Abel Ferrara by Nicole Brenez

Abel Ferrara by Nicole Brenez

Author:Nicole Brenez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00


How to Transgress the Negative?

The Blackout further intensifies this process of destruction while advancing new propositions about the image. Matty’s oceanic suicide owes a narrative schema and a number of figures to a sequence (gathering several scenes in an ensemble) that closes George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954). In both films, an alcoholic star kills himself because of love by walking into the ocean. But, from Hollywood melodrama to Ferraran treatise, we pass from a functional romanticism to a critical essay on the functioning of the psyche. How and why? Mutatis mutandis, since it does not constitute a complete remake but is content to borrow some important traits, The Blackout is in the same position in relation to its source as Body Snatchers is in relation to the earlier versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Don Siegel (1956) and Philip Kaufman (1978). Both Ferraran reprises address the treatment of a psychic state. The paranoia at work in earlier versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers becomes in Ferrara an investigation into bodily metamorphosis. Alcoholism, the subject of all four versions of A Star Is Born (1932, 1937, 1954, and 1976), becomes an inquiry into the abandonment complex. Ferrara’s “remakes” obey the same formal logic. It can be called the logic of the major image, which consists of displaying figuratively, and taking all the way to the end, what in the preceding versions is treated only elliptically.



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