‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard‘s Pierrot le fou

Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Daniel Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Short Sequence ◽  
Single Event ◽  
Actual Structure ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Way

This paper is organised around an analysis of a short sequence from Godard‘s Pierrot le fou (1965). Although the sequence appears to be a series of repetitions, close analysis reveals it to be a single event presented in a carefully fragmented order. This unexpected fact generates questions about how to account for the relation between our initial beliefs about the organisation of the sequence and our knowledge of its actual structure. We come to see, in an intimate way, that reflection on the way we watch and understand film is one of the central themes of Godard‘s filmmaking.

Civil Society in UN Peacebuilding Discourse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Conceptual Domain ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 outlines the ways in which civil society is largely associated with “women” and the “local,” as a spatial and conceptual domain, and how this has implications for how we understand political legitimacy and authority. The author argues that close analysis reveals a shift in the way in which the United Nations as a political entity conceives of civil society over time, from early engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the more contemporary articulation of civil society as consultant or even implementing partner. Contemporary UN peacebuilding discourse, however, constitutes civil society as a legitimating actor for UN peacebuilding practices, as civil society organizations are the bearers/owners of certain forms of (local) knowledge.

Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes's ''Mistaken'' Identification

2002 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Olin
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Response ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Small Child ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mistaken Identification ◽  
The Way

IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES'S subject is the significance of photography's defining characteristic: the photograph's inseparable relation to its subject, that which ''must have been'' in front of the camera's lens. Or so it would seem. The present reading of Camera Lucida argues that Barthes's essay actually shows photography's nature as dependent not only on the intimate relation to its object, commonly termed ''indexical,'' but in accord with its relation to its user, its beholder. An examination of Barthes's encounters with photographs in Camera Lucida reveals the way in which identification and misidentification figure into the viewing of images, and suggests that contact between the beholder and the photograph actually eclipses the relation between the photograph and its subject. Barthes's focus on the emotional response of the viewer disguises the fact that he misidentified key details in Camera Lucida's photographs, most significantly in a 1927 portrait by James Van Der Zee and in the ''Winter Garden Photograph.'' This latter photograph of Barthes's recently deceased mother as a small child is famously not illustrated in the book. This essay argues that it is fictional. These ''mistakes'' suggest that Camera Lucida undermines its ostensible basis in indexicality. The subject did not have to be in front of the camera after all. The present rereading of the text from this point of view articulates a notion of performativity according to which the nature of the contact that exists between the image and the viewer informs the way an image is understood. Barthes's desire to find his mother again through her photograph to a large extent acts out his desire to re(per)form and make permanent his relation to her, a desire that he elucidates in the process of describing his search for her picture and his reaction to it when he finds it. This performative element is charged with identification; the person the narrator (Barthes) seeks, in his mother, is himself. A close analysis of the ''Winter Garden Photograph,'' as described by Barthes, shows how performances of identification are inscribed with gender and familial configurations.

scholarly journals Apples and Pears: Symbolism and Influence in Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Apple Tree’ and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Setara Pracha
Keyword(s):  
Apple Tree ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Organic Unity ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Daphne Du Maurier ◽  
The Way

This essay offers a parallel reading of two stories, ‘Bliss’ by Katherine Mansfield and ‘The Apple Tree’ by Daphne du Maurier, revealing a hitherto unexamined yet fruitful area of research. Dramatic irony, organic unity and liminal spaces are identified and discussed in terms of how these are used to represent subconscious and conscious perceptions of reality. The plots incorporate symbols from well-known myths to suggest extreme mental states in narratives that invite the reader to occupy psychological spaces of delusion and fantasy. Material from previously unpublished letters reveals the extent to which Mansfield influenced du Maurier’s writing and this close analysis demonstrates how examining these writers in tandem provides a valuable mean of accessing their work in a new way. Du Maurier’s critical reputation is current undergoing a process of revision which echoes the way in which Mansfield has come to be increasingly regarded as one of the ‘high priestesses’ of modernism.

The Chinese Cinematic Remake as Transnational Appeal: Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Chan
Keyword(s):  
Original Film ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Chinese Version ◽  
Chinese Cinema ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Films ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Transnational Film ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

The past two decades have witnessed the resurgence of Chinese cinemas on the global stage. As Chinese directors confront the notion of remaking American films, they do so with the assurance that there is a potential global market for their product, which in turn might foster a more creative reimagining of a Chinese version that can stand on its own artistic merits as transnational Chinese cinema. This chapter undertakes a close analysis of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (Zhang Yimou 2009) as a transnational film remake to demonstrate how the film confidently reinvents the Coen Brothers’ original film, Blood Simple (1984) as an original in its own right. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the remake is infused with Zhang Yimou’s brand of cinematic pragmatism and the way in which the cooption of a transgressive politics of gender and postcoloniality becomes a route toward transnational appeal.

Repetition and Poetic Process: Bishop’s Nagging Thoughts

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Deryn Rees-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Christopher Bollas ◽  
Compulsion To Repeat ◽  
The Way

This chapter raises important issues about Bishop’s aesthetic response to a double, but crucially different set of traumas during infancy (death of her father and ‘disappearance’ of her mother) and argues that repetition in Bishop’s writing signals specific anxieties about loss. The compulsion to repeat, Freud writes, takes ‘the place of the impulse to remember’. Christopher Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ is applied to consider Bishop’s negotiation with both what is known and yet cannot be spoken. Drawing closely on Bishop’s original drafts, this chapter offers a close analysis of the poem ‘Questions of Travel’ to think about its wider importance as the title of Bishop’s 1965 volume. In paying particular attention to the way in which the volume’s chronological development can be read in counterpoint to its final order on publication, I argue that in the volume Bishop finds an important aesthetic resolution to set against a biographical narrative.

