Vivian Sobchack | UCLA School of TFT (original) (raw)
Edited Books and Special Issues by Vivian Sobchack
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir, ed. Robert Miklitsch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 113-129., 2014
The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions, 2019
The home-movie 'attitude' is one of Jean-Pierre Meunier's three modalities of 'filmic identificat... more The home-movie 'attitude' is one of Jean-Pierre Meunier's three modalities of 'filmic identification' in The Structure of the Film Experience. This essay both challenges and pays homage to Meunier's heuristic phenomenology. Accepting his invitation to elaborate upon it with specific cases, I thus focus on those instances when the home-movie viewer's off-screen self-image suddenly encounters its on-screen image-self in a structure of identification quite different from identification with on-screen others. Often experienced as 'uncanny,' this confrontation with one's 'self' not only adds nuance to, but also ruptures and/or transforms what Meunier considers the 'essential' characteristics and overall phenomenological function of the home-movie experience.
Nous vivons aujourd'hui parmi les écrans, voilà un constat désormais évident. Surfaces de communi... more Nous vivons aujourd'hui parmi les écrans, voilà un constat désormais évident. Surfaces de communication, de monstration et de projection, ces écrans conditionnent foncièrement notre rapport au monde et nous ne pouvons donc plus en faire abstraction. Car nous ne vivons pas seulement au milieu des écrans, mais encore par ceux-ci, à travers eux. Plus que jamais, nos vies sont sous leur condition : il devient donc urgent de cerner quelques constantes d'une telle condition. Réunissant quelques-uns des plus éminents spécialistes internatio-naux, venant aussi bien du champ de la philosophie que des études sur le cinéma, les médias, le design et l'architecture, ce volume dégage les grandes lignes d'une question située au coeur de notre condition contemporaine.
Papers by Vivian Sobchack
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2011
Formincessantly betraying its own manifestation […] for it is adequate to the samealienates the e... more Formincessantly betraying its own manifestation […] for it is adequate to the samealienates the exteriority of the other. -Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity 1 There are different ways of being a face. -Emmanuel Levinas, "On Obliteration" 2
John Libbey Publishing eBooks, Apr 13, 2018
Camera Obscura, 1986
Two very special babies were born to the American cinema in 1968: Rosemary's and Sta... more Two very special babies were born to the American cinema in 1968: Rosemary's and Stanley Kubrick's. One was born in a horror film, the other in a science fiction film. One stared up from a cradle toward its earthly mother, the other down from space toward ...
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jun 1, 1990
American Quarterly, 1979
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
History and Theory, Dec 1, 1997
Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness i... more Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness in a mass-mediated culture where historical discourse takes the form of both showing and saying, moving images and written words. The title draws upon and argues with Roland Barthes's critique of the duplicity of the "insistent fringes" that supposedly reduce and naturalize "Roman-ness" to fringed hair in popular historical film. Barthes presumes a "certainty" in such a cinematic image, and hence deems it mythological-that is, "it goes without saying." Countering Barthes with Walter Benjamin, one might argue that the "insistent fringe" is insistently historical and constitutes, in its insistence, a "dialectical image": a site and sight full of contradictions and open to excavation. That is, it concretizes historiographic saying by showing. Neither historiographic saying nor showing are privileged in medias resin a culture saturated in images and textuality, in competing modes of expression each of which has its limits. Historical consciousness is sparked and constituted from both showing and saying. Indeed, the "insistent fringe" is precisely not clear-cut-and, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated nature, its articulation as a limit that differs from, but is constituted by, the elements of the two distinct domains which it both separates and connects. Similarly, there is a dynamic, functional, and hardly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywood cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories written by scholars. They coexist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratiothus constituting the "rationality" of contemporary historical consciousness.
