Embodied meaning construction

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hermann Kappelhoff ◽  
Cornelia Müller
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Meaning Construction ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Expressive Movement ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Basic Tenet ◽  
Embodied Meaning ◽  
Sensory Qualities ◽  
The Spectator

In this article, we argue that multimodal metaphors are grounded in the dynamics of felt experiences. Felt experiences are inherently affective, with immediate sensory qualities and an affective stance. We suggest that as such, they ground the emergence and activation of metaphors. We illustrate this idea with analyzed data from a film and face-to-face conversation. Our consideration of expressive movement in speech, gestures, and feature film does not therefore target the analysis of the speech and gestures of actors. Rather we suggest an approach firmly rooted in film theory, and which considers films as composed of cinematic expressive movements. The basic tenet of our proposal is as follows: seeing cinematic expressive movements trigger the same kind of felt experience in the spectator as a bodily expressive movement that comes along with speech. Expressive movements are held to provide the experiential ‘embodied’ grounds for the construction of metaphors.

Claude Jutra’s Surfacing (1981) through visual spectacles: Framing female body, voyeurism and paranoia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nausheen Ishaque ◽  
Saba Riaz
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Film Apparatus ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The Spectator

This article examines Claude Jutra’s 1981 film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing in terms of its focus on female body, voyeurism and paranoia. The psychoanalytic perspective of the feminist film theory, with its emphasis on visual pleasure, narcissism, the male gaze, scopophilia, fetishization of the female, the oedipal nature of the narrative and female subjectivity, provides a pragmatic groundwork for the theoretical underpinning of this study. In the same way, the film apparatus, such as editing and camera work, provides a semiotic impetus to the spectator to identify with the perfect male, and not with the distorted female. With its focus on various scenes, generic codes and aspects of the film, the paper furthermore sees how Jutra’s production validates the prejudices of the classical film narrative in the context of the female image, sexual difference, female desire and stereotyped female paranoia. Despite its narrative focus on the quest of a female protagonist, Jutra’s film conforms to the traditional model of the classical cinema wherein the woman is no more than a signifier ‐ an entity that signifies things in relation to men only.

scholarly journals TRAJES DEL PERÚ, REPOSITORIO DIGITAL PARA VALORAR EL PATRIMONIO CULTURAL INMATERIAL

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
César Soria-Morales
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
User Experience ◽  
Web Design ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Digital Repository ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Digital Repositories ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Over Time

La presente investigación muestra la ausencia de un repositorio ordenado de la indumentaria utilizada en el ámbito de las artes del espectáculo, rituales y actos festivos en el contexto peruano. Como consecuencia, la brecha entre el objeto y el espectador se amplía a pesar de diferentes eventos realizados de manera presencial. El traje típico, como parte del patrimonio cultural inmaterial de las danzas, ritos y festividades de una ciudad, evoluciona y se transforma con el transcurso del tiempo por diferentes factores. Un repositorio digital que capture la esencia del traje y su evolución es necesario para conectar y vincular con el objeto cultural. En este sentido, a partir de las características definidas en el Ux Honeycomb la investigación propone determinar la interacción entre estas características en un repositorio digital de trajes para generar valor a la comunidad. Para lograr los objetivos, se ha realizado una revisión de literatura, un análisis de repositorios digitales y entrevistas a expertos, profesionales y alumnos de carreras creativas. Los factores de valor encontrados en el repositorio digital a partir de la investigación son: preservación, conexión, representación y conocimiento, los cuales son complementarios. A partir de la interacción, producida por la fuerza interna y externa, de dos o más valores mencionados anteriormente se genera la utilidad del repositorio digital. Las relaciones e interacciones entre los elementos aportan funcionalidad y vitalidad al repositorio. Palabras clave: Repositorio de trajes, valor, patrimonio cultural, user experience, diseño web. AbstractThe research herein shows the absence of an orderly repository of the garments worn at the show arts environment, rituals, and festive acts in the Peruvian context. Consequently, the gap between the object and the spectator broadens regardless of several events carried out in a face-to-face manner. The typical costume, as part of the intangible material cultural heritage of the dances, rites, and festivities of a city, evolves and transforms over time due to different factors. A digital repository that captures the essence of the costume and its evolution is necessary to connect and link with the cultural object. In this sense, based on the characteristics defined in the Ux Honeycomb, the research proposes to determine the interaction between these characteristics in a digital costume repository to generate value to the community. In order to achieve the objectives, a review of the literature was made, as well as an analysis of digital repositories and interviews with experts, professionals, and students of creative careers. From the interaction, produced by the internal and external force, of two or more values mentioned above the utility of the digital repository is generated. The relationships and interactions between the elements bring functionality and vitality to the repository. Keywords: Costumes repository, value, cultural heritage, user experience, web design.

