Papers by Luis Antunes
Hooray for Hollywood! [2 volumes]: A Cultural Encyclopedia of America's Dream Factory, 2018
Entry on the film American Beauty for Hooray for Hollywood! [2 volumes]: A Cultural Encyclopedia ... more Entry on the film American Beauty for Hooray for Hollywood! [2 volumes]: A Cultural Encyclopedia of America's Dream Factory
Hooray for Hollywood!: A Cultural Encyclopedia of America's Dream Factory, 2018
Entry on the film Fargo for Hooray for Hollywood!: A Cultural Encyclopedia of America's Dream Fac... more Entry on the film Fargo for Hooray for Hollywood!: A Cultural Encyclopedia of America's Dream Factory
Neuroscience and Media New Understandings and Representations, Routledge, 2014
What are the perceptual correlates behind our multisensory experience of film? In other words, wh... more What are the perceptual correlates behind our multisensory experience of film? In other words, what supports the claim that the perceptual experience of a film can fall into the realm of senses outside the classic five senses? Using 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example, this chapter puts forth some arguments as to why our perceptual experience of an audiovisual medium such as film might be considered multisensory.
Mapping Cinematic Norths International Interpretations in Film and Television, Peter Lang, 2016
Norway has a rich but largely unexplored history of continental and insular Arctic Cinema, or wha... more Norway has a rich but largely unexplored history of continental and insular Arctic Cinema, or what I would like to call Norwegian Arctic Cinema (NAC). Little, if any, attention from Anglo-Saxon or even Norwegian film scholars has been devoted to mapping the films made above the Norwegian Arctic circle, specifically, in the continental counties of Nordland, Troms and Finnmark and the Svalbard archipelago. Only recently has systematic attention been devoted to mapping global Arctic Cinema and its transnational aspects beyond strict anthropological examinations of indigenous film, which are the fruit of the efforts of Anna Stenport and Scott Mackenzie,2 who first described the concept of Arctic Cinema. NAC in particular, however, has remained overlooked in its cultural importance and aesthetic contribution to Norwegian cinema.
Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games Cognitive Approaches, Routledge, 2015
One can view metaphors in film not only as cases of visuality and multimodality (between sound an... more One can view metaphors in film not only as cases of visuality and multimodality (between sound and visual information) but also as cases of multisensoriality beyond the classic five senses. Whereas multisensory studies support the perceptual bases of this claim, Gus Van Sant's film Gerry offers interesting material that contextualizes this theoretical question within the cinematic experience of walking as metaphorical representation of identity, or what is called as IDENTITY AS A WALKING EXPERIENCE. Gerry employs a type of film metaphor that is constructed through aspects of orientation and balance governed by the vestibular sense and the dynamic creation of the identity of two characters, both of whom are called Gerry. IDENTITY AS A WALKING EXPERIENCE is a metaphor that expresses a multiplicity of symbolic meanings. The metaphor of identity as a walking experience is a cinematic exercise in building specific meaningful relationships between the domain concepts through experientiality.
Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
This chapter examines the aesthetic and perceptual implications of the vestibular sense in Bergen... more This chapter examines the aesthetic and perceptual implications of the vestibular sense in Bergensbanen: Minutt for Minutt (The Bergen Train: Minute by Minute) (NRK 2009) and thermoception in Nasjonal Vedkveld (National Wood [Fire] Night) (NRK 2013). These documentaries explore a conception of film ecology in which landscape and nature are not simply represented audiovisually, but also elicit perceptual experiences as the primary cinematic appeal. By looking at issues of experientiality in the documentary film, the chapter seeks to promote an awareness within the field of cognitive film theory that the senses are as important to our understanding of film experience as emotions and empathy. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.
Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 2013
Reisen til Julestjernen/Journey to the Christmas Star, released in Norwegian cinemas in 1976, wa... more Reisen til Julestjernen/Journey to the Christmas Star, released in Norwegian cinemas in 1976, was first broadcast by the Norwegian public service television station NRK in 1993, almost twenty years later. In 1996 came a repeat broadcast; since then it has been shown every year, becoming part of Norwegian Christmas ritual. What explains that an apparently dated film has attracted renewed and ongoing interest from audiences and media programmers decades later? This short subject investigates thematic segmentation and physical acting as a partial answer to this question. This approach establishes that the complexity and depth of the film’s themes contrast with the simplicity of the plot and acting style, allowing profound meanings to be expressed through discrete and exaggerated body language.
Film International, 2014
Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) heralded the director’s return 20 years after the rele... more Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) heralded the director’s return 20 years after the release of Days of Heaven (1978). The Thin Red Line is Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal, in which American and Japanese troops fought for control of the Guadalcanal Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The film has received as much passionate praise as criticism (see Michaels 2009). Several critics have castigated the film’s use of long, complex interior monologues that concatenate the voices of multiple characters.
The Cine-Files, 2016
This essay conceptualizes thermoception (our sensory system for temperature perception) on the ba... more This essay conceptualizes thermoception (our sensory system for temperature perception) on the basis of experiential film aesthetics through an analysis of cinematic perception of temperature. I propose that thermoception allows spectators to perceive temperature in/through audiovisual media such as film without skin contact via the thermal energy from the diegesis of the film. These experiential film aesthetics, which are realized in Knut Erik Jensen’s aesthetics of cold, describe film not only in terms of its pictorial and compositional dimensions but also at the intersection between stylistic elements and human perception through sensory modalities beyond the classic five senses, specifically, thermoception. I am pursuing the following questions: can temperature be perceived in an audiovisual medium such as film? Can our thermoception actually have a direct connection to the perception of temperature through audiovisual means? In other words, what indicates that spectators can perceive the temperature represented in the material world of a film? My examination of these questions comes from my analysis of some of the paradigmatic scenes from Jensen’s 1993 Arctic film Stella Polaris.
