A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinema: langue ou langage?'"--Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."--Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a (...) reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [ Film Language ] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."--Stephen Heath, Screen. (shrink)

This study does not claim to be an exhaustive critique of the contemporary cinema, whose abundance and diversity defies any attempt to unify it. It has no other purpose than to clarify the underlying meanings of certain productions which are typical of the medium (as for example, L'Avventura by Antonioni and A bout de souffle by Jean-Luc Godard), and to show that the “learned” cinema, that is, the cinema conscious of the ends pursued and the means employed, (...) cannot but fail when it undertakes to introduce new connnections between the sign and the sense. (shrink)

I. Cinema equals Language II. _Vertigo_ III. _Maborosi_ IV. Sound, Mood, and Depth V. Sense Intensified.

Colin MacCabe _The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema and the Politics of Culture_ London: British Film Institute, 1999 ISBN 0-85170-677-0 184 pp.

Cinema no abrigo: encontros, gestos e acontecimento Resumo: Este texto é fruto de reflexões sobre nossa vivência com o Projeto de Extensão “Educação, Cinema, Outros Territórios” no Lar de Idosos ‘Abrigo Tiradentes’, em Minas Gerais. Um objetivo específico do Projeto é realizar sessões de cinema junto aos idosos em diferentes territórios. A metodologia e a avaliação das ações são compreendidas como um gesto de acompanhamento do Programa de Extensão, amparado na investigação cartográfica, prática metodológica pertinente para o (...) acompanhamento de processos em curso e a produção de subjetividades. As questões que nos colocamos para esta reflexão são: o que pode o cinema num Abrigo de Idosos? Quais conexões poderíamos arquitetar entre cinema, linguagem e acontecimento? O que essas pessoas experimentam com os filmes? O que poderíamos exercitar, a partir do conceito de acontecimento, no pensamento? Buscamos, por meio deste ensaio, um exercício de pensar “acontecimentos” no nosso encontro com os moradores e com os filmes durante as sessões de cinema no Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Palavras-chave: Acontecimento; Cinema; Idoso. Cinema in the shelter: meetings, gestures and events Abstract: This text is the result of reflections on our experience with the “Education, Cinema, Other Territories” Extension Project at the Lar de Idosos Abrigo Tiradentes, in Minas Gerais. A specific objective of the Project is to hold cinema sessions with the elderly in different territories. The methodology and the evaluation of the actions are understood as a gesture of monitoring the Extension Program, supported by cartographic research, methodological practice relevant to the monitoring of ongoing processes and the production of subjectivities. The questions we ask ourselves for this reflection are: what can cinema do in a Shelter for the Elderly? What connections could we make between cinema, language and event? What do these people experience with films? What could we exercise, based on the concept of event, in thought? Through this essay, we seek an exercise in thinking about “events” in our meeting with the residents and with the films during the cinema sessions at Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Key-words: Event; Cinema; Elderly. Cine en el retiro: encuentros, gestos y acontecimientos Resumen: Este texto es el resultado de reflexiones sobre nuestra experiencia con el Proyecto de Extensión “Educación, Cine, Otros Territorios” en el Lar de Idosos Abrigo Tiradentes, en Minas Gerais. Un objetivo específico del Proyecto es realizar sesiones de cine con personas mayores en diferentes territorios. La metodología y la evaluación de las acciones se entienden como un gesto de seguimiento del Programa de Extensión, con el apoyo de la investigación cartográfica, la práctica metodológica relevante para el seguimiento de los procesos en curso y la producción de subjetividades. Las preguntas que nos hacemos para esta reflexión son: ¿qué puede hacer el cine en un refugio para ancianos? ¿Qué conexiones podríamos hacer entre cine, idioma y evento? ¿Qué experimentan estas personas con las películas? ¿Qué podríamos ejercer, basado en el concepto de evento, en el pensamiento? A través de este ensayo, buscamos un ejercicio para pensar acerca de los "eventos" en nuestra reunión con los residentes y con las películas durante las sesiones de cine en Lar de Idosos – Abrigo Tiradentes. Palabras-claves: Acontecimentos; Cine; Ancianos. Data de registro: 19/03/2020 Data de aceite: 28/08/2020. (shrink)

Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions redefines the critical picture of language as a system of signs and ideological tropes inextricably linked to human existence. Offering reflections on the status, discursive possibilities, and political, ideological and practical uses of oral or written word in both contemporary society and the work of previous thinkers, this book traverses South African courts, British clinics, language schools in East Timor, prison cells, cinemas, literary criticism textbooks and philosophical treatises in order (...) to forge a new, diversified perspective on language, ideology, and what it means to be human. This truly international and interdisciplinary collection explores the implications that language, always materialising in the form of a historically and ideologically identifiable discourse, as well as the concept of ideology itself, have for the construction, definition and ways of speaking about 'the human'. Thematically arranged and drawing together the latest research from experts around the world, Language, Ideology, and the Human offers a view of language, ideology and the human subject that eschews simplifications and binary definitions. With contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, this book will appeal to scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, law, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and political science. © Sanja Bahun, Dušan Radunović and the contributors 2012. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Nella conferenza su Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie Merleau-Ponty introduce una singolare, ma decisiva notazione sull’arte filmica, legandola alla nozione di “ritmo”. Tale nozione dà avvio a una riflessione sull’immagine e sul rapporto tra l’immagine e lo sguardo dello spettatore al cinema. Nel presente articolo, l’uso che Merleau-Ponty ne fa e il senso di questa operazione saranno letti in riferimento alla riflessione di Émile Benveniste sul ritmo e ad alcune annotazioni contenute nei corsi di Merleau-Ponty al Collège de (...) France, di qualche anno successivi alla conferenza, su Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression e quello sulle Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. Dans le texte de sa conférence sur Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie, Merleau-Ponty introduit une lecture, singulière mais décisive, de l’art filmique, en la rapprochant de la notion de « rythme ». Cette notion engage une réflexion sur l’image et sur le rapport entre l’image et le regard du spectateur au cinéma. Dans cet article, l’utilisation que Merleau-Ponty en fait et le sens de cette opération seront lus à partir de la réflexion d’Émile Benveniste sur le rythme et à partir de certaines notes présentes dans les cours de Merleau-Ponty au Collège de France sur Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression et sur les Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage, qui suivent de quelques années la conférence.In the text of his lecture on “Film and the new psychology,” Merleau-Ponty introduces a singular and decisive reading of filmic art, approaching the notion of “rhythm.” This notion engages in a reflection on image and on the relation between the image and the gaze of the spectator at the cinema. In this article, Merleau-Ponty’s actual usage of this notion and the meaning of this operation will be read starting from the reflection of Émile Benveniste on rhythm as well as certain notes presented in Merleau-Ponty’s courses at the Collège de France on The sensible world and the world of expression and Research on the literary usages of language, that follow some years after the lecture. (shrink)

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)

Describing Cinema is part theory, part rhetoric, and part pedagogy. It examines and demonstrates acts of describing scenes, shots, and sequences in films, as probably the most common and the most underestimated way viewers respond to movies. Practiced energetically and carefully, descriptions become exceptionally rich ways to demonstrate and celebrate the activities, varieties, and challenges of a central generative movement in the viewing and interpretation of films. My motto might be an inversion of one character's tongue-in-cheek remark in Jean-Luc (...) Godard's First Name, Carmen (played by Godard himself), "badly seen, badly said," rephrased for this project as "badly said, badly seen." Here, that phrase becomes an indication how acts of describing films or parts of films can measure and instantiate complex ways of seeing that are partly about accuracy but also about the mobility of understanding and interpretation. At its best, describing films never simply denotes actions, images, sounds, or styles but rather produces the orchestration of one or more of those dimensions as an often creative and intersubjective movement between images, viewers, and a rhetorical language. Here, especially, writing about film becomes thinking about film. Part I provides a theoretical basis for this argument. Part II features sixteen short essays from landmarks of post-war cinema that demonstrate the energy and movement of precise descriptions. (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.

