Janet Staiger _Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception_ New York and London: New York University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-8147-8139-X 242 pp.

In this paper, involvement in fictional films is defined as a multidimensional construct consisting of qualitatively differing, interdependent modes of reception. Based on theoretical considerations that we developed further through successive questionnaire studies, we construct a four-factor-model with the latent factors Identity Work, In-Emotion, Imagination, and Production. We subsequently develop and validate a measurement instrument, the Modes of Reception Inventory, which assesses dominant modes of reception for fictional films. The psychometric properties and the construct validity of this (...) scale are tested using structural equation modeling. Finally, we discuss possible extensions and applications of modes of reception for audience research. (shrink)

This well-written, engaging volume by Stephen Teo is a welcome intervention in the field of film studies in that it confronts the hegemony of Western theoretical approaches to cinema and provides a counterbalancing model that applies what Teo calls “Eastern theory” to Western film classics. Although Teo’s use of terms such as “Eastern theory” and “Eastern essence” could be construed as perilously totalizing--painting “the East” with a monochromatic brush that beckons toward a regression into Orientalizing--his apologia for the (...) study and his execution of the analyses are sufficiently adept and focused to remediate the occasional sweeping generalization. Indeed, Teo spends much of his introduction and first chapter... (shrink)

The article aims to explore the ways in which scholars from Poland and Ukraine engage with Graham Harman’s philosophical work1. The introductory part briefly describes Harman’s ontology and demonstrates the link connecting Harman with Polish and Ukrainian intellectual environments. Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO) states that objects are the fundamental building blocks of reality and cannot be reduced either to what they are made of or to what they do, that is, either to their constituents or to their effects. The connection (...) with Poland and Ukraine goes back to the theory of objects suggested by the Polish philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski, whom Harman names among the predecessors of his ontology and who influenced both Polish and Ukrainian intellectual milieus. The next part of the article examines the history of the reception, identifying its key events and publications. The reception in Poland proves to be much more substantial than in Ukraine. A common tendency is determined: a conflation of Harman’s OOO and speculative realism by mistakenly ascribing the features of the former to the latter (broader concept), which suggests that speculative realism is being received through the lens of Harman’s project. The next part establishes the key discursive points that are used to map Harman’s ideas within the contemporary philosophical landscape. They can be summarised by the terms antianthropocentrism and antireductionism. The final part analyses the strategies for applying Harman’s theory showing that it can become the lens for interpretation and direct our attention to nonhumans and the hidden, inexplicable dimension of things or provide an ontological grounding for semi-literary and literary discourses. The methodology of this application, though, needs further development and clarification. Overall, in Poland, two of Harman’s books and two articles have been translated, and at least two books, one Ph.D. dissertation, and around two dozen articles discuss or apply his ideas. Apart from philosophy, his OOO is used for discussing literature, video games, films, humanities in general, education, management processes, antique studies, and ecocriticism. In Ukraine, one of Harman’s articles has been translated, and around ten articles and one collective monography engage with his philosophical project. Some of the Ukrainian works also apply Harman’s OOO in contexts that are not strictly philosophical, namely, in literary criticism, urban studies, film studies, and humanities in general. This paper can be of use to researchers studying OOO and its reception in different countries. In addition, it can help Ukrainian and Polish scholars who want to discuss or use OOO to familiarize themselves with the previous reception in their countries, thus facilitating domestic philosophical interaction. (shrink)

I adapt Robert Sinnerbrink's notion of cinematic poesis by arguing that Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line constitutes an example of ecological cinematic poesis: a style of filmmaking that works in concert with the limits and potentialities of the filmmaking as a medium. This cinematic bearing emerges in a new way following Malick's return to Hollywood, where a combination of factors spur the emergence of a radical Emersonian practice of cinematic receptivity. I draw on oral histories, and the film (...) itself, to demonstrate how Malick's creative process consistently tends towards an ethos of poverty. To further pattern and illuminate the ecological stakes of this Emersonian stance, I draw on the complementary framework of second-order systems theory, and in particular, on Niklas Luhmann's concept of simultaneity. In so doing, I outline the layered nature of Malick's cinematic praxis – a doubled Emersonian receptivity which not only invites defamiliarizing depictions of warfare and the nonhuman, but also welcomes, and toys with, the otherness haunting technical images and human cognition. As such, The Thin Red Line, and its immediate counterparts, perform the ecological work of reframing the conditions of wonder, asking us to marvel not at what we have seen, but what we haven’t. (shrink)

