Suchergebnisse

Antonioni's Blow-Up, released in late 1966, is usually taken, on the one hand, to represent (celebratingly and scandalously) the youth culture of Swinging London and, on the other, the problems of (tenuous) relation between reality and its representation (the main protagonist thinks he discovers a murder by analysing photographs he has taken). Although most critics have attempted to link these two levels by means of some existential metaphor (most often: the main protagonist who represents the image-crazed youth of Swinging London encounters its biggest taboo, death, which is unrepresentable to boot), the paper proposes a more literal and political interpretation arguing that the abstraction of blurry grain of silver halide into which the image of the corpse finally dissolves in a series of photographic blow-ups is a way of representing something which also cannot have a proper image: the all-pervasive but no longer perceptible lowkey everyday violence which constitutes the propelling force of the supposedly emancipated "swinging" lifestyle.

For a long time now discussions on European identity have been deeply embedded in political discourses of the old continent. It has often been said that Europe has always been the idea present in the minds of the enlightened Europeans (not to mention rulers of holy empires), and that the present process of integration is only a natural realisation of a spiritual condition called European culture. Leaving alone the question whether it makes sense to speak of European culture in the times when the classical model of education has largely gone out of use, we nevertheless have to have a closer look at the origin of our contemporary situation and ask ourselves the uneasy question whether the Europe we are talking about here, the Europe of the last fifty years, the post-war Europe of market economy and post-colonial nostalgia has been, in fact, European at all. [fragm. tekstu]