PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sussex
Department Name: Sch of Media, Film and Music
Abstract
Opening image: a surgeon's scalpel cuts the eye of a beautiful woman. With this shocking scene, Catalan director Joachín Jordá provokes his audience in an attempt to counter what he calls 'aesthetic drowsiness'. For Jordá, an unpleasant or ugly image is necessary to fend off the seduction of cinema, and this claim, in various forms, runs through the history of writing on film. For not only this avant-garde filmmaker, but for film theorists from Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin to Cahiers du Cinéma and Laura Mulvey, aesthetically pleasing images are dangerous. The very disparate claims on cinematic value and politics made by twentieth-century film theories are linked by what kinds of images they reject, and what is rejected shares an implicit aesthetic critique. The rhetoric of film theory has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine or apolitical, and locating truth and value instead in variants of Jordá's ugly film body.
PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY traces the history of this visual rhetoric from film studies to art history, attempting to uncover its roots in aesthetic theory and, more importantly, its dependence on discourses of gender, sexuality and race. This philosophical history draws from Plato's separation of idea from image, with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason, and at worst a deceptive and dangerous cosmetic. The very language of western aesthetics is not only logocentric but iconophobic, and Dudley Andrew has pointed to Marxist and feminist film theorists as contemporary iconoclasts. Modern aesthetics replaced the binary of rational word versus cosmetic image with a hierarchy within the image. Since art history could hardly reject the image altogether, it reframed the debate to one of line versus colour, or meaning versus decoration. These concepts closely tied colour and ornament to the feminine, the effeminate and the foreign, contrasting the European purity of neoclassicism with the inferior 'Oriental' or 'primitive' style.
Thus, PRETTY relocates seemingly abstract questions of style and aesthetic form within political histories, and asks how these histories have affected ideas about cinema. Seen in this light, the critical centrality of supposedly pure, unformed film styles like Italian neorealism, or the automatic valuation of narrative over spectacle must be re-evaluated. If spectacular qualities such as colourful design, richly textured mise-en-scène, and sweeping camera movements are viewed within histories of European visual thought, their rejection can be seen as a continuation of a sexist and racist politics of the aesthetic body. While film scholarship has often addressed gender, sexuality and race as issues of representation, these ideological or ethical engagements are undermined by the exclusion of the pretty at the level of form and style.
PRETTY explores these issues in two strands. The first traces a history of film theory, outlining how art historical and aesthetic ideas influenced film scholarship, and analysing the significance of this influence across twentieth-century writing on cinema. Key periods are film theory's emergence around nineteenth-century debates in art, interior design and architecture; 1920s debates on cinematic specificity and modernity; postclassical film theory's rejection of aesthetics; and the contemporary return to realism. The second strand consists of case studies of what we might call pretty films: filmmaking practices that have been accused of being overly aestheticised, but within which we can discover alternative ways to envision aesthetics and politics. This section treats feminist director Claire Denis, queer artist Derek Jarman, Asian exile Christopher Doyle, and the popular films of Baz Luhrmann.
PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY traces the history of this visual rhetoric from film studies to art history, attempting to uncover its roots in aesthetic theory and, more importantly, its dependence on discourses of gender, sexuality and race. This philosophical history draws from Plato's separation of idea from image, with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason, and at worst a deceptive and dangerous cosmetic. The very language of western aesthetics is not only logocentric but iconophobic, and Dudley Andrew has pointed to Marxist and feminist film theorists as contemporary iconoclasts. Modern aesthetics replaced the binary of rational word versus cosmetic image with a hierarchy within the image. Since art history could hardly reject the image altogether, it reframed the debate to one of line versus colour, or meaning versus decoration. These concepts closely tied colour and ornament to the feminine, the effeminate and the foreign, contrasting the European purity of neoclassicism with the inferior 'Oriental' or 'primitive' style.
Thus, PRETTY relocates seemingly abstract questions of style and aesthetic form within political histories, and asks how these histories have affected ideas about cinema. Seen in this light, the critical centrality of supposedly pure, unformed film styles like Italian neorealism, or the automatic valuation of narrative over spectacle must be re-evaluated. If spectacular qualities such as colourful design, richly textured mise-en-scène, and sweeping camera movements are viewed within histories of European visual thought, their rejection can be seen as a continuation of a sexist and racist politics of the aesthetic body. While film scholarship has often addressed gender, sexuality and race as issues of representation, these ideological or ethical engagements are undermined by the exclusion of the pretty at the level of form and style.
PRETTY explores these issues in two strands. The first traces a history of film theory, outlining how art historical and aesthetic ideas influenced film scholarship, and analysing the significance of this influence across twentieth-century writing on cinema. Key periods are film theory's emergence around nineteenth-century debates in art, interior design and architecture; 1920s debates on cinematic specificity and modernity; postclassical film theory's rejection of aesthetics; and the contemporary return to realism. The second strand consists of case studies of what we might call pretty films: filmmaking practices that have been accused of being overly aestheticised, but within which we can discover alternative ways to envision aesthetics and politics. This section treats feminist director Claire Denis, queer artist Derek Jarman, Asian exile Christopher Doyle, and the popular films of Baz Luhrmann.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Rosalind Galt (Principal Investigator) |
