Bernard Stiegler’s theory of consciousness claims: consciousness is cinema. The invention of the technological dispositifs of photography, phonograph, and cinema, have made this structure visible. He develops the thesis of the cinema of consciousness in Technics and Time, where it leads to a deconstruction of Husserlian consciousness and of the Kantian I. This theory also orients Stiegler’s large-scale criticism of contemporary cinematic capitalism that engages with the works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Debord. This article presents and critically (...) examines Stiegler’s theory of consciousness as a nonconscious power of dreaming that is not based on the imagination hidden in the the unconsciousness but on collective technical image-objects. While Stiegler criticizes the colonisation of the imagination by the cinematic industry, this article looks for its creative potential. The article also presents a theory of mimesis that is presupposed but ignored by Stiegler and that explains the pharmacological nature of cinematic consciousness. (shrink)

Le blockbuster, c'est de l'explosif. A l'origine du mot, une bombe utilisée pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, capable de détruire tout un pâté de maisons. Et il n'y a sans doute pas d'image plus typique du blockbuster que celle d'une gigantesque explosion. Les déflagrations dont il s'agit dans ce livre ne sont pas uniquement celles que racontent les films. Produit grand public, confectionné grâce à d'immenses investissements financiers, le blockbuster s'apparente à une bombe à fragmentation, pulvérisant l'objet (...) filmique dans des contextes de consommation qui n'ont plus rien à voir avec le cinéma, se diffractant sur le marché mondial sous forme de produits dérivés, T-shirts, figurines et autres gadgets. Sept auteurs, philosophes et critiques, se sont penchés sur quelques blockbusters de leur choix. A chaque fois, les films dynamitent la pensée et l'entraînent dans des directions inattendues : les gremlins sabotent les écrans et contaminent les images, Godzilla et King Kong se font machines à échanger les regards, Batman devient le théâtre d'une déconstruction du politique, Alien met en scène les métamorphoses d'un récit qui ne change jamais, et Titanic coule comme cette industrie lourde qu'est le cinéma lui-même... (shrink)

Shard cinema tells an expansive story of how moving images have changed in the last three decades, and how they have changed us along with them, rewiring the ways we watch, fight, and navigate an unsteady world. In a set of interrelated essays that range from the writings of early factory workers to the distributed sight of contemporary surveillance, Williams argues for deep links between the images we see and the hidden labors frozen into them, exploring how even the (...) apparently trivial or spectacular carries unique opportunities to detect and process the social frictions of their making. Spanning film, video games, radical history, architecture, visual effects, and war, the book crosses the twentieth century into our present to confront a new order of seeing and making that slowly took shape: the composite image, where no clean distinction can be made between production and post-production, filmed and animated, material and digital. Giving equal ground to costly blockbusters, shaky riot footage, disaster photography, and early cinema, Williams leads us from computer-generated 'shards' of particles and debris to the broken phone screens on which we watch these digital storms, looking for the unexpected histories lived in the interval between"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

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

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)

Hailed as one of America's original art forms, film has the distinctive character of crossing high and low art. But film has done more than this. According to American philosopher Stanley Cavell, film was also a place where America in the 1930s and 1940s did its thinking, a tradition that was taken up and enriched throughout world cinema. Can film indeed think? That is, can film do the work of philosophy? Following Cavell's lead to think along the tear of (...) the analytic-continental traditions, this book draws from both sides of the philosophical divide to reflect on this question. Spanning generations and disciplines, pondering everything from art house classics to mainstream blockbusters, "Thinking Film: Philosophy at the Movies" aims to fling open the doors to this conversation on all sides. (shrink)

