scholarly journals Representation of reality in filmmaking: philosophical and culturological aspects

Author(s):  
Yaroslav Klimov

This article explores the issues pertaining to perception of reality through cinematography, including modern film editing. Analysis is conducted on modern surrealistic portraying of the world in movies, highlighting the importance of created reality in movies and its perception by the viewers. The article presents brief analysis of the works of such renowned philosophers as André Bazin, Henri Bergson, Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin. Modern cinematography in form of “movie universes” and “movie franchises” is used as an example. This research covers modern films, which reflect popular demand for maximal realism as an opportunity to identify and reach maximal immersion into story on the screen. Cinematography began be showing real events as chronicles, later undergoing changes, and with development of technology becomes more distant from portrayal of specific reality and people. In the 1980s the conceptual idea changes, and cinematography becomes more realistic. However, in the early XXI century, while chasing realism modern movies became hyper-realistic, causing gradual degradation of sense of reality of the picture.

Author(s):  
Christopher Tomlins

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Philipp Klar ◽  
Georg Northoff

The existential crisis of nihilism in schizophrenia has been reported since the early days of psychiatry. Taking first-person accounts concerning nihilistic experiences of both the self and the world as vantage point, we aim to develop a dynamic existential model of the pathological development of existential nihilism. Since the phenomenology of such a crisis is intrinsically subjective, we especially take the immediate and pre-reflective first-person perspective’s (FPP) experience (instead of objectified symptoms and diagnoses) of schizophrenia into consideration. The hereby developed existential model consists of 3 conceptualized stages that are nested into each other, which defines what we mean by existential. At the same time, the model intrinsically converges with the phenomenological concept of the self-world structure notable inside our existential framework. Regarding the 3 individual stages, we suggest that the onset or first stage of nihilistic pathogenesis is reflected by phenomenological solipsism, that is, a general disruption of the FPP experience. Paradigmatically, this initial disruption contains the well-known crisis of common sense in schizophrenia. The following second stage of epistemological solipsism negatively affects all possible perspectives of experience, that is, the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives of subjectivity. Therefore, within the second stage, solipsism expands from a disruption of immediate and pre-reflective experience (first stage) to a disruption of reflective experience and principal knowledge (second stage), as mirrored in abnormal epistemological limitations of principal knowledge. Finally, the experience of the annihilation of healthy self-consciousness into the ultimate collapse of the individual’s existence defines the third stage. The schizophrenic individual consequently loses her/his vital experience since the intentional structure of consciousness including any sense of reality breaks down. Such a descriptive-interpretative existential model of nihilism in schizophrenia may ultimately serve as input for future psychopathological investigations of nihilism in general, including, for instance, its manifestation in depression.


Author(s):  
Abigail Williams

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book offered a series of vignettes of reading lives and practices. It presented a cluster of historical figures and a range of historical books, and used them to try to reconstruct what literature has meant and what it has been used for. It showed that the way in which people used the books they read are closely bound up with other aspects of amateur, domestic culture. This book also showed that anxieties about forms of reading are not new. Eighteenth-century commentators worried about learning bought too easily and readers who could no longer engage with whole texts. Families encouraged reading together because they feared that young people were losing their sense of reality through their immersion in addictive imaginative fictions. The world of eighteenth-century reading was a very different land, but in some ways, perhaps not so far from our own as we like to think.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Casadei

It is beautiful to be able to have the opportunity to allow oneself a doubt on the unquestionability of one's mental habits; it is beautiful to be able to renew one's energy to relate to the world in a way not bent by the banality of convenience and calculation. It is beautiful to realise that one feels the need for beauty as an inspirational motive for one's thinking, feeling and acting, and as a resource towards a new education. The serious pandemic crisis has probably accelerated a necessary but demanding process that takes time to accomplish: that of becoming aware of a reality based on the principle of interconnection and interdependence – of the person with all his/her dimensions, with each other, with the Cosmos. I believe that this new perception of reality – as the result of an experience – can mark a new step for the discourse and pedagogical practice so as to devote itself to a new form of beauty in the search for a ἀλήθεια (aletheia) truth to be configured as a desire for unveiling and deep understanding of the sense of reality, to be nourished in a revitalised interdisciplinarity, with a sense of wonder and amazement for every aspect of life. Care, responsibility and commitment, if animated by joy and love, can only aspire to excellence, giving the person the opportunity to fully realise his or her dignity and humanity.


