Film Theory

The intention of this article is to investigate the visual presence of animals in contemporary literary and cinematic productions, specifically in the films La ciénaga (2011) and La
mujer sin cabeza [The Headless Woman] (2008) by Lucrecia Martel, Verano [Summer] (2011) by Jose´ Luis Torres Leiva, Perro muerto [Dead Dog] (2011) by Camilo Becerra,
and in Carlos Busqued’s 2009 novel Bajo este sol tremendo [Under this Terrible Sun]. Despite the fact that authors like John Berger and Akira Lippit have claimed that the animal tends to disappear in modernity, authors like Pick and Jonathan Burt have rescued a persistent animal presence in literary and flim productions as a positive element. Burt emphasises the
visual agency of the animal not so much as subjectivity, but rather as an affective power facing the human observer, and Pick underlines the vulnerability of the animal on screen. In this
article I show the importance of the animal-human figuration, the look between species and the mobility/immobility duality as axes around which the visual presence of animals is articulated in these contemporary Latin American cultural productions.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569325.2014.1000285#.VXnv7NKG-Fc

In Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, James Harvey contends that Rancière’s writing allows us to broach art and politics on the very same terms: each involves the visible and the invisible, the heard and unheard, and the distribution of bodies in a perceivable social order. Between making, performing, viewing and sharing films, a space is constructed for tracing and realigning the margins of society, allowing us to consider the potential of cinema to create new political subjects. Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

Edited by Rimgaila Salys

The early years of the twenty-first century have been an exciting transitional period in Russian cinema, as the industry recovered from the crises of the late 1990s and again stepped onto the global stage. During these years four generations, from the late Soviet directors through post-Soviet and New Russian filmmakers to the Russian millennials, have worked in varying visual styles and with diverse narrative strategies, while searching for a new cinematic language. Financing and distribution models have evolved, along with conservative politics driving Ministry of Culture regulation. This reader is intended both for contemporary Russian cinema courses and for modern Russian culture courses that emphasize film. It does not attempt to establish a canon for the period but seeks to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to significant Russian films released between 2005 and 2016 that are also available with English subtitles. The twenty-one essays on individual films provide background information on directors’ careers, detailed analyses of selected films, along with suggested further readings both in English and Russian.

Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/filmandmediastudies/the-contemporary-russian-cinema-reader

This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

The Lisbon sisters, Camille, and the "Arminuta" are the daughters and the protagonists of three novels set in three different geographical-linguistic areas: the United States, France, and Italy. "The Virgin Suicides" (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides, "Hunting and Gathering" ("Ensemble, c’est tout", 2004) by Anna Gavalda, and "A Girl Returned" ("L’Arminuta", 2017) by Donatella Di Pietrantonio are the selected novels covering the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century. The theoretical background of the mother-daughter relationship provides an introduction to the textual analysis of the novels, which unveils the condition of outsiders of the protagonists. Their characterization develops within their social marginality: imprisonment (the Lisbon sisters), "emotional autarky" (Camille), and abandonment (the "Arminuta"); while their marginal status is the product of their particular relationship with the controversial personality of their mothers. Mrs. Lisbon is a control-obsessed, authoritarian mother; Catherine is a narcissistic woman; while both the biological and the adoptive mothers of the "Arminuta" abandon her. The outsider theme, particularly its literary-philosophical theorization by Colin Wilson, is the key point of our analytical method. In our literary selection, each storyline identifies one of the three existential steps of the outsider, originally conceived as a male figure. By analyzing the fictional development of the Lisbon sisters, Camille, and the "Arminuta", we retrace backwards the existential journey of the outsider as theorized by Wilson: the mystic detachment from reality as the final stage of a route which started with the pursuit of Truth, and went through the process of accepting personal alienation. Retracing the outsider's experience allows us to show that being an outsider in literary terms is not a male prerogative: it is a condition of marginality embodied by female characters as well. In addition to this, precisely as outsiders the protagonists can express their agency.

The theme of spectatorship is central in this essay that reviews and critiques a number of approaches to animation spectatorship. Its basic premise is that the phenomenal and the noumenal 'worlds' animation confronts us have an uneasy relationship with notions of 'reality' and representation.

