Participation

Abstract

Aiming at rendering “somewhat irrelevant” the “question of sadism” in the critique of film’s “seductive epistemological promise,” Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argued for a “participation in the film” that is “at once self-reflexive and self-shattering.” Such participation may bring about the very panhuman condition of “being-togetherness” that Bersani and Dutoit have registered in the ontology of Alain Resnais’s and Terrence Malick’s films. This peculiar “community of all being” is based on a specific (and paradoxical) kind of movement within the spatiality of a remembrance engendered by the inhibition of movement. Certain films thus render possible connection and participation due to the mobility they entail.