Trinh T. Minh-ha

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yelizaveta Goldfarb
Keyword(s):  
Music Composition ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Still Images ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The University ◽  
Female Filmmakers ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist

Born in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1952 and raised in Saigon Trinh T. Minh-ha received her schooling in music composition in Saigon before immigrating to the United States in 1970 for her higher education. In addition to her filmmaking, she composes music; creates multimedia installations, publishes on literary and film theory, feminism, and postcolonialism; and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley’s Gender and Women’s Studies Department. Trinh’s essay, literary, and theoretical work has been written about extensively by academics, and analysis of her films and her filmmaking has been greatly influential in visual ethnography studies. Trinh’s films also have been favored by postcolonial, feminist, and essay-film theorists, with some resistance from theorists of African postcolonialism for her outsider perspective and some resistance from feminism theorists for her participation in the very models of narrative and representation that she works to challenge. In opposition to these criticisms, many theorists have written defenses of Trinh’s work and process. Trinh herself has also given interviews and written essays that acknowledge that her work necessarily incites these criticisms. Trinh’s films take the form of ethnographic documentary, political documentary, essay film, and allegorical feature film, and they travel between Africa, Asia, and North America. In her work, she revisits themes of postcolonialism and neocolonialism, translation, multiplicity of identity, feminism, filmmaking itself, and, in more recent years, the digital turn. Trinh’s films emphasize process and ambiguity over direct message, and so her films tend to be formally essayistic, analyzing or thinking through subjects and theories as they are presented. In this way, her films have often been described by critics as genre crossing and hybrid. Like other female filmmakers who aim to garner some control over their image and their professional reception, Trinh has republished her creative work (as still images, scripts, and installation programs) and select interviews in several collections. These books also provide select bibliographies of reviews, additional interviews, and articles on Trinh’s work.

Technology and the Ethics of Spectatorship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascale Aebischer
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Live Streaming ◽  
Conceptual Spaces ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Digital Hologram ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
The Spectator

This chapter revisits debates regarding the use of technology to enhance or remediate performances in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of the ethical encounter as a face-to-face encounter between a subject and her/his other. Building on these debates and Robert Weimann’s distinction between locus and platea, it suggests that performance theory’s emphasis on the physical co-presence of spectator and performer undervalues the experience of the spectator. Using three productions that use digital media as examples, the chapter demonstrates how online live streaming (in Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure), digital hologram projection (in the McGuires’ Ophelia’s Ghost), and the use of an online stage (in the RSC’s collaboration with Google+ on #dream40) each harness the affordances of digital media to create conceptual spaces in which spectators can experience ethical encounters. Digital media thus open up distinct ways of experiencing dilemmas explored by Shakespeare’s plays.

scholarly journals Making Sense of Complex Narration in Perfect Blue

Animation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Antonio Loriguillo-López ◽  
José Antonio Palao-Errando ◽  
Javier Marzal-Felici
Keyword(s):  
Information Flow ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Cognitive Illusions

