Introduction. Flesh and its reversibility ; Defining the baroque ; 'Good looking' ; A cinema of baroque flesh -- 1. Flesh, cinema and the baroque : the aesthetics of reversibility. Baroque vision and painting the flesh ; Baroque flesh ; Analogous embodiments : the film's body ; Baroque vision and cinema ; Summation : face to face-feeling baroque deixis -- 2. Knots of sensation : co-extensive space and a cinema of the passions. Synaesthesia, phenomenology, and the senses ; Cinesthesia and (...) the Bel composto ; A passionate baroque : emotion, excess, and co-extensive space ; Assault and absorption : cruel baroque ; Summation : beside oneself -- 3. Baroque skin/semiotics. Chiasm : language and experience ; Baroque poetic language and the seventeenth-century infinite ; Baroque luxury ; Skin-deep : baroque texturology ; Tickles : baroque wit ; Summation : cine-mimesis -- 4. One hand films the other : baroque haptics. Touching-touched ; Haptic visuality and the baroque ; Baroque haptics and cinema ; Analogical assemblages : Baroque databases ; Summation: TEXXTURE -- Conclusion : or the baroque 'Beauty of the act'. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a unified account of cinematic representation as primary depiction. On this account, cinematic representation is a distinctive form of depiction, unique in its capacity to depict temporal properties. I then explore the consequences of this account for the much-contested question of whether cinema is an independent representational art form. I show that it is, and that Scruton’s argument to the contrary relies on an erroneous conception of cinematic representation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

This article examines popular cinema’s interactions with digital culture, focusing on cinema and social structure. A product of technological and social developments, digital culture has introduced the creation of cyberspace, the emergence and spread of social media, and the formation of virtual communities. This article focuses on a specific period (1980 – 2010) to examine the evolution in cinema of portrayals of digital culture. The analysis includes four influential films: WarGames (1983, by John Badham), Perfect Blue (1997, by Satoshi Kon), (...) Pulse (2001, by Kiroshi Kurosawa), and Life in a Day (2011, by Kevin Macdonald, Loressa Clisby, and Tegan Bukowski). The article provides a guide to popular cinema's interaction with and use of the possibilities offered by digital culture, revealing how the four selected films reflect digital culture themes. Each film demonstrates different aspects and dynamics of digital culture at a particular time, offering a unique look at that period's social and technological landscape through its portrayal of technological developments, human relations, cultural values, and social norms. Each film evaluates the impact of the digitization process on cinema from different perspectives, depicting how cinema adapts and responds to technological changes. (shrink)

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avo...

The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflections? In the (...) first part of this book, Paisley Livingston surveys positions and arguments surrounding the cinema's philosophical value. He raises criticisms of bold theses in this area and defends a moderate view of film's possible contributions to philosophy. In the second part of the book he defends an intentionalist approach that focuses on the film-makers' philosophical background assumptions, sources, and aims. Livingston outlines intentionalist interpretative principles as well as an account of authorship in cinema. The third part of the book exemplifies this intentionalist approach with reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Livingston explores the connection between Bergman's work and the Swedish director's primary philosophical source-a treatise in philosophical psychology authored by the Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading this book was a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he "built on this ground." With reference to materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive, Livingston shows how Bergman took up Kaila's topics in his cinematic explorations of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and the problem of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Michael Haneke is one of the most important directors working in Europe today, with films such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000), and Hidden (2005) interrogating modern ethical dilemmas with forensic clarity and merciless insight. Haneke's films frequently implicate both the protagonists and the audience in the making of their misfortunes, yet even in the barren nihilism of The Seventh Continent (1989) and Time of the Wolf (2003) a dark strain of optimism emerges, releasing each from its terrible and (...) inescapable guilt. It is this contingent and unlikely possibility that we find in Haneke's cinema: a utopian Europe. This collection celebrates, explicates, and sometimes challenges the worldview of Haneke's films. It examines the director's central themes and preoccupations--bourgeois alienation, modes and critiques of spectatorship, the role of the media--and analyzes otherwise marginalized aspects of his work, such as the function of performance and stardom, early Austrian television productions, the romanticism of The Piano Teacher (2001), and the 2007 shot-for-shot remake of Funny Games. (shrink)

