The Part Is Greater Than the Whole

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-83
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Sound Design ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Formal Systems ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Infinite Array ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Film Form

Pure cinema is defined in terms of the interrelationship of formal “fragments” that subtend an infinite array of formal systems within the work. In this model, the aesthetic philosophy of the fragment is developed through the seminal work of Raymond Bellour, one of the most astute of the classical Hitchcockian theorists. The fragment structures aesthetic form across mise en scène, montage, sound design, and narrative. The philosophy of the fragment is read in further detail and greater philosophical specificity through the historical tension between Eisenstein’s montage as whole and Deleuze’s attempts to read montage through the itinerary of the part. The resonance or vibration of the part is read as intensity, structuring the “excessive affect” that underpins the aesthetic of the fragment in film form. The aesthetic of the fragment is revealed in close formal analyses in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Argento’s Suspiria, and De Palma’s Union Station sequence in The Untouchables.

Music You Can Hear

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-184
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Sound Design ◽  
Harmonic Structure ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Rear Window ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Harmonic Progression ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Film Form

Pure cinema and the aesthetic of the fragment is applied to the evolution of sound design in the avant-garde experimental silent cinema of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter argues that sound design and production were conceived as an integral part of pure cinema, tracing the emergence and development of this philosophy within the avant-garde experimentation with film form. Hitchcock articulates a philosophy of pure sound cinema in a number of critical pieces from the early 1930s and is clearly influenced by European philosophies of the early sound image. Sound is read as a discretized contrapuntal aesthetic form, achieving the abstraction of noise as patterned pitch (melodic), harmonic, and rhythmic form, in close analyses of Rear Window, The Birds, the imitation of Vertigo’s “Madeleine” theme in Pino Donaggio’s score for Dressed to Kill, and Argento’s cutting of a narrative segment of Deep Red to a standard blues I–IV–V harmonic progression. The chapter concludes with a study of Bernard Herrmann’s concluding sonic motif in Psycho as the purity of sound form in its atonal harmonic structure.

scholarly journals Beneath sci-fi sound

2012 ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Nessa Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Independent Cinema ◽  
Surround Sound ◽  
Industry Standard ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The Aesthetic

Primer is a very low budget science-fiction film that deals with the subject of time travel; however, it looks and sounds quite distinctively different from other films associated with the genre. While Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi relies on “sound spectacle” as a key attraction, in contrast Primer sounds “lo-fi” and screen-centred, mixed to two channel stereo rather than the now industry-standard 5.1 surround sound. Although this is partly a consequence of the economics of its production, the aesthetic approach to the soundtrack is what makes Primer formally distinctive. Including a brief exploration of the role of sound design in science-fiction cinema more broadly, I analyse aspects of Primer’s soundtrack and sound-image relations to demonstrate how the soundplays around with time rather than space, substituting the spatial playfulness of big-budget Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster sound with temporal playfulness, in keeping with its time-travel theme. I argue that Primer’s aesthetic approach to the soundtrack is “anti-spectacle”, working with its mise-en-scène to emphasise the mundane and everyday instead of the fantastical, in an attempt to lend credibility and “realism” to its time-travel conceit. Finally, with reference to scholarship on American independent cinema, I will demonstrate how Primer’s stylistic approach to the soundtrack is configured as a marketable identifier of its “indie”-ness.

STUDY OF DECORATIVE VARIETY IN GORONTALO KARAWO FABRIC IN AESTHETIC AND SYMBOLIC ELEMENTS

ARTic ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 121-134
Author(s):  
Apsari Dj Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Manufacturing Process ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Decorative Motifs ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
The Aesthetic

This study aims to examine the decorative types of Gorontalo karawo fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. Researchers want to know as made in the research design, aspects that are present in the decoration of fabrics in aesthetic and symbolic elements. This study uses a number of related theories to get results, and as a determinant, the authors use aesthetic theory, as well as historical approaches. With this theoretical basis, the author seeks to describe the aesthetic aspects and symbolic meanings that exist in Gorontalo karawo fabric. Through the data collection of the chosen motif and provide a classification of motives, the part is used as a reference for research material. The results showed that Gorontalo filigree had an aesthetic value consisting of unity formed from the overall decorative motifs displayed, complexity formed by complexity in the manufacturing process, and intensity of seriousness in the manufacturing process or the impression displayed on the filigree motif. The aesthetic form also reflects the diversity of meanings for communication, such as the symbol of a leader with his noble instincts, a symbol of cultural cooperation, which is worth maintaining, and ideas about nature conservation. This research proves that the decoration in Gorontalo filigree cloth (karawo) does not only act as a visual value, but also as a communication of cultural meanings and social status. Of all these distinctive motifs show a relationship between humans and humans and humans with nature. The influence of culture from the Philippines is also known to have a strong influence on the emergence of the Gorontalo filigree namely manila filigree.

