Articulating a materialist conception of rhythm and temporality in the medium of film, this paper... more Articulating a materialist conception of rhythm and temporality in the medium of film, this paper seeks to explore the way in which Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) is constituted by the alternation of explosions and implosions of historical time-images. The author makes a detailed analysis of several sequences of the film in order to lend support to the central argument: that spectators are taken “out of time” through an anamorphic experience of death in the material contact transmitted by a spectral dimension of history and memory. This argument allows political considerations regarding the mediation of social memory and mourning and also epistemological considerations regarding the critique of traditional historiography and the literary bias of narrative storytelling.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the translation and the reception of haiku poetry allowed f... more At the turn of the twentieth century, the translation and the reception of haiku poetry allowed for theoretical advances beyond the purview of the literary. The haiku-idiom reinvented itself as a practice of poetry as audio-visual technique : haiku as a line of flight, medium of another relationship to language and to images. A hybrid-model of the modernist arts (poetry photography, film), the haiku-idiom became a vehicle for theories articulating the experience of a new spatio-temporal economy of images. As a mode of writing in laconic fragments, gestures of everyday-life, and shadows of memory, the haiku-idiom mobilized for others a relationship of movement, opacity, and distance to language.
Any serious thinking about the relationships between audiovisual media, cultural memory and globa... more Any serious thinking about the relationships between audiovisual media, cultural memory and global modernity must confront the phenomenological problems of homelessness, the politics of place and displacement, and the experience of exile and diaspora. The recent publication of Laura U. Marks' The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema y Embodiment y and the Senses marks an important moment of such interdisciplinary and intercultural thinking and will force students and scholars alike to think in the words of other worlds. Marks situates her book next to the work of many contemporary artists and writers, including Black Audio Film Collective, Julio
... temporality of the re-play, a replay that is never identical to the original experience, but ... more ... temporality of the re-play, a replay that is never identical to the original experience, but must ... lost and replayed in the media of video and film in order to align experience with the ... 2. Walter Benjamin named his classic essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ...
This brief article maps out some of the central concerns and questions raised in two relatively r... more This brief article maps out some of the central concerns and questions raised in two relatively recent anthologies of essays by major intellectuals, film scholars and historians. In addition to problematizing the representation of history and audio-visual media, these two anthologies examplify the circulation of ideas, the bridges as well as the divisions between the interests of academic inquiry in North America and Europe. What seems to be a common preoccupation, the weight of history in cinema, is only the marker of a clear line of division which is emblematic of divergent values and institutional orientations.
Articulating a materialist conception of rhythm and temporality in the medium of film, this paper... more Articulating a materialist conception of rhythm and temporality in the medium of film, this paper seeks to explore the way in which Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) is constituted by the alternation of explosions and implosions of historical time-images. The author makes a detailed analysis of several sequences of the film in order to lend support to the central argument: that spectators are taken “out of time” through an anamorphic experience of death in the material contact transmitted by a spectral dimension of history and memory. This argument allows political considerations regarding the mediation of social memory and mourning and also epistemological considerations regarding the critique of traditional historiography and the literary bias of narrative storytelling.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the translation and the reception of haiku poetry allowed f... more At the turn of the twentieth century, the translation and the reception of haiku poetry allowed for theoretical advances beyond the purview of the literary. The haiku-idiom reinvented itself as a practice of poetry as audio-visual technique : haiku as a line of flight, medium of another relationship to language and to images. A hybrid-model of the modernist arts (poetry photography, film), the haiku-idiom became a vehicle for theories articulating the experience of a new spatio-temporal economy of images. As a mode of writing in laconic fragments, gestures of everyday-life, and shadows of memory, the haiku-idiom mobilized for others a relationship of movement, opacity, and distance to language.
Any serious thinking about the relationships between audiovisual media, cultural memory and globa... more Any serious thinking about the relationships between audiovisual media, cultural memory and global modernity must confront the phenomenological problems of homelessness, the politics of place and displacement, and the experience of exile and diaspora. The recent publication of Laura U. Marks' The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema y Embodiment y and the Senses marks an important moment of such interdisciplinary and intercultural thinking and will force students and scholars alike to think in the words of other worlds. Marks situates her book next to the work of many contemporary artists and writers, including Black Audio Film Collective, Julio
... temporality of the re-play, a replay that is never identical to the original experience, but ... more ... temporality of the re-play, a replay that is never identical to the original experience, but must ... lost and replayed in the media of video and film in order to align experience with the ... 2. Walter Benjamin named his classic essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ...
This brief article maps out some of the central concerns and questions raised in two relatively r... more This brief article maps out some of the central concerns and questions raised in two relatively recent anthologies of essays by major intellectuals, film scholars and historians. In addition to problematizing the representation of history and audio-visual media, these two anthologies examplify the circulation of ideas, the bridges as well as the divisions between the interests of academic inquiry in North America and Europe. What seems to be a common preoccupation, the weight of history in cinema, is only the marker of a clear line of division which is emblematic of divergent values and institutional orientations.
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