Cinema’s Ontological Challenge

Abstract

In very different ways, Persona and Two or Three Things I Know About Her render and confront the ontological violence of both cinema and modernity — that of the films’ contemporary real but also, in refractory fashion, the much ‘later’ stage at which we watch them today. Chapter 1 sets out to historically, philosophically, and filmically put into context cinema’s potential foregrounding of negativity through these two select case studies. Thereafter, Chapter 2 can develop a more direct analysis of exactly how all this plays out through the formal seams of these two films, which from five decades later appear so exemplary of post-war cinema’s modernist peak.