by Brian Bergen-Aurand Although the trailer does not do it justice, the sound of Ossos (Pedro Costa, 1997) is what I cannot get out of my head. [While most of the film has no music on the soundtrack, the trailer has an engaging rock song laid over it.] If you do not already know Ossos … Continue reading
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Absence–Presence : A Ghost Story of Sorts
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Having just experienced a preview performance of the play Absence–Presence, I cannot help thinking about the relations among desire, intimacy, art & commerce, and touch. I was not sure where the play was going to take me or how it was going to get me there, but by the end I could … Continue reading
Without Rulers
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Of late, I’ve encountered a number of objections to my critical speculations based on the idea that anarchism and similar non-hierarchical, non-coercive collective political theories have no place in an “Asian” setting. The argument against them is that they are simply another set of imported European philosophies, another paradigm of cultural Imperialism, … Continue reading
Reading Wheatley Compelled by Haneke (Part 1)
by Brian Bergen-Aurand What is the first question of Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005)? According to Catherine Wheatley, in Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (Berghahn 2009), the primary question we ask while screening a Haneke film, such as Caché, is “Succinctly put, the brutality of Haneke’s films prompts spectators to ask themselves … Continue reading
A Funny Thing Happened While Reading these Books
by Brian Bergen-Aurand September is comedy month around here. Actually, every month is comedy month around here. However, September is especially funny right now since I have two large projects due in the next ten or so days. One of those projects is involved with the journal SCREEN BODIES. The other, is a book on … Continue reading
Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic
by Brian Bergen-Aurand An early installment in Arsenal Pulp Press’s QUEER FILM CLASSICS series, Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s Farewell My Concubine (2o10) takes a queer cultural studies approach to a close reading of Chen Kaige’s 1992 Chinese film, starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li. After reading this one short (120 pocket-sized pages) study from … Continue reading
Becoming Camera To Record Everything
by Brian Bergen-Aurand There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of … Continue reading
Reading The Pink Book
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, … Continue reading
Touching On: Eyes, Hands, and Screens
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The mise-en-scène of the blind is always inscribed in a theater or theory of the hands. ~Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind It is a question of touch, of touching the screen or being touched by what one sees on screen, or both. It is a question of the relation between how … Continue reading
The Filmic Experience
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The Myths of Blind Cinema Imagine film, or more precisely, the filmic experience in relation to three figures: Gyges, Butades, and Medusa (in contrast to Polyphemus). These three figures, or more precisely, the relations among these three figures raise for us the possibility of addressing the flimic experience in terms of a man … Continue reading
Foreign Influence 