ABSTRACT

Radical comedy liberates spectators from their compulsive attachments to volatile objects. In that spirit, modernist film theorists placed their hopes in the raucous, world-shattering laughter elicited by violent slapstick comedies to explode the crises of the present and their foothold in habituated perception. But what remains of laughter’s revolutionary modernist project in the twenty-first century? In this article, I rethink the concept of cine-genre to pursue tropes of uncanny, uncontrollable laughter that have proliferated across all genres of contemporary cinema. Conventional genre provides an aesthetic contract of solid expectations (brokered between audiences, media-makers, and producers) to sustain the hope for what’s possible through the repetition of what’s imaginable. But in times of escalating crisis, genre itself falls apart, spawning perverse hybrid mutations. Cinema, I argue, in its renewed capacity for dialectical ‘hybridity’ can give rise to radical forms of embodied perception and affective experience that slam the brakes on the nightmare of postmodern carnival and reveal new ways forward toward a less dystopian future.

摘要

激进喜剧将观众从他们对易变物体的强迫性依恋中解放出来。本着这种精神，现代主义电影理论家将他们的希望寄托在暴力闹剧喜剧所引发的喧闹、震撼世界的笑声中，以打破当下的危机和他们在习惯性感知中的立足点。但是笑声在 21 世纪的革命性现代主义计划还剩下什么？在这篇文章中，我重新思考了电影类型的概念，以追求在当代电影所有类型中激增的离奇、无法控制的笑声。传统流派提供了一种具有坚实期望的美学契约（在观众、媒体制作人和制作人之间进行调解），通过重复可想象的事情来维持对可能发生的事情的希望。但在危机升级的时期，流派本身就分崩离析，产生不正当的杂交突变。我认为，电影在其辩证“混合”的新能力中可以产生激进形式的具身感知和情感体验，从而为后现代狂欢节的噩梦踩刹车，并揭示通往不那么反乌托邦未来的新途径。