Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema argues that art cinema, unlike classical film, draws attention to its disjointed, multi-parted form, but that criticism has too frequently sought to explain this complexity away by stitching the parts together in totalizing readings. This stitching together has often relied on the assumption that complicated character explains articulated form and that the solution to art cinema’s puzzles lies in interpreting each film as the expression of a focalizing character’s internal disturbance. This book challenges this assumption. It argues that the attempt to explain formal complexity through this character-centric approach reduces formal achievements and enigmatic characters to inadequate approximations of one another. Reference to character cannot fully tame unschematic and unpredictable combinations of—and collisions between—contradictory levels of narration, clashing styles, discontinuously edited shots, jarring allusions, dislocated genre signifiers, and intermedial elements. Through close analyses of films by Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, and Kelly Reichardt, Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema offers an ethics of criticism that suggests that the politics of art cinema’s eccentric form are limited by character-centred readings. Each of the featured films presents inarticulate or muted characters, whose emotional and intellectual lives are unknowable, further complicating the relationship between character and form. This book argues that, by acknowledging this resistance to interpretation, critics can think in new ways about art cinema’s interrogation of the possibilities of knowledge.
This chapter uses key ideas from queer theory in order to argue that the queerness of Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992) lies less in its protagonist’s presumed homosexuality and more in its formal arrangement of quotations from disparate cultural texts. This bricolage exposes the operation of a culture committed to reproducing compulsory heterosexuality. Criticism, however, has concentrated on explaining the density and arbitrariness of cultural quotation through reference to Bud, insisting that the scraps of film and popular music that make up The Long Day Closes reflect the boy’s escape into self-expression, offering relief and release from the humdrummery and cruelties of life. Building on Derrida’s post-structuralist theories, this chapter argues that the mosaic of references does not provide a medium through which characters can speak, but rather speaks over characters and limits what is sayable. Far from nostalgic, this articulation-through-quotation constrains the possibilities of individual identity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.