Tractatus Logico-Pilosophicus, the only book published during Ludwig Wittgenstein's lifetime , has since attracted the imagination of generations of philosophers as a work of great philosophical genius. Nonetheless, even today, more than eighty years later, philosophers are struggling to reconcile its diverse themes within a single, coherent picture. The present work is an attempt to meet this challenge. ;Wittgenstein considered the single proposition as a concrete model for the fact. The challenge is to show how a system of propositions can (...) serve as a model of reality. My work concentrates on three pillars of the logic of the Tractatus: the picture theory, negation as "reversal of sense," the independence of elementary propositions. Using a simple scenario of the ordering of objects or letters on a line, I examine the conflict generated by the attempt to adequately accommodate all three themes and offer my own solution. My solution brings implications to the problem of negation and to the Tractatus's thesis that the possibilities of logical space are spanned by the possible configurations of the ultimately simple objects. One such implication, which stands in contrast to the common reading, is that in atomic facts we have 'complex objects' as constituents. ;The resolution offered, furthermore, exposes an intrinsic difficulty in the Tractatus, for which I have reserved the term arbitrary choice. The difficulty is manifested in the lack of assurance---from the perspective of logic---that a concept-word will preserve its 'standard' meaning when it is reapplied or when its scope of application varies. In this I uncover the seed of central themes in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, e.g. the rule-following argument, as present already in the Tractatus. ;In the concluding chapter, I suggest a new account for the nature of the proposition by connecting the analysis offered in the Tractatus with the subject of time and motion. The picture with which the work concludes then considers language not as corresponding to reality, but as engaged or synchronized with reality---if you will, it is a picture of language and reality in a dance. (shrink)

This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary (...) social issues, film’s kinship to other art forms, and the influence of historically seminal schools of thought in the philosophy of film. Of emphasis in many of the essays is the relationship and overlap of analytic and continental perspectives in this subject. (shrink)

Introduction -- Time and matter: temporality, embodied subjectivity and film phenomenology -- Knowing and nothing: Chris Marker, subjective temporalities and vocalic bodies in the future tense -- Agnès Varda's Trinket box: subjective relationality, affect and temporalised space -- Burlesque gestures and bodily attention: phenomenologies of the ephemeral in Chantal Akerman -- Threatened corporealities: thinking with the films of Philippe Grandrieux -- Conclusion: rethinking cinematic subjectivity and beyond.

This book provides an answer to the question: «Where does the point-of-view shot come from?» It investigates the emergence of this filmic form as the product of a culture and its history, unravelling the difference between a point-of-view shot and a character's subjective viewpoint.

Previous research has demonstrated that duration of implied motion (IM) was dilated, whereas hMT+ activity related to perceptual processes on IM stimuli could be modulated by their motion coherence. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to examine whether subjective time perception of IM stimuli would be influenced by varying coherence levels. A temporal bisection task was used to measure the subjective experience of time, in which photographic stimuli showing a human moving in four directions (left, right, (...) toward, or away from the viewer) were presented as probe stimuli. The varying coherence of these IM stimuli was manipulated by changing the percentage of pictures implying movement in one direction. Participants were required to judge whether the duration of probe stimulus was more similar to the long or short pre-presented standard duration. As predicted, the point of subjective equality was significantly modulated by the varying coherence of the IM stimuli, but not for no-IM stimuli. This finding suggests that coherence level might be a key mediating factor for perceived duration of IM images, and top-down perceptual stream from inferred motion could influence subjective experience of time perception. (shrink)

In this essay I show that texts by early Caribbean women writers, such as the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, reveal and resist the effects of colonial paradigms by leaving textual traces of how such paradigms can effectively be countered and overturned. I arrive at such a reading of Seacole via an analysis of Frantz Fanon's reading of Mayotte Capécia's turn-of-the-century novel, Je suis martiniquaise, in light of advances in postcolonial and feminist theory. I argue that doing (...) so can bring us to recognize the contributions that early writings by Caribbean women have made to a broader understanding of the nature of being, across differences of “race,” class, and geography. I consider how we might recover in Capécia important models that Fanon himself replicates, yet dismisses, that predate Capécia's own text and that can be located in a text like Seacole's. In the end, I come to contend that Mary Seacole's text is more than a mere record of a “free colored” woman's life in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is, to use today's postcolonial parlance, an interventionist, hybrid text that attempts to subvert dominant discourse while participating in its circuits. (shrink)

