Nietzsche on Film

This is the final version of the article. Available from Edinburgh University Press via the DOI in this record.This article tracks the many appearances of Friedrich Nietzsche throughout the history of cinema. It asks how cinema can do Nietzschean philosophy in ways that are unique to the medium. It also asks why the cinematic medium might be so pertinent to Nietzschean philosophy. Adhering to the implicit premise that, as Jacques Derrida once put it, ‘there is no totality to Nietzsche's text, not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one,’ the essay's mode of argument avoids reductive totalization and instead comprises a playful sampling of variously Nietzschean manifestations across dissimilar films. It begins with an extended account of Baby Face, a 1933 drama from which the abundant references to Nietzsche were either altered or expunged ahead of theatrical release. It then maps some of the philosophical consistencies across two genres in which characters read Nietzsche with apparent frequency: the comedy and the thriller. While comedies and thrillers both treat Nietzsche and his readers with suspicion, and do so for perceptive historical reasons, the essay then asks what an affirmatively Nietzschean film might look like. It explores this possibility through a discussion of cinematic animation in general and then more specifically via several critically familiar films that self-consciously evolve their aesthetic through Nietzsche's philosophy. The essay concludes by affirming Béla Tarr's final film as one of the medium's greatest realizations of a Nietzschean film-philosophy. The Turin Horse, released in 2011, is exemplary because it takes Nietzsche as a narrative premise only to sublate that premise into a unique visual style

Women film directors: An international bio-critical dictionary

My dissertation looks at the lives and works of numerous women filmmakers who have been neglected in cinema history, offering a complete survey of their films, a brief biography of their life and career history, as well as a critical analysis of the films under consideration. Among the directors included are Alice Guy Blache, perhaps the first director to make a narrative film (in 1896, titled La Fee Aux Choux); Chantal Akerman, one of the foremost directors of the French feminist Postfilm generation; Julie Dash, an African-American filmmaker whose Daughters of the Dust has attracted major critical attention; as well as Christine Choy, Joyce Chopra, Safi Faye from Senegal, Marta Meszaros of Hungary, and Trinh T. Minh-ha of Vietnam. In many cases, these directors have been marginalized in conventional cinema history. This dissertation, therefore, discusses the life and works of many important women filmmakers who have been dropped from canonical cinema discourse. International in scope, the dissertation explores the ways in which these films by women directors offer an entirely different vision from that of conventional patriarchal filmic discourse, and demonstrate that since the beginning of film, there has been a feminist filmic tradition. This dissertation is being written under contract to Greenwood Press, and will be published in late 1995; most practically, it is designed as a key reference text in women\u27s film studies courses