Repulsive Film Studies? New issue of FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Cinematic Disgust

Life's Work: The Films of Roman Polanski - Chapter 5: Repulsion, the Dark Art of Desire written and narrated by Kim Morgan and edited by Matt Zoller Seitz. Video Essay Series hosted by PressPlay at IndieWire

[Tarja] Laine’s insights on disgust have important implications for thinking about the aesthetic paradox of unpleasure. In her assessment, [Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)] offers a particularly pertinent limit-case in which disgust is not readily convertible into pleasurable cognitive satisfaction. Ultimately, her reading of the film suggests that we may need to re-think theories that construct unpleasure as antithetical to aesthetic experience. In this, she joins Korsmeyer and other thinkers who have recently suggested that we may need to abandon the pleasure-unpleasure binary, in favor of thinking about disgust as ‘modifier of attention, intensifying for a host of reasons some experience that the participant would rather have continue than not’ (Korsmeyer 2011, 118). Indeed, as Laine puts it, it is possible that what we value in cinematic renderings of disgust is precisely the ‘vivid and immediate experience’ that it offers us, ‘regardless of its non-pleasurable, non-rewarding features’. [Tina Kendall in her editor's 'Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust' for the Film-Philosophy special issue on Disgust, discussing Tarja Laine's brilliant article for that issue, as well as citing Carolyn Korsmeyer's Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)]

Many of you will already have heard about the new issue of Film-Philosophy that came out in late December, but Film Studies For Free is obsessively completist in its mission to bring you news of notable, open access, film studies, hence this, otherwise possibly superfluous, entry.

Besides, it's a brilliantly provocative special issue which successfully takes explorations of filmic disgust well beyond the, to date, canonical or entrenched Film Studies approaches to film horror. Despite some of the attractions of these approaches, for those of us marking undergraduate essays on horror cinema and television from time to time, this greater plurality of conceptual pathways into these topics is a Very Good Thing - that is, in FSFF's ever so humble view.

Thanks so much for that, and more, Film-Philosophy!

Vol 15, No 2 (2011): The Disgust Issue

Guest Editor: Tina Kendall

Articles

• Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust PDF Tina Kendall
• Toward a Poetics of Cinematic Disgust PDF Julian Hanich
• Imprisoned in Disgust: Roman Polanski's Repulsion PDF Tarja Laine 
• Laura Dern’s Vomit, or, Kant and Derrida in Oz PDF Eugenie Brinkema 
• Chew on This: Disgust, Delay, and the Documentary Image in Food, Inc. PDF Jennifer Marilynn Barker
• Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia PDF Steven Shaviro

Book Reviews

• Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (2010) Cinema at the Periphery PDF Rowena Santos Aquino
• Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds. (2010) Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead PDF Caroline Walters
• Joseph Mai (2010) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne PDF R. D. Crano
• Boaz Hagin (2010) Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema PDF Richard Lindley Armstrong
• Peter Lee-Wright (2010) The Documentary Handbook PDF Wes Skolits
• William Brown, Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (2010) Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe PDF Alison Frank
• Richard Misek (2010) Chromatic Cinema PDF Robert Barry
• Alain Badiou (2010) Cinéma PDF Manuel Ramos
• Annie van den Oever, ed. (2010) Ostrannenie PDF Lara Alexandra Cox
• David Martin-Jones (2010) Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities PDF John Marmysz