From mainstream blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative and narration are the driving forces that organize a film. Yet attempts to explain these forces are often mired in notoriously complex terminology and dense theory. Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. Narrative and Narration distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts: narrative structure, processes of narration, and narrative agents. The book opens with (...) a discussion of the emergence of narrative and narration in early cinema and proceeds to illustrate key ideas through numerous case studies. Each chapter guides readers through different methods that they can use to analyze cinematic storytelling. Buckland also discusses how departures from traditional modes, such as feminist narratives, art cinema, and unreliable narrators, can complicate and corroborate the book's understanding of narrative and narration. Examples include mainstream films, both classic and contemporary; art house films of every stripe; and two relatively new styles of cinematic storytelling: the puzzle film and those driven by a narrative logic derived from video games. Narrative and Narration is a concise introduction that provides readers with fundamental tools to understand cinematic storytelling. (shrink)

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

From Inception to The Lake House, moviegoers are increasingly flocking to narratologically complex puzzle films. These puzzle movies borrow techniques--like fragmented spatio-temporal reality, time loops, unstable characters with split identities or unreliable narrators--more commonly attributed to art cinema and independent films. The essays in Hollywood Puzzle Films examine the appropriation of puzzle film techniques by contemporary Hollywood dramas and blockbusters through questions of narrative, time, and altered realities. Analyzing movies like Source Code, The Butterfly Effect, Donnie Darko, Déjà Vu, (...) and adaptations of Philip K. Dick, contributors explore the implications of Hollywood's new movie mind games. (shrink)

This essay examines reflexive strategies in three contemporary Hindi-language feature films directed by women, Om Shanti Om, Luck By Chance, and Dhobi Ghat/Mumbai Diaries. These Mumbai-set films, directed and written by Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Kiran Rao, respectively, offer insider industry perspectives and a variety of outlooks on Bollywood and Indian society more generally. I introduce the concepts of “selective reflection” to critically examine self-conscious representations of the excessively star-driven world of Bollywood filmmaking in an age of globalization, directing (...) styles and strategies of image-making, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artifice. This article presents a close analysis of narrative tropes, filmi references, casting, spectator dynamics, and gendered agency in films that represent a taxonomic range from commercial blockbuster to art cinema. (shrink)

This handbook offers new ways to read the audiovisual. In the media landscapes of today, conglomerates jockey for primacy and the internet increasingly places media in the hands of individuals-producing the range of phenomena from movie blockbuster to YouTube aesthetics. Media forms and genres are proliferating and interpenetrating, from movies, music and other entertainments streaming on computers and iPods to video games and wireless phones. The audiovisual environment of everyday life, too-from street to stadium to classroom-would at times be (...) hardly recognizable to the mid-twentieth-century subject. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics provides powerful ways to understand these changes.Earlier approaches tended to consider sound and music as secondary to image and narrative. These remained popular even as practices from theater, cinema and television migrated across media. However, the traversal, or "remediation," from one medium to another has also provided practitioners and audiences the chance to rewrite the rules of the audiovisual contract. Whether viewed from the vantage of televised mainstream culture, the Hollywood film industry, the cinematic avant-garde, or the participatory discourses of "cyberspace," audiovisual expression has changed dramatically. The book provides a definitive cross-section of current ways of thinking about sound and image. Its authors-leading scholars and promising younger ones, audiovisual practitioners and non-academic writers - open the discussion on audiovisual aesthetics in new directions. Our contributors come from fields including film, visual arts, new media, cultural theory, and sound and music studies, and they draw variously from economic, political, institutional, psychoanalytic, genre-based, auteurist, internationalist, reception-focused, technological, and cultural approaches to questions concerning today's sound and image. All consider the aural dimension, and what Michel Chion calls "audio-vision:" the sensory and semiotic result of sound placed with vision, an encounter greater than their sum. (shrink)

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Žižek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point (...) beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. _After the Red Army Faction_ maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's _Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof_, and the blockbuster exhibition _Regarding Terror_ at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success _The Baader-Meinhof Complex_. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. (shrink)

