The aim of this article is to contribute to responsible innovation by developing a conceptual framework for the processes of creativity and innovation. The hypothesis is that creative and innovative processes are similar in that both are affective in nature. I develop this conceptual framework through an interpretation of the insights of Henri Poincaré’s notion of the ‘four stages’ in the creative process and Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of the entrepreneur. Building on this framework, I analyze the creative and innovative practices (...) of the film director Lars von Trier and the entrepreneur Steve Jobs. The interpretation and analysis suggest that the processes of creativity and innovation are similar in nature in that both are based on the moods of disturbance and enthusiasm; but that they differ in that creativity is based on the feelings of interest and irritation, whereas innovation is based on the feelings of desire and anger. In the conclusion I discuss the implications of this for responsible innovation with regard to the social aspect of resistance towards innovation and the ethical aspects of anger in entrepreneurial leadership. (shrink)

Lars von Triers Filme »Antichrist«, »Melancholia« und »Nymphomaniac« vermitteln den Autoren zufolge in einer verstörenden Weise den »Schock des Realen«, der aus einer Zone des Unvorstellbaren und Unbegreiflichen einbricht. Es sind absurde, sinnfreie Zumutungen, die sich der Filmszenen bemächtigen und diese in »Oberflächenabgründe« verwandeln. Solche Effekte werden in ausgewählten Szenen in den erwähnten Filmen v.a. im Rückgriff auf Lacans Theorien untersucht.

The films of Lars von Trier offer unique opportunities for thinking deeply about how Philosophy and Cinema speak to one another. The book addresses von Trier’s films in order of their release. The earlier chapters discuss his Golden Heart trilogy and USA: Land of Opportunities series by addressing issues of potential misogyny, ethical critique, and racial justice. The later chapters focus on his Depression Trilogy and address the undermining of gender binaries, the psychoanalytic meaning of the sacrifice (...) of children and depression, and philosophical questions provoked by the depiction of the end of the world. Taken together, the volume explores the topics of Philosophical Psychology, Social Theory, Political Theory, Theories of the Self, Philosophy of Race, and Feminist Thought, and opens a conversation about von Trier’s important work. (shrink)

Why did human beings throughout the millennia so often think about a doomsday? Could there be a profit to our inner pleasure and pain equilibrium, when believing that doomsday is nearing, an idea suggested by Sigmund Freud? An analogous instinctive dynamics was thought by Nietzsche who wrote that human beings do prefer to want the nothingness rather than not to want anything at all. In this essay, 'Melancholia', a movie by Lars von Trier, is taken as an exquisite (...) masterpiece, a grandiose exposition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche Philosophies.. (shrink)

In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ’s love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as an indictment (...) of the institutions structuring its expression. Finally, I argue that Bess’s love for Jan combines aspects of love that have typically been segregated into eros and agape in a way that enriches our understanding of agape and prompts us in turn to re-evaluate our understanding of Christ’s love and death. (shrink)

O presente trabalho, a partir da articulação inicial dos conceitos de dialogismo, tal como defendido inicialmente por Bakhtin, argumenta que um filme é produto cultural inscrito em um período sócio-histórico. Assim, a proposta que aqui se sucede é buscar interrogá-lo, já que ele oferece um conjunto de representações que remetem direta ou indiretamente à sociedade na qual se inscreve. Para tanto, se escolheu como obra analisada o filme _Melancolia_, do diretor Lars von Trier. A metodologia utilizada foi a (...) abordagem qualitativa, com procedimentos para uma desconstrução de algumas cenas, escolhidas de maneira não probabilística, mas que contemplem o todo em suas partes. A análise se focou, em especial, na direção de fotografia e na análise do roteiro como argumento filosófico, tudo para se entender a construção discursiva maior proposta na obra. Assim, se procedeu a uma análise filosófico-escatológica e a uma busca por entender como a direção de fotografia ajuda a compreender melhor a obra em questão dentro da discussão sobre o fim do mundo. Dessa forma, a narrativa do filme é mais bem entendida quando pensada a partir da intertextualidade, ao se considerar as diversas vozes que compõem o discurso, tais como o acorde cromático, os quadros, os formatos, a história, a discussão escatológica, as obras de arte, enfim, todos os padrões e processos inseridos no filme. (shrink)

