Film/History/Experience

This chapter describes the interactions and intersections between film experience and historical experience. The first section introduces the phenomenological theories underpinning the notion of film experience and applies them to the historical film. Focusing on concepts of embodied film perception, it discusses the spectator’s impression of making direct contact with a film’s historical world. This imaginary contact with history bears similarities to Frank R. Ankersmit’s theory of historical experience, which is examined in the second section. The interconnections between Ankersmit’s concept and Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological theory of film experience are considered in greater depth in the third section. The aim is to develop a concept of histospheres in which sensuous and cognitive perceptions are fused into a unified cinematic experience of history.

Topografie krajobrazu filmowego

DOI 10.24917/20837275.9.4.1Artykuł porusza problem metodologiczny topografii krajobrazu filmowego. Dla podejścia tego równie ważne co dyskurs wizualny, zorientowany na tryb analizy estetycznej są praktyki kulturowe, pozwalające w procesach filmowego postrzegania i przetwarzania krajobrazów dostrzegać elementy życia i doświadczenia. Zasadniczą tezą jest stwierdzenie, że do filmowejeksploracji krajobrazu i miejsca daje się zastosować praktyka wizualnego mapowania. Mapowanie w filmie rozumiane jest jako sposób myślenia, zarówno twórcy (reżysera, operatora), jak i odbiorcy dzieła (widza), który wiąże się z przyjęciem przez nich pewnego punktu widzenia oraz zastosowaniem/odkrywaniem określonej taktyki. Wśród strategii mapowania wyróżnione i omówione zostały, za Teresą Castro: chorografia (opis), topofilia (miłość do miejsca) i penetracja.Topography of a film landscapeThe paper raises the issue of the methodological problem of topography of a film landscape. For this approach are equally important – the visual discourse oriented on an aesthetic analysis mode and the cultural practices enabling to recognize the elements of life and experience in the processes of film perception and transformation of landscapes. The fundamental thesis is the statement that it is possible to use the practice of visual mapping to explore a landscape and place. The mapping in a film is understood as at the same time a way of thinking of a creator (director, operator) and a recipient of a work (a viewer), which is connected with adopting by them certain point of view and the application/ discovering of a specific tactics. Among the strategies of mapping, according to Teresa Castro, there were distinguished the following: chorography (description), topophilia (love of place) and surveying.

Hearing Films: A Contribution to the Discussion on Film Sound and Music Education

The paper presents a comprehensive overview of the issues of the broadly defined audial education (how to listen), with special regard to its meaning in the need of film education. Beginning with comments on the specificity of contemporary audiovisual culture and on the role of education in the matters of listening (including music education) in general as well as professional education, the author analyses the consequences of this state concerning incomplete film perception and interpretation resulting from underestimating the role of its audial layer. In the second part of the article the author points to and describes certain important initiatives aimed at the improvement of the previously shown negative situation.

Movies and the Mind: On Our Filmic Body

Over the last decade, the role of the spectators’ body has become considerably more important in theoretical as well as experimental approaches to film perception. However, most positions focus on how cinema has adapted to the spectator’s body over time, that is, to the basic principles of human perception and cognition, in developing its immersive power. This article presents the latest contributions to this topic, while also providing a new stance regarding the relationship between the mind and movies. Based on selected research from embodied approaches to cognition and picture perception, we suggest that humans learn to see film by integrating filmic means into their body schemas, and through this process develop a “filmic body”, available to them during film watching and, possibly, also off screen. Film language and film cognition are plastic products of mutual influence between films and embodied agents, and thereby move the medium towards novel filmic means and us toward novel experiences. We propose a number of research designs for further exploring these claims.

The Influence of the Painting Tradition on Derek Jarman’s Films

The article aims at revealing intertextual references to paintings woven into feature films by the British director Derek Jarman (1942-1994). The author explores various manifestations of intertextuality from direct citations to reminiscences, which allow to emphasize the continuity of film-directors work, the connection of its aesthetics, composition, film mood with the original fine art source paintings. The target is to enhance the emotional impact on the viewer. The concept of intertextuality has undergone significant changes since its introduction to the research usage by the poststructuralist French theorist Julia Kristeva. This term has gone beyond the literary discourse and has begun to be used in the analysis of all the semiotic formations to describe the interaction of both verbal and non-verbal texts. In this regard, it is important to analyze and reveal the intertextual references to paintings woven into feature films made by a British director Derek Jarman whose works are insufficiently explored in Russia. Intertextuality is a characteristic feature of Jarmans creative style that seeks to blur the clear distinction between painting and cinema. Analysing the influence of such artists as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca, William Turner, Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Eakins and Francis Bacon on Jarman, the author reveals the interconnection between the directors aesthetics, composition, mood, light and shade frame modeling and the original paintings. Derek Jarman uses a variety of intertextual references from direct citations to reminiscences affecting the visual associative row of the audience and their film perception, emphasizing the continuity of his work. The intertextual references seek to enhance the emotional impact on the viewers, to recreate the mood of the epoch and its atmosphere, to aggravate the tragedy of the situation. The metaphors and allusions greatly expand the spatial and temporal characteristics of Jarmans films. Numerous intertransitions from one semiotic system to another fill his films with inner dialogue and strengthen semantic polyphony of meaning.

The Film Experience as Cognitive Structure

A structural analysis of film can make good on the traditional “film is language” metaphor in several ways. As a linguistic grammar formally partitions the world into sentential and nonsentential objects, a structural theory of film partitions the world into those objects that are narrative film scenes and those that are not. Additionally, it is argued, such an analysis offers substantive foundation for descriptions of structural relations between film scenes, the organization of film perception, the film as an aspect of human symbolic capacity, and of film aesthetics.