This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, (...) with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning. (shrink)

_The Undercut Reader_ Edited by Nina Danino and Michael Maziere London: Wallflower Press, 2003 ISBN 1-903364-47-7 277 pp.

Edward S. Small _Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre_ Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-8093-1920-9 122 pp.

For historians of psychology, Hugo Münsterberg is best remembered as William James’ successor as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and a pioneer of applied psychology. By contrast, for film and media studies scholars, Münsterberg is recognized less for his contributions to experimental psychology than for those to film theory, a field in which his penultimate book, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), is frequently claimed as an inaugural text. However, lost in the blind spots of both disciplinary perspectives (...) has been a thorough examination of Münsterberg's collaboration with Paramount Pictures, translating psychological tests into experimental short films. Despite reaching millions of moviegoers in 1916, Münsterberg’s ‘Testing the Mind’ series has received little attention from historians of science and early cinema alike. One reason for this neglect is that, to date, not a single extant copy of a ‘Testing the Mind’ release has been located. This article is about the author's efforts, in collaboration with students, to reanimate these lost psychological tests for the screen through meticulous historical reconstruction based on the original scripts, journalistic accounts, and correspondence between Münsterberg and Paramount. This reconstructive process, I show, yields new insights into the relationship between psychology and early cinema and an opportunity for reflection on this promising new space for research at the intersection of media archaeology, the history of psychology, and experimental history of science. Film URL: https://archive.org/details/munsterberg_paramount.pictographs. (shrink)

Malcolm Le Grice _Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age_ London: British Film Institute, 2001 ISBN 0-85170-872-0 (pb) 0-85170-873-0 (hb) 330 pp.

In today’s age, we see the increasing influence of technology on people, which begs to raise the question: “Is society determined by technology?” Rising up within the constraints of each society, technology had its limitations, as it catered to the needs and interests of the masses. As society evolved, so did its requirements. We are at a stage where dependence on technology has gone through the roof with new innovations coming up in the sector, the rise of artificial intelligence, for (...) instance. Technology has replaced the concept of being a mere tool and is creating/demanding space of its own. With advancements in various fields like robotics which churn out machines that can mimic human behaviour and are equipped with anthropomorphic features, it has become rather difficult to view them as mere commodities waiting for one’s (human master’s) command. Keeping this in view, the paper primarily focuses on the relationship between society and technology, with special emphasis on artificial intelligence, through an analysis of the films Ra One (Bollywood), Android Kunjappan (Mollywood), and Ironman 3 (Hollywood). Secondarily, an experimental study was carried out to know the perception of the Engineering students, the future technologists, who are the stakeholders of the 21st-century technological world, with an aim to know their perception of technology and bring an awareness of the limitations of technology and its role in the creation of utopian and dystopian world. Finally, the paper examines the consequence of technological determinism and autonomy from a colonial perspective and intends to bring preparedness among the students to perceive technology conscious of its limitation and bring harmony between society and technology that leads towards building a utopian world. (shrink)

This book rethinks the discussion of sport as a cinematic subject. Arguing for the vitality of the sports film as distinctively 'modern' genre, the book looks at its innovative potential to capture twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport in all its complexity. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout, the book integrates work and ideas from film studies with thinking from sports psychology, philosophy, data theory and ecocriticism. In its detailed analyses of a wide-ranging group of films, the book shows (...) how film, from fictional works to biopics to experimental documentaries, can illuminate individual sporting experience, as well as sport's wider place in modern life. (shrink)

Film viewers make sense of films first of all at a precognitive level, triggered by their bodi­ly responses. The key notion here is movement: the movements of screen characters, the movements simulated by the viewers who perceive these characters, and the camera move­ments that mediate between the two. This review essay evaluates two monographs: Maarten Coëgnarts’ Embodied Cinema, which expands conceptual metaphor theo­ry to account for film’s unique affordances to communicate embodied meaning; and Vit­torio Gallese's and Michele Guerra’s The (...) Empathic Screen, which buttresses embod­ied simulation by film viewers experimentally by demonstrating the workings of “mirror neurons.” The review ends by discussing how these two books tie in with other develop­ments in the study of gene-culture coevolution. (shrink)

