Critical Century – serie

“when I admire a film | they say to me | yes, it’s very pretty | but it’s not | cinema | so | I asked myself | what it was”Phrases presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: Germany Nine Zero, The Kids Play Russian, JLG / JLG, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema, For Ever Mozart, and In Praise of Love. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godard’s “years of memory”, these films and videos were made alongside and in the shadow of his major work from that time, the monumental Histoire(s) du cinema, complementing and extending its themes. Like Histoire(s), they offer meditations on, among other things, the tides of history, the fate of nations, the work of memory, the power of cinema, and the nature of love.Gathered here, in written form, they are words without images: not exactly screenplays, not exactly poetry, but something else entirely. Godard himself described them enigmatically: “Not books. Rather recollections of films, without the photos or the uninteresting details… Only the spoken phrases. They offer a little prolongation. One even discovers things that aren’t in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books aren’t literature or cinema. Traces of a film…”. In our era of ubiquitous video streaming, e-books, and social media, these traces of cinema raise compelling questions about the future of media—cinematic, literary, and otherwise.

“One must make films with this knowledge: there’s no point anymore. Let film meet its end, that’s the only cinema.”The Darkroom contains the script for Marguerite Duras’s 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck). Between images of a truck in motion, juxtaposed voiceovers, and cutaways to Duras in conversation with Gérard Depardieu, Le camion turns the art of film into a means of enabling the viewer to engage multiple faculties—not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.Also included here is a series of short essays in which Duras makes provocative connections between film and textuality, as well as a fascinating dialogue with Michelle Porte. Together amounting to a crucial contribution to the field of film theory, these texts make brilliantly apparent the depth and integrity of Duras’s aesthetic, philosophical, and political thinking.

“Politics is will and not truth. A very primitive formulation, but rich in consequences.”Robert Musil was keenly aware of literature’s vulnerability to what he called “the over-reach and encroachment of politics”, but he was also an acute observer of the ways in which literature and politics interact. Literature and Politics presents Musil’s writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism.In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on current events, Musil charted the increasing dangers posed to artists and intellectuals by projects of ideological conscription, as well as the broader threats posed by nationalism and other extreme forms of collectivism. His political thinking was unfailingly supple and nuanced, but at its heart was a passionate belief in the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society. The main texts are translated by Genese Grill and Klaus Amann provides an invaluable Introduction to Musil’s political thought, while Philip Payne introduces Musil's "On Stupidity" (which he has also translated into English).

“The real obstacle to the development of modern art forms is erudition, conscious knowledge, and an excess of knowledge: all growth and development in the realm of art has to take place in the dead of night.”The Greek Music Drama marks a significant moment in the development of Nietzsche’s thought. Delivered as a lecture in 1870, it was the first public articulation of the major themes of his later, philosophical work: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Nietzsche here repudiates abstract scholarly approaches to the art of classical antiquity, proposing instead that that art demands of us the cultivation of distinctive emotional and intellectual capacities.While The Greek Music Drama was written on the brink of the insights that inform The Birth of Tragedy, it stands as a fascinating document in its own right. Paul Bishop’s preface and informative critical notes and Jill Marsden’s illuminating introduction serve to redress the comparative neglect that this seminal text—presented here in an elegant bilingual format—has suffered in Nietzsche studies. They also set in its original context a work that will prove essential to anyone interested in theater, performance, and the art of tragedy.

“Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest.”In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms, and the uses and abuses of criticism. Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa’s writings on art and poetic theory—most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers—thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.