October 2009: Daniel Morgan

Daniel Morgan, University of Pittsburgh

"The Afterlife of Superimposition:

Remarks on Ontology, Style, and Montage in Bazin and Godard"

Respondent: Noël Carroll, City University of New York

Friday, October 30

5:30PM
Temple Univ. Center City room 420

 

While superimposition plays a minor role in the history of film style, it can serve as an important means to rethink basic aspects of the accounts of cinema given by André Bazin and Jean-Luc Godard. Bazin’s discussion of superimposition, while brief, opens up onto an account of cinema in which ontology and style are mutually interdependent, relational concepts, and realism, far from being a restrictive constraint, is a complex and expansive stylistic resource. When Godard takes up superimposition in the 1990s, using it in several key sequences in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), it serves to model a practice of historical montage precisely on the terms that engaged Bazin. But where Bazin takes up superimposition as a way to reveal something about the ontology of cinema, Godard displaces those arguments onto the realm of the historiographic: how, and on what terms, different parts of the history of cinema can be brought together.

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Morgan is an assistant professor in English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing a book entitled, "A Feeling of Light: Cinema, Aesthetics, and the Films of Jean-Luc Godard at the End of the Twentieth Century." The book is a study of Godard's late work, in particular the films and videos he has made since the late 1980s. It is also about the place of aesthetics in cinema, and about the persistence of modernism, political radicalism, and 19th century artistic and philosophical concerns into the end of the twentieth century. The book looks the way Godard's films and videos inherit these traditions and, in so doing, transform them in and for the cinema.

Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The City University of New York. He has written extensively on film theory and philosophy, including Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (Routledge, 1990), and Mystifying Movies (Columbia University Press, 1991)