The Feel-Bad Film

Film-Philosophy Vol. 15, No. 2, 2011, 2011

arts.monash.edu.au

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory

This article contends that the common thread running through all of the films of Lars von Trier is the inability of his characters to enact good works, at least as a work of their own. If the Good is efficacious in his films, e.g. in his Gold Heart Trilogy, then it is only operative by means of the effacing of the heroine herself. When the Good is operative, it is never operative as a work wrought by an autonomous agent as a possession of their own. Finally, this article will also show that the fact that von Trier’s female figures are ones who ‘suffer’ the Good is not to condemn him to misogyny. In fact, through a critical encounter with Carleen Mandolfo, I wish to argue that von Trier’s ultimate agenda is not political at all, but rather has to do with the purity of heart in a Kierkegaardian sense.

Film-Philosophy, 2019

Routledge, 2019

Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity deals with the relationship between cinema and ethics from a philosophical perspective , finding an intrinsic connection between film spectatorship and the possibility of being open to different modes of alterity. The book's main thesis is that openness to otherness is already found in the basic structures of cinematic experience. Through a close examination of the ethical relevance of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze to cinema studies, Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity pursues the question of how film can open the viewer to what is not her and so bring her to encounter otherness in a way that is unique to cinematic experience. The book sees ethics as not just the subject, content or story of a film but part of its aesthetic structure. Accompanied by readings of films mainly from mainstream cinema, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the encounter with alterity through cinema. The book gives particular attention to how theoretical discussion of the cinematic close-up can lead to ethical insights into the status of both the human and the non-human in film, and thus lead to an understanding of the relationships the viewer makes with them. The book is a helpful resource for students and scholars interested in the relationship between philosophy, film and ethics, and is appropriate for students of philosophy and media and cultural studies. Orna Raviv is a filmmaker and a film theorist. She teaches on the MA program in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Haifa, and at the Unit for History and Philosophy of Art, Design and Technology, at Shenkar College.

Film-Philosophy Journal, 2019

Continuum, 2016

Taking 2009 Cannes Film Festival as a case study this article explores the narrative limits and possibilities of a global movement in art-house cinema: the portrayal of extreme corporeal violence-a movement that ranges from new French extreme to Asian extreme cinema. Cannes 2009 housed a collection of films that display extreme bodily violence, showing acts ranging from brutal rape and dismembering of the body to graphic scenes of torture, genital mutilation, and murders. The analysis of a selection of festival films provides an opportunity to track a transnational movement in which graphic scenes of violence become not only a convenient tool to further audience affect but also a means to reinforce the reality effect. This study, on the one hand, explores how films that display extreme bodily violence as an eruptive force seek memorability in the competitive arthouse film market. On the other hand, it suggests that on the eve of the 2009 global financial crisis, showing corporeal affect alludes to the disposability of bodies under a neoliberal economy obsessed with efficiency and adaptability. Hence, the ethical impulse that seeks the production of sympathetic bodies in the audience often goes hand in hand with the marketing of sensationalism.

Sociology.Though and Action, 2018

The article explores how certain roles imposed on a person oppress him or her, and at the same it is investigated how consciously chosen roles help understanding human nature and become "truer" than the reality itself. The text consists of three interrelated parts. In the first part, dramaturgical theory, psychosocial and artistic experiments are presented. The second part analyses the trilogy of Lithuanian theatre director Oskaras Korsunovas-Hamlet, The Lower Depths and The Seagull. In the third part, the trilogy of Danish cinema director Lars von Trier is examined-Antichrist, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. These trilogies embrace common dichotomies: truth vs lie; individual responsibility vs collective conformism; freedom vs oppression; life vs death; openness vs hypocrisy; reality vs fiction; deep play vs superficial theatricality, etc. The analysed works of art, combined with the psychosocial experiments, reveal that realistic play (experimentation) can help assembling such shocking and "stripping" data that would be extremely difficult to collect without acting.