This article examines the breathing and breathless body in Camille-Vidal Naquet’s Sauvage. Respiration has been characterised by Peter Sloterdijk, in the first volume of his Sphären trilogy, as the first extension of the womb. The air we breathe is a “nobject” that escapes the subject-object relation, like the placenta before it. Sauvage engages the respiratory, alongside the placental and the acoustic, as three pre-oral “nobjects” for exploring what Leo Bersani has termed the body’s “somatic receptivity”. Duration, framing, lighting, and camera (...) movements cultivate a spectator’s receptivity to these “nobjects” and participate in acts of sphere formation. This provides a framework for thinking about how cinema itself might function as a “nobject”: a connective medium or sphere that supports and augments a subject, providing a field of protection and attention. However, the film’s presentation of breathlessness also signals a blocked receptivity, an inability to take in, introducing friction and resistance to the discourse of immediacy and exchange that characterises philosophical reflections on breath. Breathlessness has implications for thinking about bodily autonomy and forms of freedom that speak to the queer politics of Sauvage, as well as questions about movement and stillness, animation and lifelessness, that reflect back on the medium of film itself. (shrink)

Resumo Na entrevista ficcional que se segue, as ideias de Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos sobre as artes de representação serão aplicadas a aspectos relevantes do cinema. Du Bos argumenta que, normalmente, as obras de ficção cinematográfica são projectadas para dar origem a “paixões artificiais”, que têm a função de fornecer alívio ao tédio, sem as consequências negativas que muitas actividades alternativas têm. Também será considerada a questão, se os filmes têm um significado filosófico. O resultado é uma perspectiva desconhecida, do (...) princípio do século XVIII, em algumas temáticas contemporâneas. Palavras-chave : catarse, cinema apocalíptico, Du Bos, emoção, paixões artificiais, paradoxo do afecto negativoIn the following fictional interview, the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ ideas about the representational arts are applied to relevant aspects of the cinema. Du Bos argues that normally works of cinematic fiction are designed to give rise to ‘artificial passions’ that have the function of providing relief from boredom without the negative consequences that many alternative pursuits would have. Du Bos’ solution to the paradox of negative affect and his position on Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis are also set forth in the interview. The question of whether films have philosophical significance is also taken up. The upshot is a somewhat unfamiliar early 18th-century perspective on some contemporary issues. Keywords: apocalyptic cinema, artificial passions, catharsis, Du Bos, emotion, paradox of negative affect. (shrink)

Resumo Neste artigo, tentar-se-á reconstruir e defender a noção de “especificidade média” que se refere ao cinema. Começar-se-á por discutir a ontologia de um certo tipo de exibição visual, geralmente encontrada em conexão com uma vasta gama de obras cinematográficas. Argumentar-se-á que estas exibições têm uma natureza essencial ou real. Obras construídas em torno de tais exibições estão aptas a manifestar certas qualidades e poderes peculiares. Assim, o “meio de cinema” consiste em parte, num tipo particular de meio veicular e, (...) de várias propriedades nem sempre manifestas distintas dele. Ao discutir-se o conceito de “meio”, considera-se também um sentido em que esta noção é negligenciada, a saber, que as competências e habilidades pessoais operam uma mediação entre a concepção de uma exibição e a sua produção. Prosseguir-se-á, argumentando, que apesar dos defeitos da “especificidade média”, proveniente de uma versão da teoria clássica do cinema, o cinema como uma forma de arte ou corpo de obras de arte, é ou tem um “meio especial” dotado de distintas propriedades artísticas. Palavras-chave : essencialismo, medium specificity, medium, obra, ontologia do cinema, valor artísticoIn this paper, I try to reconstruct and defend the notion of medium specificity as it relates to cinema. I begin by discussing the ontology of a certain kind of visual display commonly found in connection with a vast range of candidate cinematic works. These displays, I argue, have an essential or real nature. Works constructed around such displays are apt to manifest certain qualities and powers peculiar to displays of that kind. Thus cinema’s medium consists in part of a particular type of vehicular medium and various not always manifested properties distinctive to it. In discussing the concept of medium, I also consider a neglected sense of this term, namely, personal abilities and skills that mediate between one’s designing a certain display and one’s producing a matching object or result. I go on to argue that, despite the defects of classic film theory’s version of medium specificity, it is true that cinema, as artform or body of artworks, is or has a special medium endowed with distinctive artistic properties. Keywords : artistic value, essentialism, medium specificity, medium, ontology of cinema, work. (shrink)

This special issue responds to the current discourse on cinema and education from a philosophical point of view. Considering the fact that young people worldwide are watching films and series via their smartphones or personal computers, we here explore the educative aspects of this popular activity. Does this wide-ranging habit mis-educate the next generation? Or does cinema carry a potential for ethical-political education, parallel to the ancient Greek tragedies and the modernist Bildungsroman? The authors of this special issue deliberate this (...) question by exploring the intersection between cinema and philosophy and the potential powers of cinematic education. (shrink)

