Asbjørn Grønstad

• University of Bergen

From the critical and commercial fanfare his films generate, it is largely understood that Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the more interesting filmmakers to have emerged out of the new century. A markedly transnational filmmaker, between Dogtooth and The Favourite Lanthimos has managed to traverse the gap between the art-house and mainstream while not...

This chapter explores the concept of transgressive art and its relation to freedom of speech and censorship, charting its history as an oppositional communicative practice and locating Ways of Seeing within that history. As the previous chapters argue, Ways of Seeing aims to interrogate the meaning of what one may call normative visibility, and in...

After analyses of the judicial and aesthetic dimensions of the play, the fourth chapter delves more deeply into its content and meanings, in a reading that finds the opposition between neoliberalism and the feminist experiment in Rojava to be the fundamental theme of the play. Key to the argument in this chapter is that the topics explicitly flagge...

The introductory chapter provides relevant background information for the case of Ways of Seeing and presents the overall research questions to be pursued in the book. Approaching the play as a work of sousveillance—surveillance from below—the chapter argues that its chief ambition is to expose hegemonic practices of looking, practices that are int...

This chapter first considers some of the intellectual and interpretive frames that help make sense of the strategies employed by the play to challenge culturally authoritative ways of seeing. Discussed in this section are, among other things, the play’s reference to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), and Trevor Pagl...

This book focuses on the theme of counter-surveillance in art through a multi-faceted engagement with the highly controversial Norwegian play Ways of Seeing. Denounced by the prime minister and subject to a police investigation, the play gained notoriety when it featured footage showing the homes of the country’s financial and political elite as pa...

The introduction presents the premises for the study. Two observations are paramount in this regard. One is the awareness that contemporary culture is doused in a pervasive yet largely unquestioned faith in the preeminence of transparency, of total illumination. The other is the discovery of a vital yet mostly uncharted propensity for non-transpare...

This chapter analyzes the facemasks made by the artist Zach Blas in his Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014) in the context of a poetics of opacity as an instrument of political resistance. Blas’s projects are considered as a reaction to the increasing dominance of biopolitical forms of governmentality. Resembling a new ocular regime, these forms...

This chapter shifts the focus from experimental cinema to what might be termed avant-garde television. Approaching the phenomenon of opacity from not only a graphic but also a narrative point of view, the chapter considers the eight installment of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), an episode in which “clarity is besides the point,” as on...

Blurry photographs can serve as an index of a conspicuous absence, as a reminder that potentially significant information is being intentionally withheld from us. One such use of opacity is realized through the projects of the artist and researcher Trevor Paglen. Focusing on stealthy military operations and test sites—remote desert installations in...

This chapter explores the idea that an intertextual assemblage might be considered as a kind of ruin. In a historical context, the intertextual fragment embodies another manifestation of the aesthetics of decay, of the ruin as an object of philosophical contemplation. In focus here is the work of the British filmmaker artist and collagist John Akom...

This chapter surveys an array of works that in various ways adopt (partial) illegibility as a poetic device and, more substantially, to chart the critical genealogies of the present attempt at theorizing opacity. Identifying a possible origin for the thesis that the photographic/filmic image is essentially opaque in the anti-mimetic criticism of ea...

The subject of opaque art readily invokes matters of mediality, and this is the point of departure for this chapter. Examined here are the strange and optically regenerative practices by which materially impaired images exploit their own opacity to attain a new modality of existing as a visual artifact. In order to do this, I turn toward American a...

This chapter widens the scope of the poetics of opacity to include sound. Turning to the 2018 release of Double Negative, the Minnesota slowcore band Low’s 12th album, the chapter considers the sonic radicalism of the record in the context of its historical moment. The record’s profound use of distortion and noise epitomizes the musicians’ attempt...

This chapter situates Matt Saunders’s 2010 installation Passageworks within the context of an art of opacity, showing how the work in its stratified materiality recalls both Gehr’s poetics of spectrality as well as Akomfrah’s fascination with transtextuality and its archival accent. Like that of Gehr, Saunders’s art seeks to transcend the boundarie...

This is the first book to offer a systematic account of the concept of opacity in the aesthetic field. Engaging with works by Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, Matt Saunders, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low, the study considers the cultural, epistemological, and ethical values of images and sounds that are fuzzy, indeterminate, distorted, d...

