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Intellect Books - Robert Furze

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159 pages

English

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Description

Narrative and spectacle describe two extremes of film content, but the oeuvres of John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg resist such categorization. Instead, Robert Furze argues, the defining characteristic of these directors’ respective approaches is that of “visceral” cinema—a term that illustrates the anxiety these filmmakers provoke in their audiences. Cassavetes demonstrates this through disregard for plot structure and character coherence, while Cronenberg's focus is on graphic depictions of mutilation, extreme forms of bodily transformation, and violence.

The Visceral Screen sets out to articulate alternative ways of appreciating film aesthetics outside the narrative/spectacle continuum. Cassavetes and Cronenberg are established auteurs, but the elements of their films that appear to be barriers to their artistic status—for example, slipshod method and lingering violence or pre-digital special effects—are reassessed here as other indicators of creativity. In this way, Furze encourages debates of what makes a film good or bad—beyond how much it is seen to adhere to particular, established models of filmmaking.

Prologue

Cassavetes, Cronenberg, Barthes: A literature review

Gestation

Visceral

Hidden

The viewer

The chapters to follow: An overview

Chapter 1: The Visceral: From Adjective to Noun

Excess

Legibility

Semiology

Denotation

The visceral

Chapter 2: The Auteur and the Visceral Sense

The place of the author

The out-of-control auteur

The imperfect auteur

The auteur and the visceral sense: John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg

John Cassavetes

David Cronenberg

A few words on cult cinema

Chapter 3: John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg: Lists and Emptiness

Cassavetes, Cronenberg and the DVD special feature

Lists

Emptiness

Semiotics or semiology?

Arbitrariness

Paradigm/syntagm

Chapter 4: Effects

Spectacle

Attractions

Digital

Horrors

Camera Lucida

Theatre

Objects

Videodrome

Faces

Limits

Love Streams

From film to video games

The Path

Digital/analogue

Reaching out, pulling away

Conclusion: The visceral ‘wounds’

