E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1990) opens with a preface that evokes the absence of meaning of past discourse in the immediacy of the present.[1] These words, however esoteric, express the aesthetical theme of reincarnation. Primarily, this theme is evinced through the decayed and ambiguous ontological status of the image. Indeed, Merhige’s Begotten is notable for its challenging cinematography that obscures the events on-screen. Through this ambiguous ontology, and in conjunction with its own implicit theme of reincarnation, Begotten formally reproduces the physical and cultural effects of time on discourse. Furthermore, due to the ambiguous nature of the text, phenomenological responses to the film are conducive towards understanding the effects of its ontology on spectators. …show more content…
As such, a recurring attribute in the film is ambiguity, a tendency that permeates the cinematic avant-garde. David Bordwell, in particular, argues that ambiguity is one of the principle elements that differentiate the art film from other types of cinema.[3] He argues that ambiguity in the art film typically involves a lack of character or narrative motivation, which can be read as either an appeal to realism (in Bordwell’s terms, “things happen that way in real life”) or as symbolism.[4] Problematically, Bordwell’s argument involves purely structural and narrative ambiguity.[5] While the ambiguity present in Begotten can be interpreted from a structural and/or narrative viewpoint, it is important to consider the ambiguous implications of its
During the opening six minutes of Nicholas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now, the viewer experiences a dynamic mixture of film techniques that form the first part of the narrative. Using metaphor and imagery, Roeg constructs a vivid and unique portrayal of his parallel storyline. The opening six minutes help set up a distinct stylistic premise. In contrast to a novel or play, the sequence in Don’t Look Now is only accessible through cinema because it allows the viewer to interact with the medium and follow along with the different camera angles. The cinematography and music also guide the viewer along, and help project the characters’ emotions onto the audience because they change frequently. The film techniques and choppy editing style used in Don’t Look Now convey a sense of control of the director over the audience and put us entirely at his mercy, because we have to experience time and space as he wants us to as opposed to in an entirely serial manner.
Whether Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky 1966/1969) ‘accurately’ or precisely reveals the reality of life in the 15th century has nothing to do with any actual audiences’ reactions to the film as experience. Instead, what we can feel is the becoming of the experienced world into distraction from something else. As a spotlight, for its intensity, might remind us what is outside its beam, the sprawling and unlimited earthly world of the film points to something outside the widescreen frame. The film makes itself a diversion from something that had equally not existed before the image began moving – or had it existed? The movie is enough to send audiences fleeing to god. And is, in this manner, a proof of god much like Pavel Florensky’s by iconography: “There exists the icon of the Holy Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefor...
In the book, Philosophy Film, by Mary M. Litch, it examines the question briefly, “Does life have meaning?” To explore this idea, a question must be asked, than an argument must be formed, which requires critically thinking to concluded the discussion. This question is a basic question that can be answered through ones deep and disciplined thinking with multiple answers. The purpose of this book is to understand the foundation of Philosophy as well as its expression through film.
In the first scene of Paul Morrissey’s 1968 film Flesh, the viewer is taken on a brief journey through the streets of New York City. The perspective taken is that from a passive observer looking into the life of the main character. The camera does not tamper with the images nor try to impose new meaning on them – we see the sequence of events as it actually unfolds. Throughout the film clip, a main theme is centered on the banality of the protagonist’s existence, and his restless state is reflected within both technical and organic aspects of the clip.
As the great Philosopher Nietzsche proclaims boys always resembles their father. Thus I have analyzed the similarities and the traces of parents on their off-springs. And literary creations of them seem to me that they are the mirrors of their real selves. As Oscar Wilde reveals in De Profundis: "Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol." (93) so art symbolizes man. And his art is the symbol of his personality just as Marius the Epicurian is the symbol of Walter Pater's. Consequently, art harbours not only readers and life but also the creators of them. In fiction, Words speak two times; one reveals plot, the other reveals author; whatever a literary men writes, he writes himself but nothing else...
This essay uses a contemporary short film and an 18th century text to discuss Chatman's concern of bestimmtheit in films. I hope to address certain concerns such as the extent to which a film can "specify" a particular object and what this specification does with regards to our understanding of the text. In addition, I will relate the compression of information into imagery to the limitations of time, given that a short film has a limit of 15 minutes. To do this, I shall analyse the cinematography of the short film, and show how relevant they are in bringing out certain scenarios described in Defoe's text. The short film in question is The Periwig-Maker, a clay-animated film directed by Stephen Schaeffler and narrated by actor Kenneth Brannagh, and it will be analysed with relation to the text it is based on, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
...r, with investigation into the visual elements of this film, meanings of this film expand beyond the literal dialog and -- existing in the film.
Kracauer, Siegfried. “Basic Concepts,” from Theory of Film. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Seventh Edition, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 147–58. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
...the predominant theme of disorientation and lack of understanding throughout the film. The audience is never clear of if the scene happening is authentic or if there is a false reality.
In the article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the relationships amongst psychoanalysis (primarily Freudian theory), cinema (as she observed it in the mid 1970s), and the symbolism of the female body. Taking some of her statements and ideas slightly out of their context, it is interesting to compare her thoughts to the continuum of oral-print-image cultures.
Each chapter invents its own reality, a reality of the screen, of the movies, that is brought into closer contact by means of a literary text. The book as a whole, then, glorifies in the postmodern tradition multiple interpretations of reality. Movies themselves present alternative realities or interpretations of perceived realities, most often differing from our own individual constructions. Thus, by offering ...
Berger makes his attempt to inform an audience with an academic background that there is a subjective way that we see things all around us every day and based on our previous experiences, knowledge, and other things that occur in our lives, no two people may see or interpret something in the same way. In the essay Mr. Berger uses art as his platform to discuss that we should be careful about how people look at things. Mr. Berger uses rhetorical strategies such as ethos, pathos, and logos. These rhetorical strategies can really help an author of any novel, essay, or any literature to truly get the information they desire across to the audience in a clear and concise
Theo D’haen, a professor at the University of Leuven, synthesizes that a postmodernist writer is one who uses a “combination of any number of techniques that were seen as innovative and perhaps even transgressive, especially with regard to all forms of referentiality, be it reference to some “real” reality as in realism or to a “psychological” reality as in modernism”(Theo D’haen 272). Following this explanation, the self-reflectiveness, interdependency, parody and mimetic reality that readers are exposed to when reading a metafictional piece, branches into the different interpretations presented by D’haen: a ‘real’ reality and a ‘psychological’ reality. The act of judging any work of art in relation to its representation of reality is a parallel to the reader’s assimilation of a mimetic reality, acknowledged by a physiological th...
Livingstone, Paisley & Carl Plantinga. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. London: Routledge – Taylor & Francis Group. 2009. Print.
While Shakespeare doesn’t have the cinematic luxuries of lighting and shadow at his disposal, he proves that Mulvey’s argument that desire is expressed in voyeuristic and scopophiliac fashion, but also that these innate desires of an audience transcend mediums and can in fact be fulfilled and appreciated in written form as much as within the intricacies of modern film.