Abel Ferrara (Contemporary Film Directors)

In this concise study, Nicole Brenez argues for Abel Ferrara’s place in a line of grand inventors who have blurred distinctions between industry and avant-garde film, including Orson Welles, Monte Hellman, and Nicholas Ray. Rather than merely reworking genre film, Brenez understands Ferrara’s oeuvre as formulating new archetypes that depict the evil of the modern world. Focusing as much on the human figure as on elements of storytelling, she argues that films such as Bad Lieutenant express this evil through visionary characters struggling against the inadmissible (inadmissible behavior, morality, images, and narratives).   

Computers & Technology

Brenez, Nicole

Web Development & Design

University of Illinois Press

In this concise study, Nicole Brenez argues for Abel Ferrara’s place in a line of grand inventors who have blurred distinctions between industry and avant-garde film, including Orson Welles, Monte Hellman, and Nicholas Ray. Rather than merely reworking genre film, Brenez understands Ferrara’s oeuvre as formulating new archetypes that depict the evil of the modern world. Focusing as much on the human figure as on elements of storytelling, she argues that films such as Bad Lieutenant express this evil through visionary characters struggling against the inadmissible (inadmissible behavior, morality, images, and narratives).

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Last Movies

Arts & Photography

Balsom, Erika

Schtinter, Stanley

Photography & Video

Tenement Press

Films fill our imagination with figures, figurines, and talismans. They ceaselessly rework the same archetypes and invent troubling prototypes – especially when they establish a deeper relationship to reality. How do we understand these presences that are both so characteristic and so diverse in cinema? How does film deal with bodies, movements, and gestures? Why are we so drawn to these shadows, silhouettes, and hypothetical beings? What organizes the figurative values at work in a film? How do cinematic creatures circulate from film to film and image to image? How does film articulate the links between the abstract and figurative? Is it possible to write a history of figurative forms? Starting from films themselves and works that are both classical (Sergei Eisenstein, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles) and contemporary (Abel Ferrara, Brian DePalma, Patricia Mazuy), celebrated (Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits) and overlooked (Al Razutis, Jean Genet, Monte Hellman, and John Travolta), from auteurs as well as aesthetic questions (representations of dance, the naked body, character development…), the essays in this volume, most available for the first in English, aim to open a field that has been neglected by analysis, while also suggesting the tools necessary to understanding figurative phenomena specific to cinema.

On The Figure In General And The Body In Particular:: Figurative Invention In Cinema

Anthem Press

Manifestations: Écrits politiques sur le cinéma et autres arts filmiques

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

DE L INCIDENCE

Jean-Luc Godard. Comprendre pourquoi un plan commence et pourquoi il finit, à quoi bon une image dans le monde. Comprendre que si un film peut être produit c’est qu’il est déjà admis par la société, transformer la production en transfert de fonds du capital vers le travail et non pas l’inverse. Métamorphoser les oripeaux visuels du commerce (bandes-annonces, clips, publicités, films d’entreprises) en manifestes pour la poésie. Affermir le cinéma en art, et ne pas rabattre ce terme sur l’infâme entreprise d’engrangement tranquille de plus-value qu’il est devenu. Être à la fois le Rembrandt, le Cézanne et le Hans Haacke de sa propre discipline. Devenir le Homère des Troyens, c’est-à-dire des vaincus. Amener le cinéma à ce qu’il pourrait être. Oser affirmer toute sa vie ce qu’il devrait être. Faire tout ce qu’il ne faudrait pas faire. Avec Jean-Luc Godard, le terme d'« art » reste le nom usuel d’une pratique inédite de l’insoumission créatrice.

Jean-Luc Godard: écrits politiques sur le cinéma et autres arts filmiques, tome 2

The Lettrist movement is unique in the history of avant-garde formations. Founded by Isidore Isou in Paris immediately after World War II, it remains active to this day, having lost none of its radicalism, either aesthetic or ethical. In this book, Nicole Brenez presents the key figures and the basic concepts of Lettrist cinema, the art form within which their formal innovations proved the most far-reaching, prefiguring the breakthroughs of the nouvelle vague and the experiments of expanded cinema.Copublished with Moderna Museet, Stockholm, with support from Allianz Kulturstiftung

We Support Everything Since the Dawn of Time That Has Struggled and Still Struggles: Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

History & Criticism

Sternberg Pr

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Books by Brenez, Nicole