Embalming Time is a theoretical inquiry into the temporality of film - consisting of three parts - in associative conversation with a visual thesis. The first chapter of the thesis is centered...Show moreEmbalming Time is a theoretical inquiry into the temporality of film - consisting of three parts - in associative conversation with a visual thesis. The first chapter of the thesis is centered around more ‘classical’ thought about the temporality of film; ranging from Andre Bazin to Roland Barthes’ view on cinema and its impossibility to have a punctum - and how these are brought together and critically reworked by Laura Mulvey. The second chapter revolves around Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books and the Bergsonian heritage of his conception of film as a medium. The third and last chapter (featuring at once one of the most recent film-philosophers and arguably the oldest) discusses Jacques Rancière’s writings on cinema, focusing on film’s opsis -its pure visuality -over the narrative qualities of the medium, and dives deeper into the influence of Jean Epstein’s thinking about film, focused through his discussions of photogénie and slow motion. Together, these three chapters form a tentative inquiry towards the possibility of a new cinematic form, of which the temporality of the filmic medium is integrally and inextricably part.Show less
In this thesis I will give a reading of the films Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014) and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009), in which authorship is addressed or at stake. Burton’s film is about the female...Show moreIn this thesis I will give a reading of the films Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014) and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009), in which authorship is addressed or at stake. Burton’s film is about the female painter Margaret Keane and Campion’s film is about the last three years of the life of the poet John Keats (1795-1821) For my analyses I will use Foucault and Barthes’ theories of the author as starting point because their theories are, especially in certain circumstances, such as in the case of female authorship, still relevant today. The overall research question of my thesis is: ‘when or in what circumstances are the theories of Foucault and Barthes relevant, and when are they not relevant?’Show less
