[Reader-list] [Announcements] Talk @ Sarai by Mark Betz

[Mitoo Das]

Talk at Sarai
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You are invited to an illustrated talk by Mark Betz at Sarai- CSDS. 
Please read on for details:

Beyond Europe: The Parametric Tradition
by Mark Betz
Date: 27th November, 2008
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS
Time: 3:00 pm

Although “art cinema” is no longer a category with institutional 
currency that is deployed to describe a coherent body of contemporary 
film practice—“world cinema” is now the term of choice, albeit one with 
a more encompassing range of stylistic possibilities—challenging films 
continue to be made and celebrated on the international stage, 
particularly through film festival premieres, screenings, and awards. 
And while art cinema can also refer to many types of films and film 
aesthetics, the high water mark of it in its most “difficult” formal 
guise is arguably parametric narration, David Bordwell’s term (via Noël 
Burch) to describe a mode of filmmaking that emphasizes style at least 
equally as much as narration, often more so. Whether aligned with the 
transcendental (Ozu, Dreyer, Bresson), serialism (Resnais, Bresson 
again, Godard on occasion, Akerman), or long takes, often combined with 
camera movement (Jancso, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Angelopolous), a special 
place has been reserved for parametric filmmaking from the 1950s through 
1970s among art film cognoscenti. But in the near quarter century since 
Bordwell's formal analysis of this style, little has been made of the 
shared aesthetics of contemporary parametric filmmakers practicing 
usually outside of Western Europe, such as Aleksandr Sokurov, Béla Tarr, 
Idrissa Ouedraogo, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhangke, Bruno 
Dumont, Jafar Panahi, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Might these aesthetics 
constitute one strand of an “international style” for contemporary world 
cinema, indeed contemporary art cinema? To what degree is this 
international style recognised and promoted via the international film 
festival circuit—less visibly and concretely articulated than Dogme95, 
for example, but perhaps equally programmatically? What is the relation 
of the global to the local in this style? And in what ways do these 
aesthetics complicate received wisdom concerning the end of modernism in 
the postmodern era?

Mark Betz is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the School of 
Humanities, King’s College, London. He earned his PhD in Film Studies 
from the University of Rochester in1999. His research interests include 
Post-World War II European cinema (especially art cinema), non-Western 
and alternative cinemas (especially Third cinema and Southeast Asian 
cinema), national cinemas and transnationalism, exploitation cinemas, 
film theory and historiography, the history of film studies, the archive.

Some of his publications are
*“Co-productions,” in the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Volume 1, ed. 
Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Schirmer Reference/Thomson Gale, 2007), 369-373.

*“Dubbing and Subtitling,” in the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Volume 
2, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Schirmer Reference/Thomson Gale, 
2007), 101-104.

*Co-author, Instructor’s Resource Manual with Test Item File for 
Understanding Movies, by Louis Giannetti and Jim Leach, 2nd Canadian 
edition (Toronto: Prentice Hall, 2001), 1-76.
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