Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow’s Metafiction

This article examines how the body of fi lms commonly described as "slow cinema" require the fi lm theater for their spectatorial contract to be fully met, an aspect illustrated by recent durational fi lms that focus on the theatrical experience as a theme in its own right. By exploring the ways in which slow cinema eschews the conventional temporal articulations of narrative cinema in favor of indeterminate temporalities, the article posits that the slow style might be fruitfully understood as a metarefl ection on a collective mode of spectatorship that loses its exclusivity as cinema ventures into new spaces and onto new screens.

Die meisten Menschen wollen nicht eher schwimmen als bis sie es können." Ist das nicht witzig? Natürlich wollen sie nicht schwimmen! Sie sind ja für den Boden geboren, nicht fürs Wasser. Und natürlich wollen sie nicht denken; sie sind ja fürs Leben geschaffen, nicht fürs Denken! Wer das Denken zur Hauptsache macht, der kann es darin zwar weit bringen, aber er hat doch eben den Boden mit dem Wasser vertauscht, und einmal wird er ersaufen

This inquiry researches the until this day unexplored subject of Western esoteric scrying practices within the context of Media Studies. This study is the first of its kind; an exciting combination of the highly neglected field of Western esotericism and the Media Archaeological methodology as a means to gain insight in the Western esoteric dimension of media culture. It uses John Dee and Edward Kelly's scrying practices as a starting point to explore the past and present of scrying and the past and present of screens and cinema. Thereby it provides new frameworks to historically understand screens and cinema (including 3D technology and virtual reality) as a continuation of scrying practices and consequently the possibility to understand digital screens and cinema and analog cinema within one framework. It seems the human desire to transcend the limitations of one's physical and spatiotemporal existence which underlie the practice of scrying (gnosis) is also recognizable in the context of screens and cinema. This inquiry provides concrete evidence of a direct influence of scrying practices (including ancient Greek scrying institutions) on media technology and materiality and the way it functions in regard to the user/spectator. It offers an insight in the reasons why people have real bodily (physical and emotional) responses to fiction, why they enjoy fiction and why they can temporally relate to it though knowing it is not real.

In Gleyzon, Francois-Xavier (Ed.), David Lynch in theory (Prague, Czech Republic: Litteraria Pragensia Books), 2010

Examining the physical spaces in which the diegeses of Lynch’s films and other projects are played out, this paper will map correspondences between the spatial geographies of Lynch’s universe and its ideational content. Particular attention will be paid to those times when the action of Lynch’s films return to the space of the cinema itself, for it will be contended that these are privilege moments that speak volumes about Lynch’s attitude towards the cinematic. Indeed, it will be maintained that scenes taking place in the cinema foreground a spectacular and non-narratival space which is thus entirely in accord with the ornate, luxurious cinema interiors that we see in his films with their attendant accoutrements—such as red velvet curtains—that come to inhabit so many other spaces in his œuvre. In this regard, Lynch will be seen to engage with the history cinema and particularly the history of the built architecture of the cinema as these spaces are, as was the case during the early days of the picture palaces, spaces to be considered as much for their own material qualities as for the narratives taking place in or projected into that space. It will then be contended that Lynch’s works undertake a consideration of the cinema more broadly, not only as a constellation of technical and economic factors but as a material, embodied entity, a dream factory quite literally insofar as this term turns around both the ideological, ideational and material axes from which the cinema is constructed. Key moments to be analysed will include the ‘no hay banda’ scene from Mullholland Drive, Lynch’s segment ‘Absurda’ from Chacun son cinéma, his contribution to Lumière et cie and scenes from Inland Empire, but, more broadly than this, such analyses will lead to a consideration of the spatial geographies of Lynch’s mise-en-scène in order to ascertain the ways in which the material deployments of the cinematographic apparatus resonate with the films’ content and this in order to argue that what we see in Lynch is a specifically cinemat(ograph)ic ontology.

Introduction to the Film Criticism special issue on cinematic identification

The theme of spectatorship is central in this essay that reviews and critiques a number of approaches to animation spectatorship. Its basic premise is that the phenomenal and the noumenal 'worlds' animation confronts us have an uneasy relationship with notions of 'reality' and representation. Using a framework of phenomenological concepts that reviews other authors' approaches to animation spectatorship, the essay explores the viewer's experience of the 'worlds' of animation film in screening, particularly investigating the relationship between the images on screen and their tangible, extant counterparts in the real world outside the diegesis. With a focus on puppet animation exemplified by the Quay Brothers Street of Crocodiles, the essay posits a number of propositions as to how animation as a form addresses and engages its audience. If aims to articulate the difference between a world, created with the animation technique, and the world, the phenomenal world we negotiate in our daily lives. The book is available at: http://www.johnlibbey.com/books_detail.php?area=ani&ID=50

Grey Room, 2008