The paper examines three examples of Saint Jerome’s contemporary reception. First, in Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, the essay by the French writer and translator Valery Larbaud (1946), Jerome’s life is imagined as the large city of Hiéronymopolis where three itineraries are possible: one that is imaginary to Stridon, Rome, and Bethlehem; one that is iconographical through the paintings of Raffaello, Correggio, and Domenichino, and one that is literary through Jerome’s works, divided into many “city districts,” where an impressive (...) bridge, the Vulgata, connects Jerusalem to Rome. – In the eccentric novel Jérôme ou de la traduction by the French-Canadian writer Jean Marcel (1990), Hieronymus’s famous lion narrates the main episodes of the Saint’s life, especially regarding his translations. This is an existential metaphor for the passage from the ancient eastern world to early Christian Rome. – The poetic movie by the Brasilian director Júlio Bressane, São Jerônimo (1999), is not a biographical reconstruction of Jerome’s life, but rather a fresco, which consists of some moments of his life and some iconic symbols (the skull, the lion, the desert). (shrink)

This article argues that attention and distraction form a central concern of Benjamin's writings on literature. Individually and in conjunction, they underpin processes of textual production and reception, yet their relationship is fluid and subject to historical change. In this respect, Benjamin's exploration of the interplay of attention and distraction in writers such as Leskov, Baudelaire and Brecht also leads to more general reflections about the social, cultural and psychological shifts brought about by industrialization and modern mass culture. Benjamin's (...) writings on literature trace developments which he also explores in relation to film. And echoes of his ‘literary history of attention’ can also be found in both his own critical approach and his self-reflexive comments on the process of writing. (shrink)

Thomas Elsaesser _Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject_ Amsterdam University Press, 1996 ISBN 9053561846 (hb); 9053560599 (pb) 396 pp.

This book discusses feature films that enrich our understanding of doctor-patient dilemmas. The book comprises general clinical ethics themes and principles and is written in accessible language. Each theme is discussed and illuminated in chapters devoted to a particular film. Chapters start with a discussion of the film itself, which shares details behind the making of the film; critical reception; casting and other facts about production. The chapter situates the film in a history of medicine (...) and medical sociology context, analyzes ethical issues raised in the film from a clinical ethics lens, and explains to readers how to use each film as a teaching aid for clinical ethics. Readers will understand how each film in this collection served to bring particular clinical ethics issues to the public’s attention, or reflected medico-legal issues that were part of the public discourse. The book is a perfect instructor's guide for anyone teaching bioethics, healthcare ethics, medical sociology, medical history, healthcare systems narrative medicine, or nursing ethics. (shrink)

