scholarly journals The Gothic at the Heart of Film and Film Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Bronfen
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Psychic Reality

The main elements of the Freudian uncanny - re-animation of the dead, doubles, repetition compulsion, omnipotence of thought - can also be seen as a catalogue of the key techniques of cinema, the magical thinking on which the affective effect of cinema is predicated. So as explore the Gothic at the heart of cinema's theorization of its own epistemological, psychological and aesthetic concerns, this chapter begins with the flashback scenes in the TV series Mad Men. Montage (and especially superimpositions) perform the spectral haunting at issue, notably how the past overshadows and encroaches upon the present and how the distinction between material and psychic reality, body and mind comes to blur. Given that, like much current cinema, Mathew Weiner's show is a genre mix, the chapter finally moves back into cinema history to explore the Gothic at the heart of film in Alfred Hitchcock's unique splice between film noir and melodrama.

scholarly journals The Old Greeks

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Kouvaros
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Dead

In his final unfinished book on the writing of history, Siegfried Kracauer wonders about his increasing susceptibility to ‘the speechless plea of the dead’. ‘[T]he older one grows, the more he is bound to realize that his future is the future of the past—history.’ For the children of migrants, the question of how to speak well of the dead is distinguished by complex feelings of attachment and rejection, identification and denial that are expressed in a range of everyday interactions. ‘The Old Greeks’ examines the part played by photographic media in this process of memorialisation. It elaborates a series of propositions about the value of photographic media that are tested through a consideration of the events that surrounded the author’s first years in Australia.

Alessandro Gavazzi: a barnabite friar and the risorgimento (Presidential Address)

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 303-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Hall
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Mind

Think nowHistory has many cunning passages, contrived corridorsAnd issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,Guides us by vanities. Think nowShe gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

scholarly journals California and Irony in Mad Men

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Taveira
Keyword(s):  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
The Self ◽  
Television Series ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mad Men ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The Aesthetic

The combination of melodramatic and art cinematic techniques and influences in AMC’s television series Mad Men (2007¬–) reveals how a melodramatic televisuality can image novel modes of social and intimate relations and an alternative to the archetypal American narrative of the self-made man. Set in 1960s’ America, the series uses a contemporaneous and cosmopolitan California to triangulate the formal and narrative insistence of the past on the present. This triangulation is played out by Don Draper’s relations with his family, women, and his former identities and by the representation of homosexuality throughout the series. The application of Lee Edelman’s concept of “sinthomosexuality” and Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” reveal a queer, visual rhetoric to the show’s narrative and formal structures, forming a queer irony that allows the show to straddle the aesthetic extremes of “quality TV” (Jane Feuer) and soap opera, which, in turn, queers the exemplary American heterosexuality of Don Draper.

scholarly journals Patterns of Memory in Askold Melnyczuk’s Novels as an Example of Ukrainian-American Émigré Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-137
Author(s):  
Marta Koval
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
European History ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Definition Of

Although Ukrainian emigration to North America is not a new phenomenon, the dilemmas of memory and amnesia remain crucial in Ukrainian-American émigré fiction. The paper focuses on selected novels by Askold Melnyczuk (What is Told and Ambassador of the Dead) and analyzes how traumatic memories and family stories of the past shape the American lives of Ukrainian emigrants. The discussion of the selected Ukrainian-American émigré novels focuses on the dilemmas of remembering and forgetting in the construction of both Ukrainian and American narratives of the past. The voluntary amnesia of the Ame- rican-born Ukrainians in Melnyczuk’s novels confronts their parents’ dependence on the past and their inability to abandon it emotionally. Memories of ‘the old country’ make them, similarly to Ada Kruk, ambassadors of the dead. The expression becomes a metaphoric definition of those wrapped by their repressed, fragmentary and sometimes inaccessible memories. Crucial events of European history of the 20th century are inscribed and personalized in the older generation’s stories which their children are reluctant to hear. For them, their parents’ memories became a burden and a shame. Using the concept of transgenerational memory, the paper explores the challenges of postmemory, and eventually its failure. 