This article presents how the act of falling has been used as a metaphor for invention within avant-garde art and aesthetics. It takes Lars von Trier’s documentary The Five Obstacles (2003) as its point of departure and seeks to historically contextualize the figure of falling by discussing Charles Baudelaire’s essay ‘De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques’/‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1955 [1855–1857]). The article also discusses the fascination with falling in early cinema, (...) stressing how cinematic representations of the fall highlight the new medias potential for grasping general modern conditions like motion, speed and contingency. To think of art in terms of falling makes it possible to see a link between cinematic popular culture and so called high modernism. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationship between control and contingency within film aesthetics in the digital age. I will also discuss the aesthetics of Oulipo writers like George Perec and Raymond Queneau, and artists like Jackson Pollock and John Cage as exponents of what can be called an aesthetics of contingency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer’s print Melencolia (...) I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume’s contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists. (shrink)

The form of Western mainstream film is the crux of its ideological efficiency: by using established formal techniques, films ensure audiences un- derstand that aesthetic decisions support and clarify the narrative to ensure maximum spectatorial satisfaction. However, some films exploit their formal aesthetics in order to prevent clarification, thwarting satisfaction in favour of viewing practices that can be considered perverse in that they withhold, suspend or obstruct immediate pleasure. Contemporary Western filmmaking in the mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of a distinct (...) group of filmmakers and films that, in the popular discourse of cinematic criticism, were together coded as “difficult” or “perverse.” These films were, as a result of the characteristics we identify below, situated obliquely in relation to the larger economic and artistic struc- tures of a commercially oriented “mainstream” cinema. Included in this new form of cinematic production were films from directors such as Tim Burton: Edward Scissorhands ; David Cronenberg: eXistenZ ; David Fincher: Se7en ; Peter Greenaway: The Baby of Maçon ; David Lynch: Lost Highway ; Quentin Tarantino: Pulp Fiction and Lars von Trier: Breaking the Waves . Whilst Western cinema as a whole has a long history of exploring “difficult” or “perverse” material within the overt or covert content of narrative, plot and story, such films demonstrate a particular relationship between the content being explored and the specific formal characteristics utilised in the delivery of that content. Thus where previous examples would utilise standardised formal techniques as a way of both delivering and containing the difficult or objectionable material, the films instead offer instances where the material of the narrative content seems to bleed backwards, affecting the form and rendering the very materiality of the film itself suspect and problematic. (shrink)

In what follows, I wish to use the circumstances and dynamics of the nocturnalscene of destruction at the Old Mill and the subsequent scene of carnage at the house of Chuck and Vera in Dogville as a springboard for developing some reflections on the‘politics of gift-giving’, and the relationship between friendship and hostility in theexchange of social goods. The term ‘springboard’ is no doubt too vague, here, because Iintend to approach the two scenes, and the film as a whole, as (...) a radical provocation, thusdistinguishing my approach from the traditional methodology of ‘application’, in which awork of art is used in order to exemplify a certain theoretical construction. As it happens,‘provocation vs. illustration’ in itself constitutes one of the key ‘moral’ antagonisms of vonTrier’s film and, as I shall argue, it is the dogged determination of Tom Edison Jr. , the town’s amateur-philosopher, moral lecturer and self-crowned “miner of thehuman soul”, to illustrate the human problem and his failure to be provoked which bringsunrest to the township of Dogville and which finally makes it go to the dogs. (shrink)

The cinematographic successes of Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan and Lars Von Trier's Manderlay are contingent upon the palpability of tension and attraction created by their respective, many racial and sexual relations, thus both films aggressively bring them to the fore by excessively rehearsing old stereotypes and taboos, and inverting the expected agents therein, to reveal their persistent, still-relevant power. Both films similarly test our convictions and squeamishness, but do so from entirely different moral stances. Brewer explores how (...) an act of charity and humanitarian openness can save lives, literally and spiritually. Von Trier explores how similar acts of openness can smother appreciation of the other and reenact the worst oppression. The former tells a persuasive story with wide appeal, while the latter tells a story that will make even the most desensitized viewers cringe. Using these pictures as paradigms, is either approach better for bringing prejudice into the light for thought and film? (shrink)

