Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

This book was first published over ten years ago. Did we then and do we now need another version of this book or any other book on historicity? I mean surely – today – we all understand that histor...

Regimes of historicity: presentism and experiences of time

Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz is a two-part book. It begins with a text that was published in 2001 in the context of ‘Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermi...

Images in spite of all: Four photographs from Auschwitz

Well you might call this whole tale the story of Hannah’s houses: the poorhouse, the whorehouse, the workhouse, the jailhouse, the crazy house, the outhouse, the almshouse, the house of ill repute, the mug house, the crimp house, the tenement house, the merchant house, the house of J.P. Morgan, the banking house, the trading house, the Senate house, the house of mirrors, the playhouse, the courthouse, the gambling house, the opera house, the clubhouse, the parish house, the house of assignation, the house of correction, the dead house, the parlor house, the panel house, the slaughterhouse, the shock and fall house, the Trinity house, the house of the spirits, the haunted house, the house of detention, the bawdy house, the governor’s house, the doll’s house, the funhouse, the counting house, the movie house, the death house, the fashion house, the house of cards, but above all, the house on Central Park.

from Central Park

Outside, its architectural style suggests late period Ceausescu. Inside, the former rules of East European states would have felt at home with its luxuries and obsessive secrecy. No wonder the locals refer to the building as the Kremlin or the People's Palace and talk in hushed tones of its fabled opulence.

Yet this is Quarry House, Leeds, built at a cost of [L]55m to house the NHS Management Executive and partly the Department of Social Security when it moved from London. It is tangible evidence of the new managerial ascendency. Here and Now took us on a guided tour of its interior, courtesy of cardiac surgeon Duncan Walker, who smuggled in a camera and a tape recorder.

But before our clandestine tour we …

The Man with the Movie Camera

This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’;
a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and
contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent
literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable
generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and
filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic and televisual genres
and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters
new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a
critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working
definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the
history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the
essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter
Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental
nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect,
allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation,
irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s
reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and
perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet
avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and
photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s
historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s
project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on
Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye (1967) to Histoire(s) du cinema
(1988-1998) – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical
discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4
investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun
Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images
and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging
available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary,
cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how (from
Montaigne to Farocki) knowledge and history (whether in the form of text or image) is
archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate
citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their
respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the
capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well
as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical
correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a
consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual
practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism,
the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and
archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts.

Alex Fletcher

Papers

Compilation and critique : the essay as a literary, cinematographic and videographic form