Non-cinema: the location of politics in film

Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an ‘uncinematic’ element in the negation of movement in modern cinema, ‘which constitutes its artistic character’. Similarly, Lyotard defended an ‘acinema’, which rather than selecting and excluding movements through editing, accepts what is ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed’. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou embraces a similar idea, by describing cinema as an ‘impure circulation’ that incorporates the other arts. Resonating with Bazin and his defence of ‘impure cinema’, that is, of cinema’s interbreeding with other arts, Badiou seems to agree with him also in identifying the uncinematic as the location of the Real. This article will investigate the particular impurities of cinema that drive it beyond the specificities of the medium and into the realm of the other arts and the reality of life itself. Privileged examples will be drawn from various moments in film history and geography, starting with the analysis of two films by Jafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (In film nist, 2011), whose anti-cinema stance in announced in its own title; and The Mirror (Aineh, 1997), another relentless exercise in self-negation. It goes on to examine Kenji Mizoguchi’s deconstruction of cinematic acting in his exploration of the geidomono genre (films about theatre actors) in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangigku monogatari, 1939), and culminates in the conjuring of the physical experience of death through the systematic demolition of film genres in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012).

Family, locality and nationality: vernacular adaptations of the Expugnatio Hibernica from late medieval Ireland

This paper examines two late medieval abridgements of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica, one in Hiberno-English and one in Irish. The manuscripts in which these adaptations survive all date from the late fifteenth century and appear to bear witness to a sudden and pronounced interest in Gerald’s text. Drawing on evidence from the extant manuscripts, this paper explores the readerships of, and the nature of their interest in, these adaptations. A key conclusion is that the Expugnatio, which gives prominence to Gerald's own relatives, the Fitzgeralds, was valued as a family history by the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and their allies. The Earls were at the height of their power in the period in which these manuscripts were produced. Examination of this neglected evidence of the adaptation and readership of the Expugnatio in late medieval Ireland suggests that, for some medieval readers at least, the primary identities Gerald’s text expressed were familial and local rather than colonial or national.

A lost insular version of the romance of Octavian

This article is the first full examination of the Irish translation of the popular and influential medieval romance "Octavian". I argue that the source for this Irish translation was an insular version of the romance, probably in Middle English. I show how the Irish translator incorporated material from another romance, "Fierabras", in order to introduce the characters of Charlemagne and his vassals into the story. This is the only version of "Octavian" that gives the text a Carolingian setting. I also demonstrate that the version of the romance from which the Irish translation was produced differed in significant ways from any of the surviving versions in other languages. I suggest that the Irish translation provides our only witness to a lost variant version of "Octavian" and, as such, extends our knowledge of the corpus of insular romance in the Middle Ages.

The circulation of romances from England in late-medieval Ireland

The fifteenth century saw a striking upturn in the number of texts from foreign vernaculars that were translated into Irish. Indeed, one might go so far as to speak in terms of a ‘translation trend’ in Ireland during the mid to late fifteenth century. A notable feature of this trend is that a particularly high number of these Irish translations are of romances; contextual and textual evidence suggests that the original exemplars for many of these translated texts appear to have come from England, though not all of them were necessarily in English. Irish translations of eight romances have survived to the present day: Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; La Queste de Saint Graal; Fierabras; Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troie; William of Palerne; the Seven Sages of Rome; and Octavian. This paper addresses two aspects of these texts of particular relevance to romance scholars who do not work within the sphere of Celtic studies. Firstly, it argues that certain aspects of the dissemination and reception of romance in Ireland are quite distinctive. Manuscript and textual evidence suggests that the religious orders, particularly the Franciscans, seem to have played a role in the importation and translation of these narratives. Secondly, examination of the Irish versions of romance tends to bear out an observation made by Flower many years ago, but not pursued by subsequent scholars: ‘texts of an unusual kind were current in Ireland, and it may be that interesting discoveries are to be made here’. Certain narrative features of several of these Irish translations diverge from all the surviving versions of the relevant romance in other languages and may witness to a variant exemplar that has since been lost from its own linguistic corpus.