Death and the Aesthetic Sublime: A Comparative Study

(Hardback)

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Employing the modern aesthetics of Burke and Kant, as well as the postmodern relay of Lyotard, this book delineates the elements of sublime experience through exploring the enigmatic cinematic design of Chris Markers film La Jete. Through its enigmatic cinematic design, with a masterful arrangement of still frames in the entire diegesis, the empathic and imaginative audience cannot help but ponder on what it is to remember. When the illusion of movement is deliberately eliminated, the film presents the profound space of timeless moments, ubiquitous and yet ungraspable, the unpresentable and yet the viscerally felt. Jung Kwon argues that this film is a contemplative practice of memory and time, simultaneously in the protagonist and the viewer, in which lies the cinematic vision of Marker. What connects the frozen moments and creates the sense of time passing that inevitably halts at the inescapable barrier of time called death if not memory in its spiraling loop that defines who we are as experiencing and suffering being

Author Bio

Jung Kwon is lecturer in philosophy at the California State University Dominguez Hills, USA.