Sheds new light on the aesthetic factors that shaped Kubrick's artistic voice by examining the links between his photojournalist work (done between 1945 to 1950) and his films.

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility, affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship and instead enter the reality (...) of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach the microphone from its adherence to space, the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form. (shrink)

On the origin of the cinematic odyssey Kubrick remarks: 'I do not remember when I got the idea to do the film. I became interested in extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, and was convinced that the universe was *full* of intelligent life, and so it seemed time to make a film'. But as to the confusion surrounding the film upon its release, and in particular many thinking Floyd had gone to the 'planet' Clavius he said: 'Why they think there's (...) a planet Clavius I'll never know. But they hear him [Floyd] asked, 'Where are you going?', and he says, 'I'm going to Clavius'. With many people -- *boom* -- that one word registers in their heads and they don't look at fifteen shots of the moon; they don't see he's going to the Moon'. At the same time he rhetorically asked: 'How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover'. This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to _2001_'. (shrink)

This article analyses 2001 in terms of what I term paleofuturism. Fusing deep future and deep past, this cyclical figure reconciles rational machinic intelligence with diverse repressed temporal layers: archaic cultures, the embryonic state of individuals, and bygone biological and geological eras. In 2001, paleofuturism is nourished by Nietzsche’s Übermensch of the future, reborn as a child, and by Jungian ideas of individuation, the reconciliation with the shadow of the collective unconscious that leads to the black cosmos itself. Further paleofuturist (...) contexts for 2001 are explored in the so-called “ancient astronaut thesis” of science fiction, speculative science, and pseudo-science. Finally, in minimalism and earth art of the late 1960s we meet a structural parallel to 2001’s bypassing of the organic human body, one that bridges the inorganic entropic realities of deep future and deep past. (shrink)

Films and Dreams considers the essential link between films and the world of dreams. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein reveals a common structure of "dreamtense" in the works of major filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Bergman, and Wong Kar-wai.

The book covers scientific and philosophical topics by bringing them closer to literature. Some topics are scientific explanation, the concept of cause, rational argumentation, pseudoscience, language, ethics, philosophy of mind, posthumanism, and democracy. Summary Prefazione di Severino Saccardi. Introduzione. Capitolo 1: Le scrivanie di Eddington. 1.1. Il vecchio Qfwfq (I. Calvino. Le cosmicomiche). 1.2. L’assassino invisibile (L.F. Celine, Il dottor Semmelweis). 1.3. Gli gnommeri di Ingravallo (C.E. Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana). 1.4. I sergenti di Napoleone (L. Tolstoj, (...) Guerra e pace). 1.5. Tex e il Coyote nero (G. Bonelli, Il Coyote nero). 1.6. “Elementare Watson!” (A.C. Doyle, Il segno dei quattro). Capitolo 2. Non saranno mai delusi. 2.1. L’albero di Natale. (V. Perrin, Cambiare l’acqua ai fiori). 2.2. Il dagherrotipo di Buendia. (G.G. Marquez, Cent’anni di solitudine). 2.3. Don Ferrante e la peste. (A. Manzoni, I promessi sposi). Capitolo 3. Capitolo puffo. 3.1. L’Accademia di Lagado. (J. Swift, I viaggi di Gulliver). 3.2. Bruto è uomo d’onore. (W. Shakespeare, Giulio Cesare). 3.3. Le oche mute. (G. Orwell, 1984). Capitolo 4. “Quarantadue!” 4.1. Lo zio N’Ba N’Ga. (I. Calvino, Le cosmicomiche). 4.2. La mosca cocchiera. (J. de La Fontaine, Favole). 4.3. Il fiore del dr. Dek. (E. Salgari, Le meraviglie del Duemila). Capitolo 5. L’ultimo uomo. 5.1. La pernice accusatrice. (Cyrano de Bergerac, Gli stati e gli imperi del Sole). 5.2. Pallino in via Mjasnickaja. (M.A. Bulgakov, Cuore di cane). Capitolo 6. Scenari perturbanti. 6.1. Dissipatio. (G. Morselli, Dissipatio H.G.). 6.2. Un mammifero meccanizzato. (S. Butler, Erewhon). 6.3. Mlle Olimpia. (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Racconti notturni). Capitolo 7. La gente perbene. 7.1. La balena bianca. (H. Melville, Moby Dick). 7.2. Betsabea Everdeene. (T. Hardy, Via dalla pazza folla). 7.3. Un’idea francese. (C. McCarthy, Cavalli selvaggi). 7.4. Le montagne del Montana. (D. Delillo, Rumore bianco). (shrink)

