Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Précis (original) (raw)
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October, 2022
Two film theorists, D. N. Rodowick and Murray Smith, have recently addressed the place of the natural sciences in the study of film and art, and they reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Rodowick argues that natural scientific explanations have little or no role to play in the study of film and art as "cultural practices," while Smith advocates a "naturalized aesthetics of film," which he describes as "an approach that . . . treats [film] as a phenomenon which is likely to be illuminated by various types of scientific as well as traditional humanistic research." In this paper, I argue that, while both views contain important insights, they are ultimately mistaken. Rodowick overlooks the important role the natural sciences can play in explaining the perceptual, cognitive, affective and bodily capacities that shape and constrain our engagement with art as well as the properties of artworks that elicit and inform this engagement. Nevertheless, this does not mean, I maintain, that aesthetics should be naturalized, as Smith believes, given that the types of explanations standardly proffered in film studies and other humanistic disciplines can be autonomous from those of the natural sciences in the sense of being explanatorily self-sufficient.
Film, Art, and the Third Culture
Film, Art, and the Third Culture, 2017
We live in a world teeming with insights and innovations borne out of scientifi c discovery; coming to terms with and understanding such a world is a critical task.
Film as Aesthetic Experience and Work of Art
Postmodern Openings, 2019
This study aims to show that cinema can produce works of art, especially in the current period, one that is still hyper-aesthetized, at least for a significant part of the audience, where watching movies has reached a climax. The approach we have followed in shaping the subject is progressive, drawing upon the theoretical and methodological framework of Aesthetics, Hermeneutics and Continental philosophy. The study begins with the characterization of art films, in order to distinguish them from mainstream films that contain certain artistic aspects and aesthetical features, at least in their shape or form. Afterwards, we shall highlight the features of the film as a work of art, the aesthetic categories that can be found at this level, the developed aesthetic experience, and other relevant theoretical aspects. In order to illustrate the theoretical notions of our study and to reveal the content in a concrete manner, we also included an applied part, in which, through the tools offered by the abovementioned qualitative methodology, we analyzed three films. The interdisciplinary analysis shall reveal the aesthetic language and categories specific to each film as well as how they contain a message of a philosophical nature that can act through certain scenes and sequences as an analogy for various philosophical concepts. The study will end by highlighting some conclusive ideas.
Art's Desire: Responding to Film and Literature
Anvil, 2011
A defining feature of contemporary culture is the presence and impact of media, which reflect our lives while also shaping our attitudes, priorities and perspectives. All media and art is the product of human beings who bear the divine image and yet are also fallen, and thus all creative work embodies the tension between these two faces of humanity. At its best, therefore, art should embody in some combination the transcendental values of beauty, truth, and goodness, but most fundamentally it should have integrity. This paper outlines five levels at which to respond to creative works: aesthetics, emotions, worldviews, morality, and spirituality.
JCLA, 2020
4 / JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS Films, the Visual, and their Effects on our Minds and Emotions METKA ZUPANCIC The visual, and in particular the audiovisual, appears to be overbearingly present intoday’s world, not only in the so-called “technologically advanced” society, but alsoin places where we could hardly imagine the existence of the devices that allow us toconstantly check information that is often accompanied by images. Abundant mediaresearch is already warning about various levels of influences this exposure to the devices may have on today’s humans, especially the younger generations (see, f. ex., Kabali et ali 2015). What does such a massive exposure to images mean for the research in the field of myth criticism, the approach we apply in the present volume of JCLA? The main hypothesis is that images, together with all other domains of human creativity,from literature to fine arts and even music, carry within them a layer, a substratumthat I would call a “mythical charge.” In this sense, the main purpose of our collectiveendeavors in this context is to verify the modalities in which the underlying mythical schemes, connected to ancient myths from various cultures, continue to manifest themselves in the vast realm of the (audio)visual. Furthermore, we are interested in finding out how these mythical models are being transformed because of the various media in which they may appear, from photography, paintings, comics and video gamesto cinema.
The Role of the Arts in the History of Emotions: Aesthetic Experience and Emotion as Method
Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2018
What role do the arts play in the study of the history of emotions? This essay reflects on the position that aesthetic works and arts-oriented methodologies have occupied in the field's development since the early 2000s. It begins by connecting artistic sources to anxieties about impressionism within cultural history, before looking at examples from literature that help illustrate the advantages works of art can bring to the study of emotion over time. Chief among these benefits is the power of artistic sources to create emotional worlds for their audiences-including, of course, historians. Ultimately, in arguing for a greater use of aesthetic works in our field, the essay makes the case for a more overtly emotional history of the emotions.
1974
The subjects of the three separate, but related essays in this dissertation are art in general, one particular art fora, and one individual work of art. The first essay, a continuous piece of sustained abstraction, primarily concerns the field of aesthetics, while the second, more concrete essay is drawn from material conceived as a book on the theory of the narrative film. The third essay, focusing on the field of cinema studies (an analytical description of "Notorious "), constitutes an example of the concreteness and precision which writing about film should achieve to be adequate to the complexity and unity of the great classic narrative films. Although all three essays reflect the same view of the nature of art, each one addresses a particular audience and a particular field and does not refer explicitly to either of the other essays. (JN)
How Many Emotions Does Film Studies Need? A Phenomenological Proposal
Projections, 2021
A look at current emotion research in film studies, a field that has been thriving for over three decades, reveals three limitations. (1) Film scholars concentrate strongly on a restricted set of garden-variety emotions-some emotions are therefore neglected. (2) Their understanding of standard emotions is often too monolithic-some subtypes of these emotions are consequently overlooked. (3) The range of existing emotion terms does not seem fine-grained enough to cover the wide range of affective experiences viewers undergo when watching films-a number of emotions might thus be missed. Against this background, the article suggests at least four benefits of introducing a more granular emotion lexicon in film studies. As a remedy, the article suggests paying closer attention to the subjective-experience component of emotions. Here the descriptive method of phenomenology-including its particular subfield phenomenology of emotions-might have useful things to tell film scholars.