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Cinema and Sensation
French Film and the Art of Transgression
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Book Presentation:
Explores the re-emergence of filmmaking practices that give precedence to cinema as the medium of the senses
Martine Beugnet focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream cinema. Her book draws on the writings of the likes of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and Bataille, but first and foremost, she develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques and motifs which allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. In turn, she demonstrates how the films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching those questions that are at the heart of today’s most burning socio-cultural debates: from the growing supremacy of technology, to globalisation, exile and exclusion, these are the issues that appear embedded here in the very texture of images and sounds.
Films explored include: Adieu; A ma soeur; Baise-moi; Beau Travail; La Blessure; La Captive; Dans ma peau; Demonlover; L’Humanité; Flandres; L’Intrus; Les Invisibles; Lady Chatterley; Leçons de ténèbres; Romance; Sombre; Tiresia; Trouble Every Day; Twentynine Palms; Vendredi soir; La Vie nouvelle; Wild Side; Zidane, un portrait du XXIème siècle.
Press Reviews:
Cinema and Sensation persuasively argues that the radical styles of recent French films merit new theories and approaches.– Hunter Vaughan, Film Quarterly
This exciting work by film scholar Martine Beugnet makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on the materiality and affective potential of cinema.– Carrie Tarr, Kingston University, Modern and Contemporary France
Cinema and Sensation achieves a seamless intermingling of theoretical enquiry and film analysis, allowing film and theory to shape and inflect each other... Beugnet is an unflinching viewer, and her boldness, combined with her evident pleasure in the works she discusses, makes for much of the exhilaration of the volume. Cinema and Sensation offers new and elastic contact with French cinema, as it also awakens new thought through the senses.– Emma Wilson, Screen
Cinema and Sensation achieves a seamless intermingling of theoretical enquiry and film analysis, allowing film and theory to shape and inflect each other... Beugnet is an unflinching viewer, and her boldness, combined with her evident pleasure in the works she discusses, makes for much of the exhilaration of the volume. Cinema and Sensation offers new and elastic contact with French cinema, as it also awakens new thought through the senses.– Emma Wilson, Screen
It is a testament to her incisive and highly eloquent prose that her core argument is never obscured by dense theorising or hijacked by all-too obvious straining for academic profundity... those who still remain inured to (or unconvinced by) Deluzean film analysis would do well to dip into this book, so lucidly does it presnt complex arguments.– Ben McCann, University of Adelaide, Screening the Past
Beugnet’s book offers a compelling example of how film criticism can operate at the junction between perception and understanding, between embodied response and critical reflection... In its articulation of connections between sensation and transgression, and in its linking of film’s affective powers to the urgency of political contexts, Cinema and Sensation presents a rich and timely assessment of contemporary French film’s engagement with the senses.– Laura McMahon, Girton College, Cambridge, The Senses and Society
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same author:
Indefinite Visions (2017)
Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty
Dir. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit
Subject: Theory
> On a related topic:
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The Prison of Time (2024)
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Deep Mediations (2021)
Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures
Dir. Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible
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