THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION

THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION by Catherine Grant

A VIDEO TRIBUTE TO THE WORK OF FILM SCHOLAR ELIZABETH COWIE.

A pioneer in psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to cinema studies and author of two important books in our field (Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, 1997, and Recording Reality, Desiring the Real, 2011), Professor Elizabeth Cowie recently retired from the post she had held in Film Studies at the University of Kent since 1982. I was very fortunate to work alongside her in that department between 1998 and 2008. I enjoyed and learned so much from that experience that I wanted, personally, to mark this moment of transition in her work with a tribute to it, one especially fuelled by the hope that she will have even more time and space in which to watch and write about movies and the visual arts in future.

To make this tribute I asked a few people to whom Elizabeth also means a lot, either as a colleague or as an advisor in the distant or recent past, to pick a favourite short passage from her work, and to record themselves reading it. They sent me the recordings and I crafted a video around them. Thanks to them, and of course to Elizabeth, for the inspiration.

ANDREW KLEVAN chose to read from Elizabeth Cowie’s ‘Figuring the Fetish’, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 267-8, His reading is accompanied by a remix of Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930).

CHRISTINE EVANS chose to read from Elizabeth Cowie’s ‘Fantasia’, Representing the Woman,  p. 163. Her reading is accompanied by a remix of The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949).

CORAL HOUTMAN also chose to read from ‘Fantasia’, Representing the Woman, p. 149. Her reading is accompanied by a remix of Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942).

SARAH WOOD chose to read from Elizabeth Cowie’s ‘Documenting the Real’, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pp. 121-2. Her reading is accompanied by a remix of Let There Be Light (John Huston, 1946).

MUSIC transformed from Cylinder 9 by CHRIS ZABRISKIE as shared at the Free Music Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chris_Zabriskie/2014010103336111/Chris_Zabriskie_-_Cylinders_-_09_-_Cylinder_Nine

VIDEO by CATHERINE GRANT, 2016

FOR STUDY PURPOSES ONLY