Playing Dead: Pictorial Figurations of Melancholia in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajnal Király
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Single Image ◽  
Still Image ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
The Dead ◽  
A Site

Contemporary Hungarian cinema has been often coined as "dark", depicting an "ontological melancholia" paired with a preference for the still image. In films by Béla Tarr, Kornél Mundruczó or Benedek Fliegauf for example, tableau-like compositions serve as "interruptions" revealing the single image as a site in-between where figuration happens. These painterly images relate to the narration metaphorically, triggering an aesthetic detachment of a "pensive spectator." This chapter focuses on a corpus of contemporary Hungarian films in which bodies are represented in pictorial compositions evoking either Andrea Mantegna's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ or Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, with the aim to identify 'the figural' that makes sense without a story. Relying on Kristeva's controversial "gendered" interpretation of melancholia, the chapter includes comparative analyses of films by Hungarian female and male directors (Ágnes Kocsis and Kornél Mundruczó, for example).

The Space of Difference in Law: Inquests into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Somatechnics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherene H. Razack
Keyword(s):  
Aboriginal People ◽  
The Body ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Aboriginal Community ◽  
Police Custody ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
A Site ◽  
Deaths In Custody

Paul Alphonse, a 67 year-old Aboriginal died in hospital while in police custody. A significant contributing factor to his death was that he was stomped on so hard that there was a boot print on his chest and several ribs were broken. His family alleged police brutality. The inquest into the death of Paul Alphonse offers an opportunity to explore the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society and, significantly, how law operates as a site for managing that relationship. I suggest that we consider the boot print on Alphonse's chest and its significance at the inquest in these two different ways. First, although it cannot be traced to the boot of the arresting officer, we can examine the boot print as an event around which swirls Aboriginal/police relations in Williams Lake, both the specific relation between the arresting officer and Alphonse, and the wider relations between the Aboriginal community and the police. Second, the response to the boot print at the inquest sheds light on how law is a site for obscuring the violence in Aboriginal people's lives. A boot print on the chest of an Aboriginal man, a clear sign of violence, comes to mean little because Aboriginal bodies are considered violable – both prone to violence, and bodies that can be violated with impunity. Law, in this instance in the form of an inquest, stages Aboriginal abjection, installing Aboriginal bodies as too damaged to be helped and, simultaneously to harm. In this sense, the Aboriginal body is homo sacer, the body that maybe killed but not murdered. I propose that the construction of the Aboriginal body as inherently violable is required in order for settlers to become owners of the land.

The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-113
Author(s):  
Obert Bernard Mlambo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
School Sports ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Practice

This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.

Writing and the Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions

Hebrew funerary inscriptions began to appear in Judah during late Iron IIB. These inscriptions are relatively unique in that they are written on, or inside, tombs. But they also include amulets that adorned the body during burial. The funerary inscriptions emerged at a stage when the bench tomb had fully developed, and their writings reveal multiple concerns regarding the dead. The Hebrew inscriptions stress the imperative of safeguarding the dead inside the tomb on multiple levels. The interred are identified by name, and their place inside the tomb is described. All of these concerns relate to the existence of the dead and the preservation of their memory. These concerns are also consistent with blessings and curses that are often inscribed on the tomb, which indicate that Yahweh’s power could extend over the dead as well as the living.

Unqualified Pleasure

2018 ◽  
pp. 791-808
Author(s):  
Branka Arsić
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Dead

Everything that Poe wrote is touched by the question of life. Most notably, dead women come back to life, the living switch personhoods with the dead, and hearts dismembered from the body keep on beating. Such existential shifts were typically interpreted as Poe’s take on the Gothic, his engagement with the supernatural, or, as political allegories. Declining to follow any of those directions, this chapter will take Poe’s ideas about life literally and nontrivially. Closely discussing such texts as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Mesmeric Revelation,” and Eureka, the essay will investigate Poe’s continuous insistence that nothing is inanimate and immaterial, as well as his claim that life can’t be understood according to an anthropomorphic model. Reading his literature against the backdrop of the scientific treatises on life and vitalism that influenced him, this chapter will seek to explain what is at stake in Poe’s statement that even “unorganized matter” is alive and sensuous, endowed with capacity for pain and joy.

THE POLITICS OF DANCE: EUNOMIA AND THE EXCEPTION OF DIONYSUS IN PLATO'S LAWS

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Yu
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
Entire Class ◽  
A Site

