Rupturing the Spectacle: On Certain Paradoxes of Film Image Cover Image

Probiti spektakl: o nekim paradoksima filmske slike
Rupturing the Spectacle: On Certain Paradoxes of Film Image

Author(s): Adrian Pelc
Subject(s): Aesthetics, Film / Cinema / Cinematography, Phenomenology, Ontology, History of Art
Published by: Hrvatsko Filozofsko Društvo
Keywords: film image; alienation; Marxism; phenomenology; André Bazin; spectacle; film;

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, confronted are two radical currents of thought about the film image. In a first step, demonstrated is how some Marxist theorists (Beller, Debord, Baudrillard) define the film image as ontologically grounded in alienation and the destruction of non-mediated presence due to its technical origin, as well as its effects. In a second step, I try to show how André Bazin, influenced by phenomenology and taking up identical premises as the Marxists, came to diametrically opposite conclusions: it isn’t but the film image that discloses the real. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, in a third step I establish a certain synthesis between these two currents and examine how spectacle is guarded, but also re-evaluated within the regime of film images. Through this re-evaluation, one gets a glimpse at the contours of an exigent aesthetic program that in some respects conforms to, while also deviating from eminent ideas on cinematic postmodernism.

  • Issue Year: 40/2020
  • Issue No: 03/159
  • Page Range: 457-476
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Croatian