The Visitation of the Idea

2019 ◽  
pp. 319-337
Author(s):  
Rohan Kalyan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the life and work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou in the context of a broader meditation on the relationship between film, philosophy, and communism. It draws in large part from the author’s own experiences codirecting and coproducing a feature-length documentary film about this octogenarian communist philosopher. It further juxtaposes this film with several other films on communism, as well as their analyses by Badiou himself and other leftist critics. Ultimately, by foregrounding the historical intersection between film, communism, and critical thought, the article argues that in the process of making the documentary Badiou, the author became an ambivalent participant in the production of late-communist visual culture.

scholarly journals The Social Construction of Internet Addiction in China: Youth between Reality and Temporal Autonomy in the Documentary Web Junkie

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-105
Author(s):  
Annika Pissin
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Internet Addiction ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Core ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
The Social ◽  
China Today ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article addresses issues surrounding the social construction of internet addiction, focusing on conceptualisations of reality, escape, hope, and time. Drawing on a critical realist account of semiosis, the framing of internet addiction in China is analysed using the documentary film Web Junkie as an empirical pivot and point of departure. A contextual overview of relations, interests, and tensions surrounding youth and the internet in China is provided, and the film Web Junkie is briefly presented. The main body of the article consists of a critical analysis of conceptualisations of “reality” and “escape.” The core tension focused on in the analysis is the struggle over time, necessitating engagement with critical thought on hope and utopia. The analysis concludes that struggles over temporal autonomy underlie conflicting claims about “reality” and “escape” that are central to “internet addiction” and its treatment in China today.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

scholarly journals Evil, Agency, and Citizenship Education

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent den Heyer ◽  
Cathryn van Kessel
Keyword(s):  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Opportunity To Learn ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Critical Thought

We all have a sense of evil, but many of us do not ponder its nature or the ways in which our beliefs about evil shape what we teach and learn about the actions of citizens in historical or contemporary times. We argue that the word and concept of evil can be detrimental to the development of good citizens when it is used as a political and educational shibboleth to shut down critical thought about traumatic historical and contemporary events. Read through the work of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou, however, a pedagogical engagement with our understandings of evil offers an opportunity to learn from difficult events in a way that might inform contemporary action towards a less violent future.

scholarly journals Plot vs Emplotment - Testing the narrative concepts of aesthetics and authenticity in the documentary short Far Away Land

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre O’Toole
Keyword(s):  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Original Story ◽  
The Relationship

This paper recounts the research and production of Far Away Land, a short documentary that uses recreations to illustrate a woman’s memory of drowning. The images used to illustrate the narrator’s experience will be interrogated to establish how they might enhance or take from the original story. The idea of plot vs emplotment will be explored in this paper to explore how the aesthetics and visualisations of recreations reflect, compliment and contrast with voice-over narrative. This paper also investigates the relationship between linking visual imagery to the narrator in the absence of an on-camera interview. Placing this short film in the lineage of documentaries that use recreation the efficacy of this style will be discussed in terms of delivering an authentic and aesthetic documentary film.

scholarly journals infância, cultura visual e educação

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-20
Author(s):  
Adriana Hoffmann Fernandes ◽  
Helenice Mirabelli Cassino
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Multiple Images ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Framing ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This article combines thoughts about childhood, visual culture and education. It is known that we live among multiple images that shape the way we see our reality, and researchers in the visual culture field investigate how this role is played out in our culture. The goal is to make some applications those ideas, to think about the relationship between the images and education. This article tries to grasp what visual culture is and in what ways presumptions about childhood generate and are generated by this association. It also discusses the genesis of these presumptions and the images they generate through a philosophical approach, questioning the role of education in a culture tied to the media, and about how children, who are familiar with multiple screens, presage a new visual literacy. We see how images play a fundamental role in the way children give meaning to the world around them and to themselves, in the context of their local culture. Given this context, it is necessary to consider how visual culture is tied to the elementary school, and what challenges confront the generation of wider and more creative ways to approach visual framing in children’s education.

The Courtroom as Theater and the Theater as Courtroom in Ancient Athens

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adi Parush
Keyword(s):  
Strict Liability ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Democratic Regime ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Ancient Athens ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Ferment ◽  
The Relationship

To prevent any misunderstanding, I first would like to clarify that I am not a historian dealing with classical studies; my main disciplines are philosophy and law. However, following a seminar I gave dealing with several philosophical-legal aspects of Greek tragedy, and an article I wrote about the relationship between the concept of guilt in Oedipus Tyrannus and the principle of strict liability in modern criminal law, I have found myself in recent years becoming increasingly interested in the unique culture which emerged in Athens during the classical period, particularly in the 5th century BCE. In the course of that century, Athens was involved in many wars – against the Persians in the early decades, against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War) in the latter decades, and other “minor” wars. And yet despite these wars, during the 5th century BCE Athens was in a state of cultural-social-political ferment that left its mark on the whole history of western culture. In the course of that century, there was in Athens a burgeoning of independent-critical thought in the philosophical domain, nature and medicine were systematically studied, tragedies by the Athenians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were written and performed, and the democratic regime took shape.

Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Earlie
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Key Questions

This book offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida’s thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, it sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida’s response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche’s relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, from the relationship between memory and the archive to the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok, and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, the book argues that Derrida’s writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent ‘textualist’ reading of Derrida’s work, it explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror.

Filming History and The Spanish Earth

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-156
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Relief Effort ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
The Relationship

Dos Passos was instrumental in initiating The Spanish Earth, a 1937 documentary film relief effort for the Republican fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, although he likely did not contribute to its writing. Yet the dangerous, divisive circumstances surrounding the film’s creation and his collaboration with its Communist director Joris Ivens and with colleague Ernest Hemingway during its production in Spain challenged Dos Passos’s beliefs about the relationship between politics and art and profoundly affected his subsequent career. The execution of a Spanish friend, José Robles, at the hands of Russian military personnel who were ostensibly Republican allies, and a subsequent coverup, led Dos Passos to re-evaluate his leftist political positions, his professional alliance with Ivens, and his longtime friendship with Hemingway. The film and its circumstances raised complex questions about the dynamics between fact and fictionalization in documentary and the artist’s ethical and aesthetic responsibilities. Dos Passos’s choices to report fully on the repercussions of factionalization in the Spanish anti-fascist cause, to represent multiple perspectives of the looming greater European conflict, and to articulate unequivocally his conviction that Communism was compromising both European and U.S. leftist movements earned opprobrium from literary critics who had theretofore lionized him.

Framing as a method of creating a film's metaphorical context

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-86
Author(s):  
Roman V. Korobko
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Logical Thinking ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Emotional Language ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Abstract Language ◽  
The Relationship

This essay continues the study of the semiotics and synergetics of Framing in the Art of Cinematography which substantiates the hypothesis that framing (perspective) constitutes one of the most important codes of screen communication in its cinematographic and metaphorical contexts. Thus, framing is represented by two hierarchical levels of representation of contextual semiotic connections: the connection between mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scne (the level of the cinematographic form of film sign); and the relationship between cinematographic imagery, action and meaning (the level of the cinema sign). Framing consolidates the process of cinematography divided by the artistic and production dichotomy, which is especially important in the context of mass culture determined by the total industrialization of all areas of life, including cinema. The essay is based on the statement of Sergei Eisenstein that each high film work has the unity of two dialectical categories: the content (abstract language, part of logical thinking) and the form (emotional language, part of emotional-sensory thinking). It identifies and analyzes the spatial-temporal and linear-tonal features of cinematic framing as a method of expressing the metaphorical existential context of the crisis of Russian self-identification, using as examples a number of expressive episodes of the documentary film Anna: 618 (1980-1993; dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, DOPs: Pavel Lebeshev, Vadim Yusov, Vadim Alisov, and Elizbar Karavaev). This film work is explored as a study of the socio-cultural situation in modern Russia undertaken from a multi-faceted and multi-level authorial perspective associated with expressive cinematographic framing.

Ex-centric Cinema: Machinic Vision in the Powers of Ten and Electronic Cartography

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Harbord
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
The Body ◽  
Educational Film ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

After a century of cinema, accounts of this cultural form see it as divided between documentation and animation (the real and the magical). Yet the challenge that cinema presented in terms of a relocation of perception from the eye to the machine has become occluded. The shock of cinema in its earliest manifestations resided in the body of the spectator, no longer the site of primary perception, but dependent on an other (the camera, the projector) lacking in human qualities. This article argues that the newly configured body–machine relationship provided by cinema became a marginalized feature of cinematic culture, an ex-centric cinema relegated to the sub-fields of science and educational film. In the mid-20th century the project surfaces spectacularly in the work of pioneering designers Charles and Ray Eames, most poignantly in their film Powers of Ten (first made in 1968, remade in 1977) , a journey into the cosmos and back again into the body of a man. Bringing together discourses of space travel, cartography, physics and cinema, the film moves us towards an understanding of visual culture as an apparatus of calculated possibilities, where visualization replaces representation. If we take the Powers of Ten as a non-representational film, an ex-centric cinematic practice, we uncover non-linear and non-representational ways of apprehending the relationship between bodies and matter. This literal line of flight is one path that cinema may have taken. Its presence, however, is detectable outside of the cinema, in the software programs of electronic cartography copyrighted as Google Earth. The human body is not made virtual by its engagement with calculated visualization but is in turn part of the field of enquiry, equally porous, and definable in various scales and in different dimensions.

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