_Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video_ Edited by Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor Toronto: YYZ Books, 2000 ISBN 0-920397-26-3 373 pp.

A new orthodoxy suggests that André Bazin's work had little influence in anglophone countries until decades after his death. This article cites a wide range of evidence, mainly from British publications, in order to challenge this view. Starting with the critics who were associated with the ground-breaking magazine Movie in the early 1960s, it notes also Bazin's early impact in America via the magazine Film Quarterly and the high-profile critic Andrew Sarris. Moreover, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, two of (...) the most prominent British theorists commonly associated with an anti-Bazinian ‘Screen Theory’ of the 1970s, are shown to have been both continuously respectful of, and influenced by, Bazin's work. In short, it is argued that Bazin's influence on anglophone film culture has been continuous and formative rather than sporadic. (shrink)

The relationship between film and philosophy, along with the idea of film as philosophy, has attracted widespread interest over the last decade. Film theorists and philosophers of film have explored not only the philosophical questions raised by cinema as an artform, but also the possibility that cinema might contribute to philosophical understanding or even engage in varieties of “cinematic thinking” that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and (...) Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be known as “film-philosophy,” developing philosophical insight out of their close engagement with film, and bringing philosophical... (shrink)

Introduction. Observing the production and consumer area of modern cinematography makes it possible to draw conclusions about the value dominants of modern society, to conduct its sociocultural analysis. Cinema, both auteur and mass, is a way of reflecting and modeling the society spiritual state and its analysis makes it possible to draw quite serious and justified philosophical and social conclusions. The film in a philosophical sense is ontologized by the dominant intention of the era. Such a dominant intention of (...) modernity is hedonism. Pleasure, enjoyment, happiness, according to the humanities, is the basic values of the 21st century society. Cinema is the most comprehensive reaction to the needs of hedonism, since hedonistic prerequisites are to some degree laid down in its technical (movement, photographic phenomenology) and social nature (art and entertainment). In this regard, it seems relevant to conduct a philosophical analysis of the ontological level of modern cinema. The aim of the study is to conduct a philosophical analysis of the ontological level of modern cinema; identify ontological models, variations and combinations of which provide its artistic diversity. Methods: the authors use the general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, the phenomenological method, since they identify the sensory intentions that underlie modern cinema. The authors also use the hermeneutic method, since they reveal the hidden meanings of the film, determined by the time and conditions of its creation, as well as the semiotic approach, which makes it possible to analyze the structural-semiotic whole of the film. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the authors analyze films from philosophical aspects, and not just cultural studies, as is customary. In modern cinema, the authors look for a reflection of the “social soul”, identify those intentions that underlie modern cinema, both auteur and mass. This makes it possible to deduce a typology of film models that have not previously been applied to the analysis of the film process. Results. During the analysis, the authors developed a hedonistic-ontological typology of cinematic models, identified five generative models of cinema, four of which have a hedonistic orientation: an alimentary model that pleases the recipient by intensively stimulating his perceptual sphere; a parkour model that gives pleasure to light and unhindered movement, minimizing the severity and resistance of the environment; an arcade model that provides the viewer the pleasure of victory through virtual immersion in the ups and downs of the “action film”; a detective model that gives the viewer pleasure through the removal of cognitive uncertainty. The fifth model, tentatively called existential, should lead the viewer into a complex philosophical state of being-with-self-self, an experience of one’s own fulfillment, associated with the experience of suffering. However, due to the hedonistic orientations of modern culture, this model is not relevant in the first decades of the 21st century. Conclusions. Philosophical analysis of modern cinema has revealed that at the ontological level it is based on the philosophy of hedonism. Modern cinema delivers the following types of pleasures to the recipient: enjoyment of the flesh of the world, enjoyment of bodily freedom in motion, enjoyment of peace, cognitive enjoyment. (shrink)

"Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book." -- Edward W. Said In The Material Ghost , Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory, lifelike and dreamlike at once, a peculiar mix of reality and imagination. "The images (...) on the screen," he writes, "carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost." "Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating." -- Alfred Guzzetti, Boston Book Review "A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum "Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism." -- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor "Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic André Bazin." -- Sight & amp Sound "The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation none of the chapters is without memorable insights." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book--the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film." -- Stanley Cavell "Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses." -- James Naremore, Cineaste. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper explores the relationship between the medium of motion-picture film and the representation of autobiographical memory during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The paper argues that a reciprocal relationship developed between film and memory, in which film was understood as an externalized form of memory, and memory an internalized record of personal experience similar in many respects to film. Memory was often represented as an object-like entity, preserved in stable form within the body, (...) and able to be extracted by the right stimulus or trigger. A particularly important community in which this representation was developed was psychotherapeutic practitioners with psychoanalytic orientations, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. In special circumstances, therapists and others claimed, records of past life events could be projected, film-like, onto the screen of an individual's conscious, replaying previous experiences in real time. The paper develops a social historical account of this relationship, and reflects on its significance for the history of selfhood in the twentieth century. (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 (orientation and balance), proprioception (posture and body position), 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 (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) plus Paranoid Park (2007). 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)

Italian neo-realism has inspired film audiences and fascinated critics and film scholars for decades. This book offers an original analysis of the movement and its defining films from the perspective of the cultural unconscious. Combining a Jungian reading with traditional theorizations of film and national identity, _Filming the Nation_ reinterprets familiar images of well-known masterpieces by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti and introduces some of their less renowned yet equally significant films. Providing an illuminating (...) analysis of film images across a particularly traumatic and complex historical period, _Filming the Nation_ revisits the concept of national identity and its ‘construction’ from a perspective that combines cultural, psychoanalytic and post-Jungian theories. As such this book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of film and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films comprises 200 essays by leading film scholars analysing the most important, influential, innovative and interesting films of all time. Arranged alphabetically, each entry explores why each film is significant for those who study film and explores the social, historical and political contexts in which the film was produced. Ranging from Hollywood classics to international bestsellers to lesser-known representations of national cinema, this collection is deliberately broad in scope crossing decades, boundaries and (...) genres. The encyclopedia thus provides an introduction to the historical range and scope of cinema produced throughout the world. (shrink)

In the past two decades, African American filmmakers like Spike Lee have made significant contributions to the dialogue about race in the United States by adapting techniques from classic _film noir _to black American cinema. This book is the first to examine these artistic innovations in detail from a philosophical perspective informed by both cognitive film theory and critical race theory. Dan Flory explores the techniques and themes that are used in black _film noir _to orchestrate the audience’s emotions (...) of sympathy and empathy felt toward morally complex characters whom people might not typically find appealing in real life, such as thugs, drug dealers, or murderers. Using an approach that combines the cognitive insights of theorists like David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, and Murray Smith with the reflective Wittgensteinian methods for considering film employed by Stanley Cavell, Stephen Mulhall, and William Rothman, Flory shows how these films scrutinize the state of race in America, induce their viewers to do so as well, and illuminate the ways in which categories of race have defined and continue to direct much of our vision of the moral self and what counts as appropriate moral sensibility. (shrink)

In the past two decades, African American filmmakers like Spike Lee have made significant contributions to the dialogue about race in the United States by adapting techniques from classic _film noir _to black American cinema. This book is the first to examine these artistic innovations in detail from a philosophical perspective informed by both cognitive film theory and critical race theory. Dan Flory explores the techniques and themes that are used in black _film noir _to orchestrate the audience’s emotions (...) of sympathy and empathy felt toward morally complex characters whom people might not typically find appealing in real life, such as thugs, drug dealers, or murderers. Using an approach that combines the cognitive insights of theorists like David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, and Murray Smith with the reflective Wittgensteinian methods for considering film employed by Stanley Cavell, Stephen Mulhall, and William Rothman, Flory shows how these films scrutinize the state of race in America, induce their viewers to do so as well, and illuminate the ways in which categories of race have defined and continue to direct much of our vision of the moral self and what counts as appropriate moral sensibility. (shrink)

This book explores the themes and symbols of classical myth and literature reflected in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Mark W. Padilla examines the classical resonances of four movies, one from each of the filmmaker’s first decades.

