Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars Von Trier

ISBN-13: 9780190600181 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 464 str.

Bonnie Honig; Lori J. Marso

Opis

Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Trier of being cliched, the editors argue that he intensifies the "cliches of our times" in ways that direct our political energies towards apprehending and repairing a shattered world.

The book is certainly for von Trier lovers and haters but, at the same time, political, critical, and feminist theorists entirely unfamiliar with von Trier's films will find this volume's essays of interest. Most of the contributors tarry with von Trier to develop new readings of major thinkers and writers, including Agamben, Bataille, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Deleuze, Euripides, Freud, Kierkegaard, Ranciere, Nietzsche, Winnicott, and many more. Von Trier is both central and irrelevant to much of this work. Writing from the fields of classics, literature, gender studies, philosophy, film and political theory, the authors stage an interdisciplinary intervention in film studies.

Recenzje

This exciting collection is fundamentally a gamble. Instead of repudiating Lars von Triers use of cliché and provocation, the contributors double down on the most controversial, problematic, and seemingly intractable figures in his corpus: the Woman, the Sacrifice, the Earth, Evil. Wresting his films from tired evaluations and defensive posture, the essays here approach these tropes and things with due seriousness to show how their intensification in von Triers works constitutes a mode of speculative potential, one that situates the cliché at the ground of cinematic experiment, the cinematic at the heart of political thinking, andmost boldlyvon Trier at the center of feminist theory.

O autorze

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University. Lori J. Marso is Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at Union College.