Film Outside Cinema

Cinema and film are terms that have been inextricably linked since the Lumière brothers showed their first motion picture Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon in 1895. It is difficult to conceive of one without the other. According to film theorist Jonathan Walley, the vanguards of ‘paracinema’ (such as Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad) have tried to release cinema from the medium specificity of film with works that prioritise time and light, arguing for a cinema without film. The question this project proposes is: can film exist outside cinema? This MPhil by project is led by a direct approach to creating the film image using experimental filmmaking techniques. A series of experiments will look at subject (time, motion, representational imagery) and context (location, site of the pro-filmic). The studio outcomes will lead to a critical and philosophical inquiry into theories of time, duration and movement through Henri Bergson and Mary-Ann Doane, assessing how this relates to the notion of what cinema is via André Bazin. A series of installations will demonstrate the tension between the visible and invisible by capturing motion using lensless apparatuses, against a desire to see simultaneous moments of time all at once with a material that divides and segments time. Using expanded cinema strategies, these works will be presented to see how and to what effect film, when presented as projection, object, and as a component of sculptural installation, communicates ideas of movement, space and time. The thesis analyses Jonathan Walley’s three pivotal essays on paracinema comparing the concept and practice to expanded cinema. The filmstrip will be explored through simultaneous exposure, site-specificity of the pro-filmic and installation, printing, projection and hand processing. This will form the basis of a critical analysis of how the lensless apparatus presents the nature of the film image, movement and duration, against forms of paracinema

Literary Practice as High-Stakes Action: Narrative Medicine in the School of English

At the heart of narrative medicine as conceived and practiced at the Columbia University Program in Narrative Medicine lies the desire to maintain contact, the move toward intersubjective encounter, reader and writer, doctor and patient, colleague and colleague. Whereas narrative medicine is most commonly described as arming medical professionals with narrative tools to develop more effective relationships in health care, the human consequences and ethical implications for literature scholars in this interdisciplinary practice are equally profound.  “Ethics” can be an unfashionable word in contemporary literary circles. Today’s scientific community, by contrast, regularly tackles issues of empathy and “meaning.” Contact, engagement, and affiliation are at the heart of both the literary and the medical act, and by extension, the ethical act. Post-workshop reflections from the Aristotle University Thessaloniki School of English narrative medicine seminar “Understanding Illness and Trauma through Narrative” (2013) indicate that narrative medicine calls readers and writers toward conscious engagement with the complexity of the other.  Around the narrative medicine table, when physicians, writers, and literary scholars alike look and look again at a text, they are called to act, to engage with the real-world implications of those texts, and so to understand literary practice as real-world endeavor

Modes of processing influencing errors in reading comprehension.

Learner’s processing styles may play a vital role in their approach to learning, more specifically; the ability to make inferences plays an important role in all areas of language and learning and may contribute to difficulties learners are experiencing at school. It is therefore that the research was directed at investigating a possible relationship between the left hemispheric analytical and right hemispheric holistic processing styles and the types of errors inferential versus literal, made in reading comprehension tasks. The hemispheric processing styles were operationalised as the approach taken to the Rey- Osterreith Complex Figure (ROCF) and the types of errors made on the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test (SDRT) across two levels of educational development. The sample consisted of grade 4 and grade 10 model C learners from the same schooling district. The data obtained from both assessments were subjected to correlation analyses, chi squared tests, analyses of variances (ANOVAs) and logistic regressions. Finally the results and associative conclusions indicated that there were only modest positive relationships between the predominant hemispheric processing styles and the error types on reading comprehension tasks and the demographics of the learners were the main contributors and accounted for the results discovered in the study as opposed to general hemispheric processing. Thus there is a need to understand the unique dynamics within the country and to explore alternatives to teaching practices to account for the variations evident in the classrooms

A Window into the Soul of International Arbitration: Arbitrator Selection, Transparency and Stakeholder Interests

New Zealand Law Foundation International Dispute Resolution Lecture 2013, delivered at Stone Lecture Theatre, University of Auckland Faculty of Law, 26 November 2013. This essay derives from that lecture, which considers the important issue of arbitrator selection, appointment and challenge standards and procedures, and introduces the Arbitrator Intelligence project - a proposed solution for informational asymmetries that can affect the fairness of arbitrator selection and appointment

Fit and Function in Legal Ethics: Developing a Code of Conduct for International Arbitration

