The Presence of the Past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Picture Show ◽  
Historical Past

In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Presence And Absence ◽  
Historical Past

In film culture of the late sixties and seventies, often between the cracks of more dominant forms and topics of discourse, we can locate a concern with the historical past as a complex field of imagined experiential presence. This concern was fueled by and found expressive purchase in the era commonly known as the New Hollywood cinema. This “presence” of the past played out not just as cultural allegory, but as a complex dialectic of presence and absence that became tangible in diverse genres and aesthetic sensibilities. These sensibilities were mutually inscribed into broader culture discourses of the sixties and seventies, as well as into the transformational changes of film culture, criticism, theory, and industrial filmmaking. Stylistically, they also become significant to the increasing diversity and eclecticism of film music and the development of the creative category of sound design.

scholarly journals Uneasy Listening

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Yair Rubinstein
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interesting Object ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Musical Genres

This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI’s automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. As a result, notable AI-music programmers like composer David Cope and software developers Flow Machines have galvanized the public’s interest in AI-generated music not by creating completely alien sonic forms, but by simulating popular styles like rock and classical music. Consequently, listeners often report AI music sounds unnervingly familiar rather than aesthetically inaccessible. I argue that it is precisely AI music’s devotion to uncannily approximating its human forebears that makes it such an interesting object of contemporary sonic production. It also provides a useful historical parallel to a short-lived musical movement from the 2000s known as sonic hauntology. Much like AI programmers, producers of sonic hauntology applied digital technology to the sonic past. However, they confronted it in more deliberately political and subversive ways. Sampling sonic artifacts and cultural marginalia from the mid-20th century, sonic hauntologists created eerie soundscapes designed to challenge mass culture’s erasure of history’s political depth, or what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as late capitalism’s cultural logic of postmodernism. While AI music has yet to be exploited in this way, I argue its inherently “uneasy listening” carries the potential to further sonic hauntology’s project of repurposing the sonic past to estrange listeners from the present moment.

Hellenistic literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-136
Author(s):  
Anke Walter
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Apollonius Rhodius ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dynamic Time ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
The City

In the Histories, the fourth-century historian Ephorus engages with one of the central aetia of the past: the story of how Apollo founded the oracle in Delphi (F 31b). Ephorus shifts the emphasis from the continuity of archaic time to the more dynamic time of the history of men on earth. In his discussion of the Spartan constitution and its origin (F 149), Ephorus uses aetia to give a nuanced picture of the interplay of continuity and change in human affairs. Callimachus, in the story of Acontius and Cydippe in his Aetia, juxtaposes the reference to the continuity of Acontius’ line with the eventful history of Acontius’ island of Chios, thus raising the question how stable the aetion can actually be. Rather than the aetiological formula, the beauty of the young couple, made immortal in Callimachus’ poetry, guarantees the story’s eternity. In Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, aetia are prominent in creating an intense moment of the sacred presence of the god, in which the present moment of the performance is just as much involved as the historical past of the city of Cyrene and the mythical past of Apollo’s deeds on earth. The aetia employed in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica function as hinges between the earlier foundational deeds of the Olympian gods and the new earth-bound time-frame of the Argonauts, which is carefully measured out in terms of the days and nights the Argonauts spend at sea or on land. Overall, however, the aetia of the Argonautica emphasize continuity and eliminate further change, creating a present that is remarkably stable, while being anchored in several layers of the past

The past in the present: Understanding David Claerbout’s temporal aesthetics

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy S. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Temporal Concepts ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Discrete Moment ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Present Understanding

David Claerbout’s recent video and photographic works generate a distinct temporal aesthetic. In particular, these works experiment with time by situating the historical past not as a discrete moment in time, but rather as an actively engaged part of the present moment. Through the use of digital technologies Claerbout re-presents, experiments with, and opens up time as non-linear and complex, in effect producing a new experience of temporality through a mediation of the past. Using Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of time, informed by Michel Serres’ and Roland Barthes’ work on photography, I explore a theory of time through these artworks in which the past is understood as transpiring within the present, attempting to understand Deleuze’s temporal concepts aesthetically, not just philosophically.