Over the last two decades, many philosophers have been increasingly inclined to consider science fiction films as philosophical exercises that center on the nature of human consciousness and existence. Albert Camus' philosophy of the absurd, however, has almost never been employed as a constructive perspective that can illumine unexplored aspects of these films. This is surprising, since science fiction films seem to be packed with visions and dialogues that echo the Sisyphean universe. Cosmos and Camus endeavors to set foot on (...) this uncharted terrain. Its first part aims to introduce the main components of Camus' absurdity in such a way that it can be easily applied to the analysis of the films later. Equipped with these Camusean essentials, it delves into an in-depth analysis of two first-encounter films (Contact and Arrival) and two AI films (A.I. and Her). These analyses yield more than an insightful reflection of the absurd contents in science-fiction film. Indeed, imaginative collisions with nonhumans seem to tell us a lot about the nature of the absurd in the human condition, as well as raising the question of whether absurdity is exclusively a human matter. Ultimately, the interpretation of the films illuminates the films themselves just as much as it illuminates, challenges, and expands Camus' concept of absurdity, thus contributing to our current understanding of what the absurd reality is and how we can either live with it or transcend it. (shrink)

On November 15th, one week after the results of the 2016 US presidential election were known to all, Timothy Snyder, a distinguished historian of Modern Europe, took to his Facebook page where he formulated a series of steps he urged readers to take in response to what he clearly deemed an emerging threat to the future of American democracy. Snyder's message, which captured the sense of urgency and foreboding that was palpable across large swaths of the land, instantly went viral. (...) In a preface to comments informed by deep knowledge of the totalitarian regimes that held Europe in their grip in the decades following World War I, Snyder wrote: Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to... (shrink)

Film and television portrayals of posthuman cyborgs melding biology and technology, simultaneously “animal and machine” abound. Most of us immediately think of iconic characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relentless cyborg assassin in the Terminator series or Peter Weller’s crime-fighting cyborg police officer in Robocop (1987). Or perhaps we recall the many cyborgs populating the Dr. Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars television series and films—including Darth Vader, surely the most famous cinematic cyborg of all time. But lesser-known explorations of cybernetic (...) embodiment have appeared in film and television for many decades. And not all portrayals involve the sort of extreme transformations exemplified by these iconic characters. This chapter considers some of different ways that film and television have explored the transformative relation between embodiment and technology. (shrink)

The significance of narrative artworks as resources for, and possibly as instances of, philosophical thinking has increasingly been recognized over recent decades. Utilization of such resources in philosophy of religion has, however, been limited. Focusing on film in particular, this article develops an account of film’s importance for a ‘contemplative’ approach to philosophizing about religious ethics, an approach that prioritizes the elucidation of possibilities of sense over the evaluation of ‘truth claims’. Taking Dead Man Walking as a case (...) in point, the article shows how this film facilitates an enhanced comprehension of specific concepts, most notably the concepts of faith, truth and love, as they feature within a characteristically Christian form of life. (shrink)

The basic aim of this research study is to describe the Applications of the fusion of aesthetic philosophy and practical philosophy in film and television music production. This research study depends upon primary data analysis for measuring the research study to generate different questions related to the aesthetic philosophy and practical philosophy to determine the research study used smart PLS and run different results related to the variables. Modern philosophy of art includes the philosophy of film as a (...) well-established subfield. Although philosophers were among the first academics to write studies of the new art form in the early decades of the twentieth century, the area did not enjoy considerable development until the 1980s, when a resurgence began. The rapid expansion of this sector can be attributed to a wide variety of factors. Let it be enough to state that the evolution of philosophy as a discipline and the growing importance of cinema in popular culture has made it crucial for philosophers to view the film as an art form on par with literature, music, and the visual arts. The overall research study found that there are negative and some positive relations between aesthetic philosophy and practical philosophy in music production. The result found that significant relationship between aesthetic philosophy and practical philosophy in film and television. (shrink)

