Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour - Brossura

Mavor, Carol

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822352710 ISBN 13: 9780822352716

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2012

Riassunto

Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.

Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.

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Recensione:

"In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades." --Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It s avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass s extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book s super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions.... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense. --Brian Dillon, Art Review, October 2012

"Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play. Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage, an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience, and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field. It resonates with and pays tribute to such key art historical works as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass's prose poem, On Being Blue." --Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

"In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades. As a testament and a symptom, Black and Blue belongs to a growing number of first-person accounts that have coped with the years 1939 46 and after, including those by Sarah Kofman (Rue Ordener, rue Labat) and Jean-Luc Godard (Histoire(s) du cinéma), in which the 'author' deals with his or her own relation with the past, from a highly autobiographical standpoint. What makes Black and Blue stand out is its movement to and from a theoretical critical canon, through an impressive body of films, texts, and images, which literally punctuate the book." --Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

'...a testimony to the bruising and wounding power of art through four case studies (four tender buttons, as she calls them): Barthes s Camera Lucida, Marker s La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (both Duras s novel and Resnais s film). Together, these works comprise a quartet of blue patches that wield the power to inflict upon their readers and viewers the interstitial, liminal mark of a bruise that is, a wounding tenderness perceivable even after healing has taken hold. Black and Blue is an unabashedly first person, nonprescriptive account from one such reader-viewer, one that seeks to combine catastrophe with frivolity in its quest to reveal something of the link between private and public affect by staging a struggle between them... For every Dead White Man she references, Mavor is just as quick to mention Betye Saar, James Van Der Zee, Carrie Mae Weems, or Kara Walker. Each of the chapters Mavor devotes to the book s titular subjects, however, is less an extended analysis than is an occasion to use each work as a prism through which conceptual light refracts, illuminating other works, no matter how apparently disconnected.' --Dylan J. Montanari, Los Angeles Review --Lucy Scholes, TLS

'...a testimony to the bruising and wounding power of art through four case studies (four tender buttons, as she calls them): Barthes s Camera Lucida, Marker s La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (both Duras s novel and Resnais s film). Together, these works comprise a quartet of blue patches that wield the power to inflict upon their readers and viewers the interstitial, liminal mark of a bruise that is, a wounding tenderness perceivable even after healing has taken hold. Black and Blue is an unabashedly first person, nonprescriptive account from one such reader-viewer, one that seeks to combine catastrophe with frivolity in its quest to reveal something of the link between private and public affect by staging a struggle between them... For every Dead White Man she references, Mavor is just as quick to mention Betye Saar, James Van Der Zee, Carrie Mae Weems, or Kara Walker. Each of the chapters Mavor devotes to the book s titular subjects, however, is less an extended analysis than is an occasion to use each work as a prism through which conceptual light refracts, illuminating other works, no matter how apparently disconnected.' --Dylan J. Montanari, Los Angeles Review of Books

'It is impossible to make sense of and represent catastrophes Hiroshima, the Holocaust, loss of memory, death and these are all approached in an oblique way that makes one ponder the concept. This reviewer would answer in the affirmative Mavor s indirect question when she seems to wonder if she effectively combines catastrophe with frivolity as the text moves between the public and the private, in an effort to make sense. Thiswell-maintained tension is the underlying thread that makes the reader watch, read, and think more deeply. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty, general readers.' - E. A. Vanborre, Choice

'Mavor succeeds in producing a truly hybrid work: image and text, art criticism and self-analysis come together almost seamlessly, culminating in an impressively phenomenological approach to the subject of memory. . . . [H]er keen attention to etymology and intellectual history succeeds in opening the text, the field of play: the films she discusses function just as Proust s madeleine, describing but not finally demystifying Mavor s memory, involuntary in its movement between present and past, research and experience, art and life.' - Andrew Marzoni, Rain Taxi

'[T]he overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, ths elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text. . . . a joy to read . . . a veritable feast for the eyes.' - Lucy Scholes, TLS --E. A. Vanborre, Choice, Andrew Marzoni, Rain Taxi & Lucy Scholes, TLS

L'autore:

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, all also published by Duke University Press.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0822352710
• ISBN 13: 9780822352716
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 193