Eyal Peretz

The Off-Screen

An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Becoming Visionary (Stanford, 2007).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. März 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 159mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 570g
• ISBN-13: 9781503600720
• ISBN-10: 1503600726
• Artikelnr.: 45577841

Autorenporträt

Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Becoming Visionary (Stanford, 2007).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
The Unframing Image
chapter abstract
The book opens its investigation of the category of the "off" by examining
a paradigmatic painting of the early modern period, Rembrandt's The
Sacrifice of Isaac. The painting is shown to involve a reflection on
the historical significance of the modern category of the "off". The key
element is the painting's attempt to differentiate the dimension of the
outside the frame (the "off") of a modern painting from the outside the
frame in a sacred image. While in the sacred image the outside is conceived
as the divine, in the modern painting the outside marks the disappearance
of the divine. This new dimension of the "off" is also conceived, due to
its critique of the logic of the divine, as what allows for a liberation
from the logic of sacrifice that guided the monotheistic religions.
The Off-Screen: Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tarkovsky
chapter abstract
The paradigmatic articulation for the modern age of the work of art's
relation to the "off" is Hamlet. Hamlet's ghost, occupying the
off-stage as the play begins, is a figure for the dimension of the
"off-stage." The figure of the ghost appears with the disappearance of
divine order, and the work of art, which now becomes fascinated with the
new dimension of the "off," becomes the arena for showing ghosts, replacing
the sacred work as an arena for showing the divine. In order to demonstrate
the generality of this matrix the book engages in a discussion of Bruegel's
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which,
much like Hamlet, show the emergence of the modern work of art to
depend on the disappearance of divine order, associated in both works with
the death of the father.
1On the Origin of Film and the Resurrection of the People: D.W. Griffith's
Intolerance
chapter abstract
This chapter consists of a reading of Griffith's masterpiece
Intolerance. From the point of view of the development of cinematic
grammar, Griffith is perhaps most famous for two things: for having
basically invented cinematic montage-a logic of cinematic cutting-and for
having liberated the location of the camera, no longer having it simulate
the position of a theatrical audience, freeing it from occupying a constant
center and distance in relation to which a stage opens. These innovations
meant that the perspective and order of cinematic shots were no longer
subjected to the principle of a given center; any shot could follow any
given shot, without any pre-established reason or meaning. The chapter
demonstrates how these innovations are fundamentally based on Griffith's
understanding of the dimension of the off-screen.
2The Actor of the Crowd-The Great Dictator: Chaplin, Riefenstahl, Lang
chapter abstract
This chapter stages a confrontation, a confrontation which Chaplin himself
staged in The Great Dictator, between the two most famous and
influential screen "personas" of the 20th century, Chaplin and Hitler. Both
Chaplin and Hitler understood the screen as an arena in relation to which
the question of the modern city crowd is raised, and they both saw their
task, the task of a movie star, as transforming the crowds, helping them
out of their condition of anxiety of the modern world and abandonment by
the ruling powers. However, whereas Chaplin's project is a revolutionary
and liberatory one, allowing the crowds to conceive of themselves as part
of an unprecedented democratic project, Hitler's "project" cancels the
freedom of the crowds and submits them to a ruling fascistic identity.
3Howard Hawks's Idea of Genre
chapter abstract
In this chapter the book extends its demonstration that the dimension of
the off-screen is the very heart of the medium of film by showing how it
can become the lens through which to examine another fundamental cinematic
question, that of film genre. The chapter is dedicated to a reading of a
single film of Howard Hawks, the relatively late work Monkey Business,
through which it also opens up the general Hawksian poetics. The chapter
demonstrates that Hawks' brilliance consists in having understood genres to
be differing modalities of inscription of the dimension of the "off".
Monkey Business transitions between dozens of genres displaying the
main Hawksian principle of genre: there is no sense of speaking, as in the
classical theory of genres, about a hierarchy of genres (tragedy is high,
comedy is low, farce even lower, etc.), nor about a limitation of their
number.
4What is a Cinema of Jewish Vengeance? Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
chapter abstract
This chapter examines film genre by taking a look at the project of a
cinematic heir of Hawks, Quentin Tarantino, in his Inglourious
Basterds. Moving as he does between multiple genres without hierarchy,
Tarantino discovers in Inglourious Basterds the weight behind this
logic, which is that of making the screen the arena of a historical
witnessing to the dimension of the "off". The film expresses three main
cinematic ideas. First, that the only way for film to activate the
dimension of the "off" is by creating an unstable generic system where
cracks between genres allow the "off-screen" to leak into the film. Second,
that violence has to do with the attempt to eliminate the "off," and is
always accompanied by the creation of images without an "off." Third, that
the task of the modern cinematic image is to liberate the image from all
false images.