Research on metaphor has over the past decades increasingly been extended to its visual and multimodal varieties. While analysts of verbal metaphors are helped by the fact that languages have grammars and vocabularies, researchers of visual and multimodal metaphors need to rely on other methods for identification and interpretation. One approach that claims to have developed a robust method for analyzing metaphor in moving images is FILMIP, which has hitherto focused on the specific genre of commercials. In this paper it (...) is argued that there are serious problems with FILMIP. First, the theoretical basis of FILMIP and two empirical studies drawing on it are discussed. Subsequently, its limited use for analyzing metaphors in the genre of feature films is demonstrated on the basis of four case studies. The paper ends with sketching some general advice pertaining to researching metaphor in film, and provides a cautious alternative to FILMIP. (shrink)

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was one of the most innovative and revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century. Author of more than twenty books on literature, music, and the visual arts, Deleuze published the first volume of his two-volume study of film, _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_, in 1983 and the second volume, _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, in 1985. Since their publication, these books have had a profound impact on the study of film and philosophy. Film, media, and (...) cultural studies scholars still grapple today with how they can most productively incorporate Deleuze's thought. The first new collection of critical studies on Deleuze's cinema writings in nearly a decade, _Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy_ provides original essays that evaluate the continuing significance of Deleuze's film theories, accounting systematically for the ways in which they have influenced the investigation of contemporary visual culture and offering new directions for research. Contributors: Raymond Bellour, Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques; Ronald Bogue, U of Georgia; Giuliana Bruno, Harvard U; Ian Buchanan, Cardiff U; James K. Chandler, U of Chicago; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Amy Herzog, CUNY; András Bálint Kovács, Eötvös Loránd U; Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin U; Timothy Murray, Cornell U; Dorothea Olkowski, U of Colorado; John Rajchman, Columbia U; Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, U Paris VIII; Garrett Stewart, U of Iowa; Damian Sutton, Glasgow School of Art; Melinda Szaloky, UC Santa Barbara. (shrink)

This article examines work by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi related to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguing that Paolozzi’s print series As Is When, executed in 1964-65, together with work from nearly three decades later (Manuscript from Cassino), can be seen as a comprehensive examination of Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophy. Further, this article argues that Paolozzi’s take on Wittgenstein forms a new aesthetic ontology of “film”, embedding its reading of Wittgenstein in a reified Platonic cave, whose escaped philosopher finds (...) himself basking only in the light of the artificial sun of the flickering cinema light. (shrink)

William H. Whyte's instructional film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1979), which chronicles the findings of his decade-long study of people's behavior in small urban spaces in New York City in the 1970s, offers a precise analysis of the rules of attraction that draw people into places and that keep them attached. By combining direct observation with complex technical arrangements and new forms of movement studies, Whyte's study advocates a quintessentially process -oriented understanding of 'placemaking' that shaped (...) a new bottom-up approach to urban design in the 1970s. (shrink)

William H.Whyte’s instructional film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1979), which chronicles the findings of his decade-long study of people’s behavior in small urban spaces in New York City in the 1970s, offers a precise analysis of the rules of attraction that draw people into places and that keep them attached. By combining direct observation with complex technical arrangements and new forms of movement studies, Whyte’s study advocates a quintessentially process-oriented understanding of ‘placemaking’ that shaped a new (...) bottom-up approach to urban design in the 1970s. (shrink)

