From the 'cinematic' to the 'anime-ic': Issues of movement in anime

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.This article explores the way that movement is formally depicted in anime. Drawing on Thomas Lamarre's concepts of the `cinematic' and the `anime-ic', the article interrogates further the differences in movement and action in anime from traditional filmic form. While often considered in terms of `flatness', anime offers spectacle, character development and, ironically, depth through the very form of movement put to use in such texts.The article questions whether the modes of address at work in anime are unique to this form of animation.Taking into account how the terms `cinematic' and `anime-ic' can be understood (and by extension the cinematic and animatic apparatus), the article also begins to explore how viewers might identify with such images

Power / Truth, Resistance / Subjugation: The Discursive Theater of the Avengers

This article comes from studies carried out during the post-doctoral internship between March and December 2019 at the Federal University of Pernambuco During this period The Avengers filmography was observed taking as theoretical basis Foucault s researches Archaeology and Genealogy In this work four enunciative sequences taken from the film The Avengers 2012 a Marvel Cinematographic Universe component are presented and analyzed In this Universe the stories form a network of overlapping narratives a discourse field FOUCAULT 1969 1997 from which multiple contrasts are perceived utopia dystopia violence peace subjugation resistance promoting truth effects As an analysis instrument three questions were elaborated trying to establish the relationship between the Foucauldian concepts and the research object They are which truth effects are produced from this film circulation How are the heroes and villains images produced in this filmic materiality What is the relationship between film media and the history of the present In response to these questions it was found that this filmography is crossed by political mythical religious scientific discourses with the emphasis on the power of weapons technolog

Eisenstein, Part 1: 'A Fly in the Fly-Bottle' – Montage to 1930

Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay (Part I) I shall unpack what Eisenstein said early on of the mistake that he was making – before recognising it as such. I shall then in a second essay (Part II) reconstrue it definitively as he did later on – after the recognition

Story of Use: Analysis of Film Narratives to Inform the Design of Object Interactions

Not only is using a product an experience, it is an interaction and it is narrative in nature. This work in progress paper describes the narrative theory background for this statement, in particular schemata theory and the concepts of agency, tellability and narrativity, then describes methods that are being used in the project to analyse film narratives and apply these to the design of tellable physical products

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Interventions, Productions and Collaborations:the relationship between RAI and visual artists

On 17 May 1952, before RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana Studios began their regular broadcast from Milan, the Spatialist painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana broadcast his own experimental 'artwork' on Italian television, beginning a fruitful relationship between RAI and visual artists. For some, such as the painter Mario Sasso and the Arte Povera artist Pino Pascali, it provided careers as designers and art directors. For others, such as Carlo Quartucci and Gianni Toti, who were given unique access to RAI's television apparatus, it was an opportunity to explore their own artistic experimentations with an expensive and exclusive medium. RAI also hosted seminal artists' performances on-screen including John Cage and Fabio Mauri. This article, based on documents and interviews collected during the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project REWINDItalia, discusses these and other seminal cases as well as tracing and assessing the history of this fruitful and complex exchange between RAI and visual artists

Art/Sci Nexus, 9 Evenings Revisited

Following the exhibition of Hybrid Bodies at KKW in 2016 Andrew Carnie and I were invited back to act as mentors to a group of young artists and scientists from all over Europe undertaking a week long workshop designed to lead to new art/science collaborations. We were also invited to present the Hybrid Bodies project at a one day public event preceding the workshop

The weight of the past: trauma and testimony in Que bom te ver viva

This article examines representations of trauma in Lúcia Murat’s Que bom te ver viva (How Nice to See You Alive, 1989), a semi-documentary focusing on the experiences of former political militants who, like the director herself, were arrested and tortured under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Despite having limited distribution at the time of release, the film has since gained status as one of the most significant representations of State-sanctioned violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It has received renewed attention more recently as Brazil enters a new period of reckoning with human rights crimes committed during the military regime. I first consider elements of trauma theory and their potential for better understanding the ways in which the film establishes connections between individual suffering and the wider socio-political realm. Essential to the film’s understanding of historical trauma are processes of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ which I explore along with the need, partially fulfilled in Que bom te ver viva, to create a witness to traumatic events. This is combined with an examination of stylistic strategies. I argue that the film’s flexible and unconventional aesthetics is a crucial means through which it can represent certain experiences associated with trauma and perform a radical re-envisioning of history

Audio-visual Rhetoric: Visualizing the Pattern Language of Film

Audio-visual Rhetoric is a knowledge domain for designers in theory and practice that is valid for all communicative actions through media that aim for persuasion. Within this domain, we introduce a framework for media analysis. We developed an Audio-Visual Pattern (AVP) language for film that is visualized within a notation system. This system shows auditory and visual parameters in order to reveal film’s rhetorical structure. We discuss related theories from pattern language and rhetoric and apply the AVP method to analyze 10 commercials. Keywords: Pattern Language, Film Analysis, Rhetoric, Emotion, Persuasion, Design Research</p

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach