books by Laura Rascaroli
Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, 2020
As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, cont... more As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.
How the Essay Film Thinks
This book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by th... more This book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where and how such strategies operate. Against the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno's discussion of the essay form's anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Gilles Deleuze's understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay film can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film's disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.
The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film
The Personal Camera is an exploration of an elusive but more and more compelling field: essayisti... more The Personal Camera is an exploration of an elusive but more and more compelling field: essayistic cinema. The essay film, together with its cognate formsthe diary, the travelogue, the notebook and the self-portraitis cinema in the first person. It is a cinema of thought, of investigation and self-reflection, in which the filmmaker, instead of withdrawing behind the camera, comes out into the open, to say 'I', to take responsibility, and to address and engage with the spectator within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Authorial, experimental and radical, essayistic cinema belongs within the lineage of avant-garde and political filmmaking and responds above all to the need we feel today for more contingent, autobiographical, private forms of expression. This study provides a unique insight into an intricate but fascinating field, by engaging with the work of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alexander Sokurov, Michelangelo Antonioni, Derek Jarman, Federico Fellini, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas and Agnés Varda.
From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema
Travelling from Warsaw to Blackpool, Marseilles to Madrid, this lively and accessible book invest... more Travelling from Warsaw to Blackpool, Marseilles to Madrid, this lively and accessible book investigates the postmodern nature of contemporary Europe's urban life and cinema and shows how European films represent the cities across old and new Europe. Interdisciplinary in approach, the text engages with diverse films, including "Luna Park", "Run, Lola, Run", "Trainspotting", "Wonderland" and many more. It tackles the issues of postmodernity raised by these films and the changes wrought in European cities since the 1980s under the effects of political change, from the post-communist era in Moscow and Berlin to the effects of Thatcherism in Edinburgh and London.
Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie
Although a long-established and influential genre, this is the first comprehensive study of the E... more Although a long-established and influential genre, this is the first comprehensive study of the European road cinema. Crossing New Europe investigates this tradition, its relationship with the American road movie and its aesthetic forms. This movement examines such crucial issues as individual and national identity crises, and phenomena such as displacement, diaspora, exile, migration, nomadism, and tourism in postmodern, post-Berlin Wall Europe. Drawing on the work of Said, Hall, Shields, Urry, Bauman, Deleuze and Guattari and other critical theorists, Crossing New Europe adopts a broad interpretation of "Europe" and discusses directors and films who have long been associated with the road movie, such as Wim Wenders (Alice in the Cities, Lisbon Story) and Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America!), and other more recent contributions such as Run Lola Run, Dear Diary and The Last Resort.
The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries
The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries provides an analysis of the work of the most impo... more The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries provides an analysis of the work of the most important Italian filmmaker of the past thirty years and an outstanding figure in contemporary European cinema. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging, the authors use Moretti's films as a lens to view and discuss contemporary phenomena such as the crisis of masculinity and authority, the decline of the political Left, and the transformation of the citizen's relationship to the State. Films discussed include Aprile, Dear Diary and The Son's Room, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2001.
Antonioni: Centenary Essays
This collection of new essays by leading film scholars addresses Michelangelo Antonioni as a pree... more This collection of new essays by leading film scholars addresses Michelangelo Antonioni as a preeminent figure in European art cinema, explores his continuing influence and legacy, and engages with his ability to both interpret and shape ideas of modernity and modern cinema.
Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web
With the advent of digital filmmaking and critical recognition of the relevance of self expressio... more With the advent of digital filmmaking and critical recognition of the relevance of self expression, first-person narratives, and personal practices of memorialization, interest in the amateur moving image has never been stronger. Bringing together key scholars in the field, and revealing the rich variety of amateur filmmaking-from home movies of Imperial India and film diaries of life in contemporary China, to the work of leading auteurs such as Joseph Morder and Péter Forgács-Amateur Filmmaking highlights the importance of amateur cinema as a core object of critical interest across an array of disciplines. With contributions on the role of the archive, on YouTube, and on the impact of new technologies on amateur filmmaking, these essays offer the first comprehensive examination of this growing field.
The Cause of Cosmopolitanism: Dispositions, Models, Transformations
Today, cosmopolitanism can be identified with ideas, practices and representations that are among... more Today, cosmopolitanism can be identified with ideas, practices and representations that are among our most important resources as we grapple with the pressures of a globalized world. The book, in assessing cosmopolitanism as a cause, argues that justifications and critiques of the cosmopolitan are shaped as much by political and cultural forces as by the distinctive philosophical tradition in which they are situated. The volume brings together a series of case studies, both historical accounts of the vicissitudes and the legacies of the cosmopolitan outlook, and critical analyses of a range of spheres – political and social theory, film, literature – where cosmopolitanism can be both an asset and something of a problem.
