Pynchon and Film

This essay considers recent work by D.N. Rodowick and Garrett Stewart on digital technology and cinema. By comparing Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film to Stewart’s Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, the essay argues that Rodowick need not be so pessimistic about the prospects of cinema in the face of digital technology, even if material film itself is becoming obsolete. Furthermore, the essay queries whether the boundaries between virtual and actual as proposed by Rodowick are so clearly defined, and posits that a more complex relationship between the two is in existence (and has perhaps existed for a long time). The essay also proposes that the work of Rodowick and Stewart, among others, suggests that film theory still has plenty to offer film studies, not least because this postfilmic cinema is expanding so rapidly.

pbk). 15 illustrations, vii+193pp. £16.95 (pbk).

Critical Responses to World Literature, 2013

2020

The editors would like to acknowledge the help of all the people involved in this project and, first of all, the late Thomas Elsaesser. Without his support and guidance, this book would not have become a reality. Our sincere gratitude goes to the chapter's authors for their wonderful texts. We would like to thank Janice Loreck for her research assistance in preparing this volume and the editorial team at Amsterdam University Press-Maryse Elliot, Mike Sanders, Chantal Nicolaes, and Danielle Carter-for contributing their time and expertise to this book. Special thanks are due to Adrian Martin for translating into English, for the first time, Raymond Bellour's 'Trente-cinq ans après: le "texte" a nouveau introuvable?', written in 2009, and collected in Raymond Bellour's La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma-installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), pp. 124-137. It is reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.

2013

In the photographic technique of contre-jour, the camera is pointed directly at a source of light. The intervening figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides detail, concentrating the image on a play of borders that focuses on shape and line. In Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon employs contre-jour (and titles the novel as such) to stage an encounter between the visual and the literary. Sean Cubitt’s digital theory of the cinema is used in this essay to investigate the possibility of representation and effects sought by Against the Day’s Futurist painter and anarchist, Tancredi. Working in Venice, Tancredi rages against the “damnable stillness of paint” (AtD 586) in his efforts to create an Infernal Machine of destructive transformation. Three pictures by Luigi Russolo, René Magritte, and Umberto Boccioni currently hang in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and resonate with Pynchon’s representation of visual culture and the work of Tancredi. Moving through these paintings and the Futurist and Cubist movements, the association between “wound culture” (Mark Seltzer) and photography is forged. The pataphysical and cinematic technology of the “Integroscope” then animates photography, (re)producing the Barthesian punctum that comes with the temporal aberrance of what Pynchon thematizes as “bilocation” (that is, being in two places at the same time). Akin to Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” what I call Pynchon’s “graphic impulse” plays out the tension between the moving and the still image. Further, the content and form of Pynchon’s representation of visual culture reveals the historio-graphy of his graphic impulse. His focus on other sensorial modes of apprehending the visual—smell and sound—complicates the encounter between the visual and the literary, coloring the ending of the Against the Day with a darker tone."

Table of Contents Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau Part 1 - Cinematicity Before Cinema 1 Dickensian ‘Dissolving Views’: The Magic Lantern, Visual Story Telling, and the Victorian Technological Imagination Joss Marsh 2 ‘Never Has One Seen Reality Enveloped in Such a Phantasmagoria’: Watching Spectacular Transformations, 1860-1889 Kristian Moen 3 Moving-Picture Media and Modernity: Taking Intermediate and Ephemeral Forms Seriously Ian Christie Part 2 - Transitions: Early Cinema and Cinematicity 4 Reading in the Age of Edison: The Cinematicity of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ Karin Littau 5 Time and Motion Studies: Joycean Cinematicity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Keith B. Williams 6 Nature Caught in the Act: On the Transformation of an Idea of Art in Early Cinema Nico Baumbach Part 3 – Cinematicity in the ‘Classic’ Cinema Age 7 Cinematicity of Speech and Visibility of Literature: The Poetics of Soviet Film Scripts of the Early Sound Film Era Anke Hennig 8 Making America Global: Cinematicity and the Aerial View Jeffrey Geiger 9 Invisible Cities, Visible Cinema: Illuminating Shadows in Late Film Noir Tom Gunning Part 4 - Digital Cinematicity 10 Cinema, Video, Game: Astonishing Aesthetics and the Cinematic ‘Future’ of Computer Graphics’ Past Leon Gurevitch 11 Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone Martine Beugnet 12 Kino-Eye in Reverse: Visualizing Cinema Lev Manovich

The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Heywood and Sandywell, 2011

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2020