European Film Theory: A Critical Introduction. And its emphasis on contingency suggests that there are multiple possible outcomes to any historical conjuncture, presenting “social arrangements and institutions … as historical, transitory, and subject to change” (Kellner 1980, 31).Īaron, Michele. By undermining identification and immersion, this type of narrative and acting style encourages a more critical and distanced form of spectatorship. In Brechtian theater, attenuated narrative development is often combined with a contingent style of acting in which the actor will perform “in such a way that the alternative emerges as clearly as possible, that his acting allows the other possibilities to be inferred and only represents one out of the possible variants” (Brecht In Brecht’s plays, “each aesthetic component retains its autonomy and ‘comments’ on the others, often in contradiction, to provoke thought and insight” (Kellner 1980, 33).Įstrangement and defamiliarization can be achieved through narrative strategies such as delayed exposition or development, introduction of contingencies and digressions that loosen cause-effect relations between narrative elements, reflexive foregrounding of narrative devices and lack of narrative resolution (Jameson 1972, 61–63). Estrangement seeks not only to separate elements but also to foreground the contradictions between them in ways that may illuminate the social contradictions that precipitate historical crises (Jameson 1998, 76–81). The separation of elements in Brechtian theater counters the tendency of traditional drama to combine formal properties “into one seductive and overpowering whole in which word, music, and scene work together to engulf the spectator in the aesthetic totality” (Kellner 1980, 33). Tropological movements depend on a prior separation of stylistic elements, which allows transitions between them to be noticed and understood by the reader or spectator. In the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, perhaps the most effective implementations of Brechtian estrangement in film culture, “small displacements in traditional methods” are used to challenge the conventions of bourgeois representation (Lellis 1980, 141). As with a crisis, exception introduces a period of radical contingency, but without the openness to alternative principles of judgement” (Davies 2014, 177).
Defamiliarization minimalist artists full#
It is this full and public failure of rule that the state of exception prevents. William Davies argues that in the neoliberal era, emergency conditions are often invoked during crises in order to prevent the critical reevaluation of economic and political orthodoxies: “A declaration of exception is therefore a form of violent anti-crisis, in which judgement is debarred or delayed … The speed of events or proximity of a threat is deemed so severe, that achieving a critical or objective distance from them is deemed impossible (or too existentially dangerous) … For a historic crisis to occur, a regime of judgement must be allowed to fail, producing a situation of political uncertainty in which a new mode of judgement might emerge … The crisis itself will be experienced as a moment of radical contingency and openness, in which there is no dominant ‘higher’ principle on which a shared evaluation can be based. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press) David Bordwell (Narration in the Fiction Film © 1985 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. the ‘boundary-situation’ story … the causal chain leads up to an episode of the private individual’s awareness of fundamental human issues … The boundary situation is common in art-cinema narration the film’s causal impetus often derives from the protagonist’s recognition that she or he faces a crisis of existential significance. William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition
A politics of anti-crisis arises, through which the very authority of doubt (and hence of critical judgement) is challenged, and the time and space of political uncertainty are closed down. New form of contingent neoliberalism has emerged, which renounces the classically modern schema of judgement, offering only cultural-political affirmations of certain forms of conduct and certain representations of reality.
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