Naslov
Moonstone: The Cinema that Always Was

Autori
Janica Tomić

Vrsta, podvrsta
Radovi u časopisima, znanstveni

Izvornik
Badley, Linda, Mosse, Gitte i Dagsdóttir, Úlfhildur (ur.) North of the Sun: Critical Approaches to Sjón. Routledge (2023)

Status rada
Poslan

Ključne riječi
Sjón, Moonstone, heterotopia, cinema, counter-memory

Sažetak
Moonstone: The Cinema that Always Was This chapter explores the cinematic Otherness in and of the novel Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (2013) and the different functions cinema plays as an instance of Foucauldian heterotopia: a “counter-site“ in which the real sites “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted, ” that is “at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, ” in its relation to the prison, hospital and other “heterotopias of deviation“ (Foucault) in the novel. Sjón refers to Moonstone as his most autobiographical book, with the protagonist Manni Stein “[having] much in common with the adolescent I once was – the rebellion, the movie mania, being at odds with society.“ It is fitting that his cinephilia turns towards early cinema, its anti-narrative stance, the love of experiment and (proto)avant- garde interest in cinema as a “philosophic toy“ and its “ludic sovereignty“ over the laws of space and time (Michelson ; Elsaesser). A commonly fetishized piece of early film history, Louis Feuillades’ serial film Les Vampires (reproduced in the novel even in photographs, disrupting the illusion of a linear narrative) pairs an anarchist tale of an eponymous criminal group terrorizing the Parisian bourgeoisie with an appropriately non-classical form. From the novel's opening, a close-up fellatio, zooming out gradually into a contextualized view of the scene, Moonstone narrates Otherness in analogy to cinema. A subjective point of view (sexual acts, the vivid, sensual language of enjoyment) is contrasted with normative language of medical, legal, and national discourses it challenges, up to the fatal intercourse with a Danish sailor that becomes the object of both film censorship and parallel disciplinary mechanisms in Moonstone's montage. By adding the invention of film to the tectonic social changes of 1918 (from the eruption of Katla to the Spanish Flu pandemics, World War I, and Icelandic independence), Moonstone uses cinema to rewrite the grand history of the 20th century, bringing to mind novels such as The Boxer's Dementia (La démence du boxer, 1992). But the novel’s coming-of-age tale in which the cinema functions as a heterotopia, shaping the subjectivity of young social outcasts, will be put primarily in the context of cinematic history, a lineage consisting of classics such as François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups, 1959), Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953), and Bo Widerberg’s All Things Fair (Lust och fägring stor, 1995).

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

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