Lars von Trier's movies can be seen as a series of iterations in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. After testing the logic of this game, at the core of which is the dilemma of cooperation or conflict, at the middle level at which an individual confronts a community up till Dogville, he has transposed the game to the level of social systems in Manderlay and the level of the minimal social unit, the couple in Anti-Christ. The story is (...) the Oedipus myth reversed and fit into the logic of the prisoner's dilemma which is, one could argue, the mathematical model of a Hobbesian world view. In that sense it could be called Von Trier's Anti-Oedipus. Moreover, this is the first film in which Von Trier fully embraces digital technologies. It is as if he as a filmmaker acts like the male protagonist in Anti-Christ, and assumes the role of the Anti-Christ in order to become a Savior, since digital technologies and special effects are aligned with 'evil' in this movie. (shrink)

Lars von Trier's film the boss of it all unfolds the mutual constitutional relations between man and medium and re-inserts itself in these relations. As one might expect, the anthropoid features, such as reflexivity and autopoiesis, are attributed to the personality of the author and its metonymic figures, while the instrumental, allopoietic medial functions, in contrast, are attributed to the genre of comedy. This attribution, however, fails. Rather, both types of functions interfere with each other, so that they (...) can enter into a relationship of transfer; now, the medium appears to be reflexive, while man appears as an instrument and effect. By maintaining their respective functions, however, man and medium constantly produce each other. (shrink)

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) has often been described as a ‘gothic’, if not straightforwardly ‘horror’ movie. While this claim could easily be challenged with regard to strict genre definitions, it is doubtless the case that the film deals very explicitly with fear, first and foremost the female protagonist’s fear of herself, which is placed at the top of the so-called ‘pyramid of fear’ drawn by her therapist/wanna-be-Saviour partner. My opinion is that Antichrist perfectly displays the horrific effects (...) of the direct embodiment, following a true love encounter, of the symbolic positions which Lacan associated with male and female sexuation. If human sexuality relies on the logic for which there is only one mythical man who is truly whole while every real woman is not wholly whole, what happens when He and She (the nameless protagonists of the movie) fully identify with such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature? They short-circuit the material singularity of a specific human animal with the abstract universality of gender. With the same move, they cannot overcome (or sublimate) the realisation that, in the female protagonist’s own words, woman is ‘evil’ – as long as she feels guilty of what man accuses her – and man is a ‘bastard’ – haunted by the phantasm of unifying purity which woman disrupts. Gynocide as male totalizing extermination of universal difference and genital self-mutilation as female reflexive hatred for the supposedly exceptional man mark the sadomasochistic extremes of the scene of the not-two, the frightening ob-scenity ( o-skené ), or off-representation, of human sexuality. (shrink)

This paper interprets von Trier’s Dogville as a suspension of belief that provokes a re-evaluation of contemporary moral values. Reading Dogville through the Stoic concept of phantasms and Nietzsche’s perspectivism, I analyze the plot and visual techniques as revealing how we form, evaluate, and re-evaluate our beliefs based on changing impressions and shifting perspectives. The philosophy of the Stoics and Nietzsche and the visual techniques of Dogville demonstrate that the recognition of the artificiality of appearances serves a moral purpose (...) by forcing us to examine our beliefs more deeply. In this way, von Trier presents film as a powerful art form for suspending and evaluating how we see and understand the world. (shrink)

Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a unBergsonian ontological one. In this essay, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an “attitude of the body”—something that projects an actual, corporeal, and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that “a director makes only one movie in (...) his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again,” so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one “single point” throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a “vanishing image,” only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body —one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about “attitude” as well as “gesture” and “mime.” We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions. This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s “one film” and Bergson’s singular “vanishing image” respectively. Is the “one” being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema. (shrink)

