Cinema and Counter-History

Marcia Landy

Description

Despite claims about the end of history and the death of cinema, visual media continue to contribute to our understanding of history and history-making. In this book, Marcia Landy argues that rethinking history and memory must take into account shifting conceptions of visual and aural technologies. With the assistance of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cinema and Counter-History examines writings and films that challenge prevailing notions of history in order to explore the philosophic, aesthetic, and political stakes of activating the past. Marshaling evidence across European, African, and Asian cinema, Landy engages in a counter-historical project that calls into question the certainty of visual representations and unmoors notions of a history firmly anchored in truth.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Crisis of the Movement-Image and Counter-history
2. History Growling at the Door: Horror and Naturalism
3. Comedy, Theatricality, and Counter-history
4. Minoritarian Cinematic Forms as Counter-history
5. Memory, the Powers of the False, and Becoming
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Película fotográfica
• Theory
• History of film
• Epistemology
• Cinema
• History
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253016195
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

CINEMA COUNTER-HISTORY
CINEMA

COUNTER-HISTORY
MARCIA LANDY
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Marcia Landy
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landy, Marcia, [date]
Cinema and counter-history / Marcia Landy.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01612-6 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01616-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01619-5 (ebook)
1. Motion pictures and history. I. Title.
PN 1995.2 L 36 1996
791.43 658-dc23
2014036942
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Crisis of the Movement-Image and Counter-History
2. History Growling at the Door: Horror and Naturalism
3. Comedy, Theatricality, and Counter-History
4. Minoritarian Cinematic Forms as Counter-History
5. Memory, the Powers of the False, and Becoming
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MORE THAN ANY BOOK I have written, this book is vastly indebted to colleagues and friends. To begin with, I express my gratitude to Adam Lowenstein, who, after reading my draft of a proposal for publication, encouraged me to pursue the work. I hope that, after reading the completed volume, he feels I have not disappointed his expectations. Daniel Morgan generously read the manuscript and offered many helpful comments on it. I am grateful for the time he took from his busy schedule to devote to my thinking and for his encouraging responses. I also want to thank David Martin-Jones for his early support of the project and for his wonderful studies of cinema that are mindful of the significance of the writings of Deleuze. My thanks go also to an unidentified reader who perused the manuscript not only in terms of copy-editing but also with an eye rigorously and critically trained on the positions expressed. Similarly, I thank Robert Burgoyne for his extremely helpful critical observations on and suggestions for improvement of the text. I acknowledge the support of the Richard D. and Mary Jane Edwards Endowed Publication Fund in the publication of this book.
I owe a huge debt to N. John Cooper, dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, who has, over the years, been supportive of my work. Thanks as well to my colleagues in the French and Italian Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Francesca Savoia and Lina Insana, who were instrumental in selecting me to give the keynote address at the American Association of Italian Studies conference in 2011, where I was able to test ideas for the book. Along the same lines, I am grateful to the Italian Department at the University of Texas at Austin and to the graduate students and faculty, especially Professors Daniela Bini and Paola Bonifazio, for giving me the opportunity to present my paper Biography, Spectacle, and Counter-History.
By way of print that facilitated my thinking on aspects of the present volume, I mention three published essays of mine that are relevant to my book; sections are included herein with permission from the presses. I am grateful to the editors for their inclusion of my works in their anthologies and for their permission to incorporate parts of them into Cinema and Counter-History:
Comedy and Counter-History. In Historical Comedy on Screen: Subverting History with Humour , edited by Hannu Salmi, 175-98. London: Intellect Press, 2011.
The Hollywood Western, the Movement-Image, and Making History. In Hollywood and the American Historical Film , edited by J. E. Smyth, 26-48. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillian.
Horror and Counter History: Deep Crimson . In Transnational Horror across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies , edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer, 228-42. New York: Routledge, 2013. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC , a division of Informa pic.
