The process of conceptualization and creation of a film score heavily depends on the collaboration between the film director and composer. The harmony of the director’s and film composer’s ideas should provide an impetus for the synchronization of literature (the script and film narrative) and music (film score). This was mainly used as a guide in crafting the film score for the independent film Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (The Rapture of Fe, 2009) directed by Alvin Yapan. This article explores (...) how the music is deployed to resonate with the mythic and folkloric sensibility of the film narrative. We chose to use the tambuleleng, a native lute instrument/chordophone from Bukidnon, Southern Philippines, that is a modern adaptation of three traditional instruments. In its invention, its crafting, and in the sounds it produces, the tambuleleng is an artful blending of tradition and modernity. The tambuleleng’s composition, its symbolism and function in native life and rituals, aside from the sound it creates, all became material in conveying the folkloric narrative, and articulating the issues presented in the film. Some concerns on Philippine film musical scoring are also tackled, mainly focusing on the constraints, as well as the liberties involved when operating within a limited budget for an independent movie production. (shrink)

This book philosophically and creatively examines ways in which independent filmmakers may explore, through practice, the discovery and development of a personal voice in the making of their films. Filmmaker and academic, Professor Erik Knudsen, uses a combination of autoethnographic experience derived from his own filmmaking practice and new insights gained from a series of ethnomediaological StoryLab workshops with independent filmmakers in Malaysia, Ghana and Colombia to drive this innovative examination. The book contextualises this practice exploration within (...) an eclectic pschological and philosophical framework that ranges from Jungian psychological theories of the collective unconscious to Sheldrakian scientific theories of morphic resonance, from Christian mystical ideas about creative motivation to structuralist theories that underpin our linguistic understanding of story and narrative. Why should we create? What is a creative act? This in-depth study tackles these questions by examining the early ideation stages of cinematic expression and ultimately seeks to understand the practical ways in which ideas are shaped into stories and narratives"--Back cover. (shrink)

This article chronicles the material conditions of producing a film in the Philippine independent film scene which has experienced a marked resurgence at the turn of the century, and has been credited for having revived the ailing Filipino film industry. By way of case study, I use my own film Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe (international title: The Rapture of Fe), awarded the best feature-length digital film at the 33rd Cairo Film Festival in 2009. I co-produced, wrote and directed this (...) film. I recount the different factors that helped shape the film, from scripting to film financing, and provide further evidence of the significance of the private sector, in infusing new money and in reviving the national Filipino film industry as a whole. (shrink)

Film production is the process of creating a film, involving stages such as progress, pre-production, invention, post-production, and sharing. It encompasses planning, scripting, shooting, editing, and finalizing the film for public viewing. The process of imagination drives innovation in scripting, directing, and cinematography, resulting in unique, engaging experiences that captivate audiences with their emotive stories. The principle of this investigation is to assess how psychological factors add to enhancing imagination in film production, focusing on their impact (...) on creative processes and outcomes. A study surveyed 680 students from college film program students to analyze their creative personality and imaginative capabilities using structured questionnaires. Key psychological constructs included Creative Self-Efficacy, Emotional Resilience, Cognitive Flexibility, and Intrinsic Motivation. The study investigated the impact of psychological factors on college cinema students' creative imagination in filmmaking, demonstrating high validity and reliability with Factor Loadings exceeding 0.76, Composite Reliability higher than 0.88, and Average Variance Extracted (AVE) range as of 0.59 to 0.67. Discriminant validity was confirmed as every construct AVE was better than its square correlations by other constructs. Psychological factors significantly influence film production imagination, fostering creative thinking and emotional depth. Understanding and harnessing these factors enhances storytelling, character development, and audience engagement, ultimately enriching the cinematic experience. (shrink)

The English Surgeon . 2008. Produced and directed by Geoffrey Smith. Eyeline Films and Bungalow Town Productions. English and Ukrainian, with English subtitles. 1 hour 33 minutes. http://www.theenglishsurgeon.com Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11673-010-9225-7 Authors Rebecca L. Volpe, California Pacific Medical Center Clinical Ethics Fellow, Program in Medicine & Human Values 2395 Sacramento Street, 3rd floor San Francisco CA 94115 USA Journal Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529 Journal Volume Volume 7 Journal Issue Volume 7, (...) Number 2. (shrink)