The contribution explores Lars von Triers meta-filmic comedy The Boss of it all, starting from Jean Francois Lyotard’s reflections on the experiment in art and philosophy, and following the lines of Stanley Cavell’s assumptions on »genre as medium« and on comedy as reflexive form of film genre. The Boss of it all unfolds the experimental character of genre film, fi lm genre, and comedy. The fi lm presents itself as a paradoxical experimental object, detaching itself from its author, from (...) genre rules and spectator’s expectations. It acquires an independent status of action and reflection, and precisely by this looks at itself as a product of the orderings which it puts into question. This is described here under the aspect of ontology as well as in terms of action theory with the help of the concept of the agent. (shrink)

In _Politics with Beauvoir_ Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, (...) class='Hi'>Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. _Politics with Beauvoir_ gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional. (shrink)

Introduction: why did philosophy go to the movies? -- The analytic-cognitivist turn. The empire strikes back: critiques of "grand theory" -- The rules of the game: new ontologies of film -- Adaptation: philosophical approaches to narrative -- From cognitivism to film-philosophy. A.I.: cognitivism goes to the movies -- Bande à part: Deleuze and Cavell as film-philosophers -- Scenes from a marriage: film as philosophy -- Cinematic thinking. Hollywood in trouble: David Lynch's Inland empire -- "Chaos reigns": anti-cognitivism in Lars (...) von trier's Antichrist -- Song of the earth: cinematic romanticism in Malick's The new world -- Coda: "the six most beautiful minutes in the history of cinema". (shrink)

This article examines the role of moods in aesthetic experience by focussing on film. It considers specifically the function of moods in relation to narrative and aesthetic perspectives which a film provides and which recipients are invited to adopt. I distinguish superficial transitory moods from profound enduring ones. This differentiation is important with regard to the question why moods in film matter and why they are different from emotions. I will focus on Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia” and (...) claim that the moods of the leading characters can at one and the same time count as moods and perspectives on the world. Their moods are strongly connected to how they perceive their world, evaluate it, and “are” in the world. By being put into a mood that assails human beings holistically, viewers get acquainted with a perspective of a fictional character in an encompassing manner that includes mind and body. However, it will be discussed whether the viewers feel profound or superficial moods when engaging in the moods of the film and the characters and whether they are infatuated or can remain aesthetic distance. (shrink)

In this note we argue that Lars von Trier’s movie Dogville can be viewed as an illustration of a simple economy where one agent has only her body as initial endowment. The movie illustrates some interesting comparative statics of equilibrium allocations. It shows how life would be like in a world where, in the absence of constitutional or legal constraints, economic forces reign freely and raises some fundamental issues of voluntary exchange versus force that apply to a number (...) of contentious issues in public debate. JEL codes: A20, D30, D51, D63, F13. Keywords: Dogville, general equilibrium, welfare theorems, comparative statics, international trade, child labor, prostitution, economics education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse by Jean-Paul EngélibertCyril CamusJean-Paul Engélibert. Fabuler la fin du monde: La puissance critique des fictions d’apocalypse [Fabulating the end of the world: The critical power of apocalypse fiction]. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2019. 239 pp. Print. 20€. ISBN 978-2-348-03719-1.Jean-Paul Engélibert is a well-established expert on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. His exploration of the genre thus far includes (...) the monograph Apocalypses sans royaume: Politique des fictions de la fin du monde, XX–XXIe siècles (2013), numerous articles, as well as the essay collection L’Apocalypse: Une imagination politique, XIXe–XXIe siècles (2018), which he co-edited. In his latest book, Fabuler la fin du monde, he returns to several texts and aspects of the genre previously covered, delving deeper into what he calls “fictions of the end of the world.” In the ten chapters, gathered in five parts, he approaches his subject as a seasoned scholar in the field of comparative literature, and his analysis draws from comparisons between modern fiction’s representation of apocalypse and biblical literature’s visions of apocalypse and messianism. The book also offers ecocritical insights into the specter of Anthropocenic manifestations in fiction, with reflections on the interrelated genres of utopia and dystopia, theories of cinema, and philosophical writings on the catastrophic history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.The range of fictional works discussed is wide, including Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Émile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu’il sera (1846); Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883); Robert Merle’s Malevil (1972); José Saramago’s Blindness (1995); Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (1999); Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003); Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Céline Minard’s Le dernier monde (2007); Davide [End Page 163] Longo’s The Last Man Standing (2010); and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003], The Year of the Flood [2009], and MaddAddam [2013]). Engélibert also touches on feature-length movies such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2012), and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), as well as on other literary and audiovisual fictions, such as E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), Edward Bond’s dramatic trilogy The War Plays (1985), and the first season (2014) of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s TV series The Leftovers (2014–17).Engélibert’s exegeses of the genre build around two aspects of the evolving relationship of apocalyptic narratives to the context of their production. Apocalypse (in the sense of “the end of the world” rather than the etymological sense of “revelation”) is no longer primarily a religious myth: the creation and use of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the theorization of the Anthropocene, and the mainstreaming of concerns over climate change have made the term “apocalypse” a very real, tangible prospect for the future. Engélibert relies on Günther Anders’s Die atomare Drohung (1981) to highlight the importance of the A-bomb in bringing home the reality of potential annihilation to people’s collective consciousness. Yet his second contextual/historical point is that the Anthropocene (albeit unnamed at the time) actually started with the Industrial Revolution, and that thinkers and polemicists such as Charles Fourier or Eugène Huzar, as well as contemporary fiction writers, were already acknowledging the environmental impact of humans and their economic/industrial/technological activity as threats to human and nonhuman life, and to the health of the planetary system itself.1Citing the work of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil on the history of climate science, Engélibert analyzes in detail several nineteenth-century novels (namely Le Dernier homme, Frankenstein, Le monde tel qu’il sera, and Ignis) and one early-twentieth-century story (Forster’s “The Machine Stops”) that denounce the harm that the idol of the time, Progress, was already wreaking on nature and human life... (shrink)

