The Ukrainian war pervades – as a token for deciphering the ruins of our present – the lines of this interview. That deciphering implies both refusing to be subjected to the devastation of the cities as an inevitable fate and trying to unfold the possibilities of rediscovering a «poetry of the city» (Fabrizio Desideri). We risk falling into incontrollable mistakes and mystifications if we hide from ourselves life’s violence. Philosophically speaking, the most beautiful victory is the one in which (...) we defeat ourselves (Plato). But the role of art, the only human activity able to tear off the masque to violence (Giorgio Colli) is irreplaceable: from Greek tragedy to contemporary cinema. (shrink)

Since its origins, cinema makes an irruption into the world bringing a new reality that inserts itself into a changing social and cultural environment. Raising as an “art of the time” it contributes to the generation of a new perception development and a new aesthetic that brings a “state of encounter” that disrupts the usual relationship between the spectator and the visible while it emerges with a temporary space that interacts among the time experience. The present becomes a contracted (...) past and the memory can be visualized. Cinema becomes an event with a revealing function that will always question its definition and concept. (shrink)

The problem of self-knowledge, originally ethnic, and then national, always excited and continues to worry humanity. At different times, she was sharper, then she calmed down, then stepped forward, then she became one in line with other issues of political, economic and social life. But this problem was inevitable. It was one of the sources of the spirit and activities of the people.

Inspired by Farshad Zahedi’s audiovisual essay The Petrified Object and the Poetics of Time in Cinema, this article briefly presents three philosophical approaches to cinema’s ways of expressing time – as articulated by Bergson, Tarkovsky, and Deleuze – and questions how absolute time and chronological time are brought to a state of crisis by this modern form of art.

_The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America_ Edited by Hannah Patterson London: Wallflower Press, 2003 ISBN 1-903364-75-2 195 pp.

Aleksandar Dundjerovic _The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory_ London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003 ISBN 1-903364-33-7 181 pp.

Introduction. Flesh and its reversibility ; Defining the baroque ; 'Good looking' ; A cinema of baroque flesh -- 1. Flesh, cinema and the baroque : the aesthetics of reversibility. Baroque vision and painting the flesh ; Baroque flesh ; Analogous embodiments : the film's body ; Baroque vision and cinema ; Summation : face to face-feeling baroque deixis -- 2. Knots of sensation : co-extensive space and a cinema of the passions. Synaesthesia, phenomenology, and the (...) senses ; Cinesthesia and the Bel composto ; A passionate baroque : emotion, excess, and co-extensive space ; Assault and absorption : cruel baroque ; Summation : beside oneself -- 3. Baroque skin/semiotics. Chiasm : language and experience ; Baroque poetic language and the seventeenth-century infinite ; Baroque luxury ; Skin-deep : baroque texturology ; Tickles : baroque wit ; Summation : cine-mimesis -- 4. One hand films the other : baroque haptics. Touching-touched ; Haptic visuality and the baroque ; Baroque haptics and cinema ; Analogical assemblages : Baroque databases ; Summation: TEXXTURE -- Conclusion : or the baroque 'Beauty of the act'. (shrink)

In the film Sans Soliel, Chris Marker challenges received wisdoms with regard cinematic production of real worlds and real people. In Marker’s techniques, Jacques Rancière observes an intensely political, highly accessible, art form that leads to a theorisation of cinema for its democratic and educational functions. In this paper we take up Rancière’s interest in the democratic and educational functions of cinema through a reading of three films: Sans Soliel, Minority Report, and After Yang. Marker’s essayist cinema (...) produces an uncanny experience of anthropological irony, and a mode of rethinking imperialism, revealing stories of communities that typically do not get told. Spielberg’s film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story is a cautionary contemplation on the ethics of the future of a police force that has access to visions of the future. Kogonada’s poetic lens muses on what it is to be human, what it is to be a family, and what it is to be a child and a parent negotiating complexity, loss, and identity. Each film is of interest here for the openness with which they engage thinking about democracy and education. They are democratic and educational precisely because they do not tell us what to think about democracy and education. Each film at the same time provides insight into Rancière’s thinking about the functions of cinema in producing senses of politics. (shrink)

