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Abstract
As billowing masses averse to stillness and defined by perpetual variability, clouds, fog and mist share common ontological properties. This article will group them together under the rubric of the “nebulous,” and probe its conceptual and aesthetic relationship with film. Fog, smoke and mist are pervasive through the entire history of cinema and crop up in an array of genres and modes. What would film history look like if traced from the perspective of these cloud forms? The article hopes to sketch out the first contours of such a history by honing in on a durational cinematic tradition, from the “landscape film” of the 1970s through to contemporary slow cinema. It will conceive of such a history as intermedial both in the sense that it extrapolates the boundaries of the film medium and in that it treats fog, mist and clouds as elemental “media” in their own right.
Abstract
While water as setting and as mirror have driven animation technologies in mainstream American animated features (requiring, in Disney’s 1937 Snow White, the enormous resources of the multiplane camera), contemporary Indigenous productions activate another relationship of viewer to screen and viewer to water, converging to form a new Indigenous screen imaginary that connects instruction with care. This article traces the integration of North American Indigenous animation aesthetics with interrelated relationships and obligations around water and water protection. Drawing on examples from an expanding corpus of short animated productions, I argue that Indigenous ways of envisioning water present viewers with instruction towards action: water conveys a teaching. Following Lenape critic Joanne Barker’s turn to water as an analytic – “a water that (in)forms, a water that instructs” – I explore Indigenous animation of water as both pedagogy and technology, a conjunction that foregrounds human creative authorship even as it decenters the human in favor of water as a teacher.
Proposals for single-authored monographs and edited volumes are equally welcome.
All submissions are subject to a double-anonymous peer-review process prior to publication.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals to the publisher at BRILL, Masja Horn.
Abstract
The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic speaks to a liminal space between male and female, living and dead, human and nonhuman, which mirrors contemporary debates within Black studies around the exclusion of Blackness from the normative category of the human: the contingency of the definition of humanity based on racial exclusion. As a result, it is not only the nonhuman perspective that the ocean provides in Atlantics, but a spectral haunting of those deemed other than human by global capitalism, which disrupts, as a queer prophecy, the veneer of necessity that the neocolonial order requires to sustain itself.
Abstract
This article examines the movements of the elements (water, air, fire, and earth) in the recent (2018–2021) films of Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino. It proposes that Makino’s unique style of filmmaking – which consists of layering thousands of moving images of the natural world on top of each other – expresses and encompasses elemental tensions between form and formlessness, clarity and obscurity, and identity and transformation. Taking the storm as an ecological force which foregrounds elemental kinetics, Makino’s films are analyzed in their capacity to disclose natural motion. This allows for a renewed conception of the elemental, understood as process and flow rather than individual units. An elemental politics of the storm emerges, which calls for the fostering of productive and complex movement rather than the stasis of conservation.
Abstract
Adapted from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s semi-autobiographical text, The Intruder remains one of French director Claire Denis’ most transnational and yet dreamlike works. In this article, I pair philosopher Gaston Bachelard (in particular, his concept of the material and dynamic imagination and his reveries on water and air) with Denis to explore how The Intruder enacts an imagining of the elements and an elemental poetics of film form. Bringing Bachelard into a dialogue with Saad Chakali’s, Rosalind Galt’s and Nancy’s writing on the film’s imagery, I also approach The Intruder as an image-poem that is structured by poetically ‘weighted’ images and by recurrent symbolism. Shot through with an oneiric sense of drift, voyaging and diffusion, I explore some of the ways that Denis’s elemental imaginings of air and oceanic water reflect an affective politics.