Using a framework of phenomenological concepts that reviews other authors' approaches to animation spectatorship, the essay explores the viewer's experience of the 'worlds' of animation film in screening, particularly investigating the relationship between the images on screen and their tangible, extant counterparts in the real world outside the diegesis. With a focus on puppet animation exemplified by the Quay Brothers Street of Crocodiles, the essay posits a number of propositions as to how animation as a form addresses and engages its audience. If aims to articulate the difference between a world, created with the animation technique, and the world, the phenomenal world we negotiate in our daily lives.

The book is available at:
http://www.johnlibbey.com/books_detail.php?area=ani&ID=50

Poter accedere a qualsiasi immagine, in qualsiasi momento, in qualsiasi luogo. I nuovi media prospettano straordinarie vie di fruizione. Ma come orientarsi in questo scenario? La nostra cultura visuale è capace di tenere il passo della tecnologia? Questo libro racconta come il cinema, ben prima dell'avvento della tecnologia digitale, abbia saputo accogliere immagini provenienti da archivi pubblici e privati: dai rapporti con la pittura al foundfootage, dalla pratica del remake all'intermedialità. Molte volte assegnato al compito di produrre un calco del "reale", il film costituisce piuttosto uno spazio del pensiero nel quale si rielaborano le immagini del passato e si rigenerano i materiali "usurati" della cultura. Se i nuovi media invitano lo spettatore a manipolare le immagini e non semplicemente a osservarle, è dunque a partire dalle lezioni di montaggio offerte da maestri come Godard e Herzog, Sokurov e Van Sant, Pasolini e Moretti, che diventa possibile assumere un ruolo attivo e consapevole nell'orizzonte estetico e mediatico contemporaneo.

This article focuses on the relationship between the history of spiritualist séances in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the introduction of film. It examines in particular two cases: the convergence of psychological studies on magic and spiritualism with early film theory, signalled in particular by Hugo Münsterberg's involvement in both fields; and the trajectory from spirit photography, a spiritualist practice that was based on the appearance of spectres on the photographic plate, to the trick movies of early cinema. The conclusion sets the relationship between beliefs in spirit and fictional representation of ghosts in film as a promising field of inquiry for contemporary film studies.

In my talk I will focus on Andrei Tarkovskys unrealised film script “Hoffmanniana” as well as his mid-career masterpiece “Mirror", tracing the influence of German romantic Naturphilosophie and magic as found in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s writings on Tarkovsky’s conception of film. Especially the central motive of the mirror will be inquired as a trigger for a reflexive function of the cinematic apparatus.

Drawing upon Maya Deren’s panel contribution at the 1953 Cinema 16 Symposium and Martin Heidegger’s “Memorial Address” from Discourse on Thinking this paper uses Deren’s vertical/horizontal investigations theory and Martin Heidegger’s ideas on calculative/meditative thinking to describe how the mechanics of filmmaking contribute to the process of poetically creating meaning in film.
Maya Deren suggests two kinds of investigation in film, that of the horizontal and that of the vertical. The horizontal operates primarily to move the plot forward in sequence of action-after-action-after-action, while the vertical stops at a particular point on the horizontal plane of action and proceeds to move upward into the story or character, exploring meaning-upon-meaning-upon-meaning.
In the avid pursuit of the horizontal, popular filmmaking, in a distancing from the experimental, has lost concern for the vertical poetic investigation of Deren’s description, in the visual, the symbolic, and the act of characterization. What remains is a shallow preoccupation with pace, a perpetuation of action not story, an attraction to only the look of a character. What is forgotten is content - narrative and otherwise - the meaning of a moment, a character, an exploration. Such films can be seen as a reflection of present culture, which has come to reject the vertical poetic in thinking as well.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger presents a duality in thinking, similar Deren’s duality in filmic investigation. He observes two, contrasting kinds of thinking - that of the calculative thinking and that of the meditative - as approaches for how human beings think about the world. Calculative thinking, Heidegger says, concerns the technical and formulaic, while meditative thinking explores meaning. Meditative thinking, he believes, is practiced less and less by the modern human.
While Deren and Heidegger worked in different disciplines, film and philosophy, respectively, their thoughts can be seen as not only complementary to one another but when connected can advance an understanding of how meaning is poetically created in film. This process ultimately reflects cultural shifts in the way human beings think, understand, and create when guided by calculative practices instead of meditative. Discussion of the commonalities between the ideas and examination of Deren’s short films will serve as the vehicles by which this concept is explored. Film Theory is the field of academic discourse to which the paper contributes.