Shadow Philosophy: Plato’s Cave and Cinema is an accessible and exciting new contribution to film-philosophy, which shows that to take film seriously is also to engage with the fundamental questions of philosophy. Nathan Andersen brings Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange into philosophical conversation with Plato’s Republic , comparing their contributions to themes such as the nature of experience and meaning, the character of justice, the contrast between appearance and reality, the importance of art, and the impact of images. (...) At the heart of the book is a novel account of the analogy between Plato’s allegory of the cave and cinema, developed in conjunction with a provocative interpretation of the most powerful image from A Clockwork Orange , in which the lead character is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent films. Key features of the book include: a comprehensive bibliography of suggested readings on Plato, on film, on philosophy, and on the philosophy of film a list of suggested films that can be explored following the approach in this book, including brief descriptions of each film, and suggestions regarding its philosophical implications a summary of Plato’s Republic , book by book, highlighting both dramatic context and subject matter. Offering a close reading of the controversial classic film A Clockwork Orange , and an introductory account of the central themes of the philosophical classic The Republic , this book will be of interest to both scholars and students of philosophy and film, as well as to readers of Plato and fans of Stanley Kubrick. (shrink)

O artigo articulará a temática do dossiê Religião e Cinema no gênero da ficção científica. Para isso, propõe-se uma reflexão acerca de um conceito de Deus em 2001 Uma Odisseia no Espaço a partir de uma declaração do diretor Stanley Kubrick. O trabalho mostrará, inicialmente, um fundo de reflexão comum tanto para a religião quanto para a ficção científica. Uma narrativa cuja realização se dá num evento maior distingue-se, no filme, da confessionalidade religiosa, encontrando, a despeito da tecnologia e (...) da ciência, na própria ficção a emancipação da finitude e das determinações por meio de símbolos infinitos. O símbolo maior, manifestado como protagonista, é o Monolito: fonte de reflexão sobre um outro conceito de Deus distinto de tradições religiosas monoteístas. Como uma metáfora da jornada da humanidade, o neologismo monoliteísmo sugere a busca da compreensão de si mesmo por meio de significações últimas na expressão artística de Kubrick da circularidade, da linearidade e, sobretudo, do silêncio. Apesar de contar com uma análise crítica da linguagem cinematográfica, sobretudo a partir de Deleuze, o método de pesquisa é o hermenêutico e o referencial bibliográfico selecionado contempla obras de crítica tanto filosófica quanto cinematográfica. (shrink)

O artigo articulará a temática do dossiê _Religião e Cinema_ no gênero da ficção científica. Para isso, propõe-se uma reflexão acerca de um conceito de Deus em _2001 Uma Odisseia no Espaço_ a partir de uma declaração do diretor Stanley Kubrick. O trabalho mostrará, inicialmente, um fundo de reflexão comum tanto para a religião quanto para a ficção científica. Uma narrativa cuja realização se dá num evento maior distingue-se, no filme, da confessionalidade religiosa, encontrando, a despeito da tecnologia e (...) da ciência, na própria ficção a emancipação da finitude e das determinações por meio de símbolos infinitos. O símbolo maior, manifestado como protagonista, é o Monolito: fonte de reflexão sobre um outro conceito de Deus distinto de tradições religiosas monoteístas. Como uma metáfora da jornada da humanidade, o neologismo _monoliteísmo_ sugere a busca da compreensão de si mesmo por meio de significações últimas na expressão artística de Kubrick da circularidade, da linearidade e, sobretudo, do silêncio. Apesar de contar com uma análise crítica da linguagem cinematográfica, sobretudo a partir de Deleuze, o método de pesquisa é o hermenêutico e o referencial bibliográfico selecionado contempla obras de crítica tanto filosófica quanto cinematográfica. (shrink)