This article questions how contemplative contemporary cinema “sexualize” the landscapes. Through the filmography of four directors, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lars von Trier and B...

A deeply personal reckoning with family, mental illness, and suicide, Dana Trusso captures the meaning of Nietzsche's armor fati--to love one's fate--through her surreal imagery and longing to heal intergenerational wounds. Lines are drawn from Lars von Trier's Melancholia, Sonic Youth's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, and lines she read from her aunt's journals as a child. -/- The photo is a sculpture of an earth goddess by Jean-Philippe Richard located in the botanical gardens of Èze, (...) France. Nearby is Le Chemin de Nietzsche, a steep hike from the seaside to mountainous ruins that is said to have inspired Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (shrink)

Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory ([1896] 1994), but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a (very) unBergsonian ontological one. In this article, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an ‘attitude of the body’ – something that projects an actual, corporeal and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that ‘a director (...) makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again’, so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one ‘single point’ throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a ‘vanishing image’, only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is an embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body – one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about ‘attitude’ as well as ‘gesture’ and ‘mime’. We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, 2003). This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s ‘one film’ and Bergson’s singular ‘vanishing image’, respectively. Is the ‘one’ being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema. (shrink)

All Thoughts Are Equal is both an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an exercise in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his "non-standard" approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking--including the nonhuman--are equal. John Ó Maoilearca examines how philosophy might appear when viewed with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. He does so (...) by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film (Lars von Trier's documentary The Five Obstructions) as an example of the non-standard method. Von Trier's film is a meditation on the creative limits set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how these limits can push our experience of film--and of ourselves--beyond what is normally deemed "the perfect human." All Thoughts Are Equal adopts film's constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle's radically new style of philosophy is best presented through our most nonhuman form of thought--that found in cinema. (shrink)

The present paper explores the moral psychology of fiction conceptually through the paired concepts ‘fictional relief’ and ‘reality check’. I suggest that the spectator of fictional films and television series sees himself as relieved from some of the moral obligations the spectator of nonfiction films sees himself as subject to, such as considering the consequences of a character's actions and attitudes. A fictional attitude is disturbed when elements of nonfiction are inserted into the fiction, such as the documentary photographs in (...) Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003), or when the fiction otherwise reminds the spectator of the moral and political consequences of his engagement. I call this reality check, and explore how Dr Melfi often reminds the spectator of The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) of the consequences of having a sympathetic attitude towards the main character and gangster Tony Soprano. The related notion fictional relief captures the relief from considering such consequences, and finally I discuss how Omar Little exemplifies fictional reliefs at work in a socially realistic setting in The Wire (HBO, 2002–08). (shrink)