If narrating—the feeling of stories, fictional or otherwise—is an inherent possibility of motion pictures , then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films how to construct a formative sequence of events within an absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events with an obviously real visual and social setting? (...) And isn't that paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional filmed narrative? Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the photographic surfaces of things in the material world , overlooks this paradox altogether. It overlooks the fact—extremely relevant to the cinema—that the term "realist" means one thing in its common application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble," "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual world. We see—or think we see—in a painting what we see—or think we see—in the real world.1 But a realistic story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping, then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-century painting/photography with the psychological realism of late-nineteenth-century novel/drama. · 1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers operate in this assumption because they think there is something real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of their holding such a belief. Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

ArgumentFranco's fascist regime in Spain offers the possibility of exploring the complex relationship between media communication practices and the processes of production, circulation, and management of knowledge. The regime persistently used film, and later on television, as indoctrination and disciplining devices. These media thus served to shape the regime's representation, which largely relied on the generation of positive attitudes of adherence to the rulers through people's submission and obedience to experts. This article examines the changing nature of modernization discourses (...) and practices, as a fundamental element of the regime's propaganda strategies, and as portrayed in documentaries produced under its rule. The rhetoric of modernization involved an explicit deficit model of knowledge management, which aimed at legitimating the regime's deeds and policies in its first decades, as we shall see regarding colonial-medical documentaries produced for the official newsreel in the 1940s. However, the focus of such rhetoric, despite its enduring political aims, had to somehow open up as the relationship between experts and non-experts changed, both in epistemological and practical terms, such as in wildlife documentary films produced for television in the 1970s, the regime's last decade. (shrink)

The Human Sciences after the Decade of the Brain brings together exciting new works that address today’s key challenges for a mutual interaction between cognitive neuroscience and the social sciences and humanities. Taking up the methodological and conceptual problems of choosing a neuroscience approach to disciplines such as philosophy, history, ethics and education, the book deepens discussions on a range of epistemological, historical, and sociological questions about the "neuro-turn" in the new millennium. The book’s three sections focus on (i) epistemological (...) questions posed by neurobiologically informed approaches to philosophy and history, (ii) neuroscience’s influence on explanations for social and moral behavior, and (iii) the consequences of the neuro-turn in diverse sectors of social life such as science, education, film, and human self-understanding. This book is an important resource both for students and scholars of cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology interested in the philosophical, ethical, and societal influences of—and on—their work as well as for students and scholars from the social sciences and humanities interested in neuroscience. (shrink)

During the last two decades, many thinkers on Iranian cinema have had many things to say about censorship, especially the issue of the veil imposed on women’s gender by the authorities in Iran. In this paper, I will describe Hamid Dabashi’s narrative as related to the concept of “truth” to show further that the veil issue has reached a new phase in Iran. Although much of what Dabashi defines as the absented body of women in his article “Body less faces: (...) Mutilating modernity and abstracting women in an ‘Islamic cinema’” may still hold, I believe his over-arching narrative doesn’t contribute enough to our understanding of the new relations among the authorities and actresses’ Fashion styles on red carpets. This paper’s method is connected with cultural and visual studies through Roland Barthes’ semiotics. I first focus on Hamid Dabashi’s conception of “truth” and how he believes “truth” is related to Islamic ideology and embodied in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema to further (through analysing photos of Iranian actresses’ clothing who attend festivals) conclude that Iranian women try to adopt new resistances in choosing their costumes compared to the early two decades of post-revolutionary Iran. The presence of Iranian women in festivals especially regarding what they wear has established a new interwoven relationship with authorities which has somewhat not been surveyed properly. By surveying the photos of their fashion and style I conclude that they are in constant negotiation with authorities through what they rebelliously wear. (shrink)

In this essay, I look back at some of the earliest attempts by the first generation of literature-and-medicine scholars to answer the question: Why teach literature and medicine? Reviewing the development of the field in its early years, I examine statements by practitioners to see whether their answers have held up over time and to consider how the rationales they articulated have expanded or changed in the following years and why. Greater emphasis on literary criticism, narrative ethics, narrative theory, and (...) reflective writing has influenced current work in the field in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1970s. The extraordinary growth of interest and work in the field nationally and, especially since 1996, internationally has included practitioners in many additional areas such as disability studies, film studies, therapeutic writing, and trauma studies. Along with the emergence of narrative medicine, this diverse community of scholars and practitioners—affiliated more through their use of narrative methodologies than the teaching of literature—makes the perennial challenge of evaluation and assessment even more complicated. (shrink)

