The Erotics of Cinematic Listening

Author(s):  
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

This chapter explores cinematic listening by bringing together ideas from contemporary musical and sound studies, the concept of erotics in art championed in the 1970s feminist discourse, and ideas of “new materialism” in film studies. It emphasizes the sensuousness of film form as something distinct from sensory overload, and suggests that a sensuous mode of listening is inherently musical. Focusing on films including Arrival (2016), Under the Skin (2013), Elephant (2003), and Tree of Life (2011), the chapter shows that the erotics of cinematic listening is facilitated by the practice of foregrounding the materiality of music and an increasingly integrated approach to the soundtrack.

Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Chung

Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy's foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.


Author(s):  
Keith Withall

This chapter examines the second decade of cinema, which runs approximately from 1905 to the start of World War I in 1914. This period sees the establishment of an industrial organisation for film, both in Europe and the USA. The development of the industry involves two key concepts in film studies: vertical and horizontal integration. Essentially, as the industry developed and firms grew larger, they attempted to exert ever greater control on the market. The key was exhibition, which is where the actual money from admissions was made. Both France and the USA are interesting models for study in this development, and each has distinctive features. The study should include as many of the key factors that enabled this growth in monopoly. These include the development of the dedicated film theatre, the introduction of a rental system, and the developments in programming and film form. Also, there is the rich area of stardom as this period sees the establishment of the film centre Hollywood.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jordan Schonig

The Introduction examines why “movement” is often invoked as a term in film criticism and film theory but is rarely analyzed as an aspect of film form. The reason for this is twofold. First, because film theory has largely examined movement only as a defining property of the cinematic medium, movement is rarely singled out in film criticism. Second, because film theory has inherited the philosophical intuition that form is primarily spatial rather than temporal, formal analysis in film studies tends to break up the temporal flow of film into static units, such as in shot breakdowns and frame analyses. In film studies, then, “form” and “movement” are conceptually incompatible. As a means of thinking motion and form together, the Introduction proposes the concept of “motion forms,” generic structures, patterns, or shapes of motion. The Introduction then explores the philosophical roots of the motion form in phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, and explains how such a way of thinking about cinematic motion differs from other phenomenological approaches in film studies. Finally, the introduction outlines the six chapters of the book, each of which investigates a particular motion form that emerges throughout the history of cinema.


Paragrana ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-214
Author(s):  
Birgit Althans ◽  
Elise v. Bernstorff ◽  
Carla J. Maier ◽  
Jule Korte ◽  
Janna R. Wieland

Abstract In diesem Fazit & Ausblick werden nun die in der Einleitung formulierten Themenfelder, in denen wir auch die Anschlüsse an Arbeiten und Forschungsgebiete der Historischen Anthropologie gegeben sahen, wieder aufgegriffen. Dies geschieht entlang von Aspekten, die durch die responses aufgeworfen wurden, und die wir hinsichtlich unserer Forschung zu Arenen transkultureller Bildung weiterdenken. Ein wichtiger Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf den Transmissionseffekten, die sich im Forschungsprozess, auch unter Einbezug der responses, zwischen den Forschungsfeldern – den Arenen Theater und Schule – ergeben haben. Daran anschließend formulieren wir die Implikationen, die sich daraus für die Weiterentwicklung unserer Methoden ergeben haben, sowie einen Ausblick, der sich den Möglichkeiten der Erweiterung der Forschung zu kultureller Bildung unter Einbezug postkolonialer und transkultueller Analyseperspektiven widmet. Wir haben in den drei Method Labs„Method Mixing: Methoden der Praxis in postmigrantischen Kontaktzonen“ (November 2017); „Towards new methodologies in transcultural education: Performativity of the digital, Material Feminism and transcultural analysis” (Juni 2018) und “Arenas of transcultural Education: artistic research, art based methods, New Materialism and Sensory Ethnography“ (Januar 2019). Praktiker*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen, die aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen und Forschungsschwerpunkten kommen und in verschiedenen europäischen Universitäten und Institutionen forschen und arbeitenSound Studies, Historische und pädagogische Anthropologie; Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft, Anglistik und Postcolonial Studies, Global Childhood & Youth Studies, International Childhood Studies, Grundschulpädagogik, Theaterpädagogik und Dramaturgie sowie Lehrerbildung, künstlerische Forschung und kulturelle Bildung., eine Auswahl des über drei Jahre im Feld erhobenen Materials, das Method Mixing der beiden Arenen Schule und Theater, sowie unsere diffraktionellen Analysen, die entstandenen Interferenzen, und das sich daraus entwickelnde Method Mixing des Projekts vorgestellt. Nach intensiven, über zwei Tage andauernden Diskussionen über das unseren Gästen der Method Labs vorgestellte Material haben wir diese um eine Verschriftlichung ihrer responses gebeten. Die Wahl des Themas sowie des Umfangs und der Form wurden dabei freigestellt. Herausgekommen sind sehr unterschiedliche, und, wie wir finden, im Kern ebenfalls diffraktionell operierende Antworten, die in den vorangegangen Kapiteln vorgestellt wurden.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Agustinus Dwi Nugroho

