Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema argues that art cinema draws attention to its disjointed, multi-parted form, but that criticism has too frequently sought to explain this complexity away by stitching the parts together in totalizing readings. This stitching together has often relied on
the assumption that the solution to art cinema's puzzles lies in interpreting each film as the expression of a focalizing character's internal disturbance. This book challenges this assumption. It argues that the attempt to explain formal complexity through this character-centric approach reduces
formal achievements and enigmatic characters to inadequate approximations of one another. Reference to character cannot fully tame unschematic and unpredictable combinations of - and collisions between - contradictory levels of narration, clashing styles, discontinuously edited shots, jarring
allusions, dislocated genre signifiers, and intermedial elements. Through close analyses of films by Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, and Kelly Reichardt, Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema offers an ethics of criticism that suggests that the
politics of art cinema's eccentric form are limited by character-centred readings. Each of the featured films presents inarticulate characters, whose emotional and intellectual lives are unknowable, further complicating the relationship between character and form. This book argues that, by
acknowledging this resistance to interpretation, critics can think in new ways about art cinema's interrogation of the possibilities of knowledge.
Author(s): Benedict Morrison
Series: Oxford English Monographs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 224
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Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: Articulating Art Cinema
The Many Faces of Film Articulation
Cinema’s Forms of Articulation
The Critical State of Art Cinema
Eccentric Inarticulacy
Critical Eccentricity
The Articulated Structure of this Book
1: Articulation in Ruins: Complicating Style in Germania anno zero
At Point Zero: Mise en Scène and the Ruins of Meaning
Ironic Causation: Manifold Explanation in Eccentric Play
Between Styles: The Synthesis of Realism and Formativism?
In Place of Meaning: The Ethics of Inarticulacy
2: Telling Tales: Complicating Narration in Journal d’un curé de campagne
The Diary’s Order Established
The Diary’s Order Challenged
The Diary’s Withdrawal from Time and Place
The Diary as Consolation
3: Untidying the Image: Complicating Editing in Belle de Jour
Cuts in the Film
Cuts in the Mind
A Surfeit of Significance
A Polluted Logic
An Irruption of Order
The Box Bursts Open
4: Queering Articulation: Complicating Bricolage in The Long Day Closes
Post-traumatic Articulation
Bricolaged Echoes in the Silence
Cultural Articulations
Radical Recontextualizations in The Long Day Closes
Inarticulate Character
Queering Inarticulacy
Silent Characters without Beginning and End
5: The Technology of Articulation: Complicating Intermedia in The Pillow Book
Losing Your Voice: Revenge in Place of Character
Dismembered Forms and the Inarticulate Body
Piles of Old Bones
Spinning Axes
Flattening Positions
Skin Deep
6: Indecipherable Lostness: Complicating Genre in Meek’s Cutoff
Articulating Genre
Meaning Cut Off
Getting Lost in the Western
Unstable Signifiers
The Threat of the Meaningless
Cultural Exchange
The Unknowing of Genre
Conclusion
The Haunted Cinema
Rhizomatic Structures
The Mythic Critic
Filmography
Primary texts
Other Films Referenced
Bibliography
Index
