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Philosophy and science fiction are two separate discourses that use counter-intuitive scenarios in two distinct ways. Where philosophy endeavours to ground counter-intuitive scenarios, science fiction as a transmedial fictional genre acts in a pragmatic and exploratory manner by seeking to imagine what it would be like if they were real. In this paper, I analyse David Cronenberg’s science fiction film eXistenZ, and defend two theses. The critical-theoretical thesis: Cronenberg thinks society is being gamified and seeks to dramatise the process of gamification along with its pitfalls. The metaphysical thesis: Cronenberg’s diegetic world brings about a new articulation of the scepticism as an old philosophical problem. An attempt to excavate the metaphysical presuppositions of this work reanimates Cartesian interactionist dualism and Kantian transcendental idealism, as two well-known philosophical positions.
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In this paper, the author establishes and defends the thesis that the 1980s horror film production acts as a paradigm of the spectacle, especially in terms of the system of reduction of immediate life to image related mediations and phenomena. Thus, three disparate elements are now connected in a conceptual framework by which author supposes one must judge the media theory and media at large at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The three elements are the Heideggerian notion of the age of the world-picture, the Debordian notion of the spectacle, and the Deleuzian experiment of the philosophy of film that, through Beller, establishes itself as a film-philosophy, to be a possible answer to the contemporary state of a society in which the film spectacle reflects itself in the essentially cinematic culture, that is, in society put in motion exclusively only through the relation of image representations.
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In Deleuzeʼs studies on film, it is striking that the dismantled “essence” of metaphysics as an ontology (being – god – world – man) is synthetically linked with a new approach not only to the movement of the concept, speaking in Hegelʼs language but also to the thinking as an event. That is even more true for the understanding of that which lasts in time and thus has the character of the thought-image. As the author points out in this article, Deleuze establishes this by turning the brain into a screen, and the film from the sphere of the so-called reality becomes the virtual code of the world as an image. The difference between concept and image eliminates the difference between the image no longer preceding the term and the term no longer preceding the image. How crucial this turn will be to Deleuzeʼs notion of the cinema can be seen in the derivation of the concept of an event (événement). The image and term correspond to the singularity of the event. The problem with comprehending Deleuzeʼs “images-ontology” shows that film cannot be reduced to the autonomous production of a cinematic way of thinking unless we have previously clarified what movement is and how it is created. In this paradigmatic case, a cinema cannot be viewed simply as a “visual code” of contemporary art. Its “essence” is revealed in that it enables the image-movement and image-time to synthetically realize the possibilities of the technosphere as (1) computation, (2) planning and (3) construction. Eventually, the cinematic thinking advocated by Deleuze becomes a question of the possibility of film as a meta-film reaching a new level of philosophical consideration of what becomes and emerges with a new set of relations between Being and event.
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High artistic achievements were repeatedly connected with poetry in the tradition of Western aesthetical thought, and the poetry with eliciting emotions. The same has happened within the tradition of film reviewing and theorising: poetry has been repeatedly evoked as a paradigmatic artistic achievement of particular films. But among the different affective states that can be elicited in humans by arts, attribution of ‘poetry’ typically addresses the eliciting and articulation of particular general moods, not the specific, episodic, short-term emotions. In this paper, specified are the differences among emotions and moods, and how a distinct (‘dark’) mood is achieved is demonstrated by the close analysis of the introductory descriptive scene in the film Citizen Kane. However, the crucial question is how very different and heterogeneous stylistic means pointed out in the analysis of the scene could elicit a particular, unique, holistic mood. In short, the answer is given by understanding that in the same way in which the moods selectively regulate our relations toward the world, choosing for the perception mood-congruent features of the world to sustain a particular mood, so the filmmakers choose a repertory of stylistic solutions congruent with the selectivity of the intended mood to elicit it in the immersed film viewer.
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The paper elaborates specific perceptive purposes and structural procedures generated by the various experimental abstract films and shows the ways how abstract film engages spectator’s attention. By “liberating” our visual system from representational (daily visual) experience, the abstract film encourages us to cultivate different sensory and sensual sensibility, explore new associations and alternative paths for moods and emotions. Various streams of abstract film will be analysed, relying primarily on classical abstract films (Whitney brothers, McLaren, Richter, and Eggeling, etc.).
