To develop my arguments about this revision of the logistics ofdisappearance, I will turn to several recent Iraq War films, look at thedifferent types of screens they present and investigate their aestheticdimensions and ethical implications. Among the multiple screens present inthese films, the video war diaries made by the soldiers at the front are mostsalient. These diaries will be an important focus of my analysis of acontemporary logistics of perception, which, following the implication ofWeb 2.0 applications, I will call (...) the logistics of perception 2.0. (shrink)

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

Film, Samuel Beckett's 1964 short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as ‘The Greatest Irish Film’, is a seminal text in the latter's cinematic canon as it helps us to extrapolate the transition from the Bergson-based movement-image of Cinema 1 to the Nietzschean time-image of Cinema 2. Film is unique insofar as its narrative traverses and progressively destroys the action-, perception- and affection-images that constitute the movement-image as a whole, using Keaton's body, and more importantly his (...) face, as a means of attaining a pure intensity or Entity abstracted from all spatio-temporal coordinates, a condition of exhaustion/saturation that Deleuze and Guattari call, ‘non-human becoming’. Beckett's film is predicated on Bishop Berkeley's fundamental philosophical principle, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) and, using Keaton as its protagonist, raises the question of whether it is possible to escape perception, not only by a third party, but also by oneself. The latter is ‘played’ by the camera itself, which ‘stalks’ Keaton from behind, taking great pains not to exceed a 45-degree ‘angle of immunity’ (lest Buster experience percipi or the anguish of perceivedness) until the film's final close-up when he comes face to face with his own self-perception and affective annihilation. Film's denouement thus deconstructs the very nature of conventional cinematic language, whereby filmic suture – the enfolding of character, camera and spectatorial ‘viewing-views’ into a unified field of vision – gives way to a perspective where, at the very moment that the perceptive/affective body dies, the work of filmic art gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience. (shrink)

Both perception and imagination seem to play a crucial role in our engagement with fiction films but whether they really do so, and which role they possibly play, is controversial. On the one hand, a fiction film, as film, is a depiction that invites us to perceive the events portrayed. On the other hand, as fiction, it invites us to imagine the story told. Thus, after watching the film Alien, one might say that one saw Ripley (...) fighting the monster but one might also say that one imagined Ripley fighting the monster. Are these two reports compatible? If they are, how can we combine them so to make sense of them? If, instead, they are not, which of them should we give up? (shrink)

The tourism economy has become a new driving force for economic growth, and film-induced tourism in particular has been widely proven to promote economic and cultural development. Few studies focus on analyzing the inherent characteristics of the economic and cultural effects of film-induced tourism, and the research on the dynamic mechanism of the sustainable development of film-induced tourism is relatively limited. Therefore, from the perspective of the integration of culture and industry, the research explores the dynamic mechanism (...) of sustainable development between film-induced culture and film-induced industry through a questionnaire survey of 1,054 tourism management personnel, combined with quantitative empirical methods. The conclusion shows that the degree of integration of culture and tourism is an important mediating role that affects the dynamic mechanism of sustainable development of film-induced tourism, and the development of film-induced tourism depends on the integration of culture and industry. Constructing a diversified industrial integration model according to local conditions and determining the development path of resource, technology, market, product integration, and administrative management can become the general trend of the future development of film-induced tourism. (shrink)