Contemporary Complex Cinema. Complex conditions: the resurgence of narrative complexity ; Complex cinema as brain-candy for the empowered viewer ; Narrative taxonomies: simple, complex, puzzle plots -- Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema. Why an (embodied-)cognitive approach? ; Various forms of complexity and their effects on sense making ; Problematizing narrative linearity ; Complicating narrative structures and ontologies ; Under-stimulation and cognitive overload ; Contradictions and unreliabilities ; A cognitive approach to classifying complexity ; Deceptive unreliability and the twist (...) class='Hi'>film ; Disorienting but solvable puzzle films ; Impossible puzzle films -- Narrative Complexity and Dissonant Cognitions. The concept of cognitive dissonance ; Cognitions in dissonance: from social psychology to narrative engagement ; Types of dissonance in narrative comprehension ; Narrative incongruities ; Narrative impossibilities ; Cognitive access to impossible storyworlds: immersed and reflected operations ; 'Impossibilities' and embodied cognition ; Disrupting viewers' reliance on image schemas by perceptual impossibility ; Disrupting viewers' reliance on image schemas by formal impossibility -- Taming Dissonance: Cognitive Operations and Interpretive Strategies. Cognitive dissonance versus narrative coherence ; Reducing dissonance: interpretation and naturalization ; Foregrounding ; Narrating agency and authorship ; Artefact emotions and metareflexive appreciation ; Interpretation as dissonance reduction ; Coping with dissonance: frame-switches and poetic and aesthetic readings ; Frame-switching as hermeneutic play in impossible puzzle films ; Switching between narrative and symbolical readings: Enemy and Mulholland Drive ; Cognitive hesitation and the fantastic -- Impossible Puzzle Films: Between Art-Cinema and (Post-) Classical Narration. From art-cinema to puzzle films ; Art-cinema as a narrative mode ; Dissonance in modernist art-cinema ; Art-cinema as a cognitive reception frame ; Narrative complexity and meaning-making in art-cinema ; Impossible puzzle films and (post-)classical narration ; High degree of tellability ; Identification with goal-oriented characters ; Strong reliance on classical genre elements ; Adherence to classical narrative cohesion devices ; Inclusion of quasi-rational frames of naturalization -- Wallowing in Dissonance: The Attractiveness of Impossible Puzzles. Hermeneutic play and interpretive multiplicity ; Orientation, navigation, mapping ; Game logic and the fascination in failure ; Effort justification ; Diegetization of decoupling ; Fascination in infinity ; Destabilized ontological certainty ; Eudaimonic motivations and intrinsic needs. (shrink)

Hanna Pitkin explains that Arendt’s defense of collective political action tends to reify and mystify an opposing concept Arendt calls ‘the Social’. Was Arendt actually right about the rise of ‘the Social’? Does the deep-set global mass entertainment culture tend to sap action even when it purportedly celebrates it? And what can viewing publics and counter-publics tell us about the meaning and reception of ‘the Social’, especially in this massively online era? This article surveys different ways of thinking about (...) the basic problem presented by American popular action cinema, and especially big-budget Hollywood action films, through an Arendtian lens. In presenting this overview, the article looks to reorient traditional philosophical concerns about screen violence and its censorship, and to offer a holistic reappraisal of ‘the Social’ and ‘action’ by placing democratic theory in closer dialogue with film studies. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point a recurring complaint in the popular reception of horror movies: that the characters in them behave foolishly. I argue that such complaints fail to recognize that the horror genre exploits a fundamental tension in fiction, between the perspective on a fictional world offered to its audience and that available to its characters. This distinction is highlighted in horror, which often depicts characters with everyday expectations facing extraordinary threats. Horror characters are frequently taken (...) by surprise, and even the better prepared can be thwarted by the malevolence of the generic world. The extent of characters’ misfortunes can resemble deliberate persecution, self-consciously flaunting authorial manipulation. I draw on Todorov’s notion of “pan-determinism” and suggest that a more sinister variant operates in horror. Occasionally, a character’s experiences can help equip them to survive; I argue that this can be inflected politically in films where the malevolent horror world is placed alongside forms of real-life persecution and abuse. Critical attention to the world of horror, and how it is understood from both the outside and within, can clarify the connections between different theoretical understandings of the genre and bring out important but overlooked generic conventions. (shrink)

Despite considerable differences, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewal of thinking produced through and with the concept of the world. Their articulation of the legacy bequeathed by Heidegger and Wittgenstein begins with an understanding of the world in excess of knowledge and insists on this impossible mastery as the most productive incentive for thinking. Inasmuch as philosophy has understood itself as producer of worldviews, systems and principle, philosophy has constantly suppressed the thinking of the world, (...) for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision. For both Cavell and Nancy an insistence on this suppression leads to an emphasis on film. Two gestures can be said to intertwine in their thinking of film: to recapture our relation to the world as one that is not based on knowing as certainty, but on the reception of the singular; to recapture thinking as that which is attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam in experience. Nancy and Cavell reverse the idea of cinema as completing the regime of representation stressing how cinema produces a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the article names thinking as patience. The article concludes by asking: what does it mean for philosophy to understand itself as patience? (shrink)

