Black and blue book summary
Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester She is the author of Black and Blue The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida La Jet e Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour Reading Boyishly Roland Barthes J M Barrie Jacques Henri Lartigue Marcel Proust and D W Winnicott Becoming The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden and Pleasures Taken Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs. Black and blue book author Audacious and genre defying Black and Blue is seeped in melancholy in the feeling of being blue or rather black and blue with all the literality of bruised flesh Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations and subjects of Carol Mavor s exquisite image filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible At the book s heart are one book and three films Roland Barthes s Camera Lucida Chris Marker s La Jet e and Sans soleil and Marguerite Duras s and Alain Resnais s Hiroshima mon amour postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret and violence and history through aesthetic refinement. Black and blue izle Personal recollections punctuate Mavor s dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism Childhood memories become Proust s small scale contrivances tiny sensations that open onto panormas Mavor s mother lost her memory to Alzheimer s and Black and Blue is framed by the author s memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester She is the author of Reading Boyishly Roland Barthes J M Barrie Jacques Henri Lartigue Marcel Proust and D W Winnicott Becoming The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden and Pleasures Taken Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs all also published by Duke University Press Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers with appetite and fastidious delicacy she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field It resonates with and pays tribute to such key art historical works as Aby Warburg s Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass s prose poem On Being Blue Marina Warner author of Stranger Magic Charmed States and the Arabian Nights In Black and Blue Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima the Holocaust and the regime of hate in American racial history She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades As a testament and a symptom Black and Blue belongs to a growing number of first person accounts that have coped with the years 1939 46 and after including those by Sarah Kofman Rue Ordener rue Labat and Jean Luc Godard Histoire s du cin ma in which the author deals with his or her own relation with the past from a highly autobiographical standpoint What makes Black and Blue stand out is its movement to and from a theoretical critical canon through an impressive body of films texts and images which literally punctuate the book Tom Conley author of An Errant Eye Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France Black and Blue The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida La Jetee Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amourThis is one of the dazzling analytical performances that shouldn t really work but somehow does The Barthes text and films by Marker and Resnais are the overall topics of consideration and then citing an indebtedness to Proust Mavor proceeds to use all of them as means to explore various aspects of memory time trauma perception nostalgia melancholy remembering and forgetting Into each section are collaged considerations of numerous other works of art from artists as diverse of Kara Walker Joseph Cornell Ruth Asawa Meret Oppenheim Vertigo A Patch of Blue and far beyond And through it all she weaves her own memories and bits of autobiography Suspended somewhere between theory criticism and memoir it s a virtuosic performance Black and Blue seeks to tell stories Like a historical novel its function is not to correct history but rather to make history appear Arts Photography Nonfiction 
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