Thomas Austin

Figures in a landscape: work and beauty in sleep furiously

This essay considers the inter-relations of aesthetics and politics in sleep furiously (UK, 2007). I examine whether, in this film at least, social concerns and visual beauty might not just coexist, and how each might be in some ways reliant on the other to be fully realised. The film might then be seen to instantiate a challenge to the frequently proposed polarity between the profilmic world and the creative interventions of documentary filmmaking, which are often reckoned to prevent viewers from making a valid connection with that world in political, social and/or ethical terms. Yet sleep furiously cannot escape another perennial issue confronting documentary: that of social class.

Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny

ABSTRACT In this essay, I draw on close textual analysis to consider the interface between film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Konrad Wolfs Der geteilte Himmel/Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979). Both films focus on women who have to confront painful processes of self-realisation in specifically East German contexts. They also show Wolf and his collaborators working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self-conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from documentary aesthetics. Viewed from the perspective of today, the films resist the reductive stereotyping of what Christa Wolf in 1991 called the ‘phantom’ East Germany, and offer a more productive haunting. As living ghosts in the post-reunification era, they are a reminder of the necessity of remembering, and so confound both a negative ‘master narrative’ of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and a collective amnesia with no interest in this history.

'A NEVER-ENDING FLASHBACK': time, space and narrative in Anne McGuire's 'Strain Andromeda The'

This paper revisits influential theorisations of narrative and narration in dominant film form via an exploration of video artist Anne McGuires ‘back‐to‐front’ re‐edit of the virus from outer space thriller The Andromeda Strain (original 1971, re‐edit 1992). In the process I both apply theories of filmic narration and point to some of their limitations. I argue that the ‘re‐versioning’ of the original film derails and thus foregrounds habitual processes of spectatorship, in part by inverting the cause and effect logic of conventional narrative film. I also explore how McGuires experiment draws attention to significant non‐narrative elements and pleasures that are present in the original version, but risk being overlooked by modes of analysis that prioritise narrational mechanisms and procedures.