"In this edited collection, an international ensemble of scholars examine what contemporary cinema tells us about neoliberal capitalism and cinema, exploring whether filmmakers are able to imagine progressive alternatives under capitalist conditions. Individual contributions discuss filmmaking practices, film distribution, textual characteristics and the reception of films made in different parts of the world. They engage with topics such as class struggle, debt, multiculturalism and the effect of neoliberalism on love and sexual behaviour. Written in accessible, jargon-free language, (...) Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology is an essential text for those interested in political filmmaking and the political meanings of films."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze tells us that philosophical problems ‘compelled’ him to look to the cinema for answers, but he doesn’t tell us what those problems are. In this thesis I argue that the problems in question turn on the foundational role that Henri Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic illusion plays in the development of Deleuze’s ontological conception of difference – specifically in his 1956 essay “Bergson’s Conception of Difference.” The consequence of Bergson’s characterisation of human thought, perception and language (...) as cinematographic in their orientation is that any philosophy that seeks to grasp being in its own terms must overcome or surpass the human to do so. This necessity plays itself out across the Deleuzian oeuvre in diverse formulations in relation to the Nietzschean themes therein. In doing so, however, the human is ‘left behind,’ such that Peter Hallward is able to contend that the human and properly human concerns have no place in Deleuzian philosophy. My argument is that Deleuze turns to the cinema to think through the question of the human relation to being, on the basis of difference as such. Deleuze argues that the essence of the cinema is to be free of the cinematographic illusion - it ‘thinks’ in terms of real difference first of all. On that basis, it is able deduce the genesis of that illusion, and of the cinematographic orientation of human being and thought. The classical cinema dramatises the history of philosophy insofar as it remains subject to the cinematographic illusion and subordinates time to movement, but the modern cinema reverses this subordination in terms that do not ‘overcome’ or ‘surpass’ the human, but rather constitute its exposure to being as real difference. The modern cinema dramatises in turn the experience of what Kant calls the “fractured I,” which experiences its own thought not as spontaneity or power, but as time as the form of change. Deleuze’s Cinema books can thus be read as a response to the demands laid out in Solomon Maimon’s critique of Kant, locating the Cinema books and their treatment of the history of philosophy firmly in the context of Deleuze’s post-Kantian project. At the same time, the Cinema books thereby map out the relation of the human and properly human concerns to the difference of being as a creative and productive force that bears on those concerns without being reduced to them – the thought of being as the event of thought. (shrink)

In Deleuzeʼs studies on film, it is striking that the dismantled “essence” of metaphysics as an ontology is synthetically linked with a new approach not only to the movement of the concept, speaking in Hegelʼs language but also to the thinking as an event. That is even more true for the understanding of that which lasts in time and thus has the character of the thought-image. As the author points out in this article, Deleuze establishes this by turning the (...) brain into a screen, and the film from the sphere of the so-called reality becomes the virtual code of the world as an image. The difference between concept and image eliminates the difference between the image no longer preceding the term and the term no longer preceding the image. How crucial this turn will be to Deleuzeʼs notion of the cinema can be seen in the derivation of the concept of an event. The image and term correspond to the singularity of the event. The problem with comprehending Deleuzeʼs “images-ontology” shows that film cannot be reduced to the autonomous production of a cinematic way of thinking unless we have previously clarified what movement is and how it is created. In this paradigmatic case, a cinema cannot be viewed simply as a “visual code” of contemporary art. Its “essence” is revealed in that it enables the image-movement and image-time to synthetically realize the possibilities of the technosphere as computation, planning and construction. Eventually, the cinematic thinking advocated by Deleuze becomes a question of the possibility of film as a meta-film reaching a new level of philosophical consideration of what becomes and emerges with a new set of relations between Being and event. (shrink)

Deligny’s thinking is a thought that tries to open, to open the words and make them come back to the gestures from which they perhaps emerged, and to which they no doubt refer. In order to say unheard-of things about cinema, Deligny had to forge a new language whose manifesto-term is camera-ing. What’s the use of cinema ? To see again in order to see, to redouble the system of repetition characteristic of the autistic children. What is (...) Deligny’s camera-ing ? Bringing cinema to what’s outside it. (shrink)

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one (...) is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images. (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.

