The Praxis of the Tractrix

Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal

This paper establishes a comparative analysis between Borges' renowned extended sentence in "The Aleph" (1945) and Chris Marker's avant-garde film, "Sans Soleil" (1983). The primary objective is to illustrate that both artistic compositions contribute to the exploration of a cinematic surface capable of amalgamating disparate sets of images and temporal coordinates. Within this framework, we employ Deleuze's theory of planes, encompassing concepts such as event, time, and paradox, among others, to elucidate how the interpretative frameworks of history presented by Marker and Borges hinge upon the generation of novel thought-images intertwined with seriality and montage. This exploration leads us to engage, and perhaps rediscover, Deleuze's time-image and his philosophical perspective on cinema.

The issue of neobaroque is a well known fact in debates led during last two decades within the framework of liberal arts and theory. It appears as if the development of the society of spectacle and contemporary media technology has, in a certain way, been favouring a single aspect of the baroque, which admittedly had risen during the later development of that historical style, namely as its tendency towards the overemphasised movement, excess scene dynamics, illusionist effects and similar. It is not unusual that the contemporary society of mass media and hypercommunication has accepted actually those peculiarities of baroque style, since the possibilities of computer technology, internet communication, omnipresence of image and visual communication altogether invoke and renew the baroque "excesses" to a much greater degree and more convincingly than in the case of postmodern theories' attempt of explaining a break up with modernism. In my opinion the theory of neobaroque has, for this reason, caused less controversies than most of other theories that have emerged from postmodernism and poststrucutralism. I am under the impression that the talks presented at this conference have to a greater degree engaged the neobaroque problematics as opposite to the formal expressions and technological extravaganza (which still irresistibly lure us into calling them baroque). This talk will join the above-mentioned attempts and propose further arguments for comprehending the contemporary baroque in the new light, as we place the problematic and thematic focus on the issue of visibility.

in t er médi a li t és • n o 6 au t o m n e 2 0 0 5

Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an international journal Vol 1, No 2 (2014)

This paper introduces a comparative study relating the famous long sentence of The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges, and the documentary film Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker. The processes used by both artists can be studied in parallel in order to consider the construction of a complex surface in which heterogeneous fragments belonging to different times and spaces are articulated, combined and juxtaposed, exceeding the aesthetic purity of a fixed and immobile whole. My argument is that the capacity of this surface, or screen, to constantly dismantle and reassemble disparate sets of images and conceptual directions should be understood according to the concepts of “plane of immanence” and “ideal game”, prominently developed by Gilles Deleuze in his Logique du Sens (1969). These concepts connect to a constellation of other terms, like event, paradox, becoming, and, notably, Chronos and Aion, through which Deleuze conceives of a tension between the transitory present that passes and the expansion of a past that remains. Our approach is that these terms and, very specially, the coexistence between a time simultaneously contracted and expanded in vast circuits, emerge as a key point to develop an in-depth comprehension of Deleuze’s time-image, finding in the works of Borges and Marker two valuable and unexpected examples of analysis. As in Deleuze’s theory of planes and becomings, in both Borges’ and Marker’s oeuvres, the paradoxical space is also affected by a paradoxical time that is infinitive, unreservedly multiple, and subject to processes of actualization.

Outskirts Feminisms Along the Edge, 2007

Using the logic of the absence-presence of light (through mimicking shadows and remnant ghosts) in the images/time-images of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights and Jane Campion's The Piano, this paper attempts to frame time such that the overexposed past becomes the blank page of the future. I propose that history, when viewed in the light of the present, enables a truly open future for female and postcolonial subjects. It is important, therefore, to think of the blank page emerging from the overexposed image not as symbolic of a psychoanalytic lack of the phallus, but as an open response in the wake of the excesses of phallogocentrism and Eurocentrism. Such a conception of the past and the future in terms of an excess and a lack that do not constitute a dialectical relationship requires a re-visioning of the Hegelian view of time as "linear, progressive, continuing, even, regulated, and teleological" (Grosz, 1995: 98). Following Bergson and Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz problematizes the common philosophical view that history is the basis of learning from the past, and the idea that by reflecting on it, we can improve the future:

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 2014

leos carax's metamorphic Holy Motors (2012) has been received as evading conceptual, physical, and cinematic coherence. drawing on gilles deleuze's concept of the fold and Nicole Brenez's work on the figural powers of the cinema, this article argues that carax's film reprises the aesthetics of a delirious baroque. re-evaluating the relevance of the baroque for carax and for cinema, it identifies the delirious baroque as an embodied aesthetics of movement, materiality, and multiplicity as well as vision. Published by: Amsterdam University Press NECSUS thE BEaut y of thE ac t WaltoN

The goal of this analysis is to establish a parallel between Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, A Biography, the 1992 film directed by Sally Potter, and a few examples of European canvases that may have inspired both artists. Woolf broke the shackles that still dominated British literature in the 1920s by writing a storyline that encompasses four centuries of a nation's life and of mixed emotions for the novel's leading character: Orlando was/is his/her name. Both the book published in 1928 and the film directed in 1992 start by presenting Orlando as an Elizabethan nobleman. As the plot unfolds, much like a caterpillar Orlando will evolve from a shy teenage boy into a confident adult woman. However, Woolf and Potter's distinctive timelines and perceptions of the world explain the different paths offered by each author to Orlando in the last stages of their works. Focusing on this text's purpose, its writer shall start by reflecting over some recurrent elements of the book written in 1928 as a means to praise the outstanding cultural background of Virginia Woolf at the time of its production. The following step will be to present canvases produced by painters like George Gower, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt or even Marcel Duchamp that can be associated both to some excerpts of the novel and/or to scenes from the movie.

Film-Philosophy, 2003