In this rich, highly illustrated book, Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Sharing a lifetime of experience of writing about art, making films and installations, as well as curating exhibitions, she shows us how these may be brought into dialogue with insights from theory.
Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think – as artists and writers – about our own creative work. This is Mieke Bal at her most personal and her best.
Author(s): Mieke Bal
Edition: 1
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 512
Cover
Half-title
Refractions series
Title
Copyright information
Contents
List of Figures
Series Editor’s Preface
Author’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Iconomania – On the Thinking-Image and Madness
1. Introduction: Making as Thinking, and vice versa
Material Image-Thinking
Searching for a Term
Image-Thinking for Thought-Images
Thresholds: The Merging of Thinking, Imagining and Imaging
Overview of Chapters
Part I: Keys to Intermediality
2. Time-Space: Spatialising Film
Introduction: Beginning Becomes Entrance
Political Spacetime: Film in the Gallery
Social Relevance: Madness to Learn From
Forms of Madness
Beginning
Storybook
Picture Book
Working Through and Overcoming Iconography
‘Schizophrenia’: Two Sides to Every Story, Two Figures in Every Life
A Sense of an Ending
3. Who Speaks the Film, in Documentaries? A Thousand and One Voices
Introduction: Subject, Source, Speaker
Migratory Aesthetics and the Trouble with Voice
Voice and the Documentary Tradition
Murmuring Voices: Intimacy and Hybridity Within
Phantom Sentences
Dispersal of Voice
The ‘Other’ Tradition and Cultural Belonging
Beyond Aristotelian Time
Travelling Forking Paths
4. Multi-tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Pre-posterous History
Introducing Time’s Thought-Image: An Octopus
Togetherness in Time
Heterochrony Caught in the Act
From Anachronism to Pre-posterous History
It’s About Time!
5. Making Up, Making As: Fiction and/in/with Reality
Introduction: Think Again!
Becoming Vera in Free Indirect Discourse
Thinking in Film
Why Imaging and/or Thinking Move
Mastery, in Doubt
From Impatience as Lifestyle to Mis-Encounters
After-Effects and Pre-Figurations
Part II: Special Issues, Special Pleading
6. Showing Trauma? Difficulty and Necessity
Looking at Photographs
Trauma Predicaments
Alone Within Himself: Drama versus Narrative
Impossible Storytelling: Towards the Cinematic
A Way Out?
7. Agency, Facing
Introduction: Facing Migration
Abandoning Control
The Triple Act of Facing
Ideologies of the Face
Intercultural Ethics: Relationality across Gaps
Pre-posterous Time
Facing Restraint
Facing Speech
For Critical Freedom
8. Cultural Citizenship vs Identity
Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, Cultural
Becoming French in Cameroon and African in Russia
Becoming Pushkin
Pre-posterous Encounters of the Third Kind
Reality in Fiction
Memory, Nostalgia, Exile
Encounters of Cultural Citizenships
Impossible Cultural Citizenship
9. Affect as an Artistic-Political Strategy
Introduction: The Point of Affect
From ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi’ to ‘Emma Is Us’
Ambiguous Focalisation: Suspending Judgement
What Is Focalisation?
An Illness We All Have: Emotional Capitalism
Empathy: Siding with the Dying
Affective Things?
The Experience of Feeling-Looking
The Anthropomorphic Imagination
Affect, Medium and Mood
10. By Way of Conclusion – For Memory: Dis-remembered, Mis-remembered
Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought
Making Acts of Memory: Responsibility in the Present
Reunion, Resilience, Resistance
What Kinds of Memory Matter?
Failing the Past is Failing the Present
For a Different Mode of Thinking
Author’s Filmography
References
Selective Index of Names and Titles
Selective Index of Terms and Concepts
