From Altered States to Altered Titles: A Close Analysis of the Title Sequence to Ken Russell's Altered States (1981)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-571
Author(s):  
Jack Post
Keyword(s):  
Altered States ◽  
Thematic Structure ◽  
Personal Projects ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Film Images ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although most title sequences of Ken Russell's films consist of superimpositions of a static text on film images, the elaborate title sequence to Altered States (1981) was specially designed by Richard Greenberg, who had already acquired a reputation for his innovative typography thanks to his work on Superman (1978) and Alien (1979). Greenberg continued these typographic experiments in Altered States. Although both the film and its title sequence were not personal projects for Russell, a close analysis of the title sequence reveals that it functions as a small narrative unit in its own right, facilitating the transition of the spectator from the outside world of the cinema to the inside world of filmic fiction and functioning as a prospective mise-en-abyme and matrix of all the subsequent narrative representations and sequences of the film to come. By focusing on this aspect of the film, the article indicates how the title sequence to Altered States is tightly interwoven with the aesthetic and thematic structure of the film, even though Russell himself may have had less control over its design than other parts of the film.

scholarly journals THE BODY IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN EUROPEAN AND RUSSIAN THEATRE: CULTURAL VARIABILITY OF SHAME

Articult ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Leila F. Salimova ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ethical Aspect ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Considerable Body

Modern scientific knowledge approaches the study of the physical and aesthetic bodies with a considerable body of texts. However, on the territory of the theater, the body is still considered exclusively from the point of view of the actor's artistic tools. Theatrical physicality and the character of physical empathy in the theater are not limited to the boundaries of the performing arts, but exist in close relationship with the visual and empirical experience of the spectator, performer, and director. The aesthetic and ethical aspect of the attitude to the body in the history of theatrical art has repeatedly changed, including under the influence of changing cultural criteria of "shameful". The culmination of the demarcation of theatrical shame, it would seem, should be an act of pure art, independent of the moral restrictions of society. However, the experiments of modern theater continue to face archaic ethical views. The article attempts to understand the cultural variability of such a phenomenon as shame in its historical and cultural extent using examples from theater art from antiquity to the present day.

scholarly journals Out of Bounds: Confronting War Crimes and the Breakdown of Justice with Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Catherine Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Collective Remembering ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Marc Quinn ◽  
The Aesthetic

Recent art has turned to judiciary and extra-judiciary practices, specifically in the context of international conflicts, in order to assert art’s political accountability and relevance to our capacity to historicise the present. The war in Iraq inspired works that directly address issues of representation and remediation, such as Marc Quinn’s Mirage (2008), in which the aesthetic experience opens onto an ambiguous experience of the breakdown of justice. Other works have chosen to turn carceral space itself into the site of a collective remembering that harnesses affect to a critical reflection on the administration of justice, on assent and dissent. This article will turn to key works by Marc Quinn and Trevor Paglen that confront extra-judiciary malpractices, but also to recent collective art projects involving an interdisciplinary take on the experience of imprisonment, such as Inside. Artists and Writers in Reading Prison (2016), in which artists of all backgrounds responded to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis on the very premises of Wilde’s incarceration, as well as the work of 2019 Turner Prize co-recipient: Jordanian sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan whose recent works rely on testimonies from Syrian detainees and probe the political pragmatics of aural art. All these works have turned to the document—literary, visual, aural—to reflect on the process of experiential mediation. How does the experience of imprisonment, or extra-judiciary malpractices, come to the spectator? How are they read, heard, interpreted, remediated? The article ponders the remediation and displacement of aesthetic experience itself and the “response-ability”—following Donna Haraway’s coinage—of such a repoliticised embodied experience. It will assess the way by which such interdisciplinary works rethink the poetics of the documentary for an embodied intellection of justice—and injustice—in the present.

“What Is to Come After This?”

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-222
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
To Come ◽  
Socialist Art ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

Aisthesis and Dispositif: The Pulse and Its Analogues

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-129
Author(s):  
Sharon Jane Mee
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter discusses Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of aisthesis, which he develops through an examination of the executing apparatus in Franz Kafka’s short story ‘In the Penal Colony’. Aisthesis provides scope for defining the ‘felt’ spectatorship of the pulse, which can be differentiated from the aesthetic spectatorship concerned with the rhythms of the apparatus. By examining the viewing conditions established for William Castle’s The Tingler (1959), which saw cinema seats wired with electric devices that would ‘tingle’ their occupants, this chapter finds that what this apparatus ‘exposes’ is the aisthetic sensations of the spectator. It considers how the ‘machine-like’ prescription of the apparatus breaks into the energetic work of the dispositif of cinema at the site of the spectator, and more broadly, where the dispositif stands as a social apparatus in what is, for both Kafka’s and Castle’s apparatus, a disciplinary act.

