Download or read book Secular Magic and the Moving Image written by Max Sexton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather, it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet, shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with the contemporary world has led to television developing many different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization. The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the key to understanding secular magic on television and film and exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006 films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further questions about entertainment and how the relations between the program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of inter-medial relations.
Download or read book Secular Magic and the Moving Image written by Max Sexton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The convergence of film and television and the tension between the unmediated ‘reality’ of the moving image and the enchantment and illusion offered by magic suggests new ways of thinking about the interstices between film and television.
Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A history of “secular,” or non-supernatural, or entertainment magic as an important but neglected constituent of modern culture” (Nicholas Daly). Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During’s superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society’s image of itself. Praise for ModernEnchantment “During documents the extent to which magic and magical thinking have pervaded, and continue to pervade, secular life . . . the author examines 19th- and 20th-century theatrical magic and “commercial conjuring” with great sensitivity to the social and cultural context in the Western world. Equally fascinating is the analysis of magic and early film.” —R. Sugarman, Choice “A richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.” —Marina Warner, Financial Times “During moves confidently across three centuries of magic (and covers aspects of a few more besides). The sheer wealth of historical detail he provides is impressive, but no less impressive is the subtlety of his argumentation, and the suggestiveness of his claims . . . This extremely significant piece of work will appeal to literary critics, historians, and not least, devotees of magic.” —Nicholas Daly, author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914
Download or read book Moving Images written by Helen Groth and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind.
Download or read book The Moving Image as Public Art written by Annie Dell'Aria and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-08 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.
Download or read book Biological Motion written by Janina Wellmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating exploration of the changing definitions of life in biology Biological Motion studies the foundational relationship between motion and life. To answer the question, “What is Life?,” prize-winning historian of science Janina Wellmann engages in a transdisciplinary investigation of motion as the most profound definition of living existence. For decades, information and structure have dominated the historiography of the life sciences with its prevailing focus on DNA structure and function. Now more than ever, motion is a crucial theme of basic biological research. Tracing motion from Aristotle’s animal soul to molecular motors, and from medical soft robotics to mathematical analysis, Wellmann locates biological motion at the intersection of knowledge domains and scientific and cultural practices. She offers signposts to mark the sites where researchers, technologies, ideas, and practices opened up new paths in the constitution of the phenomenon of motion. An ambitious rethinking of the life sciences, Biological Motion uncovers the secret life of movement and offers a new account of what it means to be alive.
Download or read book Death 24x a Second written by Laura Mulvey and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film.
Download or read book Magic Realism World Cinema and the Avant Garde written by Felicity Gee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality. Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.
Download or read book The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema written by Richard Leonard and published by Academic Monographs. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Magical', 'out of this world', 'an experience you'll never forget': Peter Weir's films have enthralled audiences around the globe. Whether in iconic Australian works such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli or international mainstream thrillers such as Witness, Weir has deliberately created mystical movie experiences. Modern cinema studies is used to dissecting films on the basis of gender, class or race: now, for the first time, Richard Leonard shows that a mystical gaze also exists and is exercised in the secular multiplex temples of today. The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema is a meticulous and accessible book that uses a psychoanalytic approach incorporating the insights of Jung, film theory and theology to break new ground in what continues to be a hot topic in cinema studies: the spectator/screen relationship. Leonard provides a fresh and innovative perspective on what happens when we behold a film.
Download or read book Poetry Unbound written by Mike Chasar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.
Download or read book Cinema and Secularism written by Mark Cauchi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema and Secularism is the first collection to make the relationship between cinema and secularism thematic, utilizing a number of different methodological approaches to examine their identification and differentiation across film theory, film aesthetics, film history, and throughout global cinema. The emergence of moving images and the history of cinema historically coincide with the emergence of secularism as a concept and discourse. More than historically coinciding, however, cinema and secularism would seem to have-and many contemporary theorists and critics seem to assume-a more intrinsic, almost ontological connection to each other. While early film theorists and critics explicitly addressed questions about secularism, religion, and cinema, once the study of film was professionalized and secularized in the Western academy in both film studies and religious studies, explicit and critical attention to the relationship between cinema and secularism rapidly declined. Indeed, if one canvases film scholarship today, one will find barely any works dedicated to thinking critically about the relationship between cinema and secularism. Extending the recent “secular turn” in the humanities and social sciences, Cinema and Secularism provokes critical reflection on its titular concepts. Making contributions to theory, philosophy, criticism, and history, the chapters in this pioneering volume collectively interrogate the assumption that cinema is secular, how secularism is conceived and related to cinema differently in different film cultures, and whether the world is disenchanted or enchanted in cinema. Coming from intellectually diverse backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and philosophy, the interdisciplinary contributors to this book cover films and traditions of thought from America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. In these ways, Cinema and Secularism opens new areas of inquiry in the study of film and contributes to the ongoing interrogation of secularism more broadly.
Download or read book Victorian Glassworlds written by Isobel Armstrong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions. First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings. Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known. A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.
Download or read book Fuseli s Milton Gallery written by Luisa Cale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-21 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fuseli's Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli's project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other 'classics' in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformedinto repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national 'grand style' to fit the needs of a consumer society.Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To 'turn readers into spectators' meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli's Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses,let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli's embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This bookanalyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period.
Download or read book Almandal Grimoire written by Genese Grill and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Landscape and Film written by Martin Lefebvre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape is everywhere in film, but it has been largely overlooked in theory and criticism. This volume of new work will address fundamental questions: What kind of landscape is cinematic landscape? How is cinematic landscape different from landscape painting? How is landscape deployed in the work of such filmmakers as Greenaway, Rossellini, or Antonioni, to name just three? What are differences between the use of landscape in Western filmmaking and in the work of Middle Eastern and Asian filmmakers? How is cinematic landscape related to the idea of a national cinema and questions of identity. The first collection on the idea of landscape and film, this volume will present an impressive international cast of contributors, among them Jacques Aumont, Tom Conley, David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, Peter Rist, and Antonio Costa.
Download or read book Secular Magic written by John Ruf and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-03 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short essay about secular magic that is free from the religious and cultural references that usually surround it. Legit, the best book on magic you can buy today.
Download or read book Time Memory Consciousness and the Cinema Experience written by Martha Blassnigg and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Wings of Time: an Associative Prelude -- Bergson's Philosophy as Interdisciplinary Nexus with Catalytic Impact: Time, Memory, Consciousness and the Relation between 'Spirit' (l'Esprit) and 'Matter' (Matière) -- The Analysis and Synthesis of Movement in Relation to Time: Revisiting Étienne-Jules Marey's Work in a Virtual Dialogue with the Philosophy of Henri Bergson -- The Subordination of Time to Movement: From the Eye-Brain Model to the Mind-Consciousness Correlate -- The 'Image in Motion' Beyond the 'Cinematographical Tendency' of the Intellect: Dynamism, Intuition and Consciousness in Warburg, Marey and Bergson -- Time, Memory, Consciousness: Resituating the 'Spiritual' Dimension in the Perceptual Processes of the Spectators -- Bibliography -- Index.