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

The subject of the study is color symbolism in F. Fitzgerald’s novel «The Great Gatsby» in the aspect of an ambivalent understanding of the conceptual solution in the use of a certain color in creating images of characters, in describing the setting and semantic content of the ideological content of the work and its screen interpretations. The object of study is color as a meaning-forming concept in literature and cinema, the symbolism of color. The work of Francis S. Fitzgerald «The (...) Great Gatsby» is of interest in the study of the influence of color palette. The main research methods are analytical and comparative historical. The color concepts of F. S. Fitzgerald's book “The Great Gatsby” and film adaptations are comprehended. This work by F. S. Fitzgerald is of interest to the modern Russian reader and viewer due to the fact that the problems raised in the novel are still relevant today. The writer touches on the popular theme of the American dream in literature and cinema. The story of the main characters is a vivid example of the illusory nature of this dream, and the lifestyle of the characters and their worldview demonstrate spiritual emptiness and cold indifference to everything except money and wealth. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the study of the ambivalence of perception of the coloristic solution of the images of characters in the book in comparison with its screen interpretations. The author comes to the conclusion that F. S. Fitzgerald in the novel «The Great Gatsby» uses a color palette in creating images of characters and describing the scene in such a way that the ambiguity in the perception of color most unexpectedly and sharply emphasizes the problems raised and becomes the basis for rethinking the ideological content of the work. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore and address the philosophical aspects of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Beginning with a helpful introduction that places each essay in context, specially commissioned chapters examine the following topics: -/- * Philosophical issues surrounding love, friendship, affirmation and repetition * The role of memory (and the emotions) in personal identity and decision-making * The morality of imagination and ethical importance of memory * Philosophical questions about self-knowledge and knowing the minds of others (...) * The aesthetics of the film considered in relation to Gondry’s other works and issues in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, (...) core features and problems of shared human life. Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski’s Chinatown and Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human. (shrink)

Discussing the intercultural reception of Pier Paolo Pasolini, this article looks into the intercultural and medial crossovers of his person and his work. It shows the historical particularities of Pasolini's work, and it traces layers of intermedial references in his movie production, describing the many-layered intercultural interplay. Lastly, it focuses on the discussions of media relations, and the remedialisation inherent in much of Pasolini's work.

Analysing film. Distinguishing the filmic contribution to meaning -- Examples of filmic "textual organisation" -- Redrawing boundaries -- Organisation of the book -- Semiotics and documents. Semiotics and its relations to film -- The nature of discourse semantics -- The film as cinematographic document -- A combined view: filmic documents for filmic discourse -- Constructing the semiotic mode of film. Semiotic multimodality -- The internal organisation of semiotic strata -- Composing and combining semiotic modes -- Materiality (...) and "epistemological commitment" -- Christian Metz and the grande syntagmatique of the image track. The original model -- Two examples of analysis with the grande syntagmatique -- Revisions and rebuttals -- Foundations for analysis: filmic units. The basic units of film: preliminaries -- Audiovisual iconic representations -- Perception, perceptual realism and reliable measurement -- Multiplicity: from perception to discourse -- Filmic units revisited: discourse-motivated definitions -- The paradigmatic organisation of film. Beyond Metz: towards a grande paradigmatique -- Capturing discourse dependency structures in film -- The paradigmatic dimensions of projection, taxis and plane -- Two examples of paradigmatic analysis -- Summary and conclusions. (shrink)

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

Although Joyce was losing his sight when he wrote Ulysses, Stephen's and Bloom's visual experiences are extraordinarily rich and complex. Absorbing the influences of popular visual attractions such as dioramas, stereoscopes and mutoscopes, their perceptions of Dublin are shaped by what Walter Benjamin calls 'unconscious optics'. Analyzing closely the texture of their impressions and of Joyce's prismatic narrative styles, Philip Sicker explores the phenomenon of sight from a wide-ranging set of perspectives: eighteenth-century epistemology, theories of the flaneur, Italian Futurist art, (...) photography, and the silent films Joyce watched in Dublin and Trieste. The concept of 'spectacle' as a mechanically-constructed visual experience informs Sicker's examination of mediated perception and emerges as a hallmark of modernist culture itself. This study is an important contribution to the growing interest in how deeply the philosophy and science of visual perception influenced modernism. (shrink)

_Philosophy Through Film_ offers a uniquely engaging and effective approach to introductory philosophy by combining an anthology of classical and contemporary philosophical readings with a discussion of philosophical concepts illustrated in popular films. Pairs 50 classical and contemporary readings with popular films - from Monty Python and _The Matrix_ to _Casablanca_ and _A Clockwork Orange_ Addresses key areas in philosophy, including topics in ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, free will and determinism, the problem of perception, and philosophy (...) of time Each unit begins with an extensive introduction by the editors and ends with study questions linking readings to films Features chapter by chapter discussion of clips from films that vividly illustrate the critical philosophical arguments and positions raised in the readings. (shrink)

