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February 2001, Week 3

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From:
Ken Chen <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Thu, 15 Feb 2001 01:25:38 -0800
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This is a pretty old message, so I hope a February answer can work for a
December question.

This is an interesting topic, and a good pairing might be Anne Carson's Eros
the Bittersweet and, I hope this isn't too obvious a suggestion, Alain
Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour. Carson recently won the MacArthur fellowship
for her work in poetry, and Eros combines her poetic and emotional
sensibilities with her classical scholarship to examine Love through Greek
poetry. Her writing persona has some rough similarities to Margueritte
Duras--particularly the refined, lyrical sense of passion. Duras wrote The
Lover and the screenplay to Hiroshima and its the only Resnais movie I can
think of (I've only seen Stavinsky, Providence, and Mon Oncle American in
addition to this one) where the cinematic gimmickry seems to further the
emotion rather than acts as a end in itself. Hiroshima might be interesting
to consider how an avant garde cutting technique might mirror the
characters' sort of fragmentary passion, or to look at the racial
signification of the French and Japanese lovers whose passion swells up to
the point that they begin not just to represent themselves, or even lovers,
but (as in the famous last lines) the identities of place and nationalism.

Love is a big topic and my instinctive advice would be to narrow it--though
I like that you are smartly doing the complete opposite ('non-hegemonic'
relationships (e.g. homosexual > relationships, relationships between adults
and children, > pseudo-relationships from afar between fan/star, etc.').

In respect to the adult/child relationship, there are probably a number of
Asian movies that might work for you. Ang Lee is a good though probably not
great director but I think he does a good job of creating 'structures' of
love, particularly in the almost Jamesian _Eat Drink Man Woman_, though
_Wedding Banquet_ (which I feel is a less affecting movie) deals with a
doubly non-hegemonic relationship (homosexual, cross-racial) struggling out
of a traditional wedding banquet.

There seems to be a lot of stuff on 'sensuality' (is it just me or have
there been a few Marquis de Sade films this year?). I recently saw Marquis,
a French puppet version, and thought the puppets were more disturbing than
the sex! This probably isn't a great movie, but the puppetry is continually
fascinating, offering a type of Art Spiegelman-Maus kind of representational
gimmickry. Or, on the literary side, it might be interesting to explore the
paradigm of loves in whatever would constitute a 'sex' canon. I don't know
anything about this but I was just flipping through a book I got because
Ezra Pound translated it, called "The Natural Philosophy of Love." I haven't
read it, but flipping through, it has the texture of a Audubon handbook for
human sexuality. Strangely distancing. This could easily be compared with
maybe the Kama Sutra or that Ming dynasty novel about sex. I don't know
anything about this, but it might be interesting to look into.

Well, good luck,
Ken

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Morsch" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2000 4:49 AM
Subject: Love and intimacy in the movies


> Dear list members,
>
> I am currently preparing a seminar on >Love and intimacy in the movies<
> due to take place next summer. While I am aware of a vast range of
> literature on sexuality in the cinema, it seems difficult to find
> anything on _Love_. Not a popular topic for scholarship, I suppose,
> although it is very popular in the movies.
>
> Anyways, the seminar will be based on the historical analysis of the
> semantics of love by german sociologist Niklas Luhmann, but I am still
> looking for suggestions along the following lines:
>
> - literature (books, essays) from film studies that deal with the topic
> of love not in a purely generic perspective (e.g. "love" as part of
> melodrama, like in Mary Ann Doanes book on women's movies); I am aware of
> a couple of essays by Robin Wood on Before Sunrise, by Masud Zavarzadeh
> on the ideology of love and intimacy, by Thomas Wartenberg's book on
> Unlikely Couples, but I did not find much more yet. I am also looking for
> essays who pay attention to the importance of love in the work of
> particular directors/films like Antonioni, Truffaut's Antoine
> Doinel-films, etc.
>
> - eminent literary, philosophical, etc. works on the topic of love (like
> Martha Nussbaum's _Love's Knowledge_, Roland Barthes' book an love in
> Werther, Julia Kristeva's book on the histories of love, etc.) - there
> might still be some interesting literature around that I missed.
>
> - last but not least I am looking for suggestions of important films as
> far as the topic is concerned: films that deal with love in a particular
> way, films that develop a certain - even philosophical - idea of love,
> films that present 'non-hegemonic' relationships (e.g. homosexual
> relationships, relationships between adults and children,
> pseudo-relationships from afar between fan/star, etc.) as an alternative
> to hegemonic ideas of love, or films that, on the contrary, seem to be
> emblematic for society's predominant ideas about love and intimacy (at
> least in a certain historical period).
> I am also looking for interesting documentary (like Pasolini's Comizi
> D'Amore) and maybe even avantgarde/experimental films that deal with the
> topic of love.
>
> Right now any suggestions are very welcome. And thank you very much to
> anyone who is giving it a thought.
>
> Thomas Morsch
> Film Dept.
> Freie Universitaet Berlin
> Germany
>
> ----
> For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives:
> http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html

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