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

Here is a mystery: in 1939, when the Hollywood Studio System, at the peak of its power, produced such films as Gone with the Wind, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Wuthering Heights, the movies' number-one box-office attraction was not Gable, Garbo, Wayne, Garland, Stewart, or Olivier. In 1939, 1940, and 1941, the most popular performer in the American cinema was Mickey Rooney, who owed his success primarily to a low-budget MGM series that concentrated (...) on his character, Andy Hardy. Here is another mystery: at some point in the past decade, film studies, once the most innovative of the humanities disciplines, began to harden into a catechism of predictable questions and answers. By committing itself exclusively to rational critique, film studies left itself overmatched by the enormously popular, seductive, and enigmatic representations that constitute the movies. And by eschewing experimentation with the forms of criticism, film studies ironically cut itself off from the new methods of research and writing prompted by the twentieth century's revolution in communications technologies. Robert Ray's book about Andy Hardy proposes that alternative ways of thinking and writing about the movies can be derived from the humanities' equivalent of science's pure research--the avant-garde arts. Drawing on the Surrealist tradition, with its use of games, chance, fragments, anecdotes, and collage, Ray invents for film studies new forms of research that imitate the cognitive habits encouraged by photography, computers, and the cinema itself. In doing so, he reveals that even the Andy Hardy movies, a routine product of the Hollywood Studio System, were, after all, rich and mysterious. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens-typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and incredible obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? (...) This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in narratives like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world. (shrink)

Miloš Forman began his career as a filmmaker at the Barrandov Studios in Prague in the 1960s and films Amadeus with Barrandov in the early 1980s. The contrast between the high budget historical spectacle of Amadeus and the gently ironic realism of his 1960s films could not be more pronounced. I will explore here the changes that mark both Forman’s own development as a filmmaker between the 1960s and the 1980s as well as considering the impact of normalisation on the (...) Barrandov Studios following the events of August 1968. During the 1960s, aside from its relationship with the young filmmakers of the New Wave, Barrandov supported an extraordinary range of films from popular to historical epics. Under the directorship of Josef Veselý, Barrandov turned out to be an environment that produced films that were successful with the public, formally experimental and politically challenging. The situation at Barrandov after 1968 quickly changed and Forman decided not to return to Czechoslovakia. Forman’s films during the 1970s in the USA brought him a level of international fame and popularity that is unrivalled in the history of Czech cinema but showed a radical departure from the films of the 1960s. This change culminates with Amadeus and his return to Barrandov. Even as his budgets increased massively, there was a loss of quality in the films of the 1970s and beyond and we can see in Amadeus, both as film and as production, a parable of exploitation and decadence that mourns the creative possibilities of the 1960s. (shrink)

Three decades after Chalmers named it, the ‘hard problem’ remains. I suggest a parsimonious solution. Biological dynamic systems interact according to simple rules (while the environment provides simple constraints) and thus self-organize to become a new, more complex dynamic system at the next level. This spiral repeats several times generating a hierarchy of levels. A leap to the next level is frequently creative and surprising. From ants, themselves self-organized according to physical/chemical laws, may emerge an ant colony self-organized according to (...) eusocial laws. A dynamic system need not be material. A living language (immaterial) is a complex adaptive system. Body/brain are material but the next level of complexity, a psychological dynamic system, a thought, feeling, image or ideal, is less material. From several psychological dynamic systems emerges the next level, narrative (immaterial), and from multiple narratives emerges personality. Concrete evidence explains how an early narrative emerges from body-and-brain. Evidence also shows that personality emerges from narrative. Even an objective narrative captures subjectivity since the teller’s choice of content is subjective. I argue that the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ story (movie) you are currently telling yourself (watching) is your conscious experience, ‘what it is like’ for you to be conscious. Adriana Cavarero’s arguments support this. Each level of a hierarchy of dynamic systems must necessarily be homeostatic, at that level. McDowell et al. (2023: submitted, in revision) reported evidence that a dream (a narrative) supports personality homeostatically. Perhaps the evolutionary advantage of conscious experience, also a narrative, has always been that it too supports personality homeostatically. Personality and body/brain, a chimera of symbiotic life-forms, constitute interactionist duality. (shrink)