How to inculcate virtue in the citizens of Magnesia by means of the dance component of choreia constitutes one of the principal concerns in the Laws (= Leg.), revealing Plato's evolving ideas about the expediency of music and paideia for the construction of his ideal city since the Republic. Indeed, a steady stream of monographs and articles on the Laws has enriched our understanding of how Plato theorizes the body as a site of intervention and choral dance as instrumental in solidifying social relations and in conditioning the ethical and political self. As one scholar has aptly put it: ‘a city and its sociopolitical character [are] effectively danced into existence.’ Drawing on this recent work, I focus on an enigmatic passage in Laws Book 7 that merits more attention than it has received, in which Plato curiously singles out Bacchic dances from those that are ‘without controversy’ (815b7–d4): τὴν τοίνυν ἀμφισβητουμένην ὄρχησιν δεῖ πρῶτον χωρὶς τῆς ἀναμφισβητήτου διατεμεῖν. τίς οὖν αὕτη, καὶ πῇ δεῖ χωρὶς τέμνειν ἑκατέραν; ὅση μὲν βακχεία τ᾽ ἐστὶν καὶ τῶν ταύταις ἑπομένων, ἃς Νύμφας τε καὶ Πᾶνας καὶ Σειληνοὺς καὶ Σατύρους ἐπονομάζοντες, ὥς φασιν, μιμοῦνται κατῳνωμένους, περὶ καθαρμούς τε καὶ τελετάς τινας ἀποτελούντων, σύμπαν τοῦτο τῆς ὀρχήσεως τὸ γένος οὔθ᾽ ὡς εἰρηνικὸν οὔθ᾽ ὡς πολεμικὸν οὔθ᾽ ὅτι ποτὲ βούλεται ῥᾴδιον ἀφορίσασθαι: διορίσασθαι μήν μοι ταύτῃ δοκεῖ σχεδὸν ὀρθότατον αὐτὸ εἶναι, χωρὶς μὲν πολεμικοῦ, χωρὶς δὲ εἰρηνικοῦ θέντας, εἰπεῖν ὡς οὐκ ἔστι πολιτικὸν τοῦτο τῆς ὀρχήσεως τὸ γένος, ἐνταῦθα δὲ κείμενον ἐάσαντας κεῖσθαι, νῦν ἐπὶ τὸ πολεμικὸν ἅμα καὶ εἰρηνικὸν ὡς ἀναμφισβητήτως ἡμέτερον ὂν ἐπανιέναι. So, first of all, we should separate questionable dancing far from dancing that is without controversy. Which is the controversial kind, and how are the two to be distinguished? All the dancing that is of a Bacchic kind and cultivated by those who indulge in intoxicated imitations of Nymphs, Pans, Sileni and Satyrs (as they name them), when performing certain rites of expiation and initiation—this entire class of dancing cannot easily be marked off either as pacific or as warlike, nor as of any one particular kind. The most correct way of defining it appears to me to be this—to place it away from both pacific and warlike dancing, and to pronounce that this type of dancing is οὐ πολιτικόν; having thus set aside and dismissed it, we will now return to the warlike and pacific types, which without controversy belong to us.

Specific Susceptibility to HCN and the amount of HCN recovered from Fumigated Insects

1951 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Pradhan ◽  
S. C. Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Body Weight ◽  
Water Content ◽  
Relative Position ◽  
Surface Resistance ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Effective Resistance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Effective Dosage ◽  
Adult Females ◽  
The Dead

The relationship was studied between susceptibility of a number of different species of insects to HCN fumigation and the recovery of HCN from them immediately after fumigation.The test insects used were Tribolium castaneum, seventh stage caterpillars of Corcyra cephalonica, first-and second-instar nymphs of Drosicha sp., third-and fourthinstar nymphs of Drosicha sp. and adult females of Drosicha sp.The apparatus and methods used in the fumigation and in the recovery of HCN from the fumigated insects are fully described.Preliminary expsriments showed that the processes of distillation and redistillation did not affect the recovery of HCN but that the result obtained for recovery from distillation could be affected if some volatile reducing substance were produced and carried over to the distillate. It was found that this did actually take place in the case of one of the test insects—T. castaneum—but that redistillation got rid of the impurity.In the main experiments it was shown that, on the assumption that the concentration of HCN to which insects are exposed is the effective dosage, the susceptibility of the test insects varied in the following descending order : firstand second-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp. > third- and fourth-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp.>C. cephalonica> T. castaneum>the adult females of Drosicha sp.When the same insects were arranged in descending order of the quantities of HCN recovered per 100 gm. of body weight, the order was identical except for the nymphs of Drosicha sp. which occupied a different relative position. The two categories of nymphs of Drosicha sp. were found to occupy a different relative position again with regard to the other three test insects when exposed to a superlethal concentration and assessed for recovery of HCN per 100 gr. body weight.Parallel batches of T. castaneum and C. cephalonica were fumigated and the HCN was recovered from the dead and survivors. More HCN was recovered from the dead insects than from those that survived.Both recovery and sorption of HCN were estimated separately in parallel batches of insects (adult females of Drosicha sp. and C. cephalonica). Recovery was found to be less than sorption showing that a part of the HCN absorbed is converted into a non-recoverable state. Further, that the weight of HCN sorbed per gram body weight of adult females of Drosicha sp. is much less than in the case of C. cephalonica under similar conditions of fumigation and that the amount of HCN converted into non-recoverable products is less in Drosicha adults than in C. cephalonica.A comparison of the water content of T. castaneum, C. cephalonica and Drosicha sp. (adults) showed that there was a positive correlation between water content and higher susceptibility to HCN and greater recovery of HCN was also indicated. It is suggested that this may be a factor in the “ Surface Resistance ” of an insec to a fumigant.The observations of previous workers that larger amounts are sorbed by or recovered (after fumigation) from more susceptible species than for those less susceptible was corroborated by the results obtained with C. cephalonica, T. castaneum and adult females of Drosicha sp. but not with those from nymphs of Drosicha sp.When dosage-mortality graphs were prepared by taking the amount of HCN recovered per gram body weight as an index of internal dose, the order of resistance of different test insects based on this new criterion was found to be entirely different from that based on the usual criterion of the concentration of HCN in the fumatorium being the index of effective dosage.These apparently anomalous observations may be explained by assuming that the resistance shown by an insect in an actual fumigation operation, i.e., to the concentration of HCN to which it is exposed (external dose) is what may be called the total “ Effective Resistance ” and that this “ Effective Resistance ” is the resultant of (a) “ Surface Resistance ” to the entry of fumigant and (b) “ Internal Resistance ” to the amount of HCN which actually gains entry into the body in some way or other. Thus the “Effective Resistance ” of an insect may be due to a combination either of low “ Surface Resistance ” and high “ Internal Resistance ”, giving a very low “ Effective Resistance ” as in the case of C. cephalonica, or vice versa giving the maximum “ Effective Resistance ” as in adult females of Drosicha sp. The lower recovery of HCN from the nymphs of Drosicha sp., although they were more susceptible to fumigation than C. cephalonica, is explained by their higher “ Surface Resistance ” combined with a very much lower “ Internal Resistance ”, leading to a lower “ Effective Resistance ”.

