Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
Jalal Toufic
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 088268146X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Cultural Writing. Film history and criticism. "Jalal Toufic is an amazing writer. He documents the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse--turning the trap of 'what can't be named' into a true paradise"--Richard Foreman. "Relentlessly uncompromising.Toufic's radical and visionary poetics gird the reader to forge ahead into uncharted territory"--Village Voice. "Jalal Toufic is one of the best writers in America today...and his first 2 books, DISTRACTED and (VAMPIRES), are some of the best writing of the past 20 years"--John Zorn, Film Works IV. Jalal Toufic is a teacher, film theorist, video artist, and author of several books. His films have been shown worldwide.
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of introductions. 35 Matthew Edlund, Psychological Time and Mental Illness (New York: Gardner Press, 1987), 81. 36 Exceptions: primitive cinema, Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), many of Warhol’s films ... 37 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 238. 38 As was the case with the modernist stress in painting on the flatness of the canvas (Jasper Johns’ painted targets and flags ...), the shape of the support, the properties of the
210,715 are in camps]; Jordan: 1,570,192 [of which 280,191 are in camps]; Gaza Strip: 824,622 [of which 451,186 are in camps]; the West Bank: 583,009 [of which 157,676 are in camps]; and the Syrian Arab Republic: 383,199 [of which 111,712 are in camps]),73 but that they have to grant it also to the ghosts of so many unjustly killed Palestinians either in their fiction or in haunted houses or ones rumored to be haunted. We Arabs, with so many internally displaced and so many unjustly killed as a
imply the other’s fear. In the latter case, the issue of donning a dreadful mask is not so much to psychologically induce fear in the other, as to impose on him the suggestion that while he may not be aware of it, he is already afraid: while one may be able to resist psychological fear, continuing to look at the frightening entity despite one’s fear, the fear implied by the mask allows of no resistance, since the mask is the de jure externalization of one’s swish pan of avoiding looking at
being “life-loving” to die,207 that is, that they are already dead. “By the time you see this tape, I, comrade Jama-l Sa-t.-ı , will have died” is believable, but not: “I am the martyr comrade Jama-l Sa-t.-ı .” While I can usually assume in the present of videotaping my future state at the time of broadcasting or screening, I cannot do so in the case of death.208 I cannot believe Jama-l Sa-t.-ı on TV telling me, “I am the martyr comrade Jama-l Sa-t.-ı ...”,209 even if I am told that he had died
Robbe-Grillet writes: “The duration of the modern work is in no way a summary, a condensed version, of a more extended and more ‘real’ duration which would be that of the anecdote, of the narrated story. There is, on the contrary, an absolute identity between the two durations. The entire story of Marienbad happens neither in two years nor in three days, but exactly in one hour and a half ”39—to wit the existence of the man and the woman in Marienbad “lasts only as long as the film lasts.”40
