A Tale of Sound and Fury Signifying Everything: Argentine Tango Dance Films as Complex Self-Reflexive Creation

This article equates the multidimensional artistic form of Argentine tango (dance, music and song) with the innately hybrid form of film. It compares Argentine tango culture to the height of French cinephilia in the 1950s Paris, France, arguing that they are both passionate, erotic and nostalgic ways of life. In Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998) and Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), the intertwining of the related skills of tango practice and filmmaking are an audio-visual treat for the senses and a cognitive challenge for the mind. Their self-reflexivity promotes excess and the result is a highly expressive and complex form. They evince a cross-fertilization of reality and fiction, of art and life, typical of a perfect mise en abyme as described by Christian Metz. These films are also art musicals, although they depart from the Hollywood musical conventions. Yet, one cannot speak in their case of intermedia reflexivity, according to Petr Szczepanik’s definition, because both of them retain their qualities in a symbiotic relationship of likeness that highlights their mutual aura.

Christian Metz

The film theory of Christian Metz (b. 1931–d. 1993) forms part of the structuralist revolution of ideas that challenged the phenomenology prevalent in France in the 1950s. Metz developed a structuralist (or its derivative, semiological) theory of film in the 1960s and inaugurated a groundbreaking theory and method of analysis that transformed film into a semiological object, in which film’s specificity was no longer perceived in terms of surface sensory properties or a conscious aesthetic experience. Instead, Metz reconceived filmic specificity, this most sensory of objects, as a type of signification—as the manifestation of a more fundamental, nonobservable, underlying finite abstract system of codes. To conceive film as signification involves a shift in perspective, from the study of film as a consciously experienced, continuous sensory object to the study of the abstract underlying system of discrete (or discontinuous) codes that generates and organizes those experiences. In terms of the history of ideas, semiology parallels the epistemology of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who argued that an underlying transcendental system of conceptual categories in the mind structures and makes possible human experience. Semiology’s innovation was to replace this underlying transcendental system with a historically and culturally contingent system of underlying codes. In the 1970s Metz addressed the limitations of structuralism and semiology by adopting a post-structuralist framework premised on theories of enunciation, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. For Metz, enunciation (which emphasizes signs of the speaker and receiver in a text) and psychoanalysis (which emphasizes traces of the unconscious in a text) enabled him to rethink his study of codes as secondary systems of signification, which are underpinned and driven by more-fundamental primary processes of signification (unconscious drives, fantasy, and dream logic). In his final work in the early 1990s, Metz developed a theory of filmic enunciation focused on the impersonal traces of a film’s production; that is, enunciative markers that are reflexive, that refer back only to the film itself.

Identification of Relationship Maintenance in Chinese Muslim Marriages in Film “Bidadari Mencari Sayap”

Keragaman budaya memang pada dasarnya amat menarik untuk dibahas dan dipahami lebih dalam. Tidak hanya dapat dilihat melalui peninggalan-peninggalan yang bersejarah, beragam kebudayaan juga kini dapat dikreasikan menjadi sebuah film yang disaksikan oleh banyak orang. Bidadari Mencari Sayap merupakan salah satu film yang ditayangkan pada side streams platform yakni Disney+. Film Bidadari Mencari Sayap yang resmi tayang pada 02 Oktober 2020 memiliki kisah pernikahan yang amat kompleks. Film ini mengisahkan kisah rumah tangga yang terjadi antara pasangan suami istri muslim dan Tionghoa Mualaf. Menggunakan Metode Kualitatif dan paradigma intrepretatif. Dalam menganalisis film Bidadari Mencari Sayap peneliti akan menggunakan relational maintenance dari Laura Stanford dan juga Canary yang memiliki sebanyak sepuluh elemen dalam menjaga hubungan yaitu positivity, openness, assurances, sharing task, social network, join activities, mediated communication, avoidance, antisocial dan humor dielaborasikan dengan grand syntagmatic dari Semiotika Christian Metz yaitu autonomous shot, the parallel syntagm, the bracketing syntagm, the descriptive syntagm, the alternating syntagm, the scene, the episodic sequence, ordinary sequence. Hasil dari penelitian yang dilakukan ini mendapati bahwa dalam film Bidadari Mencari Sayap menerapkan sebanyak delapan dari sepuluh elemen relational maintenance theories yang menghasilkan sebanyak empat sintagma dan juga sebanyak tiga autonomous shot dengan tipe yang beragam yakni subjective insert, explanatory insert dan juga displaced diegetic.

