Chris Marker Research Articles

Cinema e História: documentário de arquivo como lugar de memória

O artigo analisa a relação entre cinema e história considerando esse suporte como um 'lugar de memória'. Para isso, analisa-se o filme A Espiral (1975), dirigido por Chris Marker e Armand Mattelart, um documentário montado com materiais pesquisados em arquivos que se dedica a analisar a Unidade Popular no Chile. Após o golpe de Estado de 1973, seus realizadores pretenderam construir um conhecimento histórico que combatia a visão de que a ditadura 'normalizava' o caos instaurado no país, denunciando que o governo de Salvador Allende havia sido vítima de um grande boicote organizado pela direita. Nesse sentido, a montagem organiza um dossiê com base em 'provas' encontradas em arquivos.

Art History in the Cinema Age

AbstractIn the art biennales of today, video has become, like it or not, a universal tool, a sort of “green card” for today’s art. It forms a convenient platform, especially when used with subtitles and especially for the artists of emerging countries, as long as they have access to this technique.Could the art history film equally become a language shared by the community of art historians? This type of film is characterised by the collaboration of a filmmaker and an art historian, such as occurred when Roberto Longhi and Umberto Barbaro together produced their film Carpaccio in 1948. Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim and Carlo Argan have analysed cinema in this regard. Others have practised it in undertaking art history: Kenneth Clark is one example. Another is Carlo Ragghianti, who made 20 critofilms between 1948 and 1964 which he defined as “a reading and a critical analysis of artistic language realised through the visual language of cinema”.Is our contemporary era, marked as it is by the globalisation of art and the proliferation of films on art (documentaries, “art films”, experimental films, biopics), beginning thus to create its own art history? If so, of which sort?This art history through film has a comparative intention, marked by a re-reading of the art of the past, in the way that Bill Viola, for example, is enlivening painting. It has the potential to transform connoisseurship by enabling a new relationship to emerge between the eye and the artwork, but it is also a post-colonial history which bursts the boundaries between ethnographic films like those of Flaherty or Les Maîtres fous of Jean Rouch (1954) or Les Statues meurent aussi of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and films of today’s highly ritualised “performance art” manifestations. As well it brings consideration to new approaches, such as those of the neuro-sciences and questions the force of images (David Freedberg) and their “agency” (Gell). Henri Storck has written: “The eye of the camera is much more powerful than our own”.In his book L’Intemporel (1973), Malraux wrote that “the museum of the audio-visual” had replaced the “museum of the imaginary”. With video and digital art, the art history film has entered a new era, while still remaining an important element of the teaching of art history, as had been wished for from very early on since the 1950s by the art historian Pierre Francastel.Already in the 1960s UNESCO played an important part in searching out and compiling an inventory of resources relating to film on art. Such investigation needs to be resumed today. But above all, it is the history of the “art history film” which still remains to undertaken at a time when the challenges of a now polycentred world are sketching out a different future.

Signs Without Name

This paper argues that Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil derives its affective force from doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty that reveal a twofold synthesis of actual and virtual. While a focus upon the material, ever in relation to transient yet lingering sensations, cannot discharge the power and force of the film, this paper endeavours nevertheless to assess and evoke Marker and Deleuze's own interrogative methods that thoroughly explore, in the manner of a revelatory ‘schizoanalysis’ or empiricism, molecular and variable operations beneath our ‘molar’ structures and organisations. As Sans Soleil's voiceover states, ‘If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black’, a provocative remark that invokes indefinable singularities and the darkness of a wound, cracking of time and splitting of self in film, life and death. Considerations of death, consciousness and subjectivity extend this paper's examinations.

Artistic Ambitions of Screen Document at the Turn of the Century

The article deals with the auteur film, a specific phenomenon in the documentary cinema of the turn of the 21st century as exemplified by the works of such outstanding masters as Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, Godfrey Reggio, Wim Wenders. The text is part of a large monograph devoted to the history of world documentary (publications in Issues 7, 8).

