Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts

Tuesday, 28 September 2010

"Any Zombies Out There?" Undead Film Studies

Image from I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
The zombies in these films are a kind of revolutionary force of predators without a revolutionary program. Their only concern is to satisfy an instinctual drive for predation; a drive which, as is pointed out in Day of the Dead, serves no actual biological purpose. They appear and attack without explanation or reason, violating taken for granted principles of sufficient cause and rationality. Because of this, they are especially threatening to the surviving human beings. Enemies such as Nazis or Communists are comprehensible in terms of their historical backgrounds, economic interests, religious, political or philosophic beliefs. But these zombies are a new breed of enemy in that they do not operate according to the same underlying motivations human beings share in common. They are a nihilistic enemy which, as lifeless, spiritless automatons, exemplify the epitome of passive nihilism. They wander the landscape exhibiting only the bare minimum of power that is required for locomotion and the consumption of living flesh. They must steal life from the strong because they possess such a depressed store of innate energy. They are, literally, the walking dead. [John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996] 
In [George Romero's films], antagonism and horror are not pushed out of society (to the monster) but are rather located within society (qua the monster). The issue isn’t the zombies; the real problem lies with the “heroes”—the police, the army, good old boys with their guns and male bonding fantasies. If they win, racism has a future, capitalism has a future, sexism has a future, militarism has a future. Romero also implements this critique structurally. As Steven Shaviro observes, the cultural discomfort is not only located in the films’ graphic cannibalism and zombie genocide: the low-budget aesthetics makes us see “the violent fragmentation of the cinematic process itself." The zombie in such a representation may be uncanny and repulsive, but the imperfect uncleanness of the zombie’s face—the bad make-up, the failure to hide the actor behind the monster’s mask—is what breaks the screen of the spectacle. [Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010] 
The fear of one's own body, of how one controls it and relates to it, and the fear of not being able to control other bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is too fundamental to capitalist economy, are both at the heart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more deliriously evoked than in these films of the Dead [Richard Dyer,  White: Essays in Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997)].

Film Studies For Free is quaking in its digital boots as a whole host of freely accessible zombie studies gathers menacingly on the online horizon and shuffles ever nearer.... No, no, no, nooooo...

Yes.

Resistance is futile on this the Night of the Living Links.

(The only comforting thought is that film zombies also grow old and win the undying loyalty of their fans...)

    Posted by purnawan at 06:00 0 comments
    Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

    Friday, 10 September 2010

    Screening 9/11 and its aftermath in film and media studies

    Image from In America (Jim Sheridan, 2002), the first film to be (partly) shot in New York after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Seán Crosson's article "‘They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever pa, ‘cause we're the people'..." (2008)
    The absence of the Twin Towers from the post-9/11 New York City skyline posed a number of dilemmas for the creators and producers of television shows and movies that were ‘symbolically’ set in New York City after 9/11. Whilst the World Trade Center towers had been destroyed, editors in studio lots in California faced the prospect of the late 2001 ratings season commencing with stock reels of New York City that prominently featured the Towers prior to 9/11. This posed an odd dilemma for the producers of television shows such as Friends, Sex and the City, and Spin City, programs in which the Twin Towers often appeared as a backdrop and a powerful signifier of being in New York City. The response seemed universal – the Twin Towers must be removed from the tele-visual pop-cultural locations. They needed to be purged, exorcised and air- brushed out of the shot. But by airbrushing out the Towers, the producers have purged post-9/11 television of more than just the steel and concrete of the iconic buildings. I suggest that this purging is powerful, a little odd, and deeply symbolic. In order to recover, perhaps some space – and some forgetting, if only temporary – was needed. But I argue that the missing Towers also represented a missing terror, a missing city. It was as though the creators and producers of some post-9/11 television believed that the world’s viewers would have no stomach for seeing images of a pre-9/11 New York City – a city that in many respects no longer existed. Perhaps the problem lies in how the destruction of the Twin Towers was witnessed – live on TV, in real-time, as heinous, immediate and real violence. It was ugly, sickening, horrific, terrifying. Yet it was also difficult to look away. [Luke John Howie, 'Representing Terrorism: Reanimating Post-9/11 New York City', International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 3, No 3 (2009)]

    It is the eve of another anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America.