The Artist is a film that uses the silent era techniques to visualize the film. This study sought to uncover what the motivation behind the use of techniques to the silent era films with his observation of the text of both aspects of the narrative as well as aspects of the technique. The findings of the observation process could be the basis of analysis. The Artist makes this silent era technology into a cinematic technique to visualize the film. This has become a strong motivation and able to demonstrate the strength of the story as a whole that tells about the silent era transition process from the perspective of the player. The silent era techniques were used to make this technique as a force in the film. This study focuses on how the technique of the silent era emerged as a new technique in the world of film and brings new perspective in film studies. This new technique emerged because it was never used fully in the present.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-202
Author(s):  
Pansy Duncan

Across the past decade or so, “politically committed” strains of film studies have undergone a much-vaunted aesthetic turn. It is now widely acknowledged that political struggle is as likely to converge in and around the tangible, audible and/or visible surface of the filmic image as it is to involve forces operating “within,” “beyond” or “behind” that surface. Yet while this so-called aesthetic turn has restored questions of film sound, film form and film colour to the film-political agenda, questions of film lighting are yet to feature prominently in these discussions. This essay addresses this situation through a re-reading of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), a film whose ambivalent engagement with America's troubled settler-colonial history has seen it mortgaged to depth-oriented reading methods. Countering these approaches, I argue that, even before the filmic image signifies or symptomatizes settler-colonial struggle, that struggle is played out across the surface of the filmic image in the form of efforts to control the diffusion, distribution and dissemination of light itself. In arguing this, I will show how The Searchers situates its own formal and technical efforts to regulate light's movement across the surface of the cinematic image within a history of settler-colonial efforts to regulate light's movement across varied domestic, civic and geographic surfaces. In doing so, I contend, the film both foregrounds cinema's complicity in, and delivers a searing critique of, Western efforts to control light.


Author(s):  
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard ◽  
Mads Walther-Hansen ◽  
Martin Knakkergaard

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination is a two-volume anthology that covers the topic of imagination in the context of sound and music. There are seventy chapters in ten parts across two volumes that present thinking and research on the topic from a broad multidisciplinary perspective, and the fields of study represented include (but are not limited to): music (composition, improvisation, philosophy, therapy, and so forth); sound studies; acoustics and bioacoustics; cognition and neurology; psychology; literature, poetry, and comics; heritage studies; anthropology; branding and advertising; audio technology; film studies; computer games and virtual reality; and aesthetics. Volume 1 of the handbook contains thirty-nine chapters organized across five parts (“Foundations,” “Society and Identity,” “Language,” “Image,” and “Space and Place”).


Author(s):  
Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

Chapter 4 explores the sensuous dimension of contemporary soundtracks through examples of soundtrack musicality drawn from diegetic sounds such as physical activities, walking, or environmental sounds. The chapter argues that the overall musical effect produced by the interaction between repetitive sound and rhythmicized visual movement creates musicality of an inherently cinematic nature, a type of audiovisual musique concrète. This approach is theorized through the concept of the erotics of art, contending that the practice of blurring the boundaries between music and the soundtrack’s other elements is intimately connected to the emergence of a trend that emphasizes the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—without confusing it with sensory overload.


The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination is a two-volume anthology that covers the topic of imagination in the context of sound and music. There are 70 chapters in 10 parts across two volumes that present thinking and research on the topic from a broad multi-disciplinary perspective, and the fields of study represented include (but are not limited to): music (composition, improvisation, philosophy, therapy, and so forth); sound studies; acoustics and bioacoustics; cognition and neurology; psychology; literature, poetry, and comics; heritage studies; anthropology; branding and advertising; audio technology; film studies; computer games and virtual reality; and aesthetics. Volume 1 of the handbook contains 39 chapters organized across five parts (Foundations; Society and Identity; Language; Image; and Space and Place).


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