The Cinematic Sublime

Description

This interdisciplinary volume is dedicated to exploring the idea of the cinematic sublime by bringing together the disciplines of film studies and aesthetics to examine cinema and cinematic experience. Explores the idea of ‘the sublime’ in cinema from a variety of perspectives; the essays range in focus from early cinema, through classical Hollywood, documentary, avant-garde and art cinema traditions, and on to contemporary digital cinema. The book aims to apply the discussion of the sublime in philosophy to cinema and to interrogate the ways in which cinema engages with this tradition.

Offers new and exciting insights into how cinema engages with traditional historical and aesthetic discourse. Original and wide-ranging, this clear and coherent volume is a useful resource for both post-graduate students and established scholars interested in the interrelations between film and philosophy. The range of material covered in the individual essays makes this a wide-ranging and very useful introduction to the topic.

A significant new contribution to the literature on Film-Philosophy. What sets this reader apart from the existing books on the subject is the wider scope. It embraces both philosophers and film scholars to consider films from throughout film history in light of theories of the sublime from throughout the history of Philosophy. In doing so it aims to demonstrate the diverse value of sublime approaches (versus a singular definition and philosophical perspective) to a wider range of films than has previously been considered. 

An original and stimulating collection of essays contributing new insights into the crossover between historical and aesthetic approaches to contemporary cinema and cinematic experience.

The main readership will be academic markets including film studies and philosophy, and academics with an interest in the legacies of Burke and Kant on aesthetics. Useful for teaching aesthetics through cinematic illustration and application.

Appropriate to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in ideas at the boundaries of contemporary film studies.

 

Acknowledgments vii

Foreword viii

Joan Hawkins

Introduction 1

Nathan Carroll

Part I: Sublime Spectatorship 9

1. Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View 10

Samantha Wilson

2. Stars Up Close: Celebrity, Ephemerality, and the Banal Sublime 24

Claire Sisco King

Part II: Staging Sublimity: “Presenting the Unpresentable” 39

3. Between Preservation and Disintegration in Decayed Cinema: The Uncanny and the Weird of the Sublime Archival Image in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) 40

Kornelia Boczkowska

4. Negative Epiphanies and Sublime Emotion in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence 53

James Kendrick

Part III: Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments 67

5. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Historical Sublime 68

Steve Ostovich

6. Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust and the Limits of Invisibility 85

Chris Dumas

 

Part IV: The Limits of Control: Sublime Cinemascapes 97

7. A Short History of the Long Take: Digital Cinema and the “Infinite Cut” 98

Nathan Carroll

8. Stalking the Sublime: Nature and Affect in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker 124

Robert Lee Jones

Part V: The Limits of Light: The Other(s) 141

9. Sublime Abject or Abject Sublime: Sublimation and Jouissance in Andrezj Żuławski’s Szamanka 142

Carolin Kirchner

10. The Fear of Beauty and the Beauty of Fear: The Sublime in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin 155

Kwasu David Tembo

Bibliography 174

Notes on the Contributors 189

Index 193

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Película fotográfica
• Cinema
• Aesthetics
• Sublime
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781789382402
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Cinematic Sublime

