tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30690257.post5086000388657841720..comments2024-03-21T04:11:40.462-07:00Comments on Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog: The New International Art FilmChris Caglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11896423565458620046noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30690257.post-7377785298095941022008-01-01T03:51:00.000-08:002008-01-01T03:51:00.000-08:00I would like to question the view that films which...I would like to question the view that films which are attempting to map the world in new ways that avoid privileging the interiorized subject are trafficking in desolation (Shaviro) or anomie (Cagle) and are, therefore, ideologically suspect (or functionalist). <BR/><BR/>In my view, some of the most interesting examples of contemporary film are attempting to move beyond the "cinema of agency," by which I mean a cinema (whether of the left or the right) whose content and structure is ultimately based on the key (but worn-out) premise of modernity: the individual, right-thinking subject will (in the end) emerge as the true motor of history. <BR/><BR/>This, I think, is where Bela Tarr and Jansco (in his recently DVD release The Red and the Black) are heading; this is also behind the most successful of Gus van Sant's long takes in Elephant; and this is the force of von Trier's Dogville, which can partly be understood as a subversion of cinema's on-going belief in the moral validity of the individualised, first-person perspective. Even the recent blockbuster, The Bourne Ultimatum, is far more interesting for the first hour or so, when it gives us a vision of the world as a complex information grid out of which subject and meaning may emerge, than it is when it reverts to the individualized chase and the assumption that redemption depends on Bourne finding his true identity and aligning it with the few other remaining "right thinkers" (Nicky Parsons, Pamela Landy) in the narrative.Anton van der Hovenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01790477935370905089noreply@blogger.com