7 results
5 - The Unconscious as Mise-en-scène
- from II - Lyotard's Essays on Film
- Edited by Graham Jones, Monash University, Victoria, Ashley Woodward, University of Dundee
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- Book:
- Acinemas
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2017, pp 43-54
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Summary
First of all, I should make clear what I mean by the word ‘mise-en-scène’. ‘Mettre en scène’ (to stage) is to transmit signifiers from a ‘primary’ space to another space, which is the auditorium of a theatre, cinema, or any related art. I offer a classic example: one evening, at the Paris Opera, we are listening to Der Rosenkavalier, by Richard Strauss. This is a ‘performance’; of what is it made? Singer-actors on stage, musicians in the orchestra pit, stage-hands and light crew in the wings, all are following a large number of prescriptions. Some of these are inscribed in certain documents: the libretto by Hoffmanstahl, the score by Richard Strauss. Others can be solely oral, from the director Rudolf Steinbock – as in stage directions for the actors or directions for the lighting and scenery. This simplified example enables us to distinguish three different phases of the staged work.
The final phase is the performance we are attending. It consists of a group of stimuli– colours, movements, light, sounds. This ensemble which besieges our sensory body ‘tells’ it a story – in this example, the story of Der Rosenkavalier. The performance steers us along a course composed of a series of audible intensities, timbres and pitches; of sentences and words arranged according to expert rhetoric; and of colours, intensities of light, etc.
The initial phase of the work (but is it a work at this point?) is characterised by the heterogeneity of the arts which will be used to put the performance together: a written drama, a musical score, the design of the stage and auditorium, the machinery at the disposal of the theatre, etc. We have here groups of signifiers forming so many messages, or constraints in any case, belonging to different systems: the rules of the German (or better, Austrian) language, the rules of the prevalent rhetoric, and those prevailing in Hoffmanstahl's writing on the one hand; and on the other hand, the constraints of musical composition and Strauss’ own relation to those constraints, etc.; nevertheless, even in this initial phase, there is something which limits the disorder that could result from such a heterogeneity – this is the single reference imposed on all the messages which make up the work: the story of Der Rosenkavalier itself.
7 - The Idea of a Sovereign Film
- from II - Lyotard's Essays on Film
- Edited by Graham Jones, Monash University, Victoria, Ashley Woodward, University of Dundee
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- Book:
- Acinemas
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2017, pp 62-70
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Sovereign’ in this pompous title is not the sovereign. The sovereign is the supreme authority, God, Emperor, King, People. But Georges Bataille, in Literature and Evil (1997) or Inner Experience (2014), calls sovereign an experience which is not authorised and which does not appeal to any authority; an experience or an existence which appears, happens, without relation to any law by which it could claim or demand to be ‘what it is’.
A writer writes without being authorised to do so; a painter paints, a filmmaker [cinéaste] films like this. This is not to say that they are in rebellion against authority. The case is more serious: they expect nothing from authority, they ask nothing of it. The real offence which they can suffer (but this suffering is not necessary) is not to be in conflict with the figure of authority, but to find themselves elsewhere, to start to write, to paint or to film, to start to phrase in language, in colour or in the image – without waiting for the right to do so.
This situation would be nothing but a case, would be only marginal, if, still following Bataille, this sovereign indifference to authority could not sometimes (because nothing here is certain, guaranteed, authorised…) give rise to a ‘communication’ (the word is Bataille's), to a communion incomparable to all exchange of signs. A sort of communication between the reader of the book and the writer, or the viewer of the painting and the artist, or the spectator and the filmmaker, one that is not subject to the rules of exchange (you tell me this and I hear it and I respond that (interlocutory exchange); you give me this, I receive it and I give you that (socio-economic contractual exchange)). Sovereignty exchanges nothing. The literary, pictorial or filmic work – Kafka's or Beckett's, Staël's, Robert Flaherty's, Yasujirō Ozu's or Federico Fellini's – communicates intense instants, temporal spasms, which are only transcendents because they emanate from immanence, that is to say from a realist experience and existence – as one says in filmography: neo-realist.
4 - Acinema
- from II - Lyotard's Essays on Film
- Edited by Graham Jones, Monash University, Victoria, Ashley Woodward, University of Dundee
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- Book:
- Acinemas
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2017, pp 33-42
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THE NIHILISM OF CONVENTIONAL MOVEMENTS
Cinematography is the inscription of movement, a writing with movement, a writing with movements – all kinds of movements: for example, in the film shot, those of the actors and other moving objects, those of lights, colours, frame and lens; in the film sequence, all of these again plus the cuts and splices of editing; for the film as a whole, those of scene organisation [découpage]. And over or through all these movements are those of the sound and words coming together with them.
Thus there is a crowd (nonetheless a countable crowd) of elements in motion, a throng of possible moving bodies which are candidates for inscription on film. Learning the techniques of filmmaking involves knowing how to eliminate a large number of these possible movements. It seems that image, sequence and film must be constituted at the price of these exclusions.
Here arise two questions that are really quite naive considering the deliberations of contemporary cine-critics: which movements and moving bodies are these? Why is it necessary to select, sort out and exclude them?
