Simultaneity and Coexistence: Audible Overlaps in Cinematic Time

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
James Batcho
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
Cinematic Time ◽  
Image Events

This article builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to explore new approaches to cinematic audibility. Recognised film theory terms such as synchronisation and synchresis approach sonic time from the transcendent distance of audioviewership. This essay moves cinematic experience inward to ask what is audible within the film world itself. Simultaneity and coexistence penetrate cinematic time to express a multiplicity of audible layers, threads or lines that occur in relation to image-events. The essay both advances and critiques Bergson's and Deleuze's conceptions of time, making it relevant to both film studies and metaphysics.

Deleuze and Lola Montès

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rushton
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
World Today ◽  
Film Interpretation ◽  
The World ◽  
Time Image

Gilles Deleuze represents the most widely referenced theorist of cinema today. And yet, even the most rudimentary pillars of his thought remain mysterious to most students (and even many scholars) of film studies. From one of the foremost theorists following Deleuze in the world today, Deleuze and Lola Montès offers a detailed explication of Gilles Deleuze’s writings on film – from his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Building on this foundation, Rushton provides an interpretation of Max Ophuls’s classic film Lola Montès as an example of how Deleuzian film theory can function in the practice of film interpretation.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jordan Schonig
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Gestalt Psychology ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Intuition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Generic Structures ◽  
Temporal Flow ◽  
Film Form

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.

Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.

scholarly journals The virtual cultural tourist: Film-induced tourism and Kubo and the Two Strings

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Dennis Yeo
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Tourist Destination ◽  
The Past ◽  
Culture History ◽  
Destination Choices ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
Stop Motion ◽  
Cultural Tourist

Over the past two decades, there has been growing research in film-induced tourism. Much of this research is focused on how film influences tourist destination choices. There has been less emphasis, however, on the nature and types of movies that may induce this attraction to such locations. By examining Kubo and the Two Strings (Knight, 2016), a stop-motion animation produced by Laika Studios, this paper aims to apply film studies to explore current understandings of film-induced tourism. This paper argues that Kubo is itself a form of film-induced tourism by positioning the viewer as a virtual cultural tourist whose cinematic experience may be likened to a veritable media pilgrimage through Japanese culture, history and aesthetics. The movie introduces the viewer into an imagined world that borrows from origami, Nō theatre, shamisen music, obon rituals and Japanese symbolism, philosophy and mythology. The resulting pastiche is a constructed diorama that is as transnational and postmodern as it is authentic and indigenous.

Ontological, Formal, and Critical Theories of Film Music and Sound

2013 ◽  
pp. 187-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Buhler
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Interpretive Research ◽  
Critical Theories

This chapterexamines film music and sound theories. It charts some major trends in interpretive research on the soundtrack, using Francesco Casetti’s model of the development of film theory. It explains that Casetti’s developmental model of film theory traces the progressive academic institutionalization of film studies in shifts from an ontological paradigm to a methodological paradigm to a field paradigm, and suggests that the goals of ontological theories have antecedents in formalism. This chapteralso highlights critical theories’ focus on how music and sound can bear particular cultural and ideological values in a film.

M-Learning Apps for Film Studies

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Jeanny Vaidya
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Learning Support ◽  
Film Interpretation ◽  
Delivery Options ◽  
Basic Approaches ◽  
Evaluation Techniques

While there are many educational apps for traditionally taught subjects such as mathematics and science, more specialized curriculum has largely been left unexplored in terms of m-learning. Film studies, an academic discipline that deals with the theoretical, historical, and critical underpinnings of film, is one such subject that has very few mobile applications. This chapter explores creating a mobile application to teach basic approaches to film interpretation and in addition, considers a heutagogical approach in design. Benefits of m-learning include increased delivery options for multimedia, context-based learning support, and the prospects of a more fulfilling learning experience. This chapter provides direction for implementation and evaluation techniques for an introductory film studies module on film noir, which can be integrated into a mobile format to make film theory more relevant and accessible.

Affect, or Postmodern Sentimentalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Burnetts
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Contemporary Film

Chapter Four provides a wider theoretical basis for the ‘sophistication’ and self-consciousness that characterises post-classical or postmodern forms of sentimentality in US film culture, with particular attention paid to notions of ‘excess’ and distanciation. It accounts in particular for the influence of key modernists like Adorno, Benjamin and Brecht on taste categories that persist in contemporary film studies, with particular reference to the ‘ideological stoicism’ that is alleged to predominate in critical film culture. The discussion will provide context for a discussion of the ‘affective’ turn in film theory, around which the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell loom large in their centralisation of a film-as-thought paradigm.

Measuring Engaging Dialogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Jennifer O'Meara
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Audience Studies ◽  
Independent Cinema

Sarah Kozloff (2000) argues that generic speech conventions were established early in the sound era. This book considers how, and gauges why, American independent filmmakers manipulate such internalised conventions. This chapter provides an overview of the methodological framework for doing so, including the rationale for studying the significance of dialogue to low-budget cinema more generally. Addressing the long-standing bias against film dialogue, the chapter outlines the precarious status that dialogue holds in film studies, and the film industry, since the introduction of sound or ‘talking pictures’. The chapter connects niche film audiences with niche forms of dialogue, such as those in indie and art cinemas. Drawing on audience studies and cognitive film theory, it also considers the appeal of alternative dialogue styles in American independent cinema.

Multitemporality between Sovereignty and Neoliberal Governmentality

2019 ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Jecheol Park
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Korean Cinema ◽  
Neoliberal Governmentality ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Social ◽  
Latent Potential ◽  
Cinematic Time ◽  
Time Image

This chapter examines South Korean films about the minjung movement in the 1980s and analyses their tendency to reduce the latent potential of South Korea's radical struggle into cultural memories that are resolutely national, readily consumable, and highly individualized. Through a close-reading of two films, A Single Spark (Park Kwang-su, 1995) and The Old Garden (Im Sang-soo, 2006), this chapter argues that residual nationalism of such a modality of memorialization in South Korean cinema conforms to an ultimately conservative notion of the Deleuzian-Bergsonian "time-image." Cautioning against the uncritical use of Bergson within both postcolonial theories and postcolonial film studies, the chapter calls for a different kind of cinematic time-image, a Nietzschean-Deleuzianone that inspires us to demand what has been here to fore considered impossible or insensible within the social space.

Vertigo

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriano D’Aloia
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Contemporary Film

The chapter ‘Vertigo. Towards a Neurofilmology’ offers an introduction to the book’s contents and methods. The implementation of psychology of perception, philosophy of mind, and suggestions from cognitive neuroscience (in particular the role of ‘mirror neurons’ and the hypothesis of ‘embodied simulation’) has the capability to renew contemporary film theory and to reduce the distance between competing approaches (i.e. cognitivist and phenomenological film studies). ‘Neurofilmology’ adopts an enactive and embodied approach to cognition and provides interpretative tools for the exploration of contemporary cinema. Through a series of recurrent ‘aerial motifs’ in which the film character loses his/her equilibrium—acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift—the cinema offers an intense motor and emotional experience that puts the spectator’s somatosensory perception in tension. At the same time, it provides compensation by adopting embodied forms of regulation of stimuli and a dynamic restoration of gravity and orientation (the so called ‘disembodying-reembodying’ dynamic).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document