In this book, Nariman Skakov explores the phenomenon of spatio-temporal lapse in Tarkovsky's cinema - from 'Ivan's Childhood' (1962) to 'Sacrifice' (1986). He argues that dreams, visions, mirages, memories, revelations, reveries, and delusions are phenomena which present alternative spatio-temporal patterns; they disrupt the linear progression of events and create narrative discontinuity. Each chapter is dedicated to the discussion of one of Tarkovsky's seven feature films and, in each, one of these phenomena functions as a refrain. Skakov discusses the influence of the flow of and lapses in space and time on the viewer's perception of the Tarkovskian cinematic universe. He opens and closes his original and fascinating book on Tarkovsky's cinema by focusing on the phenomenon of time that was discussed extensively by the filmmaker in his main theoretical treatise 'Sculpting in Time,' as well as in a number of interviews and public lectures.

Le développement dans l’art contemporain de pratiques artistiques qui se situent à la croisée de plusieurs médiums (intermedia, mixed media, multimedia) ou qui ont recours aux « nouveaux médias », tout comme dans le domaine du cinéma le passage de l’argentique au numérique et l’apparition de nouveaux dispositifs et de nouvelles formes de captation, de manipulation, de visionnement et d’archivage des images en mouvement, ont précipité la nécessité de repenser ce qu’est un médium. Face à un panorama artistique, cinématographique et technologique en constante transformation, ce colloque se propose de rouvrir la question de la définition du médium en interrogeant la distinction entre « médium » et « média(s) ». Suivant l’essor actuel d’un champ de recherche transdisciplinaire sur ces questions (Medienwissenschaft allemande, media studies anglophones, études médiatiques canadiennes, ou encore médiologie et travaux sur les appareils et la philosophie de la technique en France), il s’agit d’envisager l’ensemble des médiations se manifestant à l’intérieur d’un contexte culturel donné : les conditions de possibilités technico-matérielles de toute forme de perception et d’expérience, de représentation et de communication, d’enregistrement et de transmission.
Pour cela, il convient d’opérer un retour sur les différentes significations et connotations qui ont été attribuées au terme d’origine latine « médium » dans le cadre d’une longue généalogie qui a ses racines dans les notions aristotéliciennes de metaxu et de diaphanes et trouve ses points focaux au XXe siècle dans les écrits de László Moholy-Nagy et Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Arnheim et Clement Greenberg, Marshall McLuhan et Friedrich Kittler. Il s’agit ainsi de faire un état des lieux de la recherche actuelle sur ce thème en contribuant simultanément au décloisonnement entre les disciplines de l’histoire de l’art, des études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles et de l’histoire et de la théorie des médias.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