This collection examines the peculiarly modern phenomena of voyeurism as it is experienced through the digital screen. Violence, voyeurism, and power populate film more than ever, and the centrality of the terrified body to many digital narratives suggests new forms of terror and angst, where bodies are subjected to an endless knowing look. The particular perils of the digital age can be seen on, by, and through screen bodies as they are made, remade, represented, and used. The essays in this (...) book examination the machinations of voyeurism in the digital age and the realization of power through digital visual forms. They look at the uses of power over the female body, at the domination and repression of women through symbolic violence, at discourses of power as they are played out onscreen, and at how the digital realm might engage the active/passive dichotomy in new ways."-Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head‐noun in semantically non‐reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye‐tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged (...) 4;5–6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head‐noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head‐nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head‐noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity‐based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short‐term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1. (shrink)

The body at close range: volume and the unlistenable in Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell -- Sonic subjection: Gaspar Noé's Irreversible and the dystopian limits of the resonant body -- A stranger everywhere: the écho-monde of Tony Gatlif's Exiles -- Feedback, asynchronicity, and sonic sociabilities: Arnaud des Pallière's Adieu -- Listening at the limit: non-human noise in Lars von Trier's Antichrist -- Listening to things: Foley as "alien phenomenology" and Peter Strickland's Berberian sound studio.

This paper focuses on whether static images can depict motion. It is natural to say that pictures depicting objects caught in the middle of a dynamic action—such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1932) Behind the Gare St. Lazare—are pictures of movement, but, given that pictures themselves do not move, can we make sense of such an idea? Drawing on results from experimental psychology and cognitive sciences, I show that we can. Psychological studies on implicit motion and representational momentum indicate that (...) motion is really perceived in some static images: our visual system is built in order to detect motion, even where it is only implied, and to anticipate the probable outcomes of others’ actions—even when the ‘others’ are only the subject matters of pictures’. I argue that, consequently, a range of popular depiction theories—perceptualist theories of depiction—can accommodate depicted motion. (shrink)

The book addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the nascent twentieth century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas---cultural, social, and personal---associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development (...) of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In Topoi/Graphein Christian Abrahamsson maps the paradoxical limit of the in-between to revealthat to be human is to know how tolive with the difference between the known and the unknown. Using filmic case studies, including CodeInconnu, Lord of the Flies, and Apocalypse Now,and focusing on key concerns developed in the works of the philosophers Deleuze, Olsson, and Wittgenstein, Abrahamsson starts within the notion of fixed spatiality, in whichhuman thought and action are anchored in the given of identity. He then movesthrough (...) a social world in which spatiotemporal transformations are neitherfixed nor taken for granted. Finally he edges into the pure temporality that liesbeyond the maps of fixed points and social relations. Each chapter is organized into two subjects: topoi, orexcerpts from the films, and graphein, the author's interpretation ofpresented theoriesto mirror the displacements,transpositions, juxtapositions, fluctuations, and transformations between delimited categories. A landmark work in the study of human geography, Abrahamsson's book proposes that academic and intellectual attention should focus on the spatialization between meaning and its materialization in everyday life. (shrink)

When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology (...) of movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individuals personal memory confronts the cinemas ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaksfigures that are fundamental to Schefers conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefers emblematic "ordinary man" seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers "The Gods" in 31 brief essays on film stills and "The Criminal Life" with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography. While Schefers book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal 'voice': the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration ) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually (...) prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of 'narrator' - of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face-to-face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal mediation . It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher's Fight Club , von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress , and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. (shrink)

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gansta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and New Black (...) Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender. (shrink)

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there (...) are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications. (shrink)