Despite much excellent work over the years, the vast history of scientific filmmaking is still largely unknown. Historians of science have long been concerned with visual culture, communication and the public sphere on the one hand, and with expertise, knowledge production and experimental practice on the other. Scientists, we know, drew pictures, took photographs and made three-dimensional models. Rather like models, films could not be printed in journals until the digital era, and this limited their usefulness as evidence. (...) But that did not stop researchers from making movies for projection at conferences as well as in lecture halls, museums and other public venues, not to mention for breaking down into individual frames for analysis. Historians of science are more likely to be found in the library, archive or museum than the darkened screening room, and much work is still needed to demonstrate the major effects of cinema on scientific knowledge. Film may have taken as long to change science as other areas of social life, but one can begin to glimpse important ways in which ‘image machines’ were beginning to mediate between backstage experimental work and more public demonstration even around 1900. (shrink)

The paper elaborates specific perceptive purposes and structural procedures generated by the various experimental abstract films and shows the ways how abstract film engages spectator’s attention. By “liberating” our visual system from representational experience, the abstract film encourages us to cultivate different sensory and sensual sensibility, explore new associations and alternative paths for moods and emotions. Various streams of abstract film will be analysed, relying primarily on classical abstract films.

Introduction -- Time and matter: temporality, embodied subjectivity and film phenomenology -- Knowing and nothing: Chris Marker, subjective temporalities and vocalic bodies in the future tense -- Agnès Varda's Trinket box: subjective relationality, affect and temporalised space -- Burlesque gestures and bodily attention: phenomenologies of the ephemeral in Chantal Akerman -- Threatened corporealities: thinking with the films of Philippe Grandrieux -- Conclusion: rethinking cinematic subjectivity and beyond.

Many experimental found footage films base their meanings and effects on an interaction between the figurative content of the image and its material-technological underpinnings. Can this interaction arise accidentally without artistic appropriation? A recently digitised film by the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký, Opening Ceremony of the Čech Bridge (1908), presents such an exercise in accidental aesthetics. At one point, the horizontal and vertical trembling of the cinematograph – obtained from the Lumière brothers – translates into a trembling (...) of the figures on the bridge so precisely that the figurative and material spheres appear to cooperate towards a common aesthetic goal. To account for such phenomena, film theory, found footage filmmaking, and archival practice need to join forces with philosophy. More specifically, Gilbert Simondon's notion of transduction, a process based on the intersection of diverse realities within a domain, allows us to conceptualise the paradoxical interaction between the figurative and material dimensions and the unintentional meanings that arise out of it. Transduction enables the distribution of elements between these heterogeneous spheres while maintaining a certain stability within a system. In the case of archival films in which transduction occurs without prior intention or expectation, transduction can be foregrounded and prolonged. The connection between transduction and the “trembling meaning” of Opening Ceremony, understood within the wider context of camera instability in experimental found footage, will uncover the aesthetic potentialities held by the autonomous creativity of film matter and its interferences with the figurative content. (shrink)

This book draws new connections between twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice and vitalist conceptions of life from biology and philosophy. Inga Pollmann shows how the links between the two created a modernist, experimental, and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theatre. Articulated by film theorists, filmmakers, biologists and philosophers, this cinematic vitalism maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.

This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation – a new way of using scientific material heritage, and of enabling audiences to supposedly observe the world of microscopic organisms in just the same way (...) as the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had observed them for himself. Knowledge transfer concerning material culture, around both historical and contemporary instruments, was the determining factor in the microcinematography practices applied in this film. The production and experience of the film also mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek's work as the origins of bacteriology in the process. (shrink)

This article deals with the aesthetics of the art documentary of the 1940s and 1950s, which can be considered as the Golden Age of the genre. Prior to the breakthrough of television in Europe, which would usurp and standardize the art documentary, cinematic reproductions of artworks resulted in experimental shorts that were highly self-reflexive. These films became visual laboratories to investigate the tensions between movement and stasis, the two- and three-dimensional, and the real and the artificial—a film on (...) art was self-consciously presented as an art film. Focusing on La Leggenda di Sant’Orsola by Luciano Emmer and Le Monde de Paul Delvaux by Henri Storck, this article also investigates how the animation of the static image by the film medium relates to Surrealist practices. (shrink)