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text

This collection of essays, selected from over sixty papers given at a 2007 Deleuze conference at the University of South Carolina, must have presented an organizational challenge. The designated fields were upscaled prairies: literary, artistic, and philosophical production viewed from a Deleuzian perspective, as well as analyses of Deleuze's explorations of ontological and epistemological concepts. The resulting volume does its best to recognize this rhizomatic complexity. Its three unequal sections — ‘Text/Literature’, ‘Image/Art’, ‘Philosophy’ — do orient the discussion but also allow for multiple transversal connections. In the first group, two essays on Beckett (by Ronald Bogue and Colin Gardner) present, on the one hand, the figure of the ‘landscape’ as a recurrent participant in key Deleuzian concepts such as faciality, percepts, and affects, and, on the other, a discussion of Deleuze's L'Épuisé, the text devoted to Beckett's television plays. (The latter contributor unfortunately cites the former in calling Dream of Fair to Middling Women a ‘fragment’, whereas it is a full-length novel — Beckett's first). The section also includes a fascinating essay by Sarah Posman that uses Deleuze as a go-between in an encounter between Gertrude Stein and Henri Bergson, by means of their attachment to (especially cinematic) movement. The second section comprises a rich diversity of engagements with the artistic image. These include Nadine Boljkovac's analysis of the Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘desiring-machine’ as suggested by Chris Marker's compelling and beautiful 1962 film La Jetée. A practising artist, Jondi Keane, examines the notion of embodiment in relation to conceptualization, perception, and action. Most impressive of all is the careful essay by Elizabeth Grosz, which forges a connection between the vibrancy of affect and the intensity of artistic production, arguing that ‘art is where intensity is most at home’ (p. 86). In her essay ‘Why is Deleuze an Artist-Philosopher?’, Julie Kuhlkens rescues the term from its pejorative usage, arguing convincingly that Deleuze (like Nietzsche) is an artist-philosopher (rather than a ‘philosophers’ philosopher') in the sense that his relation with art is not historical or mythical but future-oriented and creative. Her characterization of Deleuze's mode of philosophizing is structurally underlined by the fact that, while seven essays tumble out of the middle section on ‘Image/Art’, only two feature in the last section, on ‘Philosophy’. Constantin Boundas's essay posits Deleuze as a philosopher of freedom, though one that is productive of a series of paradoxes. The final contribution in the volume, by Hélène Frichot, uses Deleuze's commentary on Spinoza to set out three steps towards the refuge of beatitude, understood as a mode where the active power of existing is most fully expressed in its milieu. This attractively written essay is exemplary in terms of its imaginative presentation and its proficiency in drawing together many of the volume's threads. In a pluriform collection such as this, one would not expect all essays to be as scintillating as those of Grosz and Frichot — one entitled ‘(Giving) Saving Accounts’, for all its commitment, should have received much sterner editing — but all in all this is a valuable addition to Deleuzian scholarship, and one that will (as Deleuze would have celebrated) attract a multidisciplinary readership.

Artistic Ambitions of Screen Document at the Turn of the Century

The article deals with the auteur film, a specific phenomenon in the documentary cinema of the turn of the 21st century as exemplified by the works of such outstanding masters as Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, Godfrey Reggio, Wim Wenders. The text is part of a large monograph devoted to the history of world documentary.

The Elephants at the End of the World: Chris Marker and Third Cinema

In March 1967 Chris Marker attended a screening of Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam) in support of the long strike at the Rhodiaceta factory that year. From 1967 to 1977 Marker worked with the SLON collective, workers and other film‐makers both on militant films during the events of May 1968 and, equally importantly, on counter‐information films in solidarity with the struggle of the Third World revolutionary movements. These films, which do not separate political content from aesthetic enquiry, demonstrate Marker's aesthetic in which editing represents a political stake. By pushing back the limits of the language of film, rejecting a classical aesthetic and bringing about an encounter between the film‐maker and the filmed through the gaze, Chris Marker makes his work political.

"The Ultimate Doomed Victims of the Romantic Dream": Jean-Luc Godard/Peter Whitehead

