Papers by Feroz Hassan
Contagion Narratives: The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South (ed. R. Sreejith Varma and Ajanta Sircar) , 2023
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2021
An introduction to the special issue titled "Philosophical Engagements with Cinema" of the Journa... more An introduction to the special issue titled "Philosophical Engagements with Cinema" of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2021
This article explores the idea and practice of philosophical criticism in Stanley Cavell's work o... more This article explores the idea and practice of philosophical criticism in Stanley Cavell's work on cinema. Building on recent scholarship on Cavellian criticism, it stresses its origins in an anxiety whose sources are medium-specific, historically specific, as well as internal to the general project of philosophical criticism. It argues that these anxieties may serve to explain Film Studies' resistance to criticism in the sense discussed here, and may continue to pose a challenge to its practice even as the work of Cavell itself receives belated recognition from the discipline. The article also begins to draw similarities between the critical practices of André Bazin and Cavell, while examining the differences in the institutional contexts of their work.
Of all the criticisms of André Bazin’s defense of cinematic realism, the most damning has been th... more Of all the criticisms of André Bazin’s defense of cinematic realism, the most damning has been the claim that he did not account for its role in normalizing ideological and political interests. This article seeks to demonstrate that, on the contrary, he asserted a deep connection between the emergence of the medium and the political pressures of the age. The idea of ‘totality’ (and its three iterations indicated in the title) provides us the best clue to traces of these pressures and cinema’s complicity with them in Bazin’s writings.
Through a philological approach, the article links some of Bazin’s most directly political writings—on Stalinist cinema, the war documentary, and Italian neorealism—to the original version of ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’. The argument it recovers is that the ideologically abusive uses to which cinema had been susceptible in Bazin’s time proceed in a deep way from its relationship to the contradictions of democratic politics of the century. In the course of this demonstration, the article traces Bazin’s response to Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the question of Stalin’s show trials, the influence on him of the Annales school, and his invocation of Joseph Goebbels’ understanding of ‘total war’.
Miscellaneous by Feroz Hassan
National Film Preservation Foundation (US)
'The Asian Age' & 'Deccan Chronicle [Kochi edition]', 2019
Book Reviews by Feroz Hassan
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2017
Temporality has been a privileged topic in cinema studies ever since Deleuze identified modern ci... more Temporality has been a privileged topic in cinema studies ever since Deleuze identified modern cinema with explorations of the time-image. In different ways, Bernard Stiegler, Mary Ann Doane, and Phil Rosen have pushed the philosophical and historical linkage of modernity and cinematic time. Where Stiegler has argued that the modern conception of 1 consciousness is essentially cinematographic, Doane and Rosen have inquired into cinema's role since the nineteenth century in shaping, or containing, the experience of temporal and historical flow. Against these instances of recent scholarship on the topic, Lee Carruthers's book, Doing Time, is both less ambitious and also perhaps more courageous in what it takes on. While she would accept the broad claim that cinema has played a privileged role in shaping the modern experience of time, Carruthers is not working out another large claim for the medium either historically or philosophically. Instead, she looks at how particular films formally and narratively attend to cinema's potential for mediating our temporal experience. The four texts that receive a chapter each are The Limey (1999), 5x2 (2004), Ni na bian ji dian (What Time Is It There?, 2001), and The Tree of Life (2011).
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Papers by Feroz Hassan
Through a philological approach, the article links some of Bazin’s most directly political writings—on Stalinist cinema, the war documentary, and Italian neorealism—to the original version of ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’. The argument it recovers is that the ideologically abusive uses to which cinema had been susceptible in Bazin’s time proceed in a deep way from its relationship to the contradictions of democratic politics of the century. In the course of this demonstration, the article traces Bazin’s response to Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the question of Stalin’s show trials, the influence on him of the Annales school, and his invocation of Joseph Goebbels’ understanding of ‘total war’.
Miscellaneous by Feroz Hassan
Book Reviews by Feroz Hassan
Through a philological approach, the article links some of Bazin’s most directly political writings—on Stalinist cinema, the war documentary, and Italian neorealism—to the original version of ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’. The argument it recovers is that the ideologically abusive uses to which cinema had been susceptible in Bazin’s time proceed in a deep way from its relationship to the contradictions of democratic politics of the century. In the course of this demonstration, the article traces Bazin’s response to Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the question of Stalin’s show trials, the influence on him of the Annales school, and his invocation of Joseph Goebbels’ understanding of ‘total war’.