Contingent Motion

This chapter examines fluttering leaves, swirling dust, and rippling waves as one of cinema’s earliest and most significant forms of motion. While most theorists maintain that such phenomena attracted early spectators because their unplanned appearance flaunted the indexical realism of cinema’s indiscriminate recording, this chapter shows how this attraction is part of a broader visual appeal of “contingent motion” that precedes the cinematic image and persists in the age of digital animation. Specifically, the chapter juxtaposes phenomenological insights about such phenomena in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, early spectators’ reactions to such phenomena in “wave films,” and contemporary spectators’ reactions to synthetic versions of such phenomena in computer-generated cartoons like Frozen (2013). In revealing a phenomenological consistency across these three different ways of encountering such phenomena, the chapter shows how early spectators’ astonishment at fluttering leaves and rippling waves cannot be explained with theories of the photographic index. Instead, this chapter argues, the visual reproduction of contingent motion involves its own logics of visual pleasure distinct from the marvels of the photographic process.

Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910

"Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910" is a Master's thesis that takes a historical approach to the visual in order to better understand the construction of the prostitute in Victorian culture. Recent scholars have noted ways in which the prostitute was routinely depicted as a threat and victim in nineteenth-century institutional discourse. This thesis complicates these readings by examining the construction of the fallen woman in commercial imagery. Far from depicting the streetwalker as a source of pity and disease, commercial culture redefined the image of the prostitute as a source of ambiguous visual pleasure. This allowed the signifiers of prostitution to extend through pornographic representation, entertainment advertisements, actress pin-ups and fashion magazines. Making illicit female sexuality a readily consumable pleasure, however, ultimately fostered greater efforts on the part of authorities to push prostitutes back into invisibility.

Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910

"Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910" is a Master's thesis that takes a historical approach to the visual in order to better understand the construction of the prostitute in Victorian culture. Recent scholars have noted ways in which the prostitute was routinely depicted as a threat and victim in nineteenth-century institutional discourse. This thesis complicates these readings by examining the construction of the fallen woman in commercial imagery. Far from depicting the streetwalker as a source of pity and disease, commercial culture redefined the image of the prostitute as a source of ambiguous visual pleasure. This allowed the signifiers of prostitution to extend through pornographic representation, entertainment advertisements, actress pin-ups and fashion magazines. Making illicit female sexuality a readily consumable pleasure, however, ultimately fostered greater efforts on the part of authorities to push prostitutes back into invisibility.

What is a Rehearsal in Ballet?

This chapter explores rehearsals, asking what they represent practically and philosophically and when does practice in rehearsals yield to the finished product of a dance ready for public viewing. It considers the hours of labor, failure, and interruption that constitute life in the rehearsal studio as the dancer is shaped by the choreographer and rehearsal director. Rehearsals are considered in contrast to the rules of inviolability protecting a finished performance. Using Ballet 422 by Justin Peck as a case study and examples from reality TV and films to paintings, rehearsal rooms are explored as places of hidden preparation, visual pleasure, and the imaginary as well as fascination for audiences. Ballet dancers are taught to survey themselves through mirrors, the eyes of rehearsal directors, video cameras, and iPhones as ever-expanding systems of surveillance. Although ballet dancers spend the majority of their professional lives in rehearsals, the nature of what goes on in the rehearsal studio has too rarely been the focus of dance studies scholarship.

Voiceless Screams: Pictorialism as Narrative Strategy in Horror Silent Cinema

As a complementary condition to narrative, the notion of pictorialism in film is rooted in the first decades of the medium. In their quest to demonstrate the capturing and restoring of images with various devices, early filmmakers selected views with pictorial qualities in the long-standing tradition of painting, transferring them on film in the form of non-narrative shots. The evolution of fictional narratives in silent cinema displaced the source of inspiration in theatre, assimilating its nineteenth-century tradition of pictorialism. Thus, the film audiences’ appeal for visual pleasure was elevated with balanced elements of composition, framing and acting that resulted in pictorially represented moments actively engaged in the narrative system. The paper explores the notion of “pictorial spirit” (Valkola 2016) in relation to that of “monstration” (Gaudreault 2009) aiming to describe the narrative mechanism of provoking fear by means of pictorially constructed cinematic images in a selection of short-length horror silent films belonging to the transitional era, consisting in The Haunted House/The Witch House (La Maison ensorcelée/La casa encantada, Segundo de Chomón, 1908), Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910) and the surviving fragments of The Portrait (Портрет, Vladislav Starevich, 1915).1

Screening Landscapes: Film between the Picturesque and the Painterly

Inherently connected to movement and to a sequential spatial experience in time, the picturesque has been considered as a precursor of the cinematic. In addition, the idea of the picturesque is closely connected to Heinrich Wölfflin’s notion of das Malerische or “the painterly,” which stands for a dynamic style of painting characterized by qualities of colour, stroke, and texture rather than of contour or line. Based on the keynote lecture delivered at the conference, The Picturesque: Visual Pleasure and Intermediality in-between Contemporary Cinema, Art and Digital Culture (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, 25–26 October, 2019), 1 the essay disentangles the complex network of connections between image and landscape, painting and film, the picturesque and the painterly.

Pleasure or Business-Travelling and the Pandemic Virus: Socio Legal Aspect

Ever since the corona pandemic hit the world with full rancour, people have gone into hiding thus restricting movement in all spheres, bringing their movement to a halt. It has been extrapolated since ages that movement of masses is the essence of economics. A man moves to earn, to seek visual pleasure, to seek social contact and as such the freedom to move freely, is both a legal and fundamental right, guaranteed under the Indian Constitution. The following research article aims to study the socio-legal aspect of restricted or altered human movement brought about by the pandemic and its effect on the tourism and hospitality industry. The study findings include the immense loss which the industry has suffered as result of the pandemic, followed by the path forward in terms of the new trends which may emerge in the year 2021, to cope with the loses. A further scope of study in the stated research topic may include developing fail-safe systems as method of check and balance to keep the tourism and hospitality industry afloat, in the event of such unforeseen crisis.

'Male gaze' in the mini-series 'Queen's Gambit'

The patriarchal system is based on the idea of phallocentrism, in which phallus, or male sexual organ, represents the central element in the organization of society. In such a system, a woman is perceived through her lack of phallus by which she symbolizes the threat of castration, or in other words, castration anxiety. The gender difference, defined by this deficiency, is used to establish a system in which a woman is subordinate to men. As such, a woman is the subject of a controlling "male gaze." Using the theoretical framework set by Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film," this paper shows how the "male gaze" influences the construction of female characters in contemporary cinematography. The example used for this analysis is the series Queen's Gambit, which was well received by the feminist audience, despite the fact that the main character was adjusted on various levels to serve the requirements of the "male gaze." Additionally, part of the paper will analyze harmful stereotypes through which racial and sexual minorities are presented in the series and point out how the film industry shapes social norms and lifestyles through the normalization of such models.