And what about you? What are you looking for? Rene Daumal, Mont Analogue (1939) An exploration of the relationship between the work of Peter Whitehead and Jean- Luc Godard allows us to open a new chapter in the history of comparative arts. Godard's artistic initiatives have never ceased to inspire filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians. But what other artist has founded a publishing house in order to transcribe and publish Godard's cinematic work, as Peter Whitehead did in 1966 with Lorrimer Books? What other artist has had the courage to declare, through the intermediary of one of his fictional characters, that he is in love with him? (As is all beauty. Even your own. Poor Godard. I'm sure if met him I'd fall in love with him!)1 In Peter Whitehead's case, his admiration for Godard's films does not come down only to being happily inspired by Godard's categorical freedom, or even to generating a profound reflection on the forms and power of the images; they are a motif throughout his own work, an obsession, a foundational myth. In Peter Whitehead's pantheon we find Gaia, Isis, Horus, Hathor, Freud, the CIA- and Jean- Luc Godard. The Fable as Fact In the following interview, Peter Whitehead talks about and analyzes the details of his meetings with the creator of Les Carabiniers, his awareness of the ways in which such work has influenced his own, and the development of these relationships. In his novels, Whitehead credits Godard with his shiftfrom documentaries to fiction. In the novel Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, a character writes to the protagonist- an alter ego of Whitehead- explaining that seeing Pierrot le Fou made me realize you must write fictional stories. Give up all this documentary stuff. Like Godard, just write, anything, make it crazy and wild and unexpected, but not real. Surreal. About consciousness, not perception.2 Whitehead's admiration and emulation, however obvious and thematic, derives not from a direct borrowing but from shared influences and passions between the two filmmakers, starting with the work of Ingmar Bergman, whom Godard wrote about in a memorable article (Bergmanorama, Cahiers du Cinema 83) and to which Whitehead has made numerous references in his novels. Lorrimer Books also published the shooting script of Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) in 1970. Structuralism, situational thought, the nouveau roman, Marxism- Leninism, Jacques Lacan, fundamental anarchism, a passionate return to our classical and modern heritage (Mozart, Goya, Joyce, and so on)- the cultural foundations of the Eu ro pe an intellectual landscape pervade the speculative choices of both Godard and Whitehead. Sometimes Whitehead's propositions anticipate Godard's initiatives: for instance, the play of the subtitles in the 1963 short Jeanette Cochrane, a film that anticipates Godard's work on Une femme mariee in 1964. The issue here is not to identify the trailblazer but rather to demonstrate how active, creative, and fertilizing Whitehead's understanding of Godard's work is. One of the most striking symptoms of this is undoubtedly the following quote from the novel Tonite Let's All Make Love in London: I also saw Pierrot le Fou . . . Godard really is a hopeless romantic. Is the artist not always a Dostoyevskian idiot?3- that is to say, the very same figure by which Godard portrayed himself as a prince/idiot in Soigne la droite in 1987, a film that Peter Whitehead had not yet seen at the time of writing. Romantic Ideals and Civil Poetry What Peter Whitehead recognizes in Jean- Luc Godard about himself, and what he interprets from a privileged perspective, is the romantic principle. This theory, expounded by Friedrich Schiller and subsequently reconsidered around 1800 in Iena by members of the Athaneum, concerns the necessary connection between aesthetic and po liti cal revolution.4 Born from this is the impossibility of dissociating art from politics, theory, and poetry, and an essayist conception of disciplines, an absolute liberty of structure of which the film essays of Godard and Whitehead- as well as those of Chris Marker- constitute the major illustrative works of the twentieth century. …

