What Is Cinema? Volume I

Bazin, André

doi:10.1525/9780520931251

Cited by 95 publications

(57 citation statements)

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“…During one shot, the slice of a bulldozer’s arm can create new sightlines, turning a wall into a window, a frame into a pile of rubble, or darkness into light. We might revisit André Bazin’s (1967: 35) now classic argument that one-shot sequences are more realistic because they cover whole scenes through a depth of field rather than through montage. The films of Costa and Guerín, in contrast, demonstrate how even during a single long take with a fixed camera, moving architecture acts on the cinematic image, changing its depth of field as if architectural movement itself were a film edit.…”

Section: Cutting Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Textured Cuts: The Demolition Cinema of Pedro Costa and José Luis Guerín

White-Nockleby¹

2018

Journal of Visual Culture

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This article reexamines the aesthetics of the cut through cinema that challenges the possibility of totality. Looking back at films of demolitions in two Iberian cities, the author considers how cuts – both architectural and cinematic – reveal fissures created by urban renewal projects that preceded global crisis. En construcción (Work in Progress, 2001) by the Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín follows the reconstruction of Barcelona’s neighborhood ‘El Raval’, while Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000) films residents in a slum area of Lisbon as their houses are slowly demolished. By attending to neighborhoods that were ‘cut out of’ the urban landscape, these films contest the representation of unified cityscapes, exposing the fractures underlying economic development. The films also provide new ways to understand the ambivalent aesthetics of the cut, which both violently wounds the surface and exposes what lies behind. I will argue that ultimately thresholds produced by the cut speak to the ethical ambiguities of filmmaking, in which the camera inevitably alters whatever it views, thus exposing the textured incompleteness of the image.

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Section: Cutting Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Textured Cuts: The Demolition Cinema of Pedro Costa and José Luis Guerín

White-Nockleby¹

2018

Journal of Visual Culture

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“…So they're doing their natural thing but I'm moving my camera' (ibid.). Bazin (1971) argued that the long take is both more 'cinematic' than montage editing but also, in its exploration of temporal and spatial unities within a scene, underlines the perceived realism of a narrative. For Bazin, the edit compromises an event's unity, converting it from real to imaginary.…”

Section: The Choreography Of Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Visible’ and ‘invisible’ performance: Framing performance in 1970s television drama

McNaughton¹

2018

Exploring Television Acting

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1970s television drama, using close analysis of the BBC's I, Claudius (1976) to consider the proxemics of performance both in front of and behind the camera. Cantrell and Hogg (2016) differentiate between 'television acting' (actors portraying characters), and 'television performance', that is, 'adjacent performative components within the construction of text' (285). They warn against the danger that 'the particular contributions of the television actor become obscured within the larger technical mechanics of constructing Deleted: s a television performance' (286). This chapter, however, builds on Cantrell and Hogg's distinction of 'acting' and 'performance' to argue that the 'invisible performance' of camera operators can be as important as the 'television acting' of actors, and therefore demands further investigation. As well as furthering critical understandings of onscreen television performance, the chapter draws attention to the off-screen contribution of camera operators in the framing of performance in 1970s television drama. It therefore suggests that there are two categories of performance at work here in the interaction of actors and camera operators: 'visible' onscreen and 'invisible' off-screen performance. Intimate screens and dramatic rooms Assumptions about the limited aesthetic capability of television have meant a neglect of its production processes in favour of considering the writer as the creative figure in television. Academic orthodoxies consider television in general to be a visually impoverished medium (Geraghty 2003), whose multi-camera, vision mixed aesthetic and notan 1 lighting normatively generate only functional images within a tightly constrained frame. Helen Wheatley has pointed out the way in which theorists have privileged the 1960s studio as an innovative and dynamic space but dismissed the 1970s television studio as 'clumsy, dated and inexpressive' (Wheatley 2005: 145) with dialogue-driven close-ups confined to Williams's (1968) 'dramatic room'. However, as Panos and Lacey (2015) comment, studio multi-camera technique merits a critical reassessment: Television scholars are increasingly returning to the electronic studio era and attempting to understand it on its own terms, tracing practical, material and conceptual factors that influenced studio production and drawing out the dramatic and aesthetic consequences of multi-camera recording and the studio as site. (Panos and Lacey 2015: 2) Likewise, performance in television has been little studied. The teleological 'developmental model' assumes 'a broad movement away from the interior world of studio production, as also moving from a theatrical precedent' (Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and Lacey 1999: 60) Deleted: S Deleted: D Deleted: R comprising 'moments of change' in technology and aesthetics (ibid.). The 'developmental model' has implications for screen performance, assuming a move from studio's 'intimate screen' model (Jacobs 2000) of dialogue-driven close-ups to a more naturalistic mode, as well as a tendency towards more 'cinemati...

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“…However, other scholars dispute the applicability of Mulvey’s theory to porn texts, and some efforts have been made within porn studies to recuperate pornography from the male gaze, or suggest that it is sometimes precisely through pornography that this gaze can be subverted, and in which the plasticity of gendered subject positions is most clearly displayed (see, for example, Butler, 1997; Williams, 1989). Drawing on the work of Bazin, Williams (1989: 38) posits that the presentation in pornography of ‘real sex, like real death, is unaesthetic and therefore out of place’, since real erotic affect elicited in performers is ‘contradictory to the exigencies of art’ (Bazin, 1971: 173). Thus, the particularity of the male gaze that Mulvey asserts is inherent to any spectator–object relationship may seem misplaced where porn is concerned precisely because the aesthetic gaze she harnesses to mainstream Hollywood cinema is disrupted by the real in the context of porn.…”

Section: The Virility Of Authoritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Prurience, punishment and the image: Reading ‘law-and-order pornography’

Dymock

2016

Theoretical Criminology

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This article aims to expand interpretations of the representational and spectatorial politics of images by investigating what Wacquant has termed 'law-and-order pornographies'. By this, he refers to images of crime and punishment accorded signifiers of the pornographic and the prurient in order to describe the fusion of the erotic and the punitive. The first part of the article brings into conversation the fields of porn studies and visual criminology. It examines more closely what is at stake in imbuing crime images with the grammar of the pornographic. The second part of the article argues that the application of the pornographic to images of law and order has been refracted back onto the sphere of adult entertainment, in particular, the phenomenon of 'revenge pornography'.

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What Is Cinema? Volume I

Cited by 95 publications

References 0 publications

Textured Cuts: The Demolition Cinema of Pedro Costa and José Luis Guerín

Textured Cuts: The Demolition Cinema of Pedro Costa and José Luis Guerín

‘Visible’ and ‘invisible’ performance: Framing performance in 1970s television drama

Prurience, punishment and the image: Reading ‘law-and-order pornography’

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