scholarly journals Speculating the Spectator: Dance and the Mise en scène of the Gaze at the Académie royale de musique, 1827-185

Author(s):  
Madison Mainwaring
Keyword(s):  
The Gaze ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard David Evan

Rather than approaching the ‘look’ of adaptation through point of view or the ‘vision’ of the adapter, this chapter examines the material, visible texture of screen adaptation. Using two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula, I analyse how each uses mise en scène, cinematography, and editing to thicken and make tangible Stoker’s questioning of the reliability of vision in modernity. The first, Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922) employs the tricks of early cinema to shock spectators, while the second—Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)—uses a neo-baroque aesthetic that ruptures the screen and engulfs the spectator, much like one of Dracula’s victims. This chapter suggests that critical insight into an adaptation can be found quite literally in sight, and embraces how the materiality of adaptation overlaps with the materiality of vision.


Author(s):  
Emily Hughes

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). The film offers much, both in terms of thematic analysis and micro analysis of the sound, performance, cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène. Almodóvar can be considered to be a director who is a specialist in gender and the issue of gender identity is explored in Talk to Her, particularly the notion that gender characteristics are fluid and not fixed. Almodóvar's characters simultaneously embody and reject gender stereotypes and share both feminine and masculine attributes. Most of all, what makes Talk to Her such an interesting film to dissect, is the uneasy position that Almodóvar places the spectator in and how its messages and values create moral ambiguity. The film delivers morally complex, hazy messages about rape, voyeurism, and obsession and consequently, the spectator finds humour where they should find revulsion and sympathy where they should find anger. As a result, the film has sparked a great deal of critical, theoretical, and philosophical analysis, particularly around the issue of rape.


Maska ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (177) ◽  
pp. 51-57
Author(s):  
Bojan Anđelković
Keyword(s):  
The Gaze ◽  

Dragan Živadinov creates conceptual total works of art that are procedural and processual in nature. At the centre of interest of his art is the spectator, or the gaze, since the essence of this theatre is produced by a constant turning of the perspective. The project(ile) Noordung 1995-2045 has been conceived as a 50-year project to show the instability of the relation between body and technology. It stages itself and thus repeats the drama of the cosmos. A theatre of repetition that again finds the primary (ritual) sense of theatre.


Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Freemantle

An early proponent of the social sciences, Frédéric Le Play, was the occupant of senior positions within the French state in the mid- to late 19th century. He was writing at a time when science was ascending. There was for him no doubt that scientific observation, correctly applied, would allow him unmediated access to the truth. It is significant that Le Play was the organizer of a number of universal expositions because these expositions were used as vehicles to demonstrate the ascendant position of western civilization. The fabrication of linear time is a history of progress requiring a vision of history analogous to the view offered the spectator at a diorama. Le Play employed the design principles and spirit of the diorama in his formulations for the social sciences, and L’Exposition Universelle of 1867 used the technology wherever it could. Both the gaze of the spectators and the objects viewed are part and products of the same particular and unique historical formation. Ideas of perception cannot be separated out from the conditions that make them possible. Vision and its effects are inseparable from the observing subject who is both a product of a particular historical moment and the site of certain practices.


Author(s):  
Elisa  Pezzotta

In alternative and time travel narratives, our everyday conception of time is often challenged. Similarly, in counterfactual history, various parallel realities exist. In time travel narrative, it is possible to travel in the past or in the future. In all of these cases, there are clues that help viewers to comprehend new ideas of time and, in some cases, the construction of the story time is not sufficient to comprehend the story. In order to solve some of the main logical paradoxes, personal time needs to be considered and discussed. In alternative narrative, the clues are often to be found in the plot and story time, as well as in the mise-en-scène. In some examples of counterfactual history, for example Groundhog Day, and in some time travel narratives, the spectator has to reconstruct the time traveller’s personal time through story and plot time and mise-en-scène, as in Twelve Monkeys, or they have to deduce story time from personal time and mise-en-scène, as is the case in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The relationships between plot, story and personal time can be visualized through graphics which can also help us to draw conclusions about A-series and B-series.