Body & Society, Nov 1, 1995
Duke University Press eBooks, Jan 12, 2004
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter argues that rear-screen projection in Edgar Ulmer&am... more This chapter argues that rear-screen projection in Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) is just as critical to the film's audiovisual economy as voiceover and flashback. Not unlike the radiophonic “theater of the mind” projected by the 1940s noir sound track, rear-screen projection acts as a secondary screen for the protagonist's psyche. In Detour, this oneiric screen, in addition to mobilizing two of the dominant affective modalities of classic noir—claustrophobia and phantasmagoria—operates as a temporal signpost. The result is that even as Al Roberts (Tom Neal), driven by the romance of the open road, strikes out for California, the back-screen projection is a constant reminder that the past can rear up at any moment and dash his dreams.
Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 27, 1994
... Transformation, Technology, and Narrative 5. A Brief History of Morphing Mark JP Wolf 83 6. T... more ... Transformation, Technology, and Narrative 5. A Brief History of Morphing Mark JP Wolf 83 6. Tracing the Tesseract A Conceptual Prehistory of the Morph Kevin Fisher 103 Page 14. ... Beyond the Body Orlan and the Material Morph Victoria Duckett 209 11. ...
Screen, Dec 1, 2009
... This humanly inhuman dream of effortless movement of a truly 'incredible lightness of ... more ... This humanly inhuman dream of effortless movement of a truly 'incredible lightness of being' brings us to what, in the 1940s, Eisenstein called the plasmatic nature of film animation. The plasmatic, however, is also phantasmatic ...
... an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative specu-lations in physical science... more ... an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative specu-lations in physical science, space, time, socal ... fictitious use of scientific possibilities, or it may be simply fiction that takes place in the ... Century."16 He also assumes that the majority of SF films are non-visionary, not ...
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
Communication booknotes, Dec 1, 1985
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: On Classic Film Noir, ed. Robert Miklitsch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 113-129., 2014
The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions, 2019
The home-movie 'attitude' is one of Jean-Pierre Meunier's three modalities of 'filmic identificat... more The home-movie 'attitude' is one of Jean-Pierre Meunier's three modalities of 'filmic identification' in The Structure of the Film Experience. This essay both challenges and pays homage to Meunier's heuristic phenomenology. Accepting his invitation to elaborate upon it with specific cases, I thus focus on those instances when the home-movie viewer's off-screen self-image suddenly encounters its on-screen image-self in a structure of identification quite different from identification with on-screen others. Often experienced as 'uncanny,' this confrontation with one's 'self' not only adds nuance to, but also ruptures and/or transforms what Meunier considers the 'essential' characteristics and overall phenomenological function of the home-movie experience.
Nous vivons aujourd'hui parmi les écrans, voilà un constat désormais évident. Surfaces de communi... more Nous vivons aujourd'hui parmi les écrans, voilà un constat désormais évident. Surfaces de communication, de monstration et de projection, ces écrans conditionnent foncièrement notre rapport au monde et nous ne pouvons donc plus en faire abstraction. Car nous ne vivons pas seulement au milieu des écrans, mais encore par ceux-ci, à travers eux. Plus que jamais, nos vies sont sous leur condition : il devient donc urgent de cerner quelques constantes d'une telle condition. Réunissant quelques-uns des plus éminents spécialistes internatio-naux, venant aussi bien du champ de la philosophie que des études sur le cinéma, les médias, le design et l'architecture, ce volume dégage les grandes lignes d'une question située au coeur de notre condition contemporaine.
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2011
Formincessantly betraying its own manifestation […] for it is adequate to the samealienates the e... more Formincessantly betraying its own manifestation […] for it is adequate to the samealienates the exteriority of the other. -Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity 1 There are different ways of being a face. -Emmanuel Levinas, "On Obliteration" 2
John Libbey Publishing eBooks, Apr 13, 2018
Camera Obscura, 1986
Two very special babies were born to the American cinema in 1968: Rosemary's and Sta... more Two very special babies were born to the American cinema in 1968: Rosemary's and Stanley Kubrick's. One was born in a horror film, the other in a science fiction film. One stared up from a cradle toward its earthly mother, the other down from space toward ...