Representations of women, or more exactly of gender, and the presence and works of women filmmakers constitute an important area of analysis for gender studies and feminist film theories. In Turkey the presence and the participation of women in the public sphere have been one of the important objectives of the Kemalist modernization project since the founding of the modern nation-state in 1923. However, despite the modernizing efforts to empower women in different spheres of life there was no woman director (...) in Turkish commercial feature cinema until the beginning of the 1950s. Since the beginning of the 2000s the number of women directors has increased significantly, reaching a number well above that of the entire period before. This article investigates the reasons behind this increase based on quantitative data gathered from secondary sources and in-depth interviews with women producers and directors. It also questions whether and to what extent the increase in the number of women film directors contributed to the production of ‘women’s films’, based on a qualitative analysis of films produced by women directors between the years 2004 and 2013. The results show that in addition to technological and aesthetic changes in the industry, the increase in the availability of international and national public funding for low-budget independent film productions and the enlargement of the women’s movement allowed more women directors to enter the film industry. While half of the films made by women directors in the 2000s could be qualified as ‘women films’, the other half remained, largely due to market forces, within the conventions of popular or art house cinema. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy of film is a young field that is rapidly growing but that has as yet no distinct disciplinary presence within philosophy. Articles by feminist philosophers on film began appearing in aesthetics journals and anthologies in English only in the late 1980s and 1990s. In film studies, as in aesthetics more generally, disciplinary boundaries are fluid. Writers from many fields – literature, art, communications, cultural studies – make critical contributions on film, addressing philosophical issues and drawing upon philosophical theories. (...) Many questions discussed in the general field of film theory are philosophical ones, and among these are topics important for feminist philosophy and aesthetics: Is film an art, and if so why? What is the essence of film? How does film depict subjectivity? What is the nature of our emotional reactions to and interest in film? How is the photographic nature of film used in constructing realistic or other forms of representations of the world? How is ideology at work in the Hollywood production system and in the circulation of filmic images in the popular culture industry? It would be not only difficult, but arbitrary and misleading, to restrict the label or practice of “feminist philosophy of film” to professional philosophers. It is best to approach this subject, then, by situating it in relation to other fields, including feminist film theory, film theory in general, philosophical work on film, and feminist aesthetics. Feminist philosophy of film is rapidly expanding as philosophers with diverse interests turn their attention to film. The inclusion of feminist essays by philosophers in two anthologies on film in the mid‐1990s, together with the appearance of the first issue of the journal Film and Philosophy, suggest that this field is on the brink of a period of rapid growth and change. I will discuss possible new directions of growth, and connections with feminist philosophy broadly considered in the conclusion. (shrink)

Films provide many memorable scenes of care that both shape and reinforce ideas about who deserves care, how carers should behave, and what kinds of people appear ‘naturally’ suited to the labors of caring for children, the sick, the elderly and the disabled (namely women). My specific interest here is in films about migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore. from the Philippines and Indonesia, who take up live-in housekeeping positions. The films about their lives range (...) from documentary to popular, low-budget horror to independent art cinema. While surveying the strengths and limitations of a handful of these films, I offer strategies for how to frame each film in terms of its director, production methods, distribution, and target audience. How and when might different genres be best used to engage students in critical thinking about care work and migrant labor? What stereotypes exist about migrant workers and what blind spots emerge in understanding paid care work? How can we promote dialogue about the often ambivalent relationship between caregiver and cared-for? (shrink)

This is a review of the 2013 film Words and Pictures. Surprisingly, the film is not about justifying a role for the humanities in education but, rather, a battle to determine which is more valuable—literature or art?. At a time when many schools question if these have any value at all, this film uses passionate and afflicted teachers to explore which is most important and finds valuable intersections between the two.