Film theory and its emphasis on political and ideological readings of films dominated much of cinema studies in the '70s and '80s. Since then, in response to what some view as the shortcomings of theoretical approaches, a variety of other methods have emerged or reemerged. In many ways, as Nico Baumbach argues, "Anti-Grand Theory" has won the day but its victory is, in part, based on misreadings or simplifications of '70s film theory. In particular, Baumbach views contemporary critical approaches to (...) film as abandoning the crucial and productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. Baumbach does not advocate a return to the orthodoxies of the seventies but rather reads the work of Ranciere, Badiou, and Agamben as providing new ways of thinking about the history of film theory and how film creates its own way of thinking about politics. Moreover, at a time when digital technologies are asking us to think of film and the film image in new ways, the work of these thinkers once again asks, "What is Cinema?" but in a more expansive sense that can help us account for transformations in how moving images are produced, distributed, and exhibited in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In the 1910s, New York suffragette Electra Sparks wrote a series of essays in theMoving Picture Newsthat advocated for cine-therapy treatments for pregnant women. Film was, in her view, the great democratizer of beautiful images, providing high-cultural access to the city's poor. These positive ‘mental pictures’ were important for her because, she claimed, in order to produce an attractive, healthy child, the mother must be exposed to quality cultural material. Sparks's championing of cinema during its ‘second birth’ was founded upon (...) the premise of New Thought. This metaphysical Christian doctrine existed alongside the self-help and esoteric publishing domains and testified, above all, to the possibility of the ‘mind-cure’ of the body through the positive application of ‘mental pictures’. Physiologically, their method began best in the womb, where the thoughts of the mother were of utmost importance: the eventual difference between birthing an Elephant Man or an Adonis. This positive maternal impression was commonplace in New Thought literature; it was Sparks's innovation to apply it to cinema. Investigating Sparks's film theory, practice and programming reveals her to be a harbinger of the abiding analogy between mind and motion picture that occupies film theorists to this day. (shrink)

Introduction -- How orphans believe: Deleuze, national cinema and Majidi's The color of paradise. Deleuze: on realism and movement-Image -- Deleuze: neorealism (and a brief analysis of Kiarostami's life and nothing more) -- Majidi: The color of paradise -- Deleuze and Majidi: the faith of Mohammad -- "What are filmmakers for in needy times?" On Heidegger and Kiarostami's Taste of cherry -- An overview of Kiarostami's Taste of cherry and the question of the medium -- Heidegger on art and truth (...) -- Heidegger and Kiarostami -- Committed perception: Merleau-Ponty and Children of heaven -- Carroll on emotions -- Merleau-Ponty and embodied Imagination -- Censorship and Children of heaven -- Perception and ideology. Regarding you: Lacanian gaze and ethics in Kiarostami's Close-up -- A brief overview of Close-up -- Misreading Lacan's gaze -- The three orders: real, symbolic and imaginary -- The Lacanian gaze -- Gaze in Close-up -- The ethical function of the gaze in Close-up -- Stolen Jouissance: Lacan, feminism and Meshkini's The day I became a woman. A brief overview of The day I became a woman -- Hava: the birth of desire -- From Hava to Ahoo: from demand to desire and jouissance -- Traversing the fantasy: from Hoora to Meshkini -- Meshkini: the fourth woman of the story -- Deafening silence: Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles can fly and marginal politics -- Bahman Ghobadi and Turtles can fly -- The abject -- Can Ghobadi speak? National cinema and national mission, once again -- Hegemonic movement: on the way to the Green Movement -- The future of Iranian cinema is the future of the Green Movement. (shrink)