Much of the current philosophy of film literature follows Walter Benjamin’s optimistic account and sees film as a vehicle for screening philosophical thought experiments, and offering new perspectives on issues that have relevance to everyday life. If these kinds of films allow for philosophical thinking, then they are like other so-called ‘high’ artworks in that they encourage social, political and economic critique of social norms. Yet, most popular films that are digested in large quantities are not of a high aesthetic (...) or moral quality. Theorists who conceive of cinema as a means of thinking must firstly reply to the objections that most films simply do not encourage active, intelligent, imaginative participation. Prior to the publication of Deleuze’s cinema books, theorists such as T. W. Adorno feared the advent of the Hollywood Studio film as akin to Nazi propaganda. Dismissed as elitist, their concern was that mass produced and distributed artworks portrayed the depicted social norms as immutable reality. If the imagination cannot enter and engage with the messages depicted through the filmic medium, i.e. through montage or similar ‘shock’ techniques, then viewers cannot critique the moral and social status quo screened; instead, they simply receive it, and it is reinforced. If we consider how passive cinematic viewers are, voyeuristically ensconced in a darkened theatre, we can see the concern here. If only some films allow for critique of social, political and economic norms in society, and these films are attended by those viewers who are already critical viewers, then how is film more generally a tool for thinking? If we are to honestly discuss the filmic medium, we must acknowledge the Hollywood blockbusters that stifle imaginative engagement with their narratives and often depict stereotypes. I argue that we need to read Adorno alongside Benjamin, in order to acknowledge the positive as well as negative attributes of films. In doing this we see the need to focus on the critical attitude of the viewer, as well as the moral messages of the film, particularly when we consider what the majority of consumers willingly ingest uncritically. Adorno and Benjamin both offer a historical account of art whereby their aesthetics require audience reception and are linked to experience. The way art is tied to human experience and the world of sensory perception is through language. Language allows the communication of ideas or referents which convey meaning via signs that contain some kind of ‘truth’ in the form of a cognitive component that must be interpreted. While there are many different stories being told in contemporary culture, the focus on the critical thinker, the interpreter of the narrative, is vital. (shrink)

Building on Gilles Deleuze’s famous declaration that “the brain is the screen”, wholly emblematic of his thinking on cinema, this essay interrogates the place of the body within this thought in relation to Merleau-Pontyan-inspired critiques. My aim is to determine whether Deleuze offers a theory of the perceiving body in relation to spectatorial experience, despite the risk that it possibly imply a logical contradiction in the construction of the diptych on cinema. Indeed, the insistence of the body in (...) this experience, as can be seen from Deleuze’s two works, could deny the very possibility of this “objective and diffuse” perception to which the movement-image would give us access according to the philosopher. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} This article examines the relationship between the architecture of street movie theaters that used to be found at Tijuca, neighborhood in the North of Rio de Janeiro, and the experiences of movie viewing by people who were frequent attendants of these movie theaters. The objective is (...) to analyze how these buildings entered in the production of subjectivity and how they entered in the route of of pedestrians and spectators, in a gear that connected urban space, bodies, affects and sensations. (shrink)

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase that makes a turn to material hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde in Postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993; Capurro in AI Soc 25(1):35–42, 2010; Romele in Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because human–technology–world experiences need to be interpreted. (...) And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin in Digital media: human-technology connection. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so to do these visual mediated experiences. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human–technology–world perceptual and interpretive experiences. Don Ihde’s methodological framework (1990, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019) is both an idea from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that helps to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology. This use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience. Work by Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack is considered. (shrink)

Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links these depictions to (...) adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1963), The Damned (1963), and Lord of the Flies (1963), will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’. (shrink)

Christian Metz can rightfully be considered the founder of the semiology of cinema. This essay traces the supporting structures, and the problems connected to them, of this theoretical effort, starting first of all from the context that nourished it. The difficulties associated with both the construction of a general semiology and the use of its categories in cinema and artistic languages emerge.

This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m British (...) but..., up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cultural identity in the very gesture that creates it. (shrink)

Offering a theory of new media, this book places the recent developments within the history of visual culture of the last few centuries. The reliance on old conventions as well as ideas unique to new media are explored, with particular emphasis on the role of the cinema.