Imagination in the Experience of Art

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 88-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. K. Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Visual Impression ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
As If ◽  
Art Critics

In this paper I shall not be concerned with the imagination as insight, but only with certain aspects of ‘magical’ imagination, that division of the concept which centres upon the notion of an image. In the Philosophical Investigations (II xi) Wittgenstein makes the extremely interesting remark that when a printed triangle is seen, for instance, as a mountain, it is as if an image came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression (i.e. with the object as seen by me). He goes on to say that in a picture a triangular figure may have some such aspect permanently — in the pictorial context we would read the figure at once as a mountain — but that we can make a distinction between ‘regarding’ and ‘seeing’ the figure as the thing meant. I take him to be contrasting those common experiences in which we see a figure in a picture as depicting a person, or as a ‘picture-person’, with those rarer experiences, referred to by art-critics when they talk of ‘presence’, in which it seems as if the person depicted in the picture is there before us ‘in the flesh’, and I assume that, like Sartre, Wittgenstein would suppose that imagination plays a part in experiences of this latter kind. In this paper I shall be concerned not with this sense of the presence of the object depicted, but chiefly with types of imaginal experience in which the image which seems to come into contact with what is perceived is an image of something which is not depicted or described in the work, but which nevertheless achieves a certain strength of presence. I shall consider, also, some types of imaginal experience which we would not naturally describe as an image's coming into contact with what is perceived. Though I shall relate some of the examples I discuss to my starting-point in Wittgenstein, I do not claim to be elaborating Wittgenstein's remark in a manner which would have been acceptable to him. My aims are to give some indication of the nature and scope of the imaginal experience of art, to defend the aesthetic relevance of this type of experience, and to suggest why the imaginal experience of art has been, and still is, valued.

scholarly journals O corpóreo e a erupção da bestialidade em Carne e Sozinho Contra Todos, de Gaspar Noé // The bodily and the eruption of bestiality in Meat and I Stand Alone, by Gaspar Noé

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 786
Author(s):  
Josette Alves de Souza Monzani ◽  
Mario Sergio Righetti
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historia De Vida ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Procedures

Resumo: Procura-se apontar de que modo os procedimentos estéticos do diretor franco-argentino Gaspar Noé acabam por realizar uma proposta de cinematografia radical que estabelece uma tensão no compartilhamento sensorial entre o corpo da tela, o corpo da câmera e o corpo do espectador. Carne (1991) e Sozinho Contra Todos (1998) narram a história de vida do Açougueiro, um cidadão à margem da sociedade metropolitana francesa, marcada por represamentos afetivos que o comprimem e levam a cometer ações bestiais marcadas por ‘enganos’, equívocos que o prejudicarão para sempre.O corpo cinematográfico de Noé faz uso da imagem e do som hápticos, trilhando um caminho batailleano - através da transgressão, da sensorialidade e da experimentação do abjeto -, e através deles busca induzir no espectador o que denominamos afeto carnal e corporeidade imanente como forma de pontuar as questões sociais e éticas propostas pelo diretor. Abstract: It is tried to point out how the aesthetic procedures of the French-Argentine director Gaspar Noé end up making a proposal of radical cinematography that establishes a tension in the sensorial sharing among the body of the screen, the body of the camera and the body of the spectator. Meat (1991) and I Stand Alone (1998) chronicle the life history of the Butcher, a citizen on the fringes of French metropolitan society, marked by affective imprisonments that compel him to commit bestial actions marked by ‘mistakes’, mistakes that will do him harm forever. The cinematographic body of Noé makes use of haptic image and sound, traversing a Bataillean path - through transgression, sensoriality and experimentation of the abject - and by them seeks to induce in the viewer what we call carnal affection and immanent corporeity as a way of punctuating the social and ethical questions proposed by the director.

