Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Kaplan, E. Ann | Hesford, Victoria | Diedrich, Lisa | Tan, Eng Kiong | O'Byrne, Anne.
Date
2015-08-01
Keywords
Cinema, Denis, Claire, Ethics, Feminism, Levinas, Emmanuel, Nancy, Jean-Luc | Film studies
Department
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77211
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This dissertation develops an account of a feminist cinematic ethics through the films of Claire Denis, along with the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and Emmanuel Levinas. Two facets of this ethics include what I term an ethics of sense and an aesthetic of alterity. I examine how Denis presents a counter cinema to dominant Hollywood film language, by centering non-mastery, opacity, and embodied relationality in her films. Arguing that the importance of her films is best understood through the lens of ethics, I locate these ethics both at the level of the film itself and also in the sensibility the film cultivates in the spectator. Methodologically, my work gives a greater role to cinema in the ongoing attempts to create a bridge between film studies and philosophy. Instead of film being a mere object through which philosophical ideas are demonstrated, film makes its own argument through specifically cinematic means. As I demonstrate, Denis' films often go further than Nancy and Levinas' philosophical writing in terms of their ability and desire to address the historical and cultural frameworks through which we encounter bodies. My project also engages rigorously with the philosophy of Nancy and Levinas, and seeks out significant points at which they share concerns with feminism, queer theory, and critical disability studies to open them up to alternate readings. This is particularly relevant in relation to their accounts of embodiment as that which challenges the self-identity of the subject and their approaches to difference and interrelationality. Denis' films emphasize singularity and prethematic difference, as well as giving sensory encounters priority over narrative clarity and character psychology. I argue that film can engage us in an ethics of spectatorship that fine-tunes our broader ethical sensibility. Our codified ways of viewing tend to shut down an opportunity to encounter the unmasterable in the world and to see the other as uniquely singular. Beyond offering a lens through which to view Denis' films then, my work examines how different forms of exposure to the other, or new modes of encounter, can affectively reorient us towards different and more just futures. | 239 pages
Recommended Citation
Hole, Kristin Lené, "Intrusions: Embodied Ethics in the Films of Claire Denis" (2015). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3042.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3042