This paper examines the relationship between film and philosophy, especially in the light of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his claim that a picture represents the world better than the language itself and that, in that sense, it has philosophical relevance. It starts with an often made comparison of film illustrating philosophy, film about philosophy or philosophers, and film as philosophy. While the first two types are not particularly philosophically relevant or theoretically challenging and therefore not considered to be problematic, the third (...) concept shows the opposite, and it is approached within Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Namely, it is necessary to show why film as motion picture would even be possible for Wittgenstein as philosophy, or more precisely, what it is exactly that enables the film to be like philosophy. To illustrate this, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is analysed, with an emphasis on the difference between the early and late phase of his work. Yet his two philosophical studies, paradigmatic for these phases, show a certain continuity in consideration of images. Foremostly, they supply the primary argument that image, and by extension film as a series of images, best represents the world, that is, that for Wittgenstein it stands as a two­dimensional model. Since it is possible to show that image for Wittgenstein does not depend on linguistic interpretation, it can be shown that film as philosophy is possible precisely but not exclusively from the angle of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work. This treats the image as an independent bearer of meaning, which ultimately results in understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy as directly opposed to the Western philosophical tradition. Thus, one of the possible interpretations of film’s philosophical relevance is possible to find in Wittgenstein’s understanding of pictures. (shrink)

The central thesis of this article is that film is directing and directed kinaesthesis understood as an opening of world beyond the relation of “subjective” and “objective”. Thus the analysis does not focus on the recipients of a movie but on the origins filming finds in specific ways of experiencing, that is, in the living bodies of the persons who decide on the perspective of a take by using the camera’s body. Moved by its filmmakers, the body of the camera (...) is directed as the product of its authors, and is directing insofar as it establishes a world by its own means. The article explains basic forms of opening world by kinaesthetic processes in general, and applies this investigation to the corpus of film. Finally, the results of these analyses will be put in concrete terms by relating them to basic film features and a few samples of movies. (shrink)

Utopia can be conceived as a possibility – a space within language, a set of principles, or the product of technological development – but it cannot be separated from questions of place, or more accurately, questions of “no place.” 1 In between the theoretically imaginable utopia and its realisation in a particular time and place, there is a space of critique, which is exploited in anti-Utopian and critical dystopian narratives. 2 In Science Fiction narratives of this kind, technology is responsible (...) for the transformation of the utopian impulse into a set of principles that are precisely stated and rigidly enforced. The critique focuses on the impossibility, due to the reductive force of instrumental reason, of any systematic realisation of a eutopia where the positive qualities of freedom, individualism and creativity are nurtured. The films Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg , and Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol , both examine utopian claims through speculation on the possible future use of current technologies, the tools of crime investigation and the genome project respectively. However, an examination of the plot cannot attend sufficiently to the particular properties of film and how it, as a medium, constructs utopia as a place. This article aims to address this issue by examining how technologically derived images of utopia are realised in the visual space of film, that is, on the level of the mise en scène. These images are often dystopian but the distinction between dystopia and eutopia is not crucial to the argument, because the aim is not to return utopian ism to its place at the vanguard of progressive politics, nor to reject utopianism on the basis that it is unrealisable, but rather to examine how technology and utopianism can combine in the visual language of film. My concern here is to investigate how utopia is conceived according to the specific features of the medium rather than to present an overarching narrative judgement as to the value of utopian principles. In Gattaca, the utopianism of a genetically determined future is reproduced in the mise en scène as a set of aesthetic principles, whereas in Minority Report the utopian technology itself resembles the apparatus of film. This involves two quite different approaches to the visualisation of utopia: 4 in Gattaca, utopia is embodied in a society in which there can be “no other place,” realised through the subtraction or reduction of visual difference; in Minority Report, utopia is an expression of a panoptic regime that can incorporate all visual and cultural difference such that the visible is “every place.”. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary essay looks at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding. Rather historical fiction reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations.

Judith Butler argues that every category of personal identity, such as gender, the body, nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, is predicated in part on a crisis between what that identity affirms and what it excludes. How this crisis manifests itself in everyday life is key to understanding how identities are reinforced, negotiated, subverted, or rejected on both social and individual levels. In this paper I consider three films directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi between 2001 and 2006, arguing that they are especially (...) competent in not only representing ontological tensions of this kind within their narratives, but also in manifesting these tensions so that they are made viscerally available to the viewer as affect. To understand how this is achieved, I draw on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, to articulate how a stylistic system, or aesthetic, is developed across these films, and what techniques contribute to its production. I find that key components... (shrink)

