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[James Donald]

UNSW Media Film and Theatre Seminars
Wednesday 10 May 2006
5 p.m. Webster Building 327

Preposterous Figurality
Comic cinema and bad metaphor
Lisa Trahair


 From its birth, the magic of cinema has generally been understood to 
lie not just in its capacity to 'capture' movement but also in its 
ability to defy the laws of the physical universe.  Cinema can 
reverse time, conjure things from nothing, resuscitate the dead, or 
kill the living. This magic is nowhere more evident than in comic 
montage. Its pa(i)ring of images that stand on opposite sides of the 
universe, its displacements and condensations, involve more than 
Kuleshov's splicing together of images of people on Moscow streets 
with images of the White House to produce a 'creative geography'. 
Following Lyotard's insistence that the physicality of condensation 
implies both compression and a change in the state of things (as when 
gas becomes liquid), this paper explores comedy's reconfiguring of 
space, its creation of new spaces that engender an infinity of images 
which can never quite be contained and which regenerate themselves 
endlessly.

In particular, the paper investigates the relation between the 
figurative and figurality in silent slapstick by examining the comic 
deployment of birth images in Buster Keaton's film The Navigator 
(1924). It considers the contrasting articulations of metaphor 
proposed by structuralist (Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan) and 
post-structuralist (Lyotard, Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida) thinkers, 
in order to conceptualise how the operations of the primary process 
shift the register of cinematic enunciation from the demonstration of 
meaning to the exhibition of comic spectacle.

Lisa Trahair is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and 
Theatre at the University of New South Wales. This paper is taken 
from the last chapter of her forthcoming book The Comedy of 
Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (SUNY 
Press, 2007).

-- 
Dr James Donald
Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Professor of Film Studies, School of Media, Film and Theatre
University of New South Wales
Sydney
NSW 2052
Australia

Telephone	(02)9385 4858
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Telephone	+612 9385 4858
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