Abstract: It is surprising that Hollis Frampton's published writing contains no explicit reference to time-lapse cinematography.1 After all, Frampton straddled the disciplinary boundaries between science and art, claimed dual status as still photographer and filmmaker, and made movement and time central to his theoretical speculation, a cluster of investments that would seem, at the least, time-lapse adjacent. Moreover, some form of the technique appears in his films Surface Tension (1968), Ordinary Matter (1972), Pas de Trois (1975), and, the subject of this essay, Remote Control (1972). In this film, which occupies the sixth position in the seven-part Hapax Legomena, Frampton applies time lapse, a technique with ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "You're really going to be disappointed when you hear our first track on our new LP," Jimi Hendrix warned in a 1968 interview, "because it starts with a 90 second sound painting of the heavens."1 Hendrix's "… And the Gods Made Love," the instrumental opening to his final studio album Electric Ladyland, begins with two beats of a timpani followed by a musical pause filled only with the hiss of the magnetic tape and then, again, two percussive beats. Over the tape hiss that constitutes part of the track's noise floor, or its bare minimum of signal interference, a voice emerges, played backwards and slowed down. In-studio phasing and delay effects transform the voice into Hendrix's iconic stereo oscillating sound. ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Snow, Mark Bould reminds us, has a "great noirish potential": blizzards are unpredictable and treacherous, and the snowbound landscape, due to its lack of spatial markings, can easily disorient, entrap, and kill people.1 It is along these lines that scholars have considered, for instance, the recent wave of Scandinavian crime fiction (including films such as Smilla's Sense of Snow, 1996; Insomnia, 1997; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009; and The Snowman, 2017) and the Nordic variation of a transnational noir "sensibility or mood, one of alienation, pessimism, and uncertainty."2 Yet, snow has at least one quality that seems fundamentally incompatible with the classical film noir form: by naturally amplifying the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: How does animation move, actually' What are the specific dimensions of its movement, and how do we perceive the things that are doing the moving' What makes one figure hold together while another seems to dissipate or fall apart' These are the questions at the core of Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, Ryan Pierson's illuminating exploration of animation aesthetics. To answer these questions, Pierson delves deep into Gestalt theory: "animation is considered here as an art of coordinating sensory units into perceptible figures and forces. Style in animation emerges, in part, from how units coordinate with each other" (4). His description of these "sensory units" is meticulous, and what emerges from this book ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Can cinema offer alternative ways to understand gender transitions and vice versa' Eliza Steinbock in their new book Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change answers yes to both questions. Engaging in an analogical thinking between the aesthetic forms of cinema and transgender embodiment, the book discusses how both operate through the principle of disjunction, bodily or technologically. By demonstrating the striking similarities between film and trans embodiment, Steinbock pushes the concept of transgender beyond issues of political representation toward an entry point for understanding transness and cinema. Deftly moving across different fields of film theory, trans studies ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: What, if anything, changes our understanding of aesthetic form when it breaks apart in a violent encounter with excess, madness, or radical alterity' Is it any different when the same form quietly disintegrates under the corrosive effects of embedded self-canceling drives' To answer these questions, Tomáš Jirsa's monograph makes use of a wide-ranging yet coherent assemblage of conceptual instruments, pondering and dissecting an equally heterogenous corpus that spans across media from fiction, memoir, and theater to cinema, visual arts, and conceptual installations. By virtue of unexpected juxtapositions emerging from its transdisciplinary and transmedia infrastructure, Disformations reads as a work of critical ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's canonical Cuban comedy Death of a Bureaucrat (Muerte de un burócrata, 1966) begins with a satirical swipe at bureaucracy and a nod predominantly to classic Hollywood and Euro-American art cinema. To the strains of a typewriter interwoven with pompous classical music, a document overladen with official formulations—"por cuanto" (whereas); "resuelvo" (I resolve)—unfolds the film's credits in the form of numbered resolutions. The fifth and final resolution of the document dedicates the film to a long list of filmmaking greats including Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton (figure 1). Notably absent from this list are any Soviet or socialist world filmmakers. Indeed ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: He's a world leader in the field of optics, and he's figured out how to do this. He's not dead. I just can't see him.The horror film The Invisible Man (Leigh Wannell, 2020) is about a psychopathic tech entrepreneur, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who stalks his wife Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) even after his alleged suicide. Wearing a cutting-edge suit that makes him invisible to her (and us), his unseeable body still leaves footprints on carpet, exhales a jet of warm breath in cold air, and makes a knife seemingly levitate. The invisible man is repeatedly placed in onscreen space by the look our sympathetic heroine casts at an empty corner, which we are also asked to look at carefully (figure 1). It's an ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-29T00:00:00-05:00
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