Search Results

The relationship of man and God, in which they love one another, is the way of human existence in which his totality is included. Repentance and purification are maintained through the will or enduring remembrance of God. This is how the original connection between phenomena and their names is maintained: man knows them in his response to God's commandments. But reaching that is always also dependence on the Independent. Loss is the constant potential that confirms the accepted offer of belief that man will repay his debt for what he has received. That debt has two essential contents—verticality, as the connection with God through the totality of existence, and humility, as being on one level of the multiplicity of revelation of oneness. The rupture of the alliance or nonfulfilment of the debt turns man toward the love of phenomena that have ceased to be signs of perfection. Every duality in the totality of existence bears witness to the division that is the proclamation of the Creator and the created.

This chapter continues the discussion of the Del McCoury Band while re-introducing Deleuze's concepts of virtuality/verticality and actualization/horizontality to illuminate the manner in which bluegrass can remain a 'live' tradition thanks to the multiplicity/difference of the 'idea' of bluegrass. This, the differentiation of the idea, is enacted through improvisation.

Maya Deren's writings on film provide the basis for considering her dancefilm works such as A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–1946). A pivotal figure in the history of dancefilm, Deren's films marked the re‐emergence of the form within the avantgarde for the first time since the experiments of the Futurists, Surrealists, and Dadaists earlier in the twentieth century. Operating outside the major American film studios, which were releasing their highest output of dance musicals, Deren was working with modern and untrained dancers to create choreographies for the screen. Deren realized seminal strategies for dancefilm in the mid‐twentieth century that can be found in the most recent examples of the form. Vertical film form is a concept developed by Deren to account for the different film structure in non‐narrative films—what she calls “poetic film.” Rather than progressing “horizontally” with the logic of the narrative, vertical films or sequences explore the quality of moments, images, ideas, and movements outside of such imperatives. Depersonalization refers to a type of screen performance that subsumes the individual into the choreography of the film as a whole. Actors become figures across whom movement transfers as an “event.” The manipulation of gestural action through stylization occurs through individual performances as well as cinematic effects, the two levels of filmic performance combining to create screen choreographies.

The chapter examines debates about the fragility of Himalayan ecology, and the theories that have been advanced to explain and remedy environmental degradation. It reviews accounts of the introduction of environmental protection in Nepal and the impact of regulations on local patterns of resource use, which have tended to make local people hostile to the institutions designed for nature protection. Phenomenological, discursive, and political–ecological developments in approaches to human–environmental relations are described that will be drawn upon in interpreting the ethnography of Tamang environmental relations.

Chapter 4 investigates the fundamentally mobile relationship of Tamang villagers to their landscape, the historically shifting geographical ranges of their transhumance cycles, the effects mobility has on their patterns of everyday life, and the kinds of productive affordances and animate presences they talk about in their engagements with the diversity of places in the Himalayan environment. The Tamang standpoint of self-placement is intermediary to the cultural and ecological poles of the Tibetans and the Nepalis. Their realm is the ‘middle ground’ from which they ascend and descend to extremes, and in the range of which the diversity of life forms is a creationary process of fertility, giving sustenance to human domestic ecology. While a distinctively local and practice-oriented knowledge of verticality operates within the village terrain, the occasion of pilgrimage to Gosainkund provides a more expanded and extra-local symbolic frame to the ontology of living in the middle ground.

Although the category ‘Abrahamic religions’ is contentious, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do form a group of traditions related historically, conceptually, and practically. The theme of life itself has been central for them all, especially the sacrificial model of transforming death into life and an eschatology that awaits the end of days. The history of these three religions has been more conflictual than harmonious, almost inseparable from the history of power and the emergence of the idea of the nation and state. A conception of life begins to emerge in these religions from common roots in Jewish and Greek thinking. Three trajectories of interest in life itself can be traced: first, a sacrificial imaginary at work across the Greek, Semitic, and Christian histories; second, life understood in terms of verticality; and third, a horizontal, scientific drive to understand life.