According to Stanley Kubrick, “[i]f it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed”. This is true for award-winning Irish short story writer Claire Keegan (1968) whose sparse and effective prose has hit the core of audiences struggling to process the lingering impact of national trauma. Keegan confronts it all head-on, highlighting social issues that loom large in evocative narratives where thoughts, situations and scenarios spill over into the space between the words. What is left unsaid says it (...) all. The silence that reigns in a space of ‘NON-sayability’ in Keegan’s stories is anything but opaque. In Small Things Like These she navigates treacherous territories in a dark Christmas tale about the widespread and notorious Magdalene Laundry apparatus that keeps weighing heavily on our collective conscience. How can we remain passive in the face of wrongdoings and how does Keegan unlock the past and urge us to scrutinise history? (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)

In this paper, I explore the bodily constitution of violence from a phenomenological perspective, contrasting the directly lived experience of violence with imagistic violence. The analysis involves examining one’s own embodiment from the first-person perspective in two distinct situations: as the agent of violence, anchored in one’s own “I can”, and as a passive victim, marked by vulnerability and helplessness. Each situation reveals specific particularities of the other’s adversity. The final section transitions to the imagistic experience of violence, discussing how (...) bodily markers are modified in this context. Using Kubrick’s iconic film A Clockwork Orange as an example, I illustrate the shift in bodily structures and the implications of imagistic violence. (shrink)

This article looks at the film A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971) through the lenses of the free will debate. The main argument proposed is that the film exemplifies a view of free will that I call polythetic. This view says that free will needs to be understood as containing several criteria that allow us to see an action as more or less free, but none of the characteristics is essential for an action to be classified as free. In this (...) view, free will is not an on or off function, but should be understood on a spectrum. A Clockwork Orange illustrates this view. This story is a philosophical work of fiction. As the story progresses, the main character, Little Alex, is free in certain aspects and not others, touching on several important and different elements of free will. The film’s story is an ideal way to illustrate the idea of free will as something we can have more or less of, rather than something we have or do not have. The film is seen as a philosophical work in that it illustrates a polythetic view of free will, and the traditional philosophical discussions on free will can also be used to enrich the understanding of the film. (shrink)

The emergence of the hominids, more than five million years ago, marked the start of the human odyssey through space and time. This book deals with the last stage of this fascinating journey: the exploration of cyberspace and cybertime. Through the rapid global implementation of information and communication technologies, a new realm for human experience and imagination has been disclosed. Reversely, these postgeographical and posthistorical technologies have started to colonize our bodies and minds. Taking Homer's Odyssey and Kubrick's 2001: (...) A Space Odyssey as his starting point, the author investigates the 'informatization of the worldview', focusing on its implications for our culture-arts, religion, and science-and, ultimately, our form of life. Moving across a wide range of disciplines, varying from philosophical anthropology and palaeontology to information theory, and from astrophysics to literary, film and new media studies, the author discusses our 'cyberspace odyssey' from a reflective position beyond euphoria and nostalgia. His analysis is as profound as nuanced and deals with issues that will be high on the agenda for many decades to come. In 2003 a Dutch Edition of Cyberspace Odyssey received the Socrates Prize for the best philosophy book published in Dutch. (shrink)

