André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231173575
- eISBN:
- 9780231539388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173575.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for ...
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This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for capturing-restoring moving images—Lumière Cinématographe being the most successful example—and, on the other, the establishment of an institution for producing and exhibiting moving pictures. Cinema, however, cannot be simply reduced to merely projecting photographic images; it is not something one “invents.” There is no cinema patent because cinema is not a technique but rather a social, cultural, and economic system. The justification for the double birth model is its implied refusal of a one-dimensional conception of something as complex as the emergence of a new medium. The chapter argues for a pluralistic view of cinema's birth, one that projects how the history of cinema is a succession of deaths and beginnings.Less
This chapter revisits a model of the “double birth of media.” The expression “the double birth of cinema” refers to, on one hand, the invention between 1890 and 1895 of a device for capturing-restoring moving images—Lumière Cinématographe being the most successful example—and, on the other, the establishment of an institution for producing and exhibiting moving pictures. Cinema, however, cannot be simply reduced to merely projecting photographic images; it is not something one “invents.” There is no cinema patent because cinema is not a technique but rather a social, cultural, and economic system. The justification for the double birth model is its implied refusal of a one-dimensional conception of something as complex as the emergence of a new medium. The chapter argues for a pluralistic view of cinema's birth, one that projects how the history of cinema is a succession of deaths and beginnings.
B. F. Taylor
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719069086
- eISBN:
- 9781781701218
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719069086.003.0025
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) ...
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This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) sitting on a hill overlooking a new estate that is being built. The film actually closes with him and Doreen walking down the hill leaving audiences with a question that what happens to them in the future. John Hill reaches a conclusion, what he calls the ‘new wave’ narrative. Hill reaches this conclusion by drawing on Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the passage in a narrative ‘from one equilibrium to another’. This passage begins with a stable situation that is disturbed and thus becomes ‘a state of disequilibrium’. Eventually, the original equilibrium is restored but now it is somehow different from the original situation. For Hill, the narrative of a film such as Reisz's loosely adheres to this model, with the film's central disturbance ‘usually a socially or sexually transgressive desire’. Moreover, as Hill continues, this movement from disequilibrium to a new equilibrium is not random but patterned in terms of a linear chain of events.Less
This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) sitting on a hill overlooking a new estate that is being built. The film actually closes with him and Doreen walking down the hill leaving audiences with a question that what happens to them in the future. John Hill reaches a conclusion, what he calls the ‘new wave’ narrative. Hill reaches this conclusion by drawing on Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the passage in a narrative ‘from one equilibrium to another’. This passage begins with a stable situation that is disturbed and thus becomes ‘a state of disequilibrium’. Eventually, the original equilibrium is restored but now it is somehow different from the original situation. For Hill, the narrative of a film such as Reisz's loosely adheres to this model, with the film's central disturbance ‘usually a socially or sexually transgressive desire’. Moreover, as Hill continues, this movement from disequilibrium to a new equilibrium is not random but patterned in terms of a linear chain of events.
Peter Otto
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199567676
- eISBN:
- 9780191725364
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567676.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the ...
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Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.Less
Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.
Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634071
- eISBN:
- 9780748671069
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634071.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The chapter describes how the Palestinian documentary cinema created in the seventies in exile – in Jordan and particularly in Lebanon – responded to Palestinian ideology and to the role designated ...
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The chapter describes how the Palestinian documentary cinema created in the seventies in exile – in Jordan and particularly in Lebanon – responded to Palestinian ideology and to the role designated to cinema by the organizations that supported it: constructing the Palestinian national narrative as part of an international revolutionary struggle. In this cinema the individual represented the national collective, its struggles, and its fate, which was perceived as stagnant and unchanging. The portrayal of the present, moreover, merely amounted to a reconstruction of the past – a restoration of the fixed structure of profound tranquility that had been disturbed by the sudden violence of 1948 and which is continuously reflected in each and every present event depicted. Thus, rather than being experienced as a living reality, life in the refugee camps was perceived not only in its own right but also as a repetition or an echo of another experience from an earlier era. Since the present time was considered dead, hollow, and non-existent, it was deemed suitable for reviving the past. Such preservation of the 1948 trauma and what had preceded it served as a focal point of identification and consolidation for the entire Palestinian people.Less
The chapter describes how the Palestinian documentary cinema created in the seventies in exile – in Jordan and particularly in Lebanon – responded to Palestinian ideology and to the role designated to cinema by the organizations that supported it: constructing the Palestinian national narrative as part of an international revolutionary struggle. In this cinema the individual represented the national collective, its struggles, and its fate, which was perceived as stagnant and unchanging. The portrayal of the present, moreover, merely amounted to a reconstruction of the past – a restoration of the fixed structure of profound tranquility that had been disturbed by the sudden violence of 1948 and which is continuously reflected in each and every present event depicted. Thus, rather than being experienced as a living reality, life in the refugee camps was perceived not only in its own right but also as a repetition or an echo of another experience from an earlier era. Since the present time was considered dead, hollow, and non-existent, it was deemed suitable for reviving the past. Such preservation of the 1948 trauma and what had preceded it served as a focal point of identification and consolidation for the entire Palestinian people.
Elisa Pezzotta
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617038938
- eISBN:
- 9781621039822
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617038938.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), they seem to definitively ...
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Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), they seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as the author of this book contends, it is for these reasons that Kubrick’s cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Kubrick’s last six adaptations—2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help us to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur, and in particular, can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, this book concludes that, unlike his predecessors, he creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.Less
Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), they seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as the author of this book contends, it is for these reasons that Kubrick’s cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Kubrick’s last six adaptations—2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help us to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur, and in particular, can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, this book concludes that, unlike his predecessors, he creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.
