The Cinematic Body

Download or read book The Cinematic Body written by Steven Shaviro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical approach to film viewing

Download or read book Post Cinematic Affect written by Steven Shaviro and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions, and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The book traces these changes, focusing on four recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones' song Corporate Cannibal; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate, starring Asia Argento; Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales, featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson, and other pop culture celebrities; and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer.

Download or read book Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations written by Paul Elliott and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we talk of 'seeing' a film, we do not refer to a purely visual experience. Rather, to understand what we see on screen, we rely as much on non-visual senses as we do on sight. This new book rethinks the body in the cinema seat, charting the emergence of embodied film theory and drawing on developments in philosophy, neuroscience, body politics and film theory. Through the prism of Alfred Hitchcock's films, we explore how our bodies and sensual memory enable us to quite literally 'flesh out' what we see on screen: the trope of nausea in "Frenzy", pollution and smell in "Shadow of a Doubt", physical sound reception in the "Psycho" shower scene and the importance of corporeality and closeness in "Rear Window". We see how the body's sensations have a vital place in cinematic reception and the study of film.

Download or read book Somatic Cinema written by Luke Hockley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films can hold personal psychological meanings that are often at odds with their narratives. Examining the intersections between mental health and the cinema, Somatic Cinema represents the cutting edge of film theory, evaluating the significance of this phenomenon both in therapy and in the everyday world. Luke Hockley draws on the insights of phenomenological and Jungian film theory and applies them alongside more established psychoanalytic approaches. The result is to combine the idea of affective bodily experience with unconscious processes as a means to explore a new ontology of the cinema. The emphasis is therefore shifted from pure intellectual insight to greater inclusion of personally constructed meanings and experiences. Several key concepts are developed and explored throughout the book. These include: The idea of the ‘Third Image’, occupying the intersubjective space between viewer and screen, and therapist and client The concept of the Cinematic Frame (as opposed to the Film Frame), the container of the psychological relationship between viewer and screen The use of the Cinematic Experience to encapsulate the somatic expression of unconscious effects that develop while a film is viewed and which are central to the creation of personal psychological meanings. With a focus on examining why we develop a personal relationship with films, Somatic Cinema is ideal for academics and students of film studies, media studies and analytical psychology.

Download or read book The Tactile Eye written by Jennifer M. Barker and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tactile Eye expands on phenomenological analysis and film theory in its accessible and beautifully written exploration of the visceral connection between films and their viewers. Jennifer M. Barker argues that the experience of cinema can be understood as deeply tactile—a sensuous exchange between film and viewer that goes beyond the visual and aural, gets beneath the skin, and reverberates in the body. Barker combines analysis of embodiment and phenomenological film theory to provide an expansive description of cinematic tactility. She considers feminist experimental film, early cinema, animation, and horror, as well as classic, modernist, and postmodern cinema; films from ten national cinemas; and work by Chuck Jones, Buster Keaton, the Quay Brothers, Satyajit Ray, Carolee Schneemann, and Tom Tykwer, among others.

Download or read book The Spectral Body written by Dragon Zoltan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó analyses some of the films made by Academy Award winner Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó to establish an interpretative matrix disclosing the root of haunting effects in the visual and the narrative levels of the diegeses. By combining two distinct—and often incongruous—lines of psychoanalytic thought (by Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Lacan), Zoltán Dragon argues that these films are fuelled by the work of a phantom on all levels, hiding the secrets of the family history of the characters and producing uncanny visual scenarios to make the act of hiding even more effective. The book brings the reader into the realm of the “phantom text” generating the film texts and crypt screens of the oeuvre, and investigates the causes of undiscussible and painful secrets that propel some pivotal characters to reappear in subsequent films, apparently driven by a compulsion to continue their narration, failing to finish their stories—even when they appear to be successful. The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó introduces a visual reinterpretation of Abraham’s phantom theory that opens up possibilities for an alternative way of studying film. I first saw this work in the form of a full and detailed draft. I was impressed by the boldness of the ideas, the attempt to integrate and work with different theoretical positions and the quite extraordinary reading of the films of István Szabó. There was clearly a powerful and creative and original intelligence at work. A further draft accomplished one important thing that had been missing from the first one – the direct analysis of the visual material and its contribution to the overall narrative and theoretical framework. The work employs a psychoanalytic framework with some key concepts such as ‘the phantom’ drawn from the work of Torok and Abraham. This theory is fairly well known but it has not, to my knowledge, been used in any extensive way in the analysis of film texts before. Zoltan also makes reference to Freud and uses some Lacanian ideas in his analysis at the level of the visual. These multiple theoretical references are not inconsistent; they are finely judged and are most productive. Theory is never used as a grid to be imposed on the material. There is a fine balance between theory and textual analysis that is hard to achieve, but it is successful here. I think that the position that Zoltan Dragon has forged for himself and from which he writes, is a highly original and interesting one. He has been most successful in developing his framework in relation to Szabó’s oeuvre which he knows in the greatest detail. His readings of that oeuvre are rich and powerful and will provoke considerable debate in the world of film studies and also of psychoanalytical studies. Parveen Adams, Core Teaching Faculty, London Consortium

Download or read book Brutal Vision written by Karl Schoonover and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How spectacular visions of physical suffering in post–World War II Italian neorealist films redefined moviegoing as a form of political action