Search

The article discusses Chiara Quaranta's book, "Iconoclasm in European Cinema: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Image Destruction." The book explores the role of image destruction in European cinema and its impact on our understanding of truth and representation. Quaranta examines various historical modes of image denial and subversion, from Lettrism to Jean-Luc Godard's work. The book also discusses the aesthetic and philosophical implications of iconoclasm and its potential for creative and intellectual emancipation. Overall, the book offers a thought-provoking exploration of the nature of moving images and their significance in our mediated world. [Extracted from the article]

Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and crystallised category of exploitation and of the worker in the contemporary chain of value extraction. Indeed, since the neoliberal paradigm is often described as a regime shattering any distinction between life and work, such a productive dimension involves tackling subjectivity at the intersection of class, race, gender, ability/disability. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent The Assistant (2019) by Kitty Green, which, because of its melancholic and disempowering affective patterns, embodies a fascinating critical potential in reversing mythologies and imaginative traps related to dreams of individualised self-entrepreneurship. The film allows us to discuss these same intertwined levels by observing the emotional economy entailed in cultural work and how much this ecology can be connected with more general coordinates and strategies of feminisation and extraction of care-related activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate the political and conceptual power of the successful and highly praised film Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019) by inserting it within general trends of contemporary visual culture surrounding the issue of cinematic precarity. The discussion will find its analytical coordinates around the notions of chronotope and dialogism. These tools are notoriously attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin and are intended to investigate regular patterns in aesthetic experiences and to evaluate the differential and subversive potential to be attributed to every case study. The grounding assumption of the following analysis is to understand cinematic experience as an ecological encounter and an affective and conceptual interaction in which viewers find the opportunity to explore and experience complex ethical systems: a productive interrelation that allows us also to connect the discussion with reflections upon general dynamics of neoliberal governance and with trajectories of resistance and revolt against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]