The Sacrificial Economy of Luis Bunuel

In a 1959 interview with Jean de Baroncelli, the great Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel famously declared, “I’m an atheist still, thank God” (qtd. in Kyrou 120). In fact, as anyone who has seen Buñuel’s films can attest, he is more than simply an atheist; he is also an antitheist. That is, not only does he lack faith in God, he actively opposes such faith, frequently using scathing satire and blasphemy to challenge religious hegemony. Still, in spite of Buñuel’s anticlericalism and atheism, it would be difficult to find a director more obsessed with God. Religious topoi are ubiquitous in Buñuel’s filmography, and this includes a particularly prevalent (albeit undertheorized) topos of sacrifice. I want to argue that Buñuel’s sacrificial economy reveals a great deal about his complex relationship to religion. I also want to suggest that Buñuel’s appropriation of this religious theme is philosophically rich, anticipating Jacques Derrida’s theorizations of sacrifice in The Gift of Death (Donner la mort)

Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film

While most fi lms use moving images as their primary currency, there are several experimental fi lms—such as Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982)—that instead traffi c in the written word. This article argues that such experiments problematize rigid conceptions of fi lm’s ontology and instead foreground the usefulness of a Wittgensteinian approach to cinema. Unlike a book in your hand, a fi lm keeps on going whether you like it or not. For it has an existence of its own. A microcosm larger than life, its boundaries are boundless. —James Broughton1 The fi lm of tomorrow will be lettrist and composed of subtitles. If at its conception cinema was by virtue of its images an attack on reading, the day will come when the cinema will be a mere form of reading. —Isidore Iso

Animated Holes: An Interview with Naomi Uman

“Oh, Walter! Tell me what you see.” – A sexually-charged woman, Naomi Uman’s removed (1999) I’m watching a German porno from the 1970s. Well, not quite. I’m watching a German porno that’s been dubbed into English, which explains why the characters’ mouths are not synchronized with their salacious dialogue (“My God, she’s got a fantastic ass!”). The film is a German porno, once removed

Movies That Don’t Move

My Cinema Journal article, “Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film,” is part of a larger research project on stillness in cinema that has recently culminated in the publication of a book entitled Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (Columbia University Press, 2015). I began this research in 2010 and since then, I have had the opportunity to present and discuss my conclusions at a number of conferences and symposia. For the past five years, I have given my scholarly attention to films with little or no movement, films in which stasis, rather than motion, is the default setting. Examples of such static films include Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), the Fluxus film Disappearing Music for Face (1966), Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). I have had considerable difficulty explaining this research to others, even my colleagues in film studies. For a while when I was asked about the focus of my research, I answered by saying “static films.” However, I realized that this response was causing considerable confusion when an academic asked me if this meant that I studied films that consist solely of television static.[ii] In a bid for lucidity, I began answering the question in a more direct and conversational way: “I study movies that don’t move.

A Mutually-Dependent Hadamard Kernel for Modelling Latent Variable Couplings

We introduce a novel kernel that models input-dependent couplings across multiple latent processes. The pairwise joint kernel measures covariance along inputs and across different latent signals in a mutually-dependent fashion. A latent correlation Gaussian process (LCGP) model combines these non-stationary latent components into multiple outputs by an input-dependent mixing matrix. Probit classification and support for multiple observation sets are derived by Variational Bayesian inference. Results on several datasets indicate that the LCGP model can recover the correlations between latent signals while simultaneously achieving state-of-the-art performance. We highlight the latent covariances with an EEG classification dataset where latent brain processes and their couplings simultaneously emerge from the model.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures; accepted to ACML 201

Role of the irr protein in the regulation of iron metabolism in Rhodobacter sphaeroides

In Rhizobia the Irr protein is an important regulator for iron-dependent gene expression. We studied the role of the Irr homolog RSP_3179 in the photosynthetic alpha-proteobacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. While Irr had little effect on growth under iron-limiting or non-limiting conditions its deletion resulted in increased resistance to hydrogen peroxide and singlet oxygen. This correlates with an elevated expression of katE for catalase in the Irr mutant compared to the wild type under non-stress conditions. Transcriptome studies revealed that Irr affects the expression of genes for iron metabolism, but also has some influence on genes involved in stress response, citric acid cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, transport, and photosynthesis. Most genes showed higher expression levels in the wild type than in the mutant under normal growth conditions indicating an activator function of Irr. Irr was however not required to activate genes of the iron metabolism in response to iron limitation, which showed even stronger induction in the absence of Irr. This was also true for genes mbfA and ccpA, which were verified as direct targets for Irr. Our results suggest that in R. sphaeroides Irr diminishes the strong induction of genes for iron metabolism under iron starvation

The structural influence of family and parenting on young people's sexual and reproductive health in rural northern Tanzania

This paper explores the structural role of the family and parenting in young people's sexual and reproductive health. The study involved eight weeks of participant observation, 26 in-depth interviews, and 11 group discussions with young people aged 14–24 years, and 20 in-depth interviews and 6 group discussions with parents/carers of children in this age group. At an individual level, parenting and family structure were found to affect young people's sexual behaviour by influencing children's self-confidence and interactional competence, limiting discussion of sexual health and shaping economic provision for children, which in turn affected parental authority and daughters' engagement in risky sexual behaviour. Sexual norms are reproduced both through parents' explicit prohibitions and their own behaviours. Girls are socialised to accept men's superiority, which shapes their negotiation of sexual relationships. Interventions to improve young people's sexual and reproductive health should recognise the structural effects of parenting, both in terms of direct influences on children and the dynamics by which structural barriers such as gendered power relations and cultural norms around sexuality are transmitted across generations

GLOBALIZAREA SISTEMULUI DE TRANSPORT

The relationship between globalization and the volume transport is complex due to manycauses. Globalization enables transport carrier to operate in any part of the global network,without any legislative or political restrictions from the state, wherever the carrier wants tooperate