The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Special Effects ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Technological Sublime ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
Mechanical Objects

Metropolis displays a deeply conflicting attitude toward industrial modernity. Conceived and marketed as a marvel of film technology, the film pursued the techno-romantic project of transcending material reality through technological means. What is more, the goal was to capture the unfathomability of technology itself. Metropolis simultaneously portrays technology as an agent of tyranny and dehumanization and flaunts it as spectacle. Special effects facilitate encounters with overpowering technological environments and omnipotent machines, which give rise to sentiments that are best described in terms of a “technological sublime.” The sublime characterizes experiences that go beyond the earthly and finite, to attain a spiritual dimension. In attributing transcendent qualities to mechanical objects, the technological sublime embodies the technoromantic paradigm.

Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Film History ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Industrial Modernity

German silent cinema is famous for its unconventional aesthetics and film-technological innovations. These characteristics were the result of efforts to reconcile the new medium’s automatic reproductions of physical reality with idealist conceptions of art. Special effects played a crucial role in this endeavour. They afforded creative experiments with the cinematic apparatus and inspired filmmakers to convey ideas and emotions. Special effects embodied the “techno-romantic” project of construing technology as a means for transcending material reality. This common response to industrial modernity profoundly shaped German silent film culture. The techno-romantic paradigm formed the basis of one of the most creative periods in film history and proved instrumental in the evolution of cinematic expressivity and film art.

Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
German Film ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Mass Entertainment

As a form of popular mass entertainment and an apparatus for the automatic reproduction of material reality, cinema’s artistic aspirations seemed futile. Some early commentators nonetheless asserted that the new medium could be a legitimate object of aesthetic scrutiny. In an attempt to fathom cinema’s immaterial values, early film theorists including Herbert Tannenbaum and Georg Lukács explored cinema’s kinship with folk art, mental processes and the fantastic. They argued that film technology, specifically special effects, could articulate ideas in a sensual form and thus provide a pathway to a spiritual dimension. As this chapter shows, their techno-romantic lines of argument conceptualized the medium within established aesthetics and set the stage for the recognition of cinema as the first technological art.

Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Exposure ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Material Reality

Two technicians had a particularly formative impact on the evolution of special effects in Germany. Film pioneer Guido Seeber favoured methods like multiple exposure composites, which allow the cinematographer to excel both technically and creatively. Aiming at forging convincing composite spaces on screen, Eugen Schüfftan invented the only widely used commercial special-effects technique originating in Europe, the Schüfftan process. In similar ways, Seeber’s photographic and Schüfftan’s perceptual effects construe technology as cinema’s core creative tool and the cinematic image as fundamentally malleable. Both shared technoromantic views, which is apparent from their devotion to the goal of film art and commitment to devising medium-specific means for transcending material reality and expressing emotions and ideas.

Conclusion: Techno-Romantic Cinema from the Silent to the Digital Era

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Research Area ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Machine Technology ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Computer Generated Imagery ◽  
New Research

Techno-romantic thought, which construes machine technology as a means to reach beyond material reality, is still with us today. It is reflected in the vogue of speculative fiction in contemporary moving image media, which has been made possible by radical advances in digital visual effects. Computer-generated imagery has brought into reach the fully malleable photograph, a dream that epitomizes a major triumph of the human mind over outside reality and thus an essentially techno-romantic fantasy. The same ambition already animated German silent filmmakers, who saw special effects as a way to shape mechanically produced images. Their use of trick technology for conveying thoughts and emotions gives rise to a new research area: special/visual effects as artistic tools.

The Return to the Sublime

2019 ◽  
pp. 76-107
Author(s):  
James Williams
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime ◽  
Recent Philosophy ◽  
Technological Sublime

This chapter studies the return to the sublime in recent philosophy and culture. It analyses and rejects the technological sublime defended by David Nye and the environmental sublime put forward by Emily Brady. There is a consideration of the link between the sublime and nostalgia, and an explanation of the link between the sublime and values.

scholarly journals Extrañamientos en la ciudad. Del shock urbano a las derivas situacionistas

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Nuria Vallespín Toro ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
The City ◽  
New Babylon

