Humanities and Cultural Studies

"This paper will focus on the depiction of invisible form in two US films: Memoirs of an Invisible Man (John Carpenter, 1992) and Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000). Both works depict the passage into invisibility of their male subjects: in Memoirs, the invisible Nick Halloway (Chevy Chase) finds love whilst being sought by the CIA; in Hollow Man, the invisible Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) copes with a similar predicament by committing acts of sexual assault and murder.

The transgressive physical intercourse – both consensual and non-consensual – in these films brings questions of texture to the surface. Both films present the invisible bodies interacting with their visible surroundings through their manipulation of malleable forms, thus enabling an exaggerated form of what Laura Marks calls ‘haptic cinema’. But what of the texture of film itself? As with earlier cinematic depictions of invisible form, including Segundo de Chomón’s Le Voleur invisible (1909), Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), and John McTiernan’s Predator (1987), the production of both Memoirs and Hollow Man represents significant developments in cinematic visual effects, and thus in the manipulation of the materiality of the medium. Specifically, both films contributed notably to the evolution of computer generated imagery, with Industrial Light and Magic’s innovative work on Memoirs, and, for Hollow Man, Sony’s ‘Digital Human Project’.

This presentation will utilise stills and moving-image clips to explore how, in these films, the perverse presence of invisible matter may be thought of in textural terms: the absence of image complicating conceptions of the materiality of the medium."

Jonathan Law recently passed his PhD with no corrections, titled 'Materialising the Unseen: The Multisensory Cinema of the Invisible Body'. His examiners were Professor Jan Baetens (University of Leuven, Belgium) and Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald (University of Kent).

Jonathan was in receipt of the School of Arts Postgraduate Research Scholarship at University of Kent.

The long century of western cinema has produced numerous depictions of invisible bodies – those bodies that function as any other, save for the distinctive feature of their invisibility. The invisible body challenges conventions of cinematic production, presentation and reception, suggesting an ‘extra-visual’ cinema. But, as well as this, the invisible body also challenges conceptions of the limits and categorisation of the human sensorium. In tracing a sensory history of invisible bodies, this thesis is concerned with how such depictions connect with and contribute to constructions of the senses in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis thus makes an original contribution to knowledge by asking: What kind of history of the senses can be found in the onscreen invisible body? In doing so, this thesis engages a film theory of the senses that asks what the depiction of the invisible body – itself a delicate cultural construction that has no direct equivalent in nat...

This essay takes as its starting point André Bazin's 1945 text on photography and cinema, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image'. Drawing on Bazin's metaphors of statuary and the mummified body, which he uses to articulate the temporal and representational properties of photography and cinema, I explore the static images of the human form that feature in films by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Roberto Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard. These sculptural images open up correspondences between the films in which they appear and coalesce to develop theories of the cinematic mode; they provide interpretations of the function of statues, the static and the still image, whilst mobilising the ambiguous sense of movement that is part of the cinematic form in which they appear. In his essay, Bazin uses a number of different, yet related metaphors in his description of photography and cinema, primarily statuary, death masks and the embalming practices of mummification. Though connected, these forms and processes vary, and I explore how they differ when considering them as representations and preservations of bodily form.

Note: British Art Studies is a digital publication and intended to be experienced online and referenced digitally. PDFs are provided for ease of reading offline. Please do not reference the PDF in academic citations: we recommend the use of DOIs (digital object identifiers) provided within the online article. These unique alphanumeric strings identify content and provide a persistent link to a location on the internet. A DOI is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it to link permanently to electronic documents with confidence.

Note: British Art Studies is a digital publication and intended to be experienced online and referenced digitally. PDFs are provided for ease of reading offline. Please do not reference the PDF in academic citations: we recommend the use of DOIs (digital object identifiers) provided within the online article. These unique alphanumeric strings identify content and provide a persistent link to a location on the internet. A DOI is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it to link permanently to electronic documents with confidence.

"„In the late twentieth century, after all, we are ourselves literally embodied writing technologies. That is part of the implosion of gender in sex and language, in biology and syntax, enabled by Western technoscience.“
Donna J. Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, p. 128.

