The Hauntology of the Cinematic Image

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Standard Position ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Beginning with the belated rediscovery and canonization of the work of Walter Benjamin, this chapter considers the close relationship between his writing from the 1920s and 1930s, when he was most active as a critic, and the late twentieth century. It suggests that Benjamin’s standard position in film theory—as one of the most forceful advocates for a radical modernism closely allied with cinema—corresponds to just one of many positions he adopted throughout his career and contradicts the argument that the ruins of modernity remain a source of utopian potential even after their apparent obsolescence, a position advanced in his book on the Baroque mourning play, his fragmentary Arcades Project, and elsewhere. This chapter suggests that Benjamin’s work on the mourning play and allegory constitute the basis for his continued relevance to media studies in the late twentieth century, especially as a belated but prophetic contributor to debates about the end of history or cinema.

Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.

Serge Daney, Zapper

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen ◽  
Over Time

This chapter considers Serge Daney’s transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated with the possibilities of the small screen and status of cinema as an old medium. Daney challenges foundational film theory and introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s he chronicled the experience of watching cinema on television and engaged in a process of “archaeology” focused on absent or damaged images rather than the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Daney’s work at the threshold between media provides a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it questions both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding new media. Daney instead constructs a retrospective theory of film that reveals its diminution over time and the persistence of its utopian ambitions.

scholarly journals The Problem of Attitudes towards History in the Theory of Architecture of Postmodernism

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-42
Author(s):  
Alexey A. Khudin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
The Times ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Radical Transformation ◽  
The Way

The article contains a study of changes in the attitude to history in the foreign architecture of the twentieth century, in connection with the radical transformation of the perception of categories of time. The peculiarity of the sensation of time in the period of modernity is accompanied by the feeling of being at a particular point of the eternal "now", constant modernity, for which you need to keep up with the actualized state of being "in step with the times". In this state, the memory value is reduced to a minimum. For the "modern man", turning to the past becomes meaningless if there is only a series of obsolete, outdated and irrelevant forms in it It is replaced by the feeling of being in the position of exhaustion, completeness, and impossibility of producing innovations, reaching thelimit in the discovery of the new, which leads to the feeling of the end of history, the exhaustion of art. This leads to the decline of modernism, the emergence of fatigue and satiety in the race for technology and a departure from orientations to newness, which opens the way for a new attitude towards history as a source for inspiration, and its corresponding rediscovery in the late twentieth century, expressed in multiple retrospectives, conservative, traditionalist searches in art and architecture. The study touches upon the problems of postmodernism, as a style that opens a new round of references to history, viewed as a form of neo-traditionalism and eliminating a state of stalemate in a culture that has broken its ties with the past. The article presents various areas of the historical search of postmodern architects differing in their attitudes towards the phenomenon of history, continuity, and inheritance.

Time’s Arrow, Time’s Bow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film History ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Time’S Arrow ◽  
History And Theory

This chapter frames Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books as a late twentieth-century phenomenon, engaging with many of the period’s key concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. Deleuze recognizes his status as a latecomer to philosophy and film theory and develops a theory based on the rediscovery of radical thought in the modern past, as in his study of Leibniz, the fold, and the baroque. His cinema books adopt a similar approach to film history and theory by framing the medium as an art that opens onto the totality of time. If nostalgia in the late twentieth century viewed a “golden age” as the proper destination of historical inquiry, Deleuze radicalizes the concepts of return and memory by reimagining them through the cinema’s lens. One key lesson drawn from the century of cinema is that any moment in time, including the neglected or potentially revolutionary, is accessible from any other point in history.

Last Letters: Keats, Bishop and Hughes

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter looks at the discourse of last letters in the writing of poets such as John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. In particular, it scrutinises the close relationship of the ‘last letter’ to aesthetic and theoretical debates about the permanence of art over life, mind over matter, writing over speech. The chapter also addresses the elegiac strain in late twentieth-century letter writing, the sense among many poets that they are the very last letter writers.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

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