ABSTRACT
“Since [this] formalist dilemma … in which radical formal strategies render the processes of representation so arbitrary that they run the risk of lapsing into meaningless tautology … ultimately implies a shift in the location of the responsibility for meaning-making, and since it has engaged — at one point or another — all of the modernist arts, it might be useful here to extend the notion of the subject to describe both the ‘artistic subject’ (the ‘maker’ — writer, filmmaker, painter, etc.) and the ‘aesthetic subject’ (the ‘perceiver’); this makes clearer the idea of a general shift of meaning-making responsibility along an axis of subjects intersected by the art object … to reinscribe a new artistic voice [into … film] while escaping the cinematic solipsism exemplified by the films of Brakhage (just as Beckett had to escape the solipsism implicit in an intensified authorial voice). … A new and fragmented artistic subject … simultaneously intensifying and contradicting a unified subjectivity to the point of disintegration could only become clear though an analysis recognizing neither the Voice7 of the theoretician nor the ‘eye’ of the filmmaker as privileged or transcendent subject, but insists on their inscription — on all levels — as operative factors in theoretical and cinematic discourse” (Deke Dusinberre, “Consistent oxymoron: Peter Gidal's rhetorical strategy,” Screen, Summer 1977).