This article considers scientific data and methods taken as a vocabulary for a visual language of poetics, shaping an artistic practice exploring the liminal poetics of space, time, science and mythology, equally considered. These artworks focus on the moving image as an immersive, architectonic construct, one that makes it possible to blur the boundary between space and time. They are cinematic environments that create a space of spatial and temporal ambiguity, open to the performative role of the viewer in composing (...) the unfolding narrative. The artworks presented here began in the crossover between art and science, technology and anthropology, exploring topics and incorporating methods from each area. Transdisciplinary processes play a critical role in this artistic research. These works reflect cinema approached as a multimodal field of possibilities in which montage motivates movement and focus through this field, creating a participatory composition of sight, sound, movement and memory that immerses viewers by actuating somatic perception. Shape, scale, immersion, interactivity, simultaneity, embodiment, implementation and the manipulation of time create concrete metaphors that echo the multivalent content of the works: a collaboration with 300 tropical spiders to create a Kino, then letting the audience walk freely among them (or the spiders freely among the audience); an immersive environment enacting the space-time of glacial ice to experience the time of a different form of matter as somatosensory experience; a journey through the human history of the Moon, transcending time, political ideologies, realities and cultures as an encompassing field of simultaneous views and sounds; performing a 2000-year-old act of Thessalian magic on the skyline of Hong Kong. Combining the technological tools available to cinema and science, contrasting magnifications and speeds of observation reveal a material poetics beyond appearance. The artworks presented here elaborate the details of cardinal subjects, diving deep into fundamental domains to unravel the cultural implications embedded within the aesthetics of their data artefacts. (shrink)

The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers in-depth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory (...) with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be. (shrink)

This article analyses an important category from Deleuze's philosophy – the notion of intensity – and explores its significance for Deleuze and the ways it can be used to think about poetic cinema. I use the concept of the intensive-image to define a cinematic style that dissipates narrative action in favour of more contemplative and sensory experiences, hence films that are able to turn onscreen reality into purely affective phenomena. The notion of intensity, I argue, does not allow (...) us to reply easily to the question about representation (i.e., “what is the film about?”), mainly because its images are indeterminate and flowing, combined in a multiple manner that excludes any simple reduction to signification. The general argument that follows, illustrated by a careful reading of key poetic texts, is that the focus on the intensive-image inspires readers to reconsider Deleuze's classification of the cinema into two separate periods as well as to understand the ways in which intensity finds expression in films that produce problems, displacements and provocations. In the words of Pasolini, this is the poetic film tradition which must be placed diachronically in relation to the language of the film narrative, a diachronism that, he says, would appear destined to be always more pronounced. In the last section of this article, I look at Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) as an early case of the poetic image and draw on key theorists and filmmakers who have discussed the cinema's power of affection and intensity. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière relies on references to theatre and literature to articulate the modes in which meanings are communicated. It is because they are displaceable from bodies and dis-incorporable from things that these patterns of meaning are available to being picked up. But this also means that meaning occurs as a pattern of communication that is not entirely rational. Meaning, we might say, moulds as it communicates. Such references to theatre and literature are more than allegorical. The general orientation of Rancière’s (...) thought pivots on the claim that politics is aesthetic; and that theatrical and literary fields of displacement and disincorporation are modes in which politics occurs as an alteration of ordered patterns of meaning, what he describes as ‘ways of being, doing and saying’. Although it would be possible to pursue cases of such alteration in film, in general Rancière’s writing on film does not do so. Rather, his critique of modernism is the framework he uses to examine the aesthetic settings and technical possibilities of film. From this perspective, he argues that the cinematic apparatus is indifferent to its material and that its technical arsenal does not determine cinematic forms. Further, because the ‘critical’ profile of cinema is in fact indistinguishable from the role it plays in the poetic depiction of the minutaie of life, claims regarding the political significance of film need radical qualification. The implications of this position on cinema are double: first, it may be argued that there is no reason that the prospects for dis-incorporation of meaning and the political significance he attaches to such modes of aesthetic communication in the cases of theatre and literature cannot be extended to cinema; a second set of implications bring into question the aesthetic settings he gives to politics. There is a clear fissure in Rancière’s thinking between the topic of film as an aesthetic form and its critical force for remoulding the conditions of communicability of meaning. It is because of the way this fissure occurs in the case of film that we can distinguish the strands that Rancière, on account of his position on aesthetic politics, would elsewhere like to consider fused. For this reason, I argue that Rancière’s discussion of cinema tends to undermine the general perspective he defends in which meaning-forming processes in the arts are taken to be political. (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 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)