Cinema no abrigo: encontros, gestos e acontecimento Resumo: Este texto é fruto de reflexões sobre nossa vivência com o Projeto de Extensão “Educação, Cinema, Outros Territórios” no Lar de Idosos ‘Abrigo Tiradentes’, em Minas Gerais. Um objetivo específico do Projeto é realizar sessões de cinema junto aos idosos em diferentes territórios. A metodologia e a avaliação das ações são compreendidas como um gesto de acompanhamento do Programa de Extensão, amparado na investigação cartográfica, prática metodológica pertinente para o acompanhamento de processos (...) em curso e a produção de subjetividades. As questões que nos colocamos para esta reflexão são: o que pode o cinema num Abrigo de Idosos? Quais conexões poderíamos arquitetar entre cinema, linguagem e acontecimento? O que essas pessoas experimentam com os filmes? O que poderíamos exercitar, a partir do conceito de acontecimento, no pensamento? Buscamos, por meio deste ensaio, um exercício de pensar “acontecimentos” no nosso encontro com os moradores e com os filmes durante as sessões de cinema no Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Palavras-chave: Acontecimento; Cinema; Idoso. Cinema in the shelter: meetings, gestures and events Abstract: This text is the result of reflections on our experience with the “Education, Cinema, Other Territories” Extension Project at the Lar de Idosos Abrigo Tiradentes, in Minas Gerais. A specific objective of the Project is to hold cinema sessions with the elderly in different territories. The methodology and the evaluation of the actions are understood as a gesture of monitoring the Extension Program, supported by cartographic research, methodological practice relevant to the monitoring of ongoing processes and the production of subjectivities. The questions we ask ourselves for this reflection are: what can cinema do in a Shelter for the Elderly? What connections could we make between cinema, language and event? What do these people experience with films? What could we exercise, based on the concept of event, in thought? Through this essay, we seek an exercise in thinking about “events” in our meeting with the residents and with the films during the cinema sessions at Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Key-words: Event; Cinema; Elderly. Cine en el retiro: encuentros, gestos y acontecimientos Resumen: Este texto es el resultado de reflexiones sobre nuestra experiencia con el Proyecto de Extensión “Educación, Cine, Otros Territorios” en el Lar de Idosos Abrigo Tiradentes, en Minas Gerais. Un objetivo específico del Proyecto es realizar sesiones de cine con personas mayores en diferentes territorios. La metodología y la evaluación de las acciones se entienden como un gesto de seguimiento del Programa de Extensión, con el apoyo de la investigación cartográfica, la práctica metodológica relevante para el seguimiento de los procesos en curso y la producción de subjetividades. Las preguntas que nos hacemos para esta reflexión son: ¿qué puede hacer el cine en un refugio para ancianos? ¿Qué conexiones podríamos hacer entre cine, idioma y evento? ¿Qué experimentan estas personas con las películas? ¿Qué podríamos ejercer, basado en el concepto de evento, en el pensamiento? A través de este ensayo, buscamos un ejercicio para pensar acerca de los "eventos" en nuestra reunión con los residentes y con las películas durante las sesiones de cine en Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Palabras-claves: Acontecimentos; Cine; Ancianos. Data de registro: 19/03/2020 Data de aceite: 28/08/2020. (shrink)

Introduction : cinema, memory, modernity: the return of memory as film -- No escape from time : memory and redemption in the international postwar art film -- The "crisis" of memory : "traumatic identity" in the contemporary memory film -- "Global memory" : cinema as lingua franca and the commodification of the image -- The eye of history : memory, surveillance and ethicality in the contemporary art film -- "Prosthetic memory" and transnational cinema : globalized identity and narrative recursivity in (...) City of God -- Conclusion: remembering to forget: the catachreses of modernity. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between technology and aesthetics in contemporary Hollywood, using experiments with frame rates and shutter speeds to show how deep, systemic changes in cinematic technologies can alter our relation to the image’s referential functions. For eighty years, cinema’s registration of movement relied upon a standardized frame rate and shutter speed, meaning that cinema’s sense of motion was constant. With the proliferation of ever more powerful digital capture systems, however, these formerly inflexible options are made variable and (...) put into question. By changing the registration of movement, the high frame rate experiments in The Hobbit and the open-shutter cinematography of Miami Vice offer an estranged relation to cinema’s presentation of worldly motion. I argue here that this altered sense of the image’s referentiality is well suited to depictions of our contemporary reality, which, being profoundly bound up in digital technologies, seems similarly disorienting, estranging, and aesthetic. In the first section of the article, I trace out the origins of this style of movement in the logics of the corporate tech industry, which rolls out continual upgrades in audio-visual technologies in order to justify new product lines. According to industry rhetoric, these upgrades ostensibly lead to a heightened sense of realism, but viewer response has been torn over whether this new sense of motion is realistic or unrealistic. In the second section, I closely analyze The Hobbit and the recent work of Michael Mann to show how established film form shifts in relation to this problem in digital cinema’s representation of worldly movement. In The Hobbit’s case, film form is altered in order to assimilate the HFR’s unfamiliar sense of motion, but the cinematography in Miami Vice embraces a productive aesthetic estrangement which is both realistic and hyperaestheticized, leaving the divide between immanent experience and technologized disorientation an open question. (shrink)

This essay examines Gaspar Noë's film, Enter the Void, in light of the work of both Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Arguing that the film shows to viewers the 'void' that separates subjects from objects, the essay also considers Noë's film in the light of drug literature and the altered states induced by cinema and describe by Anna Powell. Finally, the essay proposes that Enter the Void is a work of 'unbecoming' cinema, which in turn points to expansion of cinematic (...) form through the use of digital technologies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I here read the Iranian film Hit the Road through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. In doing so, I hope to illuminate the triadic link between cinema, philosophy and paideia (ethical-political education). To explore, I adopt a philosophical methodology with the double ambition to reveal the latent pedagogies of the film and to acquire insights on the distinctiveness of a Badiouan conception of cinema. My questions are to what degree and in what ways cinematic experience can (...) be said to promote ethical-political formation. I start by portraying Badiou’s cinematic philosophy. Next, I expose how Hit the Road confronts us with a hidden real. Third, I close the paper by considering Badiou’s idea of cinema as an influential form of ethical-political education. (shrink)

In Selfless Cinema?, Sarah Cooper maps out the power relations of making, and viewing, documentaries in ethical terms. The ethics of filmmaking are often examined in largely legalistic terms, dominated by issues of consent, responsibility, and participantse(tm) or film-makerse(tm) rights, but Cooper approaches four representative French film-makers e" Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Raymond Depardon, and Agns Varda e" in a far less juridical way, drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that, in spite of Levinase(tm)s iconoclastic, anti-ocular (...) thinking, his concept of visage is richly applicable to film, and especially to documentary. (shrink)

Introduction: cinema, globalization and the posthuman object -- Consuming objects -- Exotic objects -- Part objects: war, disavowal, and the logic of substitution -- Objects of desire -- Posthuman objects.