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Review of: Murray Smith: Film, Art and the Third Culture, A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film; Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017.
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A collection of reviews: books, movies and plays.
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In the present paper, I suggest a modification to some aspects of Ingarden’s analyses of the sound-synchronize dfilmic work of art. The argument progresses through two stages: (1) I clarify Ingarden’s claim that the work of art is a stratified formation in which the various aspects present objectivities;(2) I elucidate and critically assess Ingarden’s suggestion that the filmic work of art is a borderline case in respect to other types of works of art—paintings and literary works. Here, I identify a problem with Ingarden’s claims about the function of sound in the concretized filmic work’s presentation of its fictive world. Ingarden identifies the presented universe of the filmic work of art as a habitus of reality,but Ingarden seems oddly conflicted with respect to his notion of habitus. I argue that this stems from Ingarden’s conceptualization of the filmic work of art as primarily composed of the stratum of represented “visible aspects” in both the cases of the silent film and the sound-synchronized film, and his restriction of the role of phonetic content in the latter. I suggest that were we to reconceptualise the role of aurally presented phonetic content in the concretized sound-synchronized film, we could better understand how film has the seeming magical capacity to transfix us.
More...De la etnografie, la film documentar
For almost half a century, Sahia Studios in Bucharest were the main propaganda tool of the communist regime in Romania. The productions carried out here described in positive shades the reality in the country, starting from the achievements of the unique party, continuing with collectivization and industrialization and ending with materials that wanted to be educational for the general public. The quality of many productions made in Sahia studios is, however, doubtful for two main reasons. The first is related to the technical difficulties, and the second is related to the strict rules that the film producers had to obey. They were watched by censors who gave verdicts about the items to be removed, kept or introduced. On the other hand, many of the films made in Sahia have a high significance not only from the artistic point of view, but from the rare images they use. This is also the case with the production analyzed in this study. The aim of this paper is to analyze the cinematographic construction of a documentary made in Romania in the 60’s in parallel with the reality described in specialized works of ethnographic character.
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This paper examines the transformation of Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending (1957), into a film medium. The Fugitive Kind (1959), a film adaptation by Sidney Lumet, is analysed in light of recent theory on adaptation as intertextual dialogism and film as a collaborative process by which the literary original is filtered through the vision of the film director and other filmmakers who, each in their own way, adapt literary work. The paper shows how the profitable material of the most popular American playwright of the fifties (a realistic portrayal of the victory of brutality in the South) was transformed into a demystified reading of the myth of Orpheus in which we find the “echoˮ of the themes typical of the director's opus dominated by male protagonists. The collaborative work on the script, the distinctive dark tone of the film created by the director of photography Boris Kaufman, as well as the actors' personae (Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani), which form an integral part of the film’s intertextuality, further complicate the question of authorship, which all points to the conclusion that the film should be interpreted and evaluated as an autonomous work of art and not just as a replica of the literary source.
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In this paper, we focus on the specifics of translation and editing of an audiovisual work – the fairy tale film Die Sterntaler (The Star Money), primarily intended for a child recipient. We present a theoretical definition of a fairy tale as a genre, including the specifics of its reception, and then we draw attention to the work of a dubbing translator and editor in the process of creating a new version, while putting emphasis on problematic aspects of translating and editing dialogue lists. In a comprehensive analysis of the original and dubbed version of the given audiovisual work, we focus on the evaluation of translation solutions and editing of dialogues (replicas) at the linguistic (qualitative and quantitative editing, authenticity of dialogues, choice of appropriate equivalents, etc.) and non-linguistic level, taking into account the specifics resulting from the process of audiovisual translation communication with the child recipient.
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Unreal Engine, initially developed to power latest generation video games, is used to present product and/or interior and exterior design projects into a new and immersive environment. UE4 allows designers to work with interactive elements such as drawers, doors, lights etc., and enable clients a real-time, first person view, visualization of the entire project.
