The Crisis of Representation, Earth-Landscape and Post-humanist Pantheism in Michael Snow's „La Région centrale”

Aleksander Kmak

aleksander.kmak@gmail.com
University of Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3724-5397

Abstract

The main subject of the essay is Michael Snow’s La Région centrale. Referencing various writings on the film, the author highlights areas that have not been tackled by scholars: the sensuous character of the film experience and its consequences for cinema’s status as a sphere of the cognition of reality. La Région centrale is juxtaposed with Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of painterly catastrophe and diagram in order to show how the experience of landscape becomes a post-humanist project of creating the whole new world, where existent dualisms of body-mind, subject-object or human-animal are completely overthrown. This interpretation is accompanied by a reflection on the cinema’s role during the age of Anthropocene and a re-affirmation of realism in film theory.


Keywords:

film theory, avant-garde cinema, Michael Snow, landscape, anthropocene, sensuous film theory

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Published
2020-08-26

Cited by

Kmak, A. (2020) “The Crisis of Representation, Earth-Landscape and Post-humanist Pantheism in Michael Snow’s „La Région centrale””, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (110), pp. 46–61. doi: 10.36744/kf.314.

Authors

Aleksander Kmak 
aleksander.kmak@gmail.com
University of Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3724-5397

Film scholar and art critic. He is currently preparing a PhD dissertation about cinema of discomfort and sensuous film theory at the University of Warsaw. He has published in Widok, Kwartalnik Filmowy, Ekrany and Pleograf while continuously collaborating with the contemporary art magazine Szum. He co-edited the book Cięcie ciał. Ruchome obrazy [Cutting Bodies: Moving Pictures] (2018).



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