This article explores the circulation of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in British film and television during the long 1960s, focusing on the controversial BBC television play In Two Minds and its cinema remake Family Life. These films were inspired by R. D. Laing's ideas on the aetiology of schizophrenia, and were understood as uniting the personal and political motivations of progressive film-makers and progressive psychiatrists. Drawing upon practitioner interviews with producer Garnett and director Loach, and extensive archival research on the production (...) and reception of these films, this article contests previous scholarship on the popular circulation of anti-psychiatry and the movement's perceived polarisation from mainstream British psychiatry. While the reception of In Two Minds and Family Life did intensify an adversarial relationship between ‘rebel’ anti-psychiatrists and hard-line behaviourists such as William Sargant, the wider psychiatric field largely welcomed the films' contributions to mental health awareness and used the publicity to counter the idea of a ‘battle’ within the profession. This included leading UK mental health organisation the National Association for Mental Health looking to Loach and Laing as models for engaging contemporary audiences as it rebranded to MIND in 1972. This article contributes to historical understandings of the complex interactions between the fields of media and mental health, as well as recent scholarship challenging the idea of a clear split between anti-psychiatry and British medical orthodoxy. (shrink)

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

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a subcategory of Art proper, it is worth reconsidering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’, mass-produced culture which presents a (...) ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-Second World War is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed storytelling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin’s theories of mass art. (shrink)

El presente artículo corresponde a un análisis de contenido, de discurso y de imagen del documental cinematográfico Dos veces mujer, (1982) de Patricia Howell, el cual forma parte de la producción estatal del Centro Costarricense de Producción Cinematográfica efectuada de 1973 a 1987; se realiza un análisis de contenido a la prensa escrita de 1982 a 1999 para conocer la relevancia que mantuvo luego de haber sido estrenado, asimismo conocer su recepción y en cuáles espacios fue proyectado. Esto como un (...) esfuerzo para conocer el impacto de los documentales estatales en la sociedad, pues exponen una crítica de la realidad costarricense. Es, además, un antecedente que permite comprender las dinámicas de producción estatal, su auge y su descontinuación, todo esto con base en los contenidos de estas producciones audiovisuales. Se analiza una imagen del documental, ya que al ser una producción audiovisual es relevante entender también la parte visual, que complementa al discurso que lleva la narrativa del filme. (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.

This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film seriesSecrets of Nature(1919–33) and its sequelSecrets of Life(1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces theSecretsusing an ‘intermedial’ approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was communicated (...) in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines theSecretsseries through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term ‘ciné-biology’, it argues thatSecretsdeveloped a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by theSecretsfilms. (shrink)

The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and the possibility for telling a social history of science through (...) investigation of the production and reception of cinema. (shrink)

An increasing sensitivity towards films and other forms of visual experience has become apparent in social theory. Recent explorations of new media of communication and entertainment have criticized the emphasis on the hegemonic or manipulative power of cultural industries and popular forms of leisure. Films, like many other discursive and visual forms, have been considered as signifying practices and investigated as processes of production, exhibition and reception. This article takes these recent contributions as its point of departure and investigates (...) two Brazilian films, made in the 1950s and 1990s, based on a play that retells the Greek legend of Orpheus in Brazilian social and cultural settings. This article considers the different historical contexts, explores discursive and visual forms of representation, struggles for power within the narratives, unconscious systems of signification, and makes some considerations about the aesthetic dimension present in each film. (shrink)

Although fictional characters have long dominated the reception of literature, films, television programs, comics, and other media products, only recently have they begun to attract their due attention in literary and media theory. The book systematically surveys todays diverse and at times conflicting theoretical perspectives on fictional character, spanning research on topics such as the differences between fictional characters and real persons, the ontological status of characters, the strategies of their representation and characterization, the psychology of their reception, (...) as well as their specific forms and constellations in - and across - different media, from the book to the internet.". (shrink)

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

Theodor Adorno’s thinking on the essay is an essential part of the recent theoretical development on the essay film. However, the reception of his reflection on the essay in that context does not connect with the breadth of his aesthetic and epistemological thought. This proposal explores how the articulation of his vision of the essay, his philosophy of non-identity, his aesthetic theory and his lesser-known appreciations of cinema contribute other arguments to the understanding of the essay film (...) —in general, of essayistic or audiovisual essay forms— as an aesthetic phenomenon. The connection of The essay as form with other works by Adorno allows us to reconsider his position in relation to the essay and art, to broaden his contributions to make the audiovisual essay intelligible and, in general, some of the most radical aesthetic paths of contemporary cinematography. (shrink)

