Provisional Insight Colloquium: Lesley Stern
19th July 2008
“Tenuous Intrigues”: Killing Sheep and Killing Time
Kracauer talks of the “tenuous intrigues” that characterize certain films, films that navigate between the genres of story and non-story, or experimental films and films of fact. He identifies a “conflict between intrigue and poetry” manifested “in the nature of real-life episodes.” In this paper I explore Kracauer’s “tenuous intrigues” in two pairs of films by two film-makers: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Warming by the Devil’s Fire, and Agnes Vardas’ Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond.
Lesley Stern is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Scorsese Connection and The Smoking Book and co-editor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. She has published widely in areas of film, performance, photography, art and cultural studies and also writes fiction. She is currently writing a book called Gardening in a Strange Land.