Monday, June 12, 2017

What is Alison Taylor reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Alison Taylor, author of Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema.

Her entry begins:
I’m gradually working my way through Michel Surya’s astonishingly detailed account of the life and writings of Georges Bataille (Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography). It’s a fantastic insight into a thinker I’ve always found intriguing (anyone who was judged too surreal for the surrealists is inevitably intriguing) and is filling in the gaps between the bits and pieces of Bataille’s own work that I’ve read over the years. While fascinating, it is a monster...[read on]
About Troubled Everyday, from the publisher:
Extreme violence in contemporary European art cinema is generally interpreted for its affective potential, but what about the significance of the everyday that so often frames and forms the majority of these films? Why do the sudden moments of violence that punctuate films like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl (2001), Gaspar Noé's Irreversible (2002) and Markus Schleinzer's Michael (2011) seem so reliant on everyday routines and settings for their impact? Addressing these questions through a series of case-studies, and considering notorious films in their historical and philosophical context, Troubled Everyday offers the first detailed examination of the relationship between violence and the everyday in European art cinema. It calls for a re-evaluation of what gives these films such affective force, and such a prolonged grip on our imagination.

Case Studies include:
Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini 1975)
Money (Bresson 1983)
Come and See (Klimov 1985)
The Seventh Continent (Haneke 1989)
I Stand Alone (Noé 1998)
Fat Girl (Breillat 2001)
Irreversible (Noé 2002)
Twentynine Palms (Dumont 2003)
Michael (Schleinzer 2011)
Learn more about Troubled Everyday at the publisher's website.

Writers Read: Alison Taylor.

--Marshal Zeringue