Cosmopolitanism calls for an exploration, both critical and theoretical, of the ways in which it constitutes a specific set of dispositions as well as an engagement with the objections and qualifications through which it has been reshaped as a concept. The collection also places a decisive emphasis on the symbolic dimension of intimations of the cosmopolitan in modern and contemporary literature and film, so documenting transformations to which it continues to be subject.
Il cinema di Nanni Moretti: sogni e diari
Il volume colloca Moretti in una dimensione sia nazionale che internazionale, mettendo a fuoco q... more Il volume colloca Moretti in una dimensione sia nazionale che internazionale, mettendo a fuoco quattro direttrici fondamentali che attraversano la sua opera: l`autobiografia, il diario e l`immagine dell`artista nei film; la crisi della famiglia e della maschilità; la comicità, la satira radicale e l`ironia esistenziale; la trasformazione del rapporto fra cittadini e politica e l`importanza del linguaggio nella politica postmoderna. Esso offre anche una prospettiva insolita, presentando talvolta Moretti come “umile diarista” o come “ironista liberale”. Una visione dell`opera di Moretti inedita e talvolta controcorrente.
Girando la nuova Europa: Viaggi postmoderni del Road Movie Europeo
Da sempre considerato dai critici un genere cinematografico tipicamente americano, in realtà il r... more Da sempre considerato dai critici un genere cinematografico tipicamente americano, in realtà il road movie esiste nel Vecchio Continente da quando film come Viaggio in Italia, Il posto delle fragole e L'avventura mostrarono che anche i registi europei sapevano fare "cinema di strada". Girando la nuova Europa esplora questa tradizione, il suo rapporto con il road movie statunitense, i suoi temi e le sue forme estetiche. In particolare, si concentra sul cinema degli ultimi decenni, attraverso il quale esamina fenomeni ed esperienze di grande importanza nei correnti dibattiti sulla società e sul cinema europei postmoderni e postcomunisti - come l'emigrazione, la frontiera, la diaspora, l'esilio, il nomadismo, il turismo, il transito, la deriva. Confrontandosi con il lavoro di pensatori del calibro di Said, Bhabha, Hall, Urry, Bauman, Perniola e Guattari, Girando la nuova Europa compie un lungo viaggio per raggiungere i confini sia del continente europeo sia delle sue strade in celluloide, ed esamina il lavoro di registi quali Wim Wenders, Eric Rohmer, Werner Herzog, Nanni Moretti, Michael Haneke, Gianni Amelio e Atom Egoyan.
Articles by Laura Rascaroli
Film-Philosophy, 2023
This article contributes to a theory of the lyric essay film by bringing studies of the essay fil... more This article contributes to a theory of the lyric essay film by bringing studies of the essay film and lyricism to bear on Pietro Marcello's Lost and Beautiful (2015). We argue that the lyric essay film delivers its argument by leveraging the tension between words and images, narrative and counter-narrative components, and the (non)human subjectivities (i.e. the director's, characters' and camera's) its text embodies and enacts. These tensions generate interstitial sites from which the ethics and politics of the lyric essay film emerge. Insofar as the lyric essay film is marked by the intrusion of subjectivity in the genre's argumentative structure, the polyvocality that this intrusion allows in terms of both critical and affective contribution to the film's argument is what enables the lyric essay film to undermine ideological homogenisation and the naturalisation of situated subjective positions. Moreover, the felt participation of the subjectivity of the camera in the rendering of reciprocal processes of subjectivation becomes ethically meaningful as it embodies a conception of subjectivity as co-determined by otherness. The ethical significance of this interaction is also relevant to contemporary environmental thought, as it maintains that human subjectivities are co-determined by human and nonhuman others.
Comparative Cinema, 2022
Problematic ideological strategies of in/visibility are played out today around borders by exploi... more Problematic ideological strategies of in/visibility are played out today around borders by exploiting advanced image-making technologies and hegemonic media discourses that produce "thin" border images lacking in semiotic complexity. This article responds to calls to move beyond the "line in the sand" metaphor by investigating essay films that experiment with a performative relationship with the border. Their "borderwork" is self-reflexive to the point of becoming a form of theory. To elucidate this theorization of the border, I invoke Derrida's limitrophic method of "thickening" the limit, mediated via Deleuze's notion of the fold. By comparing three case studies-Armin Linke's Alpi (2011), Philip Scheffner's Havarie (2016), and Tadhg O'Sullivan's The Great Wall (2015)-I interrogate the strategies that essay films employ to operationalize borders. The article is a first attempt at a semiotic classification of film-essayistic border images, and a contribution to the understanding of essay film as limitrophic audiovisual thinking.