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The article deals with the film adaptation of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, based on Hermann Sudermann’s novel Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit, 1917). The study argues that, regardless of the significant changes in the screenplay and shifting a number of problematic focuses, Murnau’s book-to-film adaptation responds with a flair for the novels contained in the book, reorienting towards consolidating the idea of urban space as a complex medium rather than translating the plot strands and the imagery in their entirety. In this context the film project transforms one type of narrative structures to another. Thus Murnau seeks to create an in-between space amid the urban simultaneous presence that would structurally correlate with the film medium, a medium placed between the other media. In the end, yet another adaptation of the same novel is comparatively outlinrd in broad strokes, i.e. Veit Harlan’s Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit, 1939). The film seeks to keep its storyline as closer to Sudermann’s novel as possible, but translates instead the commonplaces of the belletristic ambiguity and the implicit phantasmagoric sides to the novel into an apodictic film language, which nonetheless is highly susceptible to ideological suggestion.
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In this article I would like to point out the importance of the functionality of the soundtrack in film and theatre. First of all, I can mention that the chosen thematic has an almost unexistent bibliography due to the decreased number of theoretical works in this domain, and the few existent studies handle the same thematic from different angles, causing a lack of balance in the processing of musical and technical context. In most cases the cultural audience doesn’t watch a movie or a theatrical play for its music, but is yet 50% influenced by it, noticing it only when the background music changes into an objectively or subjectively disturbing one. On the other hand, if a movie has an impecable soundtrack, the audience won’t be bothered by it. These informations lead to the conclusion that the soundtrack has a big influence on our subconscience, dominantly on the auditive and less on the visual one.
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Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1969 debut feature film, The Structure of Crystal (Struktura kryształu), revolves around two scientists with opposing worldviews—one rooted in ethical integrity and the other driven by conformism. These polarities are reflected in Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image, which I apply to Wojciech Kilar’s music for the film. I argue that Kilar’s underscoring continuously reshapes the grounds of understanding between the antagonistic worldviews at the film’s core, ultimately to deliver a powerful critique of the social reality of post-1968 Poland.
More...The Different Representations of the US Military and Intelligence Agencies in Post-9/11 American War Films
The horrifying images of the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, in which three thousand civilians were killed, have become some of the most famous images ever committed to film or television. In the decade following the attacks, a wealth of war films were released, including Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007), The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009) and Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) amongst many others. Many films from this period of US cinema addressed both the 9/11 attacks as well as the US military’s conflicts in various countries suspected of harboring terrorist groups. When analyzing the ways the military and intelligence agencies (such as the CIA) are represented in some US films from this period, it becomes clear that such representations changed over just a few years: Redacted showed the military to be polarized–a place for pacifists, rapists and murderers. The Hurt Locker later depicted successful soldiers as having a “gung ho” attitude, and the military as a permanent fixture in Iraq. Finally, Zero Dark Thirty included scenes of CIA torture, which is suggested as being necessary and justified. Surprisingly, however, the ways the military and intelligence agencies are represented in these films did not necessarily mirror the political change that was occurring.
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The text consists of two parts. The first one establishes a general framework for understanding the contemporary crisis. The basic thesis is that it is impossible today to view the problem of the humanities’ legitimacy as separate from the order of the positive sciences and the epistemological problems of positive, applied and model-based sciences (such as mathematics). The problem facing the humanities is not so much one of legitimising the status of its own knowledge as the question how it relates to the issue of life forms. The second thesis is that the imagination remains the epistemological category that generates concepts. The second part of the article introduces the concept of “the implosion of time” as a catastrophic image-thought, followed by an analysis of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011).
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Prose written by Tamara Bakran.
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This texts consists of two chapters from Szendy’s book on the (post)apocalyptical imagination. Szendy examines visions of the end of the world in several films, taking into account formal, social, philosophical and planetary aspects. He also explores these visions in terms of the different kinds of contemporary aesthetic politics. The other problem treated here is apocalyptic temporality, which focuses on the figure of the date and process of dating events.
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