Everyday narratives - reconsidering filmic temporality and spectatorial affect through the quotidian

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Copyright: Rassos, Effie
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Abstract
This thesis takes as its focus the relation between particular constructions of filmic time and the resulting affective and emotional experiences these temporalities produce on a spectatorial level. This connection between time and affect is thought through more specifically here in relation to an idea of the everyday not only as a thematic concern with the minutia of routine daily existence but also as distinct, and yet shifting, conceptions of filmic and viewing time. While film studies has often approached the temporal construction of the quotidian through the rubric of ‘real time,’ I explore different articulations of the everyday in a number of film practices through the writings of Henri Lefebvre. As a sociologist and philosopher preoccupied with the revolutionary quality of everyday time in both material reality and art practices including film, Lefebvre’s work enables this thesis to approach film as an especially potent and significant site for affective experiences of time and of the everyday. Beginning with John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) and an analysis of an affective everyday temporality that film is able to produce as a temporal medium, this thesis goes on to consider the quotidian through photography and stillness in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), dying and witnessing via Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), and finally melodrama and unrequited love in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (Huayang Nianhua, 2000). In the analysis of these films and videos, this thesis draws on film debates explicitly concerned with time as well as focusing on those places in philosophy and critical theory where a promising and productive articulation of film and its inscription of time and affect can be found and conceptualised. In this investigation, the everyday as both a temporal construction and a spectatorial affective experience is a means to reflect on the cinema as a continually shifting and dynamic affective site.
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Rassos, Effie
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Publication Year
2005
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Thesis
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PhD Doctorate
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