Allegorical images

Michelle Langford is a lecturer in the School of Media, Film & Theatre at the University of New South Wales.

• Chapter 1: 'A Cinema on the Margins: Contextualizing the Films of Werner Schroeter' - Page 17 - Michelle Langford Chapter 2: 'Towards a Theory of Cinematic Allegory' - Page 53 - Michelle Langford Chapter 3: 'The Allegorical Tableau' - Page 89 - Michelle Langford Chapter 4: 'Allegorical Montage' - Page 115 - Michelle Langford Chapter 5: 'A Gestural Cinema: Allegorical Figures and Faulty Performances' - Page 133 - Michelle Langford Chapter 6: 'Brecht and Beyond: From Social to Allegorical Gestus' -Page 169 - Michelle Langford

"By excavating the ruined margins of New German Cinema together with the remnants of a marginalised film theory project, Langford herself becomes an allegorist, shattering our settled ideas about both, and yet conserving elements of each for reconsideration in light of the current Deleuzian moment in cinema studies. Langford is an original thinker whose keen scholarly insights restore not only Schroeter's lost films but a lost moment in film culture." - Felicity Collins, La Trobe University, Australia "Langford fulfils her task by drawing on Benjamin's theory of allegory, Deleuze's concept of the time-image and Brechtian ideas about gesture and tableau. Her project revises a now neglected body of theoretical, critical and politicised writing which, in the 1970s-80s, championed an intellectual cinema of political modernism (exemplified by Godard and Kluge, among others), in opposition to the voyeuristic pleasures of classical narrative or entertainment cinema. The book brings this lost modernist paradigm into a new context, making a significant contribution to the still-emerging field of Deleuzian film thinking. The ambitious achievement of Langford's book is its revitalisation of interest in a particular kind of film aesthetic and the conceptual work that might illuminate it - Langford's approach to cinema in general is made clear in an exemplary chapter in which she develops a provisional theory of cinematic allegory. Paying close attention to common ground between Benjamin's allegorical thinking and Deleuze's theory of postwar European cinema, Langford identifies the allegorical-image as a specific kind of time-imageA" (p. 55). Here, she skilfully weaves together a number of tropes (notably, the fragment and the child) which characterise not only Benjamin and Deleuze's thinking but also Adorno's desire for an alternative to the standardised films of the culture industry." - Felicity Collins, La Trobe University, Australia "If you are acquainted with or even passionate about Schroeter's work, this detailed deconstruction of the technical and theoretical elements of his craft will prove invaluable." - James Benefield, Transition Tradition