‘Photography’ (Kracauer 1927)

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Ian Aitken
Keyword(s):  
Positive Potential ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
Memory Image ◽  
Film Image ◽  
Close Analysis

This chapter is a close analysis of Kracauer’s 1927 essay ‘Photography’. In this essay, Kracauer regards photography as contributing towards the pervasive alienation within modernity, and he contrasts the photographic image with the ‘memory image, which contains substantial value. Nevertheless, the alienating photographic image can also reveal the nature of alienation, so has a positive potential. Kracauer also argues that the film image is less alienating than the photographic image because it can preserve more of the memory image

“Have You Ever Seen a Shrunken Head?”: The Early Modern Roots of Ecstatic Truth in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard John Ascárate
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
South American ◽  
American Film ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Film Image ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Hans Staden ◽  
The Way

Shortly into Werner Herzog's South American film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the Peruvian rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy) asks the eponymous protagonist (Klaus Kinski) if he has ever seen a shrunken head. This paper argues that Fitzcarraldo's short, fumbling response (“Yes. I mean, no. Sort of …”) calls into question both the European tradition of representing the New World and the very status and nature of the film image. Close analysis of a single visual from the film also demonstrates the difficulty of constructing images endowed with what the director has called over the years “ecstatic truth.” Though critically praised for his unique vision, Herzog affiliates himself through Fitzcarraldo, however unknowingly, with a constellation of texts and practices having colonialist aims, extending all the way to Warhaftig Historia (1557), the controversial captivity narrative of the would-be German conquistador Hans Staden.

The Materiality Of Film

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Effects ◽  
Direct Relation ◽  
Image Content ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Image ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Storage

Celluloid is material. The film image is inscribed and projected by light, whilst its substrate of celluloid and photosensitive emulsion has tended to be suppressed rather than exploited by filmmakers. In addition to the information provided at the levels of image content and narrative, each strip of film sustains a supplementary register of the marks and scratches of the machines of production and replay. These marginalia bear a direct relation to the circulation and storage of the film and so offer an index of its use. As the photographic image deteriorates, detritus accumulates, tracing the environmental effects of storage. Archivists seek to make sense of these marks, to discern the legacy of production from the impact of storage to identify the film. This information can be read. It is not explicative of the past, but called into an archaeological conversation around the remains of the past in the present. The study of film discerns an assemblage of texts and artefacts through which to decipher the material traces of others.

Comparable Modulation of the Late Positive Potential by Emotion Regulation in Younger and Older Adults

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra J. E. Langeslag ◽  
Jan W. Van Strien
Keyword(s):  
Emotion Regulation ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Late Positive Potential ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Apparent Discrepancy ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Psychophysiological Responses ◽  
Psychophysiological Measures ◽  
Emotional Pictures

It has been suggested that emotion regulation improves with aging. Here, we investigated age differences in emotion regulation by studying modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) by emotion regulation instructions. The electroencephalogram of younger (18–26 years) and older (60–77 years) adults was recorded while they viewed neutral, unpleasant, and pleasant pictures and while they were instructed to increase or decrease the feelings that the emotional pictures elicited. The LPP was enhanced when participants were instructed to increase their emotions. No age differences were observed in this emotion regulation effect, suggesting that emotion regulation abilities are unaffected by aging. This contradicts studies that measured emotion regulation by self-report, yet accords with studies that measured emotion regulation by means of facial expressions or psychophysiological responses. More research is needed to resolve the apparent discrepancy between subjective self-report and objective psychophysiological measures.

Feel Thine Own Self – Mood Congruency Evaluation of Emotional State Adjectives

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Szczepan J. Grzybowski ◽  
Miroslaw Wyczesany ◽  
Jan Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Mood Induction ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Semantic Access ◽  
Current Mood ◽  
Component Time

Abstract. The goal of the study was to explore event-related potential (ERP) differences during the processing of emotional adjectives that were evaluated as congruent or incongruent with the current mood. We hypothesized that the first effects of congruence evaluation would be evidenced during the earliest stages of semantic analysis. Sixty mood adjectives were presented separately for 1,000 ms each during two sessions of mood induction. After each presentation, participants evaluated to what extent the word described their mood. The results pointed to incongruence marking of adjective’s meaning with current mood during early attention orientation and semantic access stages (the P150 component time window). This was followed by enhanced processing of congruent words at later stages. As a secondary goal the study also explored word valence effects and their relation to congruence evaluation. In this regard, no significant effects were observed on the ERPs; however, a negativity bias (enhanced responses to negative adjectives) was noted on the behavioral data (RTs), which could correspond to the small differences traced on the late positive potential.

From a Distance: A Close Analysis of Skinner

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 424-425
Author(s):  
Laurence D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Close Analysis

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

Tanaka Kinuyo

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
Japanese Woman ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema. The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author. With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.

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