The first book of its kind, Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing engages broadly with the often too neglected yet significant questions of gesture in visual culture. In our turbulent mediasphere where images-as lenses bearing on their own circumstances-are constantly mobilized to enact symbolic forms of warfare and where they get entangled...

How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over th...

How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over th...

Before the emergence of an ethical turn in film and media studies, literary studies underwent a similar development. This chapter proffers a summary of some of its pivotal perspectives.

This chapter explains the background to the project and what it contributes to a deeper understanding of what might be seen as the ethical life of images. It addresses the notion of visual ecosystems and elaborates on the term biovisuality.

Turning around Emmanuel Levinas’s well-known phrase, this chapter offers a brief presentation of the historically variable relationship between ethics and aesthetics.

This chapter further expands upon the idea that ethical values might be inscribed in a film’s very form. It also grapples with the problem of commodification in relation to cinematic form and its potential to function in a way that deepens our knowledge of ethics.

This chapter expounds upon the concept of the ethical imagination, theorized through the following propositions: that aesthetic form has the potential for being inherently ethical; that images generate their own biovisual ethics; that ethics is an hermeneutics; that cinema essentially shows us other modes of being; that the ethical imagination is d...

The relation of ethics to the field of politics is a constant conundrum in many theoretical engagements with ethics. How the ethical imagination comes to reconfigure the political is the subject of my reading of Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film in this chapter.

This chapter proposes that Baudelaire’s Lost Letters to Max demonstrates how the activist potential that inheres in the aesthetic itself might be capable of generating modes of political engagement no less efficacious than those of more explicit forms.

While historical experience is opaque and irrecoverable, it may be partially retrieved and confronted through aesthetic re-articulations. This chapter examines this process of memory reclamation in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, a film about migration and the legacies of colonialism that makes explicit the connection between memory, ethics, and ar...

This chapter examines, through a reading of Michael Haneke’s Amour, the ethical attachments of corporeal experience, particularly as it is exposed to vulnerability, suffering, and mortality.

This chapter encapsulates the various approaches that make up the ethical turn in film, media, and visual culture studies and presents a possible narrative of the evolution of this research. A key assumption is that a theoretical shift is occurring in which ethics is attributed not only to a given work’s perceived content but, more importantly, to...

The final chapter considers Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light and Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux as films that augur what could be seen as a planetary ethics. Through their radical aesthetic articulations both films push against the limits of the ethical imagination itself, portending a future cinema of the Anthropocene.

This chapter pursues the thesis that ethics informed film theory long before it became an explicit concern in the field. Analyzing four distinct practices of thinking ethics circuitously, the chapter pinpoints some of the ways in which film history and the history of film theory have accommodated a more subterranean form of ethics.

This chapter shows that Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin promotes a new cinematic situation through its emphasis on the cinema theater experience. We have to picture the absent film for ourselves while simultaneously negotiating our relation with those other viewers—our elusive on-screen doubles that are different from us and indifferent to our presence—w...

The subject of this chapter is how the process of producing alternative visualities functions as a means to renew ethical discourse. It considers the concept of a posthuman gaze in Lucien Castaing-Taylor's and Véréna Paravel’s experimental documentary Leviathan.

The emphasis of this chapter is the corporeal expressivity of gesture in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, which conveys another manifestation of visual ethics. By emphasizing gesture over narrative impetus, Denis’s cinematography enables attentional energies and modes of affect that contribute to a better appreciation of alterity and its complex rel...

In this chapter, the argument is made that the act of slowing down produces a sense of duration and presence unavailable to speedier and more editing-reliant kinds of films. In visualizing duration, so to speak, Stray Dogs—and other films in the slow cinema vein—open up a space for a range of ethical processes like reflection, recognition, empathy,...

This book is the first critical assessment of one of the leading figures of modernist European art cinema. Assessing his complete works, the book brings together a team of internationally regarded experts and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines, to provide a definitive account of Theo Angelopoulos' formal reactions to the historical events...

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' last film The Dust of Time (2008), describing it as an apotheosis to the director's visual investment in duration. In The Dust of Time , a voice-over declares that ‘nothing ever ends’. The dust of time is the obliviousness of history. It would seem that the temporality of history is couched in opacity, where...

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multi...

Since the late 1990s, film as a medium has been enmeshed in routine proclamations of its own imminent end. The cinema, increas-ingly seen as culturally and technologically moribund, has acquired a certain aura of mortality that perhaps it did not have before.1 To be sure, the history of the art has produced several indelible scenes and figurations...

