Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Dissertations Department of Communication 12-4-2017 Cinemas of Endurance Adam Cottrel Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss Recommended Citation Cottrel, Adam, "Cinemas of Endurance." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2017. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss/87 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CINEMAS OF ENDURANCE by ADAM KILDARE COTTREL Under the Direction of Angelo Restivo, PhD ABSTRACT Cinemas of Endurance begins by questioning the way in which critics and scholars have addressed art cinema over the last decade, specifically the films referred to as “slow cinema.” These films have garnered widespread attention since the start of the 21st century for how they deploy what many believe to be anachronistic and redundant formal techniques, often discussed in terms of nostalgia and pastiche. This dissertation argues that these films have been unfairly couched within this discourse that largely judges their validity based on their stylistic similarities to the art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Breaking from this direction, this project proposes we take these films and their aesthetic seriously, not for stubbornly refuting the prevailing formal trends in filmmaking, but for how it creates a critical optic that grants us a greater capacity to recognize some of the most prevailing social, political, and economic issues of the last decade. Further, by using stylistic techniques that can often register as out of place, or protracted, these films can help us to understand the way our physical, mental, and affective coordinates have shifted in this historical moment. Each chapter of this dissertation takes an exemplary film from this subset of art cinema and addresses how the aesthetic works against established modes of viewing to render visible modalities of life that often escape critical ire because they are expected. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of film and media studies, aesthetic theory, realism, materialism, accelerationism, cultural studies, continental philosophy, and political philosophy. The films and filmmakers analyzed include: The Limits of Control (2009), dir. Jim Jarmusch; Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), dir. Pedro Costa; Dogville (2003), dir. Lars von Trier; and, 2046 (2004), dir. Wong Kar-wai. INDEX WORDS: ACCELERATIONISM, AESTHETICS, SLOW CINEMA, ART CINEMA, STYLE, CORPOREALITY CINEMAS OF ENDURANCE by ADAM KILDARE COTTREL A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2017 Copyright by Adam Kildare Cottrel 2017 CINEMAS OF ENDURANCE by ADAM KILDARE COTTREL Committee Chair: Angelo Restivo Committee: Alessandra Raengo Jennifer Barker Davide Panagia Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University December 2017 iv DEDICATION For my parents, who have endured burning in order to give me light v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to first thank my advisor Angelo Restivo for all of his help, guidance, and consul, not only for the duration of this project but the entirety of my time at Georgia State. Additionally, I would like to express my gratitude to Alessandra Raengo, Jennifer Barker, and Davide Panagia for serving on my committee and providing some early opportunities to work out many of the ideas that fill these pages. During my time as a graduate student I have had the pleasure of meeting, learning, and working with more fellow graduate students than I can name here. I would like to acknowledge by name Kalling Heck and Gordon Sullivan as particularly helpful both in and out of the academic world over these years and for proving their friendship to me even when I never asked them to. Thanks to Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland for generosity and encouragement at nearly every stage of my graduate career, both of you have helped shape me as a scholar and person over these years. Special thanks to Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, without whom I would never have dared to explore my intellectual curiosity and for teaching me lessons great and small without the expectation of something in return. For these gifts I owe you each more than I can ever repay. Last, I would be remiss to not formally acknowledge my parents, whose unwavering support over these last few years was especially vital in this dissertation’s completion. Thank you, I love you both. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ V 1 POETS OF THE FLESH, JUGGLERS OF THE MUNDANE: SERIOUS ENDURANCE AND THE LIMITS OF CONTROL ................................................................... 1 1.1 The Forms of Endurance ................................................................................. 6 1.2 Endurance and Sustained Action .................................................................. 14 1.3 Endurance and Sustained Thought ............................................................... 21 1.4 Action-Oriented Life ....................................................................................... 26 2 LIFE AT THESE SPEEDS: PEDRO COSTA, CINEMATIC CADENCE, AND THE FORMS OF FINANCIAL CAPITALISM ...................................................................... 29 2.1 Globality, Finance, Style................................................................................. 43 2.2 Accelerationism ............................................................................................... 53 2.3 Desynchronization and Spatial Dissymmetry: Bones .................................. 68 2.4 The Pace and Space of Fontainhas: In Vanda’s Room ................................ 91 2.5 From Economic Inclusion to Social Expulsion: Colossal Youth ............... 110 2.6 Deceleration: Intended, Unintended ........................................................... 121 3 GOVERNING BY FACULTY: ON DEBT RELATIONS, DIAGRAMS, AND THE DOGMA OF DOGVILLE ............................................................................................... 127 3.1 Lars von Trier’s “America” ......................................................................... 143 3.2 Dogville’s Debt .............................................................................................. 154 3.3 Neo-subjects and Aesthetics as Human Faculty ......................................... 173 vii 3.4 Burning the Diagram .................................................................................... 193 4 “TRACES OF TEARS”: ARCHITECTURES OF AFFECT IN WONG KAR- WAI’S 2046................................................................................................................................ 200 4.1 Spaces of Survival ......................................................................................... 217 4.2 Genre and Liquid Aesthetics ....................................................................... 224 4.3 Wong Kar-wai’s Stylistic Plurality .............................................................. 233 4.4 Crystal Liaisons ............................................................................................. 247 4.5 Endurance, Speed, Aesthetics ...................................................................... 261 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 268 1 1 POETS OF THE FLESH, JUGGLERS OF THE MUNDANE: SERIOUS ENDURANCE AND THE LIMITS OF CONTROL Without question the most well rehearsed dispute about contemporary art cinema orbits the merit of its style.1 For much of the last fifteen years art cinema has been both celebrated and decried for its explicit borrowing of techniques, most notably the long takes and deliberately slow editing patterns first made prominent during film’s modernist period of the 1960s and 70s.2 Representatives of this stylistic tendency include the films I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Satan’s Tango (1994), whose works have generally been referred to as “slow” or “contemplative” in an explicit attempt to pinpoint their value or lack thereof. The critical reception concerning this ongoing debate is generally represented by two camps: critics who condemn such films for their pointless preoccupation with studied homage, and those who laud this style for offering, at the very least, an alternative to commercial cinema’s insistence on speed, post-continuity editing, and digital embellishment.3 It would seem that art cinema during 1 Readers interested in exploring both sides of the debate surrounding the value of art cinema’s recycled modernist aesthetics will find good examples in Nick James, “Passive, Aggressive,” Sight and Sound 2, no. 4 (April 2010); Danny Leigh, “The View: Is it OK to be a Film Philistine?” The Guardian May 21, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/may/21/film-philistine; Matthew Flannagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema,” 16:9, no. 29 (2008), http://www.16- 9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm;