Options
Irritation of Life : The Subversive Melodrama of Michael Haneke, David Lynch and Lars von Trier
Series
Marburger Schriften zur Medienforschung
ISBN
978-3-89472-818-2
Type
book
Date Issued
2013
Author(s)
Abstract
Irritation of Life explores the political and emotive potential of contemporary auteur cinema. Viewing the work of celebrated directors Michael Haneke, David Lynch and Lars von Trier through the film-historical lenses of melodrama and the avantgarde, Loren and Metelmann illustrate how convention and deviance interact to establish an aesthetics of irritation. If one is willing to play the game of participatory viewership such an aesthetics initiates, one cannot but enter into a series of negotiations in which habitual viewing practices and epistemological assumptions about the visual are dislodged. With melodrama as what Linda Williams has termed a body genre, not only are novel forms of cognitive experience at stake in subversive melodrama's aesthetics of irritation, but also the invigoration of cinematic affect. Accordingly, the authors develop a strategy for interpreting filmic conventions and departure therefrom that integrates a phenomenological approach "through the senses" (Elsaesser/Hagener). Their densely illustrated readings of Haneke, Lynch and von Trier ultimately rehabilitate a question recurrent throughout the many discourses on melodrama and deviant aesthetics: what social impact might art forms like narrative film hope to achieve? This book suggests that subversive melodrama's political work is characterized by processes of empathetic unsettlement (LaCapra), encouraging new perceptual cartographies in and beyond the cinema, or novel ways of seeing being. Exploration into these uncharted territories constitutes not an Imitation but an Irritation of Life.
Language
English
Keywords
cinema
visual culture
melodrama
David Lynch
Michael Haneke
Lars von Trier
irritation
aesthetics
attraction
immersion
estrangement
Brecht
Shklovsky
Schklowski
woman's film
modernism
ethics
viscourse
empathetic unsettlement
LaCapra
Mulvey
Douglas Sirk
avant-garde
Love
Amour
Caché
White Ribbon
Blue Velvet
Mulholland Drive
Inland Empire
Melcholia
Dancer in the Dark
Breaking the Waves
Night of the Hunter
genre
narrative
discourse
postmodern
spectacle
victim
victimhood
visuality
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Refereed
No
Publisher
Schüren
Publisher place
Marburg
Volume
1. Auflage April
Number
43
Start page
210
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
224954