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy (...) started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him. Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought. (shrink)

In this article I propose the concept of ‘non-cinema’. The term points to that which is excluded from cinema, and accordingly I seek to explore the various reasons for these exclusions, in particular the political/ideological ones, together with how these exclusions are manifested on an aesthetic level. Instead of André Bazin's founding question regarding what is cinema, therefore, this essay asks what cinema is not – and why. This question is of redoubled importance in an age of technological change: not (...) only are nearly all films now not made using the traditional equipment of filmmaking (analogue cameras, linear editing systems, polyester film stock), but nor do they get exhibited in traditional theatrical venues (instead circulating on DVD and related formats, and online). On a related note, increasing numbers of filmmakers actively are moving away from feature filmmaking, e.g. into television. The essay focuses in particular on ‘non-cinematic’ works by Philippine director Khavn de la Cruz and American director Giuseppe Andrews. Formally, I argue that their films deliberately embrace that which is perceived as non-cinematic in order to put forward what Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel might define as a ‘barbarian’ film-philosophical vision of the world, which is reminiscent of Antonio Negri's concept of multitude, and which also has an ethical dimension in that it proposes the inclusion of the overlooked and the dispossessed, and of the darkness that necessarily accompanies the light. (shrink)

This is a philosophical investigation into the differing sensations of time in cinema and photography.

Interactive Cinema explores cinematic practices that work to transform what is often seen as a receptive activity into a participatory, multimedia experience. Combining cutting-edge theory with updated conventional film studies methodologies, Marina Hassapopoulou presses at the conceptual limits of cinema and offers an essential road map to the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary media.

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies remember and represent themselves. In the last quarter century, film has been an important medium in the public debate around the memory of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima; of the Algerian war for independence and of the Spanish Civil War; of the Allende legacy in Chile, the utopian dreams of 1968, and the aborted project of the German Democratic Republic; in identity formation in Palestine and in the African (...) diaspora. Hedges discusses the role of cinema within a global perspective that spans five continents, and proposes an original typology of cultural memory. In the process, she re-evaluates the contributions of major directors and uncovers hitherto neglected yet important works. The author develops her arguments in an approachable style that will encourage readers to rethink their own memories of films and to reflect on the way that cinema contributes to collective and cultural memory. The book's innovative approach should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects. (shrink)

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, (...) Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. (shrink)

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, (...) Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. (shrink)

Com o Sensualismo criam-se condições para uma nova estética, sensível e sensacionalista, que vai transformar as diversas artes (Literatura, Pintura, Escultura) e trazer consigo novas formas de espectáculo: o panorama, a fantasmagoria e o diorama (este, já no início do século XIX). O Eidophusikon, dispositivo de criação e ampliação (sensurround) de novas imagens – um híbrido de teatro e pintura, criado por Philippe de Loutherbourg entre 1781 e 1782 –, insere-se nesse processo e, com a fantasmagoria de Robertson (no final (...) do século XVIII, em França), constitui uma das modalidades do que hoje designamos por pré-cinema. No entanto, apropriando-se das novas condições de representação e de percepção do teatro introduzidas por David Garrick em Drury Lane – que promovem a “absorção” do espectador naquilo que vê em palco –, o Eidophusikon de Loutherbourg (ele próprio, pintor) pode ser considerado um elo em processo da nova concepção de pintura de Diderot – da qual a “promenade Vernet” do Salon de 1767 constitui como que a actualização por escrito. (shrink)

