The Material Image
Art and the Real in Film
Published on 30. November 2006
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-8047-5430-9 (ISBN)
Description
Focusing on intermediality, The Material Image situates film within questions of representation familiar from the other arts: What is meant by figuring the real? How is the real suggested by visual metaphors, and what is its relation to illusion? How is the spectator figured as entering the text, and how does the image enter our world? The film's spectator is integral to these concerns. Cognitive and phenomenological approaches to perception alike claim that spectatorial affect is "real" even when it is film that produces it.
Central to the staging of intermediality in film, tableaux moments in film also figure prominently in the book. Films by Scorsese, Greenaway, Wenders, and Kubrick are seen to address painterly, photographic, and digital images in relation to effects of the real. Hitchcock's films are examined with regard to modernist and realist effects in painting. Chapters on Fassbinder and Haneke analyze the significance of tableau for the body in pain, while a final chapter on horror film explores the literalism of psychopathic tableau. Here, too, art and the body-images and the real-are juxtaposed and entwined in a set of relations.
Central to the staging of intermediality in film, tableaux moments in film also figure prominently in the book. Films by Scorsese, Greenaway, Wenders, and Kubrick are seen to address painterly, photographic, and digital images in relation to effects of the real. Hitchcock's films are examined with regard to modernist and realist effects in painting. Chapters on Fassbinder and Haneke analyze the significance of tableau for the body in pain, while a final chapter on horror film explores the literalism of psychopathic tableau. Here, too, art and the body-images and the real-are juxtaposed and entwined in a set of relations.
Reviews / Votes
"In short, great writing and great reading, whose impact should not remain confined to the sole field of film studies, but considered very carefully by all those who, in literary theory for instance, want to better understand why and how texts matter." - LeonardoMore details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Palo Alto
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Cloth
Dimensions
Height: 232 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
485 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8047-5430-9 (9780804754309)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Brigitte Peucker is Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. She is author of Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts (1995) and Lyric Descent in the German Romantic Tradition (1998)
Content
Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Art and the Real in Film... Material Effects Reality Effects/Games With Illusion Illusion and Mimetic Drive Art Effects I. Art and Embodimentu Chapter 1: The Moment of Portraiture: Scorsese Reads Wharton... Intermedial Layering: The Tableau Moment Picture Writing Chapter 2: Dutch Realism: Vermeer, Greenaway, Wenders... Tableau Vivant and Hybridity "The Flesh of a Human Presence" The Keplerian Mode and the Operation of the Eye Why Tableau Vivant? Chapter 3: The Fascist Choreography: Riefenstahl's Tableaux... Tableaux and Trionfi Body Art: Sculpture and Dance Tableau and Photograph Chapter 4: The Scene of Art in Hitchcock Hitchcock, Part I: The Cut of Representation... ... Natures mortes, Trophies, and Mummies The Janus-Face Decapitations: Cut-outs and Busts Tableaux vivants; femmes mortes The Shield of Perseus P-'y" II. Illusions of the Real Hitchcock, Part II: The Picture Looks Back... Portrait, Window, Mirror The "Reality Bleed" and the Spectator in the Film Oscillating Effects Chapter 5: Kubrick and Kafka: The Corporeal Uncanny... Photographs and Stories Material Images "Canniness," or the Vital Domain Shutting the Eyes/Eyes Wide Shut Chapter 6: The Castrato's Voices: Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons... Textualities, the Voice, and the Real The Maternal Voice: Word Into Flesh Tableau: Elvire's Passion Mute Body/Flayed Text III. Art and Embodied Spectatorship Chapter 7: Violence and Affect: Haneke's Modernist Melodramas Haneke, Part I: BourgeoisTableaux... Cold Image, Hot Affect Effects of the Real Haneke, Part II: Assaulting the Spectator and Other Games... Looking and Pain The Masochistic Tableau Sentiment, Music, and the Real Chapter 8: Images of Horror: Taste, Cannibalism, and Visual Display... Touch, Taste, Vision Metaphorical Cannibalism: Hitchcock's Hunger Literal Cannibalism: Psychotic Appetites, Trophies, Tableaux The Eye as Mouth Notes Index