Postmodernism and Film

The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Heywood and Sandywell, 2011

2014

The main activity of consciousness is not to allow us to perceive the world, but to allow us to orient ourselves in it. Its work, in other words, allows each one to create a relationship with himself or herself only by directing it towards others and towards things: it ensures the presence of the self to itself only by relating it to what is different from it. The fact that the conscious being overlaps and intersects the being in relation means that the body, far from being a tyrant that imposes his laws, grows and develops itself only by means of a symbiosis with social life: it manages to give an accomplished form to consciousness only by means of symbolic interactions. This relationship between the human body and society manifests itself in the form of an ongoing struggle in which the stakes are the internal intersection points – in the heart itself of the cognitive problem – and the external ones – in the languages, in the objects, in all the social forms. It is around these eve...

2020

In the past decades, the field of cinema has undergone several transformations. The digital turn increasingly called for new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition, which imply different ways of thinking, doing, and experimenting cinema. These new forms also reduced the gap between cinema to other so-called visual arts. If cinema and visual arts were already in the process of merging, the last years forced the naturalization of thinking in similar theoretical grounds. This special issue aims to be a forum for the discussion of new practices of researching cinema, and the changes in cinema's forms of experience and production.

Radical Philosophy, 2015

2013

Audiences, 2012

Despite the assumptions of most film historians, the medium of film does not depend upon a mass audience. Research into the pre-history of moving pictures has clearly demonstrated that much of the technical impetus behind the development of film came not from entertainers, but from scientists eager to record and analyze natural motion. Even without the intervention of showmen or lantern lecturers it is evident that both film cameras and peepshow viewers would have appeared around 1895, as tools by which scientists could record and reconstitute movement in the laboratory. It is also apparent that in time these scientific devices would have been adopted by doctors wishing to demonstrate surgical techniques, by anthropologists trying to record vanishing cultures, and by salesmen needing to demonstrate heavy machinery, all without the intervention of the music hall or shop show. Eventually there would have been both projected moving pictures and even film historians, all without the appearance of either a mass audience or of purpose-built cinemas. This alternative history of the medium is not entirely fanciful. If celluloid film base had been only a fraction more expensive to produce, or just a little more fragile, it would have rendered it impossible for traveling showmen and entertainers to adopt the new moving pictures. The film camera would have remained a scientific instrument, and there would have been no impulse to develop dramatic narrative or to appeal to a mass audience. There would have been film, but not film history as we understand it, for the study of genres and styles, of actors, directors, and studios, of cinemas and fan magazines, would have had no meaning. The more we contemplate this alternative history of film the more it becomes obvious that what we call film history is nothing of the sort. It is not the history of the medium of film, but rather the story of how that medium was adapted to the needs of a paying audience. This simple observation creates considerable problems. Following the 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton, the trend of research into early film has been archive-based, and principally concerned with tracing the developing art of film through the surviving prints and negatives. 1 The basis of this history is the individual film, and yet this approach is misleading, for over the first 25 years of projected moving pictures, from 1895 to 1920, the individual film was of little "at the picture palace": the british cinema audience, 1895-1920

International Journal of Engineering, Sciences & Management Research, 2017

This article addresses some of cinema's anthropological and historical backgrounds. Etymology is also taken into account. Cinema is a hybrid kind of art which deals directly with movement. Having its roots in Ancient times, maybe in prehistory , cinema stems directly from photography. Its hybridism is due to the fact that it combines features of architecture, painting, sculpture, music, poetry and dance (the six classical arts that are historically precedent in relation to cinema) into a single work of art-hence the title "seventh art". The article also stresses the fact that technological progress and innovation in general (e.g., 3D film) do not necessarily mean quality improvement; paradoxically as it may seem, the opposite is closer to the truth, since the excess of facilities becomes a difficulty in itself-a rule valid for cinema, the other arts and each and every human activity in general.

2011

2019

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine Abstract Cinema today is similar to the process of immersing yourself in another reality.<br> You can often find comparisons with a diving, and a kind of contact with the<br> visualized space of the imaginary. The position of human in the process of film<br> viewing has changed today. Now the viewer is turning into a subject who has<br> some special skills of the film literacy, media literacy, and for orientation in the<br> digital dimension of the virtual space of modern life. A person watches a movie, it<br> enriches his social experience, he can see and evaluate those events from the<br> distant past, or events, which were taking place elsewhere on the globe in which<br> the subject could not participate directly. On the other hand, today more than<br> ever, cinematic reality is built into the schemes of thinking, perception, and<br> memory of modern man in the form of str...