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze evokes dramatization when he suggests that intensities must dramatize the Ideas to condition their actualization. This allusion to an artistic category, in the midst of his metaphysical inquiry, has remained obscure, and despite its cruciality, it is not clear why he appeals to dramatization to explain any actualization and not solely the artistic actualization. This essay attempts to elucidate this ambiguity, by foregrounding a zone of torsional continuity, wherein intensity encounters the Idea and expresses it (...) through dramatization. This process is at play in the actualization of the organic field, social field, and aesthetic field, where an intensive larval subject—embryo, disentangled individual, artist—encounters the biological, social, or artistic Idea. While referring to the artistic encounter, it is shown how dramatization is indispensable to actualize every Idea. Finally, through Tarkovsky and Blanchot, the notion of poeticization is formulated that, while complementing dramatization, unveils certain tacit nuances of the Deleuzian actualization. (shrink)

This article compares the poetics of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire du cinéma in order to realign our understanding of metaphor, metonymy and montage with the inter-formal dialogues that new media artworks increasingly demand of audiences. An analysis of Godard's ‘quotation’ of Proust's words and ideas from Le Temps retrouvé sets out an explicit rivalry between text and image. However, drawing on formalist and structuralist approaches to both literature and cinema, including Roman (...) Jakobson and Gérard Genette, as well as more recent discussions developed by Gilles Deleuze and Lev Manovich, I will argue that the nature of the image manifested in both artworks corresponds to a shared aesthetic that exceeds distinctions between word and image, literature and video. (shrink)

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

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast (...) array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis. (shrink)

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House, situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, (...) I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman. (shrink)

Gaston Bachelard distinguishes the radical novelty and newness of the imagination from pre-existing sensory impressions. In this article, I explore Bachelard's connections between time, the imagined image and poetic form, and I consider their implications for the cinema. Concentrating my analysis on Ildikó Enyedi's Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul — a film that alternates between doubled worlds, depictions of human and animal life — I draw out the temporality and the diversity of Bachelard's imagined images. Bringing (...) Bachelard's instant, vertical time and the crystalline to bear on Enyedi's film, I argue that, under the pretext of sleep, rest and dreaming, On Body and Soul engages the temporality and attentiveness of the Bachelardian imagination, together with its poetic effects. (shrink)

This article deals with the poetry of two prominent writers: Ukrainian poetess Lesia Ukrainka and Chinese poetess Qiu Jin. The diversity of wide fields of self-expression of both poetesses created the grounds for a broad and comprehensive comparison in terms of poetic, thematic, and literary similarities. The article provides a background to the translations of Lesia Ukrainka in China and accounts for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetry in China in the light of the poetic world of (...) Qiu Jin. The main aspects of the poetic discourses of Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin are outlined and studied within the core concept of the national heroine in China, formed by Qiu Jin, consisting of key elements important for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s works – revolution, nationalism, and feminism. (shrink)

L’articolo intende mettere in luce i rapporti tra le fonti storiche del Medioevo russo e la resa cinematografica della narrazione medievale nelle poetiche di Ejzenštejn e Tarkovskij. Congelando le filmografie dei due autori sulle due rispettive pellicole che hanno raccontato il Medioevo russo, l’_Alexandr Nevskij_ di Ejzenštejn e l’_Andrej Rublёv_ di Tarkovskij, l’articolo propone un’indagine critica sulle modalità d’approccio divergenti dei due registi rispetto al materiale storiografico e l’analisi della portata storica che la narrazione del Medioevo assume in un prodotto (...) artistico cinematografico. Partendo dal pensiero di H. White sulla necessità di affiancare la forma narrativa al contenuto del lavoro storico, l’obiettivo dell’articolo è anzitutto la messa in discussione della presunta oggettività della verità storiografica, spostando l’attenzione, in un’ottica cinematografica, sui precisi processi che portano a compimento una narrazione storica _tout court_ in relazione al presente della narrazione e allo sguardo dello spettatore. _This contribution aims to highlight the relationship between the historical sources of the Russian Middle Ages and the cinematic rendering of the medieval narrative in Ejzenštejn and Tarkovskij’poetics. Focusing on two respective films that recounted the Russian Middle Ages, the _Alexandr Nevsky_ by Ejzenštejn and the _Andrej Rublёv_ by Tarkovskij, the article proposes a critical investigation into the divergent approaches of the two directors with respect to historiographical material and the analysis of the historical significance that the medieval narrative assumes in a cinematographic product. Starting from the thought of the philosophy of history’s expert H. White on the need to combine the narrative form with the content of the historical work, the objective of the contribution is primarily to question the alleged objectivity of the historiographical truth. Afterwards the focus will be on the precise processes that bring to completion an historical narrative _tout court_ in relation to the present of the narrative and the viewer’s gaze in a cinematographic perspective._. (shrink)