    Film Studies For Free respectfully remembers the tragic and traumatic events of nine years ago tomorrow, and other closely related ones since, with a list of links to important, insightful, and openly accessible studies of the cultural depiction and (re)media(tiza)tion of the 9/11 attacks, as well as of their aftermath.


    Posted by purnawan at 09:57 0 comments
    Labels: , , , , , , ,

    Tuesday, 7 September 2010

    Narratology and Narration in Film and Transmedia Storytelling

    Image from Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)

    Narration in the Fiction Film

    [David] Bordwell bases his theory of cinematic narration on the work of the Russian Formalists. It is a theory that assumes a distinction between ‘the story that is represented and the actual representation of it’ (1985: 49); a distinction between the narrative as it is constructed by the spectator (the fabula) and the formal systems of representation employed in a film (syuzhet and style). Bordwell describes the spectator’s activity in constructing a narrative in the following terms:
    Presented with two narrative events, we look for causal or spatial or temporal links. The imaginary construct we create, progressively and retrospectively, was termed by the Formalists the fabula (sometimes translated as ‘story’). More specifically, the fabula embodies the action as a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events occurring within a given duration and spatial field. … The fabula is thus a pattern which perceivers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences. It is the developing result of picking up narrative cues, applying schema, framing and testing hypotheses. … It would be an error to take the fabula, or story, as the profilmic event. A film’s fabula is never materially present on the screen or soundtrack. … What is given? … The syuzhet (usually translated as ‘plot’) is the actual arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film. It is not in the text in toto. It is a more abstract construct, the patterning of a story as a blow-by-blow recounting of the film could render it (Bordwell 1985: 49-50. Original emphasis). [Nick Redfern, 'Film as Text: Radical Constructivism and the Problem of Narrative in Cinema', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 2, Autumn 2005]
    Unreliable narration in film and literature

    As discussed by Volker Ferenz (Ferenz 2005) in an article on the status of the concept of the unreliable narrator in film studies, the present scope has been wide and highly diverse. Seymour Chatman - one of the few who deals with film and literature equally well - uses it to describe a character who appears to be our source of the shown (i.e. in control of the image) and who turns out to be unreliable (i.e. the picture has not been true), and to describe voice-over narrators whose telling is undermined by the image-track. (Chatman 1978: 235ff, Chatman 1990: 131 ff.) These two uses are pretty much in agreement with what literary studies have been doing. But others, like David Bordwell, George M. Wilson and Gregory Currie, have applied the concept to films with non-personalised narrators where important omissions of information lead the spectator to draw his or her own or false conclusions as the film progresses (Bordwell 1985; Wilson 1986; Currie 1997), and yet others have applied it to films where the normal causal-logic of reality is suspended - either in favour of metafictional manoeuvres, as seen in Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marienbad (1961), or as in ghost stories like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001) or M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999)[2], both partly constructed around the axis of what Tzvetan Torodov labelled the fantastic-marvellous (Todorov 1980). Ferenz shows that Tamar Yacobi's five strategies for the naturalization of textual ambiguities and inconsistencies (Yacobi 1981) is an excellent tool for sorting out some of these (mis)understandings. In Yacobi's taxonomy it is the 'perspectival principle', by which the reader brings discordant elements into a pattern by attributing them to the peculiarities of the speaker or observer through whom the world is mediated, that are congruent with what literary studies label as an unreliable narrator, and Ferenz shows that many of the films described as unreliably narrated are better understood in accordance with Yacobi's other principles - i.e. as a matter of generic or functional principles. [Per Krogh Hansen, 'Unreliable Narration in Cinema: Facing the Cognitive Challenge Arising from Literary Studies', Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, No. 5, Autumn 2008-Autumn 2009]

    Film Studies For Free presents one of its regular bumper links lists to openly accessible scholarly materials. Today's category of choice is an essential one for our discipline: the study of narratology in film and transmedia storytelling.

