Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jete, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour

Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films-Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jet e and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour-postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.

Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.

Author: Carol Mavor
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/25/2012
Pages: 193
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.60w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780822352716

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2013

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.