COVID-19 infects cities, here grasped as quasi-living functioning systems, and the changes inflicted can poetically open us to certain things. Drawing on ecological psychology, we maintain that this brings people into contact with different realities depending on their overall wellbeing, arguing that the aesthetic experience of cities accordingly varies. We then consider iterations of these ideas in dystopian cinema, which portrays global threats altering human relations with technology, art, and the world.

Walter Benjamin pointed out the affinity of cinema and architecture, and argued unexpectedly that tbese art forms are both essentially tactile arts. The tactility of the material art of building is not difficult to grasp, but the idea that a cinematic projection could result in fundamentally tactile experience certainly meets objections. However, the philosophical as well as neurological studies ofthe past few decades in perception, emotion, and thought, as well as in artistic expressions, suggest that these two arts, or (...) poetic images at large, address ali our senses, including our synthesizing existential sense, all at once. The arts communicate through the “fiesh of the world”, to use a notion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The acts of perception, feeling, thinking, and memorizing cal! for the reality and sense of embodiment. We identify ourselves unknowingly with constructed architectural spaces as well as projected cinematic situations with our empathetic capacity. So, Benjamin ‘s argument could be re- -formulated: cinema and architecture are embodied atis in which the externa! and the internal are fully intertwined and fused. “The world is wholly inside, and 1 aro wholly outside myself’, as Merleau-Ponty enigmatically argues. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the filmakers' intention of making a film about Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture series on Friedrich Holderlin's poem, 'Der Ister,' as an 'act of philosophical expression'. With and against Heidegger's principles of thought and the possibilities of expression, I argue the filmmakers undermine its generic classification as an essay film through interruption, a technique that is exemplary of Holderlin's poetry.

Motivated by the unconventional views on film and art in general, and often unrestrained by the commercial imperatives, generative artists engage the poetic and expressive potentials of film playfully and efficiently, with explicit or implicit critique of cinema in a broader cultural context. This article looks at the creative incentives, insights and implications of generative cinema. In six interrelated categories, it presents the art projects of generative cinema, which in various ways point to the algorithmic models (...) for parametric, analytical and/or synthetic generation of the cinematic structure, narrative, composition, editing, presentation and interaction. The article states that the algorithmic essence of generative cinema significantly expands the realm of creative methodologies for the artists working with film, but also provides a platform for critical assessment of the algorithmic strategies and overall creativity in contemporary film industry. Exploring the algorithms on a multitude of levels, generative cinema is on its way of becoming the supreme art of the moving image in the early twenty-first century. Its poetic divergence, technical fluency and conceptual cogency successfully demonstrate that the authorship evolves towards ever more abstract reflection and cognition that equally treats the existing creative achievements as inspirations, knowledge sources and tools. (shrink)

