The guest editors of the Arts' Special Issue on Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films, Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas, are pleased to announce the publication of a new open-access article: "On Wrinkles, Laughter, and the Self-Reflexivity of Joris Ivens’s A Tale of the Wind", by Nélio Conceição.
In his swan song A Tale of the Wind (1988), Joris Ivens undertakes the seemingly impossible task of capturing the invisible—the wind—on film. At the same time, the film looks back over the director’s own career, in a spirit that is at once self-reflective and youthful. Set mainly in China, it functions both as an allegory of the wind and as a search for a middle ground between realism and more poetic approaches to cinema. This article examines the film through the lenses of self-reflexivity, the cinematic portrayal of old age, and the relation between life and death. It first delves into Stanley Cavell’s ontological understanding of self-reflexivity, before examining how this self-reflexivity unfolds in A Tale of the Wind. In this regard, it analyses the relationship between technique and magic, the search for a “theory of cinema”, and the importance of imagination and childhood. Taking into consideration the Deleuzian correlation between face and landscape and the notion of “any space whatever”, the article concludes by analysing old age through its marks and gestures: wrinkles, laughter, waiting, and searching—elements that contribute decisively to the film’s self-reflexivity.
You can read the full article here. More articles in full open access will be released soon!
All articles belonging to this Special Issue are available here.
📷 A Tale of Wind [1988], by Joris Ivens