This book explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We live in a matrix of visual culture that is always moving and changing. Each image is always connected to an assemblage (...) of affects and forces. This book presents a model, as well as many concrete examples, of how to work with Deleuze in film theory. It asks questions about the universe as metacinema, subjectivity, violence, feminism, monstrosity, and music. Among the contemporary films it discusses within a Deleuzian framework are Strange Days, Fight Club, and Dancer in the Dark. (shrink)

Hegel, the western and classical modernity. The myth and the frontier ; The hero in the epochs of mythical and the bourgeois ; The end of the individual ; The end of the subject -- Romanticism, crime and agonal modernity. The return of tragedy in modernity ; Heroes of coolness and the ironist -- Nietzsche, science fiction and hybrid modernity. Heroic individualismus and metaphysics ; Superhumans, supermen, cyborgs ; Heroes of the future.

Introduction -- the medium-interface -- The body-interface -- The surface of the object -- The face of the subject -- Image and subjectivity -- Conclusion.

On the surface, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, is a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. This, however, is a book by Robert B. Pippin, one of our most penetrating and creative philosophers, and so it is also much more. Even as he provides detailed readings of each scene in the film, and its story of obsession and fantasy, Pippin reflects more broadly on the modern world depicted in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock’s characters, Pippin shows (...) us, repeatedly face problems and dangers rooted in our general failure to understand others—or even ourselves—very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand. Vertigo, with its impersonations, deceptions, and fantasies, embodies a general, common struggle for mutual understanding in the late modern social world of ever more complex dependencies. By treating this problem through a filmed fictional narrative, rather than discursively, Pippin argues, Hitchcock is able to help us see the systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding and self-deceit that we are subject to when we try to establish the knowledge necessary for love, trust, and commitment, and what it might be to live in such a state of unknowingness. A bold, brilliant exploration of one of the most admired works of cinema, The Philosophical Hitchcock will lead philosophers and cinephiles alike to a new appreciation of Vertigo and its meanings. (shrink)

Cinema is commonly hailed as "the universal language," but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? Drawing on a lifetime's worth of viewing an reviewing, influential critic Gilberto Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present includin Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard--to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points (...) of view are brought into clear focus.". (shrink)

How do we understand the roots of modern identities and subjectivities (citizen, labour migrant, artist, member of a global faith community) and the cosmopolitan imaginaries and practices embraced and generated in the Asia Pacific region? Writing from a range of disciplines, and diverse sites, the authors explore the ways in which identities are recognized and contested, subjectivities dislodged and reconstituted in the contemporary world, and the role of dialogic scholarly practices in engaging, stimulating and promoting emergent subjectivities and identities.

This book rethinks the discussion of sport as a cinematic subject. Arguing for the vitality of the sports film as distinctively 'modern' genre, the book looks at its innovative potential to capture twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport in all its complexity. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout, the book integrates work and ideas from film studies with thinking from sports psychology, philosophy, data theory and ecocriticism. In its detailed analyses of a wide-ranging group of films, the book shows how (...) film, from fictional works to biopics to experimental documentaries, can illuminate individual sporting experience, as well as sport's wider place in modern life. (shrink)

Introduction : heroes like us -- Hegel, the western and classical modernity -- The myth and the frontier -- The hero in the epochs of mythical and the bourgeois -- The end of the individual -- The end of the subject -- Romanticism, crime and agonal modernity -- The return of tragedy in modernity -- Heroes of coolness and the ironist -- Nietzsche, science fiction and hybrid modernity -- Heroic individualismus and metaphysics -- Superhumans, supermen, cyborgs -- Heroes of the (...) future. (shrink)