Alyssa DeBlasio’s book The Filmmaker's philosopher - Merab Mamardashvili and Russian cinema presents Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy seen through the eyes of film directors who were directly or indirectly influenced by his lectures. With a detailed analysis of eight films, the book brings together a generation of filmmakers who translated Mamardashvili’s message into cinematic language, performing an experiment through which we might see an alternative mode of thought at work. By showing how Mamardashvili’s considerations of metaphysical, epistemological and moral (...) nature shine through in the films described, DeBlasio touches upon one of the pillars of Mamardashvili’s thought: art is, together with philosophy, a privileged language for recording each own’s experience of the field of consciousness. (shrink)

The article advocates the importance of studying conceptual meaning and change in modern mass media and highlights the significance of conceptual intermediality. The article first analyzes anger in Hindi cinema as an audiovisual key concept within the framework of an Indian national ideology. It explores how anger and the Indian angry young man became popularized, politicized, and stereotyped by popular films and print media in India in the 1970s and 1980s. The article goes on to advocate for extending conceptual (...) history beyond language on theoretical grounds and identifies two major obstacles in political iconography: the methodological subordination of visuals to language in the negotiation of meaning, and the distinction of emotion and reason by assigning them functionally to different sign systems. (shrink)

:The theme of sacrifice appears in Jean-François Lyotard's writings on cinema not in terms of any representational content but in terms of the economy of the images from which a film is formally constructed. Sacrifice is here understood in a sense derived from Bataille, and related to his notions of general economy, and of sovereignty. Lyotard's writings on cinema have received some attention in English-language scholarship, but so far this attention has been focused almost exclusively on two (...) essays which have appeared in English translation: “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.” I offer an analysis which also incorporates his two other important essays on cinema, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” [Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema] and “Idée d'un film souverain” [The Idea of a Sovereign Film]. The interest of the former is that it makes most explicit the aesthetic politics – evident in many of Lyotard's writings on art – specific to cinema. In the latter, Lyotard gives his most extensive treatment of cinema, and frames it in terms of Bataille's notion of sovereignty. I offer an interpretation of Lyotard's philosophy of cinema which links these quite disparate essays, foregrounding the political dimension of the sacrificial economy of images he proposes: films of any variety, even commercial cinema, may include some sequences and images which are “sacrificial” in that they are “other” to the chronological narrative of the whole. These images liberate us from the seductive effects of the narrative, and the invitation to fantasise, which act as means of imposing and reproducing dominant social and cultural norms. (shrink)

In 1978, just before his return to the international stage, the world’s most renowned art-film director Jean-Luc Godard improvised a series of fourteen one-hour talks at Concordia University in Montreal. These talks, part of a projected video history of cinema, were published in French in 1980. In this definitive English-language volume, translator Timothy Barnard has worked from the original footage to carefully revise and correct the faulty French transcription. The result is the most extensive and revealing account of (...) Godard’s own work, his methods, and his critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid, and disarmingly frank as he is here. This volume, by the wittiest and most idiosyncratic genius cinema has known and available for the first time in English, is certain to become one of the great classics of film literature. Distributed exclusively worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press for caboose books, Montreal. (shrink)

This article discusses the preponderance of aesthetic aspects within the sport experience, especially as these are reflected in the dialogue between sport and cinema and in relations established via the use of images and the emergence of new ideas of the body at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part identifies points of connection between sport and cinema. The remaining parts interpret the meaning of these connections. The paper concludes (...) that it is important to recognize that sport is not only a theme for art but also a language that establishes inter-semiotic dialogues, something that is deeply characteristic of sport and a source also of its aesthetic meaning. (shrink)

This book review describes and analyzes the basic ideas in Edward Branigan's book POINT OF VIEW IN THE CINEMA. -/- The review points out the importance of the topic, as well as the various kinds of POV shots used in film "language." -/- Although a few (relatively minor) challenges are raised, for the most part this review proclaims Branigan's encyclopedic treatment of POV to be EXTREMELY valuable to cinema scholars and students alike. So much so that I (...) recommend further research on the subject matter. (shrink)

