Moving Pictures, Still Lives

Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the historical fever of the 1980s and 1990s-the rise of the heritage industry, a global museum-building boom, and a cinematic fascination with costume dramas and literary adaptations-it explores the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. Author James Tweedie retraces the "archaeomodern turn" in films and theory that framed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative experiments. He examines late twentieth-century filmmakers who were inspired by old media, especially painting, and often viewed those art forms as portals to the modern past. In detailed discussions of Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Agnès Varda, and other key directors, the book concentrates on films that fill the screen with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes. It also considers three key figures-Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney-who grappled with the late twentieth century's characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes their theoretical work on film as a mourning play for past revolutions and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Looking at cinema and the century in the rear-view mirror, the book highlights the unrealized potential visible in the history of film, as well as the cinematic phantoms that remain in the digital age.

James Tweedie is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at The University of Washington and author of The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (2013), which won the 2014 Katherine Singer Kovács book award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Introduction: The Archaeomodern Turn 1. The Old Medium of Film 2. Film and History in the Late Twentieth Century 3. The Baroque Present 4. Museums for Time Machines 5. Archaeomodern Images 6. The Cinema of Painters Part I: Theory and the Modern Past Chapter One The Hauntology of the Cinematic Image: Walter Benjamin, Film Theory, and the Mourning Play 1. Haunted Screens 2. History, Allegory, and Mourning 3. Specters of Cinema 4. After Cinema Chapter Two Time's Arrow, Time's Bow: Gilles Deleuze in the Baroque Age of Cinema 1. Deleuze and the Baroque 2. Cinema Unfolds 3. After Cinema Chapter Three Serge Daney, Zapper: Film, Television, and the Persistence of Media 1. The Rearview Mirror 2. An Adult Art 3. Zapping the Cinema Part II: The Cinema of Painters Chapter Four The Suspended Spectacle of History: The Tableau Vivant in Late Twentieth-Century Cinema 1. The Post-Historical Image 2. A Painting Ruined 3. Caravaggio's Moving Pictures Chapter Five The Afterlife of Art and Objects: The Cinematic Still Life in the Late Twentieth Century 1. The Object as Event 2. Modernity and the Sacred Object: Alain Cavalier's Thérèse 3. Moving Pictures, Still Lives: On Terence Davies Chapter Six Caliban's Books: Old and New Media in the Work of Peter Greenaway 1. The Canonical Artifact in a Thatcherite Moment 2. Prospero's Library and the Unbound Book 3. Illuminated Manuscripts 4. A Nomadic Shakespeare and the Confines of Heritage Chapter Seven Old Haunts: Commemoration and Mourning in Agnès Varda's Landscapes 1. Unearthed 2. Nature's Studio 3. Land and Escapes