Mais do que nunca, pensar em comunicação significa pensar em imagens. Já se repetiu exaustivamente que vivemos em uma cultura imagética, marcada pela crescente proliferação de telas e tecnologias de produção audiovisual. E se passamos de regimes analógicos para digitais, isso só fez aumentar a vitalidade da imagem e multiplicar suas potencialidades. Nesse sentido, o presente número de Logos nos oferece uma amostragem da riqueza que também podemos encontrar hoje no campo das pesquisas sobre o audiovisual. O crescimento da pós-graduação (...) em comunicação no Brasil parece apontar para um futuro promissor em termos de exploração das artes e formas de comunicação audiovisuais. Os artigos aqui reunidos dão igualmente prova da força e da amplitude desse campo, congregando temáticas tão diversas quanto a relação entre o espectador e o documentário ou a cinefilia como forma de consumo contemporâneo. Ocorre que o audiovisual não é apenas um domínio de pesquisa de crescente popularidade na academia, senão também uma das mais poderosas expressões criativas e comunicacionais do homem, capaz de despertar as paixões mais intensas. Isso porque, desde sua origem, as tecnologias audiovisuais sempre se caracterizaram como artes do espanto e do maravilhamento. Numa das lembrança mais marcantes da minha infância, ainda consigo me ver na entrada de um dos belos cinemas da Tijuca (hoje inteiramente desaparecidos, mas tema do cativante estudo histórico de Talitha Ferraz) enquanto espero minha mãe convencer o lanterninha de que tenho mesmo 10 anos de idade – o mínimo exigido para poder assistir à 2001, uma Odisséia no Espaço , obra prima de Stanley Kubrick. Saí do filme sem entender grande coisa, mas inteiramente seduzido pelas impressionantes imagens do vasto espaço sideral e pela sedutora musica de Richard Strauss. Desde esse dia, o cinema se tornou, para mim, uma espécie de religião sem deus (ou com muitos deuses). Nessa cultura das telas em que hoje habitamos, as imagens parecem ter adquirido vida própria. Elas estão em toda parte, conferindo ao mundo certo sabor de permanente fantasmagoria. Aliás, tem sido um tema constante do pensamento apocalíptico esse processo de virtualização da realidade por efeito da multiplicação das imagens eletrônicas. Mas no fundo sabemos que nunca houve para o homem uma realidade que não fosse constituída por imagens. E as fantasmagorias, boas ou ruins, são aquilo que nos oferece suporte e sustentação para um mundo que, de outro modo, provavelmente se encontraria muito mais esvaziado de sentido. Se Edgar Morin inicia seu livro Le Cinema, ou l’Homme Imaginaire com a menção a duas grandes tecnologias legadas a nós pelo século XIX – o cinema e a aviação – é também porque as imagens nos transportam a outros mundos, nos alçam em vôos da imaginação e do pensamento. Da fotografia à arte digital, do televisão ao político, os artigos que reunimos neste numero de Logos compartilham, de diferentes modos, desse sentido de maravilhamento com as imagens. Afinal, elas acrescentam ao mundo uma dimensão suplementar de sentido. Mesmo o extraordinário impacto das imagens digitais, percebido com clareza no êxito de blockbusters tecnológicos como o recente Avatar , de James Cameron, não alteraram esse dado básico de nossa experiência com o audiovisual. De certo modo, é como se estivéssemos ainda nos sentando na sala escura para nos maravilharmos com a ilusão do movimento, lado a lado com os espectadores dos primeiros filmes dos Lumière e de Méliès. Mesmo a pesquisa e a investigação critica do audiovisual não podem furtar-se inteiramente dessa sensação de espanto com as imagens. Um saber que não é temperado pela paixão não tem sentido de existir. E sem uma pincelada de olhar infantil, o que nos poderia ensinar de sempre novo nossa curiosidade com o mundo e nossas estratégias de representá-lo? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining At first glance, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining seems to be a straightforward Gothic horror film. It starts with the Torrance family— Jack, Wendy, and Danny—moving from their Boulder, Colorado, apartment into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack (Jack Nicholson) has (...) accepted a job as the winter caretaker. By the film’s climax, an axe-wielding Jack says to his terrified wife and son (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd), through the door to the bathroom where they are hiding, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin? Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!”1 Jack assumes the role of the Big Bad Wolf, the nightmarish, predatory beast of fairy tales. These lines, along with Nicholson’s exaggerated performance as a crazed killer, parody the Gothic horror genre and slasher films and even children ’s fairy tales in what is, at its core, a story about domestic violence. In both Kubrick’s film and Stephen King’s 1977 novel, from which the film was adapted, the Gothic genre becomes a vehicle for a serious tale about violence within the family. The “discovery” of child abuse in the 1960s, “the creation of the wife-beating problem” in the 1970s, and 1. The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980; Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD. The line is from the fairytale of The Three Little Pigs. Geoffrey Cocks discusses the sources and ramifications of the fairytale in The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2004), 33–38. 690 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck the feminist movement allowed viewers to perceive domestic violence with a new level of understanding.2 It is my contention that The Shining comments on domestic violence in a way that has been mostly overlooked by critics. While most analyses of both the novel and the film have come from literary and cinema studies perspectives, I offer a sociological approach focused on the profound effect of changing social mores on cultural production. I draw also on feminist and queer theorizing of audience identification, gender, and erotic pleasure in horror films to explain the significant contributions made by King, Kubrick, Duvall, and screenwriter Diane Johnson to the film’s intervention in US public discourse about domestic violence.3 The first scholar who argued that Kubrick’s film is essentially a domestic abuse narrative was James Hala, who based his analysis on a close reading of critical reviews of the film and a discussion of the performances, with no reference to its social, political, or historical context.4 But it is important to note that both the novel and the film came at the end of a decade when the recognition of domestic violence as a social problem was still relatively new. Sociologists and the medical and legal professions did not take “wife beating” seriously until the mid-1970s, when the women’s movement brought public attention to spousal abuse.5 2. Kathleen J. Tierney, “The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (1982): 207–20; Stephen J. Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse,” Social Problems 24, no. 3 (1977): 310–23. 3. The theoretical works that I have drawn on most heavily are Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and David Greven, Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. James Hala, “Kubrick’s The Shining: The Specters and the Critics,” in The Shining Reader, ed. Anthony Magistrale (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), 203–16. 5. In 1976, a national survey reported that “at least 1.8 million American women are severely beaten in their own homes every year.” Murray A. Straus, et al., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, as cited in “‘The Burning Bed’: TV... (shrink)

