CINEMA AS SURROGATE REALITY–REPRESENTATION, SUBSTITUTION, ARTIFICIAL AND VIRTUAL IN THE AESTHETICS OF CINEMA (original) (raw)

Editorial: Cinema, the Body and Embodiment

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2012

The third issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image takes up the theme of embodiment and the body, its relationship to Cinema’s history (theory and practice), and its reawakening in a recent body of research which is attentive, not only to film, but also to new media practices. It encompasses the dismantling of one of the foundational theoretical perspectives of film studies for over a century — the metaphor of the disembodied eye — and focuses on a groundbreaking field which as been attempting to integrate the body in conceptual models for understanding art and cinematic spectatorship. It aims to be a contribution to the approaches which have been recently trying to show the fallacy of the distinction between the physical and the mental, focusing on the concept of embodiment taken, either as phenomenological encounter immersed in everyday practices, or as a material and physical process made of fluids, energies and forces. In both cases, the quest for understanding Cinema entails acknowledging its inherent sensuous qualities and recognizing that the intellectual, mental and cognitive activities must be reinterpreted as embodied and carnal. This new understanding of cinema’s spectatorship, which integrates the spectator’s body in the process of his/her emotional and mental encounter with images, has been accompanied by an ongoing development of the moving image’s sensuous and haptic qualities in contemporary world, media practices and artistic scene.

Imagination and cinema: the notion of anthropos from the figure of the spectator

Comuni@cción. Revista de Investigación en Comunicación y Desarrollo , 2019

The present work is presented as an approach between the notion of the imaginary with the theory of the film viewer, formulated in 1956 by Edgar Morin, in his classic text The cinema or the imaginary man and enlarged by Francesco Casetti with the thesis of the enunciation in the cinema. In this way, the main objective of this article is to capture theoretical bases from the reflection of both conceptualizations. Thus, this initiatory work aims to be an epistemological contribution to future research projects. For this, at the methodological level, an initial theoretical path is developed that has its anchor-and its respective critical reading-in the contributions of Gilbert Durand and Cornelius Castoriadis, in the permanent concern of both for "drawing" those elements inherent in anthropos that allow the construction of their historical-social environment from subjectivity. The latter conceived as intrinsic peculiarity to the human being. It is concluded that through an artificial-imaginary state the viewer feels close and is able to recognize the reality of the images that the big screen offers him, coming into direct contact with his fantasies, fears and dreams. In other words, here the double dimension of the film is observed as an artifact and as a subjective experience.

Examination of Cinema Art as an Emulation of Reality

Research Article In this study, it has been tried to conceptually examine how the art of cinema reveals human reality through emulation. Human stands out with his ability to change reality directly or indirectly. For this, he can consider the cinema as an opportunity. Cinema uses imitation as a branch of art that can show people different aspects of reality. However, the art of cinema creates a new reality by aestheticizing reality, not in its raw form. The cinematic reality produced in this sense is to emulate the raw reality and to imitate this reality in certain aspects. Cinema art can use raw reality to transform reality into different forms. In human life in general, there is internal and external reality. Inner reality is about spiritual reflections in the inner world of man. External reality is the reflection of concrete facts and events in social life. The issue emphasized in the study is the possibility of recreating the inner and outer reality of cinema through emulation as an art form. Thus, cinema becomes a narrated repetition of life. Aestheticized and natural reflection of a reality that exists in life on films is an important element that shows its success. There is imitation and representation in cinematic imitation. People's emotions in life are reflected on the screen with a certain story and a sense of reality can be given to people. Depending on the degree of emulation, this sense of reality can be severe or weak. Here, it has been tried to describe what kind of effect the imitation used in the art of cinema can have on the individual and social life of a person.

The Metaphor of the Net. Embodiment and Disembodiment in Contemporary Cinema

My aim in this paper is to sketch a picture of how we currently visualize human vs. artificial intelligence. I am going to analyze images depicting the transcendence of the human in recent movies, which I take to be significant for the contemporary conditio humana. I will examine how movies like Her (USA 2013, Spike Jonze) or Transcendence (USA 2014, Wally Pfister) invent and use images of human and artificial life. I will then analyze the images themselves, how they are connected and what underlying ontological assumptions can be found. My main focus will be on the concept of the body and figures of disembodied intelligence. I will argue that disembodied intelligence has become a central topos in contemporary cinema. I will show how these ideas relate to the presentation of technology as a highly complex and dynamic net-structure, comparable to the characteristics of the human brain.

Ontology and the Aesthetics of Cinematographic Bodies

2018

If it is true, as Bergson claimed, that the universe is the sum of images (less than “objective” things but more than “subjective” representations), and if it is correct, as Deleuze said, that this hypothesis bears direct consequences for our understanding of the cinematographic art, then the analysis of cinematographic images and, especially, of the cinematographic images of the body (this living part of matter, this incarnated form of consciousness) can provide not only interesting aesthetic comments about specific directors and films, but also a philosophical understanding of the diverse modes of the sensible incarnation of human bodies. Interestingly enough, the more we believe in the truth of aesthetic images, the more we believe in the ontological reality of the body, that is, the more does ontological reality become, essentially, “imaginal.”

Hyperbodiment - The Aesthetics of Film

The philosophy of film has developed an extensive literature since the 1980’s. However, full justice has not been done to the aesthetic dimension of the medium. To understand why, let us start from a negative fact. It is that film is not a virtual world that we look into as we might look through a window. Rather, it is a world which draws us in - changing our perceptual perspectives by releasing them from confinement to the single lived body. But such freedom is by no means absolute – it plays-off creatively against the realist aspect of the filmic medium. What we see in the film has, indeed, some kinship with our normal embodied perception, but it is enhanced and transformed through correlation with privileged viewing and hearing positions that are not available in our ‘normal’ perceptual mode. The aesthetic space of film is one of hyperbodiment – a belonging to the world that is based on embodiment but which exceeds its restricted viewpoint.

‘What is Body, What is Space?: Performance and the Cinematic Body in a Non-anthropocentric Cinema’

Arts, 2017

The assumption of a clear demarcation and hierarchy between figure and ground has long informed key approaches in film studies to bodies and space. However, many filmmakers working in both animation and live cinema have confounded this hierarchy, working with an integration of figure and ground on equal terms to explore the full performative potential of the ‘cinematic body’. In the animation work of Einar Baldvin, this strategy is an expressionist one, blurring the boundaries between figure and ground in order to project affective and psychic states onto the space around the body. In Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, this blurring of boundaries between figure and ground eschews an expressionist mode, working instead to render in aesthetic form a biophilosophy that emphasizes the continuity between bodies and environment to explore the possibilities of non-anthropocentric cinematic modes. An experimental writing style here serves to trace the energetic unfolding of these strategies across both films in order to frame the question, ‘what is body here, what is space’, and to ask how we as viewers engage with this embodied mode. http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/6/4/19/htm