Introduction

Introduction Ginette Vincendeau, Editor (bio) The year 2009 was awash with fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the French New Wave, from the French consulate in Hong Kong to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Ciné Lumière in London to the Vieille Charité in Marseille and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and many other places in between. Festivals, retrospectives, and conferences commemorated what has become the landmark film movement in French cinema, widely seen as “an alternative cinema that was personal, radical and independent” whose effects “are still with us today.”1 As these words (culled from the Irish Film Institute program—but I could have picked any number of other sources) make clear, the dominant tone has been one of celebration. It is with this in mind that I approached the contributors to this In Focus feature. All are recognized experts on the French New Wave and on this period of French film history through their publications, but all share the desire to challenge our vision of the movement, or at the very least to push the boundaries beyond the recognized canon of filmmakers—traditionally understood as comprising two groups, one around the Cahiers du cinéma (François Truffaut, Jean- Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette), the other the “Left Bank” filmmakers Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker. Not that there is not a lot to celebrate about the French New Wave. Undoubtedly the nouvelle vague represented a break in filmmaking practice at the turn of the 1960s, introducing new ways of making films outside the mainstream industry, spreading the use of lighter technologies, ushering in an entire new generation of directors, stars, cinematographers, producers, and composers. It also, significantly, revolutionized the way people saw films and the way they wrote about them, in particular popularizing the politique des auteurs. This familiar [End Page 135] “legend,” or “myth” in Antoine de Baecque’s terms,2 whose gods are François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, surrounded by the other directors mentioned above, has been remarkably successful at perpetuating itself. This is in part due to the fact that most are still making films fifty years later (and in many cases films that still matter), as are many of the stars concerned—Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Léaud, to name but two. The brilliance, charm, and freshness of the films is clearly another important factor. For each new generation of film students and cinephiles, the modernist yet elegiac black-and-white visions of Paris offered by Breathless (À bout de souffle [ Jean-Luc Godard, 1960]) and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7 [Agnès Varda, 1962]); the cruel yet ardent sexual games of Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous appartient [ Jacques Rivette, 1960]), Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste [François Truffaut, 1960]), Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol,1960), and Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962); the sincerity and intensity of The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups [Truffaut, 1959]) and Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais,1959), all come as a fresh revelation. In short, these films of fifty years ago have a nonchalance and modernity that is still sexy and “cool” today. Wittingly or not, the New Wave directors were adept at perpetuating their own legend through a trick of historiography. Central to this is the famous polemical article by François Truffaut titled “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” originally published in Cahiers du cinéma in January 1954,3 in which Truffaut ferociously attacked French mainstream cinema, and in particular the somber melodramas and costume films of the so-called Tradition of Quality. The article spearheaded a veritable campaign by Truffaut and others such as Godard and Chabrol to denigrate mainstream French cinema and position themselves as the figures of renewal. This classic avantgardist strategy, aimed at creating a “distinction” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) within the French cinematic field between the new generation and the rest, was successful not only in promoting the new filmmakers as both critics and cineastes, but also in creating a historiographical vacuum around the New Wave. For a long time, and to a large...

Towards a New Image of Politics: Chris Marker's Staring Back

Towards a New Image of Politics: Chris Marker's Staring Back

The personal camera: subjective cinema and the essay film

The essay film: problems, definitions, textual commitments -- The metacritical voice(over) of the essay film: Harun Farocki, found footage and the essayist as spectator -- The musealisation of experience: Chris Marker's digital subject between archive, museum and database -- Performance and negotiation: Jean-Luc Godard plays Jean-Luc Godard -- First-person filmmaking: history, theory, practices -- The diary film: Aleksandr Sokurov's Spiritual Voices and the feeling of time -- The notebook film: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the film that cannot be made -- The self-portrait film: Michelangelo's last gaze.

Aesthetic realism and subjectivation. From Chris Marker to the Medvedkin Groups

In a well-known discussion between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from 1972 on the relationship between intellectuals and power, Foucault states that the intellectual’s traditional task has been to say the truth to those who haven’t seen it yet and to say the truth in the name of those who are not able to say it. Consequently “conscience and eloquence” are the traditional characteristics of the politicized intellectual. Against this characterization, Foucault argues that a change has happ...

Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (review)

