Towards a new model for approaching conflict images: glimpsing war through Hito Steyerl’s political cinema
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Hito Steyerl’s 2007 artist’s film Lovely Andrea is organized around Steyerl’s unlikely search for a lost erotic image of herself taken in the style of Japanese rope bondage (nawa shibari) in 1987, when she was a film student in Japan. Lasting for 30 minutes, the film is shot in a lo-fi documentary style and is replete with images appropriated from across time, space and media. Several of these remixed images are highly charged documents of conflict, and relate most prominently to the so-called ‘War on Terror’, though the film also refers to other global conflicts and inequalities, from gendered violence to transnational histories of policing and wartime imprisonment. Throughout Lovely Andrea, Steyerl refrains from fully representing or contextualizing the violence she evokes: conflict images are deployed fleetingly, flashing up just long enough to be glimpsed. The film’s decontextualized circulation of these images is evocative of the dislocated...
Source: Screen
Author: Lucy Bollington
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4213042992