Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste

Crash: cinema and the politics of speed and stasis

“…In this sense, the temporality of Laurel and Hardy's comedy can be seen as analogous to the temporality of masochism, the aestheticism of which, as Jean Ma has pointed out in a different context, mirrors precisely Adorno's insistence that "art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it." 88 The leap between disaster and comedy seems like a precarious one to make; yet for Deleuze, it is precisely this leap-over the Death Instinct and into the realm of the pleasure principle-that masochism's "terrible force of repetition" enables.89 Whereas one might think that masochism's dependence on repetition reflects a conservative investment in the reproduction of the same, Deleuze argues that the coldness and desexualization associated with masochism (qualities that have also been associated with Laurel and Hardy) "[make] repetition autonomous," allow it to "[run] wild and [become] independent of all previous pleasure. "90 Resisting the violence of the law without any promise of redemption, the subversive potential of masochism's repetitious and "frozen scenes" does not oppose, but rather works through, the comic force.…”

“…23. Tyler,"Dragtime and Drugtime," 88 aujourd'hui entièrement absorbée par l'exploration de l'espace sidéral; face aux engins cosmiques, l'automobile ne peut plus accomplir aucun rêve de mouvement inconnu: c'est un objet désormais immobile" (Barthes, "La voiture, projection de l'ego," 96). Kristin Ross provides an excellent discussion of the automobile in the context of French culture in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies.…”

How to Make your Audience Suffer: Melodrama, Masochism and Dead Time in Lars von Trier'sDogville

“…Since an audience of a melodrama has volunteered to suffer, the enjoyment that this genre serves up has also been linked to masochism (Ma 2007;Wheatley 2006). Although melodrama emerged first as a stage genre, while masochism took its name and clinical profile from the literary work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, both are forms in which participants trade pain for pleasure and as Deleuze memorably observed, 'masochism cannot do without a contract ' (1989: 76).…”