Vision and Blindness in Film (intro and contents) (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Frames Cinema Journal, 2014
Three short avant-garde animated films address the issues of vision disabilities and blindness: Many Happy Returns (Marjut Rimminen 1996), A Shift in Perception (Dan Monceaux 2006) and Ishihara (Yoav Brill 2010). Through the use of diverse animation techniques intensified by sound strategies all three films evoke a dream-intoxicated-like atmosphere. These shorts subvert – in form as well as content – former cinematic and cultural representations of people with vision disabilities. Thus, by providing a phenomenologically-sensual alternative, these works critique the able-bodied cinematic construction of spectatorship. I argue that these shorts offer an antidote to the social organization of vision, and above all, to the supremacy attributed to vision in the experience of spectatorship.
Discourses of (De)Legitimization. Participatory Culture in Digital Context, 2018
This contribution sets out to aid a better understanding of the types and rules of participation that, as Jenkins (2006, p. 3) states, "none of us fully understand"-yet! Focusing on the context of interactive documentary, this chapter explores the different subprojects of the Highrise series, a "multi-and transmedia collaborative documentary experiment" (Cizek, 2012) about what life in high-rise buildings is like. Before the medium of documentary series is explored in depth, a short characterization of the main parts of Highrise will be provided, the scope of this chapter will be set and some central concepts will be clarified. Namely, these include the notion of "documentary" and "participation" as used in this chapter and their role in the context of strategies and procedures in legitimiz-ing discourses-at both the content level of documentary configurations and the meta-level of documentary practices. 'The Towers of the World and the World of Towers'-The Highrise Series As artist-in-residence at the National Film Board of Canada, in her project for the Challenge for Change Programme documentary, filmmaker Katerina Cizek modifies strategies from interventionist filmmaking and combines them with the logics of the so-called Web 2.0, open-space movement and social networking-online and offline. Launched in 2009, the Highrise series comprises six major digital audiovisual subprojects from local to global in scale, playing with different forms of interaction, participation and co-creation. Apart from the six main audiovisual projects analyzed in this contribution, Highrise has generated a total of more than 20 distinct subprojects, including mobile productions, live presentations, various activities on Flickr, performances, installations, exhibitions,
Perceptual Realism and Embodied Experience in the Travelogue Genre
This paper draws two lines of analysis. On the one hand it discusses the history of the This paper draws two lines of analysis. On the one hand it discusses the history of the travelogue genre while drawing a parallel with a Bazanian teleology of cinematic realism. On the other, it incorporates phenomenological approaches with neuroscience's discovery of mirror neurons and an embodied simulation mechanism in order to reflect upon the techniques and cinematic styles of the travelogue genre. In this article I discuss the travelogue film genre through a phenomenological approach to film studies. First I trace the history of the travelogue film by distinguishing three main categories, each one ascribed to a particular form of realism. The hyper-realistic travelogue, which is related to a perceptual form of realism; the first person travelogue, associated with realism as authenticity; and the travelogue as a traditional documentary which is related to a factual form of realism. I then discuss how these categories relate to Andre Bazin's ideas on realism through notions such as montage, duration, the long take and his "myth of total cinema". I discuss the concept of perceptual realism as a key style in the travelogue genre evident in the use of extra-filmic technologies which have attempted to bring the spectator's body closer into an immersion into filmic space by simulating the physical and sensorial experience of travelling. Such technologies can be described as tri-dimensional, surrounding, immersive, kinaesthetic and stereoscopic. Moreover, I discuss the extent to which these technologies can be considered haptic, ocular or embodied, while referring to Laura U. Marks' notions of haptic visuality and haptic images.
escaping entrapment: gothic heroines in contemporary film
In my dissertation I do a close reading of five contemporary films through a Deleuzean feminist framework: What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), The Forgotten (Joseph Ruben, 2004), Flightplan (Robert Schwentke, 2005), and In The Cut (Jane Campion, 2003). I argue that these films draw on the female Gothic genre but deterritorialise it through various strategies. The gothic has primarily been studied from a psychoanalytical perspective focusing on the heroines’ pathologies and frequently defining female subjectivity in terms of masochism. This approach seems to have led to an impasse in feminist film theory, therefore I try to follow a different path. Michelle A. Massé’s work on the literary Gothic in her book In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic and Mary Ann Doane’s exploration of the Gothic woman's film in her book The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s function as my starting points and guidelines. Massé proposes that, “we have to shift our critical focus from the ‘faults’ of the heroine that are implied by an analytic language of masochism and repressed desire.” To shift my critical focus, I approach the contemporary Gothic through an affirmative Deleuzean feminism in hope that it will reveal the rich potential of the contemporary films in terms of feminist lines-of-flight. My main guide for the conceptualisation of Deleuze’s theories in cinema is Patricia Pisters’ work in her book The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory.
Veo, veo; Leo, Leo?: A re (-) viewing of haptic and visual discourse in Bigas Luna's Bilbao (1978)
Studies in European Cinema, 2007
Bilbao as it equates to collapsing of dictatorship and an emergent dissident filmic practice. Engaging with the concept of tactile vision it posits that this recourse to sensory methods of vision, not traditionally associated with film, is the result of the search for an aesthetic capable of depicting a society in transition. The power previously thought to inhere in the cinematic gaze is interrogated as a more inclusive cinematography appeals to our sense of touch. Using the work of Laura Marks and Giuliana Bruno it explores the techniques which make this possible and highlights the slippage at work as a subversive tool in this enthralling postdictatorship production.
Quantities and Qualities: Embodied Encounters with Genetic Disorder
This research investigates the possibility of communicating human experience from, through and to the body. While investigating the experience of my own genetic disorder I will examine the dominant discourse on the subject and how it might be subverted, shifted or avoided as required in order to grasp this ineffable phenomenon as a patient. Methods of movement observation and embodied filmmaking will be used to explore the clinical environment during the course of my own treatment. If we put aside discussions of probability and risk, cause and effect, how can we characterize genetic disorder? What is the nature of the experience and how does it relate to the body? How can art, and specifically physical practices of film and movement, establish a fruitful interdisciplinary exchange with medicine on the subject of patient experiences?
2016
In Cinema’s Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, including Caché, Strange Days, Trouble Every Day, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more. Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.