Cahiers du Cinema is the most prestigious and influential film journal ever published. An anthology devoted entirely to its writings, in English translation, is long overdue. The selections in this volume are drawn from the colorful first decade of Cahiers, 1951-1959, when a group of young iconoclasts racked the world of film criticism with their provocative views an international cinema--American, Italian, and French in particular. They challenged long-established Anglo-Saxon attitudes by championing American popular movies, addressing genres such as (...) the Western and the thriller and the aesthetics of technological developments like CinemaScope, emphasizing mise en scéne as much as thematic content, and assessing the work of individual filmmakers such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray in terms of a new theory of the director as author, auteur, a revolutionary concept at the time. Italian film, especially the work of Rossellini, prompted sharp debates about realism that helped shift the focus of critical discussion from content toward style. The critiques of French cinema have special interest because many of the journal's major contributors and theorists Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol were to become same of France's most important film directors and leaders of the New Wave. Translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, the selections have far the most part never appeared in English until now. Hillier has organized them into topical groupings and has provided introductions to the parts as well as the whale. Together these essays, reviews, discussions, and polemics reveal the central ideas of the Cahiers of the 1950s not as fixed doctrines but as provocative, productive, often contradictory contributions to crucial debates that were to overturn critical thinking about film. (shrink)

It is estimated that about one and a half billion hours of moving images were produced in 1999, twice as many as a decade before. If that rate of growth continues, one hundred billion hours of moving images will be made in the year 2025. In 1895 there were just above forty minutes of moving images to be seen, and most of them are now preserved. Today, for every film made, thousands of them disappear forever without leaving a trace. (...) Meanwhile, public and private institutions are struggling to save the film heritage with largely insufficient resources and ever increasing pressure from the commercial world. Are they wasting their time? Is the much feared and much touted Death of Cinema already occurring before our eyes? Is digital technology the solution to the problem, or just another illusion promoted by the industry? In a provocative essay designed as a collection of aphorisms and letters, Paolo Cherchi Usai brings an impassioned scrutiny to bear on these issues with a critique of film preservation, an indictiment of the crimes perpetuated in its name, and a proposal to give a new analytical framework to a major cultural phenomenon of our time. The Death of Cinema is published in Italian as L'ultimo spettatore . Sulla distruzione del cinema 1999, Editore Il Castoro. (shrink)

The “scarred villain” trope, where facial differences like scars signify moral corruption, is ubiquitous in film (e.g., Batman’s The Joker). Strides by advocacy groups to undermine the trope, however, suggest cinematic representations of facial differences could be improving with time. This preregistered study characterized facial differences in film across cultures (US vs. India) and time (US: 1980-2019, India: 2000-2019). Top-grossing films by country and decade were screened for characters with facial differences. We found that the scarred villain trope (...) has actually worsened with time, although in tandem with progress in also representing non-villainous characters with facial anomalies. Country of origin did not predict the presence of facial differences in villains or heroes. “Action” and “fantasy” movies were the most likely genres to depict villains with facial differences. Finally, villains’ facial differences crossed more facial subunits and were more likely to involve lips, chin, and mandible than when present in heroes. Our findings underscore the need for critical reflection on the role of cultural practices—even when seemingly innocuous—in shaping and maintaining negative biases against already stigmatized groups. (shrink)