Luis Bunuel’s and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien andalou (1929) contains one of the most infamous and horrific sequences in cinematic history.  A women stares neutrally and without affect straight into the camera; a male hand descends from the top of the frame, holds opens her left eye with his left hand, while holding a barber’s razor in his right; the film cuts to a close-up of “her” eyeball being sliced open. There are two cuts: the cut that is shown (the sliced eyeball) and the cut of the material, of the celluloid, that is always between the image and to which we remain blind.  The eye is at once “her” eye that we attribute to her only by means of the cut that make possible this identification and to which we remain “blind.”  Yet this cut also entails that the image of “her” eye is also “an” eye (an eye abstracted from this identity), which serves to pose the problem of the relation between these two “cuts.”  The eye is cut, but this literal cut serves in turn to allegorize cinema as the making visible of blindness, the image’s inscription of absence, the fact that it is always an excision (a cutting out, a cutting away).  In this seminar, we will watch together a number of Alfred Hitchcock’s films with a view to the way that they suspend the viewer between these two cuts: between what is depicted, narrated, told and the manner in which the elements of the story serve in turn to stage an absence that is inscribed through the ‘formal’ elements of cinema (lighting, color, frame, shot, montage, etc.).  In addition to Hitchcock’s film, we shall also have occasion to discuss important texts by authors such as Pascal Bonitzer, Frederic Jameson, Kaja Silverman and Tom Cohen.

Termine:

Montag, 23. Januar 2017, 13-17 Uhr

Mittwoch, 25. Januar 2017, 13-17 Uhr

Donnerstag, 26. Januar 2017, 11-15 Uhr

Ort:

Seminarraum Franz Josefs-Kai 5/9, 1010 Wien

Anwesenheit, Mitarbeit u.a.