scholarly journals What’s hidden in my filedrawer and what’s in yours? Disclosing Non-published Findings in the Cognitive Science of Religion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michiel van Elk
Keyword(s):  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Short Report ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Superstitious Behavior ◽  
Behavior Study ◽  
Unpublished Studies ◽  
Neurocognitive Measures

In this short report I present an overview of different unpublished studies that we conducted in my lab over the past years. Across the different studies we observed consistent effects of our experimental manipulations or variables of interest on self-report measures, but less so on behavioral and neurocognitive measures. For instance, religious people said they were more prosocial but did not donate more money (Study 1 & 2); participants experienced awe but this did not affect their body and self perception (Study 6 & 7); participants had mystical-like experiences but this did not affect the perception of their peripersonal space (Study 8 & 9); and self-reported magical thinking was unrelated to superstitious behavior (Study 11). In other studies, the hypothesized effects did not bear out as expected or were even in an unexpected direction. Participants perceived more agency in threatening pictures and scenarios, but this was not related to their supernatural beliefs (Study 3-5) and a death priming manipulation reduced rather than increased participants’ religiosity (Study 10). Opening the filedrawer through the publication of short reports like this one, will hopefully further increase transparency and will help other researchers to learn from our own trials and errors.

“Workers’ Self-Management and Social Property”: A Comment

1976 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 468-476
Author(s):  
Adolph L. Reed
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Property A ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Social Property

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjur up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.1

The Rhetoric of Madness in Realist Film Theory

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Temenuga Trifonova
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Anxiety Disorders ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Reception ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter explores the rhetoric of madness and mental illness informing realist film theories. Hugo Münsterberg, author of the first work of film theory, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, considered the following several features—reminiscent of the symptomatic language of dissociative identity disorder—essential to cinema: decentralization (the ability to assume alternate points of view), mobility (the ability to invert the past and the present, the real and the virtual), and derealization and disembodiment (characteristic of film reception). Epstein’s revelationist aesthetic and Balázs’s anthropomorphic film theory are both informed by animistic beliefs, translating into the realm of the aesthetic the symptoms of various types of delusional and anxiety disorders characterized by the inability to distinguish the living from the non-living. In Kracauer’s Theory of Film affective states commonly perceived as symptomatic of madness or mental illness—detachment from reality, ennui, melancholy, distraction, and disinterestedness/apathy—are posited as necessary to film’s ‘redemption of physical reality’. This chapter explores these and other formulations, focusing on Kracuer’s Theory of Film.

To Gaze Upon the Dead: The Exhibition of Human Remains as Cultural Practice and Political Process in Scandinavia and the USA

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liv Nilsson Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Small Hand ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Dead

The clattering sound of a child’s shoes across the cold stone floors; the echo is magnificent. I am nine or ten years old and I make my way through the prehistoric exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. The dimly lit display cases are filled with arrowheads, heavy beads of perforated amber, funnel beakers, and bronze artefacts. I reach my goal, the alluring Bronze Age oak cists where the buried men and women from the heaths of Jutland are looking back at me. I touch the glass. My eyes wander over their reddened hair and their clothes, stained in deep shades of peat brown. My eyes seek theirs in the hollow orbits of their skulls. I close mine and imagine a life thousands of years ago. My small hand moves across the glass, leaving an almost invisible trace. Small fingerprints; a dreaming child’s gesture. I would stay there forever, dreaming of the past. Feeling it. I know that it was moments like this, when I could see and feel the humanity of the past that made me want to become an archaeologist. The immediate encounter with an individual from the past is a privileged moment. For a brief moment our destinies cross paths, and hundreds, even thousands of years are transcended. Scenes like this one, of children gazing at the dead and seeing the past, are not unusual. In museums across Europe, the archaeological findings from burials, including both the human remains and the items that accompanied the dead, are often displayed with pride and confidence. The public expects this and is drawn in with fascination to stand face-to-face with the deep past. Beyond this, the display of the dead and of death itself, with all of the allure and drama that accompany it, becomes a privileged locus for pedagogy and communication. But while this confident attitude towards the display of the dead may be typical in Europe, it is not as evident in North America. In North American museums, it is rare to see human remains from archaeological contexts displayed in any form (exception seems to be given to Egyptian mummies, which still are prominently displayed by many institutions that have them among their collections).

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