PRETTY: THE CONTESTED IMAGE IN FILM AND THEORY

开场画面：外科医生的手术刀切开了一位美女的眼睛。加泰罗尼亚导演Joachín Jordá用这一令人震惊的场景激怒了他的观众，试图对抗他所谓的“审美昏昏欲睡”。对乔达来说，一个令人不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。不仅对这位前卫电影制片人来说，而且对从齐格弗里德·克拉考尔、安德烈·巴赞到《电影手册》和劳拉·马尔维的电影理论家来说，美学上令人愉悦的图像是危险的。20世纪的电影理论对电影价值和政治的不同主张是由它们拒绝哪种图像联系在一起的，而被拒绝的图像又有着一种隐含的美学批判。电影理论的修辞一直贬低表面装饰，发现屏幕上有吸引力的皮肤是虚假的，肤浅的，女性化的或非政治的，并将真理和价值定位在乔达丑陋的电影身体的变体中。我是说《电影与理论中的争议形象》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。这部哲学史借鉴了柏拉图将理念与形象分开的观点，形象充其量只是一个无法表达哲学理性的复制品，而在最坏的情况下，它是一种欺骗性的、危险的化妆品。西方美学的语言本身不仅是逻各斯中心主义的，而且是厌恶偶像的，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。现代美学用形象内部的等级制度取代了理性话语与装饰性形象的二元对立。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颜色，或意义与装饰之争。这些概念将色彩和装饰与女性化、柔弱化和外国化紧密联系在一起，将欧洲新古典主义的纯洁性与低劣的“东方”或“原始”风格形成对比。因此，普雷蒂将看似抽象的风格和美学形式问题重新定位在政治历史中，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，像意大利新现实主义这样被认为是纯粹的、未成形的电影风格的批评中心地位，或者叙事对奇观的自动评价，必须重新评估。如果将色彩缤纷的设计、质感丰富的场景设计和摄像机的大范围移动等壮观的品质放在欧洲视觉思想史中来看待，那么对它们的排斥可以被视为审美主体的性别歧视和种族主义政治的延续。虽然电影学术界经常将性别、性和种族作为代表性问题来处理，但这些意识形态或道德上的参与却因在形式和风格层面上对美丽的排斥而受到破坏。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如何影响电影学术，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世纪艺术，室内设计和建筑辩论中的出现; 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;以及当代回归现实主义。第二部分是我们可以称之为“漂亮电影”的案例研究：被指责为过度审美化的电影制作实践，但在其中我们可以发现设想美学和政治的替代方式。本节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·道尔和巴兹·鲁曼的流行电影。

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.