In spite of the history of psychologicians’ warnings against the persistence of vision explanation of the movement illusion in film (Muensterberg, Woodwort, Rock) and contemporary film psychologists’ campaign against it (Anderson, Brooks, Hochberg), the illusion of movement (psychologists predominantly speak about the apparent movement) is still persistently explained in this fashion. For quite some time the persistence of movement explanation has been supplemented by the subsumption of the movement illusion to phi phenomenon also, but without any attempt to clarify the queer methodological move of explaining one phenomenon by the two unrelated explanations. One of the deeper reasons why persistence of vision explanation is still practiced, and why the two explanations are used side by side, is that — in the case of film — we are dealing with TWO ILLUSIONS, not one. One illusion is the illusion of light constancy of film image, contrary to the fact that the image is intermittently darkened by shatter mechanism during its projection. Persistence of vision is a pertinent explanation of this illusion, though there remains a question whether it is also an adequate explanation of the flicker fusion phenomenon — i. e. of the integration of intermittent flashes of film image on the screen (cf. Rushton). Second illusion is the movement illusion: we illusory see continuous movement within the film shot though what is projected is just a sequence of stills with no movement in them. This illusion is pertinently categorized as a sort of phi phenomenon (or stroboscopic movement). Though both illusions do contribute to the final perceptual impact of film, they constitute two quite different and separate phenomena, i. e. one is not necessary for the occurrence of the other. There are three substantial arguments against mixing the two phenomena (flicker fusion and stroboscopic movement). The argument of double exposure (Brooks, Hochberg) states that persistence of vision alone would produce only double exposure effect (doubling of scenic features of the two successive images within one perceived image — as it occurs in thaumatrop). Apparent movement effect is not produced by persistence of vision. The argument of film cut states that light constancy (i. e. flicker fusion) occurs over the cut though typically there is no apparent movement from frame to frame over the cut. Again, flicker fusion is obviously dissociated from apparent movement. The argument of different frequencies states that flicker frequency required for critical flicker fusion (light constancy) is quite different from the frequency of intermittent movement of projected film images required for apparent movement effect. Perfect apparent movement occurs at intermittent changes of 16 frames per second, while it is required a double shatter frequency — around 50-60 times per second — in order to eliminate a flickering effect in projected film image. Further demonstration that the two ’fusions’ — flicker fusion that produces light constancy and stroboscopic ’fusion’ that produces apparent movement — are not causally connected can be found in the fact that in early silent films the flicker effect was quite strong, while at the same time the movement illusion was full.
The problem with phi phenomenon approach to the movement illusion is that it is more an enlightening generic specification of the illusion than its proper explanation (i. e. elucidation of psycho-physiological mechanisms at the basis of different aspects of phi phenomenon). There are two problems behind the choice of explanation of apparent movement. Firstly, one can assume that perceptual mechanisms behind the apparent movement are quite different from mechanisms behind the proper movement perception. Secondly, one can assume that only one mechanism is in question, but it is a mechanism that can be ’cheated’, perceptually ’mislead’ under specific stimulus conditions. The paper argues for the last approach: there is a limitation on the adaptational specificity of our perceptual processing of environment. The processing is tuned to the particular adaptationally important stimulus configuration (say to object movement, and observer’s proprio-movement) because it is highly improbable that particular configuration changes will ever belong to the scenes/objects of complete different ontological status (e. g. to a specific succession of closely placed and closely shaped static patterns). But, if such an improbability does occur, if an object of completely different ontological status (e. g. a succession of film images) is producing the required stimulus configuration for particular processing (for movement processing), then the processing would be misled into illusory perception of movement (cf. Anderson, Brooks-Hochberg, Gibson, Palmer, Rock...).
ANALITICAL CONTENT OF THE PAPER: 1. ’Myth of persistence of vision’; 1.1. Persistence of vision as explanation of movement illusion; 1.2. Supplementary explanation by phi-phenomenon; 1.3. Harangue against the persistency explanation of apparent movement; 2. What is explained by the persistency of vision, and what is not; 2.1. The two basic illusions of film; 2.2. Argument of double exposure; 2.3. Argument of film cut; 2.4. Argument of different frequencies; 2.5. Conclusion; 3. Why darken an image in shooting and projecting a movie?; 3.1. Why shatter?; 3.2. Flicker fusion as solution; 4. Explanations of apparent movement in film; 4.1. Specificity theories of apparent movement; 4.2. Hypothesis of common processing of apparent and real movement; 4.3. Argument of superfluous parallelism; 4.4. Argument of equal proximal conditions for apparent and real movement; 4.5. Argument of common neuro-psychological mechanism; 4.6. Conclusion: functional ’typification’ of perception; 5. Status of apparent movement; 5.1. Apparent movement is illusory; 5.2. Perception of film movement is an illusion proper; 5.3. Special ontological status of apparent movement; 6. Resume and conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography.