In spite of their striking differences with real-life perception, films are perceived and understood without effort. Cognitive film theory attributes this to the system of continuity editing, a system of editing guidelines outlining the effect of different cuts and edits on spectators. A major principle in this framework is the 180° rule, a rule recommendation that, to avoid spectators’ attention to the editing, two edited shots of the same event or action should not be filmed from angles differing (...) in a way that expectations of spatial continuity are strongly violated. In the present study, we used high-density EEG to explore the neural underpinnings of this rule. In particular, our analysis shows that cuts and edits in general elicit early ERP component indicating the registration of syntactic violations as known from language, music, and action processing. However, continuity edits and cuts-across the line differ from each other regarding later components likely to be indicating the differences in spatial remapping as well as in the degree of conscious awareness of one's own perception. Interestingly, a time–frequency analysis of the occipital alpha rhythm did not support the hypothesis that such differences in processing routes are mainly linked to visual attention. On the contrary, our study found specific modulations of the central mu rhythm ERD as an indicator of sensorimotor activity, suggesting that sensorimotor networks might play an important role. We think that these findings shed new light on current discussions about the role of attention and embodied perception in film perception and should be considered when explaining spectators’ different experience of different kinds of cuts. (shrink)

Erkenntnisprozesse spielen in der Filmerfahrung eine zentrale Rolle. Dabei vermitteln Filme offenbar nicht einfach nur Tatsachenwissen, wie es gleichermaßen etwa in Aussagen ausgedrückt oder durch Beobachtung belegt würde. Das Wissen, das für die Wahrnehmung filmischer Bewegungsbilder charakteristisch ist, hat vielmehr eine spezifische Form: Es ist bestimmt durch Merkmale der Bildlichkeit, des zeitlich-dynamischen Zeigens, des Filmtons und des sprachlichen Ausdrucks. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden diese Aspekte in ihrer filmischen Einheit gedacht. Ausgehend von dieser Idee tragen einschlägige Positionen der Filmtheorie, der (...) phänomenologischen Bildtheorie und der Epistemologie zu einer systematischen Bestimmung der epistemischen Objekte des Films bei. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung bilden die Grundlage für eine philosophische Konzeption des Films, in deren Rahmen klassische Fragen der Filmtheorie beantwortet werden können - z. B. nach dem Status von Ton, Musik und Sprache im vermeintlich rein visuellen Filmbild, nach der Rolle der Subjektivität im Film und nach den Möglichkeiten einer besonderen philosophischen Kraft des Films. (shrink)

"Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book." -- Edward W. Said In The Material Ghost , Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory, lifelike and dreamlike at once, a peculiar mix of reality and imagination. "The images (...) on the screen," he writes, "carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost." "Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating." -- Alfred Guzzetti, Boston Book Review "A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum "Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism." -- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor "Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic André Bazin." -- Sight & amp Sound "The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation none of the chapters is without memorable insights." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book--the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film." -- Stanley Cavell "Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses." -- James Naremore, Cineaste. (shrink)

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter (...) our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's _Vivre sa vie_ (1962), _Contempt_ (1963), and _2 or 3 Things I Know About Her_ (1967); and Resnais's _Hiroshima, mon amour_ (1959), _Last Year at Marienbad_ (1961), and _The War Is Over_ (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists. (shrink)

Cognitive film theory is reckoned a powerful and distinctive, if minority position in film studies. What does it say? Argues that Bordwell's constructivism about meaning and his account of perception are not essential components of the project, which is better characterized by commitment to theses calls rationalism and realism, and by a presumption in favour of folk psychology. Cognitivists — who might be better called rationalists — should not be too cognitive, especially in matters of perception.

In this article, I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project makes available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my (...) treatment of these issues, I rely on Hume's ontology of ‘broken appearances’ and ‘interrupted perceptions’, as well as Stanley Cavell's ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed. I elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: the action-image; discontinuity and the fact of series; actors, artificial persons and human somethings; and political resistance and an aesthetics of politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological site where film matters to political theory: the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument. (shrink)

Focusing on a recent wave of international art cinema, Animal Worldsoffers the first sustained analysis of the relations between cinematic time and animal life. Through an aesthetic of extended duration, films such as Bestiaire(2010), The Turin Horse(2011) and A Cow's Life(2012) attend to animal worlds of sentience and perception, while registering the governing of life through biopolitical regimes. Bringing together Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema and on animals - while drawing on Jacques Derrida, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Nicole Shukin and others (...) - the book argues that these films question the biopolitical reduction of animal life to forms of capital, opening up realms of virtuality, becoming and alternative political futures. (shrink)

