Everyday Narratives

Everyday Narratives Reconsidering Filmic Temporality and Spectatorial Affect through the Quotidian Effie Rassos A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Media, Film and Theatre University of New South Wales August 2005 ABSTRACT This thesis takes as its focus the relation between particular constructions of filmic time and the resulting affective and emotional experiences these temporalities produce on a spectatorial level. This connection between time and affect is thought through more specifically here in relation to an idea of the everyday not only as a thematic concern with the minutia of routine daily existence but also as distinct, and yet shifting, conceptions of filmic and viewing time. While film studies has often approached the temporal construction of the quotidian through the rubric of ‘real time,’ I explore different articulations of the everyday in a number of film practices through the writings of Henri Lefebvre. As a sociologist and philosopher preoccupied with the revolutionary quality of everyday time in both material reality and art practices including film, Lefebvre’s work enables this thesis to approach film as an especially potent and significant site for affective experiences of time and of the everyday. Beginning with John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) and an analysis of an affective everyday temporality that film is able to produce as a temporal medium, this thesis goes on to consider the quotidian through photography and stillness in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), dying and witnessing via Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), and finally melodrama and unrequited love in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for i Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000). In the analysis of these films and videos, this thesis draws on film debates explicitly concerned with time as well as focusing on those places in philosophy and critical theory where a promising and productive articulation of film and its inscription of time and affect can be found and conceptualised. In this investigation, the everyday as both a temporal construction and a spectatorial affective experience is a means to reflect on the cinema as a continually shifting and dynamic affective site. ii Originality Statement “I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.” ……………………………………………………….. .………………………………………………………. iii Copyright Statement “I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.” ……………………………………………………….. ……………………………………………………….. iv Authenticity Statement “I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.” ……………………………………………………….. ……………………………………………………….. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To begin, I would like to extend my appreciation and gratitude to my supervisor Dr Jodi Brooks for her constant encouragement, as well as her sheer determination and stamina during this lengthy project. Jodi has not only invested intensely in this thesis but she has also challenged me and my work in a way that has materially altered the way that I think and write. I thank you for your meticulous readings and unerring generosity. Dr George Kouvaros, the co-supervisor of this dissertation, whose work has greatly influenced my own thinking and approach to film, has been an invaluable guide and mentor throughout this work. I thank you for your continual support, your detailed readings and reflections, and your counsel in relation to both my thesis and the postgraduate experience. I would also like to extend my appreciation to the faculty of the School of Media, Film and Theatre, and especially Kathy Arnold and Jennifer Beale for their administrative support and much needed sense of humour. I have been very fortunate to meet and engage with a group of extraordinary postgraduates in this School (and the School’s former incarnation, the School of Theatre, Film and Dance). I thank Erin Brannigan, Daniel Edwards and Teresa Rizzo in particular for their meticulous proofreading, and Daniel and Teresa especially for their enduring support and friendship. vi Julie Gray, long time friend and confidant, thank you for proofreading the entirety of this thesis and keeping me emotionally afloat during this process. I am so grateful and fortunate that we were able to complete our dissertations at the same time and provide each other with much needed daily (and often hourly) telephone calls (and counselling) that invariably ended in laughter. I thank you for your sense of humour, friendship and love: you have made this experience not only bearable but also truly memorable. My gratitude and thanks also goes to Annette Radocaj and the extended Radocaj/Gray/Wilkes clan for their friendship, support and wisdom during this process. To my sister and friend Jo Rassos, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continual support, love and confidence in my capabilities, for being at the end of the phone when I needed to talk and finally for much needed retail therapy and laughter over countless cups of tea. Finally I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to a truly inspiring couple who have taught me the joys of everyday life: my parents, Agapi and Alex Rassos. Thank you for showing me that the emotional highs and pleasures of life can be found in every moment of our daily lives. I thank you for your constant emotional and financial support during this project, as well as your love, encouragement, and continual belief in my abilities even when the project’s completion felt beyond my reach. I dedicate this thesis to you. vii For my parents viii CONTENTS ABSTRACT i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Everyday narratives: Narrative, filmic time and spectatorial affect 22 CHAPTER TWO: The cinematic punctum: Filmic temporality, affect and photographic stillness 85 CHAPTER THREE: To be dead, even before the dying begins: Thinking the dying body through video 145 CHAPTER FOUR: Cinematic love and spectatorial intimacy 202 CONCLUSION 266 FILMOGRAPHY 277 REFERENCES 280 BIBLIOGRAPHY 298 ix INTRODUCTION What is at stake [in modernity] is the representability of time for a subject whose identity is more and more tightly sutured to abstract structures of temporality. The theory of rationalization does not allow for the vicissitudes of the affective, for the subjective play of desire, anxiety, pleasure, trauma, apprehension. Pure rationalization excludes the subject, whose collusion is crucial to the sustenance of a capitalist system. In the face of the abstraction of time, its transformation into the discrete, the measurable, the locus of value, chance and the contingent are assigned an important ideological role—they become the highly cathected sites of both pleasure and anxiety. Contingency appears to offer a vast reservoir of freedom and free play, irreducible to the systematic structuring of “leisure time.”—Mary Ann Doane1 From the cinema’s inception, an idea of cinematic time has been, at various moments, at the forefront of theoretical and critical approaches to the medium. The fascination with cinema’s temporal capabilities has also been, and continues to be, a means of reflecting on the specific kinds of affects and emotions that are generated in the act of viewing. With the recent intensification of work in this area encouraged by the publication of the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image in 1989, earlier considerations of filmic temporality such as those by André Bazin have been resurrected and reassessed not only in terms of post-war modernist cinema but also early cinema and contemporary film and video practice.2 1 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:

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