The ‘Chemistry’ of Art(ifice) and Life: Embodied Paintings in East European Cinema

Author(s):  
Ágnes Pethő

The essay focuses on the manifold uses and re-conceptualization of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of ‘the real into the image’ (Brigitte Peucker), but it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’. The author discusses the case of the paradoxical ‘cadaverous’ tableaux vivants (among them the recurring cinematic paraphrases of Mantegna’s Dead Christ), in which a live body is displayed as a corpse, or the other way round, a corpse is presented as an embodied picture, or an object of art made of flesh. By repeatedly showing us bodies dying into art, and ideas reified as images, these films present us with uncanny rituals of ‘becoming an image’, with a yearning for a reintegration into something universal and lasting, and can be viewed in the context of the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágnes Pethő

Abstract The paper analyses the re-conceptualization of the intermedial trope of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of “the real into the image” (as Brigitte Peucker described), instead it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the “sex appeal of the inorganic” or “the Egyptian moment in art.” As such, the tableau becomes a powerful agent in generating metanarratives, offering a blueprint for a “big picture,” a comprehensive vision of the world (reinforced by recurring mythological themes like the genesis or the end of the world, the loss of Paradise, etc.). We may connect this feature of these tableaux vivants, therefore, to what Lyotard termed as the “figure of return,” and to the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.


2018 ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. Mamonov

Our analysis documents that the existence of hidden “holes” in the capital of not yet failed banks - while creating intertemporal pressure on the actual level of capital - leads to changing of maturity of loans supplied rather than to contracting of their volume. Long-term loans decrease, whereas short-term loans rise - and, what is most remarkably, by approximately the same amounts. Standardly, the higher the maturity of loans the higher the credit risk and, thus, the more loan loss reserves (LLP) banks are forced to create, increasing the pressure on capital. Banks that already hide “holes” in the capital, but have not yet faced with license withdrawal, must possess strong incentives to shorten the maturity of supplied loans. On the one hand, it raises the turnovers of LLP and facilitates the flexibility of capital management; on the other hand, it allows increasing the speed of shifting of attracted deposits to loans to related parties in domestic or foreign jurisdictions. This enlarges the potential size of ex post revealed “hole” in the capital and, therefore, allows us to assume that not every loan might be viewed as a good for the economy: excessive short-term and insufficient long-term loans can produce the source for future losses.


2007 ◽  
Vol 2007 ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunsheng Ma

This paper is concerned with a class of stochastic processes or random fields with second-order increments, whose variograms have a particular form, among which stochastic processes having orthogonal increments on the real line form an important subclass. A natural issue, how big this subclass is, has not been explicitly addressed in the literature. As a solution, this paper characterizes a stochastic process having orthogonal increments on the real line in terms of its variogram or its construction. Our findings are a little bit surprising: this subclass is big in terms of the variogram, and on the other hand, it is relatively “small” according to a simple construction. In particular, every such process with Gaussian increments can be simply constructed from Brownian motion. Using the characterizations we obtain a series expansion of the stochastic process with orthogonal increments.


Robotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Lei Shi ◽  
Cosmin Copot ◽  
Steve Vanlanduit

In gaze-based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), it is important to determine human visual intention for interacting with robots. One typical HRI interaction scenario is that a human selects an object by gaze and a robotic manipulator will pick up the object. In this work, we propose an approach, GazeEMD, that can be used to detect whether a human is looking at an object for HRI application. We use Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) to measure the similarity between the hypothetical gazes at objects and the actual gazes. Then, the similarity score is used to determine if the human visual intention is on the object. We compare our approach with a fixation-based method and HitScan with a run length in the scenario of selecting daily objects by gaze. Our experimental results indicate that the GazeEMD approach has higher accuracy and is more robust to noises than the other approaches. Hence, the users can lessen cognitive load by using our approach in the real-world HRI scenario.


