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Notes
1 ‘Slow Cinema': Temporality and Style in Contemporary Art and Experimental Film, pp. 4. Submitted by Matthew Flanagan to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English.
2 Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? - Mark Fisher, pp. 25.
3 On Slowness: Toward an Esthetic of the Contemporary (2014) - Lutz Koepnick, pp. 3.
4 Realism of the Senses in World Cinema - Tiago de Luca (2013), pp. 23.
5 Part 1, Chap 7, Of the Sublime - A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful - Edmund Burke.
6 Kant makes a threefold classification of the sublime into the terrifying sublime, the noble sublime, and the magnificent sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764).
7 ‘Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime.’
8 “In art the spiritual and material spheres are intertwined: the spiritual emerges when we become aware of the material inertia, the dysfunctional bare presence, of the objects around us.” Slavoj Zizek, in a review of Beautiful Shadow: A life of Patricia Goldsmith (London Review on Books).
9 The Sublime - Philip Shaw, pp. 4.
10 “The abject confronts us…with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-sisting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as secure as it is stifling.” Powers of Horror: An Essay on Horror - Julia Kristeva, pp. 12.
11 “Think first of swallowing the saliva in your mouth, or do so. Then imagine expectorating it into a tumbler and drinking it! What seemed natural and ‘mine’ suddenly becomes disgusting and alien. Or picture yourself sucking blood from a prick in your finger; then imagine sucking blood from a bandage around your finger! What I perceive as separate from my body becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, cold and foreign.” Gordon Allport. The Anatomy of Disgust - William Miller, pp. 97.
12 “We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.” Powers of Horror: An essay on Abjection - Julia Kristeva, pp. 18.
13 “Abjection is merely the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things (and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence).” Georges Bataille, Essais de Sociologie.
14 Visions of Excess: Selected Writing (1927–39), pp. 94.
15 In his Theory of Religion (pp. 52), Bataille defines the sacred as ‘the prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.’ The passionate experience of the sacred is simultaneously of divine ecstasy and extreme horror.
16 “The profane world is the world of taboos. The sacred world thus depends on limited acts of transgression.” Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille, pp. 67.
17 Preface to Madame Edwarda - The Bataille Reader, pp. 226. “And since, in death, being is taken away from us at the same time it is given us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us, during these interludes, exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of ecstasy coincide.”
18 Powers of Horror: An essay on Abjection, pp. 11.
19 ‘Disgust, which undergoes a counter-cathexis (or a sublimation), and laughter are complementary ways of admitting an alterity that otherwise would fall prey to repression; they enable us to deal with a scandal that otherwise would overpower our system of perception and consciousness.’ Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation - Winfried Menninghaus, pp. 7.
20 Toward an Esthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema - Matthew Flanagan. (16:9 - November 2008 - In English: Toward an Esthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema).
21 Albert Serra Interviewed on El Cant dels ocells (Birdsong) – Senses of Cinema.
22 “Excess is not only counter narrative; it is also counter-unity. To discuss it may be to invite the partial disintegration of a coherent reading. But on the other hand, pretending that a work is exhausted by its functioning structures robs it of much that is strange, unfamiliar, and striking about it.”
23 Serra himself is a practicing Catholic. Moreover, the unique relationship of Christianity and flesh has to be kept in mind - it is the only world religion in which God takes the form of a human body so as to live, suffer, and die like a human being.
24 In an interview, Serra describes Birdsong as ‘one of the truly religious films in many years’. Albert Serra Interviewed on El Cant dels ocells (Birdsong) – Senses of Cinema
25 In that sense, it serves almost as the fourth installment in Sokurov’s ‘trilogy of power’ - films on Hitler, Lenin, and Hirohito. Both filmmakers share an affinity for representing figures of ‘absolute’ power reduced to impotence and powerlessness, cast outside of their determining days of glory to the ignominious banality of everyday life.
26 Bataille defines laughter as a ‘spasmodic process of the oral orifice’s sphincter muscles, analogous to that of the sphincter muscles of the anal orifice during defecation. When it comes to outbursts of laughter, we must thus admit that the nervous discharge that could have normally been released by the anus (or by the adjacent sexual organs) is being released by the oral orifice.’ Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation - Winfried Menninghaus, pp. 355.
27 Schoonover argues that the temporality of slow cinema gets manifested in two bodies: the on-screen body and the body of the spectator. Thus, the off-screen spectator is also a kind of wastrel, giving rise to a mode of spectatorial labor ‘that appears enabled by the very determinate quality of the “unbelaboured labor” of nonprofessional actors.’ The act of watching itself becomes a valuable form of labor, thus belonging to the register of the actively political.
