Energy and eventhood: the infrastructural set piece

‘Energy and Eventhood’ considers the relationship between infrastructure and the cinematic set piece. It proposes a working definition of the set piece as a distinctly (and perhaps excessively) effortful passage or sequence, and reflects on the tendency for narrative films to incorporate infrastructural sites and structures—such as bridges, dams and pipelines—into such set pieces. A number of writers on infrastructure, as both a cultural phenomenon and a representational object, have noted the aesthetic challenge of rendering it as visible and locatable; this article examines how that difficulty becomes manifest in the infrastructural set piece. It takes as its case studies Unstoppable (2010) and Night Moves (2013), two films noted for their distinctive rhythmic expressiveness, and each one deploying the convention of the set piece in ways which exemplify and reflect on the resistance of infrastructure to narrative containment

Ogni Pensiero Vola: the embodied psyche in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

The Tree of Lifetouches on embodiment of the soul in an early sequence covering courtship, marriage and the first pregnancy of a young couple. In a delicate formal scene, Mrs O'Brien, nearing full term, treads gently along a river's edge summoning infant souls luminous in white linen. She opens a minute book of life to one of them, preparing his entry through the iron gates that open on embodied life. Presently, the infant soul rises up from his underwater home beyond the reach of conscious awareness: Mrs O'Brien gives birth to her first son, Jack. This is the boy who will eventually become a middle-aged man in crisis. Ravaged then by grief for his long-dead younger brother and his own inability to live at peace with his family or himself, his memories, visions and reflections accumulate in a way that makes him a suffering Hermes for the early twenty-first century. The initiating episode of the infant's birth complements the embodied and affective experiences of those in the audience who accept the film's sensual invitation to steep themselves in the immense scale of its gorgeous sounds and images. They then discover on the pulse that, more than the history of one Texan family, it attempts nothing less than the necessary re-creation of the godhead for the early twenty-first century. Contrary to the rigid medieval dogmas of so many orthodox religions,The Tree of Lifeassures us not of a changeless eternity but rather the sacred and ceaseless metamorphosis of numinous energy

Elastically driven, intermittent microscopic dynamics in soft solids

Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted paradigm is that such aging is gradual and its origin is in slower than exponential microscopic dynamics, akin to the ones in supercooled liquids or glasses. Nevertheless, time- and space-resolved measurements have provided contrasting evidence: dynamics faster than exponential, intermittency, and abrupt structural changes. Here we use 3D computer simulations of a microscopic model to reveal that the timescales governing stress relaxation respectively through thermal fluctuations and elastic recovery are key for the aging dynamics. When thermal fluctuations are too weak, stress heterogeneities frozen-in upon solidification can still partially relax through elastically driven fluctuations. Such fluctuations are intermittent, because of strong correlations that persist over the timescale of experiments or simulations, leading to faster than exponential dynamics.Comment: 7 pages, Supplementary Information include

Pour Félix

Oury Jean, Deleuze Gilles, Hopf Sonja, Bellour Raymond, W.-S. M., Apprill Olivier. Pour Félix. In: Chimères. Revue des schizoanalyses, N°18, hiver 1992. Cercles vicieux. pp. 207-214

Ideologiekritik und/als analyse textuelle

Inspiriert von Linguistik, Literaturwissenschaft und Psychoanalyse versteht die analyse textuelle den Film als ein Geflecht von Zeichen, die es als solche und in ihrer gegenseitigen Bezogenheit zu lesen gilt. Dabei geht es – wie anhand der verschiedenen Exponenten dieser Methode gezeigt werden soll – weniger darum, eine bestimmte, universell gültige Syntax des Films zu bestimmen, als vielmehr darum, den Film als dynamisches Gewebe zu untersuchen, das sich unentwegt selber um- und fortschreibt. Das ideologiekritische Potenzial einer solchen Herangehensweise liegt somit nicht bloß darin, dass Filme als Ausdruck herrschender Ideologien untersucht werden können, sondern auch darin, dass eine solche dynamische Textanalyse an sich die Vorstellung einer positiv zu fixierenden „Wahrheit“ oder „Botschaft“ des Films radikal in Frage stellt