Liz Watkins, University of Leeds. contact: [email protected]  'Threads of Colour and Meaning in the Film Work of Nicolas Roeg and Anthony Richmond', Guest blog for the Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema 1955-1985. https://eastmancolor.info/2018/07/25/threads-of-colour-and-meaning-in-the-film-work-of-nicolas-roeg-and-anthony-richmond/ From the vibrant hue of a detail that punctuates the image to a single colour that envelopes the screen, the chromatic, in films by Nicolas Roeg, signals a greater acuity than cosmetic distraction. In Roeg's work I would find both an attention to a central paradox of cinema – a photographic inscription of an image by light as permanent record of a fleeting moment – and an experimental approach to photography and editing that has frequently been described as fragmented and labyrinthine (Roeg 2013, p.5, p.29; Houston 1973, p.205). However, my initial textual analysis of Don't Look Now, found that the colour red demanded an attention to the materiality of the film. Colours fade and colour balances shift: cyan and yellow dyes diminish emphasising the red hues. In viewing a 1973 Eastmancolor circulation print it seemed that the degradation of the image underscored the effects of lens flare as an element of film style (Watkins 2015). What I want to suggest is that Roeg's approach to colour combines a fascination with photographic materials and effects, filmmaking practices honed through his work as cinematographer for directors including Roger Corman, François Truffaut, and Donald Cammell, and experimentation with the possibilities of different colour technologies, lighting and editing. From a stated interest in the 'retained image', which Roeg describes as much like the indexicality of the photographic (associated with Bazin's concept of the death mask), to the complexity of a film form structured through layered flashbacks, Roeg's work examines the disquieting of belief systems and social structures. The thread that can be tracked through the labyrinthine form of Roeg's film work – social order and its enactment – is underscored by a tension in the organisation of colour, as it shifts between the lighting and design of classic cinema (bright reds, yellows set forth against greys and browns, else contrasting hues) and a spontaneity of camera movement and naturalistic lighting. For example, Roeg has cited classic Technicolor designs (c.1940-1950) as an influence for his cinematography on The Masque of the Red Death (Corman, 1964) and Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966). In The Masque of the Red Death the progression of colour rooms (blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet), drawn from Edgar Allen Poe's text, is interspersed with a vibrant red hue as something that spills and consumes from within. A thread of colour can be tracked throughout the film, from the plague of the Red Death outside the castle, to the fantasies that consume from within it (Branigan 2017, p.121): its meaning lies in its movement. For Fahrenheit 451, shot on Eastman Color, Roeg recalls Truffaut's request for the 'artificial and glossy' colour schemes associated with the studio lighting of three-strip Technicolor (Petrie 1996, p.136). The film contrasts colour details – red fire engines – with a background of naturalistic hues. Roeg's references to Technicolor design are interlaced with a broader cultural shift in the visual style of 1960s filmmaking. As Duncan Petrie has written in his essay on British Cinematography, the 1960s saw a transformation from 'hard-edged, high-contrast lighting to a softer, more diffused use of illumination; from carefully composed images and minimal camera movement to a much freer, more mobile and spontaneous visual register; from the aesthetics of classicism to a much more self-conscious use of form appropriate to a decade associated with a new emphasis on spectacle and sensation' (Petrie 2018: p.204). Petrie's argument, that the availability new lenses and increased light sensitivity of film stocks facilitated 'a new topography and environment' (Petrie, p.210) links film technologies and aesthetics with a decade characterised by social and political change. However, I want to suggest that Roeg's collaborations with cinematographer Anthony Richmond further erode the dominant teleological form of a film history that has been determined by technological innovations (see Elsaesser's critique, 2016) and concepts of authorship. Roeg's work with Richmond – Walkabout (1970/1971), Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980) – combines naturalistic colour with photography considered experimental to commercial cinema: inverse images, slow motion, and mirrors extend and complicate the filmed space to convey dystopian landscapes.[1] Each of these films utilises lens flare, and shots which 'fall away into underexposure on the actors in the background' concealing the peripheral areas of the image. Richmond has linked these characteristics in Don't Look Now to the increased sensitivity of film stock (Richmond 1976; Watkins 2015). The effects of lens flare – causing the overexposure of the film as the light refracts on the camera lens and effaces the legible composition of the image – persists as the filmic expression of disorientation, intoxication and cultural displacement in contemporary works – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1976) – shot by Russell Boyd for director Peter Weir. Boyd combines time-lapse sequences of dark clouds, backlit with golden sun and reflected in the windows of a skyscraper (The Last Wave) and slow-motion, high angle and 360˚shots in Picnic at Hanging Rock. The diminished hues of each overexposed image disquiets otherwise familiar landscapes. The entanglement of film technologies and aesthetics testifies to the persistence of filmmaking practices beyond the perceived obsolescence of a colour process such as three-strip Technicolor and questions the borderlines of national cinemas.[2] The selection of film stock was significant to colour design of Performance (1970), a film which Roeg co-directed with Donald