Performing States-Of-In-Between: Dogs, Parrots, and Other Humans in Recent Austrian Performances

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilke
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Recent Developments

Every late spring since 1951, the Wiener Festwochen bring performers from around the world to Vienna for an opportunity to share recent developments in performance styles and present them to a Viennese public that seems to be increasingly open to experimentation. These festival weeks solidify a specific form of Viennese self-understanding and self-representation as a culture that is rooted in performance. This essay seeks to link two recent Austrian performances—one of them was part of the Wiener Festwochen in 2016, the other was staged in downtown Linz during the past few years—to this Austrian and specifically Viennese culture of performance by reading them as contemporary articulations of a tradition of radical performance art that can be traced back to the Viennese Actionism of the sixties and later feminist articulations in the seventies and eighties. They play on the dramatic effect of these actions, specifically their joy in cruelty, chaos, and orgiastic intoxication, by staging regressions and thus making visible what has been dammed up and repressed in contemporary society.1 Just as their historical models, these two performances merge the performing and the fine arts and they highlight provocative, controversial, and, at times, violent content. But they do it in an interspecies context that adds an entire layer of complexity to the project of societal and cultural critique.

Ways of Being and Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Better Than

This chapter develops a version of ontological pluralism that respects two common intuitions about time: that the present moment is metaphysically distinguished but not in such a way that the past is unreal. The version of ontological pluralism developed—presentist existential pluralism (PEP)—embraces two modes of being, the mode of being that present objects enjoy and the mode of being that past objects enjoy. The author argues that this view fares at least as well, and probably better, than other views in which the present is metaphysically distinguished. The chapter also introduces another form of ontological superiority called “levels of being.”

Feeling Film: Time, Space, and the Third Image

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.

scholarly journals Transdiagnostic or Disorder Specific? Indicators of Substance and Behavioral Addictions Nominated by People with Lived Experience

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyoun S. Kim ◽  
David C. Hodgins ◽  
Benjamin Kim ◽  
T. Cameron Wild
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Behavioral Addictions ◽  
Addictive Behaviors ◽  
Canadian Province ◽  
The Past ◽  
Patterns Of Use ◽  
Content Analyses ◽  
Prevention And Treatment ◽  
Qualitative Responses

Using a transdiagnostic perspective, the present research examined the prominent indicators of substance (alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, tobacco) and behavioral (gambling, video games, sex, shopping, work, eating) addictions nominated by people with lived experiences. Specifically, we aimed to explore whether the perceived most important indicators nominated were consistent across the 10 addictions or differed based on the specific addiction. Additionally, we explored gender differences in the perceived most important indicators across addictive behaviors. A large online sample of adults recruited from a Canadian province (n = 3503) were asked to describe the most important signs or symptoms of problems with these substances and behaviors. Open-ended responses were analyzed among a subsample of 2603 respondents (n = 1562 in the past year) who disclosed that they had personally experienced a problem with at least one addiction listed above. Content analyses revealed that dependence (e.g., craving, impairments in control) and patterns of use (e.g., frequency) were the most commonly perceived indicators for both substance and behavioral addictions, accounting for over half of all the qualitative responses. Differences were also found between substance and behavioral addictions regarding the proportion of the most important signs nominated. Consistent with the syndrome model of addiction, unique indicators were also found for specific addictive behaviors, with the greatest proportion of unique indicators found for eating. Supplemental analyses found that perceived indicators across addictions were generally gender invariant. Results provide some support for a transdiagnostic conceptualization of substance and behavioral addictions. Implications for the study, prevention, and treatment of addictions are discussed.

Media Genealogy of the Contagion: Syphilis — AIDS — COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-112
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Control Society ◽  
Object Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
Society Of Control

The article is devoted to a genealogy of the attitude toward viruses in social and political practice in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. The disciplinary society and the society of control have taken on a completely new configuration since the HIV crisis in the 1980s. AIDS and now COVID-19 as phenomena of social crisis have had a great impact on (sexual) relationships and have also caused a significant change in the social and political order. Epidemics and pandemics mobilize political structures and constitute power relations, thus changing the way bodies are controlled, establishing new differentiations and redefining what disease is. The authors trace the development of discourses about syphilis, AIDS and COVID-19 to describe how knowledge about the disease is being generated today; it has origins in myth and would be unthinkable without aesthetic visualization and mass media technologies. Syphilis was an exact fit for the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which stigmatized bodily pleasure and abstracted pathology by activating projection mechanisms as a sign of the Other. However, AIDS already differed significantly from that paradigm because other medical technologies are used to define HIV, and that has affected the epistemology of the disease and epidemic. The article considers HIV/AIDS as a transitional model that forms a bridge between the epidemics of the past (leprosy, plague, smallpox, syphilis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all there is a change in the biopolitical regime so that bodies are no longer controlled and regulated through sexuality. COVID-19 is a new form of sociality which is not based on the exclusion of “pathological” forms of sexuality or on “deviant” or “perverted” bodies, but involves the object-based, microlevel of relations between viruses, the immune system, and the human genome, which are then mapped with distortions and substitutions onto social relationships and practices. The authors use the term “delegated control” in a new context and introduce the original term “omniopticum” to describe the new regime of biopolitics and the “control society” in the post-COVID era.

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