“This Is Your Man – Go with Him”: About the Disrupted Identification in the Films of Alan Clarke
Karolina Kosińska
karolina.kosinska@ispan.plInstitute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1096-878X
Abstract
Alan Clarke’s later films – like Made in Britain (1983), Christine (1987), Elephant (1989) – reveal a fully crystalized, mature creative strategy of the director. This strategy is defined by extreme reduction and repetitiveness of the narrative, emphasis on the compulsiveness of the characters’ actions, concentration on behavioural aspects combined with a radical rejection of psychology. It is realized primarily through long “walking” shots, and it results in a corporeal, trans-like experience of the film, in a specific relationship of the viewer with the characters and also, consequently, with the body of the film itself. Clarke forces on the viewer the constant contact with the human figure on the screen, while methodically depriving him or her of the possibility of identification. The author problematizes this disturbed identification by analyzing Alan Clarke’s films and by situating them in the context of Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, which in a way anticipate Clarke’s style, and also in relation to the theoretical concepts of bodily perception of the cinema developed by Jennifer M. Barker.
Keywords:
Alan Clarke, Robert Bresson, identification, behaviourism in cinema, bodily perception of cinema, British cinemaReferences
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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 Cultural Anthropology, Film and Audiovisual Arts 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. Kosińska is interested in British cinema, especially in the history and aesthetics of British social realism.
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