If the title of this article resounds with the polemical palavering of literary theory in the 1940s, I have to submit that the allusion is not entirely accidental. It is not my intention here, however, to resuscitate the arguments of W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley, but rather to evoke a sense of parallelism between their issues and those at stake here. A crucial objective which informed Wimsatt's and Beardsley's project was to buttress the significance and irreducibility of (...) the literary text in the face of monopolistic authorial and receptional meaning-making. [3] The scholarly environment that was American New Criticism tended to consider intentionalism and emotionalism as threats to the epistemological prominence and integrity of the text, which was all too readily lost in a plenitude of contexts whose relevance for the literary work was not always impressively transparent. Similarly, within the domain of film studies, it has perhaps become increasingly unclear whether the real object of study is the film text itself, or rather a concatenation of different disciplinary discourses hailing from departments of psychology, sociology, and biology (to name a few). The colonization of cinema studies is not a novel development; as a process its apogee was in the 1970s. (shrink)

Empathy is a major aspect of the interplay between filmmaking and reception. Philosophers and neuroscientists have asserted how film’s technical and conceptual devices seemingly simulate the streamings of consciousness by rendering through images the very processes of thought. More recently, in a noteworthy collaborative work between neuroscience and film theory, Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra (2020) have observed how the process of “embodied simulation” is at the basis of empathy, making possible intense and diversified experiences of space, (...) objects and other individuals, and offering an important contribution to the study of how films are experienced and co-created by viewers. Drawing on these arguments from neuroscience, philosophy and film theory, in this paper I explore a renewed relationship between empathy and film aesthetics. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of Turkish film screenings in Belgium as a case study of diasporic media practices in Europe. Turkish blockbusters have only recently become part of the programs of Belgian mainstream film theaters. This study provides insight into both historical and recent dynamics that characterize this new film and audience segment in film exhibition. After analyzing transnational patterns of distribution, selection and promotion, we put forward that changing circulation patterns and the associated power (...) relations define the social and spatial conditions of reception, resulting in the creation of new semi-public diasporic spaces. Thus, the links between the political economy of media and audience research are discussed. The findings of this article are based on archival and press research and a series of semi-structured expert interviews with exhibition and distribution professionals, as well as social workers and representatives from Turkish cultural associations. (shrink)

Three studies are presented to validate the Spanish version of Oliver and Raney’s eudaimonic and hedonic motivations scale. In Study 1, 132 university students watched a dramatic film, filling out the scales to evaluate motivations regarding cinema consumption and reception processes. Eudaimonic motivation was associated with deeper cognitive processes during the reception and stronger identification with the protagonist. Study 2 evaluated the test-retest reliability of the eudaimonic and hedonic motivations scale. In Study 3, statistically significant age differences (...) were observed in hedonic and eudaimonic motivations. Furthermore, convergent correlations were detected between hedonic and eudaimonic motivations and preferences of different film genres. These results allow us to conclude that the Spanish version of the hedonic and eudaimonic motivations scale presents adequate psychometric properties, thus being convergent with those obtained by Oliver and Raney. (shrink)

In his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin compares the daily experience of buildings with the perception of films. His comparison relies on the peculiar concept of “tactile reception“, he opposes to the optically oriented traditional attitude towards art. The concept encompasses two essential traits: on the one hand, it designates the fact that films do not require a contemplative, focused attention, but a habitual, distracted approach, similar to that by which (...) we perceive buildings in our everyday life-world. On the other hand, Benjamin’s concept points to a particular “chock-effect” produced by cinematic experience, through its constant change of perspectives and points of view. By this, it challenges precisely the same form of ambient perception required in numerous situations of our daily life in the modern city. The two determinations sketch out a unitary concept that shows obvious similarities to the phenomenological idea of a “life-worldly circumspection” , a specific manner of sight guiding everyday practical life. (shrink)