Noting the extensive and sustained engagement with visual media in many contemporary American novels, this essay argues that the notion of ekphrasis as a critical notion must be reconceptualized in order to accommodate the complexity of the relations between new literary expressions and the visual.

When presenting papers from this project at conferences, or talking more informally about it with colleagues and friends, people often ask me why a film like Irréversible or Antichrist is any less watchable than a mainstream exploitation flick like, say, Saw (James Wan, 2004) or Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). It is a reasonable question, but one apparent...

Caché never discloses the identity of the person responsible for the videotapes; his or her invisibility mirrors that of the marginalized and voiceless Majid in the film. Furthermore, the painful sense of guilt that the film’s images elicit encapsulates the mechanisms of negativity that are still active in a particular strand of art cinema. In its...

The unwatchable as a trope may pertain to films, and sequences in films, that are so unspeakably brutal as to force the spectators to avert their gaze, so shockingly aggressive as to produce a visceral, physiological effect in the audience. The model works for this cinema are the films discussed in the previous chapter. Another sense of the unwatch...

When Susan Sontag in her 1967 essay sought to clarify the problem of pornography, differentiating between three different senses of the term (a social phenomenon, a psychological phenomenon, and an artistic convention, respectively),1 she was writing from an historical vantage point where porn still represented a largely undomesticated area of cult...

In the age of globalization and frenzied visuality, the battle over the possession of history, no less than that over representation itself, often takes the form of a contest of images. When rendered invisible, odious historical truths can sometimes be elided and buried. The unearthing and re-visualization of deliberately suppressed events is obvio...

The concept of transgression in the cinema has everything to do with problems of representation in relation to sexuality and gender, but maybe not quite in the way that one would think. Historically, the shattering of taboos in film has been intimately associated with the introduction of ever more explicit footage in the twin signifying realms of s...

As critics and viewers of transgressive cinema, we are easily ensnared by a peculiar and quite possibly irresolvable conundrum. It goes like this: we are attracted to the cinema in no small part because it provides a particular experience, an aesthetic experience, that cannot be had elsewhere. Whatever the subject matter of the film, we trust that...

Tracing the rise of extreme art cinema across films from Lars von Trier's The Idiots to Michael Haneke's Caché, Asbjørn Grønstad revives the debate about the role of negation and aesthetics, and reframes the concept of spectatorship in ethical terms.

This chapter explores the notion of the ‘unwatchable’ in relation to a roughly decade-long cycle of art films that compel us to rethink the notions of spectatorship, desire, and ethics. The films of the new extremism are films that compel us to look away — that constitute a ‘fork in the eye’ — an intensive visual assault on the film audience. In el...

In this article, I argue that one has yet to acknowledge the extent to which the notion of the aesthetic and its content is institutionally negotiated. A central question that we ought to bear in mind is: does the organization of "aesthetic knowledge" that the traditional disciplines facilitate promote or prevent insight into meta-aesthetic and tra...

'NO ONE GOES TO THE MOVIES ANYMORE:'(1) CINEMA AND VISUAL STUDIES IN THE DIGITAL ERA BLUE WITHIN the variegated domain of media studies, convergence seems to be one of the buzzwords of the day. Forms that were previously discrete entities merge into new constellations, in the process uprooting the entire ecosystem of the media. Business conglomerat...

In Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), the specter of the culturally repressed returns in the form of mute, unrelenting images that seem to demand something of the protagonists in the film. This article argues that Caché, in its troubled but timely reflection on the enigmatic images that make up our shared visual culture, negotiates an...

This article examines the interlocking themes of the psychology of faith and the disintegration of selfhood in Denis Johnson's 1991 novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Reading the work as a modern update of the roman noir the article proposes that the protagonist's quest for spiritual identity is both enabled and interrupted by a process of consta...

This is an essay on transtextuality — the logistics of quotation — and literary/cinematic memory, though with a particular focus on their workings in James Joyce's "The Dead" and Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953).

If the title of this article resounds with the polemical palavering of literary theory in the 1940s, I have to submit that the allusion is not entirely accidental. It is not my intention here, however, to resuscitate the arguments of W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley, but rather to evoke a sense of parallelism between their issues and those...

This article argues that the rhetoric of Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is substantially indebted to the politics of American Transcendentalism as propagated in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Themes and preoccupations such as the notion of civil revolt, non-conformity, the appreciation of nature as a condition for individuality and the d...