PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY

开场画面：一位外科医生的手术刀正在切开一位美女的眼睛。通过这个令人震惊的场景，加泰罗尼亚导演Joachín jord<e:1>激发了他的观众，试图对抗他所谓的“审美困倦”。对jord<e:1>来说，一个不愉快或丑陋的形象是抵御电影诱惑的必要条件，这种说法以各种形式贯穿于电影写作的历史。不仅对这位先锋派电影人来说，对从齐格弗里德·克拉考尔、安德烈·巴赞到《cin<s:1>档案》和劳拉·穆尔维等电影理论家来说，美学上令人愉悦的图像是危险的。二十世纪电影理论对电影价值和政治提出的截然不同的主张，是由它们所拒绝的图像类型联系在一起的，而被拒绝的图像又有一种隐含的美学批判。电影理论的修辞学一直在诋毁表面装饰，认为银幕迷人的外表是虚假的、肤浅的、女性化的或非政治性的，而将真理和价值定位在乔丹·<s:1>丑陋的电影身体的变体中。《漂亮：电影与理论中的争议图像》追溯了这种视觉修辞从电影研究到艺术史的历史，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。这一哲学史借鉴了柏拉图的理念与形象的分离，形象充其量是一种无法表达哲学理性的复制品，最坏的情况是一种欺骗性和危险的假象。西方美学的语言不仅是意义中心的，而且是偶像恐惧症，达德利·安德鲁指出，马克思主义和女权主义电影理论家是当代的偶像破坏者。现代美学用图像内部的等级制度取代了理性话语与化妆形象的二元对立。由于艺术史很难完全拒绝图像，它将辩论重新定义为线条与色彩，或意义与装饰。这些概念将色彩和装饰与女性化、柔弱化和外国风格紧密联系在一起，将欧洲新古典主义的纯粹与低劣的“东方”或“原始”风格形成鲜明对比。因此，PRETTY在政治历史中重新定位了看似抽象的风格和美学形式问题，并询问这些历史如何影响关于电影的想法。从这个角度来看，意大利新现实主义等被认为是纯粹的、未成形的电影风格的批判中心地位，或者叙事对景观的自动评价，必须重新评估。如果从欧洲视觉思想史的角度来看，诸如色彩缤纷的设计、纹理丰富的场景布置和广泛的镜头运动等壮观的品质，它们的拒绝可以被视为审美身体性别歧视和种族主义政治的延续。虽然电影学术研究经常将性别、性取向和种族作为代表性问题来讨论，但这些意识形态或道德上的参与由于在形式和风格层面上排斥美女而受到破坏。PRETTY从两个方面探讨了这些问题。第一部分追溯了电影理论的历史，概述了艺术史和美学思想是如何影响电影学术的，并分析了这种影响在20世纪电影写作中的意义。关键时期是电影理论在19世纪围绕艺术、室内设计和建筑的辩论中出现；20世纪20年代关于电影特殊性与现代性的争论后古典电影理论对美学的排斥当代回归现实主义。第二部分包括我们所谓的“漂亮电影”的案例研究：被指责过于唯美的电影制作实践，但在其中我们可以发现想象美学和政治的替代方法。本节将介绍女权主义导演克莱尔·丹尼斯、酷儿艺术家德里克·贾曼、亚洲流亡者克里斯托弗·道尔以及巴兹·鲁尔曼的热门电影。

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.