The study of film adaptations, particularly those coming from literature, has been growing at a rapid rate during the last years due to the amount of adaptations coming from both mainstream and independent film industries. The focus of these studies though is generally addressed to best sellers where the literary style is clearly adaptable to the screen; however, there are cases where the adaptive process has resulted in an entirely different outcome. Naked Lunch, written by William Burroughs and adapted (...) to screen by David Cronenberg, represents a bold change if compared with other novels turned into films. The purpose of this article is to descriptively analyse the literary style in order to understand how it has been represented and adapted into Cronenberg’s film. The analysis will be performed helped with computer-based tools to support statements, using the novel itself as corpus and adding theoretical ideas from Leech and Short’s perspectives. The results suggest that the author’s corrosive, sexually-fuelled claustrophobic style has been translated following three patterns in terms of adaptation theory, although Burroughs, in the hands of Cronenberg, becomes an almost new classification of adaptation, not only adding literary features to the film, but also distinguishable core moments of the writer’s life to the final product. The analysis conducted encourages the study of other uncommon adaptations from literary authors in order to understand the adaptive process followed by filmmakers. (shrink)

This is a review of the film Big Eyes. Adapted from a true story about artist Margaret Keane, the overarching theme of the movie is plagiarism. While most people think of written works such as books and articles being plagiarized, Big Eyes gives viewers insight into the world of stolen works of visual art, namely paintings. The victim finds moral courage through religion, while the thief lives in denial until death. Anyone with an interest in art, law, or psychiatry will (...) enjoy what Big Eyes has to offer. (shrink)

Clinical populations sometimes demonstrate difficulties forgetting stimuli related to their trauma-related disorder, perhaps because their intense personal connection to these stimuli produce deficits in the inhibitory control abilities necessary for forgetting. The present work examined this possibility for people who have high levels of traits implicated in borderline personality disorder (BPD). In two well-powered studies, we found no evidence for deficits in forgetting specific to BPD traits, even for people with clinically significant levels of the traits, contrary to previous studies. (...) The present experiments updated the designs from earlier experiments to employ the most contemporary methods to examine directed forgetting recommended by recent reviews. With these improved methods, Study 1 found that participants showed significant directed forgetting for BPD-related words independent of their level of BPD traits, perhaps because the BPD-related words were so strongly associated with one another. Study 2 found that when we removed the strong relatedness between the stimuli, forgetting of BPD-relevant words was significant and did not interact with BPD symptomology. We concluded that in contrast to people with PTSD who show specific inhibitory deficits for trauma-related works, people with BPD show normal, intact inhibitory control even for words that they should find threatening. (shrink)

During the past ten years, China’s micro film industry has made a rapid development aided by technological changes. Focusing on three types of micro films, this paper reveals some characteristics of China’s micro films within socialist cultural production with Chinese characteristics. This model departs from a past when the government managed everything during the Planned Economy, but is also different from the models of cultural policy in the West. The micro films examined are A Murder Case (...) Triggered by a Steamed Bun, a parody of film Wuji, market-conspiracy micro films such asImminent and The Only Choice, and social-welfare micro films likeI will give you happiness when I grow up. All of them bring forth the issue of coordination and harmonization of conflict between social-welfare and market efficiency. (shrink)

Leading scholars in the interdisciplinary field of geo-spatial visual studies examine the social experience of cinema and the different ways in which film production developed as a commercial enterprise, as a leisure activity, and as modes of expression and communication. Their research charts new pathways in mapping the relationship between film production and local film practices, theatrical exhibition circuits and cinema going, creating new forms of spatial anthropology. Topics include cinematic practices in rural and urban communities, development of (...) cinema by amateur filmmakers, and use of GIS in mapping the spatial development of film production and cinema going as social practices. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentRecently older people have been the target of filmmakers and marketing campaigns; the concept of the “grey pound” has become a potentially significant attraction encouraging filmmakers to explore issues relating to age and ageing in mainstream films. The recent success of films such as Mamma Mia and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel have made a significant impact on the box office, and Amour securing the 2013 Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, (...) proved that an older audience is eager to watch films with mature characters and about issues that are relevant and meaningful to them.Actor Dustin Hoffman chose the play, Quartet by Ronald Harwood, to make his directorial debut. Set in “Beecham House,” a residential home for retired musicians, Hoffman explores brilliantly the diversity of octogenarians. The home is under the threat of closure unless the residents raise a substantial amount of money to keep it open, and their cunning plan to do that is by organizing a charitable evening gala fea. (shrink)

We shall give a direct proof of the independence result of a Buchholz style-Hydra Game on labeled finite trees. We shall show that Takeuti-Arai's cut-elimination procedure of $(\Pi^{1}_{1}-CA) + BI$ and of the iterated inductive definition systems can be directly expressed by the reduction rules of Buchholz's Hydra Game. As a direct corollary the independence result of the Hydra Game follows.

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.

The ethics of advertising to children has been identified as one of the most important topics worthy of academic research in the marketing field. A fast growing advertising technique is product placement, and its use in children's films is becoming more and more common. The limited evidence existing suggests that product placements are especially potent in their effects upon children. Yet regulations regarding placements targeted at children are virtually non-existent, with advertising guidelines suggesting that it remains the prime responsibility (...) of the parents to provide guidance for children. This study measured the ethical evaluations of parents in the UK and Canada regarding product placements in children's films. After exposing parents to a four-type typology of product placements, results show that explicit placements of ethically charged products were perceived as the most unethical type of placements. Parents in the UK were more sensitive to the use of the technique and there was a significant difference in relativism between the two groups. Both sets of respondents would like to see more regulation on the use of placements, especially placements of alcohol, tobacco and fast foods. (shrink)

More and more schools begin to design simulation technology based on virtual imaging technology and virtual reality in their course contents. In particular, among these technical courses, there is a need to first strengthen the Film and Television Production education in higher institutions. This article aims to study the impact of VRT, VR, and Internet of things technology on FTP courses and audience psychology in higher institutions under the era of intelligent multimedia. How to use emerging VR technology to (...) promote the psychological wellbeing of students or patients has become a new research direction, the exploration of which has a far-reaching significance for the applications of the related technologies. First, the principle and applications of VR and IoT technology are described. Thereon, the deep learning -based training model is used to analyze the postproduction of VR-based Sand Table game, and the function and effect of the designed game model are discussed. Subsequently, VR-based Sand Play Therapy is applied to mentally ill patients to obtain its therapeutic effect. The results show that the designed VR-based Sand Table game model can be used to treat mentally ill patients and alleviate their negative psychological states. Meanwhile, the Test Anxiety Scale scores prove the significant therapeutic effect of the designed game model on the mental problems of patients. Therefore, VR-based psychological SPT can be applied in the stress relief of students and the treatment of mentally ill patients, as well as alleviate their mental health problems. This research provides a new direction and some theoretical support for the application field of VR technology. (shrink)

This article focuses on Eurimages, the Council of Europe fund for the co-production, distribution and exhibition of European films. The core investigation of this paper relates to the benefits this public fund has had for the European film sector. Reflecting on the fund's twenty-year existence, what output has been realized, both in economic and cultural terms? Turning to the future, what are the fund's prospects now that the sector is facing the technological challenge of digitization? In order to (...) evaluate the performance of the fund, the author takes a closer look at the economic, cultural and technologically innovative results achieved by Eurimages and relates these to the objectives that were set at its establishment. This evaluation is carried out by using statistical data as well as insights gained from policy documents, literature and expert interviews. (shrink)

In this paper, the Boolean representation of R0-algebras are investigated. In particular, we show that directly indecomposable R0-algebras are equivalent to local R0-algebras and any nontrivial R0-algebra is representable as a weak Boolean product of local R0-algebras.

This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological ‘objects’. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy realm of the natural world. The creation of ‘objects’ also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are (...) better understood as ontologically fluid, which is to say their identity cannot be ‘fixed’ — or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today’s biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms. (shrink)

Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art has been the best-selling and widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by a wide range of examples from various periods and countries, the authors strive to help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will deepen their understanding of any film, in any genre. Frame enlargements throughout the text (...) enable students to view images taken directly from completed films, while an optional, text-specific tutorial CD-ROM helps clarify and reinforce specific concepts addressed in the text with the use of film clips. Building on these strengths, the ninth edition adds coverage of new technologies, updated examples, and references to the authors' acclaimed weblog to provide unparalleled currency and connect students with the world of cinema today. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an aesthetic of horror film music based on the film sound theorist Kevin Donnelly's "direct access thesis". This states that horror film scores have the power to provide "direct accesses" to the bodies of an audience; they "produce bodily sensations, excite (mainly negative) emotions and insert in the audience "frames of mind and attitudes...much like a direct injection". I first argue that two dominant theories in the field, namely, the culturalist theory of film music and (...) Peter Kivy's cognitivist theory of music and emotion are inadequate. Then I will show that by aligning the direct access thesis with Jenefer Robinson's theory of music and emotion, Mark Johnson and Steve Larson's contention that musical meaning is primarily embodied, we will be able to reveal a deeper meaning of horror film scores than musical convention. I illustrate my proposal with the shark motif in Jaws and Dies Irae in The Shining. (shrink)

NOTES: Based on the book Socrates on trial written by Andrew Irvine and published by the University of Toronto Press. Performed at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, May 31-June 7, 2008. CONTENTS: Trailer, Who was Socrates?, Selected scenes, The production, Credits. UBC Library Catalogue Permanent URL: http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=3956307.

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)

Do cinematic representations of the natural world only put us in further remove from nature? A phenomenological approach shows that nature screened can produce a richer understanding of human–nature relations as these unfold in visual contact. If vision accesses the world in a unique relationship of sight, in which our contact with the world is defined by vision prior to any other interaction, the cinema offers a special setting for a phenomenology that seeks to draw-out the significance of human relations (...) with the world of nature that come before utility or action. A detailed analysis of the opening sequence of Terrence Malick’s The New World demonstrates how the act of viewing positions the viewer in relation to what she sees. This position, prior to action and with the impossibility to act is seen here as an ethical position, a position of responsibility in the Levinasian sense. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of vision is put here to use alongside the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger and the existential responsibility of Levinas, while subverting Levinas’ anthropocentrism and rejecting Heidegger’s limiting view of technology. The approach taken in this essay, of bringing phenomenology into productive and reflexive interaction with ecology and with film is dubbed an “eco-film-phenomenology.”. (shrink)

Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots. We do so using a rigorously controlled sample of child speech and child directed speech from three English-speaking children between the ages of (...) 2–3 years and their caregivers. We find different levels of creativity and flexibility between the adult and child samples for some measures, for some slots, and for some developmental periods. We discuss these differences in the context of verb frame semantics, conventionality versus creativity and child errors, and draw some tentative conclusions regarding developmental changes in children's early grammatical representations. (shrink)

We generalize to theories of modules (complete or not) a result of U. Felgner stating that a complete theory of abelian groups is a Horn theory if and only if it is closed under products. To prove this we show that a reduced product of modules $\Pi_F M_i (i \in I)$ is elementarily equivalent to a direct product of ultraproducts of the modules $M_i (i \in I)$.

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record (...) labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One (published in Thesis Eleven 109, 2012: 71–88) we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. (shrink)

In this paper we extend to non-classical set theories the standard strategy of proving independence using Boolean-valued models. This extension is provided by means of a new technique that, combining algebras (by taking their product), is able to provide product-algebra-valued models of set theories. In this paper we also provide applications of this new technique by showing that: (1) we can import the classical independence results to non-classical set theory (as an example we prove the independence of $\mathsf {CH}$ ); (...) and (2) we can provide new independence results. We end by discussing the role of non-classical algebra-valued models for the debate between universists and multiversists and by arguing that non-classical models should be included as legitimate members of the multiverse. (shrink)

In this commentary, we review evidence that production-based (perceiver-independent) measures reveal few consistent sex differences in emotion. Further, sex differences in perceiver-based measures can be attributed to retrospective or dispositional biases. We end by discussing an alternative view that women might appear to be more emotional because they are more facile with emotion language.

