Film-Philosophy, Volume 20 Issue 2-3, Page 283-302
Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujir... more Film-Philosophy, Volume 20 Issue 2-3, Page 283-302
Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujirō have insisted on the importance of the observation and evocation of change in the director's work. Change may be understood in this regard as personal, social, or cosmic: as a transformation that characters and their relationships undergo, as the giving way of traditional norms and adoption of new modes of living, or as an ephemerality that characterises all existence, human or otherwise. In this article, I will offer a reading of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) inspired by Gilles Deleuze's brief consideration of Ozu's work in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). In doing so, I will situate Deleuze's claims about Ozu both in relation to some of his other philosophical writings, and to various claims made by scholars, theorists, and critics in considering Ozu's work, particularly Late Spring. The first section will use a number of these writers to establish Ozu's engagement with social change, as well as the fact that such engagement is linked to both a considerable involvement in the lives of his characters and a metaphysical outlook that emerges through the relations binding style and narration. Like many of Ozu's best critics, Deleuze emphasises the films' observation of social change, but he also clearly recognises an affinity to his own philosophy in the metaphysical vision refracted in the filmmaker's work. Ozu is for him ‘the greatest critic of daily life’, whose films after the Second World War observe the ‘mutation of an Americanized Japan’ (1985/2005, p. 18–9), but these films also, Deleuze claims, establish a perspective in which ‘one and the same horizon links the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changing’ (p. 17). It is above all in his analysis of the famous images of a vase set before a shoji screen in Late Spring that Deleuze's view of Ozu's work crystallises, and it is by way of this crystallisation that I ultimately argue for the importance of linking change to questions of horizon and event.
Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, Jun 2014
In Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the cliché appears as mer... more In Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the cliché appears as merely one concern in a web of others, and here I would like to argue for its significance in distinguishing the nature of the two regimes of thought associated with the movement-image and the time-image. While Deleuze contends that artists and filmmakers must struggle with the cliché, it seems to me that he does not stress enough that filmmakers often make vital use of the clichés of continuity and spatio-temporal orientation that have been developed in the medium’s short history. It is in making use of these clichés, though not for the purpose of parody alone, that filmmakers are able to most forcefully make visible the limits that clichés set on cinematic thought, and the points at which thought moves outside these limits. In order to make my arguments I consider the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.
This paper examines the use of landscape imagery in Chantel Akerman’s De l’autre cote ( From the ... more This paper examines the use of landscape imagery in Chantel Akerman’s De l’autre cote ( From the Other Side , 2002). The first section focuses on how such imagery operates in relation to the political and social concerns of the film, which centre on increased security measures on the Mexican-American border after 9/11. I consider the recurring use of particular techniques, as well as the film’s global form, which is characterised by the juxtaposition of interviews and lengthy shots of (peri-)urban and natural locations. There are a number of images of the border throughout the film, and I distinguish between lengthy static shots, and images taken from a car that tracks along various sections of the border. The static images, I argue, convey something of the strangeness of borderspace by enframing it in a natural biome, while the mobile imagery seems to pursue ‘evidence' that would tie together the various accounts given by the interviewees. In the second section, I argue that th...
This chapter deals with three sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love that endow two p... more This chapter deals with three sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love that endow two pairs of footwear with pronounced expressive and symbolic dimensions. Ultimately, it contends that a focus on these sequences helps to bring out both the film’s engagement an uncertainty that arose in the midst of waning moral values in 1960s Hong Kong, as well as Wong’s signature philosophical - and more “universal” – emphasis on a distinctive vertigo of time and memory. Footwear in the film functions as expressive of the conflict between desire and decorum, but it also reveals the instability of our grasp of the challenges posed by the film to spectatorial orientation.
Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 2016
In a number of senses, Kelly Reic... more Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 2016
In a number of senses, Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 Western, Meek’s Cutoff, is a political film. Based on events that took place in mid-19th-century Southern Oregon, the film relates the tale of a small group of settlers who become lost after taking a short cut suggested by the man they’ve paid to lead their wagon train, Stephen Meek. Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond clearly recognised that this story resonated in the context of contemporary American politics, that spectators might be lead to see in it an allegory pertinent to their own time. But the portrayal of Meek also reveals a revisionist impulse, a desire to parody the figure of the frontiersman whose closeness to the land allows him to lead settlers to the promised land. And the settlers themselves are not the noble paragons of agrarian aspiration that belong to the mythography of Westward expansion. Some of them are racist, while others are compromised by religious zeal, and, as a whole, the functioning of the group is oppressively patriarchal.
