{"title":"The Time of Monsters: An Interview with Joan Fontcuberta","authors":"Albert Elduque, Joan Fontcuberta","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i19.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i19.05","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout his work, Catalan artist Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) has playfully reflected on the presumed truth claim of photography and on the possibilities of manipulation that this allows. In this interview, he discusses the technique of superimposition, most notably in spirit photography from the nineteenth century, and then comments on some works from his recent exhibition Monstres, which was held in Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona from October 2021 to January 2022. In this exhibition, Fontcuberta’s goal was twofold: to reflect on analogue photography as a perishable medium by using either rotten, burnt or devoured stills; and to interrogate the generation of new images by means of artificial intelligence. This dialogue will focus on some series from the exhibition, such as Trauma and Gastròpoda, in which the use of different conceptual and material layers becomes more noticeable, thus shedding new light on the topic of superimposition.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129953657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"X-Ray Vision: Surface and Depth in Aldir Mendes de Souza’s O homem que descobriu o nú invisível (1973)","authors":"S. Solomon","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i19.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i19.03","url":null,"abstract":"As a visual medium, cinema is an art of the surface. Bodies, objects, and environments are projected before us as two-dimensional images on the flattened surface of the screen, which provides only an impression of depth but which cannot be broached by the audience. Nevertheless, deep focus and 3D technology have sought to immerse the viewer in the world of the film, while film discourse more broadly has railed against ornamentation and superficiality in its bid to assert a certain depth of meaning. This article considers the tensions between surface and depth as they emerge in Aldir Mendes de Souza’s O homem que descobriu o nú invisível (1973), a Brazilian softcore sex comedy that makes particular use of X-ray technology for both serious and voyeuristic ends. Comparing the use of radiography in this film with the artist’s experimental work with X-rays elsewhere, this article interrogates distinctions between high and low culture, and between the literal surfaces and depths of the photographic image.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116652217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"News of the End of the World: The Essay Film as Mentality","authors":"Josep Maria Català Domènech","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.02","url":null,"abstract":"The contemporary essay film is situated within the deep transformations of cinema that led to post-cinema, just as it arises from the revolution experienced by the classic documentary, now transformed into the post-documentary, whose main axes are subjectivity and thought. Following the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, the essay film can be considered as a sign of a new image of thought derived from cinema but more complex. The essay mode in general, as a way of thinking, adapts to the complexities of the contemporary world through its fluid, rhizomatic and multidimensional condition. Likewise, based on the hypothesis that the essay form corresponds to a certain mentality anthropologically understood, it results in the existence of a post-subject that is especially evident with the essay film and that confronts the crisis of transcendental subjectivity that has characterized the twentieth-century thought.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122146733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Spectator’s Position as a Thinking Space for the Contemporary Essay Film: Face aux fantômes (2009) and Jaurès (2012)","authors":"Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.04","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims to carry out an analysis of the spectatorial position as a thinking space for the contemporary essay film based on the comparative study of two Francophone films: Face aux fantômes (Jean-Louis Comolli and Sylvie Lindeperg, 2009) and Jaurès (Vincent Dieutre, 2012). The dialogism of the essay film, the interpellation to the spectator to produce self-reflection on their position and critical thinking about the images shown, is then generated from the premise of identification. The analysis shows how Face aux fantômes offers an audiovisual thinking process on the mobilization of the gaze of the emancipated spectator theorized by Jacques Rancière, while Jaurès provokes the same reflection from the opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132987455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anachronism as Temporality of Memory in the Oeuvre of Pietro Marcello: An Interview with Bertrand Bacqué","authors":"Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez, Bertrand Bacqué","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.06","url":null,"abstract":"Bertrand Bacqué, Associate Professor at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva, discusses the work of Pietro Marcello, considered to be one of the most remarkable auteurs of the contemporary essay film and its audiovisual thinking process. His focus consists of the relationship to time, and anachronism as the temporality of memory.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129929315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unfolding Borders: For a Semiotics of Essayistic Border Images","authors":"Laura Rascaroli","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.03","url":null,"abstract":"Problematic ideological strategies of in/visibility are played out today around borders by exploiting advanced image-making technologies and hegemonic media discourses that produce “thin” border images lacking in semiotic complexity. This article responds to calls to move beyond the “line in the sand” metaphor by investigating essay films that experiment with a performative relationship with the border. Their “borderwork” is self-reflexive to the point of becoming a form of theory. To elucidate this theorization of the border, I invoke Derrida’s limitrophic method of “thickening” the limit, mediated via Deleuze’s notion of the fold. By comparing three case studies—Armin Linke’s Alpi (2011), Philip Scheffner’s Havarie (2016), and Tadhg O’Sullivan’s The Great Wall (2015)—I interrogate the strategies that essay films employ to operationalize borders. The article is a first attempt at a semiotic classification of film-essayistic border images, and a contribution to the understanding of essay film as limitrophic audiovisual thinking.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126512769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Postman’s Coming:” La Morte Rouge (soliloquio) and the Limits of Essayistic Thinking","authors":"George Kouvaros","doi":"10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2022.v10.i18.05","url":null,"abstract":"Positioning the essay film as a form of cinematic thinking enables a reconsideration of its different modalities, formal operations and philosophical influences. At the same time, it prompts us to reflect on its engagement with those elements of human experience that mark the limits of thought. Taking Víctor Erice’s La Morte Rouge (soliloquio) (2006) as its focus, this paper considers the ways in which Erice’s film explores elements of personal and collective experience that trigger an undoing of thought. What does the film’s rendition of this undoing imply about the nature of cinema? How do we register its effects in the images and sounds that characterize the director’s body of work?","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122826865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Hybrid Color Film: Multiplicity of Space, Time, and Matter","authors":"Olivia Kristina Stutz","doi":"10.31009/cc.2021.v9.i17.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2021.v9.i17.06","url":null,"abstract":"Hybrid color films of the 1920s such as The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)—that is, films comprising a mix of different historical color processes—are a particularly fruitful resource for the comparison of the silent era’s various color technologies. This article analyzes these cinematic hybridizations and argues that this type of film is much more than the sum of its parts. In embodying a multiplicity of layers of space, time, and color on a literal and metaphorical level, hybrid color films are not only symptomatic of the transformation of the medium in the 1920s but also symbolic of current approaches to film historiography based on media archaeology.","PeriodicalId":414949,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Cinema","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127939687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}