Chapter 5: Cities

Princes and shards: Ideology’s response to the visceral

Eastern Promises

Views from bridges

No centre

Terror

Husbands

Freedom

Division

Conclusion

Sujets

Popular Culture

Película fotográfica

Film director

General officer

Television

General

Cultural Studies

Radio

Film

Cinéma

Cinema

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 décembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783203727
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3800€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Heather Gibson
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-370-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-371-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-372-7
Printed and bound TJ International
Contents
Acknowledgements
Biographical Note
Prologue
Cassavetes, Cronenberg, Barthes: A literature review
Gestation
Visceral
Hidden
The viewer
The chapters to follow: An overview
Chapter 1: The Visceral: From Adjective to Noun
Excess
Legibility
Semiology
Denotation
The visceral
Chapter 2: The Auteur and the Visceral Sense
The place of the author
The out-of-control auteur
The imperfect auteur
The auteur and the visceral sense: John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg
John Cassavetes
David Cronenberg
A few words on cult cinema
Chapter 3: John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg: Lists and Emptiness
Cassavetes, Cronenberg and the DVD special feature
Lists
Emptiness
Semiotics or semiology?
Arbitrariness
Paradigm/syntagm
Chapter 4: Effects
Spectacle
Attractions
Digital
Horrors
Camera Lucida
Theatre
Objects
Videodrome
Faces
Limits
Love Streams
From film to video games
The Path
Digital/analogue
Reaching out, pulling away
Conclusion: The visceral ‘wounds’
Chapter 5: Cities
Princes and shards: Ideology’s response to the visceral
Eastern Promises
Views from bridges
No centre
Terror
Husbands
Freedom
Division
Conclusion
Appendices
Appendix A: The visceral — A relational model
Appendix B: Cassavantes and Cronenberg — An annotated filmography
Appendix C: Glossary
References
Bibliography
Filmography
Acknowledgements
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
e e cummings
The publication of this book would not have been possible without the help of many people.
I would like to thank Intellect Books, particularly Jelena Stanovnik and May Yao, and the School of Communications at Dublin City University.
Dr Jim Rogers, Dr Sheamus Sweeney and Dr Laura Canning, who sustained Robert with conversation and coffee and buoyed his spirits throughout the arduous journey of writing his Ph.D. and whose continued support has helped with the publication of The Visceral Screen .
Dr Ernest Mathijs for his words of encouragement and Dr Bernard Perron for what might have been. Patrick Hooke, for the long chats that often led to the unearthing of obscure films and the loyal friendship that Robert valued so much. Anthony Cooper, for being on our team and enduring Robert’s slightly subversive sense of humour.
Robert’s family, especially his mother Angela and his late father Ronald. You all played a huge part in Robert’s life. Your friendship and camaraderie, wisdom, advice and guidance touched him deeply.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to Dr Pat Brereton. Dr Brereton has worked with determination and devotion to see that Robert’s dedication to his art would not go unnoticed, and without him this publication would not have been possible. Dr Brereton inspired Robert and helped him to believe in himself. It is with my deepest gratitude to him that Robert’s spirit lives on through The Visceral Screen .
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more “I love you’s.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Tina Cooper, August 2014
Biographical Note
Dr Robert Furze (1971–2013) was passionate about film, and an accomplished poet. Born in Germany but reared in England, Robert relocated to Dublin, Ireland in 2002 where he lived with his partner Tina until the time of his premature death.
This book represents the culmination of a process of doctoral research that saw Robert awarded a Ph.D. in 2011 at Dublin City University (DCU). His thesis, The Visceral Screen: Between the Cinemas of John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg, a Barthesian Perspective , received funding support from the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS). By 2013 Robert was in the process of recasting this dissertation for the current book, work that was posthumously brought to completion by his former mentor at DCU, Dr Pat Brereton.
Robert was a committed and highly respected academic, lecturing students of media and film at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His articles and critical reviews are found in the pages of various academic journals. Beyond his teaching work in DCU, Robert regularly led classes in film studies at Filmbase, Dublin’s not-for-profit resource centre for emerging Irish film-makers.
His first collection of poetry, Keep Walking , was published by Spout Publications in 2000.
Have we already forgotten? Why we got into this in the first place? How it was that the moving lights, the washes of colour, first brought us to this world and thanked us, with their generous presentation of themselves, for being there with them? Has the memory faded so radically of those first inklings of beauty, scattering in all its ungraspable ephemerality across our skins as much as our eyes, beams traversing and dragging into motion muscle and bowel, as music drags us to dance?
Sean Cubitt (2001: vii)
[S]omething in the two faces exceeds psychology, anecdote, function, exceeds meaning without, however, coming down to the obstinacy in presence shown by any human body.
Roland Barthes (1977: 54)
Well, I know what it is
But I don’t know where it is,
Where it is.
Well, I know where it is
But I don’t know what it looks like
What it looks like.
Talking Heads, “Perfect World” (1985)
Prologue
W hat does cinema do that language cannot? At root, this is the subject of my book. Using two directors who are radically different from each other in their methods and intents, the techniques employed here endeavour to ask questions of cinema that challenge readings of the medium and that are centred on issues of narrative and cause-and-effect, alongside other forms of legibility read through consideration of the thrill of the spectacle. It extols the virtue of an aesthetic that defies understanding. In so doing it asks why the established language of cinema, and of the societal forces within which this language operates, is inadequate as a means of penetrating the essence of certain aspects of the filmed image. Along the way, it will discuss film in relation to other arts, in particular painting and sculpture.
Cassavetes, Cronenberg, Barthes: A literature review
As is made explicit in the subtitle of The Visceral Screen , the focus of this book will be the films of two directors, John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg. Why, and how, these two film-makers’ works are seen to be visceral will be argued in the chapters to come. So, too, will the theories of Roland Barthes, whose writings suggest a method through which the films can be read. Together, these three individuals – two film-makers and one theorist – come together to propose a definition of visceral cinema. To this end, the following literature review is intended as a way into the most pertinent academic resources that support this study.
John Cassavetes
There is an enduring, heroic vision of John Cassavetes that permeates much of the writing about the director. Much of this stems from Cassavetes’ own vociferous antagonism to the Hollywood system – a system that sustained his career as an actor, 1 just as it provided funding for his more personal projects (ones that are perceived as reactions to the more scripted, polished and audience-friendly products of the Hollywood studio). While suggestions that his films were entirely improvised (begun by the insertion of a written credit at the end of his first film, Shadows ([1959]) 2 have been exposed as an oversimplification (King, 2004), the significance of the director’s work has resulted from the interplay between the life of the man, his close friends and family, and the films they make together away from studio interference.
Interest in Cassavetes is therefore in danger of being largely biographical in its consideration of the work. In large part this is attributable to the books written by Ray Carney (1985, 1994, 2000, 2001a). There is also the collection of interviews with Cassavetes compiled and edited by Carney (2001b), numerous academic articles and the author’s website. 3 This collected prose attests to an image of the film-maker that is inseparable from the life he lead. The films are therefore an allegory of the life and vice versa; and both are resistant to the rules of aesthetics and narrative coherence imposed by Hollywood’s dominance. Carney extols the necessity for a biographical focus by reports from the productions themselves, and from watching the maverick at work (1994). 4 Affirmation of this approach is further encouraged by Ventura (2007), and implicitly by Cassavetes himself, who commissioned the author to write a day-to-day journal on the making of the director’s last, fully independent film, Love Streams (1984). The shared testament of these biographically inflected studies is that Cassavetes has no peers, certainly not in contemporary American cinema, w