BIOTECNIKA BLOG

Event Date as Display String:

Friday, March 13, 2020, 7:00pm - 8:35pm

Location:

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge

URL:

https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/ugetsu-2020-03

Event Description:

Gazette Classification: Film Organization/Sponsor: Harvard Film
Archive Cost: $10 - Regular Admission $8 - Non-Harvard Students,
Harvard Faculty and Staff, and Senior Citizens. Free for Harvard
students Contact Info: bgravely@fas.harvard.edu Link:
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/ugetsu-2020-03 [There is] a
realm of the fantastic in which the distinction and issue of low
versus high art, or marginal versus central art, precisely disappear,
I mean the realm of cinema. What I have in mind here is not especially
films of explicit magic or fantasy, the sort of things special effects
are perfectly suited to. I have in mind rather film's unaided perfect
power to juxtapose fantasy and reality, to show their lacing as
precisely not special. I once had occasion to put together a number of
films constructed on the fantastic principle that the world of
unyielding fact and the world of satisfied wish look the same, become
juxtaposed without cinematic markings to set one world off from the
other, creating in their viewers moments, I think one may say, of
uncanny disorientation. [...] To these I added Mizoguchi's Ugetsu,
whose closing image is of a husband returned from a marvelous journey
of the erotic to find his poor old house as he had left it, but empty.
He lies down on the floor, curled like a child, and in the grey light
his wife circles the room. We ache with the man for her to be real,
for the beautifully familiar to succeed, or resucceed, the beautiful
unfamiliar; but the stern, intermittent tap of a wood block wedges
itself between time and eternity, and she vanishes. It is as great an
image of the uncanny as I know on film. The experience of it scatters
our always regrouping doubts about whether we are any long capable of
that hesitation between the empirical and the supernatural on which
the experience of the fantastic depends [...]. And we are reminded
that the capacity to let fact and fantasy interpret one another is the
basis at once of the soul's sickness and of its health. - Stanley
Cavell, "The Fantastic of Philosophy," (1986) in Cavell on Film, ed.
William Rothman

UID:

http://uid.trumba.com/event/143156635

Event Start Date as Date Type:

Friday, March 13, 2020 - 19:00 to 20:35

Thumbnail:

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Detail Image:

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Feature Image:

Featured:

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https://www.harvard.edu/preview/featured/events/ugetsu