Losing Our Heads: Expanded Cinema and Unreason Between Javier Téllez and Carl Theodor Dreyer

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the rise of film installation as a consequence of cinema’s displacement in the digital age. This expansion of film exhibition to the gallery has given rise to what Raymond Bellour terms an other cinema, or a cinematic praxis that opens new possibilities for the theorization of the moving image, its history, and its relation to other disciplines. In a cinematic landscape marked by intermediality and transnationality, expanded cinema offers a path forward for filmmakers and moving-image artists in and from Latin America. In this article, I study the relation between cinema and madness in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and the 2004 film installation La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Rozelle Hospital) by Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. I argue that through his citation of Dreyer’s signature close-ups, his direct intervention in the original work, and his staging of projection, Téllez theorizes the relation between spectatorship and an embodied unreason by enacting a mimetic encounter between the audience and the mentally ill. Téllez embraces the legacy of avant-garde cinema, which sought to highlight film’s ability to suspend a cognitively oriented perception. By experimenting with the material basis of exhibition, Rozelle Hospital imagines a new audiovisual politics that stages an ethical encounter with the mentally ill through an embodied spectatorship.