The third of three chapters exploring spatial imagery, Chapter 9 presents the conduit, a distinctively Reformed motif, which portrays Jesus Christ as located in heaven and connected to believers on earth by means of the Holy Spirit. The conduit is a SOURCE-PATH-GOAL image schema by which the body and blood of Christ reach from heaven to the recipient. Typically, this is understood as taking place by faith rather than through physical eating. On occasion, however, Reformed writers use prepositions like par or per, which convey a sense that the body and blood might be received “through” the consecrated bread and wine. More frequently, they use these prepositions in connection with the idea that Christ might be seen through the elements. The chapter proposes that this might create possibilities for Reformed theologians today to experiment with conduit imagery as a component of an ecumenical repertoire of motifs for eucharistic presence.

This chapter brings Borges and Deleuze together to discuss to forms of difference: the same difference and a different sameness. The former is more familiar mapping as it does on to the openness of the creative process as witnessed particularly purely in improvisation. The second however brigs to the surface again the 'secret' form of improvisation considered sporadically throughout the book. Using Borges's short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,' as one possible example of this un-heard-of form of improvisation, some progress (if that is the right word) is made in bringing this vanishing form of improvisation into view.

The Earth’s fast-expanding array of active satellites are central to the organization, experience – and destruction – of contemporary life on the earth’s surface. Yet it remains difficult to visualize and understand their enigmatic presence. Mysterious and cordoned-off ground stations dot the earth’s terrain, their futuristic radomes and relay facilities directed upwards to unknowable satellites above. Small antennae lift upwards from a myriad of apartment blocks to silently receive invisible broadcasts from transnational television stations. Crowds might even occasionally witness the spectacle of a satellite launch atop a rocket. In such a context, this chapter introduces the ways in which the regimes of power organized through satellites and other space systems are interwoven with production of violence, inequality and injustice on the terrestrial surface. Necessarily, the chapter also attends to the importance of how space is imagined and represented as a national frontier; a birthright of states; a sphere of heroic exploration; a fictional realm; or as a vulnerable domain above through which malign others might stealthily threaten societies below at any moment. The essay addresses the contested geopolitics and ‘astrogeopolitics’ of satellites. It explores satellite regimes as means for national security states to intensely scrutinise the Earth’s surface. It analyses the increasingly weaponised means of directly launching lethal violence. Moreover, it addresses satellites systems as domains contested by all sorts of countergeographic artistic, social and political movements who appropriate the increasingly civilianized architectures of vertical military scrutiny to both contest their hegemony and to add power to ground level political and social struggles.

This chapter argues that conceptions of spiritual and intellectual transcendence in European thought are predicated on rootedness. Beginning with Plato’s Timaeus, the human has been imagined throughout history as rooted in the divine. The plant’s verticality is conceived as a model for moral rectitude. Paul Claudel, the father of neo-Catholicism in twentieth-century France, uses the image of the crucifix rooted in the Garden of Eden as the starting point for a series of cryptographic tableaux meant to illustrate the necessity of spiritual rootedness. The chapter then shows the ways in which the inverted plant, which thrives even when uprooted and replanted upside down, has been used repeatedly as a figure for intellectually purposeful unorthodoxy (in the case of the Encyclopédistes), for intellectual risk (Paul Valéry), and for the overturning of European values (Michel Tournier).

This chapter focuses on the institutionalization and establishment of geography as an academic discipline in Europe and North America, and on shifting perceptions of space in an age increasingly dominated by global transports and communications. From a seeker of inner cosmic forces, the geographer of the twentieth century became a systematic scrutinizer of the earth’s surface. This was now an almost totally “unveiled” surface. On it there were no further vast terrae incognitae to be explored, nor curtains to be lifted up, nor diaphanous veils to be looked through. The geographer’s task became that of weaving together different areas of knowledge in a coherent disciplinary tapestry, interlacing the threads of hard science with those of culture, building patterns of physical landscapes and human activities. At the same time, technological developments, such as powered flight and deep mining, added thickness to the earth’s surface and perception of global space.

Language is the main character of this film which was written in a rich, colourful and vibrant slang. A young female delinquent, played by Bernadette Lafont, is visited in jail by a sociologist who wants to study her. The confrontation between two opposite visions of the same events makes the film an irresistible comedy. Shot-by-shot analysis: At the end of the film, the delinquent visits the sociologist who is in jail. There are numerous references, in a satiric vein, to The 400 Blows.