The qualities of great works of art, their profundity, their insight into the human condition, are epitomised in Brakhage's films, which are, I argue, from the beginning related to and inseparable from a philosophical attitude toward existence. His films emerge out of an authentic 'existential' mode of attunement, a mind-set wherein the potential for human transcendence is framed and filmed within its intractable relationship to death, the most extreme possibility of non-existence. Brakhage not only views existence in a (...) philosophical manner, beyond this, he engages in philosophical inquiry in a fundamental way through the medium of film. The films arise from and respond to what Karl Jaspers views as the ultimate source of philosophy, namely, 'the will to authentic communication,' which embraces 'wonder leading to knowledge, doubt leading to certainty, forsakenness leading to the self.' This amounts to the philosophical struggle to arrive at a sense of metaphysical coherence and existential familiarity, i.e., the precarious undertsanding of belonging to the world in communion with others. This essay seeks to elucidate and detail, through a series of interpretive gestures, the philosophical themes present to Brakhage's silent films by way of a reading that emerges from the phenomenological-ontological tradition in philosophy. In doing so, I hope to interpret Brakhage's filmic art as conveying a legitimate source of human understanding, which contributes to our interpreting and discoursing about the world and our lives in new and revelatory ways. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film_ is the first comprehensive volume to explore the main themes, topics, thinkers and issues in philosophy and film. The _Companion_ features sixty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars and is divided into four clear parts: • issues and concepts • authors and trends • genres • film as philosophy. Part one is a comprehensive section examining key concepts, including chapters on acting, censorship, character, depiction, ethics, genre, interpretation, narrative, reception and spectatorship and style. (...) Part two covers authors and scholars of film and significant theories Part three examines genres such as documentary, experimental cinema, horror, comedy and tragedy. Part four includes chapters on key directors such as Tarkovsky, Bergman and Terrence Malick and on particular films including _Memento_. Each chapter includes a section of annotated further reading and is cross-referenced to related entries. _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film_ is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy of film, aesthetics and film and cinema studies. (shrink)

Aesthetics, experiments and values -- Between cybernetics, aesthetics, and semiotics -- 'I/other' oppositions in music, aesthetics, and semiotics -- Interpersonal analysis in film music -- Janácek from an interpersonal viewpoint -- Postscript.

This collection presents, for the first time in English, Jean-Francois Lyotard's major essays on film: 'Acinema', 'The Unconscious as Mise-en-scene', 'Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema' and 'The Idea of a Sovereign Film'. Then, eight critical essays by philosophers and film theorists examine Lyotard's film work and influence across two sections: 'Approaches and Interpretations' and 'Applications and Extensions'. These works are complemented by an introductory essay by leading French scholar Jean-Michel Durafour on Lyotard's film-philosophy, an overview of Lyotard's practical (...) film projects written by his collaborators Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman, and the synopsis for a later film project Memorial Immemorial, which Lyotard proposed but was not produced. Jean-Francois Lyotard was the most significant aesthetician of the poststructuralist generation, but this dimension of his thought is only recently beginning to receive the attention it deserves in the English-speaking world. He devoted a number of essays to film, and was involved in making several experimental short films. Lyotard's reflections on film offer a perspective which seeks to do justice to it as an art by focusing on its aesthetic, material qualities. His work in this area remains a largely untapped resource, with the potential for inaugurating exciting new directions in film-philosophy. (shrink)

This study attempts to investigate the role of movie and TV series clips in enhancing EFL learners’ pragmatic competence by utilizing an experimental design. The sample of the study was 42 students from the English language department at Cihan University-Duhok, Iraq. The experiment lasted one academic semester. The participants’ English language proficiency, as determined by an IELTS test sample, was intermediate, and then they were randomly split into two groups, namely experimental and control. Before and after the treatment, (...) a Written Discourse Completion Test served as a pre-and post-test given to the two groups to assess statistically significant differences between them. The experimental group received direct instruction on request and suggestion speech acts via the presentation of the carefully chosen movie and TV series clips. In contrast, the control group was exposed to a minimal amount of pragmatics through printed texts. The findings demonstrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group. More precisely, the findings revealed that movie and TV series clips had a significant influence on learners’ production of requests and suggestions. Considering the above findings, the researchers propose EFL teachers apply movie and TV series clips to improve their Students’ pragmatic competence in class. (shrink)

