James Tweedie, Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Film, New Media and the Late Twentieth Century

Screen ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-118
Author(s):  
Jørgen Bruhn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Moving Pictures ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Moving Pictures, Still Lives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Peter Greenaway ◽  
Derek Jarman ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Moving Pictures ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century, exploring the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between the past and tradition or the future and modernity. The book retraces the “archaeomodern turn” in media and theory that viewed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative modern experiments. Three theoretical chapters consider key figures—Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney—who grappled with the late twentieth century’s characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes this theoretical work on film as a mourning play for revolutions past and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Like Daney, the book emphasizes the value of looking at cinema and the century in the “rear—view mirror,” at the aging of a quintessentially modern art like film, and at the phantoms that remain after the passage into the era of new media. The second part of the manuscript, titled “The Cinema of Painters,” is structured around a series of interactions among media, filmmakers, and national traditions. It examines late twentieth—century filmmakers who systematically adopt strategies normally associated with other visual media or art forms, especially painting. Focusing on Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean—Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, and AgnèVarda, the book concentrates on films that fill the frame with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes.

The Afterlife of Art and Objects

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Spanish Baroque ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Moving Pictures ◽  
Tableau Vivant ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.

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.

Stage visions and strategies of contemporary performing practices – a broadly conceived analysis of the phenomena at the intersection of theory and practice: Valentina Valentini, Worlds, Bodies, Matters: Theatre of the Late Twentieth Century

Maska ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (175) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Nika Arhar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The first book in the new series Thinking Through Performance offers a mental feat of a concise survey of numerous performances by various artists and theatrical and philosophical concepts, which the author, Valentina Valentini, also observes within the fields of other disciplines. Three basic lines of investigation bring forth the visions of contemporary theatre worlds, their images and the strategies of their establishment, the expansion of the field while blurring the boundaries between visual art, the performative and new media, as well as the transformation of the actor into the autonomous body of the performer and the body that becomes plural, open, hybrid, space itself. With its in-depth and wide-ranging probing of the key phenomena in contemporary performing arts, its taking into account diverse perspectives, and its fragmentary approach within a complex field, the author has created a productive foundation for new starting-points and understandings in the dialogue between theory and practice.

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.

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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