La télévision est un fantasme. Au sens étymologique du mot phantasma : une apparition, une vision, une image, un ectoplasme, un fantôme. Par la magie des ondes et des flux électriques, des choses et des gens (qui ne sont vraiment ni des choses ni des gens) apparaissent chez moi, dans mon espace privé. Lars von Trier, Thom Yorke, Cate Blanchett, le Président, Daniel Cohn-Bendit viennent dans mon salon pour discuter de leur dernier film, de leur prochain album, de (...) leur carrière, ou de l'avenir du pays. Chez moi, sans que j'aie besoin ni de me déplacer, ni de faire la queue, ni d'acheter un billet. Dorénavant, ils viennent même à l'heure qui me convient (et sans publicité). Et bientôt, ils pourront se promener avec moi, à la campagne, dans la rue, dans le métro. La télévision est un énorme fantasme, multiforme et en voie d'ubiquité. (shrink)

While avoiding the pretence of producing an exhaustive reading of such a complex object as Lars Von Trier's Dogville, this article selectively uses the film to explore the process of the emergence of a new legality and a new set of legal relationships within a community. Two superimposed layers of meaning, the biblical and the mythic, are considered and their interaction with two different reasons, the symbolic and the economic, is suggested and explored. The categories of ‘critical being’, (...) by Fitzpatrick and Tuitt, and homo sacer, by Agamben, are taken as useful tools to understand such interaction and the connected dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout the article, it is argued that the perspective of the sacrifice, as framed especially by Girard, is useful to highlight an anthropological mechanism that can be retrieved in Dogville. (shrink)

A post-photographic cinema. The myth of "the myth of total cinema" -- The matrix: "a prison for your mind" -- The new realness -- Quid est veritas: the reality ofunspeakable suffering -- Social network -- Postscript: total cinema redux -- A chronicle of theBush years. 2001: after September 11 -- 2002: the war on terror begins -- 2003: invading Iraq-- 2004: Bush's victory -- 2005: looking for the Muslim world -- 2006: September 11, theanniversary -- 2007: what was Iraq and (...) where? -- 2008: the election -- Notes toward a syllabus.In praise of love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) -- Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001) -- Avant-garde goesdigital: Corpus callosum, Cotton Candy, and Razzle Dazzle -- Russian ark (AlexanderSokurov,2002) -- Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) -- Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang,2002) -- Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003) -- The world (Jia Zhangke, 2004) -- Battle in heaven(Carlos Reygadas, 2005) -- The death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) -- Day night daynight (Julia Loktev, 2006) -- Southland tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) -- Inland empire (DavidLynch, 2006) -- Between darkness and light (after William Blake) (Douglas Gordon, 1997/2006)-- Lol (Joe Swanberg, 2006) -- Flight of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007) -- Hunger(Steve McQueen, 2008) -- Opening ceremonies, Beijing Olympics (August 8, 2008) -- Carlos(Olivier Assayas, 2010) -- The strange case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010) -- Onceupon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011). (shrink)

This paper outlines the effectiveness of films as a pedagogical tool for teaching philosophy. For the author, a film skillfully explores philosophical issues, capturing students’ attention and providing a setting for discussion. The author focuses on the use of Lars von Trier's Zentropa as a beneficial tool for discussion of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The film adequately illustrates the two positions of the aesthete and the judge, and demonstrates the adverse affects of avoiding choice in one's life. The film can (...) also be useful in an introductory course and a class on existentialism because it attends to the larger philosophical questions of how one should live their life. (shrink)

