The ear against the eye : Vertov’s symphony

Vertov defined the basic qualities of his Cine-Eye by means of a simple negation: it sees what remains inaccessible to the human eye. This means that in his films we see media-based and media-produced images that have nothing to do with the imitation of human perception. According to Vertov, such filmic, telescopic, or microscopic perception develops, educates, and expands the viewer’s analytical abilities. Thus, we have on the one hand a media-induced perception and on the other a new assemblage or montage of the fragments of this mediated perception. This new montage is based on a specific interaction and follows poetic rather than prosaic rules. It is freed from such constraints as time, space, causality, or speed. In other words it is based on properly media-specific qualities and, following the terminology of the Russian Futurists who influenced Vertov in his youth, it constitutes zaum or transrationality

Review of Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. (Distributed by the Law Book Company Ltd.). 325pp. ISBN 0415075114. (pbk), $45.00.

If Point of View in the Cinema introduced its author as one of the leading film analysts by its attention to the details of the process of cinematic presentation, Narrative Comprehension and Film establishes Edward Branigan as a creative theorist beyond the boundaries of film. The book's voice is that of a craftsman speaking from his workshop. No deconstructive symplok and certainly no rhetorical terrorism. Instead, we find a certain modesty of style, which is deceptive considering that Branigan offers a great deal of substance and a range of attractive speculative insights. The author's mastery of technical intricacies within the broader frame of general narrative makes Narrative Comprehension and Film an outstanding teaching book for film studies as well as other disciplines in the humanities. What makes it especially appealing is its careful elaboration of an inferential account of how we make sense of narrative. For this and other reasons, it is well worth paying closer attention than is perhaps usual for a review article to how the book's argument unfolds and in particular to how it manages to relate the double argument about narrative in film and human perception as interpretive construals

The theatre and its screen double

This essay offers a close exploration of the live filming and sound production in the schaubühne berlin staging of strindberg's Fräulein Julie (directed by Katie Mitchell, shown on tour at the barbican, london, in 2012). It provides a series of theoretical and critical angles from which to discuss contemporary intermedia performance and audiovisual scenography. After a brief evocation of Artaud's writings in "theatre and cruelty" and on raw cinema, the essay builds on a historical understanding of Western theatre's evolving and hardly settled relationship to cinematography and moving-image technologies, as well as the "choreographic unconscious," as examined in contemporary dance and technology, before delving into an analysis of Mitchell's dramaturgy of real-time film construction and her use of the "camera-actor." A particular emphasis is placed on the question whether the live mediatization of realist drama, under Mitchell's direction, deliberately weakens the theatricality of the physical body and spoken language while proffering an extenuated, if uncritical/unpolitical modulation of digital prosthetics in a superbly crafted, seamless intermedial performance

The modernist novel and early film: A case study of influences

Para este proyecto, que sitúa la novela inglesa modernista en su contexto cultural, tanto mi tutor como yo hemos decidido enfocar este estudio en las convenciones artísticas del cine en sus primeros años.35 página

Singing in a new world: Scotland - hopeless schizophrenic or cosmopolitan post nation?

Rival views of Scotland at the beginning of the twenty-first century see the nation as either, hopelessly schizophrenic, mired in its own bedevilled tartanry and forever salvaging the present through historic erasure or as a cosmopolitan postnation at ease with its contradictory legacies and able to tap its inherent multiplicities for a contemporary self image. These contentions are being interrogated in public debates and political contexts as well as in literature in Scotland. The process of re-imagining or re-visioning Scotland began much earlier than 1999 when the Scottish Parliament, last adjourned in 1707, was reconvened. Contemporary authors have long been reconsidering issues of identity and how this could and should be represented in their writing. This paper will examine how the underlying forces of insistent Scottish identity-making now seem to be moving in the direction of synthesis rather than fragmentation within literature, permitting multiple perspectives and a plurality of approaches through different genres, recognising other people’s rights to perceive or imagine Scotland differently. Anne Forbes’ novels Dragonfire,(2006) The Wings of Ruksh (2007) and The Underground City (2008), fully post-modern fantasy novels, will be used as examples of ‘fusion’ texts introducing an optimistic new notion of ‘belonging’ transcending the cultural fatalism of the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis and building positively on the politics of difference. They represent a form of literary cosmopolitanism entirely consonant with the way Scottish society currently aspires to progress, offering the right set of circumstances for developing new forms of syncretistic myth-making and storytelling across and between communities

Magical urbanism:Walter Benjamin and utopian realism in the film Ratcatcher

Deploys Walter Benjamin to discuss fantastical representations of childhood and class in the film Ratcatcher

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends

She inches glass to break: conversations between friends is a project that aims to manifest, through research and practice, my own feminist language within the videos I have produced in my final year of my Masters of Fine Arts. My feminist language is Australian and intersectional, invested in combating sexism, racism and in deepening language and representation around sexuality in relation to Asian women. This project discusses my video She inches glass to break (2018) in length, which created intersectional feminist dialogue in response to feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s film Ticket of No Return (1979) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Additionally, given this project’s investment in language, this body of work is influenced both by aspects of psychoanalysis – in which speech is central to a “therapeutic action” – and by feminist linguistics in which linguistic analysis reveals some of the mechanisms through which language constrains, coerces and represents women, men and non-binary people in oppressive ways