Browsing by Subject "Alain"

Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory asks what are the ways that the politics of film theory have been conceptualized since the era now known as "70s film theory." In particular, it analyzes the writings on cinema, politics and art by contemporary French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in relation to the influential approaches of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze and to theories of documentary cinema. I argue that unlike the political modernism of 70s film theory and the post-theory turn of 90s film studies, Badiou and Rancière offer an approach to film theory that neither assumes that all films are political, nor that politics underdetermine theory, but rather suggests that we analyze both theories and films in terms of how they construct connections between cinema and politics. Following Deleuze, I call these connections "pedagogical" not because they transmit knowledge but because they always involve a new kind of connection or relation that seeks to transform habitual ways of seeing, saying or doing. For Badiou and Rancière this is based on a conception of cinema as "impure." Cinema, they argue, is never free of elements from other arts or daily life, but it is this impurity that is the grounds for linking its artistic and political possibilities. I look at various film forms that highlight cinema's impurity, in particular the "actuality" and how it has been reappropriated in various forms of documentary and essayistic practices as a way of giving cinematic form to questions of political equality.

This dissertation seeks to reevaluate French repertoire for the organ in the broader context of French music and society in the years between the two world wars. I argue that leading composers for the instrument were not cloistered between the musically conservative walls of the church but were rather fully engaged in cultural and musical shifts occurring across the Parisian musical scene. By analyzing music of Louis Vierne, Jehan Alain, and Olivier Messiaen, I address different ways in which these composers wrote for the organ in the early twentieth century as well as ways in which these composers engaged the world around them. Louis Vierne – older than Alain and Messiaen by forty years – represents an older generation rooted in late nineteenth- century romanticism. The way in which he composed for the organ was not only influenced by composers around him but also in the links to French musical heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alain and Messiaen – born three years apart – were colleagues who shared similar interests and were inspired by influences beyond the borders of the church and the state. For these composers, the organ was not an instrument tethered to conservative styles of composition but rather one that was fully able to engage with contemporary musical styles and absorb outside influence just as much as music of other genres and for other instruments.