Abstract
This chapter discusses the idea of contingency in relation to film experience and film studies. On one hand, contingency individuates a tension between the situatedness of spectatorship and its intelligibility. On the other, contingency also defines a network of connected discourses and impressions, a form of signification by contiguity, created and shared by viewers, that blurs the film’s textuality with the texture of everyday life. In this way, the scope of spectatorship is extended beyond the moment of projection to include the spectator’s free use of the film and spectatorship is reimagined as a double scene: a scene of looking on and the scene of a dialogue. In the final part of the chapter, the inscription of contingency in film is briefly discussed through the analysis of the short story “The Bat” by Luigi Pirandello.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
David Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism,” Iris 9 (1989): 22.
- 2.
“Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.” See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 93. “It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. […] The trace left behind is substituted for the practice .” Ibid., 97.
- 3.
Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 181.
- 4.
See Žižek , The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 100.
- 5.
See Judith Butler , “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Contingency , Hegemony, Universality , 11. For a discussion of the “lure” of metaphysics in film theory , see Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47–80.
- 6.
Elizabeth Cowie has advanced a critique of this understanding of the imaginary in these terms: “the imaginary, with which cinema has so often been identified by film theorists, is not a full, fixed subjectivity; it comes into existence in the loss of any such full subjectivity, the regaining of which is in fact the central fantasized scenario of the imaginary.” Elizabeth Cowie , Representing the Woman : Cinema and Psychoanalysis (London: Macmillan, 1997), 166.
- 7.
Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Contingency , Hegemony, Universality , 50–51.
- 8.
Judith Butler , “Competing Universalities,” in Contingency , Hegemony, Universality , 163.
- 9.
Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 51.
- 10.
Žižek , “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” in Contingency , Hegemony, Universality , 112.
- 11.
Slavoj Žižek , The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 67.
- 12.
Slavoj Žižek , “Holding the Place,” in Contingency , Hegemony, Universality , 310.
- 13.
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 192.
- 14.
Burgin, Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 68.
- 15.
Slavoj Žižek , The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 107.
- 16.
See ibid.
- 17.
“Only when the mechanism of gender construction implies the contingency of that construction does ‘constructedness’ per se prove useful to the political project to enlarge the scope of possible gender configurations.” Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 51.
- 18.
See Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 2009 [1994]), 40.
- 19.
Žižek , “Da Capo Senza Fine,” in Contingency , Hegemony, Universality , 241.
- 20.
Ibid., 240.
- 21.
Pontalis, Après Freud, 114.
- 22.
Žižek , The Fright of Real Tears, 100.
- 23.
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou , Dispossession : The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 32.
- 24.
Ibid. Emphasis added.
- 25.
Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 346. Originally published as “En sortant du cinéma,” Communications 23 (1975): 104–107.
- 26.
Antonin Artaud, Complete Works, vol. 1 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 71.
- 27.
Miriam Bratu-Hansen, Cinema and Experience : Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2012), 276.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Žižek , The Fright of Real Tears, 101.
- 30.
Ibid., 107.
- 31.
Hansen, Cinema and Experience , 268.
- 32.
Luigi Pirandello, “The Bat,” in Modern Italian Short Stories, ed. Marc Slonim and trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954 [1920]), 22.
- 33.
Ibid., 23.
- 34.
Ibid., 24.
- 35.
Ibid., 25.
- 36.
Ibid., 25–26.
- 37.
Ibid., 26.
- 38.
Ibid., 27.
- 39.
Ibid., 28.
- 40.
Ibid., 29.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Mary Ann Doane, in Linda Connor et al., “Notes from the Field: Contingency ,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012): 348.
- 43.
Ibid., 349.
- 44.
See Janet Harbord’s discussion of contingency in Siegried Kracauer’s Theory of Film. Janet Harbord, “Contingency ’s Work: Kracauer’s Theory of Film and the Trope of the Accidental,” New Formations 61 (2007): 90.
- 45.
Jacques Rancière , Film Fables (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006), 2.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency , the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 349.
- 48.
Ibid., 23.
- 49.
Maria Brennan, in Mary Ann Doane, in Linda Connor et al., “Notes from the Field: Contingency ,” 347.
Bibliography
Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Artaud, Antonin. Complete Works, vol. 1. London: Calder and Boyars, 1968.
Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. “En sortant du cinéma.” Communications 23 (1975): 104–107.
Barthes, Roland. “Leaving the Movie Theatre.” In The Rustle of Language. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.
Bordwell, David. “A Case for Cognitivism.” Iris 9 (1989): 11–40.
Bratu-Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2012.
Burgin, Victor. Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclaum, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. London: Verso, 2000.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.
Connor, Linda, Giovanna Borradori, Marcia Brennan, Mary Ann Doane, Angus Fletcher, Peter Geimer, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, C. Brian Rose, Frances Spalding, and Chris Spring. “Notes from the Field: Contingency.” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012): 344–361.
Cowie, Elizabeth. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan, 1997.
Doane, Mary-Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Harbord, Janet. “Contingency’s Work: Kracauer’s Theory of Film and the Trope of the Accidental.” New Formations 61 (2007): 90–103.
Pirandello, Luigi. “The Bat.” In Modern Italian Short Stories, edited by Marc Slonim and translated by Frances Frenaye, 22–29. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Après Freud. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006.
Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-theory. London: British Film Institute, 2001.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 2008.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Comanducci, C. (2018). Situatedness and Contingency of Film Experience. In: Spectatorship and Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96743-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96742-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96743-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)