I’m catching up on the news that Theo Angelopoulos died last week. Hit by a motorcycle. Now that the “last of the European modernists” (as he’s often called) is dead, where does that leave us? Like kids searching for a father we never knew? http://youtu.be/EC-AhAYLnOc
Archive for the ‘Visual culture’ Category
Last man
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged Angelopoulos, modernism on February 3, 2012 | 3 Comments »
The concept-image
Posted in Visual culture on September 13, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I love gex‘s simple, elegant, and beautiful graphic depictions of philosophical ideas.
Shaviro responds
Posted in Cinema, Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged affect, Shaviro on September 2, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Steven Shaviro has posted his response to my and three other “curators’ notes” on his Post-Cinematic Affect. The twists and turns of the discussions that have followed each of the daily commentaries have been fascinating. Somehow we’ve gone from a discussion of recent cinema to theorizing about affect and the limitations of recent affect theory […]
Wasting Nature: Ecocriticism & Photography
Posted in Academe, Visual culture, tagged calls on August 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Photography & Culture is calling for submission proposals for a special issue on ecocriticism and photography. See further details here. Henry Fox Talbot famously described photography as the “pencil of nature.” Although this metaphor refers to photography’s special relationship to the real, to the indexicality that makes it suited for naturalist representation, Talbot’s evocative phrase […]
Herzog’s cave
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged Herzog, interpretation on June 10, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is probably not an essential Werner Herzog film, and I sympathize with those (like Bill Benzon) who’d much rather just see the pictures and do without Herzog’s prattling on or the “banshee muzak,” as Bill calls it. In both the prattling and especially the banshee muzak (which is pretty good, for […]
Rendered beachless
Posted in Visual culture on May 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
… by the record water levels in Lake Champlain following this winter’s snows and this spring’s seemingly endless (and sometimes torrential) rains. There is usually about 40 feet of beach at the spot pictured above, just down the hill from us, all of it now under water. Average water levels in the lake are around […]
On not going to sleep (during blackouts)
Posted in Politics, Visual culture on May 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
An in-law sent me a PDF of this rudely hilarious little picture book that would warm the cruel heart (or maybe cruel the warm heart) of every new parent. Turns out the artist, Ricardo Cortes, does great little books like Sketches of the Drug Wars and the celebration of power blackouts pictured above (both links […]
Malick vs. von Trier @ Cannes
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged film, Malick, von Trier on May 18, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The artist of sublime faith (of the pantheistic, immanent kind) versus the artist of sublime cynicism. “Earth is heaven (and purgatory)” versus “Earth is evil.” With catastrophe and Kubrick’s 2001 lurking in the background of both… http://youtu.be/fLPe0fHuZsc
Vitale on Deleuze’s Cinema books
Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged Deleuze, Vitale on April 30, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Chris Vitale at Networkologies has a great series going on Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books. It’s rich with insights and video clips. It starts here and continues for several lengthy posts. Or scroll down the right here to the “Mini-Essays” links on “Reading Deleuze’s Cinema Books.”
Stalking the cinema stalking the world
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged Chernobyl, Tarkovsky on April 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Here’s a version of something that comes late in Chapter One of my Ecologies of the Moving Image manuscript. This follows a description of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (USSR, 1979), which I take as a kind of paradigmatic model for the process-relational framework the book develops. Here I discuss the film in its relationship to […]
Artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead
Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged art, artmonks, monasticism, Peirce, Thoreau, Whitehead on March 21, 2011 | 5 Comments »
If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard […]
Elixir as child’s play
Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged Aleister Crowley, art, Heidegger, Heraclitus, ParkeHarrison, visuality, von Uexkull on February 28, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Marina Zurkow’s Elixir videos are wonderful, as is her Renatured blog. (Thanks to Tim for posting about her work.) There is something sad and elemental about them, in their depiction of the self-containedness of our worlds and their ultimate vulnerability in the face of the chaos beyond. At the same time, the title suggests an […]