Philosophie, so pflegte der Philosoph Hermann Lübbe in seinen Seminaren zu sagen, ist alles, was unter diesem Namen auftritt. Dies gilt, so könnte man hinzufügen, auch für die Filmphilosophie.
Da die Zugehörigkeit der Filmphilosophie zum weiteren Feld der Philosophie damit gesichert ist, lässt sich die weiterführende Frage, was denn genau unter diesem Namen auftritt, unter Rückgriff auf Verfahren klären, die in der Philosophie, wie sie unter diesem Namen als Fach auftritt, gängig sind.
Mit Wittgenstein könnte man sich auf die Kraft des Beispiels stützen und sagen, dass die hier versammelten Texte auf eine jeweils eigene und durchaus programmatische Weise, die nicht ohne Rest unter eine große Oberkategorie subsumiert werden kann, exemplifizieren, was ‚Filmphilosophie‘ ist. Die vier Beiträge wären demnach vier verschiedene Gesten des Zeigens: „Das ist Filmphilosophie. So wird es gemacht.“ Um die Beruhigung im Transzendentalen, die von großen Oberkategorien immer ausgeht, wäre es damit aber vorerst einmal geschehen.
Will man hingegen den alten Ehrgeiz der Philosophie nicht so ohne weiteres preisgeben, den Dingen an den Erscheinungen vorbei auf den Grund und damit nachträglich vorauszugehen, dann lässt sich die Frage nach dem ‚Was‘ der Filmphilosophie auch schulmäßig beantworten: Indem man den Begriff zunächst einmal in historischer und systematischer Perspektive erläutert.

Alternative worlds in classical Hollywood cinema are built from a variety of cinematic constructions. The credibility of such worlds depends on the extent to which the film’s creators wish to stray from the concept of reality. Abstract notions of colour, dimensionality, light and sound contrast more complex cinematic concepts such as narrative, character roles, credibility and geography. It is the specific combination of these elements chosen by filmmakers which determines whether audiences are able to become immersed into the world by perceiving it as a real and coherent entity.
This thesis is an exploration into how composers James Horner and Howard Shore use music to help build conceptualisations of place in their two fantasy film series’, Avatar and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It offers three hermeneutical levels of analysis which provide different insights into how the composers musically construct a sense of place: through establishing spatial identities, through music’s relation to the narrative, and from a more conceptual viewpoint relating to power struggles in the real world. It ultimately aims to evaluate the extents in which music’s contribution toward creating a sense of place not only influences the construction of the worlds themselves, but how it is capable in altering the way audiences perceive them as credible entities as a whole.

El Diccionario de conceptos y términos audiovisuales, tal y como reza el subtítulo, es una herramienta conceptual, docente y práctica, orientada a su uso como consulta y, en su caso, divulgativa. Si bien el objetivo esencial es que el lector pueda navegar con seguridad en el entorno de los innumerables términos necesarios para la ejecución del análisis fílmico, no queda ahí su validez. De hecho, cada término va acompañado de bibliografía (elemental, si se quiere, pero indispensable) que permitirá con facilidad ampliar las líneas de autoformación propias de cada individuo, con especial rentabilidad para los alumnos universitarios.
No se pretende una acumulación global de conocimientos ni tampoco una visión holística, sino un anclaje de punto de partida que permita dar el salto hacia mayores capas de comprensión del universo audiovisual, incluyendo las múltiples novedades aportadas por la era digital. Para ello, se sigue la estela de los 'Keywords Reference Books' y más concretamente del excelente texto de Jacques Aumont y Michel Marie, ?Dictionnaire théorique et critique du cinéma', más orientado hacia la teoría que hacia la divulgación de los recursos expresivos y narrativos, campos ambos que aquí sí se abarcan.
Este es un texto inédito en nuestro panorama editorial y a buen seguro se ampliará y crecerá con las aportaciones críticas de los lectores y, además, se refuerza mediante ejemplos gráficos en el sitio web construido al efecto, de libre acceso, http://www.analisisfilmico.uji.es.