The 11 experimental, pseudo-avantgarde visual poems (wordless, other than title and date) are an indirect homage to the late-great filmmaker and photographer, Chris Marker (1921-2012), foremost to his penchant for utilizing disintegrating imagery in his film-essays and multimedia installations. All images were captured using a Research in Motion, BlackBerry 8520 cellphone, and subsequently 100-percent de-saturated, and 100-percent contrast-adjusted, using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. The images, as a result, resemble the primitive production values given to the pinhole camera, and the “dogmatic” (...) (uniform) adjustments (as above), applied to the original BB images, reference the early strictures applied to filmmaking by Lars von Trier. The above-mentioned, black-and-white adjustments notwithstanding, all images are used “as captured,” without cropping. The series begins and ends in Botwnnog, Northwest Wales, in May and August of 2013, respectively, with interregnums and brief idylls in Rijeka, Croatia, Trieste and Ancona, Italy, and Igoumenitsa, Ioannina, and Athens, Greece. Tracking the peregrinations of the author of the poems across Europe, and intimately associated with the then-nascent research and exhibition project, “Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture,”* the poems are also a compressed form of scholarship, albeit operating in the shadow-lands of knowledge per se, and evoking the non-discursive side of literary-artistic production, a penumbral zone within cultural production that nonetheless references the discursive arts (essay and/or full-blown treatise), but favors the paradox and/or tautology – privileging, then, the much-desired destruction of dialectics. (shrink)

Lars von Trierjeva Melanholija ponudi fascinantno raziskovanje filmske romantike in estetike filmskih razpoloženj. S pomočjo dramatizacije katastrofične izkušnje »izgube sveta« glavne junakinje Justine [Kirsten Dunst's], nam predstavi uničujočo podobo melanholije, ki najde ustrezni konec v sublimni filmski fantaziji izničenja sveta. V pričujočem članku analiziram nekatere estetske in filozofske sklope Melanholije, še posebej Von Trierjevo raziskovanje uporabe romantike in predstavitve filmskega razpoloženja. Von Trierer ne raziskuje namreč zgolj estetike melanholije, temveč tudi njene etične razsežnosti, s čimer ustvari umetniški film katastrofe, (...) katerega sublimna upodobitev uničenja sveta ima paradoksni učinek razkritja ranljivosti in končnosti življenja na Zemlji. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the contemporary relevance of melancholy as something different than depression or a state of mental illness. Instead, through examples of a literary, philosophical, and artistic nature, it is shown that melancholy functions as a force-field – a topos where the finite and the infinite, the earthly and the heavenly, the physical and the spiritual come together and meet in huge tension. By means of an exploration of the historical notion of melancholy and a revisit of (...) Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), coupled to a much more recent example, Lars von Trier’s film melancholia (DK/se/fr/de 2011), this paper shows how the melancholic motif continues to play an essential role in our contemporary society. The melancholic is described as a person who lives a life on the border: who intuits the point where two worlds meet and who longs for a revelation of the beyond – an apocalypse (literally: ‘an uncovering’). It is this longing – a nostalgia for being – that increasingly pervades our contemporary world, a world that represses the heterogeneous through numerous social and political conditions. The study of melancholy here undertaken therefore provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of melancholy in our (post-) modern time. (shrink)

:This article analyses some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, focusing in particular on the film's remarkable Prelude, arguing that it performs a complex ethical critique of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-italictic allegory of world-destruction. At the same time, I suggest that Melancholia seeks to “work through” the loss of worlds – cinematic but also cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might be described as a (...) deflationary apocalypticism or melancholy modernity. From this perspective, Melancholia belongs to a genealogical lineage that links it with two earlier films important for von Trier: Ingmar Bergman's Shame [Skammen] and Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice . All three films share a concern with apocalypticism, world-sacrifice, and historical melancholia; but they also explore different responses to the imagined experience of a catastrophic loss of world. By examining these films in relation t.. (shrink)

Why do we enjoy artworks that depict disasters and suffering? Is this a hangover from the Modernist impulse to break the rules of harmony? Is there actually a proper way to perform negativity in art without resorting to nihilism? The Temptation of Non-Being uses these fundamental questions to paint a picture of contemporary art as beset by an outbreak of the negative, and to construct a new theory of art as a medium of complex negativity. Charting the depth of these (...) negative practices, Artemy Magun shows how they become progressively more complex and explicit, illustrating them with examples from Lars von Trier, Jacek Malczewski, Andrei Platonov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (shrink)

