Doubly Monstrous?

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Joy Clarke ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Marc Quinn

In this article I consider instances in visual culture in which artists and filmmakers aestheticize women with damaged, missing or anomalous limbs. I focus upon Joel Peter Witkin’s photomontage Las Meninas (1987), Peter Greenaway’s film “A Zed and Two Noughts” (1985), Alison Lapper Pregnant a statue by Marc Quinn, Mathew Barney’s film “Cremaster” (2002), David Cronenberg’s “Crash” (1996), Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana” (1970) and David Lynch’s short film “The Amputee” (1973). I argue that although the artists and filmmakers reveal, rather than disguise the damaged, anomalous or missing limb(s) of the women, thus valorising their particular embodiment, these women are paradoxically still portrayed as deviant and monstrous.

Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination

Hypatia ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Betterton
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Cindy Sherman ◽  
Maternal Subjectivity ◽  
Marc Quinn

This paper engages with theories of the monstrous maternal in feminist philosophy to explore how examples of visual art practice by Susan Hiller, Marc Quinn, Alison Lapper, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman disrupt maternal ideals in visual culture through differently imagined body schema. By examining instances of the pregnant body represented in relation to maternal subjectivity, disability, abortion, and “prosthetic” pregnancy, it asks whether the “monstrous” can offer different kinds of figurations of the maternal that acknowledge the agency and potential power of the pregnant subject.

Cognitive Processing of Film Cuts Among 4- to 8-Year-Old Children

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Munk ◽  
Günter Daniel Rey ◽  
Anna Katharina Diergarten ◽  
Gerhild Nieding ◽  
Wolfgang Schneider ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Media Literacy ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Calculation Formula ◽  
Eye Tracker ◽  
Chronological Sequence

An eye tracker experiment investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-year old children’s cognitive processing of film cuts. Nine short film sequences with or without editing errors were presented to 79 children. Eye movements up to 400 ms after the targeted film cuts were measured and analyzed using a new calculation formula based on Manhattan Metrics. No age effects were found for jump cuts (i.e., small movement discontinuities in a film). However, disturbances resulting from reversed-angle shots (i.e., a switch of the left-right position of actors in successive shots) led to increased reaction times between 6- and 8-year old children, whereas children of all age groups had difficulties coping with narrative discontinuity (i.e., the canonical chronological sequence of film actions is disrupted). Furthermore, 4-year old children showed a greater number of overall eye movements than 6- and 8-year old children. This indicates that some viewing skills are developed between 4 and 6 years of age. The results of the study provide evidence of a crucial time span of knowledge acquisition for television-based media literacy between 4 and 8 years.

Surviving The Jungle Book: Trans-temporal Ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Temporal Ventriloquism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Intervention

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

Duration, Compression, Extension and Distortion of Time in Contemporary Transgender Cinema

Somatechnics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-83
Author(s):  
Akkadia Ford
Keyword(s):  
Life Experiences ◽  
Private Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Short Film ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Film Change

Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.

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