User:Aitantv/Laura Rascaroli (2017) How the Essay Film Thinks

Rascaroli, L (2017) How the Essay Film Thinks. Oxford University Press, Oxford

the future film / Adorno, The Essay as Form (1984) / anachronism

• "The possibility of making a cinema less conditioned by mainstream forms of signification and industrial systems of financing and production has obvious political implications. To say “I” or “we” is, first, a gesture of responsibility and accountability, in filmmaking too. The moment of the essay film is, therefore, politically inflected. Precisely for this reason, we can venture, the essay film first boomed worldwide in the 1960s, a decade marked by a widespread desire for increased participation, democracy, and self- expression; and it also explains why previous embodiments tended to coincide with examples of dissident analysis of actualities." (Rascaroli 2017 p.5)
• "transgression and crossover of generic boundaries, inventiveness and freedom from conventions and expressive constraints, complexity and reflexivity." (Rascaroli 2017 p.3)
• "In each decade since the 1940s, critics have saluted the essay film as an utterly novel and revolutionary form, mostly on the

basis of its ability to bring the cinema closer to a medium at once personal and intellectual, such as writing. The utopian nature of this idea can be seen in a crucial aspect of all of these theories: on each occasion, the possibility of the essay film’s coming- into- being is linked to the precondition of almost futuristic technological development." (Rascaroli 2017 p.4)

• "Returning to the cinema, then, the anachronistic matrix of the form is at the basis of the argument that the essay film is the future film, the film of tomorrow. It is so not only because it will always be the technology- to- come that will make it possible for filmmakers to use their cameras like pens, to mobilize the personal camera, to an increasing extent, but also because the essay is against its time and, thus, it is not of the “now”; it is future philosophy." (Rascaroli 2017 p.6)

The method of between, interstice, disjunction, differentiation (as opposed to suture)

• "Rather than copying its object and offering a closed argument about it, then, the essay operates on its object’s scattered parts. In this way, the essay shuns suture and works in a regime of radical disjunction. “Discontinuity” (Adorno 1984, 164) and “juxtaposition” (170) are terms also used by Adorno, which emphasize break and the contrasting positioning of elements that characterizes the essay’s argument." (Rascaroli 2017 p.7)
• "Although I continue to acknowledge the centrality of dialogue to the essay form, and to the spectatorial experience of the

essay film, my interest in this book lies in addressing the dialectical tension between juxtaposed or interacting filmic elements and, more precisely, the gaps that its method of juxtaposition opens in the text" (Rascaroli 2017 p.8)

• Deleuze interstice - Here and Elsewhere - "In writing on this film, Deleuze introduced the concept of interstice, which, drawing on the complexity of film language, he described as spacing “between two actions, between affections, between perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images, between the sound

and the visual”" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)

• "With the breaking of the sensory- motor linkages typical of the movement- image, the interval is set free; what emerges is the irrational cut, which stands on its own. Images are no longer linked to each other; the chains of images are broken and the fissures between them become larger." (Rascaroli 2017 p.9)
• Deleuze - The Time Image (v. the Movement Image) - "Given one image, another image has to be chosen which will induce an interstice between the two. This is not an operation of association, but of differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established

between the two, which will be productive of a third or of something new. (179– 80; emphasis in the original)" (Rascaroli 2017 p.10)

• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)
• "" (Rascaroli 2017 p.)

Essay Film Watch List

• Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia,
• Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory (1948)
• Khaneh siah ast [The House Is Black, 1963] by Forugh Farrokhzad
• (La rabbia [Rage, 1963] by Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Argentina (La hora de los hornos [The
• Hour of the Furnaces, 1968] by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino),
• Armenia (Menq [We, 1969] by Artavazd Peleshian)
• R -
• George Franju’s Blood of the Beasts and Hôtel des Invalides