On the Politics of Photography in Film

2011

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2018

In close intratextual connection with earlier pieces of Jafar Panahi’s oeuvre, pre-eminently The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Offside (2006), his recent films made in illegality, including This Is Not a Film (In film nist, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardeh, Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, 2013) and Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015), reformulate the relationship between cinema and the “real,” defying the limitations of filmmaking in astounding ways. The paper addresses the issue of non-cinema, pertaining to those instances of cinematic “impurity” in which “the medium disregards its own limits in order to politically interfere with the other arts and life itself” (Nagib 2016, 132). Panahi’s overtly confrontational (non-)cinematic discourse is an eminent example of “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001). His artisanal and secret use of the camera in deterritorialized conditions and extreme limitations as regards profilmic space – house arrest, fake taxi interior – gives way for multilayered reflexivity, incorporating non-actorial presence, performative self-filming and theatricality as subversive gestures, with a special emphasis on the off-screen and remediated video-orality performed in front of, or directly addressed to the camera. The paper explores the ways in which the filmmaker’s tactics become powerful gestures of “politicized immediacy” (Naficy 2001, 6) that call for the (inter)medial as an also indispensably political act (Schröter 2010).

Art & the public sphere, 2011

Oliver ressler interviewed by esther leslie radical footage; film and dissent Esther Leslie: What are the relations between aesthetics and politics? Does every artwork imply a political position? Do political acts or statements have aesthetic force? Why have those who are engaged with politics-liberatory or progressive-been so concerned to proscribe or prescribe aesthetic forms? These are the questions that interest me. I first explored these questions years ago, at university, when studying German and discovering the various positions represented in the Marxist German lineage of radical aesthetics. One place in which the variety of arguments is succinctly collected is the New Left Books/Verso collection Aesthetics and Politics, with its essays, letter exchanges and polemics by and between Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Adorno and Ernst Bloch. It was clear that there was something exciting and vital in the mudslinging and accusations that flew between the participants, and in total these pieces, written for the most part in the 1930s, represented a collective effort to understand resonances between the aesthetic and the political, which was then an urgent task. Under the dark shadow of two dictatorships, Hitler's and Stalin's, in differing and similar ways, art and the question of form and genre, carried a political edge, for good or ill. I was hooked and many years after when I was asked to name my professorial post I acknowledged this influence, in titling myself a Professor of Political Aesthetics. This label is also to indicate that the debates continue. The question of the political resonances of art, and the aesthetic modes of politics are inexhaustible, if sometimes they

2016

The present article aims to show how the consolidation of the cinematic form of the essay film in Jean-Luc Godard’s work is a consequence of the evolution of his experience in the cinéma militant. This militant cinema emerges from the political and social circumstances that caused May 68 and in the case of the filmmaker is materialized through his participation in the Dziga Vertov Group. The defining elements of the group’s filmic experience –the supremacy of montage, the dialectics between images and sounds and the relevance of the spectator as an active part of a dialogical practice– are the same that bring about the essayistic form when the film is enunciated from the author’s subjectivity. With the analysis of Letter to Jane this paper tries to demonstrate how the irruption of subjectivity in the revolutionary cinematic practice allows the appearance of self-reflexivity and the thinking process that define the cinematic essay. RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo la consolidación de la forma cinematográfica del film-ensayo en la obra de Jean-Luc Godard es consecuencia de la evolución de su experiencia en el cinéma militant. Un cine militante que surge de las circunstancias político-sociales que dieron lugar a mayo del 68 y que en el caso del cineasta se materializa mediante su participación en el Grupo Dziga Vertov. Los elementos definitorios de la experiencia fílmica del grupo –la primacía del montaje, la dialéctica entre imágenes y sonidos y la relevancia del espectador como parte activa de una práctica dialogística– son los mismos que propician la forma ensayística cuando la obra se enuncia desde la subjetividad del autor. Con el análisis de Letter to Jane pretendemos mostrar cómo la irrupción de la subjetividad en la práctica cinematográfica revolucionaria posibilita la aparición de la auto-reflexión y del proceso de pensamiento definitorios del ensayo cinematográfico.