Au-delà du signifiant imaginaire : repenser l’inscription du fantasme au cinéma

Le rapport entre la théorie du cinéma et la psychanalyse demeure trouble, tant sur le plan conceptuel qu’épistémologique, et ce, depuis les toutes premières études psychanalytiques du cinéma. Ce rapport se trouve complexifié par des avancées distinctes dans les cercles savants francophones et anglophones. Voulant faire le pont entre les réflexions françaises et anglo-saxonnes, cet article se propose de relire les fondements de l’ouvrage Le signifiant imaginaire en articulant les enjeux soulevés par Christian Metz aux relectures lacaniennes offertes par des penseurs contemporains tels que Joan Copjec, Todd McGowan, Elizabeth Cowie et Slavoj Žižek – des penseurs qui prennent acte de certaines lacunes largement présentes dans la théorie des années 1970. Il en ressort une réflexion voulant repenser le régime de signification opérant au cinéma, puisqu’à l’époque de Metz, certains concepts lacaniens (le fantasme, le désir, l’objet a, le Réel) demeuraient absents des discours théoriques en études cinématographiques. Il s’agira donc de redéfinir le désir spectatoriel en l’articulant à une « réelle » pensée lacanienne, le tout afin de resituer la place du signifiant cinématographique en le liant au rôle du fantasme. De nature avant tout programmatique, cet article ne consolidera pas son propos par le biais d’analyses filmiques, mais s’attardera plutôt à des enjeux théoriques afin de plaider pour l’approche mise de l’avant par l’américain Todd McGowan dans l’ouvrage The Real Gaze. Si le fantasme joue un rôle central dans l’articulation du désir spectatoriel, il nous appartiendra de voir comment ce rôle se rapporte au regard, au Réel et au fameux signifiant cinématographique.

Hanss Magnuss Encensbergers – literāro vinješu meistars

The article “Hans Magnus Enzensberger – Master of Literary Vignettes” is dedicated to the latest book of the outstanding German poet and publicist “Masters of Survival: 99 Literary Vignettes of the 20th Century”, published on the occasion of the author’s 90th anniversary. It presents 99 literary portraits in the characteristic style of Enzensberger – from critical attitude to admirable praise. The article first describes the vignette as a special genre of literature (miniature literature), its meaning, and history. Several examples from the history of German and Austrian literature are mentioned: Stefan Zweig, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil. All objects in Enzensberger’s literary vignettes are “masters of survival” – they are writers and poets between the First and Second World Wars. The article qualifies the critical performance of Marko Martin, Helmut Böttiger, Christian Metz, and Alexander Cammann in evaluating Enzensberger’s work. The style of Enzensberger is also characterised. It surprises the reader by bringing the personal, subjective aspect closer to various intimate facts from the lives of writers and poets. The most significant attention is paid to the representatives of German literature – Gottfried Benn, Gerhart Hauptmann, Johannes R. Becher, and others.

Representation of Korean Values Sustainability in American Remake Movies

Globalization has triggered Korean movies more competitive. Many scholars and critics considered American and Korean popular culture domination. Hollywood has experiences in shaping the lifestyle of the world. This research aims to figure out sustainable values represented on American remakes of Korean popular movies. It also has purpose to find out the reason behind the sustainability. The study applied semiotic theories from Christian Metz. Representation approach was also applied to reveal the values beneath the transnational remakes supported by qualitative methods. The results revealed that there were several Korean values remain in the remake version of Korean American movies. It also revealed that the audience demands and taste mainly influence sustainability of values as well as universality of the values believed by the audience becomes the driving force of the sustainability represented in the remake movies.

Um olhar sobre o cinema pelas lentes do imaginário

Resumo: Pesquisas acadêmicas brasileiras e europeias apresentem convergências entre os estudos do imaginário e as teorias do cinema, porém o pensamento sobre as relações entre os conteúdos simbólicos e as produções cinematográficas não está refletido em ampla bibliografia no formato livro. Ainda assim, entre obras consagradas como O cinema ou o homem imaginário, de Edgar Morin, ou O significante imaginário, de Christian Metz, trabalhos menos conhecidos, como Le cinéma et l’imaginaire, de Michel Serceau, podem ser úteis na compreensão da influência do imaginário sobre a sétima arte.Palavras-chave: Imaginário, imagem, cinema, pesquisa, teoria LOOKING AT THE CINEMA THROUGH THE LENSES OF THE IMAGINARY Abstract: Brazilian and European researches have been converging imaginary studies and film theory over the years. Nevertheless, there is a lack of books on the relations between symbolic meanings and film productions. Despite this, amongst well known publications as Edgar Morin’s Le cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire or Christian Metz’s Le signifiant imaginaire, lesser-known works like Michel Serceau’s Le cinéma et l’imaginaire could be useful to comprehend the 7th art under the influence of the imaginary.Keywords: Imaginary, image, cinema, researche, theory

From Discontinuity to Interruption

Some influential theologians argue that God’s presence in the world, and in the life of believers, takes place as an interruption. Central to the work of both the Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel and the Catholics Lieven Boeve and Christian Metz, the concept of interruption resonates with but is not the same as the ideas of rupture and discontinuity that anthropologists of Christianity have rendered important for anthropological debates about the nature of conversion and Christian understandings of time. This chapter examines what it would mean for these anthropological debates about the nature of cultural change and Christian temporality to shift toward a discussion of interruption understood in theological terms. The discussion is illustrated by materials drawn from the author’s fieldwork among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea.

Uma praia, uma pausa ou Da descrição no cinema de Abbas Kiarostami

O artigo versa sobre quatro filmes de Abbas Kiarostami no que compete à relação entre descrição e narração cinematográfica. Com o aporte da semiologia de Christian Metz e a crítica pós-estruturalista de Gilles Deleuze, identificamos algumas dinâmicas de significação que correm entre os procedimentos descritivos e narrativos. Pelo lado da semiologia, há uma profunda relação entre a pesquisa do cinema e a pesquisa da narrativa, relegando à descrição um papel menor. Pelo lado da taxonomia deleuzeana, narração e descrição coexistem de acordo com o funcionamento de cada regime de imagem. Em nossos esboços analíticos, o cinema de Kiarostami produz variações no interior de ambos os feixes teóricos.