This last point is perhaps dwelled upon most, as the film shows us that the three women in the wagon train are left out of the conversations, conducted by their husbands, about what measures to take as the situation becomes increasingly desperate due to lack of water. We’re often positioned near them, such that we only catch fragments of the discussions that will decide their fate. In this too there’s a revisionist impulse, a shift away from the pervasively masculine perspective and atmosphere that defines the Western. But there’s more to the film’s feminism than its simply positioning us such that we see that the women are given no part – aside from the lobbying they may pursue when alone with their husbands – in the incipient community’s decision-making process. The film’s deployment of landscape at times seems to direct us to reflect on and to some degree to take part in the women’s experience of being at sea in a wilderness. At it’s most evocative, it suggests a different spatial orientation, a drift within an environment that won’t be defined by any action, which doesn’t become the arena for such decisive action, but offers instead a “frontier experience” that runs counter to it. Ultimately, it seems appropriate to think the politics of Meek’s Cutoff as the interaction of the three ecological registers that Félix Guattari, drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, claimed must play a part in any effective political or ethical thought in our time. These are the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, or mental ecology.
Film-Philosophy, Volume 20 Issue 2-3, Page 283-302
Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujir... more Film-Philosophy, Volume 20 Issue 2-3, Page 283-302
Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujirō have insisted on the importance of the observation and evocation of change in the director's work. Change may be understood in this regard as personal, social, or cosmic: as a transformation that characters and their relationships undergo, as the giving way of traditional norms and adoption of new modes of living, or as an ephemerality that characterises all existence, human or otherwise. In this article, I will offer a reading of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) inspired by Gilles Deleuze's brief consideration of Ozu's work in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). In doing so, I will situate Deleuze's claims about Ozu both in relation to some of his other philosophical writings, and to various claims made by scholars, theorists, and critics in considering Ozu's work, particularly Late Spring. The first section will use a number of these writers to establish Ozu's engagement with social change, as well as the fact that such engagement is linked to both a considerable involvement in the lives of his characters and a metaphysical outlook that emerges through the relations binding style and narration. Like many of Ozu's best critics, Deleuze emphasises the films' observation of social change, but he also clearly recognises an affinity to his own philosophy in the metaphysical vision refracted in the filmmaker's work. Ozu is for him ‘the greatest critic of daily life’, whose films after the Second World War observe the ‘mutation of an Americanized Japan’ (1985/2005, p. 18–9), but these films also, Deleuze claims, establish a perspective in which ‘one and the same horizon links the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changing’ (p. 17). It is above all in his analysis of the famous images of a vase set before a shoji screen in Late Spring that Deleuze's view of Ozu's work crystallises, and it is by way of this crystallisation that I ultimately argue for the importance of linking change to questions of horizon and event.
Forum: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, Jun 2014
In Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the cliché appears as mer... more In Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the cliché appears as merely one concern in a web of others, and here I would like to argue for its significance in distinguishing the nature of the two regimes of thought associated with the movement-image and the time-image. While Deleuze contends that artists and filmmakers must struggle with the cliché, it seems to me that he does not stress enough that filmmakers often make vital use of the clichés of continuity and spatio-temporal orientation that have been developed in the medium’s short history. It is in making use of these clichés, though not for the purpose of parody alone, that filmmakers are able to most forcefully make visible the limits that clichés set on cinematic thought, and the points at which thought moves outside these limits. In order to make my arguments I consider the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.
This paper examines the use of landscape imagery in Chantel Akerman’s De l’autre cote ( From the ... more This paper examines the use of landscape imagery in Chantel Akerman’s De l’autre cote ( From the Other Side , 2002). The first section focuses on how such imagery operates in relation to the political and social concerns of the film, which centre on increased security measures on the Mexican-American border after 9/11. I consider the recurring use of particular techniques, as well as the film’s global form, which is characterised by the juxtaposition of interviews and lengthy shots of (peri-)urban and natural locations. There are a number of images of the border throughout the film, and I distinguish between lengthy static shots, and images taken from a car that tracks along various sections of the border. The static images, I argue, convey something of the strangeness of borderspace by enframing it in a natural biome, while the mobile imagery seems to pursue ‘evidence' that would tie together the various accounts given by the interviewees. In the second section, I argue that th...
This chapter deals with three sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love that endow two p... more This chapter deals with three sequences from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love that endow two pairs of footwear with pronounced expressive and symbolic dimensions. Ultimately, it contends that a focus on these sequences helps to bring out both the film’s engagement an uncertainty that arose in the midst of waning moral values in 1960s Hong Kong, as well as Wong’s signature philosophical - and more “universal” – emphasis on a distinctive vertigo of time and memory. Footwear in the film functions as expressive of the conflict between desire and decorum, but it also reveals the instability of our grasp of the challenges posed by the film to spectatorial orientation.
Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 2016
In a number of senses, Kelly Reic... more Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Edinburgh, July 2016
In a number of senses, Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 Western, Meek’s Cutoff, is a political film. Based on events that took place in mid-19th-century Southern Oregon, the film relates the tale of a small group of settlers who become lost after taking a short cut suggested by the man they’ve paid to lead their wagon train, Stephen Meek. Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond clearly recognised that this story resonated in the context of contemporary American politics, that spectators might be lead to see in it an allegory pertinent to their own time. But the portrayal of Meek also reveals a revisionist impulse, a desire to parody the figure of the frontiersman whose closeness to the land allows him to lead settlers to the promised land. And the settlers themselves are not the noble paragons of agrarian aspiration that belong to the mythography of Westward expansion. Some of them are racist, while others are compromised by religious zeal, and, as a whole, the functioning of the group is oppressively patriarchal.
This last point is perhaps dwelled upon most, as the film shows us that the three women in the wagon train are left out of the conversations, conducted by their husbands, about what measures to take as the situation becomes increasingly desperate due to lack of water. We’re often positioned near them, such that we only catch fragments of the discussions that will decide their fate. In this too there’s a revisionist impulse, a shift away from the pervasively masculine perspective and atmosphere that defines the Western. But there’s more to the film’s feminism than its simply positioning us such that we see that the women are given no part – aside from the lobbying they may pursue when alone with their husbands – in the incipient community’s decision-making process. The film’s deployment of landscape at times seems to direct us to reflect on and to some degree to take part in the women’s experience of being at sea in a wilderness. At it’s most evocative, it suggests a different spatial orientation, a drift within an environment that won’t be defined by any action, which doesn’t become the arena for such decisive action, but offers instead a “frontier experience” that runs counter to it. Ultimately, it seems appropriate to think the politics of Meek’s Cutoff as the interaction of the three ecological registers that Félix Guattari, drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, claimed must play a part in any effective political or ethical thought in our time. These are the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, or mental ecology.
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Articles by Tyler Parks
Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujirō have insisted on the importance of the observation and evocation of change in the director's work. Change may be understood in this regard as personal, social, or cosmic: as a transformation that characters and their relationships undergo, as the giving way of traditional norms and adoption of new modes of living, or as an ephemerality that characterises all existence, human or otherwise. In this article, I will offer a reading of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) inspired by Gilles Deleuze's brief consideration of Ozu's work in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). In doing so, I will situate Deleuze's claims about Ozu both in relation to some of his other philosophical writings, and to various claims made by scholars, theorists, and critics in considering Ozu's work, particularly Late Spring. The first section will use a number of these writers to establish Ozu's engagement with social change, as well as the fact that such engagement is linked to both a considerable involvement in the lives of his characters and a metaphysical outlook that emerges through the relations binding style and narration. Like many of Ozu's best critics, Deleuze emphasises the films' observation of social change, but he also clearly recognises an affinity to his own philosophy in the metaphysical vision refracted in the filmmaker's work. Ozu is for him ‘the greatest critic of daily life’, whose films after the Second World War observe the ‘mutation of an Americanized Japan’ (1985/2005, p. 18–9), but these films also, Deleuze claims, establish a perspective in which ‘one and the same horizon links the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changing’ (p. 17). It is above all in his analysis of the famous images of a vase set before a shoji screen in Late Spring that Deleuze's view of Ozu's work crystallises, and it is by way of this crystallisation that I ultimately argue for the importance of linking change to questions of horizon and event.
Papers by Tyler Parks
In a number of senses, Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 Western, Meek’s Cutoff, is a political film. Based on events that took place in mid-19th-century Southern Oregon, the film relates the tale of a small group of settlers who become lost after taking a short cut suggested by the man they’ve paid to lead their wagon train, Stephen Meek. Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond clearly recognised that this story resonated in the context of contemporary American politics, that spectators might be lead to see in it an allegory pertinent to their own time. But the portrayal of Meek also reveals a revisionist impulse, a desire to parody the figure of the frontiersman whose closeness to the land allows him to lead settlers to the promised land. And the settlers themselves are not the noble paragons of agrarian aspiration that belong to the mythography of Westward expansion. Some of them are racist, while others are compromised by religious zeal, and, as a whole, the functioning of the group is oppressively patriarchal.
