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
Barker, J. (2009). The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press.
Google Scholar
Bennett, J. (2005). Emphatic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503625006
Google Scholar
Elsaesser, T., Hagener, M. (2015). Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. London – New York: Routledge.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315740768
Google Scholar
Foster, H. (1996). The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Google Scholar
Kelly, R. (1998). Alan Clarke. London: Faber and Faber.
Google Scholar
McIlroy, B. (2001). Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Vancouver: Steveston Press.
Google Scholar
Rolinson, D. (2005). Alan Clarke. Manchester – New York: Manchester University Press.
Google Scholar
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.
Statistics
Abstract views: 248PDF downloads: 145
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Karolina Kosińska
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The author grants the publisher a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY 4.0) to use the article in Kwartalnik Filmowy, retains full copyright, and agrees to identify the work as first having been published in Kwartalnik Filmowy should it be published or used again (download licence agreement). The journal is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence. By submitting an article, the author agrees to make it available under this licence.
In issues from 105-106 (2019) to 119 (2022) all articles were published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
Most read articles by the same author(s)
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 117 (2022): Unknown/Hidden Cinema
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 110 (2020): Beyond Human Being
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 119 (2022): (New) Film Theory
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 114 (2021): Contamination, Dirt, Flaw
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 120 (2022): Film Culture
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 121 (2023): Cinema and Young Audience
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 123 (2023): Pace and Rhythm
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 122 (2023): Landscapes, Panoramas, Territories
- Karolina Kosińska, Editorial , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. 125 (2024): Cinema as a Memory Machine
- Karolina Kosińska, That Which Is Absent: Accounts and Memories of Women from the Warsaw Uprising as Ready-Made but Not Used Film Scenarios , Kwartalnik Filmowy: No. Special Issue (2013): Polish Film Scholars on Polish Cinema