Papers by Asbjørn Grønstad
Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, 2019
This chapter examines erasure as an aesthetic approach in Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh’s photogra... more This chapter examines erasure as an aesthetic approach in Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh’s photographs The Untitled Images. Noting that Barakeh’s images paradoxically materialize the invisible, the chapter shows how this way of representing suffering sidesteps both the aestheticization of pain and the reduction of affect some critics see as endemic to contemporary visual culture. Paying careful attention to the dynamic interplay between invisibility and visibility and, correspondingly, between absence and presence in the photographs, the analysis contextualizes Barakeh’s work with reference to an artistic tradition defined by gestures of radical reduction. The chapter furthermore argues that such a poetics of erasure is ripe with a rare ethical potential to resist the processes of commodification so widespread in our current image ecology.
Norsk medietidsskrift, 2009
Nation, violence is virtually a l l-encompass ing, yet it is a film from an era before Amer ican ... more Nation, violence is virtually a l l-encompass ing, yet it is a film from an era before Amer ican movies really got violent. T h e r e are no graphic close-ups o f bullet w o u n d s or s low-mot ion dissection o f agonized faces and bodies, only a series o f abrupt, a lmost perfunctory l iquidat ions seemingly devoid o f the heat a n d pass ion that characterize the deaths o f the spast ic Lyle G o t c h in The Wild Bunch or the anguished M r. O r a n g e, s lowly bleeding to death, in Reservoir Dogs. Nonetheles s, as Bernie C o o k correctly points out, Scarface is the m o s t violent o f all the gangster films o f the eatly 1930s cycle (1999: 545). ' Hawks ' s camera desists from examining the anatomy of the punctured flesh and the extended convulsions o f corporeality in transition. T h e film's approach, conforming to the period style o f ptc-Bonnie and Clyde depictions o f violence, is understated, euphemistic, in its attention to the particulars o f what M a r k...
Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture, 2020
In August, tornadoes caused by the tropical storm Harvey ravage the Houston area. In September, a... more In August, tornadoes caused by the tropical storm Harvey ravage the Houston area. In September, a major earthquake strikes Mexico City. In October, a mass murderer butchers 58 people and injures almost 500 others from his hotel window in Las Vegas. Later the same month, an uncontrollable wildfire in the Santa Rosa area north of San Francisco kills over 40 people and destroys thousands of homes. These disasters, which take place within the span of six to seven weeks in the early fall of 2017, transpire against the backdrop of a rapidly accelerating environmental crisis and-with seemingly mentally ill political leaders in North Korea and the USA-the perhaps most perilous geopolitical condition in recent memory. Rarely has it made more sense to consider one of the most defining circumstances of our lives, both as individuals and as a species. That circumstance is vulnerability. Cataclysmic events tend to place the condition of being existentially exposed on the agenda, as when Judith Butler wrote about precarious life
Farewell to Visual Studies, 2015
The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, 2021
Readings of the Particular, 2007
Isaac Julien's Looking For Langston and the Limits of the Visible World ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD Man... more Isaac Julien's Looking For Langston and the Limits of the Visible World ASBJØRN GRØNSTAD Many films are in fact declarations of love, if we could but see it David MacDougall N ONE SCENE in the Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang's stun-ning family saga Yi Yi (2000), ...
American Studies in Scandinavia, 2006
This article examines the interlocking themes of the psychology of faith and the disintegration o... more This article examines the interlocking themes of the psychology of faith and the disintegration of seljhood in Denis Johnson'.~ 1991 novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Reading the work as a modern update of the roman noi1; the article proposes that the protagonist's quest for spiritual identity is both enabled and interrupted by a process of constant transformation and self-reinvention which ultimately leads to his demise. Johnson's novel, the article argues, employs standard noir tropes such as the defeatist hero, the deceitful woman, and the enigmatic disappearance to dramatize the unfolding of an existentialist narrative in which the subjectivity of the investigator gets fractured while no case is being solved. It is suggested that the only possibility for redemption conceivable in this novel's universe is that offered by acts of transtextual reading, where quotation is invested with a power to mend the precarious fictional se(f.
