Foucault at the Movies
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- CHF 30.00
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- CHF 30.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
Michel Foucault’s work on film, although not extensive, compellingly illustrates the power of bringing his unique vision to bear on the subject and offers valuable insights into other aspects of his thought. Foucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault’s commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work.
Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan situate Foucault’s writings on film in the context of the rest of his work as well as within a broad historical and philosophical framework. They detail how Foucault’s work directly or indirectly inspired both film critics and directors in surprising ways and discuss his ideas in relation to significant movements within film theory and practice. The book includes film reviews and discussions by Foucault as well as his interviews with the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and other journals. Also included are his dialogues with the noted French feminist writer Hélène Cixous and film directors Werner Schroeter and René Féret. Throughout, Foucault and those he is in conversation with reflect on the relationship of film to history, the body, power and politics, knowledge, sexuality, aesthetics, and institutions of internment. Foucault at the Movies makes all of Foucault’s writings on film available to an English-speaking audience in one volume and offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maniglier, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Zabunyan, a film studies studies professor at the University of Paris-8, dutifully collect 10 interviews, reviews, and short articles on cinema by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, as well as insightful (and lengthier) commentaries from themselves. Because of Foucault's limited engagement with film, his written pieces and interviews vary noticeably in quality and depth, with one piece, about Ren F ret's 1975 mental institution expose Histoire de Paul, coming in at only a few pages. Another selection, an interview with famed French journal Cahiers du cin ma about representations of the Occupation era and French Resistance on film, overshadows the others with its depth and complexity. Knowledge of Foucault's larger projects, such as his concern with mental health institutions, will help. It's actually an early observation from Maniglier and Zabunyan's introduction, only tangentially related to Foucault, that comes across as the most insightful: they propose that philosophers should engage more fully with film, rather than rely on it as a source of examples for explaining existing philosophical concepts. This work is a bit slight, but, as Foucault would undoubtedly be the first to admit, so was his writing on film.