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).

Affective trajectories: locating diegetic velocity in the cinema experience

Films that feature high-speed diegetic motion, and present those high speeds through fast mobile framing and fast cutting, are frequently charged with generating a sensory overload which empties out meaning or any sense of spatial orientation. Inherent in this discourse is a privileging of optical-spatial intelligibility that suppresses consideration of the ways cinema can represent diegetic velocity, and the spectator’s sensory experience of the same. This paper will instead highlight the centrality of the evocation of a trajectory for movement for the spectator’s experience of diegetic speed, an evocation that does not depend on optical-spatial legibility for its affective force.

Sangue e carne no cinema de Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

'Macunaíma' (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969) ends with a shot of blood emerging from the water. This text proposes an approach to this image following a comparison with other films by the same filmmaker: 'Couro de gato' (1960) and 'Os Inconfidentes' (1972). The main thesis is that in these images the aesthetical work with flesh synthesizes the ritual cannibalism and the capitalist one. This synthesis is specified in heroes’ assimilation by power.

Pasolini and Third World hunger: an approach to Cinema Novo through 'La ricotta'

Among the links between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Brazilian Cinema Novo, one of the most inspiring is the political approach to hunger and consumption. In this text, I analyse this topic to look at how some of the aesthetic ideas in Pasolini’s La ricotta (1963) can also be found in some of the most important films of Cinema Novo. In 'La ricotta' (1963), the irresistible need to eat of a subproletarian interacts and clashes with his responsibilities as an actor in a movie version of the Passion of Christ, so that the film creates a complex network of relations between film shooting, social differences, art, hunger, consumption, time and light, which turns the film set into a space for displaying political relations, differences, exploitation and revolution. The correspondences between these concepts and some aggression techniques of Cinema Novo are numerous and confirm the capacity of Pasolini’s film to project ideas on cinema and politics beyond its particular production context.

Aesthetical and narrative uses of the trench in the Hollywood cinema of 1918-1930

Throughout history of painting, the representation of landscape has been considered a laboratory for the human gaze on the world. The First World War and its new approach to the battlefield altered deeply the classical forms of representation, and replaced them with a mechanised and fragmentary vision, which was related with the development of photography and cinema. As Vicente J. Benet has analysed, Hollywod cinema used these deep changes in its filmic versions of the conflict, although it organised them following a narrative logic. In this text we intend to study how the battlefield and, particularly, the trench, are inserted in this logic of the history of landscape painting. We do so through some Hollywood films from the period 1918-1930. Firstly, we approach the trench as a composition value which can structure the image and guide the camera movement. In the second place, we study how it creates a dialog between its inside, melodrama scenery, and the outside, battlefield and danger. In both cases, we conclude that the trench as a form and as a narrative element plays a structuring and integrative role with the storytelling logic.