The paper examines the relationship between film and reality, which on the author’s view cannot be grasped without taking into account the viewer. For Béla Balázs the viewer is a part of the film world. Jean Epstein goes even further in his substituting an actor for a viewer. Balázs develops the concept of identification while Epstein’s idea is to subvert the viewer’s world of peace and certainties. Benjamin shows that watching a film is a two-way effect. Barthes’ (...) aim is to show the place, from which this effect comes. Lyotard describes another particularity of the film. The stasis represents a situation when the film shows the limits of perception. (shrink)

This article uses Deleuze's three-part theory of the movement-image as a way to investigate the potential importance of his unexplored claim about the casting of Beckett's Film. In “The Greatest Irish Film” Deleuze writes that the starring role in Film “could only have been played by Buster Keaton” 23), but he does not explain why. Here, I return to the Bergsonian basis of Deleuze's film theory, as well as to early responses to Beckett's Film, in (...) order to complicate our understanding of Deleuze's perception-image, action-image, and especially his affection-image. (shrink)

The paper discusses the issue of interpersonal understanding by comparing ordinary and cinematographic experience. Recent theories of interpersonal understanding turn out to be either inconclusive or insufficient to account for the heterogeneous ways in which we get mental and emotional states of other persons. The paper advances a view of the film medium by drawing on Stanley Cavell, which is reinforced by Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s convergent accounts of cinematographic perception. Against this background, interpersonal understanding turns out to be (...) permeated by the expressivity of human appearance – an aspect easily overlooked by the mentioned theories, which is yet brought forward most perspicuously by cinema. (shrink)

The chapters progress from theoretical foundations to more applied investigations, with more detailed film analysis occurring in the later chapters. In Chapter 1, the focus is on establishing a conception of life narratives that will be used throughout the remainder of the book. It begins with a discussion of the original theories of narrative identity as they were developed by philosophers, and here I lay out the basic mechanics of narrative construction: namely, the process of selecting, connecting, and interpreting (...) narrative elements to form narrative structures. I also discuss how the meaning of life is constituted in large part through this narrative process and how that sort of meaning squares with the views of philosophers who investigate the meaning of life more generally. The original theories of narrative identity have been subject to a variety of criticisms, however, so much of this chapter also explores the debate about the adequacy of narratives as a way of accounting for lived experience. I conclude with a qualified account of narratives, opting for the more general reference to "life narratives" rather than "narrative identity," given the latter term's problematic emphasis on identity and the perennial philosophical questions surrounding it. Having accounted for life narratives, Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of film narratives, shifting to work by film theorists and philosophers of film. The second half of the chapter provides an overview of the ways in which life narratives impact film narratives and vice versa, particularly with respect to the meaning of life. It introduces how we can experience a film as meaningful, how movies can sustain problematic stereotypes in our life narratives, and how films can provide resources for exploring new avenues of meaning in our lives. The purpose of this chapter is to give the reader an overall sense of a new perspective on film and spectator experience, setting the stage for more detailed investigations in later chapters. Chapter 3 completes the theoretical groundwork while simultaneously offering an example of what can be done with this new perspective by investigating an approach to film realism. Specifically, after canvasing some pertinent existing theories of realism, I argues for what I refer to as "narrative realism,"the view that a film, or at least an aspect of a film, is realistic when it depicts narratives that could be possible life narratives - that the actual world, as narrated by us, could be like the world of the film in some relevant way. This will be important, because for a film to impact our life narratives, it must be possible for the film narratives to be substantively like our life narratives, or vice versa. Chapters 4 through Six provide more detailed and complete investigations of the connections between life and film narratives begun in the previous chapters. Chapter 4 investigates the experience of finding a film meaningful, a kind of spectator activity that hasn't been directly investigated in film scholarship. Viewer responses to The Seventh Seal provide an example of what this chapter is about. Chapter 5 looks at the tendency of films to limit our narratives or impose oppressive perceptions and attitudes. It therefore explores some negative effects of film's impact on the meaning of life. And Chapter 6 shows that cinema can have the opposite effect too, broadening our ability to make a meaningful life narrative by expanding or introducing new perspectives and new ways of being in the world and by giving more agency to underrepresented groups by combating oppressive stereotypes. I also consider how some narrative structures, like open narratives, can make us aware of the contingent nature of life narratives and our ability to rewrite them. (shrink)