The International Journal of the Image, 2016
This essay examines the concepts of originality and experientiality in film and compares Alfred H... more This essay examines the concepts of originality and experientiality in film and compares Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s homonymous shot-for-shot remake (1998) to argue for a change of paradigms from post-modernism to experientism. I seek to deconstruct the attributed importance of originality as an operational concept in film evaluation. Departing from the many meanings held by the concept of originality, I argue that the prevailing post-modern idea that all is a citation and there is nothing new because everything has already been created is no longer valid in the context of the current paradigm of filmic creation, a paradigm I call experientiality, or experientism–reflecting, the idea that everything has at least a minimum amount of originality based on experience. I build my case around a discussion of theoretical and historical groundings and an analysis of Gus Van Sant’s film Psycho (1998), a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). My purpose is to call for an end to the post-modern paradigm to invite readers to understand film creation not primarily in terms of the object but in terms of the audience experience.
Essays in Philosophy, 2012
For decades, the audiovisual nature of the film medium has limited film scholarship to the strict... more For decades, the audiovisual nature of the film medium has limited film scholarship to the strict consideration of sound and sight as the senses at play. Aware of the limitations of this sense-to-sense correspondence, Laura U. Marks has been the first to consistently give expression to a new and emergent line of enquiry that seeks to understand the multisensory nature of film.
Adding to the emergent awareness of the cinema of the senses, neuroscience, specifically multisensory studies, has identified autonomous sensory systems beyond the classic five senses: the vestibular (orientation and balance), proprioception (posture and body position), pain, and temperature perception. This essay investigates the principles of the multisensory film experience when applied to our sense of orientation and balance in film – the vestibular in film. Here I seek to outline the neural and physiological evidence supporting the idea that we can have access to the multisensory exclusively through sound and image, based on the nature of our perception and cognition.
I then apply this frame of reference to a new understanding of Gus Van Sant’s cinema of walking composed by the so-called death trilogy of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) plus Paranoid Park (2007). With this analysis I show how the vestibular sense can be a powerful aesthetic and cinematic mode of filmmaking, as well revealing of the sensuous nature of film.
The Victorian, 2015
This essay examines the adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by film direc... more This essay examines the adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by film director Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights, 2011). My main goal is to characterize the film style of this adaptation within the frame of a tendency in contemporary cinema in which the haptic and phenomenal appeal of human bodies and the landscape provide a new configuration of the materiality of the story world through the senses and experiential immersion of film spectators.
Books by Luis Antunes
Intellect Books, 2016
When the lights dim in a movie theater and the projector begins to click and whir, the light and ... more When the lights dim in a movie theater and the projector begins to click and whir, the light and sounds of the motion picture become the gateway to a multisensory experience. Moving beyond the oft-discussed perceptual elements of vision and hearing, The Multisensory Film Experience analyzes temperature, pain, and balance in order to argue that it is the experience of film that’s inherently multisensory, not the medium. Luis Rocha Antunes here explores the work of well-loved filmmakers Erik Jensen, Gus Van Sant, and Ki-Duk Kim to offer new insights into how viewers experience films and understand their stories. This is an original contribution to an emerging field of research and will become essential reading for film scholars.
Book Reviews by Luis Antunes
Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia, 2016
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Papers by Luis Antunes
Adding to the emergent awareness of the cinema of the senses, neuroscience, specifically multisensory studies, has identified autonomous sensory systems beyond the classic five senses: the vestibular (orientation and balance), proprioception (posture and body position), pain, and temperature perception. This essay investigates the principles of the multisensory film experience when applied to our sense of orientation and balance in film – the vestibular in film. Here I seek to outline the neural and physiological evidence supporting the idea that we can have access to the multisensory exclusively through sound and image, based on the nature of our perception and cognition.
I then apply this frame of reference to a new understanding of Gus Van Sant’s cinema of walking composed by the so-called death trilogy of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) plus Paranoid Park (2007). With this analysis I show how the vestibular sense can be a powerful aesthetic and cinematic mode of filmmaking, as well revealing of the sensuous nature of film.
Books by Luis Antunes
Book Reviews by Luis Antunes
Adding to the emergent awareness of the cinema of the senses, neuroscience, specifically multisensory studies, has identified autonomous sensory systems beyond the classic five senses: the vestibular (orientation and balance), proprioception (posture and body position), pain, and temperature perception. This essay investigates the principles of the multisensory film experience when applied to our sense of orientation and balance in film – the vestibular in film. Here I seek to outline the neural and physiological evidence supporting the idea that we can have access to the multisensory exclusively through sound and image, based on the nature of our perception and cognition.
I then apply this frame of reference to a new understanding of Gus Van Sant’s cinema of walking composed by the so-called death trilogy of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) plus Paranoid Park (2007). With this analysis I show how the vestibular sense can be a powerful aesthetic and cinematic mode of filmmaking, as well revealing of the sensuous nature of film.