The lessons we learn in Seeing from Scratch: Fifteen Lessons with Godard extend beyond an understanding of Godard and make us rethink the way in which moving images can produce critique in the twenty-first century. Seeing from Scratch should inspire students and teachers of film alike in ways that will surely surprise them. Read a 20-page sample in a stunning electronic-only design Taking as his starting point fifteen characteristically penetrating epigrams by Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Dienst invites us to trace a new path through some of the fundamental questions of cinema. Godard has never stopped offering lessons about seeing and thinking, always insisting that we have to learn how to start over. By starting over ‘from scratch’, Godard challenges us to rethink our ideas about embodied perception, material form and the politics of making images. Less a commentary on Godard’s oeuvre than an outline of a Godardian pedagogy, Seeing from Scratch offers a theoretical exercise book for students, teachers and practitioners alike, pursuing unexpectedly far-reaching ways to think through images. Along the way we encounter, in this brief, accessible essay, ideal for classroom use, a wide range of thinkers whose ideas are put to practical use working through the intellectual and aesthetic questions and challenges Godard’s epigrams suggest. Readers are thus introduced to some of the essential currents in canonical and contemporary thinking on the image, from Kant to Klee, Reverdy to Rancière and Brecht to Bresson – not in the abstract, but as part of the book's practical approach to intellectual problem solving. In its conversational tone, return to fundaments and practical pedagogical approach, Seeing from Scratch is an essay for the media age in the mould of John Berger's Ways of Seeing from the 1970s: a new way of discussing the theory and practice of images and the film image. A companion piece, ‘The Postcard Game’, presents a scene from an imaginary classroom, where a stack of postcards—like those found throughout Godard’s work—provokes a spiralling series of questions about images, texts and the manifold pathways of the creative process, providing a template for similar new kinds of pedagogical activity and discussion. Like Cinesthesia in the Theory and Practice series, Seeing from Scratch is being published in a pandemic-era electronic edition only. With dozens of colour screen grabs peppering the striking black-and-white typography, reminiscent perhaps of certain film essay books from the past, Seeing from Scratch makes use of all the design possibilities offered by the electronic format. Available for individuals worldwide as an $8 Kindle (now a free app for desktop and laptop computers) and for libraries as a PDF from the library e-book platform ProQuest. Please recommend acquisition to your librarian! Do you have a project for the caboose Kino-Agora series, alongside books by Aumont, Stern, Eisenstein, Shambu, Gaurdault & Marion, Kozloff and Dienst? One in particular which would benefit from the series’ new electronic-only format? Send us a proposal! November 2020. 130 pp., 57 colour illustrations. Electronic library edition, ISBN 978-1-927852-37-8. Kindle, $8. Richard Dienst is Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good and Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. His essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolt Brecht and cultural theory have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Praise for Richard Dienst’s Seeing from Scratch: Fifteen Lessons with Godard: Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard arrives on our virtual bookshelves at the perfect time. Never have we needed to rethink how we teach and learn about images more than we do now, a time when we are buried beneath bewildering imagery and when higher education is being transformed in dispiriting ways before our very eyes. Richard Dienst offers us a series of provocations infused with a wit and intelligence equal to that of Jean-Luc Godard, whose work is the inspiration for this ambitious attempt to rebuild a pedagogy of images from the ground up. It should inspire students and teachers of film alike in ways that will surely surprise them. — Christopher Pavsek, Simon Fraser University, author of The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge and Tahimik In Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard, Richard Dienst teaches us how to see and thereby think through the Swiss filmmaker’s cinematic imaginary. Combining his acute critical lens with a more playful example from a postcard game, Dienst illuminates Godard’s strategic deployment of a system of montage in which a careful selection of images is set in motion, generating a series of profound meditations. Dienst persuasively demonstrates how images, even when isolated, are never alone but exist in complex relationships with each other, forming ever-changing constellations. Seeing from Scratch traces the evolution of the nonagenarian’s image theory from the 1960s to more recent iterations in The Image Book (2018) or Goodbye to Language (2014). The lessons we learn from Dienst extend beyond an understanding of Godard and make us rethink the way in which moving images can produce critique in the twenty-first century. — Nora M. Alter, Temple University, author of The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction |
Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard – Richard Dienst – $8 Kindle
Out now, only from caboose
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