Reviewed by: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography Guy Westwell Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Pp. xix + 293. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper). This edited collection of essays explores the complex relationship between photography and cinema. Or, as the editors eloquently put it, Still Moving invites readers to "… follow the lines of flight that spin out of this generative and irresolvable encounter between stasis and motion" (9). At the outset the editors are at pains to stress the contingent and diffcult relationship between moving and still images, whether examined in relation to their entangled histories or within the contemporary moment of the digital turn. They have also cast a wide net for contributors and the collection includes a range of voices—film scholars, art historians, artists, filmmakers, curators—that certainly provide the reader with a wide range of styles and perspectives. Practitioners include Rebecca Baron, Zoe Beloff, Nancy Davenport and Atom Egoyan. The interview with Baron and Beloff's essay on the film and photographic documentation of mental illness in the early twentieth century are particularly illuminating in their corroboration and exploration of the themes and issues that appear in the more scholarly articles. The book is organised into three sections. The first section contains articles that are explicitly or implicitly engaged with the question of referentiality. Tom Gunning's article is excellent and Tim Corrigan provides a useful potted history of the essay film, with a particular focus on Chris Marker's, The Koreans (1959) and Letters from Siberia (1958). Corrigan makes a convincing case that Marker, and this particular moment in Marker's career, is a key moment in the history of both film and photography and that his experiments with the essay film format chart an "… essential modern territory between images where the fading spaces and black time lines ask the film viewer to become a thinker" (58–9). Indeed, many of the essays in the collection gravitate towards this historical period, as a formative moment in which the interpenetration of the two media was actively explored. For example, Juan A. Suarez provides a detailed account of the [End Page 266] interrelationship between experimental sound/music (and in particular, the concept of "noise") and 1960s structural film. By lending structural film an ear, as Suarez says, this essay certainly helps the editors deliver on their promise to complicate their object of study and the article is thought-provoking and frustrating in equal measure in its capacity to problematize the relationship between still and moving image and its caginess about engaging this central issue directly. The second section focuses more directly on politics through a focus on questions of nation, memory and history. Jean Ma's article on the Taiwanese film, A City of Sadness (1989) is indicative in its use of the collection's recurring theoretical reference points (namely, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes). Activated by a line of inquiry related to Taiwan's relationship with political repression, Ma successfully deploys and deconstructs these theorists in her examination of how photography is central to the film's "… confrontation with the real casualties of history, its endeavour to represent an occluded past from the perspective of the victims of state violence and political terror" (102). In an in-depth analysis, Karen Beckman teases out themes of stasis and movement, and vertical and horizontal organisation in Amores Perros (2000) while Rita Gonzalez's essay focuses on trends within contemporary Chicano, or rasquache, cinema, and details a vibrant, new and potentially utopian synthesis of photography, film and much else. Gonzalez argues that filmmaker Jim Mendiola's "… far-reaching inventory of all things 'pop' and radical conveys a retrospective discursive framing of Chicano film that places experimentation and community building at center stage" (171). The third section, titled "Working Between Media," is focused more specifically on the central question of how the two media interact. George Baker focuses on "expanded photography" and what appears at the outset to be an unclear distinction between "still film" and "film still." Any confusion is soon dispelled through the deployment of a nicely handled and fruitfully developed...

Where flowers bloom but have no scent: the cinematic space of the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

ABSTRACTWhile the mysterious Zone has frequently been the focus of narrative interpretations of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, this article offers a metaphorical reading of the Zone as cinematic space. Following Chris Marker's adoption of the term ‘the Zone’ in his film Sunless, this reading considers the Zone poetically. By focusing on the reflexivity of the Zone's presentation of space through elements of framing, camera movement, colour and editing, this article considers the way it depends on a specifically cinematic construction of space and subjectivity. This approach to the Zone and its cinematic specificity aims to provide a better understanding of what is poetic in Stalker and how it works towards the poetic cinema to which Tarkovsky aspired.

Looking back, looking onwards: selflessness, ethics, and French documentary

ABSTRACTThis article considers questions of documentary ethics in relation to the most recent films of Chris Marker, Agnès Varda and Raymond Depardon. I revisit my own arguments in Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Cooper 2006), in order to show how these directors continue to flesh out an approach to alterity that was already discernible in their earlier work, and that is still compatible with Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, albeit with a slight expansion of focus. In their late work—most notably, Marker's Chats perchés/The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), Varda's Les Plages d'Agn`s/The Beaches of Agnès (2008), and Depardon's Profils paysans/Country Profiles (1998–2008)—these film-makers seem concerned ever more poignantly with matters of mortality, their own and that of other people, along with the survival of the planet and its other inhabitants. While their future-directed anxieties connect with memories of the past to suggest that an exploration of time is key to an understanding of their filmic ethics, the most striking facet of these films is to be found in the intimate, spatial geographies that they construct. Crafted essentially on the basis of interaction with or observation of others, as well as the film-makers' own reflections on matters of life, death and the future, these films create vivid emotional landscapes of mortality and loss that unite interior and exterior worlds in a deeply subjective and personal vision that is also ethical.

Why Do Some Images Begin to Tremble? Cinema Revisits Militant Politics

This essay discusses three films which in different ways reflect on left-wing militancy in the late 1960s and 70s—Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex, Chris Marker's reissued A Grin Without a Cat, Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate—and argues that Marker's is the most insightful.

