Give me a Sign: An Anxious Exploration of Performance on Film, Under Lyotard's Shadow
- Submitting institution
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Leeds Beckett University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- R1
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- ACinemas: Lyotard's Philosophy of Film
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-4744-1894-2
- Open access status
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- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- What happens when performance art is transcribed onto film? Is there a parallel with translations between more conventional media – from spoken conference paper to written text – or psychic translation, as described by Freud? How might the newly collected writings on film-philosophy by Jean-François Lyotard contribute to this discussion? These are questions addressed in this chapter, included in the section ‘Applications and Extensions’ in Acinemas, which presents all of Lyotard’s major essays on film for the first time in English. Bamford considers three examples: a film about a performance – Matthew Aker’s 2012 documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present – an artist’s performance within a narrative film – Stuart Brisley’s performance in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983) – and a performance piece to camera – Kiff Bamford’s Emotion (2014).
What links these examples is their exploration of the media of film and video as a means of conveying or evoking aesthetic encounter, at one remove. Central is the problematic figure of the witness, whether the observer watching Brisley’s filmed performance or the cinematic eye in Lyotard’s discussion of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971). The reliability of such a position is at once questioned by Lyotard’s reaching out to Freud and problematized by his later turn to the cinematic object as a conduit for free-indirect vision, following Pasolini and Deleuze. Each encounter troubles the next with a heightening sense of uncertainty and anxiety – conveyed, despite itself, through the medium of film.
Developed from an invited presentation at Dundee University (2014) which included film clips and ended with a short dance, the process of anxious exploration through gesture continues through writing, as highlighted in the review for Senses of Cinema: ‘the aesthetic encounters are not simply encounters with the image but encounters with dialogue … and performative bodies’.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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