This article discusses the artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin’s “revisioning” of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) to consider how the poetic encounter between two artists from different generations exemplifies the relational praxis that Lorde pursued throughout her life. In revealing the ways in which Lorde opens acoustic sensory spaces for contemporary readers and listeners of her work, I specifically focus on the political and aesthetic dynamic of recitation in Lin’s experimental documentary The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). I (...) trace how recitation becomes a coalitional practice of feminist chorus through which readers and listeners embody the sonorous space they co-create through and with Lorde. The article further looks into the ways Lin pairs recitation performance with visceral images of body parts on the screen to argue that the film’s visuals dwell in and extend the form of the chorus; which is to say, the film expands the meaning and practice of chorus beyond the realm of the sonic. The bodies on the screen extend the chorus, immersing the audience in a participatory rethinking of the experience of cancer (particularly breast cancer) not merely as an individual misfortune or an aesthetic concern. In adjoining textual, visual, and acoustic elements, Lin’s film provides a powerful transformative sensory environment, reverberating through the reciters and the audience. (shrink)

Since World War II Japanese artists have employed two seemingly contradictory ways of working, using aesthetics, materials, artistic methods technologies, and approaches that are either radically innovative and wildly experimental, or traditional/classical. Many other artists, however, in a move that seems paradoxical. have combined the two to explore the new themes of the post-atomic period. Three narrative works dealing with the effects of the World War II war effort and the atomic bombings that ended them, Yasunari Kawabata’s novel The (...) Sound of the Mountain (1952), Rio Kishida’s avant-garde play Thread Hell (1984), and the film Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), directed by Mori Masaki and written by Keiji Nakazawa (Masaki and Nakazawa 1983), exemplify this third approach. Set in the pre-War textile industry that enabled the War, during the atomic bombings, and the post-War American Occupation, all three explore the experience not only of the horrific objective effects of war but of the Japanese experience of psychic numbing, which damages the person’s sense of self and their sense of agency—their ability to act effectively in the world. All three utilize classical aesthetics to provide aesthetic experiences, for their readers/viewers, to make the experience of the work tolerable, and for their characters—to demonstrate the roles of positive aesthetic experience in making life worth while and in grounding a renewed sense of personal identity and selfhood in a self that has been shattered through trauma. (shrink)

While univariate functional magnetic resonance imaging data analysis methods have been utilized successfully to map brain areas associated with cognitive and emotional functions during viewing of naturalistic stimuli such as movies, multivariate methods might provide the means to study how brain structures act in concert as networks during free viewing of movie clips. Here, to achieve this, we generalized the partial least squares analysis, based on correlations between voxels, experimental conditions, and behavioral measures, to identify large-scale neuronal networks activated (...) during the first time and repeated watching of three ∼5-min comedy clips. We identified networks that were similarly activated across subjects during free viewing of the movies, including the ones associated with self-rated experienced humorousness that were composed of the frontal, parietal, and temporal areas acting in concert. In conclusion, the PLS method seems to be well suited for the joint analysis of multi-subject neuroimaging and behavioral data to quantify a functionally relevant brain network activity without the need for explicit temporal models. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article aims to show how the metaphorical and metonymical portrayal of character perception in film can give rise to two distinct but interrelated percepts of causality in the viewer, namely the percept that the viewer sees that an object perceived by a character causes the character’s perception of that object and the percept that the viewer sees that character perception in turn causes a change of state in the perceiving character’s mind. We start our discussion with a brief epistemological (...) overview. Thereby two questions are central: How do people conceptualize perception and causality? and When do people perceive causality in perception? Answers will be given, respectively, by considering insights from cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology. In the next section, then, we bring the theoretical discussion to the foreground of Film Studies by showing how the conceptual solutions, as suggested in the prior part, can manifest themselves i... (shrink)

In Sweet Liberty, writer and director Alan Alda dramatizes the process of turning a scholarly study about the American Revolutionary War into a Hollywood film; he does so in ways that bring out the ethical complexities of adaptation, and eventually takes them to a meta-filmic level rarely seen in non-experimental cinema. While Sweet Liberty initially comes off as a light comedy with a predictable plot and ending, on closer inspection it compels us to reflect on the relationship between historical (...) research and the popular entertainment industry. Although Alda appears to chastise the makers of period films who seek to capitalize on “history” without paying heed to historical facts, his professorial hero is not particularly critically minded either. Intentionally or not, Alda demonstrates that evaluating a mainstream history film cannot be reduced to a dichotomy between truth and fiction, and that research-based knowledge should also be viewed with a healthy skepticism. (shrink)