This article tries to shed light on the multiple, but underrated pleasures of the heist film – a genre that has attracted numerous major directors from Jean-Pierre Melville and Stanley Kubrick to Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh, but has received limited scholarly attention. I approach the genre from a, broadly, philosophical perspective and draw on thinkers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Georg Simmel, Paul Souriau and Bruno Latour to argue that their emphasis on (1) skillful action and kinaesthetic empathy, (2) (...) smooth transgression of boundaries and (3) well-functioning social collaboration and we-connection, the genre's best exemplars satisfy, in fictional and quasi-utopian form, a number of real-life desires. (shrink)

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience, he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of "thinking in images" to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Richard Rorty, who see (...) politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience. (shrink)

_Screen, Culture, Psyche_ illuminates recent developments in Jungian modes of media analysis, and illustrates how psychoanalytic theories have been adapted to allow for the interpretation of films and television programmes, employing Post-Jungian methods in the deep reading of a whole range of films. Readings of this kind can demonstrate the way that some films bear the psychological projections not only of their makers but of their audience, and assess the manner in which films engage the writer’s own psyche. Seeking to (...) go beyond existing theories, John Izod explores the question of whether Jungian screen analysis can work for ordinary filmgoers - can what functions for the scholar be said to be true for people without a background in Jung’s ideas? Through detailed readings of a number of films and programmes, John Izod builds on the work previously done by Jungian film analysts, and moves on to contemplate the level of audience engagement. Offering deep readings of films directed by Kubrick and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as satirical comedy, documentaries and twenty-first century Westerns, the book explores the extent to which they manage to make the psychological impact on spectators that films of a similar kind have done on Jungian writers. The author concludes that the screen texts with the best likelihood of impacting the culture of the audience through their collective psychological force fall at opposite ends of the size and budget range: highly personal documentaries, and the most affecting of mainstream genre movies. This innovative text will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and scholars of film with an interest in understanding how screen products work psychologically to engage the viewer. (shrink)

