Film Media

Mainstream feature films on videocassettes allow viewers to relate to film acting on a level far deeper than recognized by existing film theory, requiring us to formulate an aesthetic on which this new relationship between audience and actor can be based and explored. ;Our common knowledge tells us that the primary function of film acting remains that of dramatic representation, more precisely, serving the narrative trajectory of cause and effect structured around the basic want of the central character. Our analysis, (...) however, shows us that film acting is also a filmic element, by that we mean, possessing form and qualities exclusive to the film medium. This requires us to take our inquiry onto an even deeper level, that of the filmic continuum: the time and space peculiar to the film shot, now that it can be "frozen" at will. ;We find our bearings in this hitherto uncharted domain by drawing upon ideas from Singularist philosophy , from speculative cosmology and from phenomenology Heidegger's essay on modern technology. All this leads us to adopt the film frame--as against the film shot--as the most basic unit of the filmic continuum. ;From this theoretical bedrock, we make our way upwards to show how such an aesthetic could affect a viewer's absorption of the film's narrative content. The best way to do this becomes to analyze in depth segments from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Akira Kurosawa's High and Low . ;We can then take our inquiry onto the level of an actual performance. We choose Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith's True Heart Susie , since the serious scholarship it has inspired allows us to delineate the originality of our approach in comparison. We then flesh out our 'radical' view of film acting by locating points of intersection with one, certain theories of stage acting and two, with firsthand accounts from innovative film actors and directors. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentRecently older people have been the target of filmmakers and marketing campaigns; the concept of the “grey pound” has become a potentially significant attraction encouraging filmmakers to explore issues relating to age and ageing in mainstream films. The recent success of films such as Mamma Mia and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel have made a significant impact on the box office, and Amour securing the 2013 Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, proved that (...) an older audience is eager to watch films with mature characters and about issues that are relevant and meaningful to them.Actor Dustin Hoffman chose the play, Quartet by Ronald Harwood, to make his directorial debut. Set in “Beecham House,” a residential home for retired musicians, Hoffman explores brilliantly the diversity of octogenarians. The home is under the threat of closure unless the residents raise a substantial amount of money to keep it open, and their cunning plan to do that is by organizing a charitable evening gala fea. (shrink)

This study is an analytical criticism of the epistemological foundations of contemporary film theory. The arguments of contemporary film theory are unraveled by charting the transformation of film theory into critical theory through successive paradigms of knowledge: the aesthetic theory of Andre Bazin; the semiotic and psychoanalytic theory of Christian Metz; and the post-structuralist critical theory of Stephen Heath inspired by Althussarian Marxism. It is argued that contemporary film theory read Bazinian film theory in a way that fostered Bazin's critical (...) illusions at the expense of his critical insights. The epistemological assumptions of contemporary film theory are traced to their foundations in phenomenological epistemology and the critique of epistemology articulated within Lacanian psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida's "deconstructive" phenomenology. Drawing on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is argued that the project of phenomenology is an incoherent one for it is dependent upon a naively realist epistemology, and that the critique of epistemology is equally indefensible for it presupposes the truth of phenomenology in order to make sense. This general criticism of the epistemological incoherence which underlies the critical theory from which contemporary film theory has drawn its arguments demonstrates the necessity of, and provides the basis for, a reconstruction of film theory. First, Bazin's theoretical insight into the nature of cinematic representation is elucidated and defended in the context of the suggestion that cinematic representation, while a form of aesthetic experience, transforms the character of traditional aesthetic experience. Secondly, drawing on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and the genre theory of Rick Altman, Bazin's critical insight into the contextual character of meaning in the cinema is defended and developed with reference to classical Hollywood cinema. Using film noir as a case study, it is argued that classical Hollywood cinema inscribes the contradictions of social experience as a part of its very form in a way that fails to be captured by the conception of classical cinema which is governed by the epistemological assumptions of contemporary film theory. (shrink)