In Sweet Liberty, writer and director Alan Alda dramatizes the process of turning a scholarly study about the American Revolutionary War into a Hollywood film; he does so in ways that bring out the ethical complexities of adaptation, and eventually takes them to a meta-filmic level rarely seen in non-experimental cinema. While Sweet Liberty initially comes off as a light comedy with a predictable plot and ending, on closer inspection it compels us to reflect on the relationship between historical (...) research and the popular entertainment industry. Although Alda appears to chastise the makers of period films who seek to capitalize on “history” without paying heed to historical facts, his professorial hero is not particularly critically minded either. Intentionally or not, Alda demonstrates that evaluating a mainstream history film cannot be reduced to a dichotomy between truth and fiction, and that research-based knowledge should also be viewed with a healthy skepticism. (shrink)

ArgumentIn the 1940s–50s, one of the most central questions in psychological research related to the nature of neurosis. In the final years of the Second World War and the following decade, neurosis became one of the most prominent psychiatric disorders, afflicting a high proportion of military casualties and veterans. The condition became central to the concerns of several psychological fields, from psychoanalysis to Pavlovian psychology. This paper reconstructs the efforts of Chicago psychiatrist Jules Masserman to study neurosis in the laboratory (...) during the 1940s and 1950s. Masserman used Pavlovian techniques in a bid to subject this central psychoanalytic subject to disciplined scientific experimentation. More generally, his project was an effort to bolster the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a human science by articulating a convergence of psychoanalytic categories across multiple species. Masserman sought to orchestrate a convergence of psychological knowledge between fields that were often taken to be irreconcilable. A central focus of this paper is the role of moving images in this project, not only as a means of recording experimental data but also as a rhetorical device. The paper argues that for Masserman film played an important role in enabling scientific observers to see agency and emotion in the animals they observed. (shrink)

When we think of diegesis and diegetic in film studies, we know what the words refer to within the confines of the traditional scholarly definition of film in the 20th and 21st centuries. This understanding comes from a certain ontological common sense that narratologically film has a dual nature that consists of mimesis and diegesis. Thinking about narration through images and sound, as opposed to the live-acted or read drama or epos in the times of Plato and Aristotle, has given (...) birth to a synthetic view of the poet’s voice and the characters. In fiction films, mimesis and diegesis are so symbiotic that it is often difficult to distinguish between them. However, is it possible to think of films that are non-mimetic? In other words: is it possible for a film to be completely diegetic in the sense of Plato’s understanding of the word diegesis? Plato was against mimetic arts because they were so far removed from the eidos of what they were that there was no explicable use in presenting them. On the other hand, he very much approved or at least perhaps tolerated and recognized the importance of non-mimetic art forms such as music with specific modes of harmony or poetry that only contained the poet’s words where no characters were represented. With this view in mind, two steps will be taken in this paper: the first is questioning the possibility of a purely diegetic film, and the second is the significance of inquiring about such a work. (shrink)

As artforms, film and street art seem incompatible. Contra this incompatibility, I investigate their combination: cinematic street art. Two promising cases are the artworks MUTO and Repopulate, but I argue neither is suitable. MUTO only counts if I accept the transparency thesis, the claim that photographs allow us to literally see their depicta. Repopulate only counts if we reject Noel Carroll’s requirement that a cinematic performance token isn’t itself an artwork. However, these imperfect cases demonstrate what is required in order (...) to have cinematic street art: the artwork is a 1) aconsensual artwork that 2) does not merely use street art as imagery or 3) merely use the street as a performance space. I introduce two hypothetical artworks inspired by this approach and discuss their merits, as well as their pitfalls relevant to my own desiderata. As such, this article serves as the foment for broader discussion within the philosophy of street art. (shrink)

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the emergent field of film philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde do "do" philosophy and illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The book traces the avant-garde's philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how this cinema's reflections on the (...) creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. This entails the avant-garde's locating of cinema's-and thought's-ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found that unites their films with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson who believed the "journey's end is found in every step of the road" (Cavell). Rectifying film-philosophy's neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde's interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerges from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. Sheehan reads the avant-garde's interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as also an extension of Pragmatism's commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson's influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde's philosophies to Deleuze's time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche's "powers of the false.". (shrink)