Entomophthora grylli. [Descriptions of Fungi and Bacteria].

1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. L. K. Brady
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nomadacris Septemfasciata ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
East Central ◽  
Resting Spores ◽  
The Dead ◽  
External Growth

Abstract A description is provided for Entomophthora grylli. Information is included on the disease caused by the organism, its transmission, geographical distribution, and hosts. HOSTS: Orthoptera; nymph and adults of grasshoppers and locusts; there have also been records on Lepidoptera, Diptera and Coleoptera (MacLeod & Muller-Kogler, 1973). GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION: Europe, including Britain; Canada; East, Central and South Africa. Fresenius quotes a record at 6000 ft near St. Moritz. DISEASE: The disease, causing epizootics in red locusts, Cyrtacanthacra septemfasciata (Nomadacris septemfasciata), in S. Africa is described by Skaife (1925). Infection is by germinating conidia which penetrate the integument. Dying insects characteristically climb up grass stems and die, apparently embracing the stem. The body becomes soft and easily disintegrates. The abdomen curls upward and backwards. Shortly after death a white, buff or greenish furry growth appears from the intersegmental membrane, leg joints, junction of the head and thorax and at the base of the antennae. The growth is made up of club-shaped conidiogenous cells which forcibly discharge conidia around the dead insect. Conidia, coated with the sticky contents of the conidiophore, are discharged in the evening, when the insects are clustered together and adhere to the surface of healthy individuals. A total of about 1% of locusts throughout the season die showing no external growth but are filled with resting spores; other individuals appear to be immune.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

The Images of Dante’s Inferno in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Marina G. Kurgan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Network ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Personal Space ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Dimensional Image ◽  
The Third ◽  
Character System ◽  
The Divine Comedy ◽  
The Dead

The House of the Dead was repeatedly compared with the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy even in F.M. Dostoevsky’s lifetime. However, his contemporaries usually focused on general analogies, while later scholars paid more attention to the narrative features or individual reminiscences. This research studies the main aspects of the artistic structure of the Dante code, constructing the space of Hell in Dostoevsky’s novel. 1. The organization of space. Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, the narrator in The House of the Dead, recreates a three-dimensional image that resembles a gradually narrowing funnel: from a bird’s-eye view, where the prison is seen in its entirety, the focus slowly descends, passing to smaller objects, and finally reaching the “three boards”, which limit Goryanchikov’s personal space. The same principle is employed to construct the space of Hell in Dante’s poem. In The House of the Dead, there is another significant indication of the spatial affinity of Dante’s hell and Dostoevsky’s katorga – active imagery associated with cobwebs and spiders. In the centre of the system of images associated with the designated semantic network is the parade- major, the head of the fortress and the owner of the inmate web. 2. The character system as an element constituting the space of Hell. The character system of The House of the Dead follows the compositional principle of Divine Comedy, where sinners are located in different circles in accordance with their main passion. There are three circles in the prison: the first is formal, according to the court decision; the second is informal, internal, formed by crafts and occupations; the third represents Goryanchikov’s perspective as an exponent of human and humane judgment, which distinguishes another person’s moral state. 3. Torment. The House of the Dead demonstrate a hierarchy in describing the tortures, while freedom becomes a fundamental category to embody the most important motif of physical and moral torment connecting Dostoevsky’s novel with Dante’s experience. The bodily torment ceases to be only the torment of the body to become a pain of the soul, comparable to physical torment, so the soul suffers and burns. Hell as a moral topos was the key for Dostoevsky. In The House of the Dead, he chooses the same way as Dante in The Divine Comedy: vivid corporeality conveys an esoteric metaphor of moral suffering and deep inner movements of the soul.

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