PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY

开场白：外科医生的手术刀割破了一位美女的眼睛。凭借这一令人震惊的场景，加泰罗尼亚导演Joachín Jordá激怒了他的观众，试图对抗他所说的“审美昏昏欲睡”。对于若拉来说，一个令人不快或丑陋的形象对于抵御电影的诱惑是必要的，这种说法以各种形式贯穿在电影写作的历史中。不仅对于这位前卫的电影制作人，而且对于从西格弗里德·克拉考尔和安德烈·巴赞到卡希尔斯·杜辛尼玛和劳拉·马尔维的电影理论家来说，美学上令人愉快的画面是危险的。二十世纪电影理论对电影价值和政治的截然不同的主张，是通过他们拒绝什么样的图像而联系在一起的，而被拒绝的东西分享着一种含蓄的美学批评。电影理论的修辞一直贬低表面装饰，发现银幕诱人的皮肤是虚假的、肤浅的、女性化的或非政治性的，而将真相和价值定位在何塞·S丑陋的电影体的变体中。《美丽：电影与理论中的形象》追溯了这种视觉修辞的历史，从电影研究到艺术史，试图揭示其在美学理论中的根源，更重要的是，它对性别、性和种族话语的依赖。这部哲学史借鉴了柏拉图的观念与形象的分离，形象充其量是一个无法阐明哲学理性的副本，在最坏的情况下是一个欺骗性的和危险的装饰品。西方美学的语言不仅是以理性为中心的，而且是仇视偶像的，达德利·安德鲁曾指出，马克思主义和女权主义电影理论家是当代的偶像破坏者。现代美学用形象中的等级取代了理性词语和化妆品形象的二元结构。由于艺术史很难完全否定这一形象，它将这场辩论重新安排为线条与颜色，或意义与装饰之间的争论。这些概念将色彩和装饰品与女性、娘娘腔和异国情调紧密联系在一起，将欧洲新古典主义的纯粹性与劣质的东方或原始风格进行了对比。因此，Pretty将看似抽象的风格和审美形式问题重新定位于政治史中，并询问这些历史如何影响了关于电影的想法。从这个角度来看，必须重新评估被认为是纯粹的、未形成的电影风格的批判性中心，比如意大利新现实主义，或者自动地将叙事置于奇观之上。如果把五颜六色的设计、质地丰富的米色丝绸和横扫的相机运动等壮观品质放在欧洲视觉思想史上来看待，那么它们的被拒绝可以被视为审美主体的性别歧视和种族主义政治的延续。虽然电影学术经常将性别、性和种族作为表现问题来处理，但这些意识形态或伦理方面的参与因在形式和风格层面上排除漂亮的人而受到破坏。Pretty从两个方面探讨了这些问题。第一章追溯了电影理论的历史，概述了艺术史和美学思想对电影学术的影响，并分析了这种影响在二十世纪电影写作中的意义。关键时期是电影理论在19世纪关于艺术、室内设计和建筑的辩论；20世纪20年代关于电影特殊性和现代性的辩论；后古典电影理论对美学的拒绝；以及当代对现实主义的回归。第二部分包括我们可以称之为漂亮电影的案例研究：被指责过度审美化的电影制作实践，但在这些实践中，我们可以找到想象美学和政治的替代方法。这一部分介绍了女权主义导演克莱尔·丹尼斯、酷儿艺术家德里克·贾曼、流亡亚洲的克里斯托弗·道尔以及巴兹·鲁赫曼的热门电影。

Opening image: a surgeon's scalpel cuts the eye of a beautiful woman. With this shocking scene, Catalan director Joachín Jordá provokes his audience in an attempt to counter what he calls 'aesthetic drowsiness'. For Jordá, an unpleasant or ugly image is necessary to fend off the seduction of cinema, and this claim, in various forms, runs through the history of writing on film. For not only this avant-garde filmmaker, but for film theorists from Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin to Cahiers du Cinéma and Laura Mulvey, aesthetically pleasing images are dangerous. The very disparate claims on cinematic value and politics made by twentieth-century film theories are linked by what kinds of images they reject, and what is rejected shares an implicit aesthetic critique. The rhetoric of film theory has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine or apolitical, and locating truth and value instead in variants of Jordá's ugly film body. PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY traces the history of this visual rhetoric from film studies to art history, attempting to uncover its roots in aesthetic theory and, more importantly, its dependence on discourses of gender, sexuality and race. This philosophical history draws from Plato's separation of idea from image, with the image at best a copy incapable of articulating philosophical reason, and at worst a deceptive and dangerous cosmetic. The very language of western aesthetics is not only logocentric but iconophobic, and Dudley Andrew has pointed to Marxist and feminist film theorists as contemporary iconoclasts. Modern aesthetics replaced the binary of rational word versus cosmetic image with a hierarchy within the image. Since art history could hardly reject the image altogether, it reframed the debate to one of line versus colour, or meaning versus decoration. These concepts closely tied colour and ornament to the feminine, the effeminate and the foreign, contrasting the European purity of neoclassicism with the inferior 'Oriental' or 'primitive' style. Thus, PRETTY relocates seemingly abstract questions of style and aesthetic form within political histories, and asks how these histories have affected ideas about cinema. Seen in this light, the critical centrality of supposedly pure, unformed film styles like Italian neorealism, or the automatic valuation of narrative over spectacle must be re-evaluated. If spectacular qualities such as colourful design, richly textured mise-en-scène, and sweeping camera movements are viewed within histories of European visual thought, their rejection can be seen as a continuation of a sexist and racist politics of the aesthetic body. While film scholarship has often addressed gender, sexuality and race as issues of representation, these ideological or ethical engagements are undermined by the exclusion of the pretty at the level of form and style. PRETTY explores these issues in two strands. The first traces a history of film theory, outlining how art historical and aesthetic ideas influenced film scholarship, and analysing the significance of this influence across twentieth-century writing on cinema. Key periods are film theory's emergence around nineteenth-century debates in art, interior design and architecture; 1920s debates on cinematic specificity and modernity; postclassical film theory's rejection of aesthetics; and the contemporary return to realism. The second strand consists of case studies of what we might call pretty films: filmmaking practices that have been accused of being overly aestheticised, but within which we can discover alternative ways to envision aesthetics and politics. This section treats feminist director Claire Denis, queer artist Derek Jarman, Asian exile Christopher Doyle, and the popular films of Baz Luhrmann.