Eliminating sexual violence requires understanding where it comes from and why it happens. We must learn to detect when the grounds for violence are being built up so that we can promptly take them down. How can we improve our ability to notice the subtle practices of sexism and make them a matter of critical reflection? The aim of this paper is to show how film can enhance critical perception of the social conditions that give rise to sexual (...) violence in particular. We do this by way of a specific example, showing how Joyce Chopra’s 1985 film Smooth Talk serves to display the complex circumstances that make sexual violence possible – thereby illustrating Frye’s philosophical insight about the interconnected mechanisms of oppression.​ -/- . (shrink)

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential-phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly (...) on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on some recent film- and feminist-theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts. (shrink)

Understanding how people comprehend visual narratives (including picture stories, comics, and film) requires the combination of traditionally separate theories that span the initial sensory and perceptual processing of complex visual scenes, the perception of events over time, and comprehension of narratives. Existing piecemeal approaches fail to capture the interplay between these levels of processing. Here, we propose the Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT), as applied to visual narratives, which distinguishes between front-end and back-end cognitive processes. (...) Front-end processes occur during single eye fixations and are comprised of attentional selection and information extraction. Back-end processes occur across multiple fixations and support the construction of event models, which reflect understanding of what is happening now in a narrative (stored in working memory) and over the course of the entire narrative (stored in long-term episodic memory). We describe relationships between front- and back-end processes, and medium-specific differences that likely produce variation in front-end and back-end processes across media (e.g., picture stories vs. film). We describe several novel research questions derived from SPECT that we have explored. By addressing these questions, we provide greater insight into how attention, information extraction, and event model processes are dynamically coordinated to perceive and understand complex naturalistic visual events in narratives and the real world. (shrink)

This article tracks the many appearances of Friedrich Nietzsche throughout the history of cinema. It asks how cinema can do Nietzschean philosophy in ways that are unique to the medium. It also asks why the cinematic medium might be so pertinent to Nietzschean philosophy. Adhering to the implicit premise that, as Jacques Derrida once put it, ‘there is no totality to Nietzsche's text, not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one,’ the essay's mode of argument avoids reductive totalization and instead comprises (...) a playful sampling of variously Nietzschean manifestations across dissimilar films. It begins with an extended account of Baby Face, a 1933 drama from which the abundant references to Nietzsche were either altered or expunged ahead of theatrical release. It then maps some of the philosophical consistencies across two genres in which characters read Nietzsche with apparent frequency: the comedy and the thriller. While comedies and thrillers both treat Nietzsche and his readers with suspicion, and do so for perceptive historical reasons, the essay then asks what an affirmatively Nietzschean film might look like. It explores this possibility through a discussion of cinematic animation in general and then more specifically via several critically familiar films that self-consciously evolve their aesthetic through Nietzsche's philosophy. The essay concludes by affirming Béla Tarr's final film as one of the medium's greatest realizations of a Nietzschean film-philosophy. The Turin Horse, released in 2011, is exemplary because it takes Nietzsche as a narrative premise only to sublate that premise into a unique visual style. (shrink)

High artistic achievements were repeatedly connected with poetry in the tradition of Western aesthetical thought, and the poetry with eliciting emotions. The same has happened within the tradition of film reviewing and theorising: poetry has been repeatedly evoked as a paradigmatic artistic achievement of particular films. But among the different affective states that can be elicited in humans by arts, attribution of ‘poetry’ typically addresses the eliciting and articulation of particular general moods, not the specific, episodic, short-term emotions. In (...) this paper, specified are the differences among emotions and moods, and how a distinct mood is achieved is demonstrated by the close analysis of the introductory descriptive scene in the film Citizen Kane. However, the crucial question is how very different and heterogeneous stylistic means pointed out in the analysis of the scene could elicit a particular, unique, holistic mood. In short, the answer is given by understanding that in the same way in which the moods selectively regulate our relations toward the world, choosing for the perception mood-congruent features of the world to sustain a particular mood, so the filmmakers choose a repertory of stylistic solutions congruent with the selectivity of the intended mood to elicit it in the immersed film viewer. (shrink)

