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Exquisite, image-filled ruminations on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction. First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts 1
Author's Note I. A Sewing Needle inside a Plastic and Rubber Suction Cup Sitting on a Watch Spring; or, An Object for Seeing Nothing 17
1. Elegy of Milk, in Black and Blue: The Bruising of La Chambre claire 22
2. "A" is for Alice, for Amnesia, for Anamnesis: A Fairy Tale (Almost Blue) Called La Jetée 53
3. Happiness with a Long Piece of Black Leader: Chris Marker's Sans soleil 77
Author's Note II. She Wrote Me 111
4. "Summer Was inside the Marble": Alain Resnais's and Magurite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour 114
List of Illustrations 161
Notes 169
Index 191

About the Author

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, all also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades."--Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France "Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It's avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass's extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book's super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense."-Brian Dillon, Art Review, October 2012 "Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play. Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage, an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience, and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field. It resonates with - and pays tribute to - such key art historical works as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass's prose poem, On Being Blue." - Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights "[T]he overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, tis elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text... a joy to read ... a veritable feast for the eyes." - Lucy Scholes, TLS "Black and Blue is an unabashedly first person, nonprescriptive account from one such reader-viewer, one that seeks to combine "catastrophe with frivolity" in its quest to reveal something of the link between private and public affect by staging a struggle between them." - Dylan J. Montanari, Los Angeles Review of Books "Black and Blue is a thought-provoking belletristic work. At times the style reaches the heights of Mavors' beloved Barthes and Farber. Also, many of the contemporary artists discussed will be unfamiliar to readers within film studies, and will no doubt provide additional ways of thinking and angles of inquiry. It's also worth noting that Black and Blue is beautifully presented, with ample screenshots taken from the films, and colour plates of the other artworks Mavor discusses." - Scope, February 2014