Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature applies historical and contemporary political and rhetorical theory to current popular culture to discuss the problem of the displaced autonomous self and the quest for a meaningful life.

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)

Voyages et exils au cinéma, rencontres de l'altérité s'intéresse aux phénomènes d'hybridation entre cultures tels qu'ils se traduisent à l'écran, sans restriction géographique (cinémas américain, italien, africain, libanais, indien, taïwanais, japonais etc.). Si le voyage et l'exil des cinéastes sont sources de transferts culturels et esthétiques, le thème du voyage et de l'exil représenté au cinéma questionne la notion d'altérité en proposant une vision diversifiée de la rencontre entre autochtones et nouveaux arrivants. Dans un monde globalisé, mais qui continue de (...) s'interroger à la fois sur la mixité culturelle et le sens de la nation, le cinéma reflète ainsi les cultures plurielles dans leur richesse et leur vivacité, mais aussi les replis communautaires, les phénomènes d'imprégnation et bien entendu de domination culturelle. La caméra se désigne alors comme acteur, témoin et exégète de ces processus qui, s'ils ont une longue histoire et se développent tout au long du XXe siècle, culminent dans notre temps présent. (shrink)

Expecting Saving Mr. Banks to be a jolly jaunt about the creative development of the movie Mary Poppins (1964), I found myself waiting endlessly for the “jolliness” to begin—it never did. In fact, rather than joy, there was an ever-present sensation of tension as I watched the film. Having moved house myself in recent days (during a Queensland heat wave), the scenes of the Goff family leaving their home and trekking across hot, dusty Queensland were very emotional. However, seeing the (...) family patriarch Travers Goff (played by Colin Farrell) swig from an alcohol flask in a desperate manner told me that his was no “routine” family move. And, certainly, arriving at their destination—a dilapidated ranch home—shed even more light on the Goff family’s predicament: alcoholism and the cycle of employment and unemployment. Further, it is the downstream consequences of the family predicament that fuel the identity and behaviour of Mary Poppins—a fictional character created by Travers’ daughter, a. (shrink)

English summary: The silent film of the Weimar Republic grappled with the norms and values of a society, whose elites dismissed it as a cultural product for the masses and the bulk of whose citizens were eager consumers of film. It scrutinized their civil facade and distanced itself with constructive irony and productive skepticism about their traditional (gender-) roles and modes of identity. Its silent message reaches us today like a message in a bottle from a temporary and distant, (...) but psychologically close, shore, and challenges us to translate it into the language of our own present. In the act of this metaphorically understood translation, one discovers the unexpected currency of Weimars silent film as a global form of art, which overcomes language barriers, moves people who possess various cultural horizons, and heals the trauma that lingers from the never finished Tower of Babel. The silent film of the Weimar Republic shines on us from a close remoteness with a beguiling power, which is its own genuine art. German description: Der Stummfilm der Weimarer Republik setzte sich kritisch mit den Normen und Werten einer Gesellschaft auseinander, deren Eliten ihn als Massenkulturprodukt ablehnten und deren Gros ihn gierig verschlang. Er hinterfragte ihre burgerliche Fassade und distanzierte sich mit konstruktiver Ironie und produktiver Skepsis von ihren tradierten (Geschlechter-)Rollen und Identitatsmustern. Seine stumme Botschaft erreicht uns heute wie eine Flaschenpost von einem zeitlich zwar fernen, psychologisch jedoch nahen Ufer, und fordert uns heraus, sie in die Sprache unserer eigenen Gegenwart zu ubersetzen. Im Akt dieser metaphorisch zu verstehenden Ubersetzung entdeckt man die unvermutete Aktualitat des Weimarer Stummfilms als einer globalen Kunstform, die Sprachbarrieren uberwunden, Menschen verschiedenster Kulturhorizonte bewegt und das Trauma des nie vollendeten Turms von Babel geheilt hat. Der Stummfilm der Weimarer Republik leuchtet uns aus naher Zeitferne mit einer betorenden Kraft entgegen, die nur echter Kunst eigen ist. (shrink)

Science fiction cinema proposal for Bioethic education Proposta do cinema de ficção científica para educar em Bioética Posthumanism state that technologies will eliminate aging, improve cognitive, physical and psychological skills and keep alive human minds by uploading them in machines as artificial intelligence. These beliefs, as constant features in science fiction films, could be useful to educate medical students in Bioethics. We propose some of these science fiction films related with technological changes of humans and the noxious consequences: Being turned (...) into a humanoid created by genetic engineering; a slave or a merchandize without rights; discrimination because of eugenesic genetic manipulation; and/or the creation of cyborgs of mass destruction. Also, the movies can show the reader issues of ethnic supremacy dilemmas, identity impersonate and ambition, impersonal intelligence and conscience and identity transpass after death. These films will help teachers to analyze with students the moral limits of science and technologies. Para citar este artículo / To reference this article / Para citar este artigo Alerm-González AJ, González-Pérez U. Propuesta del cine de ciencia ficción para educar en Bioética. Pers Bioet. 2019; 22: 14-33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5294/pebi.2019.23.1.2 Recibido: 10/11/2017 Aceptado: 20/10/2018. (shrink)

Several of the essays in this collection discuss the `binding problem', the problem of explaining in neurophysiological terms how it is that we see the various perceptual qualities of a physical object, such as its shape, colour, location and motion, as features of a single object. The perceived object seems to us a unitary thing, but its sensory properties are diverse and turn out to be processed in different areas of the brain. How then does the brain manage the (...) integration? Readers of the essays in this collection may find themselves suffering from an analogous binding problem about the study of consciousness, though this problem is conceptual rather than perceptual, and here the difficulty is to achieve the integration rather than to understand how an effortless integration is achieved. Consciousness is the ideal topic for inter-disciplinary investigation. It is a central concern of such diverse disciplines as neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and theology, among others, yet none of these disciplines has come close to providing full answers to the central questions that consciousness raises. Inter-disciplinary investigation seems an obvious way forward, but it generates the conceptual binding problem that this collection displays. The standard of the essays is very high, but it is extraordinarily difficult to integrate their content into anything like a single picture. We are all apparently talking about the same phenomenon, the conscious awareness of the world that each of us enjoys first-hand, but it is quite unclear how to see the very different things we say about this phenomenon as part of a single picture, or even as parts of different but compatible pictures. Having raised the binding problem for the inter-disciplinary study of consciousness, I hasten to say that I will not attempt even a partial substantive solution here: that is left as an exercise for the readers of this book. (shrink)