Resources for May 25, 2013

Kiang, Jessica. "50th Anniversary: 8 JFK Assassination Films That Revisit History." The Playlist (November 20, 2013)

Dialogic Cinephilia archives:

JFK (USA/France: Oliver Stone, 1991)

Top Films of 1975

Top Films of 1991

Top Films of 2013

Lethem, Jonathan. "The Ecstasy of Influence." Harpers (February 2007)

Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and “talk the talk” of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of “seeing” and “listening” — or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of “floating signifiers” that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon “received knowledge,” these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do — and intellectually aware of “the death of the subject,” they are highly suspicious of their own “subjective” experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular — this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed. Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. [From Vivian Sobchack, "Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue." CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image #3 (2012)

Wheatley, Ben. "A Field in England." The Seventh Art #19 (March 2014)

Daesler, Graham. "The Fall of the House of Warner: The Warner Brothers." Bright Lights Film Journal #82 (November 2013)