A Cognitive-Affective Approach to Foregrounding Categorical-Thematic Patterns in Popular Cinema

Projections ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Bartosz Stopel
Keyword(s):  
Pattern Recognition ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Cognitive Perspective ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Habitual Pattern

The article sets out to discuss disruptions of the embodied flow of movie perception triggered by foregrounded categorical-thematic patterns. First, categorical-thematic patterns are framed in a cognitive perspective and tied to categorical (or parallel) information processing as opposed schematic (sequential). I argue that the former are not prototypical of embodied movie perception and tend to be disruptive if foregrounded, as they are more prevalent in art cinema. Next, I indicate how categorical-thematic patterns may encourage a type of non-habitual pattern recognition producing a number of emotional and aesthetic effects: delight at pattern isolation, wonder emotions, emotional focus of a story theme, and intensification or modulation of global and empathetic emotions. Finally, I turn to illustrate these points using Pan’s Labyrinth, a film that systematically foregrounds categorical-thematic patterns yet naturalizes them, alleviating disruption of movie perception. This, I believe, marks an effective strategy of importing avant-garde film techniques into popular cinema.

Polish Cinema

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elzbieta Ostrowska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
European Cinema ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Film Market ◽  
Critical Discourses

Poland’s turbulent history in the 20th century has been the most significant factor affecting the development of vernacular cinema. Until 1918, when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of partitions, Polish cinema did not exist as a separate national entity and thus one can only talk about cinematic practices occurring in Polish territories. Between 1918 and 1939 Polish cinema primarily developed popular forms, ranging from nationalistic melodramas to Yiddish musicals. The outbreak of World War II and the following occupation of Poland meant a cessation of Polish national cinema for six years. In 1945 a new model of state-supported and state-controlled cinema emerged. Responding to constantly changing political circumstances, Polish postwar cinema negotiated the potential of the space between utter ideological complicity and the desire to subvert the communist regime. Limited by political censorship, it often communicated with its audience in Aesopian language. Simultaneously, the authorities of the state-funded film industry occasionally supported certain cinematic experiments mainly to demonstrate the superiority of communist art over the bourgeois. They also enabled a popular cinema as long as it conveyed an ideological message supportive of the political system. The most significant achievements of Polish postwar cinema are, according to most film criticism, in a politically engaged art cinema represented at its best by Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Agnieszka Holland, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. In consequence, other cinematic phenomena more closely linked with cinematic modernism as, for example, films by Wojciech Has, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Tadeusz Konwicki, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Walerian Borowczyk, have been significantly marginalized within critical discourses both in Poland and abroad. The collapse of communism in 1989 caused a radical change in the whole system of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Instead of political censorship, filmmakers have since been subjected to the demands of the domestic film market now entirely open to Hollywood production. They responded to these changes in a twofold manner: the younger generation attempted to establish a vernacular model of popular cinema, whereas the elder wanted to use their newfound political freedom to address the previously repressed parts of national memory. As well as its historical and aesthetic specificity Polish cinema can also be located within the broader conceptual frameworks of central eastern European cinema or now postcommunist cinema.

From Pattern Recognition to Economic Disequilibrium

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (S1) ◽  
pp. 180-203
Author(s):  
Olessia Kirtchik
Keyword(s):  
Pattern Recognition ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Optimal Planning ◽  
Analytic Framework ◽  
Mathematical Economics ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Fixed Price ◽  
Styles Of Reasoning

This article is focused on the economic works of the Soviet machinelearning pioneer Emmanuil Braverman, who published, during the 1970s, a series of papers introducing disequilibrium fixed-price models of the Soviet economy. This highly original theory, developed independently from the Western analyses of disequilibria, proposed rationing mechanisms capable, under some conditions, of bringing a system to the state of equilibrium. However, in a fixed-price economy, equilibria are not necessarily optimal or effective; therefore specific observational and analytic procedures aiming at bringing a system to a better state had to be invented. Braverman interpreted this analytic framework as a “qualitative system of control” of the Soviet economy representing a sort of a third-way solution between neoclassical models of spontaneous coordination of autonomous agents and theories of optimal planning. This innovative approach, very different from the styles of reasoning in mathematical economics of his time, was grounded in his work on pattern recognition and informed by a cybernetic vision of control as information processing and communication in complex systems.

Development of effective strategy of pattern recognition

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nickolay M. Bykov ◽  
Ivan V. Kuzmin ◽  
Antonina I. Yakovenko
Keyword(s):  
Pattern Recognition ◽  
Effective Strategy

Love Machines

Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Rachel Moore
Keyword(s):  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde

With the enormous span of time embedded in the very grain of the celluloid, old films and footage touch, in a sensate way, the strange and familiar longing for the archaic past which lies at the heart of the modern dilemma. Walter Benjamin‘s suggestion - that when delving into the secrets of modernity, including its technology, the archaic is never that far off - grows palpable when watching film from the archives. This project could just be called, ‘Why do we love old movies?’ To begin to grasp how old films touch us, its instructive to look at how technology functions within films. The power of degraded technology to create intimacy does not go unnoticed by filmmakers today where its use extends from the avant-garde to popular cinema. To further understand such effects, this paper focuses on one way technology provokes intimacy: how people fall in love in the movies.

Unruly Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rini Battacharya Mehta
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Popular Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Systematic Exposition

Unruly Cinema is a meta-history of Indian cinema’s emergence and growth in correspondence with the colonial, postcolonial, and the neoliberal state. Indian popular cinema has grown steadily from the largest national film industry to a global cultural force. Between 1931 and 2000, Indian cinema overcame Hollywood’s domination of the Indian market, crafted a postcolonial national aesthetic, resisted the high modernist pull of art cinema, and eventually emerged as a seamless extension of India’s neoliberal ambitions. The major agent of these four shifts was a section of the Hindi cinema produced in Bombay, which came to be named and marketed as Bollywood in the twenty-first century. Through a systematic exposition of four historical periods, this book shows how Bollywood’s current dominance is an unlikely result of unruliness, that is, of a disorganized defiance of norms. Perpetually caught between an apathetic and adversarial government and an undefined public, Indian commercial cinema has thrived simply by defying control or normalization. The aesthetic turns of this cinema are guided by counter-effects, often unintended and always unruly.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document