Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, capitalism, cinema, film, film theory, narrative, philosophy, politics, postmodern
Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.
The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages
Ian Buchanan (ed.): Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, capitalism, cinema, cognition, ideology, literary theory, literature, marxism, modernism, philosophy, politics, postmodern, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, urbanism, utopia
Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.
Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.
The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.
Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang
Publisher Duke University Press, 2007
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822340879, 9780822340874
296 pages
Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985–) [FR, ES, EN, RU]
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, film theory, image, montage, perception, philosophy, time
Cinema 2: The Time-Image brings to completion Gilles Deleuze’s work on the theoretical implications of the cinematographic image. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze proposed a new way to understand narrative cinema, based on Henri Bergson’s notion of the movement-image and C. S. Peirce’s classification of images and signs. In Cinema 2, he explains why, since World War II, time has come to dominate film: the fragment or solitary image, in supplanting narrative cinema’s rational development of events, illustrates this new significance of time.
Deleuze ascribes this shift to the condition of postwar Europe: the situations and spaces “we no longer know how to describe”—buildings deserted but inhabited, cities undergoing demolition or reconstruction—and the new race of characters who emerged from this rubble, mutants, who “saw rather than acted.” Deleuze discusses the films of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, Pasolini, Rohmer, Ophuls, and many others, suggesting that contemporary cinema, far from being dead, is only beginning to find new ways to capture time in the image.
Publisher Minuit, Paris, 1985
379 pages
English edition
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1989
ISBN 0816616779, 9780816616770
364 pages
Publisher (EN)
Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps (French, 1985; added 2015-7-17)
Estudios sobre cine 2: La imagen-tiempo (Spanish, trans. Irene Agoff, 1987)
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (English, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, 1989)
Кино: Образ-движение (Russian, trans. Олег Аронсон, 2004, updated on 2013-9-26)
See also Volume 1
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