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Pasolini's literature, film, theatre, and essays engaged with Classical tragedy from the mid-1960s onwards. As Bernhard Groß shows in his paper 'Reconciliation and Stark Incompatibility: Pasolini's "Africa" and Greek Tragedy', this engagement forms a modality in Pasolini's politics of aesthetics that seeks to grasp the fundamental transformation from a rural-proletarian to a petit-bourgeois Italy. Since the mid-'60s, Pasolini was concerned with the bourgeoisie and its utopian potentials, which he sought to make productive by reading Classical tragedy as a possibility to make contradictions visible. Pasolini realized his reading of the Classical tragedy by having 'Africa' and 'Europe' - as he understood them - confront one another without mediation. By means of film analyses and film theory, Groß argues that this confrontation, especially in the films on the ancient world, generates an aesthetic place where the incompatible can unfold in the spectators' experience.
The body of the actor : notes on the relationship between the body and acting in Pasolini's cinema
(2012)
Agnese Grieco's paper 'The Body of the Actor: Notes on the Relationship Between the Body and Acting in Pasolini's Cinema' deals with the specific physiognomy of the actor within Pasolini's 'cinema of poetry'. It argues that Pasolini's films allow the spectator to experience directly a complex and polyvalent reality beyond the traditional idea of 'representation'. As a fragment of that reality, actors quote and present themselves beyond and through their interpretations of a role. Instead of conceiving of the actor as a 'professional of fiction', Pasolini employs a variety of actors who are able fully to convey their own anthropological history. It is particularly the body of the actor, Grieco concludes, that becomes a door opening towards a deeper reality. For instance, the figure of Ninetto Davoli can push us back towards Greek antiquity, and the codified art of the comedian Totò or the iconic fixity of Maria Callas can interact with the African faces of the possible interpreters of an African Oresteia.
Slovenian partisan film is a term which denotes films glorifying Slovenian communist-led guerrilla fighters (so-called 'partisans'), who resisted the German and Italian occupying forces during WW II. These films were made during the decades of communist rule in post-war Yugoslavia and were an important part of the official ideological propaganda. Since the fall of communism in 1989 and Slovenia's secession from former Yugoslavia two years later, however, partisan films have fallen into complete neglect. This is regrettable since they not only represent an important (and not necessarily unattractive) part of Slovenian film history but also allow unique insights into the complexities of the official ideology during the decades of communist rule in the country (1945−89). Namely, the existing ideology was not as simple as might have seemed from the outside: while the Slovenian Communist party had no problems with class issues (class inequalities were regarded according to the Marxist agenda as bad and everything was actually done to eliminate them), there were many important areas of social life that were neglected or dealt with in ideologically relatively ambivalent terms.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's paper 'Cinematographic Aesthetics as Subversion of Moral Reason in Pasolini's Medea' explores the 1969 film "Medea". Pasolini's Medea, masterfully played by Maria Callas, betrays her homeland and her origin, stabs both her children, sets her house on fire, and dispossesses Jason of his sons' corpses. But Deuber-Mankowsky argues that it is ultimately not these acts that render the film particularly disturbing and disconcerting, but, rather, the fact that the spectator is left behind in suspension precisely because Medea cannot be easily condemned for her acts. Pasolini's film and its cinematographic aesthetics thereby not only subvert the projection of Medea into the prehistorical world of madness and perversion, but also undermine belief in the validity of the kind of moral rationality developed and constituted in an exemplary way by Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Practical Reason". In particular, Pasolini seems to relate conceptually to Nietzsche's artistic-philosophical transfiguration of Dionysus and to accuse belief in a world of reasons of failing to grasp the groundlessness, irrationality, or even a-rationality of reason itself.
