Full-text resources of CEJSH and other databases are now available in the new Library of Science.
Visit https://bibliotekanauki.pl

Results found: 6

first rewind previous Page / 1 next fast forward last

Search results

help Sort By:

help Limit search:
first rewind previous Page / 1 next fast forward last
1
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Trying an Essay Film

100%
Bal M.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2020
|
issue 10
27-48
EN
This essay is about the essay, a form (as Adorno called it) of thought alive that is partial in the two senses of the word: subjective and fragmented. Thinking as social, performative, and always un-finished; as dialogic. Through the mythical figure of Cassandra, who could foresee the future but was cursed to be never believed, I tried to “figure,” make a figural shape for the thoughts on the indifference of people towards the imminent ecological disaster of the world. At the invitation of Jakub Mikurda of the Łódź Film School to come and make an essay film, within one week, but with the participation of many great professionals, I was able to create, at least in the first draft, the essay film IT’S ABOUT TIME! The ambiguity of the title suggests the bringing together of my thoughts about time, in relation to history in its interrelation with the present, and, as the exclamation mark intimates, the urgency to do something. The former is enacted by a tableau vivant of Cassandra’s lover Aeneas as Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, with a contemporary painting by David Reed shifting over it; and by interactions with two paintings by Ina van Zyl. The urgency is presented in many of the dialogues, quoted from various sources, especially Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra. I argue that “thinking in film,” with film as a medium for thought, is what the essay film’s foremost vocation is. Through a reflection on “thought-images,” which I see as the result of “image-thinking,” I also argue for the intellectual gain to be had from “essaying” thought artistically.
2
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

Making and Breaking Borders

100%
Bal M.
Artium Quaestiones
|
2024
|
issue 35
9-33
EN
The concept of border or boundary has two ambiguities to deal with, if it is to serve a useful intellectual purpose in art and art history. One is to decide whether a border is a line, one that divides, separates, and thus can lead to competition, even to animosity; or whether it constitutes a space within which negotiating can happen. The other ambiguity concerns the differences, in style, period, national background, religious or sexual orientation, between artworks we contemplate in exhibitions, for example. That also raises the question if and how such differences can bridge the gaps and connect the artworks. I propose to take one case, a scene from my installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (from 2019), in which the knight errant and his squire have a conversation, seated at a café terrace, and probe their differences in social status, educational level, a probing that threatens their friendship and thereby establishes a new boundary. The scene is ambiguous in that the two sit next to each other in seeming equality, whereas their conversation itself establishes hierarchical relationships, thus making a border. Yet after that tense moment, they revert to their previous, friendly being-together. The border as a dividing line they were building up breaks down when the differences fade away, as the actress playing Sancho reverts to the French of her “boss”. With this making and breaking of borders, the two figures manage to share insights they would not have had before. The conversation scene is only eight minutes long, and establishes differences subsequently fading. There is very little acting, and there is nothing like a beautiful landscape. The differences between the languages they speak (French and Spanish) and the disagreements between them vanish in the face of the impossibility to maintain borders as lines, and instead produce that space of negotiation within which relationships can be restored. This enables the dynamic of empathy between the figures but also, and more importantly, between the fictional conversation and the real visitors.
3
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

Ruch: kinowość w malarstwie i literaturze

63%
Bal M., Lipiński F.
Artium Quaestiones
|
2020
|
issue 1
277-311
EN
Translation of Mieke Bal's chapter into Polish 
4
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

Sensing the Present: “Conceptual Art of the Senses”

63%
Bal M., Burke R. E.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2017
|
issue 7
27-54
EN
After Rachel E. Burke briefly introduces the essays presented with a focus on our contemporary relationship to modern subjectivity, Mieke Bal will make the case for the sense of presentness on an affective and sensuous level in Munch’s paintings and Flaubert’s writing by selecting a few topics and cases from the book Emma and Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic, published by the Munch Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Emma & Edvard. It is this foregrounded presentness that not only produces the ongoing thematic relevance of these works, but more importantly, the sense-based conceptualism that declares art and life tightly bound together. If neither artist eliminated figuration in favour of abstraction, they had a good reason for that. Art is not a representation of life, but belongs to it, illuminates it and helps us cope with it by sharpening our senses. As an example, a few paintings will clarify what I mean by the noun-qualifier “cinematic” and how that aesthetic explains the production of loneliness.
5
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

A Special Guest Of Text Matters. Mieke Bal: “Writing With Images”

63%
Bal M., Filipczak D.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2014
|
vol. 4
15-27
6
Publication available in full text mode
Content available

Sensing the Present: “Conceptual Art of the Senses”

63%
Bal M., Burke R. E.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
|
2017
|
issue 7
27-54
EN
After Rachel E. Burke briefly introduces the essays presented with a focus on our contemporary relationship to modern subjectivity, Mieke Bal will make the case for the sense of presentness on an affective and sensuous level in Munch’s paintings and Flaubert’s writing by selecting a few topics and cases from the book Emma and Edvard Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic, published by the Munch Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Emma & Edvard. It is this foregrounded presentness that not only produces the ongoing thematic relevance of these works, but more importantly, the sense-based conceptualism that declares art and life tightly bound together. If neither artist eliminated figuration in favour of abstraction, they had a good reason for that. Art is not a representation of life, but belongs to it, illuminates it and helps us cope with it by sharpening our senses. As an example, a few paintings will clarify what I mean by the noun-qualifier “cinematic” and how that aesthetic explains the production of loneliness.
first rewind previous Page / 1 next fast forward last
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.