Epistolary Form and the Displaced Global Subject in Recent Films by James Benning and Jem Cohen

  • Rebecca Anne Sheehan California State University, Fullerton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/arab.63612
Keywords: epistolary cinema, essay Film, James Benning, Jem Cohen, globalization, late capitalism

Abstract

This essay focuses on the epistolary enunciation of recent works by two contemporary American filmmakers, Jem Cohen and James Benning, arguing for the stakes of viewing their films through an epistolary lens rather than the lenses of literary forms like the essay and the diary more commonly deployed to describe films that hug the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. Looking specifically at Cohen’s Chain (2004) and Counting (2015) and Benning’s Stemple Pass (2013) and his installation Two Cabins (2011), I show how it is the epistolary enunciation of Benning’s and Cohen’s recent work that allows them to properly explore and depict the displacement of late capitalism’s subject in an increasingly globalized world. I go on to show that through epistolary enunciation both filmmakers also tap into American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist notions of individualism and selfhood that resist the homogenizing nature of late capitalism.

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Author Biography

Rebecca Anne Sheehan, California State University, Fullerton

Rebecca A. Sheehan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.  She has co-edited a book entitled Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity Through Aesthetics (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and has recently finished a manuscript entitled American Avant-Garde Cinema and the Ethics of the In-between forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her work on topics ranging from experimental cinema, sculpture and cinema, epistolary cinema, the biopic and border cinema has appeared in edited book collections and various journals including Discourse, Screen, and Screening the Past.

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Published
2019-11-04
How to Cite
Sheehan R. A. (2019). Epistolary Form and the Displaced Global Subject in Recent Films by James Benning and Jem Cohen. Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación audiovisual y publicitaria, 19(3), 363-381. https://doi.org/10.5209/arab.63612
Issue
Vol. 19 No. 3 (2019): La enunciación epistolar en el cine contemporáneo / Epistolary Enunciation in Contemporary Cinema
Section
Monográfico

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