Although identified as a feature of the film by both critics and researchers, the narrative complexity of Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, Madhouse, 1997) has been ambiguously defined. In this article, the authors examine the complex narration in Kon’s first feature film, equivocal and obscure in its more confusing points, through a narratological analysis of the film’s most ambiguous scenes. Using cognitive film theory as introduced by David Bordwell and Edward Branigan, they link its approach in terms of the modulation of information flow throughout the film – high knowledgeability, high self-consciousness and (occasionally) low communicativeness – with the conventions of the slasher genre. Their analysis of the more perplexing scenes in Perfect Blue is reinforced by monitoring the veiled changes of focalization between the film’s three focalizers: Mima, Uchida (aka Me-Mania) and Rumi. In order to do this, they explore how the narration – in the tradition of contemporary puzzle films – makes use of judgements, preconceptions and cognitive illusions in the spectators’ activity to conceal Rumi’s involvement in the persecution of Mima and the murders committed. In the conclusion, they associate the film’s complex narration with its critical commentary on the representation of Japanese pop idols (and former idols) and the state of audiovisual entertainment in Japan.

From Figures of Paradox to a Philosophy of Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-254
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Fractal Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Incompleteness Theorem ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Zeno's Paradox

This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.

scholarly journals The Art of Opera: Variability of Artistic Languages of Screen Forms

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Alexandra Vadimovna Mesyanzhinova
Keyword(s):  
Feature Film ◽  
Movie Theaters ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
Digital Format ◽  
Multimedia Technologies ◽  
Live Broadcast ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Franco Zeffirelli ◽  
La Traviata

Specifics of an artistic language of screen forms of opera and its variations (movies, TV performances, live broadcasts in movie theatres) could be explicated successfully using a case study of different interpretations of the same work. The article retrospectively illustrates variability of an artistic language of the operatic screen forms using a case study of screen adaptations of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata (1853). The article analyzes a film-opera by Franco Zeffirelli (1982), a film-opera by Mario Lanfranchi (1968), TV-broadcast of Adrian Marthalers staging of La Traviata at Zurich Central station (2008), and the live broadcast in movie theaters of Willy Deckers production at the Metropolitan Opera (2012). The author presumes that the format of an opera-film through interacting with the audience primarily on emotional and symbolic levels appears as static. TV live broadcasts of opera productions, which have replaced filmed opera, convey the completeness and stasis of what is happening on screen thus allowing the viewer to feel the spontaneity of theatrical action and actually ushering the spectator into the space of each frame. Live broadcasts of opera performances in movie theatres create a unique symbiosis of arts: a live, devoid of stasis and predetermination, feature film emerges. Nowadays, when theatres are increasingly offering live broadcasts of their performances in Internet, it is possible to state that the operatic art is not just oriented towards the screen arts but is searching new opportunities to adapt itself to the screen format, and can no longer exist independently off the screen. All this affects the artistic language of screen and theatrical forms of the operatic art. Although the operatic art interacts well with the multimedia technologies, the issues of interpretation and transformation of the artistic forms, which arise when recordings of elapsed performances are converted to digital format and viewed on modern devices, require a very delicate approach. Tablet computers and other media devices, which are able to reproduce nearly every recording, in a certain sense, allow customization of the technical and aesthetic forms of an art piece according to the users preferences, thus introducing personalized artistic accents of a viewer.

scholarly journals Hetkiä elämän virrasta. Kerronnallinen ja kokemuksellinen aika Joki-elokuvassa

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaisa Hiltunen
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Cinematic Time ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Film Form ◽  
Narrative Element

