Automutilation and Metonymy: The Economy of the Pulse

2020 ◽  
pp. 130-165
Author(s):  
Sharon Jane Mee
Keyword(s):  
Consumption Expenditure ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Restricted Economy ◽  
General Economy

Exploring an economy of the pulse in an analysis of two films, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), this chapter shows how ‘splatter’ images have the force of ‘felt’ intensities insofar as the pulse is a flexible and momentary intensity that suggests the flow and flexibility of a ‘felt’, but unseen, operation. Georges Bataille’s concepts of automutilation and metonymy are operations indebted to the consumption, expenditure, and the ‘loss’ in general economy that communicate through affective energies. This chapter argues that the pulse entails a different kind of spectatorship than that seen in subject positions by which meaning is returned in value in a restricted economy. The pulse entails a spectatorship of expenditure in which the spectator is ‘put at stake’ and ‘loses’ oneself to the experience.

Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Complex Mechanism ◽  
Still Life ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Highly Active ◽  
Conscious Process ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 3 approaches the cinema of Jia Zhangke from two angles: first, a complex mechanism of multivalent and metanarrative subject positions in and beyond the cinematic frame compels the spectator to a highly active and conscious process of taking up history and image critically; second, it proposes the concept of “surface” to highlight Jia’s cinematic texture through various figurations of superficial time and superficial space in Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. Lou Ye’s highly expressionist and kinetic works conflate screen subjectivities with directorial and spectatorial ones. An analysis of two films by Lou Ye, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, demonstrates that, despite the two auteurs’ difference in style, they share a highly comparable epistemological interest in the relationship between history, representation and subjectivity.

The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Spectral Effect ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Spectator

The dis/appearances of the characters in Veledinskii’s Alive denotes ruptures in continuity (including the continuity of the gaze). The role of the phantom is to overcome the complete break between the living and the dead as well as to overcome the ruptures in discourse. The persistent revenant is an epitome of the return: they become by coming back and in doing so they create a repetitive experience—teleological aporia, a certain inheritance. The phantom is a trace and also a differance (in Derridean terms) in that their spectral effect is in the ideological tendency and the promise of emancipation. In Alive, the phantom resists the totality of representation and so emerges as a method of paralogy: legitimacy of the subject is determined by a denial of the possibility of legitimation. The spectre as a mediation of discourse which lies in between, and in Alive—not between life and death but between death and death. In Alive political agency is the phantom’s expediency whereby the gaze onto the spectator—the pervasiveness of the ghostly experience problematizes the status of the spectator who—in the presence of the posthumous narrator—emerges as a posthumous spectator.

The Pulse in Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Jane Mee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Movement Intensity ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Spectator

This book builds on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the dispositif, Gilles Deleuze’s work on sensation and Georges Bataille’s economic theory to conceptualise a pulse in cinema. Its aim is to rethink the affective force and economy of film spectatorship better understood by Lyotard’s concept of the dispositif than the formulation of the cinematic apparatus of 1970s film theory. The dispositif recognises the distribution of the pulse – the force of intensities in the body of the spectator and in the image – in terms of an energetic exchange and expenditure. Charting prototypes of the pulse in cinema’s rhythmic forms through Étienne-Jules Marey’s protocinematic experiments from the nineteenth-century and experimental film from the twentieth-century, the book goes on to advance a theory of the pulse in an analysis of body horror films such as Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts (1949), William Castle’s The Tingler (1959), George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981). Drawing on ideas of movement, intensity and expenditure, this book argues that blood in the images of body horror films has the unseen intensity of vectors of the pulse. It contends that what the pulse communicates is affect.

An Alternative Method for Identifying a Failed Engine in Twin-Engine Propeller Aircraft

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-111
Author(s):  
Andrey K. Babin ◽  
Andrew R. Dattel ◽  
Margaret F. Klemm
Keyword(s):  
Human Error ◽  
Flight Simulator ◽  
Traditional Group ◽  
Aircraft Accidents ◽  
Alternative Method ◽  
Indicator Group ◽  
Group A ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Engine Failure ◽  
And Performance

Abstract. Twin-engine propeller aircraft accidents occur due to mechanical reasons as well as human error, such as misidentifying a failed engine. This paper proposes a visual indicator as an alternative method to the dead leg–dead engine procedure to identify a failed engine. In total, 50 pilots without a multi-engine rating were randomly assigned to a traditional (dead leg–dead engine) or an alternative (visual indicator) group. Participants performed three takeoffs in a flight simulator with a simulated engine failure after rotation. Participants in the alternative group identified the failed engine faster than the traditional group. A visual indicator may improve pilot accuracy and performance during engine-out emergencies and is recommended as a possible alternative for twin-engine propeller aircraft.

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