Moment Of Absence Research Articles

“Guarda un po”: Seductive Visuality in Remediated Opera

To articulate the phenomenon I call seductive visuality, I begin with a kiss—or, rather, the suggestion of a kiss. The moment comes from the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcast of L’elisir d’amore in 2012. It occurred at the conclusion of “Prendi, per me sei libero.” After the final note of her declaration of love, Adina (Anna Netrebko) grabbed Nemorino (Matthew Polenzani) for a full-throttled kiss. The blocking (which I had seen “in the house” at an earlier performance) was simple: Adina’s fervent embrace toppled the couple onto the ground.1 But on the day of the broadcast, the designated cameras (under the direction of Live in HD veteran director Gary Halvorson) failed to follow the pair in their tumble, leaving them out of frame for a moment. Eventually the couple stood and reappeared. Netrebko and Polenzani held their embrace for applause, and we saw (in a close-up) Netrebko’s lipstick smeared across her chin. This telltale smear suggested we had missed something thrilling in that moment of absence— no feigned “stage kiss,” but the “real thing.” The lipstick smear was visible for just an instant, before Polenzani leaned forward to wipe it away, while Netrebko bit her lips, trying to keep from laughing.

‘A world that accords with our desires’?: realism, desire and death in André Bazin's film criticism

André Bazin's criticism is often associated with a fixed notion of cinematic realism, but an examination of his treatment of the themes of desire and death reveals a different notion of the real. Bazin argues for the intrinsic realism of cinema on two grounds: first, the ontological reality of the photographic trace as an objective record of the real; and second, the cinematic reproduction of the phenomenological conditions of perception of the real through the use of deep-focus photography and the long take. This realism of plenitude is, however, accompanied by an acute consciousness of loss and absence. For desire and death, as emblematic moments of absence and loss, constitute the paradoxical limits of cinematic representation for Bazin—both that which cannot be shown and that which nonetheless underlies all that is shown. Cinema's attempt to capture the presence of reality in time is undermined by its own temporal dimension, which means that every image is already an image of the past and that what has been captured is also irreversibly lost. Bazin's realism is then not a realism of presence at all, but a realism of absence, made visible through the relation between desire, death and time.

A Planned Pregnancy

Getting pregnant starts with wondering: when, or even if, the next period will arrive. Then, waiting. A woman may urge this monthly punctuation, that she often begrudges, to arrive, or she may actively will it to stay away for once. Either way, accompanied perhaps by fatigue, nausea, or swollen breasts, when the telling sign of blood fails to appear, its absence is as profoundly mystifying as, at twelve or fourteen, its initial appearance, those red stains, which magically altered our perception of ourselves. Since then, this very moment of absence has always been menstruation's distant promise, or threat. When a woman finds herself pregnant, her sense of self is again transformed. At thirty-one, married just over a year, I am pregnant-mutually agreed upon and endlessly discussed and (surprisingly) easily accomplished. Inside me, like snow during a blizzard, a mass of cells are accumulating; I see nothing, feel little, except for tender breasts, fatigue, and intermittent waves of nausea. However, in about eight months, a baby will-if all goes well-appear in my arms, move into our house, and become a part of our lives for many years to come. Long before this, I will begin to sense, then to get acquainted with, this baby with whom I'll be sharing my living quarters. Planned and dreamt of, I still find this sea change in my life, in our lives, beyond comprehension. Barbara Katz Rothman once speculated that if abortion and birth control were truly woman-centered, then abortion would not be considered a major decision because women-from that initial tingling of the breasts onwards-understand that having children is as large an undertaking as one can commit to and hence that no woman would take on such a task unless she believed herself ready and able to do so.1 I first read her essay on this subject while I was working as an abortion counselor. What she wrote rang true; on a daily basis I was granted an intimate view into women's decision-making processes. Teenagers needed abortions; women

The Moment: A History, Typology and Theory of the Moment in Philosophy and Literature

Contents: Theories of representation vs. performance - Hermeneutic interpretation vs. deconstructive reading - The correspondence between romanticism and postmodernism - The romantic and postmodern performative moment of absence as the momentum of all texts.