This paper discusses the aesthetic and political motivations of the great importance that Walter Benjamin gives to Charlie Chaplin in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. First, it proceeds to identify the main paragraphs that Benjamin devoted to Chaplin’s films in the different versions of his famous essay. Then it examines Chaplin’s reception in Weimar Germany both in the field of avant-garde art and that of press criticism, highlighting the philosophical, ethico-political and psychological arguments exchanged in a wide (...) and intensive debate on the human dimension of the Tramp character. By focusing on Sigried Kracauaer’s and Rudolf Arnheim’s chronicles, it seeks to illustrate two approaches that are contemporaries to Benjamin’s Rückblick auf Chaplin, a brief review based on an essay written by the French surrealist poet Philippe Soupault. Lastly, it analyzes some notes on Charlot’s gestuality discarded from this famous essay and a fragment in which, six years before The Great Dictator, Benjamin compares Chaplin to Hitler. (shrink)

Using a detailed analysis of scenes from Into the Wild, this study aims to demonstrate how the theory of the sublime, particularly Kant’s theory, can be applied to film. To this purpose, the sublime will be referred to in the film heuristically as the Cinematic Sublime. My basic assumptions here are as follows: First, Kant’s theory of the sublime can be seen as a philosophical and aesthetic emotion-oriented teaching. Second, the emotional-sensory experience of the sublime is always manifested (...) in the interconnection of both the film’s technical apparatus as well as its physical and mental perception. So the different modes of experiencing of the Cinematic Sublime can be described as filmic emotions. As a consequence, the phenomenon of the Cinematic Sublime is a textually constructed sensation, which can be analyzed with the help of textual analysis. Third, the Cinematical Sublime can be experienced through intersubjective activities of the audience during film reception, requiring a high degree of imagination, empathy and constitutive perception. Thus, I am undertaking a film-philosophical investigation that can be described as an analysis of film emotions based upon the textuality of film. (shrink)

The essay defines two different modes of filmic violence: sublime and drastic pictures of violence. Based on the definitions of the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, I argue that the sublime has the tendency to detach the viewer from possible affective end empathetic response to pictures of bodies in pain on the screen. By contrast, the drastic mode has potential to evoke empathetic reactions. Both modes are grounded in specific ways of showing violence: the sublime mode diminishes the (...) bodies on the screen, the drastic mode shows us the faces in close-up and tries to immerse the viewer in the violence.Both definitions are informed by phenomenological film theory, which positions the body of the viewer at the centre of film reception. Nevertheless, the somatic experience is not the only scope of film reception. Films not only show us a filmic world but also suggest a more or less specific way of seeing the world outside the cinema.To this effect, both ways of staging violence have ideological implications. The sublime violence allows the viewer to experience himself as strong and invulnerable, while drastic pictures of violence tend to victimize the viewer.These assumptions are tested on two exemplary instances: the helicopter scene in Francis Ford Coppolas war movie Apocalypse Now and the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. (shrink)

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

La réception problématique des Cultural, Gender et Postcolonial Studies dans le champ des études cinématographiques en France s’est longtemps traduite par leur rejet. Depuis la fin des années 2000, sous la pression de l’évolution générationnelle mais aussi de la recherche internationale, on observe une prise en compte partielle des Studies. Toutefois, celle-ci s’accompagne d’une neutralisation de leur dimension critique et politique, à savoir leur remise en cause des fondements mêmes des épistémologies occidentales. Longtemps organisée autour d’histoires nationales et des critères (...) de l’histoire de l’art, l’histoire du cinéma n’échappe pas aux reconfigurations contemporaines de l’historiographie. Cependant, une autre histoire du cinéma français reste à construire. L’analyse comparée de la construction discursive du « cinéma beur » (années 1980), des « films de banlieue » et du « jeune cinéma français » (années 1990) permet de mettre en évidence le discours dominant d’un cinéma français défini par sa blanchité. La critique cinématographique des années 1990 joue ainsi un rôle d’opérateur de la blanchité qui contribue à invisibiliser les composantes non-blanches (ici maghrébines) dans la constitution de la francité. (shrink)