My thanks to colleagues in film studies whose thinking has been influential in my thinking, writing, and teaching: Paul Bov , Nancy Condee, Colin MacCabe, Adam Lowenstein, Dan Morgan, Lucy Fischer, Lina Insana, Francesca Savoia, and Jane Feuer. And a special thanks to the editors at Indiana University Press: to Jane Kupersmith, a former editor, for her initial encouragement of the project, and to Raina Nadine Polivka, present editor, for her ongoing help in every aspect of the publishing process. I am also indebted to the friendship and ongoing technical help and intellectual support of Dr. Kirsten Strayer. I have also been extremely grateful for the indefatigable efforts on my behalf of Jen Florian, film studies secretary and mainstay; Joe Kluchurosky, my administrative assistant; and graduate student assistants Jacob Spears and Kelly Andrews. Above all, I am grateful to my dear friend Stanley Shostak for his incisive critical intelligence, humor, intellectual generosity, and companionship.
INTRODUCTION
To me History is, so to speak, the work of works; it contains all of them. History is the family name, there are parents and children, literature, painting, philosophy. . . . let s say History is the whole lot. So a work of art, if well made, is a part of History, if intended as such and if this is artistically apparent. You can get a feeling through it because it is worked artistically. Science doesn t have to do that, and other disciplines haven t done it. It seemed to me that History could be a work of art, something not generally admitted except perhaps by Michelet.
-Jean-Luc Godard, in Cinema (Godard and Ishaghpour 2005, 28)
CINEMA, TELEVISION , and the Internet have become major sources for access to historical events despite declarations of the end of history and of cinema. Nonetheless, historians, social critics, and film scholars continue to debate what constitutes an accurate and realistic version of past events in relation to cinema and in light of new visual technologies. Although the media s predilection for fiction and entertainment has often been judged antithetical to truthful and legitimate presentations of history, a growing number of critics and artists regard the cinema as a significant medium for reevaluating the nature and status of the image as a guide to the uses, and particularly the disadvantages, of history for the present and future. Cinema and Counter-History , as its title suggests, proposes that, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, visual media have contributed to, and continue to contribute to, an expanded and altered understanding of what constitutes historical thinking.
My book does not claim that written and visual histories are identical, but it takes seriously how visual and aural technologies contribute to historical thinking (Rosenstone 2006, 12). Thus, Cinema and Counter-History closely examines select critical writings and visual media texts that offer versions of the past and future that run counter to received views about historicizing. My book pays specific attention to various, often conflicting theories, forms, and styles in order to identify the philosophic, aesthetic, and political stakes in thinking through media. I focus on both dominant and marginalized or neglected forms of visual history that are implicitly or explicitly illustrative of different conceptions of space and time, of bodies and places. In identifying counter-historical thinking, I am attentive to the existence of different popular and experimental film forms and their uses of the cinematic medium in relation to camera movement, continuity and discontinuity, framing, montage, and real and virtual bodies. My discussion of film theory and historical narration is directed toward a transnational context, with major attention paid to European, Asian, and African films.
My object in thinking counter-historically is to locate it in the role of invention, artifice, theatricality, and conjecture as allowing for and enlarging on an active engagement with feeling and thought as expressed through cinema. Counter-history assumes an active and irreverent position for the reader and viewer in relation to the disciplines of history and popular culture in their predilection for memorializing in terms of the past, and it regards thinking on visual media as complicit with this position. This book is not antihistorical: however, it is committed to escaping history through expanding our thinking on what constitutes historical thought. To think counter-historically does not mean condescendingly admitting visual media into considerations of the past, but rather investigating and challenging the character and quality of affective investments in them as expressed through cinema.
A RATIONALE FOR COUNTER-HISTORY THROUGH FILM
The idea of moving images existed before the invention of movie technology, through explorations in physics, biology, philosophy, and the visual arts concerning development and movement in relation to time and space. However, the invention of the movie camera in the late nineteenth century challenged thinkers to find a language and methods to characterize the new technological medium-one that promised to cross the boundaries between popular and elite art forms and science-so