This book looks at the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy adapts Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and in doing so creates its own distinctive philosophical position. Where previous work in the field has presented the trilogy as a simple ‘beginner’s guide’ to philosophy, this study offers a new methodology for inter-relating philosophy and film texts, focusing on the conceptual role played by imagery in both types of text. This focus on the figurative enables a new-found appreciation of the liveliness (...) of philosophical writing and the multiple philosophical dimensions of Hollywood films. The book opens with a critical overview of existing philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy and goes on to draw on adaptation theory and feminist philosophy in order to create a new methodology for interlinking philosophical and filmic texts. Three chapters are devoted to detailed textual analysis of the films, tracing the ways in which the imagery that dominates Baudrillard’s writing is adapted and transformed by the trilogy’s complex visuals and soundtrack. The conclusion situates the methodology developed throughout the book in relation to other approaches currently emerging in the new field of Film-Philosophy. The book’s multi-disciplinary approach encompasses Philosophy, Film Studies and Adaptation Theory and will be of interest to undergraduates and postgraduates studying these subjects. It also forms part of the developing interdisciplinary field of Film-Philosophy. The detailed textual analysis of The Matrix Trilogy will also be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this seminal work. (shrink)

This book is a critical attempt to approach world cinema in a new global frame that updates the national frame of territorial cinemas and the transnational frame of their interplay. The global frame implies the reintegration of border-crossing forces onto the postpolitical plane of troubled globalization with two ethical facets: the soft ethical inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their hard ethical symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema is formulated as staging crucial challenges that (...) today's globalism and its antinomies bring to the notions of subjectivity and community. Many films indeed depict the antagonism between the inclusive global system and its excluded remnants, allegorizing the impossible political change in various modes of catastrophe and nihilism. A global community often takes on a totalized network of sovereign violence and (counter)terror stuck in the impasse of utopian imagination. Yet some films suggest alternative ethics irreducible to collective politics when abject figures, deprived of social subjectivity and rights, become contingent agents of existential 'gift-giving' by fostering commonality without community, solidarity without unity. The psychoanalytic notion of abjection is redefined here as both the biopolitical mode of bare life and its potential for the ethical agency that opens atopian, if not utopian, networking on the edge of the global regime beyond the problematic 'soft/hard' ethics of tolerance/violence or pity/hate. This precarious yet precious abject agency is explored through a vast net of globally circulating contemporary films and a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. (shrink)

The author analyzes the theme of painting in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, referring to one of his defining works on this subject: "Truth in Painting". Consistently considering the four-part structure of this book, the author touches on such concepts of deconstruction as "parergon", "passepartout", "cartouche" and others. Of particular interest is the problem of truth in the structure of fine art – this topic is a cross-cutting theme throughout Derrida's work. At the same time, the philosopher rejects the classical (...) ontological-epistemological aspect of truth in the context of art history. The picture does not limit itself to the representation of an object or the truth attached to it. She crosses the line, overflowing her boundaries. That is why the logic of a work of art is inevitably the logic of a Kantian parergon. In the book "Truth in Painting" Derrida rethinks all aspects of artistic creativity. For Derrida, painting is, first of all, an action and the most correct question is: "What does this painting do?". The picture in the produced action breaks away from the conditions of the image, moves away from the discourse, setting in motion the difference. The structure of a painting work consists not of presence or representation, but of a projection of movement. The painting is silent and remains outside the language, is unrepresentable and heterogeneous, is out of line with any discourse, is irreducible to any text and is not subject to archiving despite all the efforts of museum authorities. (shrink)

The present collection of essays brings into dialogue Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982) by comparing their cultural and intellectual legacy. Pasolini and Fassbinder are amongst the last radical filmmakers to have emerged in Europe. Born in Italy and Germany, they inherited a traumatic social and political past which is reflected in their works through a number of similarly articulated and unresolved tensions: high and popular cultures, theatre, literature and cinema, ideology and narration, major and minor codes (...) of expression. The essays in this book examine the uncompromising character of Pasolini's and Fassbinder's films. Constantly oscillating between utopia and nihilism, these works invite us to reconsider subjective and collective questions which from today's perspective seem lost forever. (shrink)

In Projecting a Camera, film theorist Edward Branigan offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding film theory. Why, for example, does a camera move? What does a camera "know"? (And when does it know it?) What is the camera's relation to the subject during long static shots? What happens when the screen is blank? Through a wide-ranging engagement with Wittgenstein and theorists of film, he offers one of the most fully developed understandings of the ways in which the camera operates in (...) film. With its thorough grounding in the philosophy of spectatorship and narrative, Projecting a Camera takes the study of film to a new level. With the care and precision that he brought to Narrative Comprehension and Film , Edward Branigan maps the ways in which we must understand the role of the camera, the meaning of the frame, the role of the spectator, and other key components of film-viewing. By analyzing how we think, discuss, and marvel about the films we see, Projecting a Camera, offers insights rich in implications for our understanding of film and film studies. (shrink)