Emerging between Documentary film and Fiction film, “Hybrid” film attempts
to bridge the divide that has long separated the two. Mixing reality with fiction,
noticeably or sometimes less so, these hybrid narratives use filmic techniques from both
sides of the divide to create a unique narrative that can serve quite varied storytelling
purposes. From works like the Canadian films Stories We Tell (Polley 2012) or My
Winnipeg (Maddin 2007), which apply fictional elements to personal stories
experienced first-hand by the filmmakers as a means to comment on the unreliability of
Memory or Sensation, to the films of several Iranian filmmakers, such as Abbas
Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, or Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to name just a few, which poetically
deconstruct the illusion of filmic narrative, through metacinematic devices that
obliquely allude to the political censorship and control exerted by the Iranian
authorities, to the magical realism of directors like Miguel Gomes or Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, the Hybrid form offers a wide range of creative solutions for a
filmmaker to address any subject matter.
This essay will attempt to propose a general delimitation of what “hybrid film”
is and is not. It will consist of a journey of sorts through some films which sit on what is
generally considered to be the border line between Documentary film and Fiction film.
By comparing and contrasting the stylistic elements in the chosen films, it is expectable
that tensions will emerge and, consequently, offer valuable ideas towards a delimitation
of the topic of the essay.
As I will further expose below, there is a lack of clear, decisive academic
knowledge about Hybrid films. This gap has spread to film criticism, journalism, and
programming, realms in with the term “hybrid” is used indiscriminately. A few of the
films analysed in this essay were taken directly from film reviews, film festival
programmes, and articles where they were defined as hybrids; as argued below, most
times wrongly so. Notwithstanding this, one must nevertheless recognize that these
more informal texts reflect a tension that is deeply rooted in the hearts and minds of
casual filmgoers when confronted with a film that defies characterization. Moreover, as
proposed below, the way the audience engages and perceives these films is an aspect
with an important contribution to the definition of “hybrid film”.
Despite the lack of any substantial academic framework surrounding Hybrids,
there is an outstanding number of authors working mostly from within the Documentary
field who have written about the issues of Reality, Reconstruction, Intervention, and so
on, in Documentary practice. One of these authors is Brian Winston, whose recap of the
spectrum between fact and fiction (2013) has been central to the analysis present in this
essay as a first step towards a taxonomy of documentary and fiction techniques that can
be used to attempt a definition of “Hybrid film”
At any rate, and due to the fact that, as I will begin by addressing in the next
chapter, the Hybrid form is ever-changing, highly adaptable, and generally elusive, this
essay cannot purport to be an exhaustive survey of the reach the Hybrid form has;
rather, my intention is that it can offer a general road map on the subject, identifying the
main questions that can, after further study, contribute to a definitive delimitation of the
form, while leaving the door open for whatever the evolution of this subject might
bring.

This chapter examines the meaning-making functions of cinematic sound from the perspective of embodied cognition. Using embodied simulation theory (Gallese, 2005) as a unifying framework, and placing particular emphasis upon the affective aspects of ‘Feeling of Body’ (Wojciehowski & Gallese, 2011), an account of cinematic media emerges which puts into play Mark Johnson’s concept of ‘embodied meaning’ (Johnson, 2007). Central to Johnson’s concept is the assertion that all human meaning, abstract conceptual thinking, and imagination have basis in our sensorimotor interactions with the world. In the context of cinematic media, it suggests the stylistic crafting and patterning of perceptual content not only elicits an affective response but also shapes cognition. Drawing upon examples of cinematic sound design an embodied aesthetics is illustrated.

This book examines a set of theoretical perspectives that critically engage with the notion of postmodernism, investigating whether this concept is still useful to approach contemporary cinema. This question is explored through a discussion of the films written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, largely regarded as the epitome of postmodern cinema and considered here as theoretical contributions in their own right.  Each chapter first presents key ideas proposed by a specific theorist and then puts them in conversation with Tarantino’s films. Jacques Rancière’s theory of art is used to reject postmodernism’s claims about the ‘death’ of the aesthetic image in contemporary cinema. Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Žižek’s dialectical thinking is mobilized to challenge simplistic, ideological readings of postmodern cinema in general, and Tarantino’s films in particular. Finally, the direct influence of Carol Clover’s psychoanalytical approach to the horror genre on Tarantino’s work is discussed to prove the director’s specific contribution to a theoretical understanding of contemporary film aesthetics.

Since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. This book focuses on the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Barbara Creed. Each of these thinkers has opened up a new and distinctive approach to the study of film and this book provides the most detailed account so far of their ideas. It illuminates
the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value
as tools for film analysis:

• the male gaze
• the female voice
• technologies of gender
• queering desire
• the monstrous-feminine
• masculinity in crisis.

Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new
critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as ‘post-feminist’.

This dissertation analyzes the postfeminist tendencies and biopolitics in contemporary media practices by considering the pop culture exemplar, the Kardashian-Jenner family.