The Cinematic Sublime
_________________
Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences
E DITED BY
Nathan Carroll
First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Cover image: Image from “Decasia” (Bill Morrison, USA, 2002).
Original source: “Meet Me Down At The Luna” (1905, Lubin), archived at Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 9781789382396
ePDF ISBN 9781789382419
ePUB ISBN 9781789382402
To find out about all our publications, please visit
www.intellectbooks.com .
There, you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse, or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Joan Hawkins
Introduction
Nathan Carroll
Part I
Sublime Spectatorship
1. Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View
Samantha Wilson
2. Stars Up Close: Celebrity, Ephemerality, and the Banal Sublime
Claire Sisco King
Part II
Staging Sublimity: “Presenting the Unpresentable”
3. Between Preservation and Disintegration in Decayed Cinema: The Uncanny and the Weird of the Sublime Archival Image in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia
Kornelia Boczkowska
4. Negative Epiphanies and Sublime Emotion in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence
James Kendrick
Part III
Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments
5. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Historical Sublime
Steve Ostovich
6. Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust and the Limits of Invisibility
Chris Dumas
Part IV
The Limits of Control: Sublime Cinemascapes
7. A Short History of the Long Take: Digital Cinema and the “Infinite Cut”
Nathan Carroll
8. Stalking the Sublime: Nature and Affect in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Robert Lee Jones
Part V
The Limits of Light: The Other(s)
9. Sublime Abject or Abject Sublime: Sublimation and Jouissance in Andrzej Żuławski’s Szamanka
Carolin Kirchner
10. The Fear of Beauty and the Beauty of Fear: The Sublime in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin
Kwasu David Tembo
Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
I wish to offer my deepest gratitude to everyone who participated in compiling this project, first and foremost the contributing authors for their time and continued commitment to this project. I would especially like to thank Joan Hawkins for contributing the foreword, and Chris Dumas for conforming the manuscript to the Chicago style. The staff at Intellect Press have been extremely generous with their help and comments throughout the process of bringing this manuscript to print. I would also like to thank the filmmaker Bill Morrison for allowing the use of an image from Decasia on the cover of this book.
This project was made possible by the Department of Communication, Theatre, and Art at The College of St. Scholastica, which granted me sabbatical leave to finish the project. I also wish to thank, retroactively, the Department of Communication and Culture (CMCL) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Although the department has now been dismantled, during its all-too-brief existence CMCL produced many excellent scholars and colleagues with its commitment to a truly interdisciplinary approach.
Finally, this collection is dedicated to my partner, Laurie, for all of her incredible patience and help.
Foreword
Joan Hawkins
As a philosophical and aesthetic concept, the sublime encompasses many concerns crucial to contemporary film studies: formalism, affect studies, taste politics, and audience cultures, to name just a few. But while the sublime encompasses these contemporary film studies topics, its actual intersection with film studies scholarship has been a vexed enterprise. The journal Film-Philosophy occasionally publishes essays treating some aspect of the sublime; Cynthia Freeland and Steven Shaviro continually struggle with it (to interesting effect) in their work. But for the most part, contemporary film studies has tended to regard discussions of the sublime with deep suspicion, as though simply evoking the term is to summon an entire moribund tradition of elitist snobbery and textual essentialism.
This anthology seeks to reinvigorate scholarly consideration of the cinematic sublime and its uses in taste culture. It does this largely through challenging any stable, monolithic articulation of the sublime. Like Susan Rubin Suleiman’s provocative discussion of the avant-garde, which argues for the existence of multiple avant-gardes, The Cinematic Sublime begins its intervention with a direct hit on expectations of a unitary, solipsistic articulation of the sublime. 1 “The goal of this collection,” Nathan Carroll tells us, “is to apply . . . various ‘ sublimes ’ to specific films and to general topics in film studies. The point is not to manufacture theoretical continuity between different philosophers and film scholars, but to recognize overlaps and identify differences” (emphasis added).
The book’s introduction is key here, providing a helpful and well-articulated framework for understanding its organizational logic. It presents a useful thumbnail teleology of the category “sublime,” situating the term’s various iterations in philosophy and cultural history. Therefore I would recommend that you read it before dipping into the collection. But after that, you should feel free to sample at will. The volume is divided into five parts, each of which pairs chapters that are similar in topic or approach. So it invites us to read according to Eisensteinian logic, allowing one chapter in a part to comment upon the other. But it certainly doesn’t require the reader to follow that strategy. One of the strengths of anthologies, it seems to me, is their ability to disrupt cause-effect logic and traditional categories, to cluster ideas and approaches around a central thorny issue and allow contradictions to emerge. Following a slightly different dialectical strategy than the one governing Soviet montage theory, they allow us to think outside the box and create multiple arguments (or stories) from the same text. This is particularly true in the case of The Cinematic Sublime , which like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), will reward repeated polyvalent reading strategies and approaches.
As someone who has spent much of her career interrogating taste categories, I find the breadth and scope here refreshing. Chapters on celebrity culture and banality, Steven Spielberg, and Jerry Lewis sit alongside chapters on Hollis Frampton, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the use of the long take. In that sense, the book enacts the kind of taste politics that I’ve long advocated. 2 Especially interesting is Part III titled “Time, Memory, and History : Ruptures and Fragments ,” which pairs a chapter on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah with a piece on Jerry Lewis. Using the sublime to analyze Shoah , a work remarkable for its denial of any possible aesthetic engagement with Holocaust imagery (Lanzmann famously refused to use archival footage or images), itself opens new readings and interpretive strategies. But pairing it with the Lewis piece is brilliant, repositioning Shoah within a historiography that interrogates the limits of an “appropriate” or “truthful” historical Holocaust narrative, while simultaneously asking us to consider what is foreclosed in film history through the suppression of certain bad objects (Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried ).
All of the parts pair canonical titles or themes (the long take) with more popular—or in the case of Lewis, derided—texts. As Carroll notes in his introduction to this volume, “via sublime aesthetics, the study of Michael Bay is potentially every bit as productive as is the study of Stan Brakhage.” And from that standpoint, this volume has resonance for scholars working in fields outside normative studies of the sublime, those interested in a “limit-test or event horizon to their own systems” of Film Theory, “fixing the extent to which their larger theories of meaning hold firm (or don’t) in the face of the unimaginable.”
So far I’ve spoken about the book’s significance for scholars working and teaching in film studies. For philosophers, too, this volume will resonate. In an academic system increasingly driven by enrollment figures and, by extension, courses in popular culture, Philosophy departments frequently scramble to maintain their budgets and curriculum. The Cinematic Sublime certainly provides one model of demonstrating the applicability of philosophical ideas to art and to popular movies. But it also opens some space for us to reevaluate and reconsider the post-structuralist Philosophy/Theory divide, which apportioned courses on Hegel and Heidegger to philosophy departments and courses on Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze to film, literature, and critical studies. In this volume, the larger discussion of the sublime (which dates to Longinus, but generally invokes Kant) unfolds alongside renewed consideration of Deleuze, Kristeva, François Lyotard, and Hayden White. In so doing, it invites us to read our own disciplines in the same way that we, as scholars, read culture. It invites us to interrogate the foreclosed limits of our own fields of knowledge.

NOTES
1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Inte