If no movements are picked out we will accept what is fortuitous, dirty, confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed… For example, suppose you are working on a shot in video, a shot, say, of a gorgeous head of hair à la Renoir; upon viewing it you find that something has come undone: all of a sudden, swamps, outlines of incongruous islands and cliff edges appear, lurching forth before your startled eyes. A scene from elsewhere, representing nothing identifiable, has been added, a scene not related to the logic of your shot, an undecidable scene, worthless even as an insertion because it will not be repeated and taken up again later. So you cut it out.
We are not demanding a raw cinema, like Dubuffet demanded an art brut. We are hardly about to form a club dedicated to the saving of rushes and the rehabilitation of clipped footage. And yet… We observe that if the mistake is eliminated it is because of its incongruity, and in order to protect the order of the whole (shot and/or sequence and/or film) while banning the intensity it carries.
6 - Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema
- from II - Lyotard's Essays on Film
- Edited by Graham Jones, Monash University, Victoria, Ashley Woodward, University of Dundee
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- Book:
- Acinemas
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2017, pp 55-61
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1. The title is doubly deceptive. It seems assertive; it should be interrogative. The question is: whether anything escapes from seduction. It is proposed apropos of political cinema. The two cases are: the work of Syberberg, and the sequence of the attack on the Vietnamese village by the American dragoon helicopters in Coppola's Apocalypse Now. But I will say hardly anything about the work of Syberberg.
2. There is not a Gorgias fragment preserved which does not rest on the peithô (persuasion), the goètéia (sorcery) of language, on its deception (apatè), its power (dunastès). Tragedy is a deception, he says, and he adds: ‘the deceiver is more honest than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the non-deceived’ (DK 82 B23; Freeman 1953: 201).1 Gorgias says further that ‘the power of speech over the constitution of the soul can be compared with the effect of drugs on the bodily state’ (DK 82 BII, 14; Freeman 1953: 198). He wonders about this power; he says that it consists in the metastasis of the opinions of the listener: their displacement, the displacement of their foundation. In a dialogue entitled Menexenes, Plato's Socrates describes the efficacy of the funeral oration that an orator is charged to deliver every year to the memory of the citizens who died for Athens. It appears that this efficacy consists in the metastasis of the names on the pragmatic places of the addressee (you), and of the referent (they), according to the following dispositif:
– these dead were virtuous
– they were virtuous because they were Athenians and died for Athens
– you are Athenians
– you are virtuous
We have in these analyses of Ancient rhetoric the rudiments of a pragmatics of seduction by language.
3. These indications suffice to situate the manner in which it appears to me interesting to speak of seduction. I don't mean as an intentional action exercised by a seducer on a victim: Gorgias’ observation on tragedy signifies that both play a single game and that it's seduction itself (deception, apatè) which determines the rule.
3 - Libidinal economy in Sade and Klossowski
- Edited by David B. Allison, State University of New York, Stony Brook, Mark S. Roberts, State University of New York, Stony Brook, Allen S. Weiss, New York University
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- Book:
- Sade and the Narrative of Transgression
- Published online:
- 21 August 2009
- Print publication:
- 30 March 1995, pp 62-75
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In Sade, the group of relations surrounding the value of the monetary sign and its intensity is quite different from that found in prostitution. To begin with, the client's body is the same as the procurer's – and from this perhaps stems Sade's republicanism. The Society of the Friends of Crime is not the society of procurers. The criminal milieu embodies the duplicity of signs: adultery of money with jouissance, fraud of jouissance when it is converted into currency. The sign of these exchanges becomes the accomplice of untransmittable phantasms; the consumption of the libidinal singularity is bought at the price of universally estimable sums in the form of money. Like Hegel's Mitte, the criminal milieu assures the institution's permeability to desire. In this respect there is little difference between it and the Police. “Perverse” drives are channeled by it towards the social body, the body of exchanges, towards the circuit of the communication of exchanges and goods. It is a milieu of duplicity and dissimulation par excellence, even though it has no need to hide itself, just like the Police, since it too is concerned with the detection and regulation of allegedly socially perverse partial drives.
1 - The postmodern condition
- Edited by Steven Seidman
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- Book:
- The Postmodern Turn
- Published online:
- 07 September 2010
- Print publication:
- 25 November 1994, pp 27-38
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I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: But that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements – narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.
Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games – a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches – local determinism.
The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable.
A propos de Cl. Lévi-Strauss : Les Indiens ne cueillent pas les fleurs
- Jean-François Lyotard
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- Journal:
- Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales / Volume 20 / Issue 1 / February 1965
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 11 October 2017, pp. 62-83
- Print publication:
- February 1965
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La méthode qui guide Claude Lévi-Strauss dans la mise à jour de « la pensée sauvage » paraît jurer avec son objet : celui-ci, penser en tant qu'activité universelle et primordiale, peut-il être déterminé à partir de la pensée structuraliste, codage élaboré et particulier pas même à l'Occident, mais à notre temps ? Nous prendrons cette question pour foyer, nantis de la seule autorité que la pensée à l'état sauvage peut conférer à un esprit qui n'est pas scientifique.