scholarly journals Corpus Methodologies in Literary Translation Studies: An Analysis of Speech Verbs in Four Spanish Translations of Hard Times

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Ruano
Keyword(s):  
Translation Studies ◽  
Basic Function ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

In this article, speech verbs in Dickens’sHard Times(1854) and their translation into Spanish are analyzed. Apart from their basic function of introducing speech, these verbs can also contribute to characterization. The regular occurrence of a particular speech verb to report the direct speech of a particular character helps to create a fictional personality. Given the important role they may play, the rendering of such verbs in four Spanish versions of this novel is assessed. To do so, a corpus-based methodology has been employed. A concordancing software was used to retrieve speech verbs from the original novel, allowing their close analysis in context. Then, using an aligned parallel corpus containing the four versions, a comparison was carried out to see how they have been rendered. Evidence is provided that none of the four translations entirely preserves the characterizing value of the verbs, which may affect the way readers form impressions of characters in their minds. The use of this corpus metholodogy is thus seen to contribute to the field of literary translation studies.

Between East and West

Experiment ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
Maria Taroutina
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Way

Abstract Taking cue from Dmitry Sarabyanov’s seminal publications on the Stil Modern and turn-of-the-century Russian visual culture, the present article resituates Mikhail Vrubel’s œuvre “between East and West” by demonstrating that the artist moved beyond the narrowly circumscribed nationalist agenda typically attributed to the work he produced at the Abramtsevo and Talashkino artistic colonies. In addition to indigenous sources, Vrubel also assimilated a number of external artistic influences such as Jugendstil, medieval Gothic and Renaissance ceramics, Japanese and Chinese porcelain, and Egyptian and Assyrian art. Through a close analysis of Vrubel’s orientalist paintings, as well as his cycle of folkloric works such as Mikula Selyaninovich and the Volga (1896), I demonstrate that his aesthetic program crossed multiple boundaries: geographical, temporal, material, and institutional. Through a complex renegotiation of the global and the local, the past and the present, and the traditional and contemporary, Vrubel arrived at a strikingly modernist visual syntax, which paved the way for an entire generation of avant-garde artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, and Naum Gabo, among others. Using Vrubel as a case study, this article thus proposes to rethink the opposing binary categories of avant-gardism and revivalism, historicism and innovation, Orientalism and Occidentalism, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, as they have been applied to the trajectory of modern Russian art—a set of ostensibly fixed dichotomies that Dmitry Sarabyanov had repeatedly and successfully challenged in his own work.

Chinese (Grand) Strategies for (Global) Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-120
Author(s):  
Shaun Breslin
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Global Change ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Strategic Thinking ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
The Way

The chapter traces the changes continuity and change in China’s international relations under Xi. Continuity in terms of building on pre-existing trends evident before his assumption of power, and change in the way that these were accelerated and concentrated after 2012. In particular, it focuses on how reforms implemented under Xi were designed to overcome fragmentation in decision making, and allow for ‘joined-up’ strategic thinking that serves both domestic and international interests. Through a close analysis on Xi’s thinking on international relations (and Chinese scholars’ study of it), it establishes a ‘conceptual flow’ in Xi Jinping’s thinking that links philosophic starting points through action to objectives. It then outlines ten broad ‘strategic strands’ that have been at the heart of Xi’s agenda for global change.

Pandemic Parliamentary Oversight of Delegated Legislation: Comparing the Performance of Westminster Systems

ICL Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pritam Dey ◽  
Julian R Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Legislative Oversight ◽  
The World ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
Legislative Model ◽  
Parliamentary Oversight ◽  
The Way

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic is testing parliamentary systems of governance across the world, especially in relation to oversight of executive actions. Observers in multiple jurisdictions have already noted the proliferation of delegated legislation during the pandemic and the shortcomings in legislative oversight of the same. To date, however, no close analysis has been conducted of the way in which legislative oversight mechanisms have broken down during the pandemic. This paper provides such an analysis, using examples from Westminster systems adopting the ‘legislative model’ of providing extraordinary powers. Looking at individual examples from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the analysis seeks to identify and explain the failures, and relative successes, in different mechanisms for parliamentary oversight, including parliamentary scrutiny committees (pre-existing and ad-hoc), disallowance, and sunset clauses. Although primarily descriptive, the comparative approach analysis permits preliminary conclusions to be drawn as to the way each jurisdiction may improve its methods of parliamentary oversight of delegated legislation. These comparative lessons will be of use both during and beyond the pandemic.

‘Akerman’ on-screen: Chantal Akerman behind and before the camera, and after cinema

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Griselda Pollock
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Family ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

To challenge the increasing tendency to read Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre autobiographically, this article analyses two documentaries on the filmmaker. It theorizes the effects of the increasingly frequent appearance of the filmmaker on screen in such documentaries and in her own films by reviewing both tendencies through the classic debates about authorship. Noting and critiquing the way in which the documentary filmmakers attempt to mimic ‘Akerman’ filmmaking, the article argues that their attempts betray the codes that constitute ‘Akerman’ cinema by reproducing the modes against which her cinema worked. ‘Akerman’ names a cinematic journey towards the formulation of an aesthetic language of space, shot, frame and temporality through which to make visible the unseen and make audible the unspoken that constituted both the conditions and the imperative for a cinematic intervention from a historically situated post-war, post-Shoah ‘Polish Jewish family in Brussels’. This article proposes the term filmworking (drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s post-traumatic concept of artworking) to reveal how Akerman queered cinema. This effect emerges only from close analysis of each instance of filmworking and not from the closed tropes of a retrospective narrative of the life of the filmmaker, who, being repeatedly interviewed, herself contributed to such extra-cinematic explanations and closures of her own work.

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