While it is possible, as Vivian Sobchack and others show, to illuminate film through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, it is more difficult to find within Merleau-Ponty’s work a coherent and systematic reflection on cinema. This absence is seldom interrogated. This article addresses what this absence might reveal by analyzing the reasons why Merleau-Ponty stopped short of an explicit discussion of film. The argument builds on these analyses to show how what Merleau-Ponty found problematic about cinema might turn out to be (...) one of cinema’s most resourceful features. For Merleau-Ponty, cinema is caught between a deadening exactitude and a disappointing partiality. It is because of these two apparently opposing extremes that Merleau-Ponty sidelines cinema. However, the pairing of exactness and partiality provides an interesting moment for reflection. Intuitively the two should not coexist, since they appear mutually exclusive. Yet their coexistence seems to renew rather than foreclose a thinking of film. Guided by these two terms, Jean-Luc Nancy produces his own thought on cinema. To show how film is apt at capturing the essential excess and ambiguity of the world, the article will turn to the Lebanese film Je Veux Voir, which offers a powerful instance of cinema’s simultaneous exactitude and partiality.Bien qu’il soit possible, comme Vivian Sobchack et d’autres l’ont démontré, d’illuminer le cinéma à partir de la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, il est beaucoup plus difficile de trouver dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty une réflexion cohérente et systématique sur le cinéma. Cette absence est rarement interrogée pour elle-même. Cet article considère ce que cette absence peut révéler en analysant les raisons pour lesquelles Merleau-Ponty ne s’est pas engagé dans une réflexion explicite sur le cinéma. En nous appuyant sur ces analyses, nous montrons que ce que Merleau-Ponty trouvait de plus problématique dans le cinéma est peut-être sa ressource la plus précieuse. Pour Merleau-Ponty, le cinéma est pris entre une exactitude abrutissante et une partialité décevante, et c’est pour cette raison que Merleau-Ponty le met sur la touche. Cependant, le jumelage de l’exactitude et de la partialité devrait nous donner matière à réflexion. Intuitivement, les deux ne devraient coexister : ils apparaissent s’exclure l’une l’autre. Pourtant, leur coexistence est en mesure de renouveler plutôt que d’exclure une pensée du cinéma. C’est guidé par ces deux termes que Jean-Luc Nancy produit sa propre pensée du cinéma. Pour montrer comment le cinéma est à même de capturer l’excès et l’ambiguïté essentiels du monde, nous proposons une lecture du film libanais Je Veux Voir, et montrons comment il offre un exemple puissant de la simultanéité de l’exactitude et de la partialité dans le cinéma. Mentre è possibile, come Vivian Sobchack e altri hanno mostrato, comprendere il film attraverso la filosofia di Merleau-Ponty, risulta più difficile rintracciare all’interno del suo lavoro una riflessione coerente e sistematica sul cinema. Se quest’assenza è stata di rado oggetto di discussione, questo articolo propone invece di interrogarsi sul possibile significato di questa assenza analizzando le ragioni per cui Merleau-Ponty non ha sviluppato una riflessione esplicitamente dedicata al cinema. Sulla base di questa analisi, si intende mostrare che ciò che Merleau-Ponty trova problematico riguardo al cinema può invece rivelarsi una delle sue caratteristiche più preziose. Secondo Merleau-Ponty, il cinema si trova costretto tra una monotona esattezza e una deludente parzialità. È a causa di questi due estremi, apparentemente opposti, che Merleau-Ponty accantona il cinema. Tuttavia, la coppia esattezza-parzialità fornisce un interessante spunto di riflessione. Intuitivamente, i due termini non dovrebbero poter coesistere: sarebbero invece reciprocamente esclusivi. Eppure, la loro coesistenza sembra rinnovare piuttosto che precludere una riflessione sul cinema. È sulla scorta di questi due termini che Jean-Luc Nancy sviluppa il proprio pensiero su questo tema. Al fine di mostrare come il cinema sia in grado di catturare l’eccesso e l’ambiguità essenziali del mondo, l’articolo propone una lettura del film libanese Je Veux Voir, che offre un esempio efficace della simultanea esattezza e parzialità del cinema. (shrink)