Introduction. The technical art of cinematography is traditionally regarded as a synthetic unity of scientific and technological progress and creativity. The possibility of unlimited copying of movie plots makes it possible to extend the authority of cinema to broad areas of public attention and forms a mass man. At the same time, the fact that cinema is, first of all, an experiment with time, organized by technical means, remains behind the scenes. The purpose of the study. If the core issues (...) of humanity are centered on the problem of life and death, on the problem of mastering and overcoming time, then cinema clearly shows that humanity has a ready-made embodied model of its desire. Methods. The authors use a phenomenological method that allows one to see the temporal fabric behind the “opaque body” of cinema. The eidetic reduction to the foundations of the constructed film plot temporal reality is complemented by the structuralist method of analyzing technical devices and technological methods of the film industry. Scientific novelty of the research. The ontology of the technical art of cinema goes beyond rationality and pragmatics. By launching a special kind of experiment with time, cinema technologies allow the viewer to be present in the bifurcation moments of temporal metamorphoses that connect different temporal modes. The temporal fabric is subject to the plot logic. Results. In cinema, time is constructed by technical means. The nature of this construction allows us to see the layered structure of time, the intersections of time flows, influxes, reverse time orders and stops in time. The cinema technique clearly shows that time barriers are conditional. Conclusions. Cinema dissolves any empirical density, creating gaps in it and transitions to other worlds. The connection between the worlds is carried out by constructed time. Time is taken out of objects and, obeying the course of the narrative, expands the reality of the world. (shrink)

Introduction -- Physical cinema. The end of the other -- The immaterial difference : Werner Herzog revisited -- The reality of the medium. Conceptual realism in Land in trance and I am Cuba -- The work of art in progress : an analysis of delicate crime -- The ethics of desire. The realm of the senses, the ethical imperative and the politics of pleasure -- Hara and Kobayashi's "private documentaries" -- The self-performing auteur : ethics in João César Monteiro.

Cinema against Spectacle -- Introduction -- Cinema against Spectacle -- I. Opening the Window? -- II. Inventing the Cinema? -- III. Filming the Disaster? -- IV. Cutting the Figure? -- V. Changing the Spectator? -- Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field -- Introduction -- I. On a Dual Origin -- The ideological place of the "base apparatus" -- Birth = deferral: The invention of the cinema -- II. Depth of Field: The Double Scene -- Bazin's "surplus realism" -- (...) The work of "transparency" -- For a materialist history of the cinema -- "For the first time ..." -- III."Primitive" Depth of Field -- IV. Effacement of Depth/Advent of Speech -- V. Which Speech? (shrink)

This updated edition of Cinema in the Digital Age takes a fresh look at the state of digital cinema. It pays special attention to the ways in which nostalgia for the look and feel of analogue disrupts the aesthetics of the digital image and examines how recent films have disguised and erased their digital foundations.

An in-depth study of several films and television shows to demonstrate the difficulties of conveying the experience of viewing cinema.

Shard cinema tells an expansive story of how moving images have changed in the last three decades, and how they have changed us along with them, rewiring the ways we watch, fight, and navigate an unsteady world. In a set of interrelated essays that range from the writings of early factory workers to the distributed sight of contemporary surveillance, Williams argues for deep links between the images we see and the hidden labors frozen into them, exploring how even the apparently (...) trivial or spectacular carries unique opportunities to detect and process the social frictions of their making. Spanning film, video games, radical history, architecture, visual effects, and war, the book crosses the twentieth century into our present to confront a new order of seeing and making that slowly took shape: the composite image, where no clean distinction can be made between production and post-production, filmed and animated, material and digital. Giving equal ground to costly blockbusters, shaky riot footage, disaster photography, and early cinema, Williams leads us from computer-generated 'shards' of particles and debris to the broken phone screens on which we watch these digital storms, looking for the unexpected histories lived in the interval between"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It (...) argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such 'limit cinema' has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley's psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild's eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human. (shrink)

Cinema has a long history of engaging with the theme of sacrifice. Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. It is on screen that the new grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Sacrifice can provide stories of loss and mourning, betrayal and redemption, death and renewal, destruction and re-creation, apocalypses and the birth of new worlds. The contributors to this (...) volume are not just scholars of film but also students of religion and literature, philosophers, ethicists, and political scientists, thus offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between cinema and sacrifice. They explore how cinema engages with sacrifice in its many forms and under different guises, and examine how the filmic constructions, reconstructions and misconstructions of sacrifice affect society, including its sacrificial practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities. (shrink)

Cinema and the automatic sweetheart. The work of art as an automatic sweetheart. Automatic sweethearts without names: the place of films in the world of art -- Cinema and new realism. Realism and trasparency in film. What is new in realism? Cinema, philosophy and the rediscovery of reality -- Cinema and documediality. The movie theatre of Babel. Toward a new ontology of film. The digital secret of the moving image -- Cinema and the ontology of the cell phone. Double signature. (...) An ontology for mobile movies. Film me, stupid. On Eco on mobile phones and stupidity -- Cinema and animality. Humans, animals, machines. Anthropocentrism and science fiction cinema. (shrink)

