{"id":15337,"date":"2024-10-30T21:04:45","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T21:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/?p=15337"},"modified":"2024-10-30T21:14:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T21:14:50","slug":"from-materiality-to-eloquence-magazine-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/notas\/from-materiality-to-eloquence-magazine-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"From Materiality to Eloquence MAGAZINE 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"15337\" class=\"elementor elementor-15337\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-69cec2e e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"69cec2e\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-94744fa elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"94744fa\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-21f4b9b e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"21f4b9b\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-e783315 elementor-widget__width-inherit elementor-widget elementor-widget-heading\" data-id=\"e783315\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"heading.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<h2 class=\"elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default\">From Materiality to Eloquence<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-a135d03 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"a135d03\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ef4cb25 elementor-widget__width-inherit elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"ef4cb25\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By Adrian Martin<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-e8db727 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"e8db727\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-1f6c400 elementor-widget__width-initial elementor-widget elementor-widget-image\" data-id=\"1f6c400\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"image.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figure class=\"wp-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-1024x576.jpg\" class=\"attachment-large size-large wp-image-15149\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-18x10.jpg 18w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/elementor\/thumbs\/21.-A-ILUSTRACION-DE-ADRIAN-scaled-qw3whl5r6wox0z1cwhdv32h55vrpgoi5upxk77ksnk.jpg 754w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<figcaption class=\"widget-image-caption wp-caption-text\"><\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-edd3d1b e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"edd3d1b\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-cc6d179 elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"cc6d179\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ef3c000 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"ef3c000\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ca846bb elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"ca846bb\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><b>Introduction: Film Festival Report<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the Rotterdam Film Festival of early 2024, a theme developed among a network of three films which all looked back, in different ways, to the Pan-African movements of liberation in the early 1960s. Billy Woodberry\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">M\u00e1rio <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">was probably the best-publicised of the trio, due to the director\u2019s presence at the event (he is now 74) and his illustrious past as a participant in the \u201cLos Angeles Rebellion\u201d collective of black filmmakers in the 1970s and \u201880s.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But no less striking was <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nome<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> by Sana Na N\u2019Hada, which I will discuss further below. Even an entirely mainstream film from Sweden, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hammarskj\u00f6ld<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the biopic of a progressive statesman within the United Nations, gave some insight into the turbulent struggle inside African countries and regions at that historic time.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the span of festival reviews I randomly consulted post-Rotterdam, this network of films was never identified, and the individual titles (apart from, occasionally, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">M\u00e1rio<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) never mentioned. We know how festival reportage often works: a journalist appointed by <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> or <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Film Comment<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> flies in for a few days, catches a few designated \u2018highlights\u2019, maybe walks into a random Virtual Reality art installation, has a couple of drunken chats with old friends from around the world, and then flies out. Subsequently, perhaps a 750 or 1,000-word piece appears online or in print. Very little of the total festival program thus gets documented or reflected upon for posterity, due to this unfortunate system of coverage.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to particularly retrieve and underline here the significance and power of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nome<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, which I assert to be among the best films from anywhere in recent years. In it, Na N\u2019Hada, a veteran director from Guinea-Bissau, revisits the years of his youth and the turbulent struggle of Africans against the Portuguese colonial army from 1969 to the mid \u201870s. The approach is minimal and stylised, yet bursting with lyrical beauty and frankly spiritual mystery. A man named Nome leaves home to join the guerillas and becomes a heroic leader \u2013 but the personal relationships he has abandoned return to haunt him during the complicated and confused post-revolutionary period.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Both <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nome<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">M\u00e1rio<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> probe, from their distinct perspectives, the hopeful, Utopian dimension of African revolutionary movements. Both confront, with the wisdom of hindsight, the seeds of corruption and betrayal that always existed there. But neither film embraces despair. A unique feature of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nome<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is the archival footage from the time originally shot by Na N\u2019Hada and his comrades. These images do much more than guarantee documentary authenticity; in their very fragility, they allow the film to elevate the materiality of scratched, battered frames into a full-blown, poetic language.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Flashback: An Encounter with Gilberto Perez<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Watching <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nome<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> moved me to, once again, consider the legacy of the great, Cuban-born critic-scholar Gilberto Perez (1943-2015). I recall, particularly, a discussion with conference participants following my presentation on Sidney Furie\u2019s horror film <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Entity<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1982) and Peter Tscherkassky\u2019s experimental \u2018remake\u2019 of it, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Outer Space<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1999), at Reading University (United Kingdom) in 2008. [1] Gilberto, another keynote speaker at the event, took the lead in this far-ranging discussion. The conference was, in fact, the first time I had met him in person, after several years of distant, email correspondence.