This paper argues for a feminist genealogy of anti-nuclear protest art, around the nucleus of the women’s camp at Greenham Common, 1981–87, a coherent account of whose significance is missing from both feminist film history and left protest history. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s poetics as a thread connecting the larger anti-nuclear and non-violent/anti-military feminist movement specifically to aesthetic and political formations that informed films made at and about Greenham, the paper constellates a number of experimental works in relation to the (...) well-known observational documentary Carry Greenham Home. Their legacy, and the concept of a Greenham genealogy, is apparent in Sally Potter’s anti-nuclear Cuban Missile Crisis-set drama Ginger & Rosa, whose imbrication of poetry, politics, and experimental film techniques argues for a Greenham poetics. In particular, this paper considers a feminist poetics of attending to the nuclear, re-visioning the atomic, molecular and core as both an ecopoetics and a refusal of heteropatriarchal structures, both necessary to a viable alternative political formation. In their granular detailing of both world and work, these feminist texts offer a rich and continuous history, practice and analysis of anti-nuclear protest art that demands the same attention as they enact. (shrink)

In this paper we review certain cinematographic practices which, by inscribing a becoming minor into the production and reception of films, attest to a resistance to normalisation. We pay special attention to the ways in which problems of representing the minor and transmitting their experiences have been addressed in the works of Dardenne and in Pasolini’s poetic cinema. Each of these filmmakers have developed a true « minor cinema » where the body, by taking over language, becomes (...) problematic. (shrink)

In the article considered sources of forming of outlooks Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Oles in the context of the cultural processes of the early twentieth century. Traced the influence of the panteïstičnogo worldview of the writer on the poetics of his works that appeared in the system of mythologems and symbols, the synthesis of nature and of man. Notes about the characteristic capture romantics âzičnic′koû mythology and a kind of obožnennâm nature.

This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, (...) with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning. (shrink)

The cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is celebrated as challenging the status quo. From the political films of the 1970s through to the more existential works of his later career, Vrasidis Karalis argues for a coherent and nuanced philosophy underpinning Angelopoulos' work. The political force of his films, including the classic The Travelling Players, gave way to more essayistic works exploring identity, love, loss, memory and, ultimately, mortality. This development of sensibilities is charted along with the key cultural moments informing (...) Angelopoulos' shifting thinking. From Voyage to Cythera until his last film, The Dust of Time, Angelopoulos' problematic heroes in search of meaning and purpose engaged with the thinking of Plato, Mark, Heidegger, Arendt and Luckacs, both implicitly and explicitly. Theo Angelopoulos also explores the rich visual language and 'ocular poetics' of Angelopopulos' oeuvre and his mastery of communicating profundity through the everyday. Karalis argues for a reading of his work that embraces contradiction and celebrates the unsettling questions at the heart of his work. (shrink)

Resumo: O texto trata das noções de “amizade” e de “escrita de si”, a partir do filme Gabriel e a Montanha, de Fellipe Barbosa. A discussão inscreve-se nos estudos de Michel Foucault, acerca de uma “estética da existência”, articulando o cinema e as práticas ascéticas, como exercícios de autotransformação e aprendizagem de si. Para tanto, utiliza-se o método de pesquisa, nomeado de “memórias de formação”; voltado a discutir as narrativas de pessoas, em relação as suas experiências de criação com (...) as linguagens poéticas. Desse modo, é possível aproximar processos artísticos e modos de existência, no interior de um debate ético e estético, acerca das relações entre arte, vida e formação. Palavras-chave: Amizade; Cinema; Formação; Escrita de Si; Estética da Existência. Self-writing and friendship in the film “Gabriel and the Mountain”, by Fellipe Barbosa Abstract: The text deals with the notions of "friendship" and "self-writing", from the film Gabriel and the Mountain, by Fellipe Barbosa. The discussion is part of the studies of Michel Foucault, about an “aesthetics of existence”, connecting cinema and ascetic practices, as exercises of self-transformation and self-learning. Therefore, the research method, called “memories of formation” is used; aimed at discussing people’s narratives, in relation to their experiences of contact and creation with poetic languages. Thus, it is possible approaches artistic processes and modes of existence, within an ethical and aesthetic debate, about the relationships between art, life and formation. Keywords: Friendship; Cinema; Formation; Self-Writing; Aesthetics of Existence. Escrita de sí y amistad en la película “Gabriel y la Montaña”, de Fellipe Barbosa Resumen: El texto trata de nociones de “amistad” y de “escrita de sí”, a partir de la película Gabriel y la montaña, de Fellipe Barbosa. La discusión se inscribe en los estudios de Michel Foucault, acerca de una “estética de la existencia”, articulando el cine y las prácticas escépticas, como ejercícios de autotransformación y aprendizaje de sí. Para ello se utiliza el método de investigación, denominado “memorias de formación”; destinado a discutir las narrativas de las personas, en relación con sus experiencias de contacto y creación con lenguajes poéticos. Así, es possible aproximar procesos artísticos y modos de existencia, en el interior de un debate ético y estético, sobre las relaciones entre arte, vida y formación. Palabras clave: Amistad; Cine; Formación; Escrita de Sí ; Estética de la Existencia. 1 Este trabalho faz parte de uma pesquisa maior advinda da tese: Memórias de formação: Inventar com vozes artistas uma escrita em educação. Ver: Silva, 2024. Data de registro: 11/07/2024 Data de aceite: 27/11/2024. (shrink)

