Cinematic Sublime

Nathan Carroll is a professor in the Department of Communication, Theatre, and Art at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota where he teaches courses in film studies, media criticism and sublime aesthetics.

• Acknowledgments viiForeword viiiJoan Hawkins Introduction 1Nathan Carroll Part I: Sublime Spectatorship 91. Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View 10Samantha Wilson 2. Stars Up Close: Celebrity, Ephemerality, and the Banal Sublime 24Claire Sisco King Part II: Staging Sublimity: “Presenting the Unpresentable” 393. Between Preservation and Disintegration in Decayed Cinema: The Uncanny and the Weird of the Sublime Archival Image in Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) 40Kornelia Boczkowska 4. Negative Epiphanies and Sublime Emotion in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence 53James Kendrick Part III: Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments 675. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Historical Sublime 68Steve Ostovich 6. Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust and the Limits of Invisibility 85Chris Dumas  Part IV: The Limits of Control: Sublime Cinemascapes 977. A Short History of the Long Take: Digital Cinema and the “Infinite Cut” 98Nathan Carroll 8. Stalking the Sublime: Nature and Affect in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker 124Robert Lee Jones Part V: The Limits of Light: The Other(s) 1419. Sublime Abject or Abject Sublime: Sublimation and Jouissance in Andrezj Żuławski’s Szamanka 142Carolin Kirchner 10. The Fear of Beauty and the Beauty of Fear: The Sublime in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin 155Kwasu David Tembo Bibliography 174Notes on the Contributors 189Index 193

'Editor Nathan Carroll writes in his introduction that ‘the only common factor in all the theories of the sublime is the lack of agreement between them’ (p. 1). Applying the concept to cinema raises a further set of questions. [...] But the concept of the sublime can be fruitfully applied to cinema, as this anthology demonstrates.While the ten authors are for the most part from film or media studies departments and the book is pitched very much at film scholars and philosophers, the variety of topics means that it can also be dipped into by anyone possessing a rudimentary grasp of critical terms.'