Cinema and Sensation

by Beugnet, Martine

• ISBN13: 9780809328567
• ISBN10: 0809328569
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-29
• Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ Pr

Summary

Cinema and Sensation:French Film and the Art of Transgressionlooks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the reemergence of filmmaking practices (and, by extension, of theoretical approaches) that give precedence to cinema as the medium of the senses. France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the release, in close succession, of a series of films that exemplify a characteristic awareness of cinema's sensory impact and transgressive nature:Adieu;A ma soeur;Baise-moi;Beau Travail;La Blessure;La Captive;Dans ma peau;Demonlover;L'Humanite;Flandres;L'Intrus;Les Invisibles;Lady Chatterley;Lecons de tenebres;Romance;Sombre;Tiresia;Trouble Every Day;Twentynine Palms;Vendredi soir;La Vie nouvelle;Wild Side; andZidane, un portrait du XXIeme siecle. These films, among others, typify a willingness to explore cinema's unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually. Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Bataille, among others, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques, and motifs that allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching today's most burning sociocultural debatesfrom the growing supremacy of technology, to globalization, exile, and exclusion.

Author Biography

Martine Beugnet is a reader in film studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she heads the Film Studies Section.

Table of Contents

Beginnings	p. 1
Sombre	p. 1
Lecons de tenebres	p. 1
Cinema and sensation	p. 2
Doing away with the context?	p. 11
French cinema and transgression	p. 14
A 'third path'	p. 21
The 'precocious old age of the cinema'	p. 24
The 'precocious old age' of film theory and criticism	p. 26
The trouble with French cinema: film and transgression	p. 32
Horror that sticks	p. 41
Pronocracies	p. 47
Liminal visions	p. 54
The art of sensation	p. 59
The aesthetics of sensation	p. 63
The haptic and the optical	p. 65
From formlessness to immanence	p. 68
Synaesthesia	p. 72
Close-up	p. 88
The gaze of the inanimate	p. 108
The aesthetics of chaos	p. 113
Film bodies (becomings and embodiment)	p. 125
From genre to archetype	p. 125
Becomings	p. 129
Film bodies	p. 149
Corporate (dis)embodiment	p. 150
Becoming film	p. 170
Epilogue	p. 177
Bibliography	p. 179
Filmography	p. 189
Index	p. 190
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