On the aesthetics and poetics of Hawks and Ford; their resurgence in film studies.

Throughout its existence, the Ukrainian people have created a treasure trove of knowledge that has, through different historical periods, brought up growing generations in a spirit of love for man, the environment, a willingness to overcome evil and the ugliness of life. Oral and poetic folklore among the various segments of the population of Ukraine contained tips for children and adults.

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic "intent" about the characters, spaces, and events of film. Discussing contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely contribution to the study of film and philosophy will provoke debate among (...) audiences and filmmakers alike. FILMOSOPHY ® is a registered U.S. trademark owned by Valentin Stoilov (www.filmosophy.com) for educational services in the field of motion picture history theory and production. Mr. Stoilov is not the source or origin of this book and has not sponsored or endorsed it or its author. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Necessity of TheaterNoël CarrollDespite the fact that theater was the first art form to be examined in depth by Western philosophers, it has not received a great deal of attention by contemporary philosophers of art. Essays on literature, music, and cinema are more likely to appear in journals such as the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism than are articles (...) on theater. But with the publication of Paul Woodruff's The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, James Hamilton's The Art of Theater and the recent anthology Staging Philosophy, edited by David Zucker Saltz and David Krassner, the tide seems to be turning. Philosophers are interested in theater again. Perhaps some lovers of theater may regard this as bad news, recalling what Plato, Augustine, and Rousseau attempted to do to theater. But contemporary philosophers of theater belong more to the school of Aristotle than to that of Plato.Of these recent contributions to the philosophy of theater, Paul Woodruff's book is the one that most resembles Aristotle's Poetics, especially in terms of its analyses of plotting, characterization, conflict, choice, and mimesis. This is maybe no surprise, since Paul Woodruff is not only a professor of philosophy, but also a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 435]One thing that is immediately striking about The Necessity of Theater is the elegance of its intellectual design. Woodruff begins with the hypothesis that theater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching in measure time and place. That is, theater is art of being watched and watching. This distinction between being watched and watching, then, provides Woodruff with the means to, on the one hand, examine the elements that go into making theater, and, on the other hand, the elements that go into watching or appreciating theater.Creating theater involves making something worth watching—something that will hold the audience's attention. What sorts of things command our attention? Human action, notably as it is organized in terms of a plot which Woodruff, like Aristotle, emphasizes must be of a magnitude sufficient to be cognitively manageable. Since actions require choices, Woodruff follows his analysis of plot, naturally enough, with a discussion of the choices that give rise to those actions for much the same reason that Aristotle includes dialogue as one of the components of tragedy.In order to be worth watching, Woodruff recommends that these choices be free and coherent. Since choices derive—or are thought to derive—from character, theater, in order to hold our attention, needs characters. These characters must be agents and, in addition, they must be capable of engaging our emotions, not just pity and fear, but the gamut of emotions, although the most important of these, on Woodruff's view, would appear to be the elicitation of care on the part of the audience on behalf of the characters on stage. Woodruff contends that care for a character is engendered by giving the character a past as well as hopes for the future (an aim, a project, a problem) and by making that person a center of love (that is, someone who loves and/or is loved by or who cares and is cared for by other people).Theater primarily makes us interested in watching people by encouraging us to respond to characters emotionally. It is able to do this because it traffics in mimesis. Woodruff understand mimesis as a matter of a mimetic object, a theater piece, bringing to the fore certain effects of the object of which it is a representation. With respect to a theater piece, the relevant effects are emotional effects. Because mimesis is selective, it may be able to achieve those effects more intensely than its off-stage model can; the selectivity of the theater piece both places greater emphasis on the emotion-provoking features of situations while also blocking out otherwise [End Page 436] interfering detail. However, theater does require the complicity of the audience who must fill-in the model imaginatively.The introduction of the role of the audience's... (shrink)

