Forget Godard: The Cinematic Abductions of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Guy Debord

Thesis/Dissertation: Thesis (M.A.) -- School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2005 Published: 2005. Physical Description: 113 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm. Includes: Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 108-113) Abstract: In writing on the cinematic practices of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Guy Debord, a pattern of sorts began to unravel as questions began to surface; through that pattern and questioning, the contentious debate over modern cinema emerged. At first, I had no conceptual framework to sustain the relationship between the cinematic works of Pasolini and Debord, except for their uncanny similarities in arguing that the modern "spectacle" was a social technology of "false progress." As I delved further into their theoretical and cinematic works, however, a tension of disputes ensued--a tension that held the cinema as a discursive entity. It is through their disputes, their acts of practicing and writing on (and against) the cinema, that Jean-Luc Godard materialized as another protagonist in their critique of modern cinema. For it was through their discourses against Godard's cinematic work that a critical conflict emerged on the nature of cinema's role as a medium. In the disputes of Pasolini and Debord against Godard, a conflict of interests occurred that could not be resolved: the cinema became a contentious and discursive site of inquiry and practice. The cinema became, to use Jean-François Lyotard's term, the différend. A différend is a conflict that cannot be resolved because of a "lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments." Modern cinema, then, was the site of unresolved conflicts because it lacks a "ule of judgment" it is an entity that is unstable because of its discursive nature and the disputes it elicits. "Forget Godard" considers the issue of modern cinema as the différend, as articulated by Pasolini, Debord and Gilles Deleuze, and Godard as the witness of that very diffdérend. From Pasolini and Debord's rhetoric, two different approaches to the différend that is modern cinema manifest themselves. In the first chapter, I argue that through Pasolini's work on the cinema, the performativity of the camera renders the apparatus itself as its own form of subjectivity through the fictive economy of a film. As I attempt to demonstrate (through a close reading of V.N. Voloshinov and Ann Banfield's critique on the literary method known as "free indirect discourse"), Pasolini's cinematic transcription of that literary procedure renders the fictive milieu of a film as non-communicative--for better or worse. Debord, on the other hand, takes the other extreme and places the cinema as communicative, as somatic, as a somaticization. In doing so, Debord sought to extend the relation of a film from its static representation as an image to one that literalizes film as movement. Subject (LCSH): Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1922-1975 --Criticism and interpretation. Debord, Guy, 1931- --Criticism and interpretation. Godard, Jean Luc, 1930- --Criticism and interpretation. Art Institute of Chicago. School--Dissertations. Motion picture producers and directors--Criticism and interpretation. Art, Modern--20th century--History.