This dissertation is a study of the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of the essay form as it passes into cinema particularly the modern cinema in the aftermath of the Second World War from literary and philosophic sources. Taking Jean-Luc Godard as my main case, but encompassing other important figures as well (including Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, and Guy Debord), I show how the cinematic essay is uniquely equipped to conduct an open-ended investigation into the powers and limits of film and other audio-visual manners of expression. I provide an analysis of the cinematic essay that illuminates its working principles in two crucial respects. First, whereas essay films have typically been described in taxonomic terms that is, through classification schemes that hinge on reflective voiceover commentary, found footage montage, and hybrid combinations of fiction and documentary I articulate a more supple and dynamic sense of the essayistic through a detailed reading of Montaigne. As I treat it, the essay form emerges in complex acts of self-portraiture, citation, and a range of stylistic maneuvers that exhibit an impulse toward dialogical exchange. Second, I use Godards prolific body of work to establish the essay as a fundamentally intergeneric and intermedial phenomenon. Godard figures as a privileged case in my argument because, as I show, he self-consciously draws on essayistic traditions from a broad spectrum of linguistic and pictorial media as he carries out experiments between film, television, and video. Through close engagements with his works, I show that the essayistic, far from being a mere descriptive label, is crucial to our understanding of many of the most intricate features of his practice: how he retools antecedent materials and discourses; how he combines critical and creative faculties; how he confronts his own agency as both an author and spectator; how he perpetually revises his own earlier output; how he inhabits his work and achieves a consubstantial presence with the sights and sounds he handles; how he tests out ideas without offering a direct argument; and how he longingly pursues a dialogue with a co-operative viewer according to conditions of perceptual sharedness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-02132011-181347 |
| Date | 01 July 2011 |
| Creators | Warner, Jr., Charles Richard |
| Contributors | Colin MacCabe, Marcia Landy, Lucy Fischer, Daniel Morgan, Randall Halle, Adam Lowenstein |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-02132011-181347/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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