Session 4: Masks and Meaning, Icons and Identity
Session 4: Masks and Meaning, Icons and Identity
Chair: Barbra McKenzie
The Masks of Performance: Art’s Aesthetic and Social Representation in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander
Sarah Gilmartin
Buffalo State College, Buffalo, NY, USA
“When I show a film I am guilty of deceit. I employ an apparatus constructed on a physical imperfection of man, an apparatus with which I cause in my public powerful shifts of emotion like the swinging of a pendulum. I can make them laugh, scream with terror, smile, believe in legends, become indignant, shocked, seduced, or yawn with boredom. I am, then, either a deceiver or—when the public is aware of the deception—a performer of tricks.” (Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art 69)
The presence of magical realism within a work of art suggests the creator’s concern with the nature of reality, and how it is represented; film, like other visual languages and mediums, seeks to, as authors Kostelnick and Hassett assert, “define the social behavior among designers and readers that shapes, stabilizes, and transforms it and that normalizes it as conventional codes” (Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions 3). This study focuses on the ways in which Ingmar Bergman visually depicts culture, community, and the use of magical realism as a means of critiquing and displacing accepted practices and social mores. Within the work of Ingmar Bergman, and in particular within the film Fanny och Alexander (or Fanny and Alexander) (1983), this genre is revisited and reworked as a means of exploring and transgressing artistic and social boundaries not removed from culture, but, rather, immersed within a cultural context; for Bergman, film is the medium through which conventions, ritual, and traditional cultural values can be explored by juxtaposing, and the play with, mask, spectacle, and theatrics. Although this study focuses primarily upon Bergman’s later work Fanny and Alexander, there will be some analysis of early Bergman films, such as Ansiktet (or The Magician) (1958), in order to further illustrate the presence of reoccurring themes and genres within his œuvre, which, ultimately, shows Bergman’s attempt to construct an artistic aesthetic, as well as the viewer’s reading of social representations within a visual medium.
The Cut-and-Paste Queen: The Anti-Fascist Propaganda Through Photomontage and the Grotesque in Virginia Woolf’s The Years
Isabel Andres
Universidad de Granada, Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana, Granada, Spain
Profoundly disillusioned with a socio-political scenario presided over by the imminence of an international combat, powerfully instigated by the rapid ascent of fascism and dictatorial forces, Virginia Woolf envisions her society as an authentic carnivalesque universe of parodies and debasements which, inhabited by a catalogue of distorted, risible figures, comes to attest for the absolute inadequacy of a political and ideological apparatus encroached by the eagerness for dominance and the repression of individual freedom.
Furthermore, in opposition to the traditional approach of The Years as a traditional narrative encased within the strict conventions of the family saga, this paper aims to illuminate the subversive potential underlying the use of visual arts in Woolf’s novel. In particular, the present analysis will try to shed light on the narrator’s resort to some of the most ground-breaking and suggestive techniques of a series of artistic forms, ranging from avant-garde pictorial compositions of Dada and Surrealist painters to the transgressing creations by 1920s artists of photographical montage, which developing simultaneous to the publication of The Years, come to converge and interact in Woolf’s work.
In this regard, this article explores how this choral integration of artistic tendencies ultimately aims to clamour in unison for the debunking of the rotted and corrupt traditional system. At the same time, this analysis will bring to the surface the consistently ignored presence of the aesthetics of carnival and the grotesque in Woolf’s narrative, in consonance with the author’s indefatigable advocacy for the demolition of the decayed structures of the post-Victorian socio-political edifice.
‘The Veil and the Veiled’: the Use of Image in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love
Iva Jevtic
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love is considered one of the key mystical texts in Middle English. Throughout it is characterised by a striking use of visionary language: the sixteen visions, however, tend to be seen as separate and counterposed to Julian’s commentary. Rather than focusing on the narrative ‘instability’ of the text, the seeming break between the chronologically ordered visions and spatially and chronologically indeterminate contemplation can be productively bypassed through the consideration and application of some of the key elements of Walter Benjamin’s definition of ‘true image’ (das echte Bild).
There have been several approaches to understanding Benjamin’s use of images, ranging from purely metaphorical readings to no less problematic abstractions of image into interpretative schemas. Writing in images is at the heart of Benjamin’s work and cannot be separated from its placement in language. Considering, however, that both writing and reading are mimetically grounded acts, Benjamin’s characteristic deconstruction of, as Sigrid Weigel points out, images of the world that have become world-views, is always at the same time a process of perceptual re-organisation, language made present in and through the body.
Benjamin’s conception of image rests on pre-modern Judaic notions of image as likeness, which sidesteps the problems inherent in the narrowing down of image to a material, realistic likeness that is promoted to the detriment of the conceptualisation of the image itself. In this sense it allows a creative overcoming of the bridge between the historically indexed, ‘strictly’ visual content of Julian’s Revelation and the ostensibly non-visual contemplation. It furthermore points to the possibility of reconciliation between image and the body, in which the understanding of the history of the image cannot be separated from the examination of its perceptual counterparts.
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