There has been much said in recent years about the body in cinema, as if somehow before we had film devoid of the corporeal, no matter if we have always been watching shadows thrown onto the screen. Yet isn’t there something to be said for talking so much more about the body recently, as opposed to fifty years ago, and how best can we make sense of the shift? Where we have had Gilles Deleuze…
Andrei Tarkovsky proposed that genre films are a tomb, but a better description might be that they are prisons, works contrary to those that allow what Jacques Ranciere called, in a very different context, the emancipated spectator. Instead, we have the incarcerated spectator, with the viewer serving their two-hour sentence, well-aware of what to expect from the experience. This isn’t quite …
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 I first noticed him working at a bar in an arthouse cinema in Edinburgh. He was more confident in a particular way than I would expect in an environment that wasn’t averse to hiring attractive people. But these were individuals one might have expected to see working too in an art gallery, a bookshop or a museum. The confidence in him I would have described as cocky, while the type of assur…
People may no longer watch genre films with the same restrictive expectations of an earlier generation, but they might be watching them with a much greater generic awareness. While it might have been common for audiences in the forties and fifties to like a good western, or a musical, or a gangster film, or perhaps a horror, contemporary viewers are less inclined to know what they like, but more a…