Film and the Ethical Imagination

256 Pages·2016·3.49 MB·English

by  Asbjørn Grønstad (auth.)

Film and the Ethical
Imagination
Asbjørn Grønstad
Film and the Ethical Imagination
Asbjørn   Grønstad
Film and the Ethical
Imagination
Asbjørn   Grønstad
Department of Information Science
and Media Studies
University of Bergen
Bergen , Norway
ISBN 978-1-137-58373-4 ISBN 978-1-137-58374-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58374-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959502
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The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United
Kingdom
For my father John Grønstad
1949–2014
In loving memory.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book emerges out of a larger research program undertaken under
the auspices of the Nomadikon project “New Ecologies of the Image” at
the University of Bergen 2008–2013. As both director of the project and
author of this work, I would like to express my gratitude to the Bergen
Research Foundation, without whose generous support the Nomadikon
project, now The Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture, would not have
been possible. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Social Sciences at
the University of Bergen for co-funding Nomadikon, and the Department
of Information Science and Media Studies, in particular its chair Leif Ove
Larsen, for providing such an excellent environment for our work.
As a research center Nomadikon is dedicated to studies of the relation
between ethics and the fi eld of visual culture, and this book is just one of
several projects that have examined questions pertaining to this fraught
nexus. F ilm and the Ethical Imagination also represents the continuation
of an abiding interest in fi lm and ethics that began in a more nascent
form in my book T ransfi gurations (Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
and evolved further in S creening the Unwatchable (Palgrave Macmillan,
2012) and in several anthologies I have recently co-edited. So many
people have been involved in the activities around Nomadikon gener-
ally and in the research for this book in particular that it is impossible
to name them all. To begin with, I would like to thank the members of
the fi rst iteration of Nomadikon—Henrik Gustafsson, Tonje Haugland
Sørensen, Øyvind Vågnes, Synnøve Vik, and Pauline Hoath—for provid-
ing the best work environment one could hope for as well as for making
the project such a success. I would further like to thank all those who
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
contributed to the many conferences and seminars we have organized
for their invaluable input, among them Mieke Bal, Marq Smith, Joanne
Morra, W. J. T. Mitchell, Matthias Bruhn, Keith Moxey, Mark Reinhardt,
Anders Michelsen, D. N. Rodowick, Eivind Røssaak, Joe Sacco, Mark
Ledbetter, Eyal Weizman, Marin Jay, Libby Saxton, Nina Lager Vestberg,
Wendy Steiner, Garrett Stewart, Laura Marks, Arild Fetveit, Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson, Susan Cumings, Yvonne Spielmann, Joanna Zylinska,
Max Liljefors, Jo Anna Isaak, Aud Sissel Hoel, Alison Griffi ths, and Jody
McAuliffe, to name some of the many guests we have been fortunate
enough to receive. Thanks also go to the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis for once again hosting me as a visiting researcher in the spring of
2013, and to Martin Jay, again, for being such an excellent host during
the summer of the same year, spent doing research for this book at the
unfailingly picturesque UC Berkeley campus. I am also grateful for the
opportunities I have had, during many academic conferences, to discuss
parts of this book with colleagues around the world. Much appreciated
is the feedback I received upon writing a draft for an ERC Consolidator
grant and a Center of Excellency application based on the research for
this book; thanks to Kristine Jørgensen, Øyvind Vågnes, Joanna Zylinska,
Nils Gunnar Songstad, Anja Hegen, Hans Egil Offerdal, and Jan Petter
Myklebust. I have also benefi tted enormously from many stimulating con-
versations about ethics, fi lm, and literature that I have enjoyed with Jakob
Lothe. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the valuable criticism provided
by the anonymous reviewers who read a draft of the proposal. As always, it
has been a pleasure working with the very competent and gracious staff at
Palgrave, Chris Penfold and Harry Fanshawe among them.
Running a research project like Nomadikon, as well as writing this
book, is not something that incurs only academic debts. I am very grateful
to my family—Stephanie, Sunniva, Sebastian, and Joanna—for being there
and for making every single day so full of joy. Thanks also to my mother-
in-l aw, Bodil Pedersen, for helping out so much, and to my mother Liv
Torunn Grønstad, for everything. This book is dedicated to the memory
of my father, John Grønstad, who taught me the meaning of ethics. He
passed away from cancer as I was about halfway through this book. I miss
him every day.
Some parts of this book have appeared in somewhat altered versions in
other publications. The section on Abbas Kiarostami has been published
as “Abbas Kiarostami’s S hirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy”
in Film Criticism , 37.2 (2013): 22–37. The part dealing with Michael
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
Haneke’s Amour appeared as “Haneke’s A mour and the Ethics of Dying”
in D eath in Classic and Contemporary Film: Fade to Black , eds. Daniel
Sullivan & Jeff Greenberg, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. The
chapter on Eric Baudelaire’s fi lm came out as “Here is a Picture of No
Country: The Image between Fiction and Politics in Eric Baudelaire’s
Lost Letters to Max ,” in Socioaesthetics: Ambience—Imaginary , eds. Anders
Michelsen & Fredrik Tygstrup, Leiden: Brill, 2015. Finally, the segment
on S tray Dogs was published as “Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration”
in S low Cinema , eds. Tiago de Luca & Nuno Barradas Jorge, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Bergen, February 20, 2016 Asbjørn Grønstad
C
ONTENTS
Part I Ethics 1
Introduction 3
From an Ethics of Transgression to a General Ethics of Form 17
Optics as an Ethics 23
The Return of Ethics in Literary Studies 31
Screen Ethics before the Ethical Turn 45
The Ethical Turn in Film and Visual Culture:
From Content to Form 53
The Responsibility of Forms 75
Six Theses on the Ethical Imagination 85
xi
xii CONTENTS
Part II Imagination 101
Ethical Intimacy and the Cinematic Face 103
Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration 119
The Ethics of Dying 137
A Cinema of Gestures 151
Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Form 161
The Ethical Image Between Fiction and Politics 169
The Ethics of Matter and Memory 181
Bioscreens 207
Film Visions, Planetary Ethics 219
Index 241