Fold upon fold: figurative logics and critical priorities in Nicole Brenez's work on Abel Ferrara

This article is a study of aspects of the criticism, and critical methodology, of Nicole Brenez, taking her book Abel Ferrara (2007) as its primary text. Abel Ferrara was translated by Adrian Martin, who has done a great deal to champion Brenez's work in the English-speaking world. I am fully in agreement with Martin about Brenez's significance, but I find that he sometimes appears to overstate the distinctiveness of her methodology. He has written that she practices 'a mode of film criticism that calls itself figural analysis' (Martin 2015); in what follows I shall argue that, rather than representing a wholly distinct 'mode of film criticism', Brenez's work has affinities with that of critics in the tradition associated with Movie, specifically V.F. Perkins (affinities that I have not seen commented upon elsewhere). But, though both Brenez and Perkins give a central role to notions of synthesis, their critical priorities are somewhat different, and I shall also indicate some areas of divergence, which could be said to hinge around ideas of credibility and the importance of the viewer's uninterrupted immersion in the fictional world.