For decades, the audiovisual nature of the film medium has limited film scholarship to the strict consideration of sound and sight as the senses at play. Aware of the limitations of this sense-to-sense correspondence, Laura U. Marks has been the first to consistently give expression to a new and emergent line of enquiry that seeks to understand the multisensory nature of film.Adding to the emergent awareness of the cinema of the senses, neuroscience, specifically multisensory studies, has identified autonomous sensory systems (...) beyond the classic five senses: the vestibular , proprioception , pain, and temperature perception. This essay investigates the principles of the multisensory film experience when applied to our sense of orientation and balance in film – the vestibular in film. Here I seek to outline the neural and physiological evidence supporting the idea that we can have access to the multisensory exclusively through sound and image, based on the nature of our perception and cognition.I then apply this frame of reference to a new understanding of Gus Van Sant’s cinema of walking composed by the so-called death trilogy of Gerry , Elephant and Last Days plus Paranoid Park . With this analysis I show how the vestibular sense can be a powerful aesthetic and cinematic mode of filmmaking, as well revealing of the sensuous nature of film. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the essay's opening paragraph: Marguerite Duras prefaces the second edition of Le navire night , from which an excerpt is cited above, by explaining that after writing the story of a man named J.M., everything came too late, including the realization of the film version of Le navire night. Once the event has been written and the common night of history been closed up, did she have the right to flash a light into (...) the darkness to go back and see? The only seeing through cinema that was possible, she continues, was to film the failure, the disaster of the film. But how does one film the failure of realizing a film adaptation of a written text, which itself was transcribed from an oral re-telling of a story, which itself was adapted from memory? The event already took place – writing, “this history here” –, leaving cinema to film what never took place, namely, the film itself. As Jean-Luc Godard confirms in a chapter titled Seul le cinéma in Histoire du cinéma, not only in the form of his project as a whole but also more explicitly in one shot that positions two close-up photographs of his face with the sound of Paul Hindemith’s “Funeral Music” and this text: “Faire une description précise de ce qui n’a jamais eu lieu est le travail de l’historien.” Describing the rise of the film Le navire night from its disastrous death, Duras writes: “On a mis la caméra à l’envers et on a filmé ce qui entrait dedans, de la nuit, de l’air, des projecteurs, des routes, des visages aussi.” The camera turned upside-down, or in the other sense, inside-out, Duras films the entrance of the exterior, a sort of a Levinasian visage. The question no longer is one of having the right but of the duty to re-write history, as is insinuated by the reference to “The Critic as Artist” written across one of the photographs mentioned above, which is again a gesture of Godard’s positioning himself as the critic whose role Oscar Wilde defined: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”. (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)

This book discusses the role of the trickster figure in contemporary film against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and postmodernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always reflect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of films, from Charlie Chaplin’s classics such as _Modern Times_ and _The Great Dictator_ to contemporary comedies and dramas with ‘trickster actors’ such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. _The Trickster in Contemporary Film_ offers a (...) fresh perspective on the trickster figure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original film analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media, and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: common motifs in trickster narratives the trickster and personal relationships gonzo-trickster and the art of comic insurrection. Employing a number of complementary approaches such as Jungian psychology, film semiotics, narrative structure theories, Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of film, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider critical issues in contemporary culture. (shrink)

In the context of the well-recognized dialogue between faith and film culture, this article considers Ang Lee's award-winning and controversial film, Brokeback Mountain . Against the misinterpretations and ideological rhetoric that coopted the film, it effects a close reading of the narrative, tracing the development of the film's central theme, the constitutive vocation of the human being to give and receive love, an experience touched by human sinfulness and divine grace. After analyzing the film's masterful adaptation of the short story (...) on which it is based, its complex use of metaphorical language and its rich, expressive soundtrack, the article concludes with a consideration of the epilogue of the film as representing a breakthrough of grace and as an expression of the redeeming power of love. (shrink)

The recent film District 9 raises several issues of significance to transhumanism. These issues include whether it is permissible to give a human being superhuman powers against his will, under what circumstances humans will be accepting of transhumans or posthumans, and what roles space colonization and extraterrestrial encounter may play in the future of humanity. Consideration of these issues deepens the viewing experience, and it can inform current decisions about transhumanism’s future as a cultural movement.