Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2) (remove)
Keywords
- Dauer (2) (remove)
Mafrouza is a twelve-hour-long documentary by French director Emanuelle Demoris, shot in a now-demolished neighbourhood in Alexandria, Egypt. Demoris is one of a long chain of western filmmakers who appeal to some form of 'taking one's time' as an instrument for - morally, politically, epistemologically - adequate representation. Based on the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Eduard Glissant, and Poor Theory, this chapter evaluates what happens when a film adopts a strategy of deferral in cases in which it is not clear how questions of 'doing justice' could be resolved. Using long duration and an insistence on the quotidian, Demoris's film forces us to think about the conditions that make pronouncements about character, situation, and narrative possible, continuously postponing the moment when it will become possible to say: 'this film is about …'. By setting itself up for failure, the film proposes one possible approach to the ethics and politics of visibility.
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.