Jenny Chamarette

Embodied Worlds and Situated Bodies: Feminism, Phenomenology, Film Theory

This article provides an overview of the emerging field of film phenomenology. It argues that the field is a different “scratching of the philosophical itch” that is created by an interrogation of film’s relationship to embodied and situated experience. Film phenomenology is not a movement as such, and yet in the past decade, a wave of scholarship, often written by female scholars and often feminist, has emerged in this field, and in the associated fields of cultural studies, political theory, and sense theory. Contrary to the supposed rigor of philosophical traditions (though this term is questionable in the context of phenomenology’s antiphilosophical stance), film phenomenologies retain a looseness and lightness of foot. This characteristic is often described as a lack of rigor under standardized disciplinary modes, where rigor stands in as a means of summarily dismissing methods that resist disciplinary singularity. In this context, the essay presents a plural, flexible notion of feminist film phenomenologies rather than a singular methodological enterprise, in examples of recent research in this field from the United States and United Kingdom.

Transitional borders and intermedial spectacle: Kiarostami and opera, between France and Iran

ABSTRACT This article discusses the complex cultural and theoretical relationships between France and Iran, Europe and the Middle East in recent intermedial work by the film-maker Abbas Kiarostami. Through the installation Looking At Tazieh (2004), the film Shirin (2008) and the staging and direction of the opera Così fan tutte, the article explores the philosophical and contextual implications of spectacle within these trans-cultural productions. In particular, it discusses how French cultural interventions into Kiarostamis recent intermedial work can be rethought productively outside the remit of francophone or transnational cinemas, instead refocusing on the intermediality of spectacle and modes of enculturated looking in these three recent productions.

Agnès Varda’s Trinket Box: Subjective Relationality, Affect and Temporalised Space

We long for objects, because they are never ours for long. Peter Schwenger’s comment above serves as a reminder of the persistently affective relationship between a subject and an object. When that object in question relates to the film object, what takes place is a subjective spatio-temporal encounter that is as simulacral as it is material. In this chapter, the melancholy and the productivity of nostalgia, that particularly timely affect, become the key means of thinking with productive communicative and relational strategies of cinematic subjectivity. Nostalgia, as an immaterial, powerful, circulating form of affect, becomes coextensive with virtual and actual cinematic worlds. As a consequence, ethics do not dominate the thinking of cinematic subjectivity here, but instead ethical relationality surfaces as a mode of apprehending the spatio-temporal engagements of Agnes Varda’s films and installations.