Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image

Description

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come Notes For an Ethics of the Cinema I. Type II. Persona III. Divo Notes Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard 1 Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben The law of the crystal: Revealing the image from within Stabbing darkness in the back: The silence of the gesture Cinema: The sphere of pure means Notes 2 Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work Energeia, dunamis and gesture Gravity, grace and decreation Notes 3 Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple Boulevard du Temple The instant and the continuum Notes 4 Film-of-Life: Agamben’s Profanation of the Image “Images are beautiful” Redeeming the image The brazen image “The saved night” Acknowledgments Notes 5 Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body Neurological gaze Footprints Animals and machines Notes 6 Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On “Ciné-Trances” and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries Excursus—Manet (Mme Guillemet attending cinema) Cinema possessed In-conclusion: Prospects for a gestural cinema (from a filmmaker’s point of view) Notes 7 Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures Introduction Inhabiting language through gestures Gestures and the cinematic dispositif: Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead A gesture of profanation: Bill Viola’s The Greeting The potential of A New Life Conclusions Notes 8 Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics The internal tensions of Potentia Sight defects “To be present”—Beyond mediation Image Sub Specie Mortis Notes 9 Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive The witness The image Montage and history Notes 10 Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology after Auschwitz Pilgrimage and profanation Primal scenes Testimony and territory Here and elsewhere Notes Notes on Contributors Index