What Movies Show: Realism, Perception and Truth in Film

Film-viewing is a unique aesthetic experience, and it seems to possess a unique sort of tension. On the one hand, a film’s story seems to just be there before us: we’re directly presented with sights and sounds and can perceive the objects, people, and places depicted in the same sort of way we perceive things in the world. On the other hand, there’s an important sort of constructedness in film. Film-viewers have to cognize what’s represented by a film’s perceptual prompts; we have to bring our awareness of convention to understand shot-transitions and montage; and we have to extrapolate from what’s shown in order to pick up on what’s implied by the shots we see. These two aspects—perceptual immediacy and constructedness—seem opposed. And theorists typically treat them as opposed, with cinematic realists focusing on film’s perceptual content, semioticians focusing on how movies communicate, and narrative theorists focusing on how we cognize a film’s fiction, and each of them engaging in those analyses independent of the others. In this dissertation, I argue for nuanced ways in which what we see and hear, what we know, and what we imagine interact throughout film-viewing. I argue that film’s perceptual content and representational content entwine insofar as we perceive a film’s fictional world. I argue that because movies show (in ways that other art forms, like novels, cannot), they have an epistemic directness—they present their fictional truths immediately. I argue that movies communicate, in a roughly Gricean way, and that they do so partly through showing—with their perceptual content helping imply certain fictional truths. My analyses pave the way for a full theory of film meaning that does not treat as separate different, intertwining layers of meaning. I use and apply concepts from philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and epistemology in order to clarify what precisely goes on when we watch movies and to motivate ties between philosophy of film and other areas of philosophy

What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games: Revised and Commented Edition

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? The author examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, the author argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch

Pictorial Appearances. A Phenomenological Inquiry

This work thematizes the phenomenological thresholds that separate image and reality. The Husserlian theory of image consciousness is discussed, criticized in light of the contemporary debate on depiction, and then questioned against different types of pictorial spaces. It is argued that the major limitation of this theory is its focus on depictive images and the consequent flattening of the conditions that make possible the appearance of an image on the conditions of its having a meaning. To overcome this problem, a genetic phenomenological approach to the study of the image is proposed that takes into account the phenomenology of passive syntheses and the analyses of the constitution of space—three-dimensional first, and then pictorial. This work presents the idea that pictorial appearances unfold in a specific way that contrasts with phenomenal sequences of the ordinary objects that populate our environment. This contrast grounds the divide between image and reality

Chihiro Boards a Train: Perceptual Modulation in the Films of Studio Ghibli

This paper examines the ability of Studio Ghibli animated films to perceptually modulate their audiences. Working from Hayao Miyazaki’s suggestion that if a filmmaker wants to stay true to empathy they need only quieten things down, this paper seeks a technical explanation for this process. It will examine how the interplay of simple character designs and the sliding sensation of the animation stand induce a certain cognitive state. Through this process, the onlooker is more likely to imbue a two-dimensional character with a multidimensional, metaphysical presence

What is the Avatar?

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? Rune Klevjer examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, Klevjer argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch

The Effect of Dramatic Play on Children\u27s Graphic Representation of Emotion

Drawing is valued as a non-verbal assessment tool to measure children\u27s conceptual development and emotional state. Drawing has also been described as a problem-solving activity and unique symbol system. Although drama has been known to facilitate learning in other symbol systems, such as reading and writing, and to bring about advances in perspective taking and understanding of emotion, its impact on drawing has not been previously examined. In this study, Kindergarten and first grade children were instructed to draw a happy tree, sad tree, and angry tree before and after a 10-hour drama intervention. Half of the children participated in the intervention while the remaining children were members of a control group who participated in the regular school program. Consistent with expectations, children who participated in the drama program showed significantly greater improvement from pretest to posttest in drawing emotion compared to control children. Their drawings of emotion improved in clarity, that is, they depicted more clearly the emotion they were instructed to convey. Participants in the drama program also used significantly more highter level drawing strategies. The results suggest that the experience in emotional perspective taking provided by dramatic play may generalize to the domain of drawing and enhance expression

Towards extracting artistic sketches and maps from digital elevation models

The main trend of computer graphics is the creation of photorealistic images however, there is increasing interest in the simulation of artistic and illustrative techniques. This thesis investigates a profile based technique for automatically extracting artistic sketches from regular grid digital elevation models. The results resemble those drawn by skilled cartographers and artists.The use of cartographic line simplification algorithms, which are usually applied to complex two-dimensional lines such as coastlines, allow a set of most important points on the terrain surface to be identified, these form the basis for sketching.This thesis also contains a wide ranging review of terrain representation techniques and suggests a new taxonomy

The Multidimensional Depth of the Image: Body-Environment-Artefact (A philosophical reflection for graphic design)

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.The Multidimensional Depth of the Image: Body-Environment-Artefact Current discourses within cultural studies are re-iterating the limitations of language to adequately describe the affective domains of corporeality and materiality in the study of cultural artefacts. Within the discourse of graphic design, however, there remains an enduring focus placed upon models of language and communication to understand the meaning of designed materials. Rather than upholding a focus upon language, this thesis undertakes a theoretical investigation to extend the literature available to the discourse of graphic design to better understand how visual materials ‘come to mean’ within the experience of an embodied subject coupled to an affective environment. This thesis proposes an ontology of images that is emergent as a part of what, within the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, is describes as a mind-body-world system through which the ‘meaning’ of visual materials should be grounded. This thesis asks not ‘what’ visual materials mean but rather ‘how’ visual materials come to mean in terms of a complex relationship involving the embodied perceptual experience of the maker and the viewer that is immersed within an affective environment, what the thesis terms the multidimensional depth of the image. A phenomenological theory of art is extended to include a range of materials of popular visual culture to frame a study of how form and style come to mean qua the gestures of an embodied experience as coupled to an environment — a meaning that reciprocally emerges through the embodied experience of the work by the viewer. The environmental processes of which an embodied subject’s movements are coupled are brought into focus through enactive conceptions of mind within the cognitive sciences, describing how mind and meaning are emergent within an autopoietic organism-environment system. This provides a framework in which the affective dimensions of matter can be more fully understood as having a cognitive efficacy. Within this context, Material Engagement Theory (an approach within cognitive archaeology) is utilized to include a more focussed discussion of the affective domains of materials, objects, and artefacts and their role in the emergence of mind and meaning.HER