Motion pictures, from their emergence in the late nineteenth century, have been used in ways that have held in tension a number of competing or seemingly contradictory impulses. Movies can document and reveal physical and social realities, extend perception through time and space, and create audio-visual approximations of subjective perspective and mental states; they can mimic or transform reality, or create new verisimilar or fantastical screen worlds that, in part, resemble, or abstract our own. Over the past 120 years, (...) many thinkers have attempted to define the aesthetic nature of the medium in, at times, prescriptive or overly conditional ways that centre on some technologies (notably the camera), techniques, or types of motion picture making while excluding others (notably animation), and that bracket or narrowly circumscribe the question of viewer experience. However, in the past thirty years or so, we have seen an expanded interest in forms previously more marginalized in film studies, such as documentary, docudrama, and animation. This is due in part to the digital turn in both screen media production and distribution, which has led to the proliferation and pervasiveness of both. We have also seen much deeper consideration of how viewers understand, experience, and think with screen media with the rise of phenomenological and cognitive approaches to the screen-viewer relationship. Carl Plantinga has become a key and productive figure during these years, generating persuasive understandings of the emotional, schematic, and moral dimensions of our experience of screen media, and the ways in which films and TV are designed for such purposes. A cognitivist, he is interested in the possibilities of the screen to allow us to better imagine and empathize with the experiences of others, to persuade us of a state of affairs, and to provoke our capacity for moral reasoning. (shrink)

This book is about film's encounter with love throughout the medium's history. It is also about the philosophy of love... [it] outlines a new metaphysics and ontology of love as a reciprocal erotic relationship. This study argues that film's special narrative language is particularly well suited to depicting love in this way. It begins with early silent directors, such as Joseph von Sternberg, and concludes with contemporary filmmakers, such as Sophia Coppola; it also compares classical French and American love films (...) of the 1940s with modernist films by Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, and Wong Kar Wai, amongst many others"--Page [4] of cover. (shrink)

The objective in the present paper is to analyze the aspect of subjectivity having to do with construing motion and change where no motion and change exists outside the representation, that is, in cases where the conceptualizer does not intend to convey the idea that these properties exist in the state of affairs described. In the process of doing so, I will elaborate on a critique of the notion of fictivity as it is currently being used in (...) cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary work in philosophy and film studies, Joseph Kupfer investigates narrative theory through the analysis of five films that have narrative as their subject matter and where stories and storytelling are central: A River Runs Through It, Wonder Boys, Ordinary People, The Shape of Things and Unforgiven. Kupfer's readings of the films explore the role of story creation in knowing ourselves and planning our future, in structuring social relationships, and in sharpening our experience of popular culture - including mass-marketed (...) films. (shrink)

In the late 1920s, the American obstetrician Joseph DeLee brought the motion-picture camera into the birth room. Following that era's trend of adapting industrial efficiency practices for medical environments, DeLee's films give spectacular and unexpected expression to the engineering concept of ‘streamlining’. Accomplishing what more tangible obstetric streamlining practices had failed to, DeLee's cameras, and his post-production manipulation, shifted birth from messy and dangerous to rationalized, efficient, death-defying. This was film as an active and effective medical tool. Years later, (...) the documentarian Pare Lorentz produced and wrote his own birth film,The Fight for Life(1940). The documentary subject of the film was DeLee himself, and the film was set in his hospitals, on the same maternity ‘sets’ that had once showcased film's remarkable streamlining capacity to give and keep life. Yet relatively little of DeLee was retained in the film's content, resulting in a showdown that, by way of contrast, further articulated DeLee's understanding of film's medical powers and, in so doing, hinted at a more dynamic moment in the history of medicine while speaking also to the process by which that understanding ceased to be historically legible. (shrink)

