Provisional Insight Colloquium: Andrew Benjamin and Deane Williams
18th July 2009
Denaturing Time
Andrew Benjamin
On a number of occasions in the texts that make up The Mass Ornament Kracauer is concerned to position modernity against nature. Rather than understanding this development as a simple refusal of nature it must be understood as integral to the complex politics of time that mark the advent of modernity.
Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash University. He was previously Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick University. An internationally recognised authority on contemporary French and German critical theory, he has been Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York and Visiting Critic at the Architectural Association in London. His many books include: What is Deconstruction? (1988), Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde (1991), Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997), Philosophy’s Literature (2001) and Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (2004). He also edited The Lyotard Reader(1989), Abjection, Melancholia and Love: the Work of Julia Kristeva(1990) and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (1993) and Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (2002).
Fertile Grounds: Kracauer’s Realist Film Theory, New York City 1945-1960
Deane Williams
This paper seeks to better understand the place of Kracauer’s Theory of Film amongst the debates about filmic realism that occurred in New York City in the immediate post-war years (Eduoard de Laurot, Jonas Mekas, James Agee). In seeking this understanding, this paper will diminish the traditional divide between filmic realism and modernism to propose that in this period, in this culture, that filmic realism was a pre-eminent modernist form. Of course these debates were accompanied by an upsurge in independent realist film making leading to the emergence of what we now call the New American Cinema. Another major aspect of these debates, one that is rarely dealt with and is an instructive and vital component is the films included for discussion. This paper will attend to these, including In the Street (James Agee and Helen Levitt 1953), The Quiet One _(Sydney Meyers 1949), _On the Bowery _(Lionel Rogosin 1956), _Little Fugitive (Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley 1953) and Cry of Jazz (Edward O. Bland 1959). Deane Williams is Senior Lecturer, Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. He has written on realist film in its many forms including documentary film and Australian film history. He is Foundation Editor of Studies in Documentary Film and in 2008 his Australian Postwar Documentary Films: An Arc of Mirrors will be published by Intellect and his (and Brian McFarlane’s) Michael Winterbottom will be published by Manchester University Press.