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gilberto was especially intrigued by the material marks of the filmmaker\u2019s presence and intervention in Tscherkassky\u2019s work: silhouettes of small shapes of sharp objects dotting individual frames, dancing in and through clusters of shredded imagery. This was not a case of rote \u2018reflexivity\u2019 \u2013 the artist reminding us that we are watching a film, which is a fact all of us could easily verify for ourselves \u2013 but, for Gilberto (and for me) a more intense and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">eloquent<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> form of self-inscription, brimming with the forces and drives of the unconscious.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It struck me at the time that very few of the most revered film analysts of a certain empirical tradition \u2013 such as Robin Wood, Victor Perkins or the recently deceased George Wilson \u2013 would likely have any interest in a frankly avant-garde, short work such as <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Outer Space<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. It is even less likely that the oft-quoted stars of the contemporary \u2018film-philosophy\u2019 movement \u2013 like Stanley Cavell (deceased) or Robert Pippin (living) \u2013 would ever deign to concern themselves with a film like this, let alone its tiniest, most intricate and fleeting details. Narrative fiction \u2013 usually at feature-length \u2013 firmly remains the Gold Standard of serious film criticism. This amounts to a form of apartheid. (Referring again to the Rotterdam program, the short films were frequently more forceful in their considered condensation than the features \u2013 but, once again, no reviewer that I consulted bothered to see or mention any of them.)<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What does this anecdotal memory of mine tell us about Gilberto Perez? That he focused his generous attention, with an open mind, on whatever was presented to him; and that he cared about the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">materiality<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of cinema: about what goes into each frame (as well as into the soundtrack). We are too used, in the 21<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">st<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> century, to hearing the term <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">formalist<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> wielded as a grand-slam insult: \u2018You are looking inward, solipsistically, to the technical or stylistic details of a film, instead of urgently looking outward to the wider social, cultural and historical context! You are a formalist, trapped within formalism!\u2019 This division of realms into \u2018text versus context\u2019 was pointless to Gilberto (and to me).\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To discuss the materiality of films, how they are made and the effects that each creative decision has on the spectator, is always, immediately, a reflection upon social reality. The materiality of cinema (of any art form) is part of the entire, complex, material fabric of the world, after all! Conversely, to bypass style or form and simply jump to a discussion of the Big Themes reflected on screen \u2013 power, gender, decoloniality, capitalism and so on \u2013 results in an inhibited, broken, insubstantial mode of critique.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The \u2018hot takes\u2019 of thousands of people on social media (professional film critics included) about Greta Gerwig\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Barbie<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2023) will be (already have been!) swiftly forgotten; what Gilberto painstakingly and lyrically wrote about Jean Renoir or John Ford, Dani\u00e8le Huillet &amp; Jean-Marie Straub or Bruce Conner, will be remembered and worked-through for decades to come \u2013 if the world manages to survive that long.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I suspect that, were he still with us today, Gilberto would wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of Eugenie Brinkema\u2019s polemic in her recent books on cinema, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Forms of the Affects<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2014) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Life-Destroying Diagrams<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2022). She argues that, rather than anyone being \u2018too formalist\u2019, the fact is that, as film analysts, we are <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">not yet formalist enough<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">! We have not yet pushed our critical accounts far enough to the frame-by-frame level, savouring every material detail of image and sound. [2]<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Filmmakers, after all, do exactly this in their practice: they weight up the impact, the function, the shape of every edit, every mix of sounds, every rhythmic cluster that accelerates or decelerates. A recent biography of Elaine May tells us that, during prolonged months (even years) of editing her films, her memory of the shooting was so precise that she could assemble a sentence of dialogue not as it was recorded live in one burst, but reconstituted from individual words taken from numerous, separate takes! But would anyone dare say to the maker of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mikey and Nicky<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1976) that she is \u2018too formalist\u2019?<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this light, Gilberto had more in common with the mature, 21<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">st<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> century work of Laura Mulvey in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2006) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2019), or Raymond Bellour in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Le Corps du cin\u00e9ma: Hypnoses, \u00e9motions, animalit\u00e9s<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2009) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Pens\u00e9es du cin\u00e9ma<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2016). Or \u2013 to take a sideways swerve into today\u2019s DIY cinema forms \u2013 the short \u2018audiovisual essays\u2019 of film criticism made digitally by Cristina \u00c1lvarez L\u00f3pez, Catherine Grant, Johanna Vaude and many others.<\/span><\/p><p><b>Argument: Cinema\u2019s Paradox<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let us return to the nexus, in Perez\u2019s critical work, between <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">formal effect<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and the complex process of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">spectatorship<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Form matters in cinema because it shapes a mode of address for its audience \u2013 and this is what Gilberto called a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">rhetoric<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If we look at the main titles and subtitles of his two books, we can trace an interplay of terms. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Material Ghost<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1998) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Eloquent Screen<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (published posthumously in 2019); \u2018films and their medium\u2019 and \u2018a rhetoric of film\u2019. He was always endeavouring to interrelate and fuse what might at first appear to be paradoxical terms: the ghostly projection that is cinema is not only fleeting in its immediate effect, but also <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">material<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">; the screen is not something flat, a mere frame, window or repository, but it becomes <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">eloquent<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> through its means of style. Cinema is a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">medium<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u2013 a channel of communication, like television or radio \u2013 but it is also a <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">rhetoric<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a full and expansive mode of discourse (once we understand that discourse is not only verbal and literary, but also auditory and pictorial, performance-based and rhythmic). And its discourse is not individual in its effect or address (as literature generally is), but <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">trans-personal<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, collectively unifying (at least potentially so).<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perez\u2019s work can, in 2024, be put into fruitful dialogue with Anna Kornbluh\u2019s important book of cultural diagnostics, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2023). She argues that the all-pervasive tendency to immediacy (in art, writing, theory, TV streaming, and lifestyle) is \u201cfundamentally negating mediation\u201d, an \u201cinstant replay of emanative intensity in continuous flow\u201d. The result is a massive logjam: we celebrate the ineffable present moment in an increasingly microscopic, individualised way, because we can no longer even imagine a possible, collective future. Everything that smacks of an old-fashioned \u2018critical distance\u2019 is castigated and hurled aside by the hip auto-theorists, object-ontologists and \u2018flat materialists\u2019 of the current intellectual scene.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perez would have agreed with Kornbluh that \u201cmediations are connective collectivisers, and ideas are social things\u201d \u2013 that is precisely the foundation of the rhetoric of film in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Eloquent Screen<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u201dRepresentation\u201d, Kornbluh writes, is a \u201csocial activity\u201d; and mediation is a process of offering context, commentary, perspective on a described, evoked and dramatised situation.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The positive models for Kornbluh range from the complex point-of-view structures of 19<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">th<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> century literature to the epic-mosaic canvases of Colson Whitehead\u2019s 2016 novel <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Underground Railroad<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (filmed by Barry Jenkins in 2021) and the TV series <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Succession<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2018-2023). Fredric Jameson (the avowed model for Kornbluh) and his notion of \u2018cognitive mapping\u2019 is never far from the argument of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Immediacy<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> \u2013 we need, as spectators, to be able to observe and then <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">connect <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">pieces and levels of a complex reality, to make some deep sense across the scattered networks of contemporary experience.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perez has a richer and more varied grasp of aesthetics than Kornbluh\u2019s sometimes over-generalised picture allows. He realises (as any good critic should) that immediacy \u2013 or <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">immersion<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, to cite the currently popular term \u2013 is a filmmaking option with a long, diverse history, used to significant effect by, for example, John Cassavetes or Terrence Malick and, in even more contemplative setting, Hou Hsiao-hsien or Tsai Ming-liang (who has explored 3D virtual reality installations). The style reaches its nadir (as Kornbluh discusses) in the Safdies\u2019 <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Uncut Gems<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2019) or the cinema of Gaspar No\u00e9, but a dead end is neither an origin nor a destiny. Filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann and Bi Gan regularly alternate, within a given work, immersive sequences and those that step back to gauge a critical distance.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ultimately, Perez is on the side of mediation as a social and artistic good. In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Material Ghost<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> he distinguishes between <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">drama <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">narrative<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Drama involves the direct enactment of unfolding action; narrative, by contrast, is an ordering, an account, a report of action. The beauty and complexity of cinema arises from the way it overlays both modes. Perez deepens this conceptual framework with a consideration of Bertolt Brecht\u2019s principles of theatre. For Perez, Brecht\u2019s plays \u201cclearly engaged the space of life from a space clearly marked out as a theatre stage, the site of illusion rather than reality, the autonomous space of art\u201d. He adds: \u201cMaybe the autonomy of art is an illusion, but an illusion that allows space for standing back from what is and entertaining the alternative, constructing not just fantasies but the possible realities to which fantasies may lead.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><b>Conclusion: Back on the Chain Gang<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Where is contemporary cinema \u2013 and how can Gilberto Perez\u2019s work help illuminate it for us today? These are the questions that the editors of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Fantasma Material<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> posed to me. I believe we are at a unique juncture in the mid 2020s. There is no use in decrying every effect of screen-immediacy at a time when we are desperately trying to understand and articulate what (for example) computers, social media and Artificial Intelligence are doing to reshape our emotional lives, our working hours, and our innermost, unconscious psyches.