The Deleuzian studies on cinema highlight the importance of two semiotic regimes (movement-image and time-image) for the understanding of our aesthetical and epistemological relationship with moving images. On the contrary, this article highlights the moments of crisis between the two regimes, pointing out the generic character of uncertainty and ambiguity in the nature of mental images: once the sensorimotor scheme that dominates the cinematographic montage has been weakened, the characters, unable to act, can imagine, desire, dream, hallucinate, and remember. New (...) types of images appear: recollectionimages, dream-images, and world-images. How do these new types of images make us rethink our usual relationship with the world and with reality? With this article on cinema’s virtual and oneiric dimension, I expect to disseminate one of Gilles Deleuze’s greatest contributions to film philosophy: the distinction between the imaginary and reality. (shrink)

Preface: The target of film theory -- Camera searching in the world -- Is a camera essential? -- Cahiers axiom -- Tracing Bazin's trace -- Images contested today -- Editor's discovery of form -- Bazin's forerunners -- Documentaries in the cauldron of history -- Cahiers line -- Pursuing cinema in the twenty-first century -- Projector as spectator's searchlight -- Power of projection -- Opening the screen's dimensions -- Frame as threshold -- Writing out of the frame -- Evolution of the (...) subjects of cinema -- Modern film: Between classic and avant-garde -- Ontogeny of cinema -- Credits and auteurs: An ecology of adaptation -- Fidelity: The economy of adaptation. (shrink)

Résumé Le cinéma peut être considéré comme un exemple particulièrement pertinent et instructif d’un discours et d’une pratique rapportables à chacun des trois grands domaines de l’imagination selon Ricœur – discours, articulation entre un niveau théorique et un niveau pratique, et imaginaire social. Tout en ayant pour objectif de se concentrer sur ce dernier niveau, une approche plus complète des notions de récit filmique et d’imaginaire social en venant de Ricœur requiert de traverser de nouveau les deux autres niveaux. (...) Il est notamment nécessaire de retrouver les termes d’une philosophie ricœurienne de l’imagination dans l’articulation entre mise en intrigue et représentation qui s’opère depuis Temps et récit et une approche ultérieure de la notion de récit filmique. Un rapport critique à l’imaginaire social et politique peut finalement être retrouvé à travers le cinéma. Il s’agit toutefois de comprendre le passage d’un positionnement critique hérité de la tradition philosophique à un mouvement critique interne aux pratiques cinématographiques: tout en prenant en compte la notion de récit, ce mouvement critique peut mettre en avant, de manière nouvelle, la notion d’image, contribuant à sa revalorisation au sein d’une philosophie de l’imagination. La dernière partie de cet article s’intéresse notamment au rapport privilégié entre cinéma et historicité. Mots-clés: Image, imaginaire social, historicité, mise en intrigue, récit filmique, représentation.Cinema can be considered a particularly relevant and instructive example of a discourse and practice that refer back to each of the three great domains of imagination identified by Ricœur—discourse, articulation between a theoretical level and a practical level, and the social imaginary. While the aim of this article is to focus on the third level, a more comprehensive approach to the ideas of cinematic narrative and social imagination, drawn from Ricœur, requires us to go through the other two levels again. It is particularly necessary to find the terms of a Ricœurian philosophy of imagination in the articulation between emplotment and representation, operative since Time and Narrative, and a later approach to the notion of cinematic narrative. A critical relationship to the social and political imaginary can eventually be found through cinema. But, it is a matter of understanding a transition from a critical stance inherited from the philosophical tradition to a critical movement internal to cinematic practices: while taking into account the notion of narrative, this critical movement can bring to the fore, in a new way, the notion of image, contributing to its reappraisal within a philosophy of imagination. The last section of the article is particularly interested in the special relationship between cinema and historicity. Keywords: Image, Social Imagination, Historicity, Emplotment, Cinematic Narrative, Representation. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze tells us that philosophical problems ‘compelled’ him to look to the cinema for answers, but he doesn’t tell us what those problems are. In this thesis I argue that the problems in question turn on the foundational role that Henri Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic illusion plays in the development of Deleuze’s ontological conception of difference – specifically in his 1956 essay “Bergson’s Conception of Difference.” The consequence of Bergson’s characterisation of human thought, perception and language as cinematographic (...) in their orientation is that any philosophy that seeks to grasp being in its own terms must overcome or surpass the human to do so. This necessity plays itself out across the Deleuzian oeuvre in diverse formulations in relation to the Nietzschean themes therein. In doing so, however, the human is ‘left behind,’ such that Peter Hallward is able to contend that the human and properly human concerns have no place in Deleuzian philosophy. My argument is that Deleuze turns to the cinema to think through the question of the human relation to being, on the basis of difference as such. Deleuze argues that the essence of the cinema is to be free of the cinematographic illusion - it ‘thinks’ in terms of real difference first of all. On that basis, it is able deduce the genesis of that illusion, and of the cinematographic orientation of human being and thought. The classical cinema dramatises the history of philosophy insofar as it remains subject to the cinematographic illusion and subordinates time to movement, but the modern cinema reverses this subordination in terms that do not ‘overcome’ or ‘surpass’ the human, but rather constitute its exposure to being as real difference. The modern cinema dramatises in turn the experience of what Kant calls the “fractured I,” which experiences its own thought not as spontaneity or power, but as time as the form of change. Deleuze’s Cinema books can thus be read as a response to the demands laid out in Solomon Maimon’s critique of Kant, locating the Cinema books and their treatment of the history of philosophy firmly in the context of Deleuze’s post-Kantian project. At the same time, the Cinema books thereby map out the relation of the human and properly human concerns to the difference of being as a creative and productive force that bears on those concerns without being reduced to them – the thought of being as the event of thought. (shrink)