The association of colour, sensation and the body, which is noted by Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Merleau-Ponty through their insights on colour as the disturbing of structure and form, offers a way in which to foreground a series of questions about embodiment and the discourse of vision. An analysis of the chromatics of Red Road, which features a female protagonist who works as a surveillance officer in a CCTV control room, offers a way to echo and disrupt the ‘mechanisms and techniques (...) of reality-control’ and to challenge what constitutes socially acceptable bodies and the cinematic institution of the image of woman. In Red Road the legible architecture of the film image emerges through the myriad colours of light reflected by a camera lens and the effacement of details in areas affected by shadow and variations in focus. The camera is almost always in motion and responsive to the gestures of the protagonist's body, signalling the potential of the chromatics of Red Road to trouble the structures of seeing familiar to cinematic representation. Colour and perception remain open to contingency and change, fostering alternative subject positions that trace the interrelations of the body — its senses and sensations — and the discourse of vision. The unsettling of perception refigures the encounter between the self and others through the imaginary or fictional worlds that remind us of the uncertainties and vulnerability of such interactions. (shrink)

This article discusses some of the philosophical themes in the Hollywood film "The Truman Show." I argue that the film presents and interesting twist on the traditional philosophical problem of skepticism. Whereas Descartes' skeptical worries were based on the deceptive nature of sense perception, the source of illusion and skepticism in the Truman Show is the modern media system and "reality TV." This engaging film compels viewers to reflect upon the extent to which we are all (...) ensnared in a world of lies and deceit. (shrink)

Concepts in Film Theory is a continuation of Dudley Andrew's classic, The Major Film Theories. In writing now about contemporary theory, Andrew focuses on the key concepts in film study -- perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, evaluation, identification, figuration, and interpretation. Beginning with an introductory chapter on the current state of film theory, Andrew goes on to build an overall view of film, presenting his own ideas on each concept, and giving a sense (...) of the interdependence of these concepts. Andrew provides lucid explanations of theories which involve perceptual psychology and structuralism; semiotics and psychoanalysis; hermeneutics and genre study. His clear approach to these often obscure theories enables students to acquire the background they need to enrich their understanding of film -- and of art. (shrink)

Even today, film restoration is a challenge, because it involves multidisciplinary competences: from analogue film inspection and conservation to digitisation and image enhancement. In this context, thanks to the high manageability of digital files, the film restoration workflow often follows a digitisation step, which presents many approximations and issues that are often ignored. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to the issues commonly encountered in film restoration aiming at restoring the original colour appearance, through (...) models of human colour perception. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

What is film? Why are movies important? Why do we care about them in the way we do? How do we think of the connections between the projected image and what it is actually an image of? Most movie-goers assume that they are entitled to make jugments and come to conclusions about the movies they see--to evaluate how "good" they are, or what they "mean." But what do they base, or what should they base, their judgments on? In this (...) thought-provoking new book, Stanley Cavell, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Harvard who has long taken a lively interest in movies, looks closely at these and other questions concerning America's most popular art and the perceptions we make of, by, and through it. His answers are surprising and important--not only to our understanding of film and of ourselves, but to our expectations of life and art. Mr. Cavell's explorations of some of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films--as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors--will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people of all ages. (shrink)

