Journal Title: International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS) - Year 2014, Vol 1, Issue 2
Abstract
Baz Luhmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge saw the advent of theatricality in cinema, a performative event reconsidered by a number of films between 2011 and 2012. The controversial 2011 Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s directorial endeavour on the authenticity of the Shakespearean plays, is followed by Tom Hooper’s Les Miserable and Joe Wright’s 2012 Anna Karenina that literally stages Leo Tolstoy’s canonical literary text. This paper critically examines what agency and affect mean in performative terms and how those relate to an ethics of the image, which the above films arguably indicate. This gesture in itself is an action that can be asserted as an indication of how formative an event can be in collective or communal senses just as it is for individual, creative autonomy, akin to George Steiner’s grammars of creation. While this is pertinent to the consciousness of the politics of identity and cultural constitutions, this paper investigates how this consciousness arises and the manner in which it translates to action, an investigation that entails an ethical reading of performativity and its significance in contemporaneity. In view of the communal and individual conscious or unconscious, a principle is ushered in to speak of the relational and participatory nature of the authorial text, the performative event and the audience that will have political and ethical implications in social interactions. The theatrical films can be argued as instances of such a principle that, according to Jacques Rancière in Mute Speech, is a principle dialectically conceived. And a dialectical conception of theatre and film indirectly attests to the interactive nature of the dramatic event, the audience and the authorial text that is critically commented in terms of affect and the viability of cultural agency in modernity. Multimodality informs this rethinking of theatre and cinema that also entails a re-conceptualisation of the other arts.
Authors and Affiliations
Constance Goh| Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore
Keywords
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