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We have to get right inside that entire complex, and cinema can help both to guide us in and ease us out of it. For there are sparkles of Utopia \u2013 dreams, visions, slivers of hope, new possibilities of thought and action \u2013 in even the spookiest, most disembodied manifestations of \u2018digital subjectivity\u2019. The old Marxist concept of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">alienation<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> can only take us so far \u2013 because some effects of alienation can actually be productive, turning reality around and allowing us to see it from another angle. Jane Schoenbrun\u2019s films <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019re All Going to the World\u2019s Fair<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2021) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I Saw the TV Glow<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2024) are all about that possibility, as they explore a generalised <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">trans<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> state: identity transition, and not only in the sex\/gender sense.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Strange, new collectivities can be formed between the disembodied cine-spectators who move (as Thierry Jousse once described this phenomenon) past each other like \u2018fish in an aquarium\u2019, in and out of flickering screen interfaces. This is a political state of fragmented being explored, for example, in the queer-punk splinter-cultures of Colombia as evoked by Theo Montoya\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Anhell69<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (2022), or in the marginal Brazilian productions of Adirley Queir\u00f3s and Joana Pimenta. States of being that are, all at once, both ghostly and material.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ultimately, the question is: how can we get all the way from the brute <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">materiality<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of cinema to its expressive <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">eloquence<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">? How can films help us to truly see and hear something, to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">grasp<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> something about our contemporary condition? In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Eloquent Screen<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Perez proposed many tools for this work. Much of the book is devoted to an illuminating consideration of formal tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche in cinema. But what really matters for Perez, finally, are those special moments in films that give a twist to these tropes, adding a surplus level of meaning or feeling to typical, conventional procedures. His condensed, mini-essays on an astounding range of works \u2013 from <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">City Lights<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1931) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By the Bluest of Seas<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1936) to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All My Life<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1966) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ceddo<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1977) \u2013 are frequently breathtaking; even canonical classics like <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Battleship Potemkin<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1925) and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Citizen Kane<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (1941) come up fresh and revivified. Perez gave renewed meaning and vitality to the notion of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">allegorical interpretation<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of films: it is not an obscure, arcane or elitist procedure, but goes to the very heart of how we all process the trans-personal, generalised, collective, rhetorical address of cinema.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I wish to conclude \u2018back on the chain gang\u2019 (as the splendid 1982 song by The Pretenders says) by plunging again into the global Film Festival circuit and the random, hidden, exciting discoveries that a critic can (and should) make there. Le\u00efla Kilani\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Indivision<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (aka <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Birdland<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, 2023) conjures a world that is both enchanted and filled with danger. Mansouria near Tangier is an area that combines an abundant forest, the wealthy homestead of the Bechtani family, and villagers who have squatted there for 40 years. An announced wedding triggers a splitting of paths: while the matriarch of the Bechtani clan wants to sell and clear out the land, her son Anis and granddaughter Lina live within nature in a fully mystical way, paying heed to coincidences and signs that announce a coming social revolution.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yet, far from relegating its dreamtime visions to a nostalgic, prelapsarian past, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Indivision<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> fuses its depiction of nature with the new means of communication and creation engendered by the Internet. The mute Lina, who writes keywords and questions all over her body, emerges as a paradoxical teenage warrior for our troubled times: she believes herself to be a superheroine, gifted or cursed, who holds the fate of the whole world in her hands. Ultimately, the film radically combines an intrigue-filled family melodrama with transcendent lyricism, and the far-sighted political wisdom born of Morocco\u2019s Arab Spring movement.<\/span><\/p><p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Indivision<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is a film that, I firmly believe, Gilberto Perez would have championed.<\/span><\/p><p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">July 2024<\/span><\/i><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[1] <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u00a0See the chapter \u201cEntities and Energies\u201d in my book <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mysteries of Cinema<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020) for the text of this talk.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[2] An informative lecture from 2022 by Brinkema, which discusses this issue, can be found on YouTube at <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=46dMe5VJT04\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=46dMe5VJT04<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ed2bfe3 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"ed2bfe3\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-0254657 elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"0254657\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-85e1541 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"85e1541\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-97d3501 elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"97d3501\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Materiality to Eloquence By Adrian Martin Introduction: Film Festival Report In the Rotterdam Film Festival of early 2024, a theme developed among a network of three films which all looked back, in different ways, to the Pan-African movements of liberation in the early 1960s. Billy Woodberry\u2019s M\u00e1rio was probably the best-publicised of the trio, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"disabled","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15337"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15337"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15341,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15337\/revisions\/15341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}