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jun 1, 1990
American Quarterly, 1979
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
History and Theory, Dec 1, 1997
Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness i... more Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness in a mass-mediated culture where historical discourse takes the form of both showing and saying, moving images and written words. The title draws upon and argues with Roland Barthes's critique of the duplicity of the "insistent fringes" that supposedly reduce and naturalize "Roman-ness" to fringed hair in popular historical film. Barthes presumes a "certainty" in such a cinematic image, and hence deems it mythological-that is, "it goes without saying." Countering Barthes with Walter Benjamin, one might argue that the "insistent fringe" is insistently historical and constitutes, in its insistence, a "dialectical image": a site and sight full of contradictions and open to excavation. That is, it concretizes historiographic saying by showing. Neither historiographic saying nor showing are privileged in medias resin a culture saturated in images and textuality, in competing modes of expression each of which has its limits. Historical consciousness is sparked and constituted from both showing and saying. Indeed, the "insistent fringe" is precisely not clear-cut-and, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated nature, its articulation as a limit that differs from, but is constituted by, the elements of the two distinct domains which it both separates and connects. Similarly, there is a dynamic, functional, and hardly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywood cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories written by scholars. They coexist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratiothus constituting the "rationality" of contemporary historical consciousness.
Body & Society, Nov 1, 1995
Duke University Press eBooks, Jan 12, 2004
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter argues that rear-screen projection in Edgar Ulmer&am... more This chapter argues that rear-screen projection in Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) is just as critical to the film's audiovisual economy as voiceover and flashback. Not unlike the radiophonic “theater of the mind” projected by the 1940s noir sound track, rear-screen projection acts as a secondary screen for the protagonist's psyche. In Detour, this oneiric screen, in addition to mobilizing two of the dominant affective modalities of classic noir—claustrophobia and phantasmagoria—operates as a temporal signpost. The result is that even as Al Roberts (Tom Neal), driven by the romance of the open road, strikes out for California, the back-screen projection is a constant reminder that the past can rear up at any moment and dash his dreams.
Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 27, 1994
... Transformation, Technology, and Narrative 5. A Brief History of Morphing Mark JP Wolf 83 6. T... more ... Transformation, Technology, and Narrative 5. A Brief History of Morphing Mark JP Wolf 83 6. Tracing the Tesseract A Conceptual Prehistory of the Morph Kevin Fisher 103 Page 14. ... Beyond the Body Orlan and the Material Morph Victoria Duckett 209 11. ...
Screen, Dec 1, 2009
... This humanly inhuman dream of effortless movement of a truly 'incredible lightness of ... more ... This humanly inhuman dream of effortless movement of a truly 'incredible lightness of being' brings us to what, in the 1940s, Eisenstein called the plasmatic nature of film animation. The plasmatic, however, is also phantasmatic ...
... an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative specu-lations in physical science... more ... an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative specu-lations in physical science, space, time, socal ... fictitious use of scientific possibilities, or it may be simply fiction that takes place in the ... Century."16 He also assumes that the majority of SF films are non-visionary, not ...
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
Communication booknotes, Dec 1, 1985
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Jul 3, 2017
ABSTRACT ‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ approaches the intentional formation and per... more ABSTRACT ‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ approaches the intentional formation and performance of bodily movement and expression from the various perspectives of individuals who are ‘differently abled’. Exploring what it is for a non-dancer to experience various rhythms, movements and spaces with crutches, prosthetic leg, and cane, the essay interweaves phenomenological description and interpretation of suddenly defamiliarized daily activities with discourse drawn from the experiences of professional dancers who are ‘differently abled’. The aim is to foreground the opacities, transparencies, and ambiguities of a more general sense of embodied and expressive movement that subtends the ‘abled’ and ‘differently abled’ and the non-dancer and dancer. It is also to emphasize the lived – and living – body as the common ground that enables all of our thoughts, movements, and modes of expression, however differentiated their myriad forms.
J.B. Metzler eBooks, 1998