Mental imagery of movement is a potentially valuable rehabilitation task, but its therapeutic efficacy may depend on the specific cognitive strategy employed. Individuals use two main strategies to perform the hand mental rotation task, which involves determining whether a visual image depicts a left or right hand. One is the motor imagery strategy, which involves mentally simulating one’s own hand movements. In this case, task performance as measured by response time is subject to a medial–lateral effect wherein the RT is (...) reduced when the fingertips are directed medially, presumably as the actual motion would be easier. The other strategy is to employ visual imagery, which involves mentally rotating the picture and is not subject to this medial–lateral effect. The rehabilitative benefits of the HMRT are thought to depend on the MI strategy, so it is essential to examine the effects of individual factors such as age, image perspective, and innate ability on the strategy adopted. When presented with pictures of the palm, all subjects in the current study used the MI strategy, regardless of age and ability. In contrast, when subjects were presented with pictures of the back of the hand, the VI strategy predominated among the young age group regardless of performance, while the strategy used by middle-age and elderly groups depended on performance ability. In the middle-age and elderly groups, the VI approach predominated in those with high performance skill, whereas the MI strategy predominated among those with low performance skill. Thus, higher-skill middle-aged and elderly individuals may not necessarily form a motion image during the HMRT, potentially limiting rehabilitation efficacy. (shrink)

Norbert Elias’s project in The process of civilization involved reconstructing invisible movement—both the slow tempoof long-term historical change and the modification of psychic structures and embodied dispositions. To do this, he resorted to uncommon devices: treating historical texts as constituting a series amenable to a rudimentary discourse analysis, he constructed an imagined ‘curve of civilization’ serving as an approximation of the hidden process of change. Elias’s curve was not supposed to represent single past states, but movement itself, its direction and (...) pace. This novel concept of historical representation was related to the perception of cinema as a new medium making actual movement visible. But beyond making it possible to imagine how one could telescope long-term historical process, cinema also held the promise of serving as a microscope, making the minute movements of the human body, gestures and manners available for close inspection. While anthropologists were devising ways of using the new medium to document fleeting gestures and bodily postures, it was used by popular audiences as a source for remodelling behaviour and acquiring polite manners and body techniques, as noticed by such acute observers as Marcel Mauss and Joseph Roth. Hence, popular appropriation of the cinema gave rise to a heightened awareness of the historicity of gestures and the changing modalities of their transmission. Cinema was itself part of the accelerated motion of history, of a perceived change of pace in the process of civilization, which in its turn shed light on its historical antecedents and played an essential role in rethinking the notion of civilization and culture.Keywords: Norbert Elias; Marcel Mauss; Joseph Roth; Cinema; Gestures; Body; Discourse; Historiography; Sociology of culture. (shrink)

In The Phenomenology of Religious Belief, the renowned philosopher Michael J. Shapiro investigates how art - and in particular literature and film - can impact upon both traditional interpretations and critical studies of religious beliefs and experiences. In doing so, he examines the work of prolific and award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Robert Coover. By placing their work in conjunction with critical analyses of media by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini and (...) combining it with the work of groundbreaking thinkers such as George Canguilhem, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Shapiro takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the question of how life should be lived. His assessment of phenomenological subjectivity also leads him to question the nature of political theology and extend the criticism of Pauline theology. (shrink)

A COMPANION TO MOTION PICTURES AND PUBLIC VALUE A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value brings together original essays by world-renowned scholars investigating the varied intersections of the moving image and the public good. Covering a wide range of types and genres of cinema, this unprecedented volume explores the past, present, and possible future contributions of motion pictures to public value. With a cross-disciplinary approach, the text presents original conceptual work, global perspectives, philosophical arguments, historical discussion, (...) empirical research, and specific case studies of the direct and indirect public value developed through motion pictures. Organized into seven thematic sections, this Companion identifies and discusses the various kinds of values that motion pictures can deliver, including artistic and aesthetic, ethical and moral, spiritual and religious, cultural, environmental, political, and cognitive. Throughout the text, readers are provided with deep insight into the issue of public value as it relates to cinema and its positive impact on human life and society. A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, and is a valuable resource for scholars across a variety of disciplines. (shrink)

