from Le salaire de la peur (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
Issue 0. - Reviving Photogénie
25 October 2012
Though Epstein’s intellectual legacy has resided within the margins of film theory for a long time, Sarah Keller in this article argues his complex and hitherto often supposedly inexplicable thoughts are highly applicable to the present moment. An increased visibility of his work through a more widespread availability of his films and scholars’ reinvigorated interest in his theoretical works, has led to a reevaluation of some of Epstein’s undervalued concepts, but has also caused his best-known concept, photogénie, to flourish yet again. Keller mentions different scholars’ reconceptualizations of the notion in order to point to the term’s perpetually ineffable nature. By explaining some of Epstein’s other notions and practices without ceasing to connect them to photogénie, Keller makes a convincing case for the sake of using one of cinematic theory’s most contested concepts to shed light on “several of the issues of the current, changing media environment.”
25 October 2012
Instead of focusing on a film’s overtly privileged characters or moments, “real” film-lovers, or cinephiles, tend to cherish details or (seemingly) contingent moments so as to create a personal recollection of non-canonical moments, alternative to the better-known classical canon. Tom Paulus links this tendency to Epstein’s concept of photogénie, because this concept, too, draws on fleeting moments while searching for cinema’s essence. Moreover, like photogénie, the details that constitute cinephile’s personal canons are hard to put into words, but are rendered significant through a feeling of true love. Paulus aims to explain cinephiles’ tendencies to fetishize such moments as a celebration of a personal encounter with film. He uses Barthes’ explanation of fetishism as well as Epstein’s photogénie and Proust’s concept of involuntary remembrance to point at the possibility for everyone (even “the less infatuated moviegoer”) to partake in film culture through a relationship with filmic images based on pleasure.
16 October 2012
In “The Promised Land,” Katja Geerts combines Epstein’s concept of photogénie (which enables the cinematic medium to offer new ‘truths’ about reality by providing the spectator with unexpected moments of vision) with Leo Charney’s notion of drift (an ephemeral perception that immediately renders the present past) – which can be seen as the cinematic medium’s engine. She associates both ideas with the ephemeral nature of cinema, and argues they can best be understood in relation to certain modernist modes of perception (e.g. Baudelaire’s “flâneur” – a spectator absorbed by but distanced from film), since cinema itself emerged out of modernizing forces and is characterized by distraction and contingent reality. Photogénie, Epstein argued, is in need of indefinitely pluralistic definitions, and is thus best understood in terms of modes of perception that are equally ephemeral.
Moments
The cinephiliac moment is not grand or dramatic, nor carefully designed and choreographed to be memorable, but rather marginal or accidental, a moment that is remembered almost in spite of itself. A fleeting moment that triggers an affective, emotional intensity, which embodies each cinephile's obsessive relationship with cinema.
from The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952) and 55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray, 1963) and Bigger than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)
from Every Night at Eight (Raoul Walsh, 1935)
from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Blog
13 May 2013 - 14:22
We are pleased to announce our first open call for papers - the deadline for proposals is July 1, 2013. Read editor Tom Paulus's status quaestionis after the jump.
Submissions (as Microsoft Word e-mail attachments) and questions should be directed to editor@photogenie.be. Consult our style guide here.
We look forward to receiving your contributions!
3 Apr 2013 - 15:19
Celebrating the recent release of no less than two Alexander Sokurov box sets, Vanity Celis dives into one of the Russian master's earliest features, Save and Protect, to take a closer look at some of Sokurov's cinematic strategies.
25 Mar 2013 - 12:14
Tom Paulus thinks the debate surrounding The Master needs to change focus. He takes a closer look at the cinematography and finds there's more than meets the eye. See for yourself, after the jump.
7 Mar 2013 - 15:45
Anke Brouwers on the subsequent rediscoveries of Mary Pickford and her admirers' eternal struggle with ... curls (and what they represent).
