The End of the Other: Ethics and Physical Cinema

• 19 Oct 2011
• 16:00 – 17:30 U.K. - England - London
• What time is this for me?
• Virtual

Speaker details

Professor Lucia Nagib University of Leeds

Event contact

Anoushka Kulikowski (a.kulikowski@leeds.ac.uk) University of Leeds

Event resources

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Abstract

In this talk, I will focus on the trope of the cinematic runner cutting across four typical new-cinema films:

Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001), the first Inuit feature film;

Yaaba (Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1989), a landmark in Sahel filmmaking;

Black God, White Devil (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, Glauber Rocha, 1964), Brazil’s Cinema Novo milestone;

and The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups, François Truffaut, 1959), the first Nouvelle Vague feature film.

Stemming from entirely disparate historical moments, cultures and locations, these films arrive at a surprisingly similar presentational solution for key moments in the plot which elude verbal discourse, namely, the protagonists’ protracted act of running on foot. Performed in reality, in vast wintry landscapes, burning deserts or Arctic sea ice, these races invariably take the upper hand over the diegesis and impose their own narrative, one related to the characters’ recognizing, experiencing, demarcating and taking possession of a territory, and, in so doing, defining a people and its culture. These characters are thus anything but victims of alien forces. If there are any victims and villains, they all circulate within the unified cosmos in which fable and the real are conflated. Hence in these films, to echo Badiou’s words, ‘difference’ is simply what there is, and ‘otherness’ in relation to a ‘self’ or ‘same’ makes no sense. Instead, cast and crew testify to their total commitment to a moment of truth, their physical engagement with the profilmic event and their fidelity to what Rancière calls the ‘honesty of the medium’, in short, their ethics of realism.

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