Read My Lips: Onscreen Visual Acoustics in Alfred Hitchcock’s Early Movies

Epos Revista de filología ◽

10.5944/epos.37.2021.32480 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 225-241

Author(s):

Fabio L. Vericat

Keyword(s):

Visual Experience ◽

The Spectator ◽

Acoustic Experience

This essay will cover some of Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent movies up to and including Blackmail (1929), of which he filmed both a silent and a sound version simultaneously. Hitchcock’s success with sound was directly linked to his training in silent technique. Silent movies actually allowed him to explore how they were capable of sound. This essay will consider how silent movies were able to induce an acoustic experience without the aid of extra-diegetic practices that added live – and sometimes gramophonic – soundtrack to films. What I am interested in is the aural effect of the visual experience of the screen alone. In the early days of cinema, the frame was silently read for all kind of sounds heard in the head of the spectator.

Download Full-text

Grave Visions: Visual Experience and Adaptation

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation ◽

10.5117/9789463722100_ch01 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Richard David Evan

Keyword(s):

Visual Experience ◽

Point Of View ◽

Early Cinema ◽

Gothic Novel ◽

Francis Ford Coppola ◽

Mise En Scene ◽

Critical Insight ◽

The Spectator ◽

The Look ◽

Insight Into

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.

Download Full-text

(Re)framing Movement in Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation N°1

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film and Media Studies ◽

10.2478/ausfm-2014-0003 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 35-48

Author(s):

Emőke Simon

Keyword(s):

Visual Experience ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Short Films ◽

The World ◽

Way Of Thinking ◽

The Spectator ◽

Stan Brakhage ◽

The Way

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial

Download Full-text

Trzy kroki w stronę obrazów. Pierre Bonnard i percepcyjne opóźnienie.

Artium Quaestiones ◽

10.14746/aq.2016.27.4 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 67-92

Author(s):

Łukasz Kiepuszewski

Keyword(s):

Visual Perception ◽

Art History ◽

Visual Experience ◽

Specific Composition ◽

Starting Point ◽

History Of ◽

The Spectator ◽

Late Works ◽

Analytical Practice

The essay is an analysis of three interpretations of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings offered by Jean Clair, John Elderfield, and Yves-Alain Bois. Their approaches are crucial in the context of the revaluation Bonnard’s works and his place in the history of modern painting, which has been continuing since the 1980s. Today’s scholars have been interested mostly in his late works from 1920-1947. At that time the artist created a multidimensional pictorial synthesis which addressed the most advanced dilemmas which appeared in the first half of the 20th century. The critical opinions analyzed in the essay, referring to physiology and the psychology of perception, the cognitive conditions of visual perception, and specific philosophical traditions, stem from individual visual experience and demonstrate significant tensions. Taking the painting as a starting point triggers differences in interpretation not just at the level of theoretical discourse, but in respect to visualization itself. Bonnard’s works significantly program the process of visual perception – grasping the changing rhythm of relation between the center and periphery and moving toward fixations scattered in the visual field. The specific composition of paintings makes the spectator deconcentrate; it can be grasped in an act of perception which extends in time. Such “delay” of perception means that Bonnard’s paintings are a challenge to the gestalt psychology which prevails in the analytical practice of art history. The unique quality of Bonnard’s works, based on the coexistence of the rhythms of organization and disorder,shows no superior coherence of the gestalt. They establish an “inconclusive” relation between the part and the whole, which results in continuing deference and delay of the integration of motifs and elements of the pictorial field. The discussed episode in Bonnard’s art’s reception confirms a belief that “he is not a painter for those in a hurry. The phenomenon of the perceptive delay seems to be significantly connected with the delay in discovering such qualities by art historians.

Download Full-text