Seeing oneself speak:Speech and thought in first-person camera cinema

Cinema struggles with the representation of inner-speech and thought in a way that is less of a problem for literature. Film also destabilises the notion of the narrator, be they omniscient, unreliable or first-person. In this article I address the peculiar and highly unsuccessful cinematic innovation which we can call the ‘first-person camera’ or ‘first-person’ film. These are films in which the camera represents not just the point-of-view of a character but is meant to be understood as that character. Very few such films have been made, and I will concentrate on the way in which speech and thought are presented in Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) and Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947). I use Jacques Derrida’s critique of the idea of ‘hearing oneself speak’ and phenomenology’s dream of direct experience to explore the generally understood failure of such films and conclude by considering the implications of such a technique for a homunculus theory of mind

Detective/text/critic

This thesis grapples with the curious relationship of the metaphors of detection and reading. Detective fiction is often seen as an enactment of reading, while the literary critic is often described in terms of detection, investigation and interrogation. The Introductory section discusses the implications that such a self-reflexive and reflecting involvement has for narrative, the self, logic and the very institution of academic literary criticism itself. The notion of a detective genre, and genre-criticism in general, is put into question by analysing the legal and coercive nature of a literary concept that styles itself as objective, scientific and historical. The power of the critic to construct genre is likened to the legal capacity of the detective and a polemical call is made to re-examine the academy's resulting claims of authority. An analysis of the crime of incest in two films, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Jack Nicholeson's The Two Jakes, is used to further problematise the notion of the law. Claude Levi-Strauss' work on kinship structures helps to point to the aporetic and contradictory position that incest can be seen to occupy in the formation of human society. Criminal anthropology provides an interesting frame for this discussion. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is used to explore the fundamental uncertainty in which the detective/reader necessarily finds herself. Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny is introduced to account for the interpreter's state of unease in the face of ambiguity. Finally, a literary essay, Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", is read rather as a form of detective story than as a factual analysis, whether this experiment is successful will be up to the reader. The overriding claim of this thesis is that there is no such thing as perception

The fetishism of meaning: disavowal in Kafka, Svankmajer and the Quay brothers

According to Freud, fetishism is based on disavowal (Verleugnung): the possibility of believing two contradictory propositions to be true simultaneously. This thesis argues that the structure of the sign and of meaning more generally can be understood to function in exactly this way. The sign both is and is not that which it represents. Disavowal offers a theoretical explanation of the functioning of language, meaning and text based on a principle of the simultaneous existence of two contradictory propositions. The fetish is aligned with a series of concepts which, it is argued, have a similar contradictory structure: Sigmund Freud's unheimlich, Tzvetan Todorov's fantastic, Slavoj Žižek's real (incorporating Jacques Lacan's objet petit a and Alfred Hitchcock's McGuffin), Jacques Derrida's différance and Ferdinand de Saussure's sign. Theoretical underpinnings come from psychoanalysis, anthropology and Marxism. There is a consideration of the history of fetishism in philosophy and in film theory. Following the work of Derrida in Glas, an argument is made for the radical potential of the "generalised fetish", defined by disavowal. The thesis explores the action of fetishism in writing and film. Hair is used as one example of a symbolic object to show that an understanding of such a symbol is based on disavowal. The concept of fetishism is then used to explore the way in which the object is represented in the writings of Franz Kafka and the films of Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay. These works provide complex representations of objects on a thematic level while the texts themselves function as just such fetish objects on a formal level. It is the self-reflexive interaction between these two levels that makes these texts exemplary

Why Bother with Cinema?, on Paolo Cherchi-Usai The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age

Paolo Cherchi-Usai _The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age_ Preface by Martin Scorsese London: British Film Institute, 2001 ISBN 0851708374 (pb) 0851708382 (hb) 134 pp