Books: Image-Thinking | Mieke Bal Official

Part Two: Special Issues, Special Pleading

1. Showing Trauma? Difficulty and Necessity
DON QUIJOTE, A LONG HISTORY OF MADNESS
Looking at photographs
Trauma Predicaments
Alone Within Himself: Drama versus Narrative
Impossible Story-Telling: Toward the Cinematic
A Way Out?

2. Agency, Facing
NOTHING IS MISSING (the installation)
Bertien van Manen
Introduction: Facing Migration
Abandoning Control
The triple Act of Facing
Intercultural Ethics: Relationality across Gaps
Preposterous Time
Facing Restraint
Facing Speech
For Critical Freedom

3. Cultural Citizenship vs. Identity
BECOMING VERA
STATE OF SUSPENSION, SEPARATIONS, Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugeni Onegin
Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, Cultural
Becoming French in Cameroon, African in Russia
Becoming Pushkin
Preposterous Encounters of the Third Kind
Reality in Fiction
“My Africa”: Memory, Nostalgia, Exile
Encountering Cultural Citizenship
Impossible Cultural Citizenship

4. Affect as a Political Tool
MADAME B (the film, various installations)
DORIS SALCEDO: PALIMPSESTO
Introduction: The Point of Affect
From “Madame Bovary c’est moi” to “Emma is Us”
Ambiguous Focalisation: Suspending Judgment
What is Focalisation?
An Illness We All Have: Emotional Capitalism
Empathy: Siding with the Dying
Affective Things?
The Experience of Feeling-Looking
The Anthropomorphic Imagination
Affect, Medium and Mood

5. By Way of Conclusion
For Memory: Mis-remembered, Dis-remembered
ACCESS DENIED, A LONG HISTORY OF MADNESS, REASONABLE DOUBT
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, WHERE IS WHERE?
Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought
Making Acts of Memory
Reunion, Resilience, Resistance
What Kinds of Memory Matter?
Failing the Past is Failing the Present
For a Different Mode of Thinking

References
List of images
Author’s Filmography
Acknowledgments
Selective Index of Names and Titles
Selective Index of Terms and Concepts

Image-Thinking proposes a new model of synthesis of creative and intellectual work that will benefit practitioners, students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. It merges theoretical and practical considerations in innovative and empowering ways, while clarifying difficult concepts through accounts of practice including trauma, agency, identity and affect.

It closes with a discussion of cultural memory and includes 10 in-depth case studies of films made over 20 years where each case study integrates concrete analysis with theoretical reflection.

Table of Contents

“Iconomania”. Prologue by W.J.T. Mitchell
Author’s Preface

1. Introduction: Making as Thinking, and vice versa
Material Image-Thinking
Searching for a Term
Image-Thinking for Thought-Images
Thresholds: the merging of Thinking, Imagining, and Imaging

Overview of Chapters

Part One: Keys to Intermediality

1. Time-Space: Spatialising Film
A LONG HISTORY OF MADNESS
Nalini Malani, REMEMBERING MAD MEG; Pieter Breughel the Elder, Mad Meg
Introduction: Beginning Becomes Entrance
Political Spacetime: Film in the Gallery
Social Relevance: Madness to Learn From
Forms of Madness
Beginning
Storybook
Picture Book
Working Through and Overcoming Iconography
“Schizophrenia”: Two Sides to Every Story, Two Figures in Every Life

A Sense of an Ending

2. Who speaks the film, in documentaries? A Thousand and One Voices
MILLE ET UN JOURS
MARCEL Proust, In Search of Lost Time; Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
Introduction: Subject, Source, Speaker
Migratory Aesthetics and the Trouble with Voice
Voice and the Documentary Tradition
Murmuring Voices: Intimacy and Hybridity Within
Phantom Sentences
Dispersal of Voice
The “Other” Tradition and Cultural Belonging
Travelling Forking Paths

3. Multi-Tentacled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism for Preposterous History
2MOVE (the exhibition)
Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled; It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency
Introducing Time’s Thought-Image: An Octopus
Togetherness in Time
Heterochrony Caught in the Act
Heterochrony versus Clock Time
From Anachronism to Preposterous History
It’s About Time!

4. Making Up, Making As: Fiction and/in/with Reality
BECOMING VERA, REASONABLE DOUBT
Various works of contemporary art
Introduction: Think again
Becoming Vera in Free Indirect Discourse
Thinking in Film
Why Imaging and/of Thinking Move
Mastery, in Doubt
From Impatience as Lifestyle to Mis-Encounters
After-Effects and Pre-Figurations