Sublime Screen Spaces : A reading of the postmodern sublime in the collaged audiovisual images in Prospero’s Books, The Pillow Book and A Life in Suitcases.

Sammanfattning

This thesis consists of a rereading of The Postmodern Sublime centered on collaged sequences in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero's Books (1991), The Pillow Book (1996) and A Life in Suitcases (2005). The selected films share a collaged imagery that deconstructs the visual screen space into smaller frames, an aesthetic tendency that is here traced and discussed in relation to theories on the sublime established by Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Frederic Jameson. Although the postmodern sublime has been studied extensively within philosophy and aesthetics, it remains underdeveloped in Cinema Studies. Having been most prominent during the 1980s and 1990s, the concept furthermore begs for a reexamination within a more contemporary framework. By applying the concept to audiovisual images created by an early digital editing technology, The Quantel Paintbox, this thesis proposes a medium specific, technological sublime found in new media’s capacity to create shock through innovation. The thesis, furthermore, affirms the significance of Kant’s notion of Darstellung to the general conceptualization of the postmodern sublime; something that can be seen in the Quantel collages capacity to disrupt and challenge conventional modes of representation.