Day for Night won an Oscar for Truffaut and marks the return of his films to box-office. It is the beginning of a new creative period that will produce a series of masterpieces. In Day for Night, Truffaut, in the role of a film director, confronts all the many difficulties of shooting a fiction film. The subtext is particularly rich and complex. Under the mask of a light comedy, Day for Night actually offers a profound meditation on creativity from the elation it can engender to its darker, more conflictual realities. Shot-by-shot analysis: The film director’s three dreams linking the creative impulse to delinquency and infirmity.

In this film, Truffaut captures the dynamics among a group of young children. The plot is structured around the complementary of two of them: a blond boy prone to love infatuations and another, dark-haired, who is abused. The style of the film can be read as bilingual and accessible to both children and adult viewers. As in The Wild Child the film explores the complexities of language and a large spectrum of modes of communications. Shot-by-shot analysis: The blond boy’s silent adoration of the mother of one of his schoolmates while she served him a Rabelaisian dinner.

This chapter presents a detailed description, discussion, and interpretation of the Middle Bronze Age site, the Wilsford Shaft. The discussion moves the debate beyond the existing ritual-versus-economic explanation, and argues that the reader should assess the site, its creation, and use in terms of digging to extreme depths. The chapter positions the Wilsford Shaft in the context of recent and current thinking about southern Britain in the Middle Bronze Age, as presented in a detailed description of excavations of the farmstead at Down Farm, and current thinking about the local prehistoric, social landscape in Britain at this time. The chapter concludes by suggesting that current attempts to understand Wilsford can be supplemented by focusing on the presence of ground-cutting that occurred both at The Shaft and at Down Farm.

This part of the book examines the emergence of the modern skyline and the ways in which it acquired symbolic and cultural significance between 1890 and 1940. The discussion takes the post-9/11 city as a point of departure to bring into focus the cultural and architectural significance of the New York skyline as a site and source of anxiety. It then circles back to the early high-rise architecture of pioneers like Cass Gilbert and Ernest Flagg to focus on the rise of the modern skyscraper, cityscapes, panoramas, verticality, and imaginations of the vertical city. The main argument in Part I is that the modern skyline of New York figures across a diverse body of cultural production as a highly unstable space to read and interpret. In works ranging from the immigrant stories of Abraham Cahan and Willa Cather to the social realist paintings of the Ashcan School, the high-rise photography of Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the vertiginous flickerings of urban actuality films and avant-garde cinema, the skyline hovers between the sublime and the uncanny, ultimately figuring as a site of instability and change that invites yet resists interpretation.

In this directly autobiographical film, Truffaut transposes the real-life secret of his illegitimate birth by the maternal adultery. After a fateful encounter in the streets with his mother, who is embracing her lover, Antoine Doinel experiences a progressive familial and social exclusion declined in a pseudo naturalistic style. In fact, the story is carried along by the power of an exceptionally effective metaphoric vision inscribed in the visual components. Shot by shot analysis: While roaming the streets with his friend, Antoine Doinel sees his mother with her lover; she, too, sees him.

This adaptation of an autobiographical novel by a 76-year-old writer makes extensive use of the literary text in a voice over. Time is the main protagonist of the film. Split into two complementary figures, the masculine is under the spell of an unforgettable feminine persona played by Jeanne Moreau. Her character confirms the collusion between idealizations and death. Fluid camera work gives the narrative the power to spatialize of time. Shot by shot analysis: The race on a bridge where Catherine wins by cheating.

This painfully autobiographical film was shot just before Truffaut’s divorce. Deprived of a voice-over, the hero projects his conflicts and shortcomings onto obsessional images of objects and mechanical devices. In this love story between an airhostess and a writer, the film work constantly emphasizes verticality. Shot-by-shot analysis: The beautiful love scene, static and horizontal, where the hero silently caresses his lover’s soft skin. Static and horizontal, it contrasts with a narrative that is vertical and fast-moving.

In this adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Truffaut adopts the style of fairy tales with simplified but well-defined characters and a creative use of colors. The film can be read as a transposition, in a strikingly different style, of The 400 Blows. The hero like a child lost in a cold world discovers a magic object: the book. Verticality is once again pervasive with flames sending burning the paper high up into space a visual leitmotiv. Shot-by-shot analysis: At night, alone, the hero reads for the first time David Copperfield by Dickens, a novel that played a significant role in Truffaut’s childhood.