: The film "Who Should Survive?: One of the Choices on Our Conscience" contains a dramatization of the death of an infant with Down syndrome as the result of the parents' decision not to have a congenital intestinal obstruction surgically corrected. The dramatization was based on two similar cases at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and was financed by the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation. When "Who Should Survive?" was exhibited in 1971, the public reaction was generally critical of the (...) parents' decision and the physicians' inaction. Although technological developments in medicine were a necessary condition for the production of this film and its unanticipated reception, they were not a sufficient condition. The proximate cause was a changed understanding of the capabilities of individuals with Down syndrome. Part of the impetus for this change was data showing the adverse effects of institutionalization on normal children. (shrink)

This article examines the breathing and breathless body in Camille-Vidal Naquet’s Sauvage. Respiration has been characterised by Peter Sloterdijk, in the first volume of his Sphären trilogy, as the first extension of the womb. The air we breathe is a “nobject” that escapes the subject-object relation, like the placenta before it. Sauvage engages the respiratory, alongside the placental and the acoustic, as three pre-oral “nobjects” for exploring what Leo Bersani has termed the body’s “somatic receptivity”. Duration, framing, lighting, and camera (...) movements cultivate a spectator’s receptivity to these “nobjects” and participate in acts of sphere formation. This provides a framework for thinking about how cinema itself might function as a “nobject”: a connective medium or sphere that supports and augments a subject, providing a field of protection and attention. However, the film’s presentation of breathlessness also signals a blocked receptivity, an inability to take in, introducing friction and resistance to the discourse of immediacy and exchange that characterises philosophical reflections on breath. Breathlessness has implications for thinking about bodily autonomy and forms of freedom that speak to the queer politics of Sauvage, as well as questions about movement and stillness, animation and lifelessness, that reflect back on the medium of film itself. (shrink)

How will the Holocaust be remembered as its survivors disappear? In this article Janina Bauman reflects upon her own work on the Holocaust in the context of the Holocaust's broader reception. She offers her own views about the genre with reference to contemporary documents and testimonials, secondary work, scholarly work, fiction and film. These observations and stories all circulate around her own 1986 landmark text, Winter in the Morning.

This article considers the implications for film analysis of the presence or absence of a manual crank. More specifically, it looks at the 16 mm Time and Motion Study Projector as used in behavioral research in the 1960s and 1970s. The controversial concept of ‘interactional synchrony’, or the dance-like coordination of people in conversation, emerged from the use of this hand-turned projector. William S. Condon developed the concept along with the technique of microanalysis. Starting with the projector manufactured by (...) Bell & Howell, he made numerous improvements to facilitate observation—‘sweeping’ over segments of very short duration to discover the rhythmic synchrony of all filmed participants. It led him to a theory of ‘process’ in communication, and in the reception of speech in particular. People always ‘danced’ to the tune of their own voice, and their listeners ‘danced’ to the tune of the speaker—at intervals of one-sixth or one-eighth of a second. This also led Condon to an epistemology of discovery derived partly from philosophy but mostly from his machinery. The universe, he said, is a ‘continuum of order’ whose structures are preserved through translations of order: of thought into speech, speech into vibrations, vibrations into neurons, and back into behavior. The only exceptions are people with disabilities, like the autistics Condon studied from the 1970s onward. But the very distinction of normal and pathological was epiphenomenal to his scanning technique; it was rooted in material and formal qualities of film and of the projector whose crank he turned often. (shrink)

While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films – from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, to Brian De Palma's Obsession, and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.. What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is (...) also a shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film, D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers, and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs, themes and strategies ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated. (shrink)

The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End (1947), begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on. The scene, with its funereal overtones yet grim optimism that, even in the face of catastrophic destruction, the germ of civilization will endure, recalls the ceremonies surrounding the interment of the Westinghouse time capsule (...) at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Time capsules, this article argues, stand in a complex relation to war and temporality, seeking to at once anticipate and work through the challenge posed to futurity by the threat of global conflict. As a container, the capsule attempts to deliver and control the reception of a legible inventory of the present, yet the principle of selection and the impossibility of predicting how information might be received in the deep future – if it is received at all – threatens this aim. The dilemma faced by time capsule curators is, we argue with reference to William Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s so-called cut-up method of writing, one of control. By reading the time capsule through the cut-up, anticipated catastrophe can be seen to be functioning proleptically in the present and already active as a challenge to the capsule as proof against disaster. (shrink)