Du film Her de Spike Jonze à 2001 L’Odyssée de l’espace de Stanley Kubrick, et des androïdes de Philip K. Dick à l’utopie intergalactique de la Culture de l’écrivain Iain M. Banks, il est impossible de comprendre aujourd’hui l’intelligence artificielle sans s’intéresser à ses puissants imaginaires. Ceux-ci, nourrissant bien des fantasmes de la Silicon Valley, sont essentiels à décrypter pour ne pas les subir, voire pour se les approprier et mieux les détourner, en faire des antidotes contre les multinationales (...) du numérique, puis cultiver grâce à eux nos propres machines rebelles de quelque futur. (shrink)

La philosophie contemporaine est tiraillée entre deux pôles apparemment inconciliables, que sont la littérature et les sciences dures. Une possibilité de réconciliation et de fusion est pourtant envisageable en remontant à Descartes, qui ne voit pas, dans son traité du Monde, de discontinuité entre philosophie et science et qui utilise la fable et la fiction pour exposer une vérité scientifique universelle. Or, cette vérité est exposée par des moyens (la déréalisation expérimentale du monde, la géométrisation de l’espace, la force d’un (...) esprit qui s’exprime par un « je », l’analogie, qui permet d’expliquer l’homme) qui sont aussi ceux qu’emploient des artistes modernes comme Marcel Proust et Stanley Kubrick. En confrontant le Monde de Descartes à À la recherche du temps perdu de Proust et à 2001 : l’Odyssée de l’espace de Kubrick et de Clarke, il est possible de montrer la fraternité des œuvres malgré leurs différences d’époques, de styles et de buts et de souligner l’unité de leur prétention à la vérité, qu’elle soit scientifique, artistique ou philosophique. Les différences entre les disciplines fusionnent dans les œuvres, qui ont toujours pour finalité de refaire le réel à l’image de l’entendement humain, pour mieux pouvoir l’expliquer. (shrink)

In this book, ten experts in philosophy of film explore the importance of transcendence for cinema as an art form in the films of the great directors, David Cronenberg, Karl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Yasujiro Ozu, and Martin Scorsese.

In 1958 William L. Langer, in a well-known presidential address to the American Historical Association, declared the informed use of psychoanalytic depth psychology as "the next assignment" for professional historians. _Psychoanalysis and History_, volume 31 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_, examines the degree to which Langer's directive has been realized in the intervening 45 years. Section I makes the case for psychobiography in the lives of historical figures and exemplifies this perspective with analytically informed studies of the art of Wassily (...) Kandinsky; the films of Stanley Kubrick; and the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler. Section II reviews Freud's own psychohistorical contributions and then considers the relevance to historical inquiry of the more recent perspectives of Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut. Section III explores an intriguing tributary of psychobiographical inquiry: the impact of the biographer's own subjectivity on his or her work. Section IV turns to a topic of perennial interest: the psychobiographical study of American presidents. Section V turns to the special challenges of applying psychoanalysis to topics of religious history and includes topical studies of religious figures as disparate as the 15th century Asian Drukpa Kunley and Osama bin Laden. Section VI focuses on the recent extension of psychohistorical inquiry to groups of people and to cultural phenomena more generally: an investigation of the youth movement in pre-Nazi Germany; consideration of how societies, no less than individuals, reenact and work through traumas over time; and an outline of the role of analysis in constructing a depth-psychological "social psychology" of use to historians. These papers, no less than those that precede them, are compelling testimony to the claim with which editors James William Anderson and Jerome A. Winer begin the volume, to wit, that "Psychoanalysis would seem to be a resource indispensable to the study of history.". (shrink)

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work (...) with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