scholarly journals Terrorens poetik: Revolutionen skrives med småt

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (107) ◽  
pp. 52-73
Author(s):  
Susanne Stoltz ◽  
Anders Tønnesen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Poetics of Terror: The Manifestoes of the RAF:This paper points to a ‘forgotten’ literary history of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) in order to contest a common misconception. The RAF is often perceived solely as a political phenomenon and its justification of terrorism as a political discourse. Thereby many scholars bluntly fail to pinpoint the attractiveness of the left-wing terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper argues that the writings of the first generation of the RAF also convey a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. It points to a somewhat overlooked strategy of justification in the writings, which can be formulated as follows: Both the act of terrorism and the utterance of its defence are justified as aesthetic experiences. Furthermore, this was constructed under heavy influence from groups of avant-garde artists in the tradition of the Situationist International (SI). The paper analyses the strategy of justification found in the first few RAF-statements. Beneath the political jargon of left-wing radicalism and the »credo of immediate action«, the paper locates another strategy of justification that carries the sign of avant-garde thought. According to the manifestoes of the RAF, the aesthetic experience of a terrorist act could liberate the spectator. The study concludes that the writings of RAF unveil a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. The act of terrorism is a radical transgression of reality. Hence, the terrorist act destroys the ‘mechanical’ system of cognitive oppression because it shows the possibility of another world. That is why the RAF views terror as a model of spiritual liberation. In addition to this the statements communicate a parallel concept to the ‘poetics’ of the terror act. The RAF constructed a concept of revolutionary language, ‘the armed propaganda’, which claimed to break down the barriers of ‘domination’ in the consciousness of the recipient. In doing so the statements perform what they preach; they are themselves acts of terror. The RAF’s concept of terrorism comprises both word and deed. The writings are acts and the acts are utterances. Accordingly, RAF’s ‘poetics’ of terrorism can be described as the transgression of reality in the word or deed of terror that leads to spiritual liberation.

scholarly journals Escrita, doutrina e esquecimento: Kafka e Benjami

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Romero Freitas
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Resumo: Qual o significado da escrita no motivo benjaminiano da história como salvação do passado? No ensaio sobre Kafka (1934), o problema do caráter estético da escrita da história alia-se à questão do valor de verdade (“doutrina”) da literatura de ficção. Entre ambos, esboça- se uma dialética entre memória e esquecimento, na qual a escrita faz da narrativa uma espécie de memória que, agindo contra si mesma, atinge o “mar do feliz esquecimento”.Palavras-chave: Benjamin; Kafka; escrita; doutrina; memória; esquecimento.Abstract: What is the meaning of writing in Benjamin’s motif of history as a redemption of the past? In the essay on Kafka (1934), the problem of the aesthetic character of the writing of history is associated with the issue of the value of truth (“doctrine”) of fiction. Between the two there starts to come out a dialectics between remembering and forgetting, in which writing transforms narrative into a kind of memory which, acting against itself, achieves the “sea of happy forgetting”.Keywords: Benjamin; Kafka; writing; doctrine; remembering; forgetting.

scholarly journals Toward a Common Configurative Impulse

MODOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-127
Author(s):  
Kaira M. Cabañas
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
Relational Contract ◽  
Brazilian Art ◽  
Geometric Abstraction ◽  
Concrete Art ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Creative Production

Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa’s theorization of art’s affective power, whereby the relational contract with the spectator is neither rational nor purely visual but is infused with feeling, was decisive for understandings of geometric abstraction as expressive in the 1950s. “Toward a Common Configurative Impulse” turns to another modernism, nestled alongside the geometric ones that would come to define the aesthetic of artists associated with Concrete Art in these years. Beyond Concrete Art, Pedrosa’s modernism also encompassed the creative production of diverse practitioners, among them, popular artists, self-taught artists and psychiatric patients (the latter is the subject of my book Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art). With this in mind, this essay tracks the historical and discursive origins for such an inclusive modernism and how Pedrosa’s embrace of different artistic subjectivities calls for a necessary shift in the historiography of Brazilian modernism at mid-century.

The Filmmaker as DJ

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-317
Author(s):  
Todd Decker
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Constituent Element ◽  
Film Images ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Racial Performance ◽  
First Time ◽  
Music Recordings ◽  
Film Form

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) is structured around a compiled score of almost sixty popular music recordings. Scorsese himself, working with editor Thelma Schoonmaker and using digital editing tools for the first time, assembled and arranged a diverse body of pre-existing music into a unified score that plays for more than two of the film’s three hours. This article offers a close analysis of Scorsese acting as composer—crafting Casino’s compiled score in the manner of a DJ—and, in reciprocal fashion, editing film images and narrative to recorded music. Casino demonstrates highly varied, multivalent relationships between musical form and film form. Indeed, musical form proves a constituent element of Casino’s construction at multiple levels of magnification. The large-scale form of the score as a whole articulates the larger arc of Casino’s dual narrative. The strategic deployment of musical styles (from jazz to rock to pop) and the targeted use of lyrics as voiceover (often subtly deploying aspects of racial performance in popular styles) serve to differentiate narrative strands and fill out otherwise unspoken characterization. Scorsese builds several sequences in Casino on a direct, often audible relationship between song forms and narrative unfolding, creating song scenes in which compiled tracks heard as musical wholes grant a musical shape to discrete narrative units. Casino’s complex use of music does not, however, penetrate the inner lives of the film’s three primary characters, who seem unaware of the musical flow Scorsese employs to set their story dancing. The analysis draws upon the filmmaker’s own words about his creative process and offers select comparisons to other Scorsese films with compiled scores.

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