The cognitive value of film art. The implications of Stanisław Lem’s philosophy of literatureSince the mid-twentieth century, audiovisuality has taken over the means of communication. Progress in technology has contributed to the dynamic development of media such as film and television. Today we can safely admit that life is under the pressure of audiovisual media. The film is an element of common experience, part of everyday life. The question is whether it is also cognitively valuable? Can a (...) movie be a model that helps you to know yourself, your place in the world, relationships with others? And if so, how much can you trust such knowledge? The aim of this article is to reflect on the cognitive value of films, in the light of Stanislaw Lem’s theory of the reception of literature. The author compares a literary work to a model that represents a fragment or the whole of reality. Modeling is a design that lets us look at old problems from a new perspective or sheds light on the issues we did not realize before. An artwork becomes a model when, over time, it is recognized as outstanding by the public. Then the presented vision of the world begins to function as cognitively valuable. However, this is largely a random process. Similarly, it can be applied to a movie. The use of Lem’s theory for the analysis of literature and film aims to illustrate the importance of cognitive and culture-creating role of these arts. (shrink)

Melancholy is a central expressive property of the Before films and key to understanding and appreciating the trilogy as a whole. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis I develop in this paper. In the first section, I present a philosophical account of melancholy in general and aesthetic melancholy in particular. Melancholy is understood here as the profound and bittersweet emotional experience that occurs when we vividly grasp a harsh truth about human existence in such a way that we come (...) to appreciate certain aspects of life more deeply. The second section of the paper focuses on the many intense as well as more subtle moments of melancholy in the various encounters between Celine and Jesse. These moments, I argue, are partly prompted by the environment and the circumstances in which they find themselves. But both of them also actively seek out and create such moments by the stories they tell and the reflections they engage in. That seems part of who they are as individuals and, I contend, it may be part of what attracts them to each other. In the third section, I address ‘film expression’, as opposed to ‘character expression’, and argue that melancholy is not just present in the characters’ dialogue and in their facial and bodily expressions but is also expressed through various cinematic means. The final section centres on the audience and the reception of the Before trilogy. I introduce the distinction between expression and expressiveness and suggest that the films may have resonated deeply with some viewers because they are so expressive of melancholy. (shrink)

For Situationist, theorist and film-maker Guy Debord, the aerial view reproduced the falsely objective world-view he called ‘the spectacle’. To counter its myth of an infinitely expandable, omniscient perspective, Debord focused on reducing views from above to ‘derisory documents’ of the social and the environmental through détournement in the two films he made while the Situationist International was in existence. The films engage critically with aerial photography as a hegemonic mode of indexical media, with the aerial view’s application as (...) information image and ornament, and with the formal phenomenon of ciné-mapping. This analysis suggests that the détournement Debord performs in and across these films can be best conceptualized as a critical optic that constitutes a practice of seeing, a mode of reception and a call to action in the social space beyond its aesthetic employ. As such, the optic of détournement is the contestational counterpart to the optic of the aerial view. This remains the case despite the contemporary complexity of photographic views from above and their increased abstraction of social agents and spaces. An alternative to the testimonial function of embodied photographic views, détournement as optic represents an indexical civil contract founded upon representational inadequacy. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical examination of two recent Holocaust films that exemplify contrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s 1997 The maelstrom: A family chronicle and Quentin tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds. One film is historical; the other translates history to figurative exaggeration. The essay explores how The maelstrom positions viewers within the constructed subjunctive spaces of the film, while Inglourious basterds positions viewers as spectators of history as comic book. Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical (...) claims to expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust memory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysis reveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cinematic memory construction of the Holocaust. (shrink)

Summary Embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism of our brain, and its neural underpinnings are discussed and connected to intersubjectivity and the reception of human cultural artefacts, like visual arts and film. Embodied simulation provides a unified account of both non-verbal and verbal aspects of interpersonal relations that likely play an important role in shaping not only the self and his/her relation to others, but also shared cultural practices. Embodied simulation sheds new light on aesthetic experience and is (...) proposed as a key element for the dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities within the biocultural paradigm. (shrink)

In _Animacies_, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually (...) differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns. Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and film, the lead in toys panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, _Animacies_ illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness—and demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world. (shrink)