Hetkiä elämän virrasta. Kerronnallinen ja kokemuksellinen aika Joki-elokuvassaJarmo Lampelan elokuvassa Joki (Suomi 2001) kerrotaan kuusi samanaikaista, toisiaan sivuavaa tarinaa, joissa joukko pikkukaupungin ihmisiä joutuu valintojen eteen tai kohtaamaan elämän mullistavia asioita. Eri-ikäisten henkilöhahmojensa kautta Joki piirtää esiin koko elämänkaaren.Artikkelissa Jokea tarkastellaan ajan näkökulmasta kiinnittämällä huomiota ajan eri tasoihin ja ulottuvuuksiin. Aikaa tarkastellaan yhtäältä osana elokuvan muotoa ja toisaalta katsojan ja elokuvan välisessä kohtaamisessa syntyvänä ilmiönä. Lisäksi kysytään, miten Joki filosofisen sisältönsä kautta tematisoi aikaan liittyviä kysymyksiä.Kertovassa elokuvassa aika kytkeytyy kerrontaan. Joen tapauksessa tämä ulottuvuus korostuu, koska elokuvan rakenne poikkeaa tavanomaisesta lineaarisesta ja yksilinjaisesta kerronnasta. Samanaikaiset tapahtumat kerrotaan peräkkäisinä episodeina. Joen episodimaista rakennetta analysoidaan muun muassa David Bordwellin verkostonarratiivi-käsitteen avulla. Aikaa kerronnallisena ilmiönä käsitellään elokuvateorian ja Paul Ricoeurin kerronnan ja ajan suhdetta käsittelevän filosofian valossa.Myös Joen katsoja tulee tavallista tietoisemmaksi ajasta joutuessaan suhteuttamaan tarinalinjoja toisiinsa. Elokuvan aika on aina kokemuksellista siinä mielessä, että se on katsojaa varten rakennettua ja syntyy elokuvan ja katsojan kohtaamisessa. Joessa aika on kokemuksellista myös siinä mielessä, että se ilmaisee henkilöhahmojensa aikaan sidottuja kokemuksia. Näitä kokemuksellisia ulottuvuuksia tarkastellaan ajan fenomenologian ja fenomenologisesti suuntautuneen elokuvateorian avulla.Aika ei ole redusoitavissa pelkästään kerronnalliseksi ilmiöksi, vaikka Joessa aika kytkeytyy vahvasti kerrontaan. Artikkelissa pohditaan lisäksi millä muulla tavoin aika ilmenee Joessa kuin osana kerrontaa. Moments in the Flow of Life. Narrative and Experiential Time in The RiverJarmo Lampela’s film The River (Joki, Suomi 2001) narrates six simultaneous and intersecting stories in which small town characters are faced by important choices and life-changing events. Through the characters of differing ages The River outlines the course of a human life.In this article I ask how time is manifested in The River. I examine the many dimensions of time that can be reached through cinema. On the one hand, time is examined as a part of film form, and on the other, as experiential. Moreover, the article asks how The River thematizes time through its philosophical content.In The River, narrative time is emphasized, because its structure with six storylines deviates from the typical linear and unitary narrative. The six simultaneous events in The River are told as subsequent episodes. David Bordwell’s concept of network narrative is used to analyze this episodic structure. Film theory and Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative are used to address questions related to narrative time.The spectator becomes conscious of time when she has to figure out what the relationships between the storylines are. Cinematic time is invariably experiential, because it is constructed for the spectator, and comes into existence in the encounter of the film and the spectator. In The River, time is experiential also in the sense that its narrative expresses the personal experiences of its characters that are temporal in nature. This experiential dimension of cinematic time is examined in the framework of phenomenology of time and film theoretical adaptations of phenomenology.Time in cinema is more than a narrative phenomenon. Thus, the article examines how time is manifested both as a narrative and a non-narrative element in The River.

scholarly journals Beyond the Screen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenio De Angelis
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Active Agent ◽  
Art World ◽  
Role Changes ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Japanese Art ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Movie Theatre

Intermedial practices are a common trademark of the Japanese art world in the sixties and seventies. This article focuses on a case study of such practices, namely the relationship between artwork and audience in Terayama Shūji’s cinema. Moving from the author’s theatrical theories on spectatorship (kankyakuron), the paper applies those theories to Terayama’s experimental movies, analysing how they are adapted to the cinematic medium. This study conceives a three-phased system, where the spectator is progressively brought towards the screen and his role changes from passive viewer to active agent. The study adopts an approach based on performance studies and avant-garde film theory to reveal how Terayama moulds the movie-going practice into a performative and collective event, using the movie theatre as a theatrical stage.

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