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A nonverbal transmission and an implicit way of communication are highly encouraged in Japanese society. The reason for this “silence prerogative” is often found in historical facts of lengthy feudal era or in ancient philosophies and religions such as Buddhism and Confucianism and their various concepts which privilege taciturn way of communication. Moreover, the unspoken comprehension is often complemented by the attitude which equates truthfulness with silence. This paper explores the silence as a communicative act in the domain of Japanese art, where the body takes over the place of the language. In traditional Japanese theatrical performance, such as noh, words are often inadequate to convey emotion and therefore the aesthetics of emptiness, understatement and abstraction is transcended by the masks with "nonmoving lips". Drawing on theoretical perspectives from both East and West, I argue that the silent bodies operate as deliberate and integral determinants of Japanese non-silent art forms – especially in cinema and theatre. In the Eastern thought, visual perception is fundamental in cognition of the world, whereas auditory discernment is secondary to "image-thinking" (Yuasa). Accustomed to taciturnity, Japanese audience effectively corresponds to the performance and "completes" it in silence.
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This paper is a note on the theatrical offer in Romania and it seeks to lay emphasis on some of the elements that are essential to the understanding of theatrical marketing in this geographic area. The focus is on the understanding and the definition of the theatrical product and on repertory construction. Furthermore, the article includes a series of economic analyses conducted in order to complete the theoretical examination, as well as case studies material to our research topic.
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From a Circular Dramaturgy to an Image of the Oriental Concept of Time: Case Study of a Persian Historical Drama. The present study invites us to discover a new narrative strategy in the way a Persian dramatist chooses to recount his historical drama. By creating holes or narrative obstacles over the moments of traditional topoi, he explodes the linear narrative and chooses a cyclical, even helical form to complete the fault of the initial narrative. The narrative form adopted broadly resembles a temporal and philosophical vision of history in its oriental approach, which is similarly considered cyclical.
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The participants in this inquiry comment on Oliver Frljić’s The Curse, seeing it both as a theatrical production and a socio-political event. Most of them make reference to the performance’s critique of the Catholic Church, indicating the tension between reality and fiction in the play’s structure, analyzing the status of the actors, and investigating how Wyspiański’s text has been used. The participants also mention the play’s media reception, raising the subject of provocation, its role and the risks it brings, and discuss Frljić’s production in the context of current debates on freedom of artistic expression in Poland.
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The article is an introduction to the problems of science fiction genre, posthumanism and a short presentation of the articles of the present volume.
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The main purpose of this paper is to overview the differences between various embodied experiences we, as users, can have when interacting with contemporary visual media. By using the concept of modes of imagination, the author is approaching the problem of media speci city from another perspective. Using the four different “Ghost in the Shell” narratives as a coherent case study, the paper discusses the different modalities in which the most important categories of contemporary visual forms of representation (cinema, animated cartoons, graphic novels and video games) create immersive practice. The assumption is that “cinematic mode” or the “gaming mode” have their own ghost-like “modality”, as they bringing the user/ reader/ viewer inside their imaginative world differently. The discussion about modes and modalities is not rejecting the semiotic modes theories, it rather proposes a change of view. Starting with the philosophical intuition of Jacques Derrida, who claimed that what we imagine is never the image that we see, by the fusion of the two fundamental dimensions of any illusion, this author takes into consideration the deep separation between image and imagination. Using the insightful method of “hauntology”, the author overviews the most important theories about media speci city and proposes the use of cinematic modalities as experienced by the users of lm as ctional world.
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Hans Moravec’s Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind remarkably blueprints a future where rapid technological feats will grant humans the ability to upload/ download their consciousness into computer software and/ or computer chips, preserving their lifelong memories and identities. This blueprint is edi ed by Robert Mitchell’s and Phillip Thurtle’s book, Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, further problematizing the im/material and immortalized information/terminal eshy bodies. These dichotomies are shattered as bodies and information become innate scions, continually grafting onto the other’s multilayered epidermis. Flesh is trans gured into information and information is trans gured into esh. Bodies are edi ed by information; corporeality and dis/embodiment are further problematized while we live in the age of informatics. Interesting questions arise as a result: What does it mean to have – or occupy – a body when it becomes part of a downloadable network? Advantageous, directed by Jennifer Phang, depicts a future where female bodies are continually represented as easily replaceable vessels. It is my contention that Advantageous cinematically presents a future where digitized mechanical reproduction is possible. Bodies become updated, evolving into informatically-structured bodies. Following a similar cinematic line of vision, Oshii Mamoru’s lm Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence depicts how human consciousness is arti cially implanted onto sex dolls, reproducing them into sentient gynoids.