This article is about a relationship between the Socratic practice of philosophy and the aesthetic practice of watching and appreciating film. The conclusion that I defend is that certain narrative films, like the elenctic method in the hands of Socrates, are philosophical tools for examining our cognitive and emotional life and thus for gaining insight into aspects of our character. In the early sections of the article I construct an analogy between the practice of watching narrative film and the (...) practice of self-examination through dialogue and reflection. I argue that good aesthetic practice in film appreciation is analogous to good philosophical practice in the manner of Socrates, and I treat the elenchus as a method of self-examination rather than of conceptual analysis and Socrates himself as an examiner of people rather than of abstract concepts. In the later sections I discuss three films directed by Christopher Nolan—Memento, The Prestige, and Inception —as paradigm cases of Socratic film. I argue that these films show us something about ourselves by prompting extemporaneous emotional responses and cognitive judgments that we come, reflectively, to reject. (shrink)

This article explores the 2020 Turkish Netflix series Bir Başkadır (Ethos) written and directed by Berkun Oya about contemporary Turkey through its objects. With objects surge memories, which are both personal and collective. From the charged objects that convey private attachments, traumas, and histories to ordinary household trinkets and finally archival audiovisual material, this series assumes the status of museum in its drive to carefully exhibit the material world on screen. As the Turkish title of the series indicates, these objects (...) are “bir başkadır”: one of a kind. Through themes and practices of lost innocence, counter-archives, and archiveology, I sift through the quotidian objects, miniatures, old photos, souvenirs, and analogue film footage re-presented and re-collected in this series with an eye to their new scope and allure. The past and present rest adjacent to one another in the mise-en-scène of this series. In engagement with the philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin on the collector, the archive, and memory, Andreas Huyssen's concept of the “museal gaze,” Jennifer Culbert's “counter-archival sensibility,” and finally Catherine Russell's practice of “archiveology,” this article examines how the objects that fashion the on-screen world acquire depth and meaning and the film as museum comes to form. (shrink)

Introduction. Observing the production and consumer area of modern cinematography makes it possible to draw conclusions about the value dominants of modern society, to conduct its sociocultural analysis. Cinema, both auteur and mass, is a way of reflecting and modeling the society spiritual state and its analysis makes it possible to draw quite serious and justified philosophical and social conclusions. The film in a philosophical sense is ontologized by the dominant intention of the era. Such a dominant intention of (...) modernity is hedonism. Pleasure, enjoyment, happiness, according to the humanities, is the basic values of the 21st century society. Cinema is the most comprehensive reaction to the needs of hedonism, since hedonistic prerequisites are to some degree laid down in its technical (movement, photographic phenomenology) and social nature (art and entertainment). In this regard, it seems relevant to conduct a philosophical analysis of the ontological level of modern cinema. The aim of the study is to conduct a philosophical analysis of the ontological level of modern cinema; identify ontological models, variations and combinations of which provide its artistic diversity. Methods: the authors use the general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, the phenomenological method, since they identify the sensory intentions that underlie modern cinema. The authors also use the hermeneutic method, since they reveal the hidden meanings of the film, determined by the time and conditions of its creation, as well as the semiotic approach, which makes it possible to analyze the structural-semiotic whole of the film. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the authors analyze films from philosophical aspects, and not just cultural studies, as is customary. In modern cinema, the authors look for a reflection of the “social soul”, identify those intentions that underlie modern cinema, both auteur and mass. This makes it possible to deduce a typology of film models that have not previously been applied to the analysis of the film process. Results. During the analysis, the authors developed a hedonistic-ontological typology of cinematic models, identified five generative models of cinema, four of which have a hedonistic orientation: an alimentary model that pleases the recipient by intensively stimulating his perceptual sphere; a parkour model that gives pleasure to light and unhindered movement, minimizing the severity and resistance of the environment; an arcade model that provides the viewer the pleasure of victory through virtual immersion in the ups and downs of the “action film”; a detective model that gives the viewer pleasure through the removal of cognitive uncertainty. The fifth model, tentatively called existential, should lead the viewer into a complex philosophical state of being-with-self-self, an experience of one’s own fulfillment, associated with the experience of suffering. However, due to the hedonistic orientations of modern culture, this model is not relevant in the first decades of the 21st century. Conclusions. Philosophical analysis of modern cinema has revealed that at the ontological level it is based on the philosophy of hedonism. Modern cinema delivers the following types of pleasures to the recipient: enjoyment of the flesh of the world, enjoyment of bodily freedom in motion, enjoyment of peace, cognitive enjoyment. (shrink)