In this text, my aim is to provide a reading of Mauro Carbone’s Philosophy Screens: From Cinema to the Digital Revolution in the context of his other writings. My claim is that in this most recent work, Carbone makes a decisive step from being an original interpreter of the work of Merleau-Ponty and Proust to making an original contribution to what I describe, following Merleau-Ponty and Carbone, the history of “a-philosophy”: an historical attempt to reverse the “official philosophy” that (...) has been with us since at least Plato. This reversal is staged through a series of concepts, created by Carbone, that I take up here viz à viz Plato’s allegory of the cave: the archescreen, the sensible idea, the screen, and philosophy-cinema. Together, these concepts illustrate what I call, borrowing a phrase from Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosophical partance: for Carbone, the work of “philosophizing” should no longer be conceptualized in accordance with Platonic imagery of ascent, illumination, conversion, and importantly, grasping and seizing upon the είδη but as “departure”: allowing the objects of thought their transcendence, a liquidity by which they slip through our grasp. (shrink)

The following article frames a particular case study: Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), referenced in the paper with its American title, Breathless. Foraging through the dense and sophisticated thicket of narrative, visual and textual features, the present study will attempt to untangle the overall intrinsic complexity of Godard’s film, as it exceeds simple commonalities between genre conventions or traditional stylistic approaches.The abrasive dialectical opposition that Breathless enacts against classical storytelling is indeed central to the specific cluster that can (...) be examined under the labels of “experimental cinema”, “auteur cinema”, “art cinema”, predicated on Godard’s abundant departures from cinematic (mainstream) norms.The methodology adopted in the article will encompass both a cultural studies approach and the visual strategies of textual analysis from the perspective of film studies. This will spur a close examination of Godard’s directorial style, paying attention to a rich plethora of technical devices inscribed within salient sequences and offset against the matrix of creative options presented by the French Nouvelle Vague. (shrink)

In recent years, few areas of research have advanced as rapidly as cognitive science, the study of the human mind and brain. A fundamentally interdisciplinary field, cognitive science has both inspired and been advanced by work in the arts and humanities. In _Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics,_ Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan, two of the most prominent experts on the intersection of mind, brain, and culture, engage each other in a lively dialog that (...) sets out the foundations of a cognitive neuroscientific approach to literature. Despite their shared premises, Aldama and Hogan differ—sometimes sharply—on key issues; their discussion therefore presents the reader not with a single doctrine, but with options for consideration—an appropriate result in this dynamic field. With clarity and learning, Aldama and Hogan consider five central topics at the intersection of literature and cognitive science. They begin with the fundamental question of the nature of the self. From here, they turn to language, communication, and thought before moving on to the central issue of the structure and operation of narrative. The book concludes with thought-provoking explorations of aesthetics and politics. Illustrating their arguments with work that ranges from graphic fiction and popular cinema to William Faulkner and Bertolt Brecht, Aldama and Hogan leave the reader with a clear sense of what cognitive cultural studies have already achieved and the significant promise the discipline holds for the future. (shrink)

Like many sociocultural phenomena in Brazil, popular music, as everyone knows, is the result of a meeting of influences. It could almost be said that it is born a cross-breed, given the half-European, half-African origins of its best-known first genres, lundu, choro and maxixe. As a result of its history it comes under the sign of the Cannibalism, the metaphor invented by modernist writers in the 1920s to refer to the ‘ritual devouring’ by which Brazil assimilated foreign values and made (...) them its own.Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil readily used the concept of Cannibalism at the end of the 1960s, when they founded Tropicalismo, which claimed a mixture of genres, styles and arts as its basis, and married international pop music and Brazilian traditions, electric guitars and berimbau. Tropicalismo as such only lasted for a few months, but the ideas which it promoted profoundly marked contemporary Brazilian culture. Caetano Veloso returned to the history of this movement in Verdade Tropical, an autobiographical work in which he reveals his thoughts on a number of subjects close to his heart: music, the cinema, masters/teachers, friends, family, love, sexuality freedom, prison, exile, books, language, etc. For this author, composer, performer, actor, director, poet and prose writer, inveterate and voracious reader and incorrigible chatterbox, anything to do with human beings is fair game. For Caetano loves words, and loves to talk about words. As early as the acknowledgements page he praises Unamuno, the author, according to him, of comments which are “the most moving that a foreigner has ever written about the Portuguese language”. And in a chapter entitled ‘Língua’ he mentions not only the songs he has written in English and his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language, but also his attachment to Romance languages in general and Portuguese in particular. (shrink)