This last point is perhaps dwelled upon most, as the film shows us that the three women in the wagon train are left out of the conversations, conducted by their husbands, about what measures to take as the situation becomes increasingly desperate due to lack of water. We’re often positioned near them, such that we only catch fragments of the discussions that will decide their fate. In this too there’s a revisionist impulse, a shift away from the pervasively masculine perspective and atmosphere that defines the Western. But there’s more to the film’s feminism than its simply positioning us such that we see that the women are given no part – aside from the lobbying they may pursue when alone with their husbands – in the incipient community’s decision-making process. The film’s deployment of landscape at times seems to direct us to reflect on and to some degree to take part in the women’s experience of being at sea in a wilderness. At it’s most evocative, it suggests a different spatial orientation, a drift within an environment that won’t be defined by any action, which doesn’t become the arena for such decisive action, but offers instead a “frontier experience” that runs counter to it. Ultimately, it seems appropriate to think the politics of Meek’s Cutoff as the interaction of the three ecological registers that Félix Guattari, drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, claimed must play a part in any effective political or ethical thought in our time. These are the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, or mental ecology.
Many commentators on the films of Ozu Yasujirō have insisted on the importance of the observation and evocation of change in the director's work. Change may be understood in this regard as personal, social, or cosmic: as a transformation that characters and their relationships undergo, as the giving way of traditional norms and adoption of new modes of living, or as an ephemerality that characterises all existence, human or otherwise. In this article, I will offer a reading of Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) inspired by Gilles Deleuze's brief consideration of Ozu's work in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). In doing so, I will situate Deleuze's claims about Ozu both in relation to some of his other philosophical writings, and to various claims made by scholars, theorists, and critics in considering Ozu's work, particularly Late Spring. The first section will use a number of these writers to establish Ozu's engagement with social change, as well as the fact that such engagement is linked to both a considerable involvement in the lives of his characters and a metaphysical outlook that emerges through the relations binding style and narration. Like many of Ozu's best critics, Deleuze emphasises the films' observation of social change, but he also clearly recognises an affinity to his own philosophy in the metaphysical vision refracted in the filmmaker's work. Ozu is for him ‘the greatest critic of daily life’, whose films after the Second World War observe the ‘mutation of an Americanized Japan’ (1985/2005, p. 18–9), but these films also, Deleuze claims, establish a perspective in which ‘one and the same horizon links the cosmic to the everyday, the durable to the changing’ (p. 17). It is above all in his analysis of the famous images of a vase set before a shoji screen in Late Spring that Deleuze's view of Ozu's work crystallises, and it is by way of this crystallisation that I ultimately argue for the importance of linking change to questions of horizon and event.
In a number of senses, Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 Western, Meek’s Cutoff, is a political film. Based on events that took place in mid-19th-century Southern Oregon, the film relates the tale of a small group of settlers who become lost after taking a short cut suggested by the man they’ve paid to lead their wagon train, Stephen Meek. Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond clearly recognised that this story resonated in the context of contemporary American politics, that spectators might be lead to see in it an allegory pertinent to their own time. But the portrayal of Meek also reveals a revisionist impulse, a desire to parody the figure of the frontiersman whose closeness to the land allows him to lead settlers to the promised land. And the settlers themselves are not the noble paragons of agrarian aspiration that belong to the mythography of Westward expansion. Some of them are racist, while others are compromised by religious zeal, and, as a whole, the functioning of the group is oppressively patriarchal.
This last point is perhaps dwelled upon most, as the film shows us that the three women in the wagon train are left out of the conversations, conducted by their husbands, about what measures to take as the situation becomes increasingly desperate due to lack of water. We’re often positioned near them, such that we only catch fragments of the discussions that will decide their fate. In this too there’s a revisionist impulse, a shift away from the pervasively masculine perspective and atmosphere that defines the Western. But there’s more to the film’s feminism than its simply positioning us such that we see that the women are given no part – aside from the lobbying they may pursue when alone with their husbands – in the incipient community’s decision-making process. The film’s deployment of landscape at times seems to direct us to reflect on and to some degree to take part in the women’s experience of being at sea in a wilderness. At it’s most evocative, it suggests a different spatial orientation, a drift within an environment that won’t be defined by any action, which doesn’t become the arena for such decisive action, but offers instead a “frontier experience” that runs counter to it. Ultimately, it seems appropriate to think the politics of Meek’s Cutoff as the interaction of the three ecological registers that Félix Guattari, drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson, claimed must play a part in any effective political or ethical thought in our time. These are the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity, or mental ecology.