The cinepheur: post-cinematic passage, post-perceptual passage

This thesis develops a hermeneutic commensurate with the aesthetic and ontological challenges of what Steven Shaviro describes as a post-cinematic media ecology, and Shane Denson describes as an emergent post-perceptual media ecology. I consider canonicity and cinephilia as frustrated efforts to contain and comprehend this new cinematic media object, offering a third unit of interpretation in their place, which I describe as the cinetopic anecdote. I associate the cinetopic anecdote with a particular way of moving between cinema and cinematic infrastructure, which I label cinetopic passage, and with a subject position that I label the cinepheur. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of the flâneur, I argue that the cinetopic anecdote precludes the extraction of a privileged cinematic moment in the manner characteristic of Christian Keathley’s cinephilic anecdote, but instead compels the cinepheur to instantiate, embody or physically recreate the infrastructural conditions that produced it, dovetailing production and consumption into what Axel Bruns has described as the emergent category of produsage; “unfinished artifacts, continuing process.” Having elaborated the cinetopic anecdote, I apply it to postmodern, post-cinematic and post-perceptual media ecologies, in order to evoke the peculiar forms of attachment and obsession bound up with the Criterion and Netflix platforms. In the process, I draw on Franco Moretti’s conception of distant reading to frame the cinetopic anecdote as a unit of distant viewing, offering distant viewings of Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak’s Cinemania, Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Just as distant reading takes “the great unread” as its object of enquiry, so the cinetopic anecdote speaks to a media ecology preoccupied by the “great unviewed,” in which cinematic scarcity increasingly ramifies as an elegaic object

Chemotherapy for testicular cancer induces acute alterations in diastolic heart function

Item does not contain fulltextBackground:After treatment with cisplatin-based chemotherapy for testicular cancer (TC), patients have higher prevalence of cardiovascular complications after long-term follow up. Little is known about acute cardiovascular effects of cisplatin-based chemotherapy. The aim of this study was to explore acute effects of chemotherapy on cardiac function in patients treated for TC.Methods:Fourteen TC patients (age 34.6+/-12.3 years) were studied before and 3 months after start with cisplatin-based chemotherapy. Cardiac function was assessed with magnetic resonance imaging. Fasting glucose and insulin levels were measured and insulin sensitivity, reflected by the quantitative insulin sensitivity index (Quicki index), was calculated.Results:Left ventricular (LV) end-diastolic volume and LV stroke volume (SV) significantly decreased from 192+/-27 to 175+/-26 ml (P<0.05) and 109+/-18 to 95+/-16 ml (P<0.05), respectively. The ratio of early and atrial filling velocities across the mitral valve, a parameter of diastolic heart function, decreased after chemotherapy from 1.87+/-0.43 to 1.64+/-0.45 (P<0.01). Metabolic parameters were unfavourably changed, reflected by a decreased Quicki index, which reduced from 0.39+/-0.05 to 0.36+/-0.05 (P<0.05).Conclusion:Chemotherapy for TC induces acute alterations in diastolic heart function, paralleled by unfavourable metabolic changes. Therefore, early after chemotherapy, metabolic treatment may be indicated to possibly reduce long-term cardiovascular complications

Site-specific coupling between vascular wall thickness and function: an observational MRI study of vessel wall thickening and stiffening in hypertension.

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to evaluate associations between aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) and aortic and carotid vessel wall thickness (VWT) using cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in patients with hypertension as compared with healthy adult volunteers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Local medical ethics approval was obtained and the participants gave informed consent. Fifteen patients with hypertension (5 men and 10 women; mean [SD] age, 49 [14] years) and 15 age- and sex-matched healthy volunteers were prospectively included and compared. All participants underwent MRI examination for measuring aortic and carotid VWT and aortic PWV with well-validated MRI techniques at 1.5- and 3-T MRI systems: PWV was assessed from velocity-encoded MRI and VWT was assessed by using dual-inversion black-blood gradient-echo imaging techniques. Paired t tests were used for testing differences between the volunteers and the patients and Pearson correlation (r) and univariable and multivariable stepwise linear regression analyses were used to test associations between aortic and carotid arterial wall thickness and stiffness. RESULTS: Mean values for aortic PWV and aortic and carotid VWT (indexed for body surface area [BSA]) were all significantly higher in patients with hypertension as compared with the healthy volunteers (ie, aortic PWV, 7.0 ± 1.4 m/s vs 5.7 ± 1.3 m/s; aortic VWT/BSA, 0.12 ± 0.03 mL/m vs 0.10 ± 0.03 mL/m; carotid VWT/BSA, 0.04 ± 0.01 mL/m vs 0.03 ± 0.01 mL/m; all P &lt; 0.01). Aortic PWV was highly correlated with aortic VWT/BSA (r = 0.76 and P = 0.002 in the patients vs r = 0.63 and P = 0.02 in the volunteers), and in the patients, aortic PWV was moderately correlated with carotid VWT/BSA (r = 0.50; P = 0.04). In the volunteers, correlation between aortic PWV and carotid VWT/BSA was not significant (r = 0.40; P = 0.13). In addition, aortic VWT/BSA was significantly correlated with carotid VWT/BSA, in both the patients (r = 0.60; P = 0.005) and volunteers (r = 0.57; P = 0.007). CONCLUSIONS: In the patients with hypertension and the healthy volunteers, the aortic PWV is associated more strongly with aortic wall thickness than with carotid wall thickness, reflecting site-specific coupling between vascular wall thickness and function

Quantification of Diffuse Myocardial Fibrosis by Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Contrast-Enhanced T1 Mapping is Associated with Subclinical Myocardial Dysfunction in Diabetic Heart Disease

Cardiovascular Aspects of Radiolog