Brief Analysis for the Aesthetic Form of Chinese Garden Art

2014 ◽  
Vol 584-586 ◽  
pp. 650-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bian Ling Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Development History ◽  
Artistic Conception ◽  
High Uniformity ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

Chinese garden art has developed gradually along with the neutralization--lasting appeal--artistic conception trend till to the peak, meanwhile, those aesthetic forms can be existed synchronously with historical advancement, logic arrangement in parallel and correspondence as well as abundance and deepening of the interior connotation and exterior extension, which represent the high uniformity of the development history and logics of Chinese garden art. Nowadays, the landscape garden development is required to probe its root, explore its cultural soul, so as to base itself upon the garden industry all over the world. Additionally, the function of traditional aesthetic form will show the powerful functions, declare publicly the deep influence of modernized landscape garden development.

scholarly journals Development of painting in Maratha area

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 198-202
Author(s):  
Sushma Jain
Keyword(s):  
Madhya Pradesh ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many

The painting tradition in the Maratha region dates back to prehistoric times. Human beings have left examples of paintings with a very careful reflex of behavior. In the primitive tendons of Madhya Pradesh, we are surprised today by the many linear signs of the human and the aesthetic form of the weapons, following the craving to be cultured and ornate on that barbar. मराठा क्षेत्र में चित्रकला परंपरा का प्रारंभ प्रागैतिहासिक काल से होता है। मानव ने बहुत ही प्रांरभ में व्यवहार की सजगता के साथ चित्रों के उदाहरण छोड़े हैं। मध्यप्रदेश की आदिम कंदराओं में हमें उस बर्बर पर सुसंस्कृत और सुअलंकृत होने की लालसा के अनुगामी मानव के रचे अनेक रेखीय चिन्ह तथा अस्त्र शस्त्रों के सौंदर्य प्रधान रूप आज हमंें आश्चर्य चकित करते है।1

Dam Epilogue: The Textual Person

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Crook
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic

Angkaiyakmin notions of a person's efficacy circulating beyond themselves and combining with others is used in this chapter as a vantage point on anthropological interpretative artefacts, and the section argues that these contemporary aesthetics of anthropological knowledge-making produce interpretative forms after a particular understanding of subjectivity and personhood. The chapter specifically compares the capacities of Bolivip and anthropological knowledge-practices, and considers how each form of knowledge adheres to a powerful aesthetic that is taken for granted by the respective practitioners. Recognition and currency for artefacts – the capacity to animate analytic and social relations in others – is governed by exhibiting this demanding aesthetic form. The chapter then addresses the insights from Bolivip knowledge-practices to anthropological knowledge-practices: by adopting the vantage point of ‘the textual person’, the aesthetic principles through which anthropological knowledge is given form are outlined, and the means by which anthropologists circulate parts of themselves to others – their efficacy and ‘relations’ – are examined. The ‘textual person’ figure makes explicit the form of subjective relationality that informs anthropological interpretation.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...

The Fragmented Frame 1

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Form ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Formal Potential ◽  
Abstract Shape ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Visual Frame ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
Topographic Representation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site

The aesthetic of the fragment is examined in detailed analyses of the Hitchcockian frame. The frame is both the formal composition underpinning mise en scène and the opening into the infinite play of fragmented images within visual, aural, and narrative form. The frame is a site of formal “expressivity,” “abstraction,” “topographic representation,” and “schematization.” The fragmented frame is revealed in the modernist experimentation of form through color, line, and shape in North by Northwest, the topographic frame in The Birds, and the canting of the visual frame in Shadow of a Doubt. The chapter concludes that the representational image forming the diegesis is overwhelmed in Hitchcock’s experimental works by the formal potential of abstract shape and pattern.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Rear Window ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Film Style ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Lengthy Discussion

Hitchcock’s clearest articulation of a pure cinema method appears in a lengthy discussion with François Truffaut in 1962. Discussing landmark works such as Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock frames pure cinema as a philosophical approach to film style. It is both medium-specific and part of a larger narrative describing the evolution of moving image art forms in the twentieth century. The introduction situates the relationship between Hitchcock and his “imitators,” filmmakers who reflexively evolved the pure cinema method. Brian De Palma emerges in the 1970s as the Hitchcockian imitator par excellence, the New Hollywood director who strove to take Hitchcock’s pure cinematic method further in terms of mise en scène, montage, and sound design.

The Moral Aesthetics of Compulsory Ultrasound Viewing and the Theological Future of Abortion

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Hovey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Us States ◽  
Moral Response ◽  
Abortion Debate ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Aesthetic

By law, women seeking abortions in some US states must undergo compulsory ultrasound viewing. This article examines the moral significance of this practice, especially as understood by pro-life religious groups, in light of Foucault’s recently published lectures on ‘The Will to Know’ and the place of the aesthetic. How does the larger abortion-debate strategy of ‘showing’ and ‘seeing’ images—whether of living or dead fetuses—work as an aesthetic form of argument that intends to evoke a moral response in the absence of reason-giving? The article draws on recent, parallel debates regarding disgust before concluding with a theological response to the priority of will over knowledge and vision over action as commentary on the future of abortion debate and law, especially in the United States.

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