Notes on Some Forms of Repetition

Abstract

Abstract Homay King’s “Notes on Some Forms of Repetition” offers an open-ended taxonomy of types of repetition found in moving images, with examples drawn from early cinema (Edison’s Fred Ott’s Sneeze), slapstick comedy (Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times), Disney animation (Pinocchio), the French New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville), documentary film (Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing), contemporary video art (Victor Burgin’s The Little House and Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV), and others. The forms of repetition defined and discussed include those found in free indirect cinema, reenactment, habit and rote repetition, automatism and comic repetition, and zoomorphism. Theoretical texts engaged with include Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition and Cinema 2: The Time-image; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry”; Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious; Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution and Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic; Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, and others.