Author(s):  
Alonso Casanueva

From 1929 to 1932, the German critical theorist Walter Benjamin broadcast a radio show intended for children, «Enlightenment for Children» (Aufklärung für Kinder). His program consisted of illuminating lessons that bound together culture and history in creative ways, to teach children about the world. Used as a tool for convivial purposes, the radio waves transported German kinder to the sites where witch trials happened, or to learn the secret language built into the city walls of Berlin, or to wonder about the life of the Romani and imagine the features of the many characters that formed part of Benjamin’s radio plays. It was an imaginative pedagogical exercise that has made me wonder about the possibilities of technological tools in the service of learning experiences.


2021 ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Jamile Satybaldieva

The article focuses on the issue of phenomenon of cinema in works of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Henri Bergson, Roland Barth, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. Postmodern methodology allows one to view cinema as a “deconstruction” of both cultural and socio-political discourse. Based on the analysis of the works of philosophers, the author generalizes the phenomenological characteristics of the cinema of postmodernism, such as the hypnotic ritualism of cinema; devaluation of meta-narratives; and appeal to the absolute “banal” and “hyper-realities”. It is noted that the spread of postmodern tendencies in modern cinema is manifested in drama, imagery, stylistics, montage and other components of the creative process. The author concludes that Jean-Francois Lyotard, Henri Bergson, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard have laid the foundations for understanding the unity of philosophy and cinema in the modern world.


Author(s):  
H. C. Hillier

This chapter looks at the reconstruction of the divine nexus in political thought in Muhammad Iqbal and Henri Bergson. Articulated in Mark Lilla's book Stillborn God (2007), the divine nexus — that is, the intersection of God, man, and the world — in Western political thought was abandoned in the early modern period and no thinker has effectively re-conceptualised it since. The chapter argues that through their shared metaphysical and epistemological ideas, Iqbal and Bergson form a new philosophical foundation that puts God at the centre of the cosmos. In this, both identify the centrality of prophecy/mysticism in the collective life of society and show the indispensable role that religion plays in challenging those political realities in the world that threaten human dignity, freedom, and well-being.


Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das

This chapter presents a reading of the posthumously published fragment The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) to show that the deconstruction of sovereignty demands a re-thinking of the question of history. Confronting Hegel's pantheistic-immanent philosophy of history, it attempts to reveal an eschatological vision of history at work in Schelling's The Ages of the World which radically puts into question the secularising theodicy formulated by Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history. He thereby opens up the possibility, later elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin, of a messianic-eschatological critique of historical Reason. Such an eschatological-messianic conception of history, by withdrawing from the triumphal march of universal world-historical politics, gives voice to those who are oppressed by the irresistible demand of progress.


2021 ◽  
pp. 154-166
Author(s):  
Rachelle Gilmour

Proposals that the violence of the ark in 2 Sam 6:7 can be explained in terms of punishment or educative violence are reviewed and shown to be unsupported by details in the text. Unlike the parallel account in 1 Chr 13 and 15, no laws are sufficient to ensure safety from the ark and the ark is simply removed. Similarly, there is a lack of evidence for punishment or educative violence in 1 Sam 6:19. It is proposed that the violence of the ark remains inexplicable, and fits the concept of Divine Violence as defined by Walter Benjamin. Divine Violence is neither a means to an end or end to a means, it is beyond law. It irrupts in the context of a misalignment in the world and is beyond ethics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 129-160
Author(s):  
Catriona Kelly

The 1960s witnessed the transformation of “film factories” from metaphor to lived reality. Lenfilm’s output rose once more to the levels its predecessor studios had reached in the 1920s, but the conditions of production were now far more complex and demanding, with staffs more than ten times the size. And while the 1960s was an era of optimistic emphasis on the Soviet film industry’s capacity to equal and surpass the world in technological terms, during the 1970s, the conviction took hold that the technological superiority of Western films was of direct relevance to audience share. Increasingly, ambitious filmmakers petitioned Goskino for permission to shoot on Kodak and to use Arriflex cameras; criticism of inferior Soviet film stock and GDR-produced film editing tables mounted, both across the USSR and at Lenfilm itself. Yet investment in studio infrastructure and technology remained at best haphazard, particularly at Lenfilm, which enjoyed less generous support from the center than Mosfilm, but also more limited resourcing than film studios in the capitals of Soviet republics. At the same time, Lenfilm had an unusually diverse, energetic, inventive, and loyal workforce, with corporate values that inspired manual workers and porters as well as “creative” personnel. Hierarchical at some levels, the work culture was egalitarian at others, and the frenetic process of scrambling to finish films in trying circumstances created strong bonds. The chapter explores the various conflicts and contradictions, but also rewards, that this situation generated.


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