A Body of Vision

The Anxious Body of Shame, Disgust, or Appalling Death: Films by Bruce Conner

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pp. 24-36

Thinkers spanning the range from Darwinian social theorists to sociobiologists have averred that for nature, humans are nothing but body, that nature's values are bodily values, and that only humans--and this only insofar as they rise above physical nature--value the mental realm.⁸ Commenting...

The Troubling Body of Sexual Difference: Williard Maas's: The Geography of the Body

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pp. 36-65

Among films that present the anxious body, troubled by some sort of shame, are many that make synecdoche their basic trope. Many of the latter rely on synecdoche's capacity to isolate the negatively charged areas (the lips, the genitalia, and so on) from the whole of the body.¹⁵ This use of synecdoche...

The Complexities of Identification--Walter Gutman and the Body Remade as Whole

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pp. 65-70

Many recent filmmakers have given us images that convey a conception of the body as sacred. There are two distinct, but compatible and, often, co-present forces that motivate the production of such representations. One impulse derives its energy from the memory (sometimes unconscious,...

The Body as Sacred--The Films of James Broughton, Especially: The Golden Positions

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pp. 70-85

In the first two sections of this work, those devoted to the films of Bruce Conner and to Williard Maas's The Geography of the Body, we explored works that drew their impulse from a similar sense of the body, viz., the troubled body, made anxious by a sense of its unseemliness or its lack of wholeness....

The Body and the Cosmos--The Films of Ed Emshwiller

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pp. 85-96

The films of Ed Emshwiller share with those of Broughton a fascination with the body. More than that, like Broughton's, they are animated by the sense that the body can be experienced as sacred. When the body is experienced in that way, it substitutes for the whole of the cosmos in all its grandeur, mystery...

First Digression: The Theory of Transformation and Its Importance to Understanding the Uniqueness of Artistic Meaning

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pp. 97-116

This work is concerned with the reasons why many advanced artists have taken an interest in representations of the body. I hope to show that this interest relates to concerns around meaning and cognition and specifically in the features that distinguish the meanings that artistic forms have (and the...

Ed Emshwiller's Mixed Mode of Cinema Contrasted with the Lyrical Film

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pp. 116-140

The lyrical form continually suggests the subject that experiences whatever the film or poem depicts. This subject is not the subject that we reflexively experience, but the subject that lies behind all that we experience. Its primitive character ensures that it never enters experience. It is therefore a site...

The Body as the Universe in Stan Brakhage's Early Films

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pp. 140-143

Emshwiller's greatest film, Relativity, identifies the body with the cosmos. This sort of identification is not uncommon in avant-garde film because it is not uncommon in ordinary life. Such an identification provides the basis for Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man (one of the twentieth century's greatest...

The Body Electric: Of Wilhelm Reich and Antonin Artaud--Laying the Groundwork for Carolee Schneemann's Body Art

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pp. 143-191

Several women artists and writers have also expressed beliefs in the sacredness of the body. This is evident in the works of that group of writers who, though they consider their positions individual, distinctive, and even opposed to each other's intellectual stance, are sometimes lumped into a...

Second Digression: A Mystical View of the Body under the Pervasive Influence of Gnosticism--Laying the Groundwork for Leonard Cohen's Writings on the Body and Carolee Schneemann's Films and Performances

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pp. 191-209

Susan Sontag pointed out, with characteristic perspicacity, that the contours of Gnosticism trace the course of Artaud's madness. The comment offers a key to Artaud's life and work; but more than that, it opens a way towards understanding the parallels between Gnosticism and a manner of imagining...

Leonard Cohen's Gnosticism and Its Influence on His Conception of the Body

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pp. 210-223

Many writers, including Artaud, discovered in Jewish mysticism the teaching that there exists a good source from which human souls derive and to which they long to return. The main teachings of this esoteric branch of Judaism are collected in the Cabala. The name "Cabala" derives from the...

The Influence of Gnosticism on the Writings of Antonin Artaud

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pp. 223-233

In her introduction to Artaud's Selected Writings, Susan Sontag offers the astute comment that the development of Artaud's madness traces the course of Gnosticism. She writes, "for the first time the Gnostic themes can be seen in evolution. Artaud's work is particularly precious as the first complete...

The Body of Gnostic Energy in the Work of Carolee Schneemann

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pp. 233-276

Carolee Scheemann's film and performances foreshadow French feminism in conveying an artistic cosmology built on notions about the erotic body and the integrative energies of sexuality. Even her wish to give expression to a sexuality that is inclusive and plural resembles the aspirations of French...

The Body of Transcendental Flesh--The Films of James Herbert

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pp. 276-294

A few film artists, such as James Herbert, have dedicated their considerable talents to presenting an image of the body that neither loathes its fleshiness nor responds to its time-bound and animal character by hypervaluing, or even by idealizing it, conceiving it in the manner of present-day gnostics, as...

The Cognitive Body--The Films of Amy Greenfield and Another View of the Films of Stan Brakhage

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pp. 294-316

The Pneumatic Body--The Films of Andrew Noren

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pp. 316-350

Not all our meanings are natural to us. We do not receive all of them at birth. Some come to us from the outside, from our dealings with others. Hegel showed in The Phenomenology of Spirit (section B.IV A) that the self takes...