Transcending the City

Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest Asia Society New York City March 3-September 13, 2009 Yang Fudong's epic five-part film cycle, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003 07), made its museum premiere in the United States this summer at the Asia Society in New York City, presenting viewers with a rare twenty-first-century Proustian world of lengthy, meditative reflections on the passage of life. The film cycle begins with a reenactment of an ancient Chinese tale in which individuals from the third century leave their bureaucratic jobs and move to a bamboo forest in hopes of achieving a pure intellectual lifestyle. In Part I, we meet seven modern intellectuals of the urban generation who go on an excursion to the scenic Yellow Mountain. The group, two women and five men, are poster children for China's yuppie bourgeois. They are passionate lovers, sentimental poets, stylish philosophers, and sometimes reckless narcissists with grand ambitions and high ideals. Each was born trapped in an emotional uncertainty and their irresolvable contradictions continued by pre-existing cultural paradigms. For example, the seven try to evade the notion of responsibility, which is vitally important in Chinese culture. As one intellectual quietly confesses, I'm selfish. I feel sorry for my parents. For the one I love, I left my family. In this first film, lasting under thirty minutes, Yang already displays his signature filmic elements the choice of black-and-white 35mm film stock, the almost confession-like long narration, the quiet slowness, the photographic documentation of movements resembling Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962), and the surreal, dreamlike situations intermingling with reality. We listen to the characters take turns narrating pieces of their streams of consciousness, and their words arc slow but thoughtful, sometimes hesitant and unsure, sometimes heroic and Utopian. Yang invented a new life for them on screen, free from the urban jungle to which they belonged, and free from themselves. While exchanging deep gazes and romantic love gestures, the seven remain completely silent. As a part of the urban generation, Yang is fascinated by the idea of spiritual transcendence, something often lauded and pursued by ancient Chinese intellectuals. Part I of the cycle is arguably the purest chapter as it pursues a clear picture of the honesty, nakedness, and unpolluted humanity through the experiences of the seven. This type of existence sought by Taoist thinkers illustrates a dream that seems too good to be true, and, thus, is unsettling and almost disturbing upon awakening. Yang is not satisfied with the dream, however, but. desires to explore its aftermath. …

The Right to Opacity: On the Otolith Group's Nervus Rerum

Taking as its subject Jenin refugee camp in Palestinian Occupied Territories, Nervus Rerum (2008) is a thirty-two-minute by London-based Otolith Group, commissioned by Homeworks IV: A Forum on Cultural Practices, which met in Beirut in 2007, and recently screened at Tate Britain in February, 2009. juxtaposing excerpts from writings of Fernando Pessoa and Jean Genet with mystifying imagery of West Bank camp, builds on artists' remarkable Otolith trilogy of 2003-2008, for which its two members, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, exploited critical potential of essay film a distinctive mixture of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic, historical, and often autobiographical narration that, in tradition of such diverse filmmakers and groups as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan, works to disrupt clear boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, real and imaginary. In process, Otolith Group has invented inspiring new political and creative possibilities for filmmaking as a critical and conceptual art. Most significantly, Nervus Rerum its title borrowed from Cicero's Latin, meaning the nerve of things confronts problem of representability of a people confined to a geographical enclave by a longstanding military occupation. Established in 1953, Jenin refugee camp was built to shelter Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their native towns and villages in areas that became Israel following nation's founding during 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Under Jordanian control for nearly twenty years, Jenin camp fell to Israeli occupation during Six-Day War of 1967, and was later handed over to Palestinian National Authority in 1996. With a population of some 13,000

Commons and Crowds: Figuring Photography from Above and Below

Drawing on Marxist historiography, this essay examines the crowd as a marker for collective life in contemporary photography. In contrast to the mass media’s demonisation of the ‘mob’ and art photography’s evacuation of the crowd, it looks at three critical projects – Chris Marker’s Staring Back; Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black); and Joel Sternfeld’s Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa – that present a ‘horizontal’ image of the crowd from below which disfigures the view from above.

Digital baroque: new media art and cinematic folds

In this intellectually groundbreaking work, Timothy Murray investigates a paradox embodied in the book's title: What is the relationship between digital, in the form of new media art, and baroque, a highly developed early modern philosophy of art? Making an exquisite and unexpected connection between the old and the new, Digital Baroque analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts. Examining a wide range of art forms, Murray reflects on the rhetorical, emotive, and social forces inherent in the screen arts' dialogue with early modern concepts. Among the works discussed are digitally oriented films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chris Marker; video installations by Thierry Kuntzel, Keith Piper, and Renate Ferro; and interactive media works by Toni Dove, David Rokeby, and Jill Scott. Sophisticated readings reveal the electronic psychosocial webs and digital representations that link text, film, and computer. Murray puts forth an innovative Deleuzian psychophilosophical approach-one that argues that understanding new media art requires a fundamental conceptual shift from linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form.