analyzes the film's aesthetics, and shows how the grave political situation in Germany reverberated in its seemingly airtight world. One of the most famous images in cinema is to be found in the film The Blue Angel (1930). Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), in revealing black suspenders, sits on a beer-barrel clasping an upraised knee with both hands while she leans slightly back. Though not Germany's first sound film, it was at the time the most prestigious and expensive by far. Sternberg had been lured back from Hollywood and, together with acting star Emil Jannings and producer Erich Pommer, he set about making an adaptation of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat. The result is a subtly claustrophobic study of a man's downfall which is a milestone in European cinema.

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The 'tensive motifs' of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams and offer embodied forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of 'Neurofilmology'―an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue―this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

Fifty years on, the American experience of the Vietnam War seems suspended between ancient history and rapidly fading cultural memory; or perhaps consigned to the vicissitudes of that habit of negotiating between history (what happened) and memory (how it is retrospectively mythologized). This chapter considers Vietnam War writings, including Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), as well as popular music and films such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994), in relation to the cultural lineage of those negotiations between history and memory. It considers literary engagements with more recent wars—such as Kevin Powers’ Iraq war novel Yellow Birds (2012)—that hark back to the Vietnam War. In discussing the war’s mythologizations and commemorations across history, the chapter explores the extent to which the Vietnam War has been seen to involve sacrifices that are politically and culturally redemptive.

Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology attempts to grasp media in the making. It delves into the underbelly of cinema in order to explore how images circulate and apparatus crystallize across different material formations. The indisciplinary experience of curators and projectionists provides a means to suspend traditional film studies and engage with the medium as it happens, as a continuing, self-differing mess. From contemporary art exhibitions to pirate screenings, research and practice come together in a vibrant form of media scholarship, built from the angle of cinema’s functionaries ― a call to reinvent the medium from within.

Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene’s status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji’s student daughter Rama and the group of urban ‘undesirables’ who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite. James S. Williams’s lucid study traces Xala’s difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory. Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene’s intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.

Greek Cinema and Migration examines the ways in which the cinema of Greece has responded to the post-1990s phenomenon of becoming a host country for immigrants. The book focuses mainly on migration from Albania that dominated social discourse and cinematic representation in the 1990s and 2000s, but also sheds light on cinematic responses to the mid-2010s ‘refugee crisis’. Placing contemporary Greek cinema within the context of European film production and transnational cinema, the book explores the fascination of Greek filmmakers with migration, mobility, borders and identity between 1991 and 2016. With case studies such as The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), The Way to the West (2003) and many more, Greek Cinema and Migration provides an in-depth understanding of contemporary Greek cinema and its direct correlation to the country’s struggles to implement European modernity. It tackles important questions on identity and representation, highlighting the role of migrants as constitutive ‘others’ who help to redefine national identity in times of encroaching globalization. The book raises in addition important questions on representations of migrants and refugees in film and mainstream media, focusing primarily on the role of migrant-related violence and its links to both humanitarianism and the agenda of the Far Right which gained a strong footing in crisis-era Greece. The author thus argues that migrants and refugees appear as either perpetrators or victims of violence in an intolerant host society, strengthening thus the role of stereotypes – both negative and positive.

Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site of one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases globally—a truly exceptional condition stemming from Japan’s abhorrence toward sexual contact around bases in its mainland that factored into securing Okinawa as a U.S. military fortress. This book merges Foucauldian biopolitics with Japanese Marxist theorizations of capitalism to trace the formation of a Japanese middle class that disciplined and secured the population from perceived threats, including the threat of miscegenation. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and autobiography, it reveals how this threat came to symbolize the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, was met with great ambivalence in Okinawa. As a borderland of the Pacific, racial politics internal to the U.S. collided with colonial politics internal to the Asia Pacific in base towns centered on facilitating encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women. By examining the history, debates, and cultural representations of these actors from 1945 to 2015, this book shows how they continually failed to “become Japanese.” Instead, they epitomized Okinawa’s volatility that danced on the razor’s edge between anarchistic insurgency and fascistic collaboration. What was at stake in their securitization was the attempt to contain Okinawa’s alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the law.

Heidi Kumao: Real and Imagined documents and contextualizes narrative fabric works and animations from Kumao’s 2020 solo exhibition at the University of Michigan’s Stamps Gallery. Using fabric cutouts and stitching of everyday objects, Kumao invents a tactile visual vocabulary that distills unspoken aspects of ordinary exchanges into accessible narrative images. Weaving in her experiences as an Asian American woman, artist, and educator, Kumao creates poetic and playful open-ended visual haikus, generating a range of associations to current events, gender roles, and institutional power structures. Captured midstream, interactions from intimate relationships, medical procedures, the workplace, and the political sphere are suspended in time within felt film stills. Real and Imagined presents the reader with an opportunity to experience this remarkable oeuvre of over thirty fabric works and video animations. For over thirty years, Kumao has developed an expanded art practice that includes animations, video installations, photographs, machine art, and fabric works that give physical form to the intangible parts of our lives: our emotions, psychological states, memories, thinking patterns. Her hybrid artworks have included electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, surreal, experimental stop motion puppet animations, performative staged photographs, and hand crafted cinema machines. She has exhibited her award-winning artwork in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Art Science Museum Singapore, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Museum of Image and Sound (São Paulo) and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Her work is in permanent and private collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Arizona State University Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This exhibition catalogue marks the first significant publication on Kumao’s work and includes a selection of works from across her career. It includes written contributions by: Srimoyee Mitra, curator and Director of the Stamps Gallery and NYC-based art critic; Wendy Vogel; an interview between the artist and writer Lynn Love; and poems by the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Award winner Marilyn Chin.