Showing posts with label David Vilaseca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Vilaseca. Show all posts

Monday, 17 May 2010

In darkened rooms: On Salvador Dalí and cinema (in memory of David Vilaseca)

"Oh Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!
[...]
I sing your restless longing for the statue,
your fear of the feelings that await you in the street."

Excerpt from Federico García Lorca, 'Ode to Salvador Dalí'
(first published in Revista de Occidente, Madrid, April 1926)

"The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms."
"[Un chien andalou/] An Andalusian Dog, one of the most universally acclaimed films in cinema history, is frequently mentioned by critics as a privileged point of reference for the Surrealist rebellion. The film remains enigmatic to this day. Criticism has concentrated on the validity and effectiveness of its images to exemplify the avant-garde attack against social conventions and against the exclusive dominance of rationality in epistemology and social discourse. But this contextual approach does not take account of the script's fragmented narrative, which finds support in Freud's psychoanalytical theories and articulates a radical proposal for identity and culture. Largely neglected by critics, this narrative has been highly influential in the history of cinema. An Andalusian Dog is central to a long list of films that explore different aspects of the irrational, among them Jean Cocteau's Le sang du poète, Hunt Stromberg's The Strange Woman, Guy Debord's script Howling in Favor of the Marquis de Sade, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, [...] David Lynch's Blue Velvet [...].
    Conventionally An Andalusian Dog has been viewed as a film about sexuality; I suggest that sexuality appears in the film as the pretext for a discussion of the threat sexual desire poses for male identity. In this respect, the film develops ideas that begin to appear in paintings completed by Dalí after his initial contact with Freud's works in the mid-1920s. These paintings display male identity as a fragile form of subsistence unfolding between two alternate forces, desire and fear: the desire for sexual realization and the opposed fear that sexual intercourse will conclude in disease and ultimately in death. Given the scarcity of Buñuel's production prior to 1929, I suggest that Dalí's monumental production of paintings during these years served as a preliminary visual point of reference for the design of some of the images in An Andalusian Dog."  Ignacio Javier López, 'Film, Freud, and Paranoia Dalí and the Representation of Male Desire in An Andalusian Dog', Diacritics, 31.2 (2001) 35-48
"[David Vilaseca's] first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."
     Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate." Paul Julian Smith, 'David Vilaseca Obituary', The Guardian, March 11, 2010
Film Studies For Free chooses today -- the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia -- to bring you the second of its posts created in memory of David Vilaseca, the openly gay Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010, having fought against homophobia, in different ways, for much of his life. A recent obituary in the Barcelona-based newspaper La Vanguardia also brutally connected these two unassailable facts in its own powerful and poetic tribute to this remarkable scholar and hugely creative writer:
Deberíamos leer a Vilaseca, que supo esquivar la soledad y el desarraigo en un mundo homófobo hasta que este se disfrazó de camión y embistió su bicicleta.
We really should read the works of Vilaseca; he knew how to dodge loneliness and rootlessness in a homophobic world, at least until the latter disguised itself as a truck and rammed into his bicycle.

As Paul Julian Smith indicates in his obituary for his friend (cited above), Vilaseca's PhD thesis, which he turned into an outstanding first book, explored the highly complex question of the homophobia of artist, filmmaker, and fellow Catalan Salvador Dalí through the lens of queer cultural theories. 

Below is a list of direct links to numerous other resources (videos, podcasts, and further, openly-accessible, scholarly material), many of which touch on Dalí's much less well-explored cinematic work in the same contexts as those studied in Vilaseca's book; that is to say, the artist's avowed 'paranoiac-critical method' and the cultural expression of his sexuality. 

[Addendum: For two much less scholarly, but still highly (and, possibly, surprisingly) engaging, fictional examinations of the workings of paranoia and homophobia in the period of Dalí's life prior to the making of Un chien andalou, FSFF's author thoroughly recommends the films Little Ashes (Paul Morrison, 2009), starring Robert Pattinson as Dalí, and Carlos Saura's Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón. (If you need more convincing, please do read Pauline Bache's article on the former film).]

Dreams designed by Dalí for Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), and Un Chien andalou

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Saturday, 13 March 2010

Deleuzian film studies in memory of David Vilaseca

Image of Ingrid Bergman as Karin in Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
Read 'Eruptions of God. Roberto Rossellini. Stromboli' by Corry Shores
For [French philosopher Henri] Bergson, the brain does not produce a representation of what it perceives. Perception is the mutual influence of images upon one another, of which the brain is only another image—it does not “produce” anything, but filters impulses into actions or non-actions. The implications for film are two-fold. By addressing the perceiving subject as one image among the world of images, Bergson steps outside models that locate perception and memory within the mind of the subject. I would further suggest, following [Gilles] Deleuze, that Bergson’s theory of matter allows us to see film not as a fixed representation, a concrete image of a “real” object, but as an image in its own right, with its own duration and axes of movement. What we might call the film-image thus occurs in the gap between subject and object, through the collision of affective images.
Deleuze’s formulation of the film-image as a mobile assemblage (sometimes a frame, sometimes a shot, a sound, or the film as a whole) lends itself to this reading. It refuses to reduce the physical image on the screen to a mere reproduction of an assumed “real” object it represents. Such a formulation similarly reevaluates the relationship between the concrete optical and sonic images that comprise the film. Rather than conceiving of each component as a “building block,” it allows for the shifting conglomerations of elements which are themselves dynamic and mobile. A film cannot be distilled to a structure that originates from outside itself. Instead, each film-image is contingent, particular, and evolving.
The distinction between the time- and movement-images becomes more clear in this context. Rather than a question of either content or form, the difference lies in their affective power, whether they are bent toward action, in the case of the movement image, or if they open into different temporal modalities. It is in this second case that the time-image falls, and it is here that Deleuze locates the creative potential of film. This potential does not exist solely within the physical image itself, however, but is contained as well in the modes of perception and thinking that it triggers. Much like the time-image, the mental faculty most attuned to the openness of time, according to Bergson, is that of intuition.
Amy Herzog, 'Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory', in Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds),Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, No. 49
Film Studies For Free lovingly presents its long list of links to online and openly accessible film-studies resources of note pertaining to the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like lots of continental theorists invoked in Film Studies, 'Deleuze' has been somewhat of a moveable feast, but, as the links below testify, in recent years this particular feast has been a highly nourishing one for a variety of approaches to this discipline.

This FSFF entry is one of two posts to be dedicated to the fond memory of David Vilaseca, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Professor Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010. His achievements in life were many, as this touching obituary written by his good friend and mentor Professor Paul Julian Smith eloquently sets out. Both in person and in his writing he was an inspiration. He will be much missed.

FSFF's author had met David Vilaseca on a number of occasions over the years and is a keen follower of his brilliant work on queer, Catalan, and Hispanic culture. She wishes to express her sincere condolences to David's family, friends, and colleagues.

David Vilaseca had a particular interest in Deleuzian philosophy as well as in the critique of Deleuze's work by fellow French philosopher Alain Badiou. Three of his related essays are linked to below, and interested FSFF readers should also look out for his third book Negotiating the Event: Post-deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Literature and Film, to be published this Autumn, which will undoubtedly explore further the pertinence of Deleuze and Badiou's work for film studies.

Good Film and Cultural Studies-related Deleuzian websites:
          Deleuzian film studies:
          • Kara Keeling, 'Deleuze and Cinema', Critical Commons, 2010 ("The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California")
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