In this Article, I develop a methodology for prescribing the normative content of a code of ethics for international arbitration, and in a forthcoming companion article, I propose integrated mechanisms for making those norms both binding and enforceable. In making these proposals, I reject the classical conception of legal ethics as a purely deontological product derived from first principles. I argue, instead, that ethics derive from the interrelational functional role of advocates in an adjudicatory system, and that ethical regulation must correlate with the structural operations of the system. The fit between ethics and function, I will demonstrate, not only illuminates at a descriptive level the reasons why the different nations of the world have adopted different ethical regimes; it also guides at a prescriptive level for developing new ethics for other systems, such as international arbitration

Restating the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration

In December 2007, the American Law Institute ( ALI ) approved the development of a new Restatement, Third, of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration (the Restatement ). On February 23, 2009, the Restaters and authors of this Essay presented a Preliminary Draft of a chapter of the Restatement (the Draft ) at an invitational meeting in New York. The Draft addresses Recognition and Enforcement of Arbitral Awards. This brief Essay provides some reflections of the Reporters from the process of producing and presenting the Draft. Subsequent Drafts have been produced and approved by the ALI

The Vocation of International Arbitrators

This Essay examines the vocation of the international arbitrator. I begin by evaluating, under sociological frameworks developed in literature on Weberian theories of the professions, how the arbitration community is organized and regulated. Arbitrators operate in a largely private and unregulated market for services, access to which is essentially controlled by what might be considered a governing cartel of the most elite arbitrators. I conclude my description with an account of how recently international arbitrators have begun to display a professional impulse, meaning efforts to present themselves as a profession to obtain the benefits of professionalization. Professional status is often used by groups to distinguish themselves, but with international arbitrators, their supposed professionalization is not a particularly compelling reason for distinguishing them from other service providers, such as lawyers. Instead of relying on the rubric of sociological accounts, I offer a preliminary conceptual analysis of the normative underpinnings of the vocation of the international arbitrator. I argue that, unlike settlement or mediation, the aim of international arbitration is to render justice, not to simply resolve disputes. I provide an overview of the ways in which the practice of international arbitration bears out this hypothesis through its development of a vibrant, if perhaps still fledgling, public realm. Finally, I return to the market for international arbitrator services and their efforts at self-regulation, evaluating them in light of obligations and expectations attendant with their justice-providing function and the public realm of the international arbitration system. I propose certain innovations that would increase the rigor and transparency in international arbitrator\u27s self-regulation, including minimizing existing information asymmetries that affect the market for arbitrator services. These improvements may be regarded as having been implicitly promised through their professional impulse and by their justice-providing role, but to date have been elusive

International Arbitration, Judicial Education, and Legal Elites

This essay sketches an account of how investment arbitration affects development of local legal institutions, in particular domestic courts. When investment arbitration is introduced into a local legal environment, it becomes integrated with international commercial arbitration, and often domestic arbitration. This integration occurs because the local economic elites, private law firms, and local businesses that deal with (or compete with) foreign investors and investment arbitration disputes also deal with international commercial matters, international commercial disputes, and domestic arbitration

The Vocation of International Arbitrators

This Essay examines the vocation of the international arbitrator. I begin by evaluating, under sociological frameworks developed in literature on Weberian theories of the professions, how the arbitration community is organized and regulated. Arbitrators operate in a largely private and unregulated market for services, access to which is essentially controlled by what might be considered a governing cartel of the most elite arbitrators. I conclude my description with an account of how recently international arbitrators have begun to display a professional impulse, meaning efforts to present themselves as a profession to obtain the benefits of professionalization. Professional status is often used by groups to distinguish themselves, but with international arbitrators, their supposed professionalization is not a particularly compelling reason for distinguishing them from other service providers, such as lawyers. Instead of relying on the rubric of sociological accounts, I offer a preliminary conceptual analysis of the normative underpinnings of the vocation of the international arbitrator. I argue that, unlike settlement or mediation, the aim of international arbitration is to render justice, not to simply resolve disputes. I provide an overview of the ways in which the practice of international arbitration bears out this hypothesis through its development of a vibrant, if perhaps still fledgling, public realm. Finally, I return to the market for international arbitrator services and their efforts at self-regulation, evaluating them in light of obligations and expectations attendant with their justice-providing function and the public realm of the international arbitration system. I propose certain innovations that would increase the rigor and transparency in international arbitrator\u27s self-regulation, including minimizing existing information asymmetries that affect the market for arbitrator services. These improvements may be regarded as having been implicitly promised through their professional impulse and by their justice-providing role, but to date have been elusive