Mediapolis, 2018
The essay form, however, because of its commitment to self-reflexivity, is decidedly metahistoric... more The essay form, however, because of its commitment to self-reflexivity, is decidedly metahistorical. The questions it raises are not just about history; they amount to philosophical considerations of historiography’s implication in power relations that continue to affect the present time, and considerations of how text and medium alike participate in historiographical discourse.
Mediapolis, 2018
I will set off from the first of the two questions that Igor asks at the end of his historical/ae... more I will set off from the first of the two questions that Igor asks at the end of his historical/aesthetic discussion of the encounter between the city and the essay film. It is certainly true to say that the critical wandering gaze is one of the key modalities that has emerged from that encounter, as Igor has shown by referring to a series of important film texts. But is the critical gaze on the city always a wandering gaze? In my recent work, I have become particularly interested in questions of usage and in how the essay film thinks through its practices. When reading Igor’s introduction to this roundtable, accordingly, I was prompted to ask how a flâneurial gaze or a static gaze may respectively, and diversely, think the filmic city.
The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2008
... It is not surprising, then, that in their famous manifesto Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getin... more ... It is not surprising, then, that in their famous manifesto Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino mentioned the essay film as one of the privileged filmic lan-guages for the development of a Third ... The same year, in fact, saw the publication of Noël Burch's Theory of Film Practice. ...
Becoming-minor in a sustainable Europe: the contemporary European art film and Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre
Screen, 2013
In today's Europe, the cosmopolitanism and openness to the world the that are at the basis of the... more In today's Europe, the cosmopolitanism and openness to the world the that are at the basis of the project of art cinema are linked to profound anxieties, as a result of the marginalization of the old continent on the global stage, and of an economic recession that generates grave doubts about the sustainability of the post-1989 supranational project. The concomitant loss of identity and centrality of European art film, once a major cinematic form, calls for a new modality of reading, which, I argue, is well served by a modified conception of the minor. Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is explicitly reflective about what I term becoming-minor and becoming-sustainable in relation to European art cinema. Deploying Deleuze and Guattari's theory of minor literature and Deleuze's concept of minor cinema, while also evaluating the film's situatedness and its critique of the sustainability of contemporary Europe, this essay explores the connections between Kaurismäki's representation of a highly symbolic city-port and its deterritorializing/reterritorializing work on filmic language as the two key components of Le Havre's geopolitical aesthetic – and as a tool for eliciting a reading strategy that may be productively employed to rethink the European art film of today.
Steel in the gaze: on POV and the discourse of vision in Kathryn Bigelow's cinema
Screen, 1997
Autoethnography: Essaying the I
Comunicazioni Sociali, 2012
The essay starts from an exploration of an elusive but increasingly compelling field: the pervasi... more The essay starts from an exploration of an elusive but increasingly compelling field: the pervasiveness of autobiography and essayistic writing in contemporary audiovisual expression. From artistic and experimental practices to non-fiction film, from collaborative digital projects to confessional modes of self-representation in television and on the Internet, such a personalisation of art and the media may be seen, in broad philosophical terms, as a consequence of postmodern discourse and as a result of the growing fragmentation of the human experience in a globalized world. Nevertheless, as many audiovisual projects analysed by the author show, such a focus on subjectivity does not imply a definitive displacement of the self, or even a closure within the horizon of one’s self. On the contrary, the impulse of self-investigation and self-reflection is linked to a real desire of communication, where the filmmaker addresses and engages with the spectator within a shared space of embodied subjectivity. Finally, the contemporary proliferation of first-person modes of expression in audiovisual media responds to a common vocation to attest the social nature of the I, that is to say its embeddedness in the world.
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books by Laura Rascaroli
Cosmopolitanism calls for an exploration, both critical and theoretical, of the ways in which it constitutes a specific set of dispositions as well as an engagement with the objections and qualifications through which it has been reshaped as a concept. The collection also places a decisive emphasis on the symbolic dimension of intimations of the cosmopolitan in modern and contemporary literature and film, so documenting transformations to which it continues to be subject.
Articles by Laura Rascaroli