These thoughts were the stimulus for this paper’s effort to treat the notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ through the controversial points of view, emerged among the feminist writings of the 1970s, the historians and psychoanalysts of the 1980s.While post-stucturalists like J. Butler are passing from gender denaturalization to the undoing of gender, brain scientists speak about a potential underestimation of innate biology at its equation with the anatomical sex; hormones and neurochemicals, constantly changing the brain state, not taken into account. ‘Gender’ constitutes in this sense the key term that is being posed and reposed, thought and rethought, done and undone. My paper will be thus divided into three parts that shall refer to a critical vision of gender categories in various discursive domains.
First part will treat the intrinsic introduction of gender as notion during the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to contest the naturalisation of the bipartite sex difference of men from women, male from female, in multiple arenas of struggle. Despite having passed from the ‘biological’ (sexual difference) to the ‘ontological determinism’ (desire) through the ‘social constructivism’ (power), the notion of “gender” remains trapped within the oppressive Western binarism culture/nature, and therefore the second part will explore the new ways of thinking gender that emerge in the 1990s towards a deconstruction or denaturalisation of this notion; that is, gender as representation and as subjective identity. Although Butler’s theory of performativity did succeed not only to disqualify normative analytical categories leading to univocity, such as sex or nature, but also to release both genders and their social frame of reference from any determinism, the third part will not only show in what extent this very notion of gender (as doing) is nowadays again in crisis but also inquire the possible explanations for the impoverishment of gender and therefore for the necessity of its undoing. A mysterious elsewhere will emerge as a sort of agency that motivates us and establishes our sexuality, whose full meaning we ignore. The innate neurochemical biology of Brizendine will thus broaden up the cognitive fields and open new perspectives of rethinking gender, the mysterious elsewhere and -why not?- biology itself.
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"For the first time in history and across much of the world, as an article in The Economist points out, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition: ‘The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity – the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.’ Except that on the one hand, according to the philosopher Chul-Han, globalising means not merely that Here is linked with There; more likely, a global Here is produced, while There is being constantly moved and removed – and so is accordingly the figure of the Foreigner. On the other, the contemporary human turns into something more than a nomad: a touristic figure that experiences culture (Kultur in German) by travelling the terrestrial and cybernetic space with her home virtually or pragmatically ‘on tour’.
This paper seeks to explore not only the slippage from the Citizen to the Wanderer of a world in flux and flow, but also the conceptual shift from identity as continuity of a single dramatis persona to its instantaneous alterations, if not to the interrelationships between a particular space-time and the Self. ‘Depending on who is looking, the exotic is the other or it is me,’ writes inter alia Minh-ha in her effort to investigate travelling as the par excellence process of othering within this era of ‘identity crisis’. In fact, the Other constitutes not an off-shore figure anymore but part of our new larger family, global from scratch; she lingers in its core, whilst exoticising familiar events. By drawing on Bourriaud’s discourse of Alter-modernity, this paper wishes then to instead introduce the Alter as difference that is neither intrinsic nor distant but rather celebrates the alternative as such."

Beginning, at least, with the re-turn to all things cinematic in the early 1990s, we have seen emerge a new approach toward the way in which the people appear or are made to appear in film and video art; an approach that is structured in terms of an economy of (in)visibility that clearly refers to and even incorporates certain elements of the ambiguous status of the extras in the cinema. Harun Farocki's Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), for instance, is quite literally a procession of cinematic extras through the ages, in the films of Auguste and Louis Lumière (La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière

In this paper I discuss three recent exhibitions focusing on the communist era archives of the Ministry of Defense (B nk'A I), the Ministry of Interior Affairs (B nk'A II), and the Albanian communist regime's secret police, namely, Sigurimi i Shtetit (House of Leaves). What is remarkable about the B nk'A I, B nk'A II, and House of Leaves exhibitions is the way in which they self-consciously appropriate and exploit the "language" or the conventions of contemporary artistic and curatorial installations,