The strange has always been present throughout history. Exploring the links between disciplines such as literature, cinema, art, sociology, etc. We place the concept of strangeness as a state that comes up: as an unforeseen event, as an effect of astonishment, and its derivations as the extraordinary, the rare, the sublime, the stranger, anomalies, random, etc. From strange wonder spaces, such as the Cabinets of Curiosities, Wonders Cameras and the Phantasmagorias linked to special effects, we will focus on estrangement in the context of the urban environment, represented by the flâneur as a distracted passer-by, by Situationists’ derives with utopian cities as New Babylon and their experimental cartographies and by cinematographic characters such Mr. Hulot, who construct poetic discourses on the estrangement of the everyday. Through them we will see how the city offers itself to us as the scene of events where the irruption of the strange in all its complexity is manifested

scholarly journals Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Amusement Parks ◽  
Insight Into

Using essays on such topics as musical films, superheroes, the sublime, morphing, science fiction, special effects, and amusement parks to illustrate his argument, Scott Bukatman’s collection explores the importance of popular culture in relation to the possibilities of flight offered to the body in constricted environments. His celebration of the sense of liberated movement offered by popular culture's varying forms of entertainment offers insight into the necessity of these types of spectacle and play in light of the frightening realities of our culture.

A Los Angeles Science Fiction Sublime

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-420
Author(s):  
John McCullough
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
World System ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article discusses representations of Los Angeles in science fiction films in the context of the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. The article argues that a Los Angeles science fiction sublime is achieved through representations that feature nature and culture hybrids, elaborate design and special effects (including the destruction of Los Angeles monuments), and detective narratives that provide labyrinthine investigations that challenge our understanding of identity, history, and being. Given that these tendencies have gained prominence only since 1980, the article considers postmodernism as an aesthetic category that can help us understand how Los Angeles spaces are integrated in the neoliberal world system.

On Self-Driving Cars as a Technological Sublime

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia M. Hildebrand ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Potential Harm ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Technological Sublime ◽  
Light Side ◽  
Self Driving Cars ◽  
Political Economic

Driverless automobility presents a “technological sublime” (Marx 1964; Nye 1994, 1997) encompassing both promises and perils. The light side of the emerging transportation future lies, for instance, in the newly gained freedom from driving. The dark side of this sublime includes ethical challenges and potential harm resulting from the required socio-technical transformations of mobility. This article explores contemporary visions for the self-driving car future through the lens of the sublime and some of its theoretical variations, such as the natural (Kant 1965), technological (Marx 1964; Nye 1994, 1997), electrical (Carey and Quirk 1989), and digital (Mosco 2005) sublime. Nissan’s IDS Concept preview clip (2015) and the Chevrolet FNR trailer (2015) serve as examples for this analysis, which aims to demythologize the visual rhetoric of the depicted awe-inspiring self-driving systems. The sublime’s inherent dialectic of inducing both pleasure and displeasure is removed in the corporate utopian visions in favor of an exalting partnership between human and machine. This strategy succeeds by setting the mobility future in the context of controlled parameters such as the trustworthy communicative vehicle, the vital and independent protagonists, and the harmless and unharmed environment. Recognizing such recurring strategies and identifying the controlled parameters which allow the sublime object to electrify, not terrify, is key for a sensible engagement with such imagined futures and their social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, and ethical implications. Such premediations (Grusin 2010) of awe-inspiring technological formations and the underlying logics ask to be unpacked toward decision making that considers all potential facets of the sublime future.

Landscape and Its Double: The Technological Sublime

ARTMargins ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
Angela Harutyunyan
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Oil Fields ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Historical Condition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Technological Sublime ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
New Social Order

Abstract The essay inquires about the historical condition of representation in our present while invoking the modern experience of the sublime and landscape as the medium of that experience. Can the sublime as the experience of the subject confronted with the very limits of representation be extended to our late capitalist conditions of mediatized representations? What constitutes “a landscape” as the site of the experience of the sublime in late capitalism? The essay addresses these questions through a renewed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1936) by focusing on the discussion of the aura and the decay of the aura in relation to landscape. In the wake of the failure of a transformative praxis to bring about a new social order, the technologically hyper-mediated engagement of man with nature under the conditions of extreme alienation and reification results in the production of the aesthetics of destruction experienced as “supreme pleasure”. In the age of the atomic bomb and technological hyper-mediation, the singularity of the moment of the experience of the sublime is multiply reproduced. The essay ends with an analysis of Werner Herzog’s 1992 film Lessons of Darkness as an example of rendering cinematically the aura’s survival under the conditions of its decay in the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Capitalism’s “desert of the real”, as the vast desert in Kuwait in Herzog’s film, is precisely the landscape in relation to which the subject attempts to represent that which evades representation (the event, nature, capitalism, and so on).

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