    As it's such a long list, FSFF will start off proceedings by singling out two particularly useful resources with which those new to this topic might like to begin:
    1. Manfred Jahn, 'A Guide to Narratological Film Analysis'. Poems, Plays, and Prose: A Guide to the Theory of Literary Genres. English Department, University of Cologne, 1.7. August 2, 2003 
    2. Dino Felluga, 'General Introduction to Narratology', Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, 2003
    Posted by purnawan at 06:49 0 comments
    Labels: , , , , , , ,

    Saturday, 13 March 2010

    Deleuzian film studies in memory of David Vilaseca

    Image of Ingrid Bergman as Karin in Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
    Read 'Eruptions of God. Roberto Rossellini. Stromboli' by Corry Shores
    For [French philosopher Henri] Bergson, the brain does not produce a representation of what it perceives. Perception is the mutual influence of images upon one another, of which the brain is only another image—it does not “produce” anything, but filters impulses into actions or non-actions. The implications for film are two-fold. By addressing the perceiving subject as one image among the world of images, Bergson steps outside models that locate perception and memory within the mind of the subject. I would further suggest, following [Gilles] Deleuze, that Bergson’s theory of matter allows us to see film not as a fixed representation, a concrete image of a “real” object, but as an image in its own right, with its own duration and axes of movement. What we might call the film-image thus occurs in the gap between subject and object, through the collision of affective images.
    Deleuze’s formulation of the film-image as a mobile assemblage (sometimes a frame, sometimes a shot, a sound, or the film as a whole) lends itself to this reading. It refuses to reduce the physical image on the screen to a mere reproduction of an assumed “real” object it represents. Such a formulation similarly reevaluates the relationship between the concrete optical and sonic images that comprise the film. Rather than conceiving of each component as a “building block,” it allows for the shifting conglomerations of elements which are themselves dynamic and mobile. A film cannot be distilled to a structure that originates from outside itself. Instead, each film-image is contingent, particular, and evolving.
    The distinction between the time- and movement-images becomes more clear in this context. Rather than a question of either content or form, the difference lies in their affective power, whether they are bent toward action, in the case of the movement image, or if they open into different temporal modalities. It is in this second case that the time-image falls, and it is here that Deleuze locates the creative potential of film. This potential does not exist solely within the physical image itself, however, but is contained as well in the modes of perception and thinking that it triggers. Much like the time-image, the mental faculty most attuned to the openness of time, according to Bergson, is that of intuition.
    Amy Herzog, 'Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory', in Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds),Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, No. 49
    Film Studies For Free lovingly presents its long list of links to online and openly accessible film-studies resources of note pertaining to the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like lots of continental theorists invoked in Film Studies, 'Deleuze' has been somewhat of a moveable feast, but, as the links below testify, in recent years this particular feast has been a highly nourishing one for a variety of approaches to this discipline.

    This FSFF entry is one of two posts to be dedicated to the fond memory of David Vilaseca, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Professor Vilaseca tragically died in a road traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010. His achievements in life were many, as this touching obituary written by his good friend and mentor Professor Paul Julian Smith eloquently sets out. Both in person and in his writing he was an inspiration. He will be much missed.

    FSFF's author had met David Vilaseca on a number of occasions over the years and is a keen follower of his brilliant work on queer, Catalan, and Hispanic culture. She wishes to express her sincere condolences to David's family, friends, and colleagues.

    David Vilaseca had a particular interest in Deleuzian philosophy as well as in the critique of Deleuze's work by fellow French philosopher Alain Badiou. Three of his related essays are linked to below, and interested FSFF readers should also look out for his third book Negotiating the Event: Post-deconstructive Subjectivities in Spanish Literature and Film, to be published this Autumn, which will undoubtedly explore further the pertinence of Deleuze and Badiou's work for film studies.

    Good Film and Cultural Studies-related Deleuzian websites:
            Deleuzian film studies:
            • Kara Keeling, 'Deleuze and Cinema', Critical Commons, 2010 ("The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California")
                        Posted by purnawan at 04:50 0 comments
                        Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
                        Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)