Affective Rhythms: Experience of Trauma in Alan Clarke’s Films from the 1980s
Karolina Kosińska
karolina.kosinska@ispan.plInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1096-878X
Abstract
Alan Clarke’s films from the 1980s are usually characterized as radical tests of the boundaries of social realism and narrative minimalism. As such, they have been described as highly political, although their political potential relates primarily to form rather than content (plot or story). Clarke’s critical approach to current affairs in Britain leads not only to a stark and pessimistic diagnosis of the state of the nation and the country but also to an analysis of the national and social traumas of the 1980s. Specific formal and narrative strategies employed by the director are highly affective – he uses intersecting patterns of different, persistent, and repetitive rhythms, visual, aural, and temporal, not to convey an intellectual meaning but rather to affect the viewer, to immerse them in a kind of trance-like experience. The author uses Jill Bennett’s reflections on trauma and affect in art to analyse the rhythmic designs of two of Clarke’s films: Road (1987) and Contact (1985).
Keywords:
Alan Clarke, trauma, affect, rhythm, British cinema, Northern IrelandReferences
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Authors
Karolina Kosińskakarolina.kosinska@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1096-878X
Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies, Audiovisual Arts and Anthropology of Culture at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IS PAN). She is the editor-in-chief of the academic film journal Kwartalnik Filmowy, published by IS PAN. Her book based on her doctoral thesis, Androgyn. Tożsamość, tęsknota, pragnienie [Androgyne: Identity, Longing and Desire] (2015), has been awarded the Bolesław Michałek Award as the best film studies publication of 2014-2015. She is interested in British cinema, especially in the history and aesthetics of British social realism.
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