Syntactic templates serve as schemas, allowing speakers to describe complex events in a systematic fashion. Motion events have long served as a prime example of how different languages favor different syntactic frames, in turn biasing their speakers toward different event conceptualizations. However, there is also variability in how motion events are syntactically framed within languages. Here, we measure the consistency in event encoding in two languages, Spanish and Swedish. We test a dominant account in the literature, namely that (...) variability within a language can be explained by specific properties of the events. This event-properties account predicts that descriptions of one and the same event should be consistent within a language, even in languages where there is overall variability in the use of syntactic frames. Spanish and Swedish speakers (N= 84) described 32 caused motion events. While the most frequent syntactic framing in each language was as expected based on typology (Spanish: verb-framed, Swedish: satellite-framed, cf. Talmy,2000), Swedish descriptions were substantially more consistent than Spanish descriptions. Swedish speakers almost invariably encoded all events with a single syntactic frame and systematically conveyed manner of motion. Spanish descriptions, in contrast, varied much more regarding syntactic framing and expression of manner. Crucially, variability in Spanish descriptions was not mainly a function of differences between events, as predicted by the event-properties account. Rather, Spanish variability in syntactic framing was driven by speaker biases. A similar picture arose for whether Spanish descriptions expressed manner information or not: Even after accounting for the effect of syntactic choice, a large portion of the variance in Spanish manner encoding remained attributable to differences among speakers. The results show that consistency in motion event encoding starkly differs across languages: Some languages (like Swedish) bias their speakers toward a particular linguistic event schema much more than others (like Spanish). Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the typology of event framing, theories on the relationship between language and thought, and speech planning. In addition, the tools employed here to quantify variability can be applied to other domains of language. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This collection of essays is unlike others in the field of African studies, for it is based on three very precisely delineated focal points: a particular geographical region, the sub-Sahara; specific modes of cultural production, literature and cinema; and a focus on works of French expression. This three-fold approach to exploring the relationships between power and culture in a non-Western environment greatly contributes to making this book unique from a variety of perspectives: African, Francophone and postcolonial studies, as well as (...) cross-disciplinary, cultural, transnational and diasporic studies. Moreover, the book offers deft and innovative analyses that move beyond the rhetoric of crises on the African continent we so very often hear of, so as to present a critical reflection on the subject at hand that is specific to the sub-Sahara and at the same time intimately linked to global culture, economy and politics. The authors' three-fold approach also presupposes that disciplinary compartmentalization increases power conflicts in academia. If only in part, compartmentalization is the result of antagonistic and competitive relations between specialization and multidisciplinary education. This book is thus a modest attempt at presenting an alternative to excessively fixed and homogeneous academic frontiers while considering that disciplinary expertise remains a must. Keeping in mind that an increasing number of scholars in Anglophone Postcolonial studies and Francophone African studies have been attempting for quite some time now to open interstices and build crossroads that can better connect them to each other, keeping in mind that these scholars work at revealing mechanisms by which any antagonistic discourses can mix, influence, act upon or react to one another, this book seeks to take a constructive step in establishing enduring grounds for multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and transnational academic research and collaboration. (shrink)

Standing at the intersection of criminology and philosophy, this book demonstrates the ways in which mythic movies and television series can provide understanding of actual crimes and social harms. Taking three social problems as its subjects - capitalist political economy, structural injustice, and racism - the book explores the ways in which David Fincher's Fight Club (1999), HBO's Game of Thrones (2011-2019), and Jordan Peele's Us (2019) offer solutions by reconceiving justice in terms of personal and collective transformation, utopian thinking, (...) and the relationship between racism and elitism respectively. In so doing, the authors set out a theory of understanding the world based on cinematic and televisual works of art and conclude with a template that establishes a methodology for future use. An Epistemology of Criminological Cinema is authoritative and accessible, ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, criminologists, philosophers, and film, television, and literary critics with an interest in social justice and social harm. (shrink)