2013

This article analyscs the rclationship b('twcen digital tcchnology and política[ film-making in thc current era of unevcn globalization. First, I study thc role of contemporary counter-narratives of mi¿.,:rratíon in gíving visibílity to thc illcgal bodies-in-motion that circulatc through the westem fortrcsses. Second, 1 disscct the di,1,.,rital and imperfect acsthctic of a set of films-Welcome to Sarajcvo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997), In this World (Michacl Winterbottom, 2002) and Turtles can Hy (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004) -in order to define the nuances of thcir poli tícal discourses. Third, l arguc that thc authenticating appeal of digital technology is largely based on thc fact that spcctators toda y cxpericncc thc digital in thcir quotidian lije expericnccs. Thcrcforc, they approach digital products not only as consumers, but also as producers of audio-visual imagcry. Finally, 1 study how these films operate in a limínal space between the flctional and documentary mudesthc fictorcal. l contcnd that thcse films fail to hidc thcir structuring artiftciality. Paradoxically, this failure, in combination with their imperfcct digital look, is the cornerstonc of their capacity to successfully engage an active spectator in thc interrogation of thc spccific sociocultural rcalitícs they explore. By deploying a range of represcntational convcntions working within a varicty of fictional genrcs, they KEYWORDS digital impcrfection immigration political film-making Winterbottom fict<Jreal

Journal of Practical Philosophy, 2020

What does it mean to hand over the camera to an Adivasi 'community' and its methodological impact on what gets represented and how one represents it? This paper tries to mark the moments that emerged with the Ho Adivasi in Jharkhand in which film became an act of thinking, creating, and 'becoming.' The paper argues that the politics of representation and social transformation are closely linked to the transition from 'conventional' to 'action' research. In this logic, the paper argues for the film as a question of creation and aesthetics - a question of politics.

Mimesis Magazine, 2023

One thing that draws me to this conversation is that I'm considering the role of liveness in cinema within hybrid, quasi-digital, quasi-recorded worlds. More specifically the kind of fragmentation of liveness-through documentation and transtemporality-that has become so inherent to contemporary storytelling. Many theoretical conversations on cinema still rely on an older framework based on the intellectual world that existed when the medium of cinema emerged, but as a maker I feel an urgency not to submit myself to that past. I want to give myself over to a different perspective within discourses of performance and community, in order to talk about and with the people I currently share space with, even when I investigate the past. Elbe Trakal: Liveness is such a central word in performance theory that I have so many associations in my mind right now. Knowing your films, I associate you with someone who is interested in auteur cinema, because I guess you are an auteur in the sense that you are making very personal and idiosyncratic films that you produce yourself. I'm trying to locate what you mean by liveness in your practice. LS: What I mean is that I see the recorded camera clips I'm editing into sequences as wormholes that are still attached to the moments in which they were recorded. They don't lose that connection in the editing process. Even when a film is densely edited, each clip brings in some spirit from the shared encounter that was documented by the camera. And since the moments I record themselves are often an intervention within my immediate community, as well as a hopeful intervention on a different register, the film becomes an agent, a fermentation process. I would argue, as many have, that all films are interventions, though some of them pretend not to be. Commercial films pretend not to be interventions but they are in the sense that something actually happens at the moment the audience watches it, as well as at the moment a producer utilizes their capital to influence how people would look at the world. I think that commercial cinema maintains a false façade of nonliveness.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION The second edition of Projections has been substantially expanded with the inclusion of four new chapters: on Natural Born Killers, Dead Poets Society, Wag the dog and Kieslowski's marvellous cinematic trilogy, Three Colours Blue, White and Red. The opportunity to enlarge this edition has been afforded by the (to me surprising) fact that the first edition of 1996 has been sold out. I hope it would not be premature to see in this an indication that the philosophical interest in film is alive and well in South Africa. The new chapters are written in the same philosophical mode as the earlier ones, namely that of critical, cultural-philosophical reflection on the themes, as well as the cinematic modes of presentation of these themes, as they are addressed in the films in question. As readers will notice, this is done in such a way as to make the relevant themes as accessible as possible, in the hope that the films dealt with here may gain greater meaning in the light of these philosophical interpretations. Have a good read!

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

The essayistic device in film often brings together two temporalities of film creation: the present of the filmed image and the present of the editing process. Through the interaction of both moments, provoked by the critical revision of the raw material and its possibilities of montage, the essay film is constructed through the filmmaker’s exploration of the filmic apparatus, thus revealing film forms as a way of producing and disseminating knowledge. The essay film, therefore, subverts a common theoretical practice: thought is no longer assumed as a procedure for unveiling an image, but it is rather produced by film forms. We claim that the essay film, as a research methodology and a theoretical approximation to film informed by practice, must be unfolded through creative gestures, this is to say, images and sounds that present an audiovisual synthesis of the conscious and intuitive work that both precedes and is synchronic to the moments of filming and editing. This article addre...