LUKAS BRASISKIS

NON-REPRESENTATIONAL CINEMATIC REALISM

One of the important outcomes of my MA thesis "Cinematic Realism beyond Representation" (advisor: Sam Ishii-Gonzales) was a fresh image of André Bazin’s concepts as the result of the consistent close reading of his texts detached from the often superficial interpretations of the French film critic’s thoughts. Consequently, explorations of the Bazinian line of thought spawned my interest in the relation between process philosophy and theories of film realism. My study of the processual basis of film, influenced by the texts of Bazin, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze as well as their contemporary followers and interpreters, including John Mullarkey, Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Jon Beasley-Murray, Diane Arnaud, Anat Pick, and Jennifer Fay, has resulted in a few short papers and presentations on cinema’s ability to put the viewer closer to the non-representational perception of the world and, in a broader scope, on the potential implications of the idea of non-anthropocentric cinematic realism for contemporary film studies.  

Instead of giving a clear description what cinematic realism is - or what do films represent - I inclined to test the idea of the possibility of cinema that does not duplicate the reductive tendencies of the mundane human perception (see: Sam Ishii-Gonzales, 2012), which, I believe, can be actualized in the light of (or in dialogue with) 'speculative turn' in today’s philosophy and media studies.