A partir de imagens de crianças encontradas no cinema dos primeiros tempos, propomos uma reflexão sobre as relações entre a infância e cinema. Segundo Walter Benjamin (2009), tanto a infância quanto o cinema são invenções da modernidade: o conceito de infância como um período importante de formação do sujeito nasce de forma inseparável das tecnologias de produção e reprodução da imagem que nos dão a ver as crianças de uma forma inédita, primeiro na fotografia e depois no cinema. A partir (...) disso, nos perguntamos se seria possível pensar na “invenção” do cinema como também um gesto de infância? Nos propomos a pensar uma ideia de infância do cinema para além de um reducionismo teleológico. Para tanto, partimos de uma visão psicanalítica sobre o processo de entrada na linguagem, que coincide com o movimento de individuação do sujeito, na infância. A partir desta perspectiva, estabelecemos uma analogia entre a infância e o desenvolvimento do cinema como momentos igualmente marcados pela entrada na linguagem: de um estado atravessado fortemente pela visualidade, pela experimentação, pela descoberta e pela brincadeira, em direção a uma entrada no sistema simbólico estruturado da linguagem através de constantes negociações com as convenções e os limites do mundo adulto. (shrink)

Se realizó una investigación cualitativa para comprobar la utilidad del cine como apoyo a la docencia en la asignatura de Psiquiatría del quinto año de la carrera de Medicina en tres subgrupos de estudiantes de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas "Carlos J. Finlay" de Camagüey. La muestra ascendió a 43 estudiantes de ambos sexos y diferentes nacionalidades, a quienes se les realizaron entrevistas individuales grabadas en audio, explorando criterios personales tras haber presenciado un grupo de películas previamente escogidas por abordar (...) el tema del trastorno mental con profundidad. Las mismas se exhibieron una vez por semana, coincidiendo su tema con los objetivos propuestos según los contenidos, siempre después de la conferencia introductoria y clase taller, y antes del seminario correspondiente. Entre los resultados obtenidos se destaca que la totalidad expresó opiniones positivas respecto a la actividad, y propuso se mantuviera en el resto de las rotaciones de Psiquiatría. La totalidad consideró que la misma representó un enriquecimiento de su cultura general. La mayoría expresó que les fue fácil la identificación de síntomas, síndromes y situaciones causales en las películas utilizadas, y manifestó que existe una estrecha relación entre los contenidos semanales y las películas elegidas. Se recogieron además algunas sugerencias respecto a la actividad. Teniendo en cuenta los resultados obtenidos, se puede considerar como muy positiva la utilización del cine como apoyo a la actividad docente en Psiquiatría en el grupo estudiado. A qualitative research was carried out in three sub-groups of medical students at Carlos J. Finlay University in order to test the usefulness of films as a teaching aid for the 5th year subject of Psychiatry. The sample was composed of 43 students, both male and female, from different nationalities whose individual interviews were recorded in order to analyze personal criteria after watching a series of movies previously chosen since the plot deals with serious mental disorders. These were screened once a week. Their subject matter coincided with the objectives set according to the class content, always after the introductory lecture and workshop class, and before the corresponding seminar. The most outstanding results show that all students expressed positive views with regard to the activity, and suggested to maintain this initiative in the rest of Psychiatry rotations. All of them considered that this activity allowed them to enrich their general culture. Most expressed that it was easy for them to identify symptoms, syndromes and causal situations used in films and that there is a close relationship between the weekly contents and selected films. In addition some suggestions regarding the activity were collected. Taking into account the obtained results, the use of cinema as a teaching aid in Psychiatry can be considered as very positive in the studied group. (shrink)

Cinema Pessimism explores the challenges of representative democracy through film. Film allows us to see the problems of democracy from a unique perspective, illuminating dangers that are not always visible to us either from day-to-day experience or the classics of democratic theory. Joshua Foa Dienstag argues that there are threats lurking in our political systems that we fail to perceive due to the many pleasures that representation provides. Ultimately, Dienstag seeks to defend a kind of pessimistic politics that might produce (...) a better sort of democratic representation than what we have today. (shrink)