School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemMontage Vietnam: documentary aesthetics and the dialectic of popular radicalism( 2014)This thesis is the first in-depth study of the politics of exposition in explicitly political, populist documentary, taking as case studies three pivotal documentaries of the Vietnam era - Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968), Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1973) and The Newsreel Film Collective’s Summer 68 (1969). Three different aesthetic approaches are linked by the filmmakers’ desire to undermine dominant representations of ‘the television war’ whilst consciously avoiding relegation to the art-house for fear of ‘preaching to the choir’. As such, the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible is continually offset by the politics of visual pleasure and documentary realism. This thesis offers an examination of how these tensions play out, termed here the dialectic of popular radicalism. These films’ political aesthetic can be mapped by examining their dialectical relationship to both mainstream entertainment and news services, as well as European modernism. This map will use the mechanics of each film’s metalanguage as its defining structure. Through a recalibration of Comolli and Narboni’s influential ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ (1969) - via the varied lenses of documentary, genre and Soviet film theory - a politicised understanding of Keith Beattie’s ‘documentary display’ will be produced. It is my contention that the dialectic between popular and radical sensibilities manifests in varying degrees of visibility of each film’s metalanguage, or textual ‘voice’, to use Bill Nichols’ 1981 formulation. This visibility is at the heart of these films’ political aesthetic. Solidifying Nichols’ conception of voice as the metalanguage of the popular political documentary provides a concrete means of understanding documentary realism in relation to rhetoric: rather than looking through documentary’s window onto the world, it draws focus onto the window itself. Taking lessons from Marxist aesthetic and film theory as well as the works themselves, this thesis encourages an antagonistic approach to traditional structures of representation in documentary, while taking into account the dynamic nature of aesthetic radicalism and the need for rhetorical intelligibility. If accepting cinema as a continuously evolving textual system necessitates the abandonment of static notions of classicism, it follows that we must also jettison those regarding documentary progressivity.
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ItemCinema's scatological imagination( 2014)For Georges Bataille, scatology is the "science of shit," and is vitally connected to what he calls "heterology." Located in the intersection between the sacred and profane, and associated with extreme experiential and bodily states, heterology is "the science of what is completely other" (Bataille 1985, 102). For Bataille, there is a critical interchange between and overlap across these liminal "sciences." Central to his understanding of scatology/heterology is the attribution of transformative, powerful properties to that which is traditionally perceived as low, base and filthy: shit – the body's wastes and excesses. While ample space has long since been provided for the discussion of sexuality and perversion in both popular and critical discourses, scatology largely remains a subject of taboo, relegated to the domain of that which is unofficial, illegitimate or other. Associated with the obscene, the infantile, disorder, and aberrance, scatology is at once a subject which elicits disgust and shock, and one which is frequently dismissed as trivial, illegitimate, or even fatuous. As such, with its evocation of both otherness and ubiquity, and its invocation of a multiplicitous scope of extreme responses which range from laughter to horror, the scatological is above all defined by its ambivalence, heterogeneity, and resistance to containment. This ambivalence arises from our responses to excrement in general, to its representation and reception in film, and, correspondingly, its place in the realm of cinema studies, where it has been largely neglected. This thesis takes up for the first time a full-length exploration of the way in which what I have termed a scatological imagination operates in the cinema. Informed by Bataille's twinned ideas of scatology and heterology, and by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's conceptualisation of what she terms the "anal-sadistic universe" (1985), this thesis explores, in broad terms, the relationship between scatology, divinity, the body, and defiance in film. It examines scatology as both a representational device and as an aesthetic, sensibility or practice which not only underpins much of its onscreen expression and display, but also offers up a powerful lens itself with which to conceptualise relationships between the cinema, experience, bodies, and pleasure. The scope of this analysis centres on three particular cinematic categories or practices: surrealism (focusing especially on the overturning, dehierarchising role of excrement in the films of Luis Buñuel); avant-garde and arthouse cinema (particularly Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous film Salò); and trash and bad taste cinemas (focusing on the "shit cinema" of trash filmmaker John Waters). I posit this latter category as one whose dissident, marginal status⎯and overriding emphasis on bodily defilement, excess, and heterogeneity⎯lends itself particularly resonantly to scatological concerns and aesthetics. I argue that Waters' project, which presents an aesthetics or even poetics of scatology⎯one which is heavily underpinned by a systematic elevation of the scatological as sublime or divine: a "holy shit"⎯offers up the most radical, mobilising and performative possibilities for the expression of scatological and anal sites. At its most extreme, the scatological imagination centralises and celebrates bodily waste, shit, and "what is completely other." Texts which celebrate the scatological and stress its relationship with the sublime, I contend, ultimately offer up more transgressive, defiant and performative possibilities for the excremental, and therefore ultimately for that which is otherwise degraded, rejected, repressed or marginalised. Across these different cinematic categories, I also examine how the scatological imagination addresses its audience, and how this might differ from earlier displays of the grotesque. Situating the scatological imagination as a vital element of what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986) have identified as emerging, displaced forms of carnivalesque practice and exhibition, I argue that the visual language of the cinema provides a particularly powerful and evocative expression of the scatological and the anal. Correspondingly, across my analysis, I also investigate the highly ambivalent and embodied spectatorial experiences which are elicited by scatological modes of address and performance, exploring the ways in which what I term a "scatological gaze" is constructed in these films, and what kinds of pleasures (or displeasures) these might offer the viewer. I also explore the ways in which the highly ambivalent pleasures invoked by such viewing experiences can be conceptualised through a scatological lens. The scatological gaze, I argue, is structured by and in ambivalence.