Le lecteur attentif du traité De l'âme et des Parva naturalia sera troublé par une ambiguïté profonde sous-jacente à toute la longue discussion de la perception dans ces œuvres. Il s'agit de savoir si la théorie d'Aristote se veut une théorie d'ordre physiologique prise au sens littéral, ou si elle se veut plutôt une théorie métaphysique, qui doit donc être prise au sens métaphorique. La doctrine en question se résume comme suit: un sens, en percevant, reçoit en lui-même la (...) forme de l'objet perçu sans la matière. Selon l'interprétation physiologique, il faudrait entendre par là que lorsqu'un homme regarde, sent, et écoute un âne, par exemple, il y aurait dans un endroit près de son cœur – dans l'organe central de la perception – une petite poupée d'âne qui braie et qui pue. Cette poupée serait reconstruite dans l'organe central à partir des composants sensoriels qui y seraient amenés des organes spéciaux: de l'œil la forme et la couleur, de l'organe olfactif l'odeur, et, de l'oreille le son. Un chirurgien qui ouvrirait la poitrine de l'homme percevant y verrait la poupée, la sentirait, et l'entendrait. La poupée serait comme celle de la princesse Leia dans le film Star Wars, à cette différence qu'elle jouirait non seulement de propriétés visuelles et auditives, mais aussi de propriétés olfactives et tactiles. (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)

This book brings together researchers from a variety of fields to jointly present and discuss some of the most relevant problems around the conscious mind. This academic plurality perfectly characterizes the complexity with which a current researcher is confronted to discuss and work on this topic. The volume is organized as follows: Part I introduces the general problems of Philosophy of Mind and some historical perspectives. Part II focuses on understanding the input that the empirical sciences can offer to the (...) theoretical problems. Part III discusses some of the core concepts of the field, namely, perception, memory and experience. Part IV debates human and artificial intelligence and, finally, Part V deliberates about the computation and the ethics of big data and artificial intelligence. The book contains valuable material for researchers in several fields such as Cognitive Science and Neuroscience, Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, and Philosophy. It can also be used as a guide to some courses at various levels, from BAs to MAs and PhD courses of several fields. It is our belief, as it is claimed in the preface by Georg Northoff, that there is an urgent need for a truly transdisciplinary exchange between philosophy and the sciences in order to stimulate some real progress. We hope that this book will become a sound step for such an interdisciplinary enterprise. (shrink)

Trucage then exists when there is deceit. We may agree to use this term when the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of the visual elements furnished him. In films of the fantastic, the impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or "impossible" events which nevertheless unfold before him in the guise of eventlike appearances. (...) In the opposite case, the spectator undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible material of which the filmic text is composed and ascribes only a portion of it to the diegesis. The services of the department of agriculture have worked more quickly because they were approached in an appropriate manner: this amounts to the diegesis. The film makes light of this sudden rapidity; ironically, it exaggerates it: here is the intention, which amounts to the enunciation. In the exact degree to which this perceptible bifurcation is maintained, the connotated will be unable to pass for denotated, and there is no trucage. The optical effect has not merged with the usual game of the photograms, the entire visual material has not been mistaken for the photographic, the diegetization has not been total. Christian Metz, one of the foremost French theorists of the cinema, is the author of Essais sur le signification au cinéma, Propositions méthodologiques pour l'analyse du film, and Langage et cinéma. He is Sous-Directeur d'Etudes Suppléant à l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. This is the first English translation of "Trucage et cinéma," which appeared in Essais sur la signification au cinéma . Francoise Meltzer [the translator of this essay] is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Trial of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Her essay, "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse," is published in Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's (...) materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, this collection narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. The volume is divided into six sections: Meta-Theory; Film Theory's Project of Emancipation; Apparatus and Perception; Audiovisuality; How Close is Close Reading?; and The Turn to Experience. (shrink)

One of the intriguing issues connected to power relations in the world of cinema that has yet to be adequately explored is what has happened over the years concerning the dominance and privilege of masculinity as signifying preferred social status. This qualitative study explores this subject based on transcribed semi-structured interviews with 13 award-winning Israeli directors over the age of 55. The research examines two questions: How has the film industry changed its relation to leading, award-winning film directors (...) as they grow older? And, what challenges confront the directors, in terms of their own self-perceptions? These questions capture the collisional intersection between hegemonic masculinity and ageism, because they examine the loss of power attributed to men in the film industry as they reach the second half of their lives. The findings led to the formation of a theoretical model of ageism within the cinematic industry, allowing for the dismantling of the different factors that create obstacles for directors as they get older. The four layers of the model are: arbitrary ageism, manifested in the demands of a rapidly changing industry in a changing world; passive ageism, expressed through encounters with negative attitudes; active ageism, reflected in preventing older directors from receiving funding and from screening their films; and self-ageism, manifested in the directors’ attitudes toward themselves. (shrink)