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<div align="center"><font face="Garamond">UNSW Media Film and Theatre
Seminars</font></div>
<div align="center"><font face="Garamond">Wednesday 10 May
2006</font></div>
<div align="center"><font face="Garamond">5 p.m. Webster
Building<font size="-1" color="#000000"><b>
327</b></font></font></div>
<div align="center"><font face="Garamond" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div>
<div align="center"><font face="Garamond" size="+3"
color="#FF0000"><b>Preposterous Figurality</b></font></div>
<div align="center"><font face="Garamond" size="+2"
color="#FF0000"><i><b>Comic cinema and bad
metaphor</b></i></font></div>
<div align="center"><font face="Garamond" size="+3"
color="#0000FF"><b>Lisa Trahair</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Garamond" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div>
<div><font face="Garamond" size="-1"
color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">From its
birth, the<i> magic</i> of cinema has generally been understood to lie
not just in its capacity to 'capture' movement but also in its ability
to defy the laws of the physical universe. Cinema can reverse
time, conjure things from nothing, resuscitate the dead, or kill the
living. This magic is nowhere more evident than in comic montage. Its
pa(i)ring of images that stand on opposite sides of the universe, its
displacements and condensations, involve more than Kuleshov's splicing
together of images of people on Moscow streets with images of the
White House to produce a 'creative geography'. Following Lyotard's
insistence that the physicality of condensation implies both
compression<i> and</i> a change in the state of things (as when gas
becomes liquid), this paper explores comedy's reconfiguring of space,
its creation of new spaces that engender an infinity of images which
can never quite be contained and which regenerate themselves
endlessly.</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2"
color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+2" color="#000000">In
particular, the paper investigates the relation between the figurative
and figurality in silent slapstick by examining the comic deployment
of birth images in Buster Keaton's film<i> The Navigator</i> (1924).
It considers the contrasting articulations of metaphor proposed by
structuralist (Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan) and
post-structuralist (Lyotard, Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida) thinkers,
in order to conceptualise how the operations of the primary process
shift the register of cinematic enunciation from the demonstration of
meaning to the exhibition of comic spectacle.</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+1" color="#000000"><i>Lisa
Trahair is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at
the University of New South Wales. This paper is taken from the last
chapter of her forthcoming book</i> The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense
and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick<i> (SUNY Press,
2007).</i></font></div>
<div><br></div>
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<div><font face="Garamond">Dr James Donald<br>
Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences<br>
Professor of Film Studies, School of Media, Film and Theatre<br>
University of New South Wales<br>
Sydney<br>
NSW 2052<br>
Australia<br>
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