This dissertation received First Class Honors from Trinity College Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

Il progetto rappresenta uno strumento originale e realmente efficace nell’analisi del film e, in particolare, del suo funzionamento linguistico. Il volume ha infatti un doppio sviluppo, cartaceo e digitale: il volume cartaceo, nell'introdurre i concetti chiave dell'analisi, insiste soprattutto su questioni teoriche e metodologiche, oltre a fornire approfondimenti di tipo storico in merito allo sviluppo della tecnologia e del linguaggio cinematografici. La piattaforma digitale, rispettando la suddivisione degli argomenti del volume cartaceo, si concentra invece sui singoli aspetti formali e linguistici, con analisi puntuali associate a un’immediata visualizzazione tramite scene e sequenze estratte da film (circa duecento in totale). La complementarietà tra volume e piattaforma è ulterioremente rafforzata da un sistema di rimandi interni (per parole chiave).

Cette étude retrace l’histoire de la couleur cinématographique, des origines au numérique, en la considérant dans le cadre d’un champ d’expériences spectatorielles et sociales, portant une attention particulière aux relations avec la culture scientifique, matérielle et visuelle de la couleur.

This study focuses on the history of cinematographic color, from origins to the digital age, by addressing it within a wider field of spectatorial and social experience, with particular emphasis on relationships with scientific, material and visual color culture.

Among scientific impulses in Peter Greenaway’s film is his interest in biochemistry and evolution. Setting aside the TV biopic Darwin (1993), I draw special attention to his two early films displaying experimental imaginations of men becoming birds. A Walk through H (1978) depicts an ornithologist’s posthumous journey to a birds’ land mapped on the director’s own paintings, and The Falls (1980) lists 92 men’s symptoms of, or transformations into, ‘becoming-bird,’ after an apocalyptic disaster named the Violent Unknown Event. These fake documentaries unfold a unique obsession with the postmortem (de)evolution of the human, which is less eschatological than virtually liberating the organic structure of life into a non-systematic ‘body without organs’ as in Deleuze’s bio-philosophy. The Falls, especially, suggests how the ‘dynamic sublime’ of the VUE (foreshadowing fallout) brings about the ‘mathematical sublime’ of innumerable human birds, the animal ontology of being a multitude. This shift in the ‘sublime’ mode not only underlies the cinema of catastrophe (e.g. Hitchcock’s The Birds) and the society of proliferating simulacra, but also embodies itself visually through Greenaway’s later experiment on multiple screens and media interfaces.
From this point, I also relocate the postmortem evolution from the onscreen organic life to the film strip as such. Greenaway’s film biology A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), with its documentation of the animal decay, appears here as a key link to Bill Morrison’ film chemistry Light is Calling (2004), an optical reprinting of an early film as seen through the roiling emulsion of the celluloid itself. What matters is not just how the film represents a virtual evolution of the human, but how it presents its own actual death and postmortem rebirth. I delve into this reincarnation of the film which always works through art-and-science combinations, and becomes ever more problematic in the dematerializing digitization that raises the question on the end of film evolution.

El  presente  análisis  muestra  la  riqueza  que  existe  en  esta  joven  rama  de  la  crítica  literaria en nuestro país. Por tal razón, este trabajo se apoya en la comparación narrativa del cuento de “Las babas del diablo” de Julio Cortázar y su adaptación cinematográfica Blow-up del    realizador    italiano    Michelangelo    Antonioni    para    ejemplificar    concretamente las virtudes de un análisis de esta naturaleza.
Ambos  textos  presentan  un  cierto  grado  de  complejidad  y  la  intención  es  ejemplificar  una  de  las  tantas  posibilidades  teóricas  que  puedan  responder  a  muchas  interrogantes que se han generado respecto a la validez de la obra de Antonioni respecto de  la  Cortázar,  ambas  grandes  exponentes  tanto  en  la  Historia  de  la  Literatura  Latinoamericana como del Cine Europeo contemporáneo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwkDJJIeb3I
R. Canudo, yedinci sanat kuramı, sessiz sinema estetiği, A. Schopenhauer, G. W. F. Hegel. 
Ricciotto Canudo’ya göre “yedinci sanat” olarak sinema: Arthur Schopenhauer ve Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’in Felsefelerinden Yola Çıkan Yeni Bir Bütüncül Sanat Görüşü mü? 

Cinema as the “seventh art” according to Ricciotto Canudo: A New Total View of Art Based on the Philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel? 
R. Canudo, the theory of seven arts, silent cinema aesthetics, A. Schopenhauer, G. W. F. Hegel.

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.

Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.