1973 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. K. Sheng

It is well known that no rational number is approximable to order higher than 1. Roth [3] showed that an algebraic number is not approximable to order greater than 2. On the other hand it is easy to construct numbers, the Liouville numbers, which are approximable to any order (see [2], p. 162). We are led to the question, “Let Nn(α, β) denote the number of distinct rational points with denominators ≦ n contained in an interval (α, β). What is the behaviour of Nn(α, + 1/n) as α varies on the real line?” We shall prove that and that there are “compressions” and “rarefactions” of rational points on the real line.


Author(s):  
Eric H. Pool
Keyword(s):  

Abstract Causa and titulus. Qualifications of possession and a change of terminology in Ulp. D. 5,3,13,1. – In D. 5,3,13,1, Ulpian states that every title to possession (like pro emptore, pro donato etc.) could be accompanied by a general title pro possessore, which becomes decisive if the other title failed. The text is interesting in two aspects: First, it is one of only a handful of classical texts which speak of titulus instead of causa possessionis. Therefore, the text is still today suspected of interpolation. Second, it is heavily disputed which circumstances lead to a possession pro possessore and why this typolology is used at all. This article proposes a solution to both problems. The pro possessore terminology can only be assessed correctly if we focus the procedural position of the possessor, especially in the realm of the hereditatis petitio. The new terminology (titulus) is a mere consequence of the fact, that the burden of prove is assigned according to the ,title‘ of possession indicated by the possessor, not by the real (and possibly unprovable) cause.


1897 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-549
Author(s):  
M. Gaster

More marvellous and more remarkable than the real conquests of Alexander are the stories circulated about him, and the legends which have clustered round his name and his exploits. The history of Alexander has, from a very early period, been embellished with legends and tales. They spread from nation to nation during the whole of the ancient times, and all through the Middle Ages. Many scholars have followed up the course of this dissemination of the fabulous history of Alexander. It would, therefore, be idle repetition of work admirably done by men like Zacher, Wesselofsky, Budge, and others, should I attempt it here. All interested in the legend of Alexander are familiar with those works, where also the fullest bibliographical information is to be found. I am concerned here with what may have appeared to some of these students as the bye-paths of the legend, and which, to my mind, has not received that attention which is due to it, from more than one point of view. Hitherto the histories of Alexander were divided into two categories; the first were those writings which pretended to give a true historical description of his life and adventures, to the exclusion of fabulous matter; the other included all those fabulous histories in which the true elements were smothered under a great mass of legendary matter, the chief representative of this class being the work ascribed to a certain Callisthenes. The study of the legend centred in the study of the vicissitudes to which this work of (Pseudo-) Callisthenes had been exposed, in the course of its dissemination from the East, probably from its native country, Egypt, to the countries of the West.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-191
Author(s):  
Nicholas Xenos

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).


2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (S1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM BAIN

AbstractThis article takes up Louise Arbour's claim that the doctrine of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ is grounded in existing obligations of international law, specifically those pertaining to the prevention and punishment of genocide. In doing so, it argues that the aspirations of the R2P project cannot be sustained by the idea of ‘responsibility’ alone. The article proceeds in arguing that the coherence of R2P depends on an unacknowledged and unarticulated theory of obligation that connects notions of culpability, blame, and accountability with the kind of preventive, punitive, and restorative action that Arbour and others advocate. Two theories of obligation are then offered, one natural the other conventional, which make this connection explicit. But the ensuing clarity comes at a cost: the naturalist account escapes the ‘real’ world to redeem the intrinsic dignity of all men and women, while the conventionalist account remains firmly tethered to the ‘real’ world in redeeming whatever dignity can be had by way of an agreement. The article concludes by arguing that the advocate of the responsibility to protect can have one or the other, but not both.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhida CHEN

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has, on various occasions, concluded treaties on behalf of its Member States. This raises some interesting questions: is ASEAN entitled to enter into treaties on behalf of its Member States; and if so, what should be the status of ASEAN and its Member States vis-à-vis the other party to the treaty? The issue is not one of whether the ASEAN Member States have consented to such a practice—it must be assumed that they have. Instead, the real issue is whether such treaty-making practice can and should be valid under international law, even if the Member States have consented for ASEAN to conclude these treaties on their behalf. This paper will argue that, under international law, ASEAN is entitled to conclude treaties on behalf of its Member States.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document