28 Nathaniel Dorsky, in his essay Devotional Cinema, refers to cinema as an ‘act of alchemy’, a transition from mere representation to a direct experience beyond narrative content. ‘For alchemy to take place in a film, the form must include the expression of its own materiality, and this materiality must be in union with its subject matter’. Dorsky uses the word devotional not in a religious sense but rather to refer to an opening or an interruption that ‘allows us to experience what is hidden’.
29 Powers of Horror - Kristeva, pp. 3.
30 “…the cinematic apparatus implies not only the passage of time, a chronology into which we would slip as if into a perpetual present, but also a complex, stratified time in which we move through different levels simultaneously, present, past(s), future(s) -and not only because we use our memory and expectations, but also because, when it emphasizes the time in which things take place, their duration, cinema almost allows us to perceive time.” The Image - Jacques Aumont, pp. 129.
31 On the Mouth, Visions of Excess - Georges Bataille, pp. 59.
32 Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, pp. 18. “In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch.” Laura’s theory is based on a phenomenological understanding of embodied spectatorship.
33 In a paper titled ‘Exhibition Cinema: A Crossroads between the Cinema and the Museum in Contemporary Spanish Film-Making’, Jordi Ballo cites Albert Serra as one of the contemporary Spanish filmmakers who have created an interaction between cinema and the museum without giving up on the narrative form characteristic to cinema (along with Pere Portabella, Víctor Erice, José Luis Guerín, and Isaki Lacuesta).
34 Eroticism - Georges Bataille, pp. 17.
35 Attraction and Repulsion II - Bataille, pp. 114.
36 Inner Experience, pp. 9.
37 “Libertinage will never be what you do, but the next thing you can imagine doing. It is like a chain reaction. What is libertinage? I think this is the subject of the film. De Sade was the one to fully understand this, that you go further and further and your only reason to exist is conceiving and doing a new act.” Festival Focus - Interview with Albert Serra. It must be noted, however, that Serra’s cinema (much like Bataille’s writings) is wholly grounded in an ontology of male desire.
38 Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion, pp. 19. ‘Marguerite-Marie Alacoque said that she was so sensitive to pain that anything dirty made her ill. But after Jesus had called her back to order, the only way she could clean up the vomit of a sick woman was by making it her food. She later absorbed the fecal matter of a woman with dysentery, insisting that this oral contact inspired in her a vision of Christ holding her with her mouth pressed against his wound’. pp. 21.
39 The 120 Days of Sodom - Marquis De Sade. In Inner Experience, Bataille remarks that “In the 120 Days, we attain the summit of voluptuous terror.”
40 Introduction, Lacan and Contemporary Film - Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle, pp. 10.
41 McGowan argues that for later Lacan (seminar XI), the gaze is something that the subject (or spectator) encounters in the object (or the film itself). It is ‘this gap within our look that marks the point at which our desire manifests itself in what we see’, the way that desire distorts our field of perception. ‘Understood in Lacan’s own terms, the gaze is not the spectator’s external view of the filmic image, but the mode in which the spectator is accounted for within the film itself.’ The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, pp. 28.
42 The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan - Todd McGowan, pp. 28. ‘The most radical aspect of the dream-like cinematic experience lies in the ability of the gaze to show itself there.’
43 For McGowan, earlier Lacanian film theory completely dismissed the power of film to disrupt ideology and to challenge—or even expose—the process of interpellation. Following Zizek (‘the subject is the void, the hole in the other’), McGowan defines the subject as a point at which ideology fails. If the interpellating system were perfect, it would allow for no new entrants. Thus, ‘in order to function properly, the symbolic order must function improperly.’ As regards cinema, ‘the encounter with the traumatic real, which is an encounter with a point of non-sense within the big Other (what the big Other cannot render meaningful), frees the subject from its subjection’. pp. 30.
44 The First Durational Cinema and The Real of Time - Micheal Walsh (Slow Cinema by Tiago De Luca), pp. 64. Walsh defines the Lacanian Real as ‘whatever is resistant to symbolization; whatever cannot be integrated into our finite universe of signifiers and objects.’ Time thus belongs to the Lacanian Real while all symbolisations of time belong to reality.
45 The Return of The Real: The Avant-garde at The End of The Century - Hal Foster, pp. 150.
46 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography - Roland Barthes, pp. 55.
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Vedant Srinivas
Vedant Srinivas graduated from Delhi University with a distinction in Philosophy and went on to study filmmaking in Prague. A devout cinephile and a voracious reader, he is equally interested in film theory and the history of cinema, with a passion for avant-garde and formalist works. His writing has appeared in magazines like Offscreen and Fipresci-India. Vedant currently works with a film production house in Mumbai.