This article shows the productiveness of “plasticity” (a concept famously developed by French philosopher Catherine Malabou) for cinema, by using Jacques Rivette’s film criticism as a detailed case study.
In several greatly influential writings (which have, among others, decisively contributed to the formation of the French New Wave), Rivette relied on an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy and aesthetics strikingly similar to Malabou’s. The crux of his distinction was that only “synthetic” filmmaking was good filmmaking, where “synthetic” means something very close to “plastic” in Malabou’s sense.
By putting forward a new, Malabou-centred interpretation of the politique des auteurs (“author theory”) advocated in the 1950s by Rivette and other French critics, this article suggests that plasticity is a philosophical-aesthetic framework that can be usefully applied to today’s cinema (or other cinemas) too.
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📸 Eisenstein's ¡Que viva México!