2017 ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
Gian Maria Annovi

Chapter Five is devoted to films that feature Pasolini in roles that evoke or directly address his authorial function. This is the case for his self-projections onto character-authors such as Chaucer in I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), or Giotto’s pupil in Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971). The director’s on-screen performances contribute to the composition of the self-portrait of a multimedia author, and at the same time affirm the intimate bond between work and authorial corporeality. In The Trilogy of Life, Pasolini presents authorship like a corporeal, material element in the film, not a mere abstract function. In doing so, he also develops a discourse of cinematic spectatorship based on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author. In the case of Il fiore delle mille e una note (Arabian Nights)’s night original screenplay, this recognition would have also included the open representation of Pasolini’s homosexuality, and his sexual encounter with three young Arabs guys. This explicit on-screen queer performance was ultimately not included in the version of Arabian Nights that was actually shot. However, even if the author’s body is not on the screen, through the mise-en-scène of his queer gaze and the explicit depiction of the male body, Pasolini obliges the spectator to participate in the dynamics of homosexual desire, thus challenging the allegedly tolerant society of the 1970s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Gianluca Solla ◽  

Nella conferenza su Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie Merleau-Ponty introduce una singolare, ma decisiva notazione sull’arte filmica, legandola alla nozione di “ritmo”. Tale nozione dà avvio a una riflessione sull’immagine e sul rapporto tra l’immagine e lo sguardo dello spettatore al cinema. Nel presente articolo, l’uso che Merleau-Ponty ne fa e il senso di questa operazione saranno letti in riferimento alla riflessione di Émile Benveniste sul ritmo e ad alcune annotazioni contenute nei corsi di Merleau-Ponty al Collège de France, di qualche anno successivi alla conferenza, su Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression e quello sulle Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. Dans le texte de sa conférence sur Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie, Merleau-Ponty introduit une lecture, singulière mais décisive, de l’art filmique, en la rapprochant de la notion de « rythme ». Cette notion engage une réflexion sur l’image et sur le rapport entre l’image et le regard du spectateur au cinéma. Dans cet article, l’utilisation que Merleau-Ponty en fait et le sens de cette opération seront lus à partir de la réflexion d’Émile Benveniste sur le rythme et à partir de certaines notes présentes dans les cours de Merleau-Ponty au Collège de France sur Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression et sur les Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage, qui suivent de quelques années la conférence.In the text of his lecture on “Film and the new psychology,” Merleau-Ponty introduces a singular and decisive reading of filmic art, approaching the notion of “rhythm.” This notion engages in a reflection on image and on the relation between the image and the gaze of the spectator at the cinema. In this article, Merleau-Ponty’s actual usage of this notion and the meaning of this operation will be read starting from the reflection of Émile Benveniste on rhythm as well as certain notes presented in Merleau-Ponty’s courses at the Collège de France on The sensible world and the world of expression and Research on the literary usages of language, that follow some years after the lecture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. WLS17-WLS40
Author(s):  
Belén Vidal

This article revisits the debates about the postfeminist biopic in the 21st century through the films Wild Nights with Emily (Olnek, 2018), Florence Foster Jenkins (Frears, 2016), The Favourite (Lanthimos, 2018) and particularly Colette (Westmoreland, 2018) to examine the ways in which new women’s biopics queer women’s histories. The article examines the debates about representation concerning the female biopic (Bingham 2010, Polaschek 2013), especially the problematic conflation of a woman’s body/sexuality with her body of work and proposes an analysis of screen biography as a filmic (that is, mediated) event open to non-normative identifications and desires. Biopics of women demand a shift in focus from representation to performance, both in relation to the actor’s function as the cornerstone of the biographical fiction and in relation to the performativity of the genre itself. Drawing on Landsberg (2015), I argue that new women’s biopics stage encounters between the spectator and the historical figure through different forms of mediation. In this respect, I examine the modalities of reflexive performance in connection with queer bodies and subjectivities in the first three films cited above, before moving on to a case study on Colette. Colette largely plays in the mid-Atlantic idiom of the postfeminist biopic (Polaschek 2013), including a non-imitative star turn by Keira Knightley, whose star persona is briefly analysed, yet the film’s queerness entertains a complex relationship with this postfeminist framework. While queer identities risk becoming diluted into the standard trajectory of female emancipation proposed by the film (a narrative invested with added urgency in the post-#MeToo moment), performance inflects this narrative differently: the intermedial mise-en-scène (particularly photographic posing, theatre, and dance) makes Colette a biopic equally concerned with the retrieval of women’s histories as with the production of the queer female self against the backdrop of patriarchal cultural industries.


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