The Ontological Question seems to be the main source of controversy in the Anti-intentionalism versus Intentionalism debate. The Ontological Question asks what determines the meaning of an artwork? Intentionalists argue that the intention of the artist determines the meaning of the artwork, while Anti-intentionalists argue that the artwork alone determines its own meaning. In this article I answer this question as it relates to film analysis. I propose a Biosemantic variety of film analysis, rooted in semantic externalist philosophy of language. (...) Via this Biosemantic approach, and with the help of a case study of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I provide an answer to the Ontological Question which refutes two main varieties of Intentionalism and supports Anti-intentionalist film analysis. (shrink)

By now it goes without saying that cinema is and has always been a synesthetic experience. But what exactly do we mean when we say that? The paper develops a phenomenology of “cinematic synesthesia” that draws upon three recent developments: first, the neuroscientific “neonatal synesthesia hypothesis”; second, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on child psychology and translator Talia Welsh’s contextualization of that work within recent developmental psychology; and third, Dylan Trigg’s concept of a “darkened phenomenology” that accounts for the radically “unhuman.” These (...) conceptual lenses are trained on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, whose legendary impact stems from its perplexing tangle of the sensory with the cognitive, the unconscious with the conscious, the individual with the collective, and the past with the present. (shrink)

_Eyes Wide Shut_ Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick Warner Bros., 1999.

While every discipline in the humanities worries about its future, film studies is caught in the thrall of a particular anxiety, namely the possibility that it lacks a consistent object and a compelling reason. Behind the question of film studies looms the question of cinema itself, an aging techn? that seems to have hung around in the midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the image as their province. Why cinema? Against so many digital incursions, more traditionally minded critics (...) have defended film on the basis of its indexical powers, but this article envisions an entirely different reason to return to the cinema. Where both the return to the index and the recourse to the digital effect tend to regard the cinema as a matter of visibility, I suggest that we might reclaim our faith in the cinema by virtue of what remains unseen and off-screen. Hence, this essay undertakes a brief history of the out of frame in order to induce a conceptualization of the cinema (pace Deleuze) as the art of the ?Outside.? Turning to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the essay concludes by analyzing how an ostensibly older sense of images nevertheless augurs the critical and philosophical developments with which we can learn to believe in the cinema once more. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que l'inconscient? À cette question, de nombreuses disciplines, de la psychanalyse aux neurosciences, ont proposé une réponse - toujours frustrante. Peut-être cet échec reposait-il sur le fait que l'inconscient a trop longtemps été considéré comme une chose à observer de loin, plutôt que comme un paysage à arpenter, à explorer. S'entourant d'une pléiade d'artistes, de cinéastes et d'écrivains, de Christopher Nolan à Mikhaïl Boulgakov, de Pierre Huygue à Stanley Kubrick, de Michel Houellebecq à Liv Strômquist, Sinziana Ravini propose (...) ici une traversée de l'inconscient en compagnie de ceux qui ont choisi de ne pas chercher à le circonscrire, mais d'en approfondir les chemins. À sa suite, on découvrira un monde où les dimensions les plus narcissiques de l'inconscient se confondent avec les plus collectives - un monde où la vie intime des individus se fait l'écho de celle de la réalité elle-même. Dans un va-et-vient méditatif, avec une approche nouvelle et sensible, Sinziana Ravini cherche moins à définir les règles de compréhension de notre vie psychique qu'à poser les questions susceptibles de nous aider à poursuivre le voyage - à devenir enfin, comme les artistes eux-mêmes, les psychonautes de notre présent."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia is a landmark work of postsocialist cinema. The film is a study in violent contrasts. It is viscerallycharged and icily allegorical; intimately physical in its exploration ofmasculine desire and bodily disgust, and sardonically distanced in its satiricalportrayal of the successive social and political regimes that dominatedHungary over the course of the twentieth century. On the one hand,Taxidermia is a highly controlled, severely formalist film. In its nearlyinhuman detachment, and its rigorously schematic organization, it is assevere as anything (...) by Kubrick. Yet at the same time, it is filled withuncomfortable and unpredictable details; and it insistently focuses onexcesses of the flesh in a way that rivals early Cronenberg. In what follows, Iconsider Taxidermia in the light of these contradictory extremes. (shrink)

Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism follows in the path blazed by Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis, where politics is seen as a mode of freedom; the possibility for individuals to consciously and explicitly create the institutions of their own societies. Starting with such problem as: What is capital? How can we characterize the dominant economic system? What are the conditions for its existence, and how can we create alternatives?, the articles examine the central institutions of modern Western societies, (...) market capitalism, representative liberal democracy, and science. To elucidate the problem of depoliticization, the authors engage a number of thinkers from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen to Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Stanley Kubrick. -/- . (shrink)

Art and the Form of Life takes a classic theme—philosophy as the art of living—and gives it a contemporary twist. The book examines a series of watershed moments in artistic practice alongside philosophers’ most enduring questions about the way we live. Coupling Tino Sehgal with Wittgenstein, cave art with Foucault, Stanley Kubrick with Nietzsche, and the Bauhaus with Walter Benjamin, the book animates the idea that life is literally ours to make. It reflects on universal themes that connect the (...) long histories of art and philosophy, and it does so using a contemporary approach. Drawing on great philosophical works, it argues that life practiced as an art form affords an experience of meaning, in the sense that it is engaging, creative, and participatory. It thus effects a fundamental renewal of experience. (shrink)

Introduction: Excess, the gaze, and cinema of confinement -- Excess in confinement in Room and Green room -- Big window, big other: enjoyment and spectatorship in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope -- Interior confinement: shattering and disintegration in Ingmar Bergman's The passion of Anna -- It "over-looks": movement and stillness in Stanley Kubrick's The shining -- "It's just a show?" Paranoia and provocation in Oliver Stone's Talk radio -- Voices, telephones, and confined spaces: Phone booth and Locke -- Captive, captor, and (...) aliens: 10 Cloverfield lane -- Conclusion: 127 hours, The wall, Panic room, and Cyberspace. (shrink)

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema's Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema's power to evoke illusions: feeling like you're flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, (...) first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers' embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad's The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema's perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema's death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema's proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. (shrink)

This book explores the shared experiential ground of cinema, art, and architecture. Pallasmaa carefully examines how the classic directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky used architectural imagery to create emotional states in their movies. He also explores the startling similarities between the landscapes of painting and those of movies.

Introduction -- Media and representation. On the one medium / Eric Gans -- The scapegoat mechanism and the media: beyond the folk devil paradigm / John O'Carroll -- The apocalypse will not be televised / Chris Fleming -- Film. Mirrors of nature: artificial agents in real life and virtual worlds / Paul Dumouchel -- Superheroes, scapegoats, and saviors: the problem of evil and the need for redemption / Joel Hodge -- Sanctified victimage on page and screen: The hunger games as (...) prophetic media / Debra E. Macdonald -- The mimetic e-motion: from The matrix to Avatar / Nidesh Lawtoo -- Apocalypse of the therapeutic: The cabin in the woods and the death of mimetic desire / Peter Y. Paik -- Eyes wide shut: mimesis and historical memory in Stanley Kubrick's The shining / David Humbert -- Against romantic love: mimeticism and satire in Woody Allen's Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona; you will meet a tall dark stranger; and To Rome with love / Scott Cowdell -- A beautiful crisis: Ang Lee's film adaptation of The ice storm / Carly Osborn -- Cowboy metaphysics, the virtuous-enough cowboy, and mimetic desire in Stephen Fears' The hi-lo country / Thomas Ryba -- Television. The self in crisis: watching Mad men and Homeland with Girard and Hegel / Paolo Diego Bubbio -- Media, murder, and memoir: Girardian baroque in Robert Drewe's The shark net / Rosamund Dalziell -- Conversion in Dexter / Matthew John Paul Tan and Joel Hodge. (shrink)