Este trabalho se propõe a uma análise do filme “Melancolia”, dirigido por Lars Von Trier, a partir dos conceitos da Logoterapia e Análise Existencial em um breve recorte sobre o trágico e a beleza. O objetivo é tentar entender a relação entre sentido da vida e beleza mesmo na tragédia a partir dos conceitos da Logoterapia. O método é o qualitativo estudo de caso e a metodologia analise de conteúdo. A análise do filme permitiu identificar como os personagens (...) selecionados tomam decisões diferentes diante do trágico, porem só um deles encontra sentido e beleza na vida, realizando valores, percebendo que vale a pena viver até o último instante, mesmo diante da morte, do trágico. (shrink)

This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a (...) substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier. (shrink)

Neste artigo, utilizaremos os conceitos nietzschianos de ideais ascéticos, ressentimento e moral de rebanho visando mostrar o entrelaçamento apontado por Nietzsche entre humanidade e doença a partir de uma leitura do filme Dogville de Lars Von Trier.

:Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. From Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc to Pasolini's Mamma Roma to Tarkovsky's Sacrifice to many of Ozu's films to Kar Wai Wong's In the Mood for Love or to Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus, to give just a few examples, sacrifice has nourished, informed and shaped filmmaking. Sacrifice (...) is a fundamental human act, and cinema has always, in some way or another, danced around it. Yet that's not all. In a world like ours from which the gods have mostly withdrawn, but people haven't stopped feeling the need to believe, in an important sense film has taken over the myth-factory. It's on screen that the post-Christian grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Our contemporaries may no longer be church-goers, but they go to the movies religiously. And the sacrificial theme makes.. (shrink)

Are the emotions elicited by real-life occurrences in analogous with those which occur in fictions? The position that Jonathan Gilmore stakes in Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind is that our emotions are not governed by the same standards of appropriateness or rationality across life and art—there is a kind of separation, barrier or “quarantine” (to borrow Gilmore’s parlance). For instance, we may admire or root for Tony Soprano when watching The Sopranos but would abhor (...) such a person in real life; similarly, we may take great pleasure in the wanton destruction in a film such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia but would be horrified by this were it to occur. Gilmore queries us to examine this discrepancy and departure, drawing attention to the consideration that, if fictions are simply extensions of our imagination why often times when we imagination something do we respond to what we imagine as if it were to really occur? When we imagine missing a train, for instance, we feel a nervousness analogous to what we would feel were we to really miss the train. On the one side is the pull of continuity, a commitment to invariance, in which our engagements with the contents of fictions and other imagined creations are said to be modeled on our engagements with ordinary real-world states of affairs. On the other is the pull of discontinuity, in which such representations are posed as offering potentially sui generis sorts of experiences that resist assimilation or reduction to those we encounter in the everyday. Thus, questions concerning art and fictive imagining’s autonomy and belief are inherently imbricated within this discourse. (shrink)

The body at close range: volume and the unlistenable in Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell -- Sonic subjection: Gaspar Noé's Irreversible and the dystopian limits of the resonant body -- A stranger everywhere: the écho-monde of Tony Gatlif's Exiles -- Feedback, asynchronicity, and sonic sociabilities: Arnaud des Pallière's Adieu -- Listening at the limit: non-human noise in Lars von Trier's Antichrist -- Listening to things: Foley as "alien phenomenology" and Peter Strickland's Berberian sound studio.

There is hardly any other art form as immersive as film. Thus, if a movie focuses on the abyss of human behaviour, dealing with crimes, violence or even murder, it is often accused of being immoral and corrupting its audience. On the basis of selected examples from Alfred Hitchcock’s ›Rope‹ to Martin Scorsese’s ›Taxi Driver‹ and Lars von Trier’s ›Dogville‹, this critical essay explores the question of the moral claims movies can make. Considering contemporary films such as ›Promising (...) Young Woman‹ and ›Joker‹ this text asks how modern anti-heroes influence the audience and what changes can be seen over the last decades in the moral reception of movies. Finally, the essay concludes with the latest attempts of censorship and looks at who determines the moral value of art. (shrink)