‘One big soul’ ( The Thin Red Line )

Abstract

zum Buch: This book approaches cinema as a domain in which possibilities of being are potentially at stake. Although often referring to the work of Lacan, Forms of Being appears to move decisively away from the classic psychoanalytic film theory assumption that films are determined in advance by the general “apparatus” of film so as to “reproduce the subject” in terms of a dominating ideology. Instead, each of the three films discussed here — Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999), Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) — is treated as an experiment in subjectivity, a kind of cinematic flight test, in which viewers are invited to participate. Each film evokes not only the availability of alternative modes of being, but the possibility of escaping the gravitational pull of any given model. The aesthetic interest here focuses on the ways in which film art may evade heavy, fixed, monumental forms of subjectivity. Each film is analysed in this context for its power to suggest a “potentiality that exists in and beyond all realised being” (114). As such, this interest is never purely formal, confined to the level of cataloguing devices, but ethical and reflective: “the retreat from being is not a particularity of the aesthetic narrowly conceived; it is an ethical duty coextensive with life itself.” (118) Each film therefore comes to serve as a kind of reflexive object lesson, not just in a theme carried by fiction, but in the potentially liberating power of fictionality itself. (...) Zitat: Ausschnitt aus Buchbesprechung von Leo Schaffer, Juli 2005 in Book Reviews, Issue 36 auf der Webseite Senses of Cinema: http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/book-reviews/forms_of_being/ (Zugriff am 08.11.2012)