in this article, we experience the exercise of a screen ethnocartography in agency with the film Beasts of the southern wild by the director Benh Zeitlin. We tested a film experimentation that led to a renewed writing ways of life. We bet on cinema and childhood as possibilities for creating cracks and a stutter of language for the creation of new worlds and ways of living. In cinema images less as a representation, and more as art that (...) proposes incompleteness, fissure, a hole in appearances. In childhood as an exercise of differentiation and resistance to dominant narratives in a given context. In childhood as a limiting experience of/in language, tirelessly exposing the human condition in front of the world. Thus, accompanying the main character of the plot, little Hushpuppy — a six-year-old resident of the “Charles Doucet Island”, experienced as “the Bathtub” —, we are shaken by the forms of life there, considered bestial and not recognized by city humans. Hushpuppy, his father and friends resist attempts to destroy their existence by the forms of the state that try to domesticate them, imbued with the logic that primitives must come to civilization, just as children must become adults. (shrink)

Some initial considerations on film in documentary form are discussed, along with its relationships with reality and fiction in cinema language. Found footage genre is explained, pointing its most important technical and aesthetical characteristics. The text points the importance of the movie camera in documentary and found footage, not only as a technical device that objectivizes the information in a static manner, but also as an axis that configures dynamism and subjectivity on films. Redacted (2007) by Brian De (...) Palma is analyzed as an example of hybrid forms of fiction and reality in cinema. Beyond a traditional analysis of narrative of films, this text emphasizes the forms in which they are developed, which affect and determine the substance of films. (shrink)

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)

Introduction -- An improbable alliance : Peter Wollen's "The auteur theory" -- Visual stylometry : Barry Salt's "Statistical style analysis of motion pictures" -- Between Shakespeare and Sirk : Thomas Elsaesser's "Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama" -- From iconicity to semiotic articulation : Christian Metz's "cinema: language or language system?" and language and cinema -- Film as a specific signifying practice : Stephen Heath's "On screen, in frame: film and ideology" (...) -- Against theories of reflection : Laura Mulvey's "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" -- Early cinema spectatorship : Tom Gunning's "The cinema of attraction(s): early film, its spectator, and the avant-garde" -- Another Lacan : "the universal: suture revisited" -- The death of the camera : Edward Branigan's "What is a camera?" -- Conclusion: teaching theory. (shrink)

This article posits that cinematic language should be reconsidered and validated as a means of research in the scientific world. It should no longer be seen as simply a disseminator of information, but also as a means of investigating reality. The new trends in cinema, specifically fiction-documentaries use various methods to investigate reality. These methods could be useful in a broader sense, namely in cross-disciplinary scientific research. The postmodern approach to the notion of complexity or narrative knowledge creates (...) a favorable framework for a paradigm shift concerning the analytical and quantifying method of scientific research. Cinema as a medium can be used as a tool and an invisible technology capable of shaping our ideas. (shrink)

Cinema functions as a rich data store for researchers in understanding and interpreting unique characteristic components of a society such as language, culture, tradition, religion, etc. The subject of this study is to question the realities of a multicultural social life with reference to PK movie. There is a set of problems such as what the basic motivations of religious groups are, whether a person could be independent of cultural/environmental factors, and how the theological and sociological perceptions of (...) religion differentiate, etc. The aim of this paper is to trace the steps of the construction of social and religious reality experienced by an alien’s own consciousness. This study combines sociology of religion with cinema through a phenomenological approach. Everyday realities perceived through an alien by suspending stocks of knowledge (externalization) enable us to apply the phenomenological approach to the study. As a result, this alien tends toward the society as a stranger and contributes to criticize it objectively. (shrink)