'Perhaps the sodomites should be written out of Dante's "Inferno"', Jarman wrote in his journal on 1 August 1990: 'I'll offer myself as the ghostwriter.' What does he mean by 'ghostwriter' here? How queer is this odd speech-act? What is he offering to do to the homophobic landscape of the "Inferno", that forbiddingly sealed textual prison, with his Hollywood pitchman's casual bid to 'write out' the sodomites as if they were a slight embarrassment to the divine justice system? Is he speaking in jest as a writer of gay satires and sacrilegious memoirs, or in deadly earnest as an activist who had renounced the middle-class pretensions and frivolities of the pre-AIDS gay world? [...] Jarman counters the trope of homosexual theft visually with the triumphant figure of Man with Snake. The Dantesque merging of snake and thief is replaced by an erotic dance in which the gilded youth raises his phallic partner above his head and seductively kisses it on the mouth. Whereas Dante would have us notice the grotesque parody of the Trinity played out in the seventh bolgia - with the unchanging Puccio as God the Father, the two-natured Agnello-Cianfa as Christ, and the fume-veiled Buoso receiving his forked tongue from the serpent Francesco in a demonic replay of the gift of tongues from the Spirit - Jarman clears away all overdetermined theological meanings to revel in the purely aesthetic impact of the phallic dancer. All the ghosts from Dante's snakepit are conjured away in the film and replaced with the solid presence of a single gorgeously spotlit male body. Ghostwriting Dante, for Jarman, meant more than a mere appropriation of homoerotic scenes from the "Inferno" into his screenplay. It meant a complete reimagining of their aesthetic significance within the filmscape of his Dantean transformations.
The 1935 Fox Films "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship's boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film's social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later 'infernal' sequences. [...] Spectacular admonition and concern about the ruthless pursuit of wealth are the main features which link this "Inferno" of the thirties to the one that had appeared some six hundred years earlier. Wealth and avarice were, of course, demonstrably serious concerns for Dante: as Peter Armour, for example, has shown, there is a recurrent and pervasive concern with money, its meaning, and its misuse throughout the "Commedia". So it is not surprising that the "Inferno" should also have been appropriated by social critics some hundred years before the 1935 Hollywood fable. [...] Some of the narrative and visual patterns in "Dante's Inferno" imply an uneasy underlying vision of the movie industry and its practices. Other productions, publicity, and journalism of the time reinforce suggestions of such a metafictional approach to movies, morality, and the market in the 1935 "Dante's Inferno".
This article shows that 'tension' cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.
This contribution consists of an explanatory introduction and extracts from recent fiction works, 'White Tales' (novel) and 'Peep Show' (novel in progress). Both fiction works explore the spiralling tensions between intensity and excess, desire and jouissance, via the structure and methodology pioneered in the author's previous work with 'subconscious narrative' film. The result of this prior work was the 18-minute subconscious narrative film 'The Dangers', which explores an experimental narrative structure and is fascinated by the creation and sustenance of suspense, particularly when created with the notion of the uncanny in mind.
Walter Salles is probably the most widely known Brazilian director and producer. This article offers a portrait of his work over the last two decades as part of the cinematic and cultural changes that took place in Brazil. It starts with a historical overview of Brazilian film history and will then take a closer look at the films directed by Salles and his activities as producer. By looking at the evolution of the Brazilian film industry in the last ten to fifteen years in terms of market structures as well as aesthetic qualities, two major references become apparent: the more (but not only) commercial oriented productions of Globo Filmes, which often meet public taste and rely on a well-proven television language; second, the movies of Walter Salles as well as the films produced by Videofilmes, a company run and founded in 1987 by him and his brother, the documentarist João Moreira Salles. Videofilmes not only fosters many of the somewhat marginal, smaller film projects, but also serves as support for more artistically orientated movies.
At the beginning of every story of murder there is always a body. If the murderer is a serial killer, there is, of course, more than one. More importantly, the bodies left by the serial killer are not likely to be intact and whole. What he leaves behind and what we, the audience, will get to see is the body in pieces, dismembered, scattered. A series of snapshots, partial views, and close-ups, inflicting cold sharp shocks, is all we may glimpse: the head of Benjamin Raspail floating in a jar of formaldehyde in The Silence of the Lambs, a finger removed by the serial killer from his landlord’s hand in Kalifornia, a ziploc bag of fingers recovered from a flooded drainpipe in When The Bough Breaks, a surgically severed hand used to leave misleading fingerprints on a wall at a crime scene in Seven.