American Studies in Scandinavia, 2009
Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 2001
TOPOGRAPHIES OF DEFEAT: MASCULINITY AND DESOLATION IN FAT CITY AND JUNIOR BONNER Success ... more TOPOGRAPHIES OF DEFEAT: MASCULINITY AND DESOLATION IN FAT CITY AND JUNIOR BONNER Success stories, per se, are not really of much interest to me (John Huston) In 1972, two of…
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2005
In the fall of 1994, as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, ... more In the fall of 1994, as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I wrote a term paper for Anna Brusutti's "Introduction to Cinema" class. The paper was called "Editing, mise-enscene, and cinematography in a selected sequence from Apocalypse Now" Although the reader's general comments were quite sympathetic to my rather flagrandy formalist analysis of the "Suzie Q" segment, he did point out that I had, to quote a remark scribbled in the margin on the last page, "glossed over... some of the historical imagery." Little did I know then that the question of history in relation to Apocalypse Now would resurface almost a decade later in a slighdy more ceremonial context. Given the chance, am I going to skirt the issue once again? Can we felicitously talk about a form of historical imagery that has not been sublated by what Thomas Elsaesser in his book on Weimar cinema calls the historical imaginary? Embedded in the current topic, quite intriguingly, is a peculiar type of paradox. On the one hand, I am specifically asked to present my analysis of Francis Coppola's excessive and perhaps over-discussed film Apocalypse Now (1979), on the other hand this analysis is one that should be carried out with special reference to the interpretive-or perhaps methodological-categories of film genre, historical context, and literary pretext. We are clearly in the realm of prefixed textualities here. However, I am not at all sure that an analysis of Apocalypse Now that is authentically my own would in fact be compatible with the concerns indicated in the lecture topic. That is, had it occurred to me to do scholarly work on this ' This essay is a revised version of a lecture offered as a "trial lecture" for the degree of Dr. Art. at the University of Bergen, December 11, 2003. The topic for the lecture was "Your analysis of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) with special reference to the film's genre, historical context, and literary pretext." The occasion usefully presented me with an opportunity to reassess the nature and substance of Coppola's vision in terms of what may be seen as an anti-generic yet re-historicized sensibility.
Film and the Ethical Imagination, 2016
This chapter encapsulates the various approaches that make up the ethical turn in film, media, an... more This chapter encapsulates the various approaches that make up the ethical turn in film, media, and visual culture studies and presents a possible narrative of the evolution of this research. A key assumption is that a theoretical shift is occurring in which ethics is attributed not only to a given work’s perceived content but, more importantly, to its formal features.
Film and the Ethical Imagination, 2016
In this chapter, the argument is made that the act of slowing down produces a sense of duration a... more In this chapter, the argument is made that the act of slowing down produces a sense of duration and presence unavailable to speedier and more editing-reliant kinds of films. In visualizing duration, so to speak, Stray Dogs—and other films in the slow cinema vein—open up a space for a range of ethical processes like reflection, recognition, empathy, and imagination.
Film and the Ethical Imagination, 2016
This chapter proposes that Baudelaire’s Lost Letters to Max demonstrates how the activist potenti... more This chapter proposes that Baudelaire’s Lost Letters to Max demonstrates how the activist potential that inheres in the aesthetic itself might be capable of generating modes of political engagement no less efficacious than those of more explicit forms.
Film and the Ethical Imagination, 2016
Film and the Ethical Imagination, 2016
Turning around Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known phrase, this chapter offers a brief presentation of ... more Turning around Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known phrase, this chapter offers a brief presentation of the historically variable relationship between ethics and aesthetics.
Film and the Ethical Imagination, 2016
The final chapter considers Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For the Light and Carlos Reygadas’s Post ... more The final chapter considers Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For the Light and Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux as films that augur what could be seen as a planetary ethics. Through their radical aesthetic articulations both films push against the limits of the ethical imagination itself, portending a future cinema of the Anthropocene.
Nordicom Review, 2008
In Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), the specter of the culturally repressed retur... more In Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), the specter of the culturally repressed returns in the form of mute, unrelenting images that seem to demand something of the protagonists in the film. This article argues that Caché, in its troubled but timely reflection on the enigmatic images that make up our shared visual culture, negotiates an ethical space within the film-world in which the audience is confronted not only with historical events that they would rather forget but also with their own complicity in the more contemporary injustices of which the subaltern is victim. With a view toward understanding the complex rhetoric of the film’s images of confrontation, the article suggests that the director’s iconoclastic project derives much of its psychological and emotional force from the narrative deployment of the figure of intrusion.
Screening the Unwatchable, 2012
When presenting papers from this project at conferences, or talking more informally about it with... more When presenting papers from this project at conferences, or talking more informally about it with colleagues and friends, people often ask me why a film like Irreversible or Antichrist is any less watchable than a mainstream exploitation flick like, say, Saw (James Wan, 2004) or Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). It is a reasonable question, but one apparently founded on the premature premise that the unwatchable comes down to a question of viscera and carnage.1 As my description above hints, and as I hope the following analyses will make clear, the unwatchable refers not just to graphic violence (in fact it may not involve violence at all) but to virtually anything in the image that may insult our sensibilities, that makes us want to avert our eyes, or that forces us to reconsider our investments, be they visual/aesthetic or political/moral. The unwatchable is the form that the negation of pleasure takes, and its aim is not emotional and cognitive discomfort for its own sake; the production of unpleasure is rather a means to an epistemological-ethical end. The shocking gore-fests of genre films like Saw and Hostel are devoid of any such external objectives. Sufficient onto themselves, they are not meant to perform any other task than to entertain the viewer, to put it in the plainest terms. The spectator may cringe in horror at outlandish scenes of torture, and she might become nauseated, but the fact remains that the discomfort-inducing images in this case are already rendered ineffective by their generic context.
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Papers by Asbjørn Grønstad