Description
Book Synopsis* Alain Badiou is one of the most widely read and influential philosophers in France today. * This volume brings together Badiou s writings on cinema from the last fifty years. The topics range from the key filmmakers of modernity (Tati, Oliveira, Antonioni, Godard, etc.
Trade Review"Fascinating ... every word of Badiou's writing radiates with a pronounced sense of exuberance for cinema, and presents the convincing case that it is the liveliest of the seven arts."
—Film International
"Provides brilliant, in-depth analyses on the techniques, styles, and themes of several films."
—Publishers Weekly
"The chance to truly and fully understand the nature of cinema through the eyes of someone who is clearly one of its most passionate advocates."
—Morning Star
"Badiou's unfashionable militancy is sure to continue to generate a degree of mock not-this-again head-scratching from the guardians of sober academic scholarship in the humanities, as well as from whoever might be assigned to review Badiou in say, The New York Review of Books."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
"While a thorough reading of this book is an intellectual investment, I would highly recommend it, particularly to those interested in the pursuit of cultural renewal by artistic means."
—Englewood Review of Books
"There is an aphoristic concision to Badiou's thinking that is capable of producing moments of true enlightenment."
—Review 31
"These rich and diverse pieces are all ostensibly concerned with cinema, but are ultimately far more profound than often their occasion would demand. Providing an important exploration of politics, esthetics, the visible, and cinema's relation to thinking and procedures of decision, this volume gives the reader of Badiou a sense of this major thinker's intellectual development. Spitzer's translation of this volume is a careful and meticulous rendering of Badiou's thought."
—Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
"Since the 1950s Badiou has written in excess of thirty essays on cinema. It is clear that film has been a constant companion in his articulation of art as a form of truth-making event, the creation of unworldly truths. This collection brings these writings together in English for the first time, allowing us to see just how important film is for Badiou’s philosophy of the event."
—John Mullarkey, Kingston University, London
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments viii
Foreword ix
1 "Cinema Has Given Me So Much" 1
2 Cinematic Culture 21
3 Revisionist Cinema 34
4 Art and its Criticism 40
5 The Suicide of Grace: Le Diable probablement 48
6 A Man Who Never Gives In 50
7 Is the Orient an Object for the Western Conscience? 54
8 Reference Points for Cinema's Second Modernity 58
9 The Demy Affair 64
10 Switzerland: Cinema as Interpretation 67
11 Interrupted Notes on the French Comedy Film 72
12 Y a tellement de pays pour aller 77
13 Restoring Meaning to Death and Chance 82
14 A Private Industry, Cinema is also a Private Spectacle 86
15 The False Movements of Cinema 88
16 Can a Film Be Spoken About? 94
17 Notes on The Last Laugh 100
18 "Thinking the Emergence of the Event" 105
19 The Divine Comedy and The Convent 129
20 Surplus Seeing: Histoire(s) du cinéma 132
21 Considerations on the Current State of Cinema 138
22 The Cinematic Capture of the Sexes 151
23 An Unqualified Affirmation of Cinema's Enduring Power 162
24 Passion, Jean-Luc Godard 166
25 "Say Yes to Love, or Else be Lonely": Magnolia 176
26 Dialectics of the Fable: The Matrix 193
27 Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation 202
28 On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem 233
29 The End of a Beginning: Tout va bien 242
30 The Dimensions of Art: Forgiveness 252
31 The Perfection of the World, Improbable yet Possible 258
Notes 261