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More than a quarter of a century after its premiere, Mamoru Oshii’s movie Ghost in the Shell (1995) based on Masamune Shirow’s eponymous manga, remains a classic of the science- ction and (post)cyberpunk genres. With its metaphysical explorations of what it means to be a human once most of the biological output has been digitalized and cyborg- ed, the movie investigated the dichotomies at the core of the human being and of its uncanny relationship with technology, of how both human and machine become intertwined through a mechanic process of quasi-transmog- ri cation. The 2004 sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, which was also directed by Oshii, continues and further expands on the themes introduced in the rst movie. If the rst followed the actions of the elusive sentient arti cial program, the Puppet Master, the sequel is centered on the investigation surrounding a series of murders committed by defective gynoids (female androids designed for sex) that kill their owners and afterwards commit suicide. Innocence is moored in philosophical and metaphorical references reiterating the notions referring not only to what the simulacra (dolls, androids, automata) or the ningyō (“human-shaped gures” (Brown 13)) say about us, but more importantly, to what the simulacra would say if they could talk (Chute paraphrasing Major Motoko Kusanagi).
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Ex-Machina is a 2015 sci- thriller, written and directed by Alex Garland, and starring Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander. Critically acclaimed, the movie explores the relations between human and posthuman, as well as the relations between men and women. The article analyzes four main themes: the dystopian spaces of relations and con icts between human and posthuman entities; the gender issues and the violent tendencies represented both in humans and in AIs; the construction and the representation of women’s bodies, roles, identities and images; the control and the manipulation perpetrated by “authoritarian” individuals on feminine bodies. The goal of my contribution is to show the reasons of the “double male fear of technology and of woman” (Huyssen 226), and I hope that my re ections could encourage a debate on posthumanism and on gendered power relations.
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The paper investigates some features of the science ction lm genre, as seen from a cognitive perspective. Starting from the theoretical framework of Lawrence Barsalou, we consider the concept of SF lm to be a radial category that encompasses a wide array of particular instantiations clustered around several generic clusters. The de nition of the genre is encyclopedic, and thus it does not require a suf cient and necessary set of distinctive features.During lm experience, the audience will categorize visual elements composing the diegetic setting in a bottom up fashion. These elements are functional bundles and form a repertoire. They evoke a representation that includes properties, relations, rules, behavior of objects, agents, settings and a wide variety of internal states such as interoceptions and mentalizing. This representation is a background situated conceptualization. This background situation is apprehended in a top down manner as an instantiation of the SF abstract concept, a whole situation category. The overall conception is a familiar landscape that has a more schematic and abstract description, a descriptive system, and comprises a collection of different situated conceptualizations.Conceptually, SF is understood as a thought experiment based on the ‘what if’ speech act scenario performed by an explicit / implicit narrator. The conceptual description of the counterfactual proposition contains a comparison between an actual situation (the natural world conception) and an alien one (the proposed new situation or event).
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This article describes the relationship that people have with technology in movies belonging to survival genre. The rst part is theoretical, and it presents some religious, cultural and philosophical approaches to this topic (as stated by Dumitru Stăniloae, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Kim J. Vicente, Jacques Ellul, Lloyd J. Dumas, Jean Paul Russo, Ollivier Dyens and other authors). The second part presents technology as it appears in some movies in general, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the contemporary movies as Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Equilibrium and many others. All these movies can be “read” as survival movies. The paper tries to show in what movies and when technology appears as a source of safety, comfort and of new abilities for man and in which and when it is a source of discomfort and even of terror, a threat. There are cases in which technology stays outside of man as a reality clearly delimitated from him and cases when it can be seen as an intrusion in people’s body and soul.
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