In the history of its reception, the myth of Medea has always been of prime importance for reflections on an awareness of civilization crisis. This process culminates in the modern age, and especially so with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s exceptionally significant version of the Medea story. Pasolini’s far-seeing and complex poetics of cinema combines the ancient myth with sources drawn from the history of religions and thereby exposes the concept of social naturalness as ideologically posited. Against an ideology of the (...) allegedly natural, his „Medea“ brings to bear an ethnoaesthetic mythography, which casts doubt on the postulate of the progress of civilization. To be sure, in the context of modernism, a rehabilitation of religious myth is impossible except in a mode of aesthetic illusion. But it is the fiction of ›mythopoiesis‹ which assures that such an enterprise can make sense, if only in an imaginary way. (shrink)

More than any other thinker, Giorgio Agamben shows us that philosophy is also a matter of style and politics a matter of poetics. This book explores the unexpected and illuminating paths that his work traces across the territories of law and literature, linguistics, dance or cinema, in search of a new idea and practice of the community. It offers an irreplaceable introduction to one of the most fascinating thinkers of our time.'Jacques RanciereGathering some of the most important established and (...) emerging scholars to examine his body of work, this collection of essays seeks to explore Agamben's thought from these broader philosophical and literary concerns, underpinning its place within larger debates in continental philosophy. Including a contribution by Agamben himself, it is essential reading for anyone interested in his work.In the past five years, Giorgio Agamben has emerged as one of the most important continental philosophers. This burgeoning popularity of his work has largely been confined to a study of the homo sacer series. Yet these later 'political' works have their foundation in Agamben's earlier works on the philosophy of language, aesthetics and literature. From a philosophy of language and linguistics that leads to a broader theory of representation, Agamben develops a critical theory that attempts to explore the hiatuses and paradoxes that govern discursive practice across a broad range of disciplines. (shrink)

Resumen: ¿Puede el cine filosofar? ¿Puede la imagen en movimiento ser medio para que la filosofía opere en otra materia expresiva? Este artículo tiene como interés auscultar la capacidad de ciertos cines de hacer filosofía al interior de la gran pantalla. Por eso, se exponen las líneas teóricas que permiten la defensa de un cine filosófico capaz de ofrecer conceptos a través de la dimensión expresiva propia de las imágenes en movimiento. Dicho proceso tiene lugar al interior del trabajo poético (...) que el cine de autor ofrece y que, a razón de su distancia del tono general del cine clásico, supone una crítica a la metafísica en el territorio del séptimo arte. Se realiza el análisis de parte de la obra iniciática del director Wong Kar-Wai y su singular poética del des-encuentro. A razón de su trabajo al filo del cine moderno es posible evidenciar cómo el cine puede darnos qué pensar.: Is it possible for the cinema to philosophize? Can the moving image work as a means for philosophy to operate under a different expressive language? This article discusses the ability of certain cinemas to do philosophy on the big screen. It describes the theoretical approaches that argue for a philosophical cinema capable of offering concepts through the expressive dimension of moving images. This process takes place within the poetic work that an auteur’s cinema offers which, because of its distance from the general tone of classical cinema, implies a critique of metaphysics from within the territory of the seventh art. The article analyzes part of the early work of the director Wong Kar-Wai’s and his unique poetics of dis-encounter. Through his work on the margins of modern cinema, it is possible to show how the seventh art can offer us something to think about. (shrink)

The article examines the individualistic manifestations of the heroes of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetic dramas. The key point is focused on the confrontation between a free personality and a passive mob. The author draws parallels between Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Lesia Ukrainka’s individualistic manifestations, and describes how the Ukrainian poetess creates her own accounts of individualism, which are close to Nietzscheanism: anti-Christianity, will to power, acceptance of destiny, self-overcoming, etc. The main difference between the two thinkers consists in Lesia Ukrainka’s (...) approach when her ideas are expressed by a strong type of woman. (shrink)

If a machine is something that cuts into a continuous flow, schizoanalysis can be read, quite literally, as an analysis of cuts. In cinematic registers, it is an analysis of montage. Looking closely at a number of modes and moments of montage in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, this paper shows how his strategies of ‘reciprocally presupposing’ actual image and virtual montage relate to a Deleuzian poetics and politics of the cinema.

This article examines stylistic and linguistic aspects of photographic thinking in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bruno Schulz. The analysis is framed by the insights of Western and Ukrainian theorists of the image. The development of photo technologies anticipates photographic thinking as an aesthetic phenomenon. Photographic thinking is embodied in the specific artistic and imaginative reflection of reality and the human world, embedded on the linguistic—syntactic—level of the artistic text. In Dostoyevsky’s tract, the text can be seen as (...) a photo album with consecutive snapshots, each frame containing a certain dominant. On the syntactic level, the phrases “suddenly” and “for a moment” introduce the photographic frame or a change of frame. The phrase “for a moment” grounds a new poetic technique, a way of capturing the psychological states of a character when the soul is revealed, that is, when he or she is reacting unconsciously. The capturing of life from the point of view of a camera distinguishes the surrealist fiction of Bruno Schulz. This photographic perspective is connected with a new conceptualization of temporality: the past and the present are on the same plane and neither is the time of representation, which means the subject of representation is always dead. The conception of time as ‘frozen’ in the moment is also part of Dostoevsky’s poetics. (shrink)

The author claims that the will to translation from foreign languages is an intrinsic tendency of development of any language. The article deals with the following problems of Ukrainian translation of the work «The Dawn of Day» by Friedrich Nietzsche: Reproduction of the poetic style of Nietzsche’s writing. Translation of Nietzsche’s neologisms that are not adopted in modern German language. Interpretation of the influence of Nietzsche’s life experience on his thinking.The author analyses his own experience of translation of (...) this work. He describes his strategy of translation which is based on the assumption that Nietzsche’s text should be translated not only as philosophical but also as a poetical one. The style of Nietzsche’s writing is deeply rooted in his life experience, and first of all in his illness. His main concepts express the fundamental aspects of existence. That is why Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s thinking can be used as methodological basis for translation of Nietzsche’s works. From this point of view we can understand and translate Nietzsche not only as a philosopher but also as a poet.So the strategy of translation is based on the following principles: The text should be interpreted in the context of Nietzsche’s life experience. The principal words of Nietzsche should be understood not as rigorous notions but as «existentials». The Ukrainian translation should reproduce not only the meaning of the original text but also the poetical style of Nietzsche’s writing. (shrink)

The book highlights the concept of ontology, relationship between language and ontology, the distinction between ontology and reality, the role of linguistic philosophers in dealing with ontology etc. Apart from these, the eminent scholars address themselves with the ontology behind the value of valuation, exclusion and discrimination, inter-religious dialogue, Indian theories of language, values in cinema, poetic language etc.

The article discusses the organization of linguistic postmodern literary text. Analyzes the poetic works of Ukrainian postmodern art discourse for selection by the authors of language means of expression to achieve communicative goals. Word in a work of art does not only nominative function, it is used in a subjectify lingual space and determine speechthinking freedom of speaker. The author draws attention to the fact that the poetic function of language, along with the reference, ambiguity and gives (...) it an opportunity for the ambiguity of the utterance. In connection with this understanding of the meaning of art depends on the different attitudes to the very subject of the statement saying, an the method of reading the text. Related words in the concept of becoming unfit for the image “literal” pattern of life. Therefore, a clear sign of postmodernism become Ukrainian verbal games, heteroglossy languages, discourse, linguistic hybrids, marginal dictionaries. He rejects the discourse of a totalitarian society, the official lexicon of Soviet-style language as inadequate to express the individual senses and feelings, instead of resorting to repetition of words, obscene language, citations, etc. The essence of the product is replaced by rhythmic melodic phrase, a phrase open to freely attach to it any associative chain. In the process of generation of artistic expression is present in the selection principle nonselection linguistic means of expression. The dialogue is born and polylogue game between the text of culture, the reader, the author. (shrink)