Metacinema The Form and Content of Filmic Reference and Reflexivity

When a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of art—either by reference to itself or to other works—we have become accustomed to calling this move "meta." While scholars and critics have, for decades, acknowledged reflexivity in films, it is only in Metacinema, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists join to enthusiastically debate the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In new essays on generative films, including Rear Window, 8 1/2, Holy Motors, Funny Games, Fight Club, and Clouds of Sils Maria, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What results is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise-en-abîme, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual and intermedial traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study found in Metacinema.

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or co-editor of twelve books, including The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, The Philosophy of Documentary Film, The Philosophy of War Films, and The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman. He has contributed book chapters on Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Casey Affleck, Kelly Reichardt, Errol Morris, Rithy Panh, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton, and Charlie Kaufman. His articles have appeared in Afterimage, Conversations, Epoch?, Estetica, Liminalities, Post Script, Transactions, Film and Philosophy, The Senses and Society, The Midwest Quarterly, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. As a documentary filmmaker, he produced and edited six features in The Intellectual Portrait Series, directed Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes, and codirected New York Photographer: Jill Freedman in the City. He was Harvard's Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom and participated in an NEH Institute, a workshop with Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, and Vanderbilt.

List of Contributors

Foreword
The Cinematic Question: "What Do You Want From Me?"
Robert B. Pippin

Introduction
An Invitation to the Varieties and Virtues of "Meta-ness" in the Art and Culture of Film
David LaRocca

Part I. Conceptual and Theoretical Reorientation to Metacinema

1. Cinematic Self-Consciousness in Hitchcock's Rear Window
Robert B. Pippin

2. Adaptations, Refractions, and Obstructions: The Prophecies of Andr? Bazin
Timothy Corrigan

3. A Metacinematic Spectrum: Technique Through Text to Context
Garrett Stewart

4. Recursive Reflections: Types, Modes, and Forms of Cinematic Reflexivity
Daniel Yacavone

5. M?li?s, Astruc, and Scorsese: Authorship, Historiography, and Videographic Styles
Eleni Palis

Part II. Illumination from the Duplications and Repetitions of Reflexive Cinema

6. 8 ?: Self-Reflexive Fiction and Mental Training
Joshua Landy

7. Clouds of Sils Maria: True Characters and Fictional Selves in the Construction of Filmic Identities
Laura T. Di Summa

8. Holy Motors: Metameditation on Digital Cinema's Present and Future
Ohad Landesman

Part III. Affectivity and Embodiment in Metanarratives

9. Fight Club: Enlivenment, Love, and the Aesthetics of Violence in the Age of Trump
J. M. Bernstein

10. Funny Games: Film, Imagination, and Moral Complicity
Paul Schofield

11. Shoah: Art as Visualizing What Cannot Be Grasped
Shoshana Felman

Part IV. Metadocumentary, Experimental Film, and Animation

12. The Act of Killing: Empathy, Morality, and Reenactment
Thomas E. Wartenberg

13. Waltz with Bashir's Animated Traces: Troubled Indexicality in Contemporary Documentary Rhetorics
Yotam Shibolet

14. Alone., Again: On Martin Arnold's Metaformal Invention by Intervention
David LaRocca

Acknowledgments
Index