This series of images forms part of the ongoing project Soft Ground, Hard Light, which speculates on a multiscalar spatial ontology of photography emanating from the Arditurri silver mine complex in the Basque Country. Evoking the mountainous massif around Arditurri where silver ore and galena have been extracted since Roman presence in the area, the depicted topographies are, in fact, data transcriptions from atomic force microscopy (AFM) probing the analogue film stock of an early 1930s experiment in 3D cinema, Cine (...) en Relieve, by the Basque cinematographer Teófilo Mingueza. In contrast to optical or electron microscopy, AFM uses a scanning probe to physically touch the specimen, recording its surface undulations at the atomic scale of a nanometre, or a billionth of a metre. As a haptic operation based on direct contact between instrument and sample, between apparatus and referent, AFM is literally a contact print, a ‘blind’ scan that senses not the visual content of the recorded image but ‘feels’ its underlying material substrate of silver nanoparticles within the 35 mm film emulsion. The resulting image assemblies visualize a topography resulting from the intra-action between the silver nanoparticles and the scanning probe as much as its transcription through the particular parameters afforded by the AFM analysis software. Hard Light, Soft Ground was initiated during an artist’s residency at Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Culture, Donostia-San Sebastián, and is currently in production as part of the wider research project Esper Syndrome: Archaeotopologies of the Image at the Royal College of Art, funded by the AHRC through the London Arts & Humanities Partnership. With additional thanks to the Basque Film Archive and Gustavo Ariel Schwartz at the Materials Physics Centre, Donostia-San Sebastián. (shrink)

Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers, including the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This volume takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar; and like all grammars, it forms part of the system of rules that govern a language, (...) and is thus applicable to wider range of media forms. In their creation of authorial trends, identification of the technology of cinema as a creative force, and production of films as aesthetic markers, film theories contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. This book explores these connections through film theorisations of processes of the diagrammatisation of cinematic matters of the filmic world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ArtistsJennifer and Kevin McCoy are Brooklyn-based artists who make projects about how our thoughts, experiences, and memories are structured through genre and repetition. In order to focus attention on these structures, they often reexamine classic works of science fiction or television narrative, creating sculptural objects, video projections, or live events from what they find.Their work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (...) The New Museum (all in New York), and The Renaissance Society (Chicago). International exhibitions include projects at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) and Kunst Werke (Berlin), and a solo exhibition at The British Film Institute (London, UK). Articles about their work have appeared in Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The Wire, dArt International, Spin Magazine, Feed, and The Independent. Installation view and detail images of Double Fantasy 2 (Sex) were shown in the solo exhibition "Directed Dreaming" at Postmasters, New York, March–April 2006. The Double Fantasy image was part of the exhibition "Night Sites" at the Hannover Kunstverein in Hannover Germany, November 2005. Each side of the sculpture has a model of a childhood sex fantasy for each of us. Cameras project large-scale images of it onto the wall, accompanied by a soundtrack. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Cover) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 16) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 32) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 47) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 63) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 77) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 92) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 9.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy. "Night Sites," installation view. November 2005 at Hannover Kunstverein, Hannover, Germany(Page 107)Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This article examines the Asian storytelling model ‘Kishotenketsu’, identifying its similarities with, and differences from, the classical Western model of dramaturgical plot construction. The ‘Kishotenketsu’ structure is used in poetry, literature, documentation, scientific research dissertations, music, and video game design. The article examines the application of this model in feature films. From the directing point of view, researchers have studied films with different artistic trends and from different production countries and discovered scripting and directing techniques having the (...) elements of the Asian model. Through the comparative analysis of the world films with those from Kazakhstan, this study attempted to reveal the use of the ‘Kishotenketsu’ model and its separate elements in the process of making films by prominent filmmakers in the past and the present from different countries. The films were studied in the context of screenwriting, visual storytelling, and editing. The study found that the ‘Kishotenketsu’ model is found in Kazakh cinematography in the direction of Art cinemas. The authors believe that ‘Kishotenketsu’ model will add more artistic value to the Kazakh cinema, allowing filmmakers to diversify unconventional ways of storytelling and filmmaking in the genres of both auteurs’ cinema and commercial cinema. (shrink)