Movies hold a mirror up to us, portraying the complexities of human reality through their characters and stories. And they vividly illustrate moral theories that address questions about how we are to live and what sort of people we ought to be. In this book, Christopher Falzon uses movies to provide a rich survey of moral positions as they have emerged through history. These include the ethics of the ancient world, medieval ethics, Enlightenment and Kantian ethics, existentialist ethics and the (...) ethics of the other. Each theory is explained in detail, using a number of examples from the book’s wide selection of movies. The discussion draws on a range of recent and not-so-recent films, from Hollywood blockbusters to art-house cinema. Key Features: In addition to covering thinkers one would expect in an introduction to ethics, the book discusses less canonical figures in detail as well. Similarly, the book examines both major ethical theories and theories too often glossed over in introductory texts. A wide range of movies are discussed, from Hollywood blockbusters and classics like The Dark Knight, Casablanca and Dirty Harry to lesser known films, like Force Majeure and Under the Skin. At the end of each chapter a focus on two feature films is included, with a plot summary and interpretations of several key scenes with a time marker indicating when in the film the scenes occur. A Filmography includes all movies discussed in the book and a Glossary covers key philosophical terms and figures; both with corresponding page numbers. (shrink)

Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that (...) even local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics. (shrink)

According to conceptual metaphor theory, there are two basic metaphorical models for conceptualising time in terms of space: the ego-moving model maps our movement through space onto our imagined movement through time, while the time-moving model represents time as an entity moving through spatial locations, the ego being just a passive observer. The aim of this article is to investigate how time is conceptualized in film where ego, movement, time and space also play basic roles. I compare the two linguistic (...) models to Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of filmic time: the movement-image and the time-image. While the movement-image and the moving-ego metaphor directly map spatial structures onto the domain of time, the time-image and the moving-time metaphor correlate only in their basic structures and involve different levels of conceptual integrations and conversions. Due to film techniques such as a mobile camera, montage and image manipulation, the time-image seems to transcend the constraints of natural perception and maps onto mental rather than external space, thus giving rise to a new reverse metaphor where space acquires characteristics of the time domain. (shrink)

La entrevista tiene por objetivo problematizar los vínculos del cine y la educación en la escuela, afirmando y defendiéndola en su precariedad, como una alternativa contundente de espacio-tiempo de concentración y atención al mundo y como pausa voluntaria de la hiperconectividad que nos hace perder el sueño y las posibilidades de soñar otro mundo, como gesto de alteración e invención.

Resumen La argumentación es una forma de discurso en la que un hablante defiende una postura en una discusión. El presente trabajo se enfoca en la complejidad argumentativa y los recursos evaluativos y evidenciales que caracterizan las disputas de niños de diverso nivel socioeconómico. Se analizaron 94 disputas entre niños de 4 años y otros niños (5 a 10 años) en situaciones de juego espontáneo registradas en hogares de sectores socioeconómicos medio y bajo. El análisis identificó diferencias marginales en la (...) complejidad argumentativa entre los grupos. Por su parte se hallaron diferencias significativas en recursos de evaluativos de emocionalidad y en los evidenciales deónticos y exclamativos a favor de los sectores de nivel socioeconómico bajo. Los sectores medios registraron un mayor empleo de expresiones de causalidad y conectores. Los resultados se discuten a la luz de los hallazgos de investigaciones previas. Abstract Argumentation is a type of discourse in which a speaker defends a claim in a discussion. The present work focuses on the argumentative complexity and the evaluative and evidential resources that characterize the disputes of children of different socioeconomic levels. We analyzed 94 disputes between 4-year-old children and other children (5 to 10 years old) in situations of spontaneous play registered in homes of middle and low socioeconomic status (SES). The analysis identified marginal differences in argumentative complexity between the groups. On the other hand, significant differences were found in evaluative expressions of emotion and in deontic and exclamatory evidential markers, more frequently used by the low SES group. The mid SES group tends to use a higher number of expressions of causality and connectors. The results are discussed with reference to the findings of previous research. (shrink)

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)