07.SVANKMAJER__Visual Viscerality in the Experience of Contemporary Cinema_Rachel Rits-Volloch (original) (raw)

04.INTRODUCTION_Visual Viscerality in the Experience of Contemporary Cinema_Rachel Rits-Volloch.pdf

4 through an engagement with the functions of our biological bodies. We are built to sensually and multisensoriously interact with our environments, whether those environments are immediate or are (im)mediated by a screen, and so I will go beyond the invocation of scientific terminology, where most theory stops, to consider the kinesthetic and proprioceptive elements of embodied affect in their bio-logical basis within our perceiving bodies and how memory works to bridge cognition and viscerality while itself being integral to the structures of cinema. The films I delve into all contrive to teach us new visual languages viscerally, and in so doing they manipulate the experience of temporality central to our sensorium and equally inherent to the apparatus of the moving image, exemplifying how, 'visual culture manifests […] "multi-temporal heterogeneity", i.e. the simultaneous, superimposed spatio-temporalities which characterize the contemporary social text'. 5 And so I will conclude with a consideration of the predominance of temporal 'tricks' in today's cinema -which precisely serve to reflect and reflect upon these simultaneous superimpositions of spatio-temporalities -as a convergence of the self-reflexivity, interactivity, immediacy and memory which together evoke our viscerality as spectators and as bio-logically (em)bodied beings.

Grotesque Metamorphoses and Creative Practices in Jan Svankmajer

2021

This paper explores stop motion puppetry films through the lens of the grotesque, to see how this aesthetic category helps in understanding the medium and its appeals. Noel Carroll describes the grotesque as, a “departure from the ordinary” whereas Wolfgang Kayser tries to explain its nature as that of an “estranged world”. The animated works of pioneering filmmaker Jan Svankmajer have been pivotal when it comes to visual manifestations of hybrid forms and the formation of illusory supernatural life by merging objects of animate and inanimate simulacra. I will discuss in which ways the grotesque is portrayed in Svankmajer’s films by examining manifestations of grotesque in the bodies of the puppets as well as in the filmmaker’s creative process. When going into a more in-depth analysis, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘grotesque body’ and its relationship to the earth as an unfinished metamorphosis of existence and Wolfgang Kayser’s writings on the grotesque as an alienated world c...

The Imagination of Touch: Surrealist Tactility in the Films of Jan Švankmajer (2013)

Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol 5 (2013)

This article is a theoretical examination of tactility in the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's film Down to the Cellar (1983). Švankmajer's deployment of tactile images in a surrealist context shows the need for a discussion of the imagination's role in the embodied film experience. Departing from Laura Marks's The Skin of the Film, this article seeks to explore the surrealist embodied imagination through surrealist poetics of analogy, as defined by André Breton, and the link between these and Walter Benjamin's writings on mimesis. Finally, the film is viewed from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard's ideas of “the imagination of matter,” where matter is seen as a highly potent stimulant for the imagination. Bachelard's notion of the imagination's multisensory properties further lends credence to Švankmajer's aims to liberate the imagination of the spectator through images that invoke touch.

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.

Research in Film and Video: Artists Using Their Bodies in Cinematic Experiments

STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI DRAMATICA, 2019

The aim of this article is to study the relationship between author and camera, the different aspects of this subtle relationship with technology. From the whole cinema history, many artists and film directors played different roles in front of the camera. Whether they interpret a scenario character, in case of fiction films, or use their body in search of cinematic effects, for video art, they choose to be in both parts of the camcorder at the same time. Why does this “video eye” sometimes turns towards the artist? Is it only meant to explore the outside world of the artist? Or is it a mirror which is sometimes inviting you to take a glance at yourself? The term used was first introduced by Gene Youngblood “The video eye” as it is a subtle metaphor for the main function of the camera. Why do so many artists use the camera with the purpose of showing themselves or their bodies into video experiments? Is it an expression of narcissism or is it a self‐exploring tool? To find the answers for all these questions, the research looks into the playful role that the “video eye” has in experimental films and videos. This role was revealed by examining different kinds of esthetic results in comparison with the artist’s intention. For example, the body mirrored or reflected, seen in its choreography or as a performer in non‐narrative films, are aspects which could draw a conclusion bout the self‐representation aesthetics.