Abstract
Any research on photography, cinema, video and television necessarily entails a reflection on technique.1 This reflection is not merely technical in nature; it is also cultural since it explores the impact of such media on the ways in which we live, think and act. In making such an assertion one has to mention Raymond Williams, one of the most important critics of our time, who from the 1950s to his death in 1988 worked to redefine the meaning of culture in the post-war world. Against the conception of culture as a given and eternal set of universal references — epitomized by the canon of ‘great works of art’, the idea of high culture that informed British intellectual life for almost two centuries — Williams put forward a notion of culture which corresponded to the realities and tensions of Western liberal democracy. In Culture and Society (1958), he wrote: ‘The history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life.’2
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Notes
This chapter was first published in Colin MacCabe and Duncan Petrie, eds, New Scholarship from BFI Research (London: British Film Institute, 1996), pp. 58–85.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 285.
See Christian Metz, ‘A propos de l’impression de réalité au cinéma’, Cahiers du cinéma, 166–7 (1965), pp. 75–82.
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, Screen, 13(1) (Spring 1972), pp. 5–6.
Jacques Lacan suggests that the human subject, aquainted with the world, has forgotten the inaugural scene of the discovery of his/her own image. Yet that scene is formative and dictates the function of the self. In a famous 1949 paper, ‘The Mirror Stage’, Lacan, deeply influenced by Jean Piaget, draw the attention to the euphoric, foundational moment in which the child — when it is approximateley six months old and is as yet unable to walk or talk — recognizes with exultation its own imago in the mirror, as well as the image of its reflected environment, and enjoys the repetition of this scene. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’, Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 93–100.
One should also investigate the distinction between the eye and the gaze. Lacan sketched this distinction, as noticed in a remarkable analysis of colour and glossiness by Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Signatures of the Visible (New York; London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 139–40.
Some psychoanalysts maintain that the era of neurosis is over and psychosis is much more representative of our age. Wouldn’t this be confirmed by the psychic effects of the contemporary plethora of images? See Contardo Calligaris, Introduction à une clinique différentielle des psychoses (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992).
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Visual and Other Pleasures (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989). This article, written in 1973, was first published in Screen (1975).
André Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), vol. 2, p. 26.
Dudley Andrew stressed in his study on Bazin the importance of the intellectual atmosphere around the Catholic and Bergsonian journal Esprit, and the influence of the Catholic critic Albert Béguin. Béguin believed in a double reality where things have a natural relationship to mystery and spirituality, not unlike the medieval religious tradition where reality is the revelation of a spiritual sense. See Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 115.
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© 2003 Patrizia Lombardo
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Lombardo, P. (2003). Absence and Revelation: Photography as the Art of Nostalgia. In: Cities, Words and Images. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286696_7
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