Cinematic Illusions

Cinematic Illusions PDF Author: Bert Cardullo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
Contains twelve essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and anti-realism (the experimental or non-representational) in film. This book treats the subject of illusion from the point of view of the cinema's unsurpassed ability to create not only the illusion of reality, but also the reality of illusion on the silver screen.

Cinematic Illusions

Cinematic Illusions PDF Author: Bert Cardullo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
Contains twelve essays arranged around the primordial subject of realism and anti-realism (the experimental or non-representational) in film. This book treats the subject of illusion from the point of view of the cinema's unsurpassed ability to create not only the illusion of reality, but also the reality of illusion on the silver screen.

Cinema's Bodily Illusions

Cinema's Bodily Illusions PDF Author: Scott C. Richmond
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145295187X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema’s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you’re flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema’s perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry.

3D Cinema

3D Cinema PDF Author: Miriam Ross
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137378573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences questions the common frameworks used for discussing 3D cinema, realism and spectacle, in order to fully understand the embodied and sensory dimensions of 3D cinema's unique visuality.

Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism

Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism PDF Author: Michael J. Blouin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137531649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book

Book Description
​This book analyzes how contemporary popular films with fantastic themes, including Candyman, Frozen, The Cabin in the Woods, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, cultivate neoliberal subjectivities. These films promise dramatic change, but they too often deliver more of the same. Although proponents maintain the illusion that the militant enforcement of freemarket economics will resolve racism, climate change, and imperialism, their magical thinking actually fuels the crises. Magical Thinking, Fantastic Film, and the Illusions of Neoliberalism explores the ways in which the visual economies of Hollywood fantasy compliment this particular political economy.

Performing Illusions

Performing Illusions PDF Author: Dan R. North
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cinematography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
The camera supposedly never lies, yet film's ability to frame, cut and reconstruct all that passed before its lens made cinema the pre-eminent medium of visual illusion and revelation from the early twentieth century onwards. This volume examines film's creative history of special effects and trickery, encompassing everything from George Méliès' first trick films to the modern CGI era. Evaluating movements towards the use of computer-generated 'synthespians' in films such as Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within (2001), this title suggests that cinematic effects should be understood not as attempts to perfectly mimic real life, but as constructions of substitute realities, situating them in the cultural lineage of the stage performers and illusionists and of the nineteenth century. With analyses of films such as Destination Moon (1950), Spider-Man (2002) and the King Kong films (1933 and 2006), this new volume provides an insight into cinema's capacity to perform illusions.

Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure

Cinema's Illusions, Opera's Allure PDF Author: David Schroeder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474291414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
The invention of cinema was ingenious, so much so that virtually no-one quite knew what to do with it. In its earliest stages, especially with the advent of the feature film, it needed models, and opera proved to be especially useful in that regard. The allure of opera to cinema early in the twentieth century held up through the silent era, into sound films, through the golden age of movies, and beyond. This book explores the numerous ways – some predictable, some unexpected, and some bizarre – in which this has happened. The influence of Richard Wagner on filmmakers has been especially striking, and some have even devised visual images that seem to emerge from a kind of non-verbal Wagnerian essence – a formative, musical urge that can underlie a cinematic idea, defying explanation and remaining purely sensory. Directors like Griffith, DeMille, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Bunuel or Hitchcock have intuited this possibility. Schroeder provides a fascinating, well-researched and always entertaining account of the influence of one medium on another, and shows that opera can often be found lurking in the background (or booming in the foreground) of an impressive range of films.

Persistent Illusions of Time and Space in Film and Television

Persistent Illusions of Time and Space in Film and Television PDF Author: Stephanie Preuthen
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640661486
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29

Get Book

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: In film and television production, most of the multiplicity of rendered effects are ultimate results of cleverly devised composition and camera techniques. To entertain in cinematic terms means to attract the viewer's attention by affecting him at the very core of his being. Very personal and intimate feelings must be evoked to achieve such visual awareness and therefore producers and directors of television shows and feature films are utilizing the entire technology's capacity. Most of the time, the usage of cinematic techniques comes along with heavy losses of such elements that are still realistic and original. Illusions of time and space are created and spectators are regularly deluded. The main concern of this term paper is to provide the reader with an as broad as possible overview of the technological trends that occurred in the past centuries and are of fundamental importance for the creation of illusions. Specific attention will at this juncture be turned to the manipulation of space and time, as well as to the director's intentions that were followed by it. In the second part of the paper in hand, the established principles of media-theoretical terms will be transferred to Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, a follow-up to the 1994's success Before Sunrise. A film which consists of long-take tracking shots and evokes the illusion of realism in terms of time and space that are passed, which is why it is almost predestined for a closer analysis like this.

Illusions in Motion

Illusions in Motion PDF Author: Erkki Huhtamo
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262547546
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book

Book Description
Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, huge circular panoramas presented their audiences with resplendent representations that ranged from historic battles to exotic locations. Such panoramas were immersive but static. There were other panoramas that moved—hundreds, and probably thousands of them. Their history has been largely forgotten. In Illusions in Motion, Erkki Huhtamo excavates this neglected early manifestation of media culture in the making. The moving panorama was a long painting that unscrolled behind a “window” by means of a mechanical cranking system, accompanied by a lecture, music, and sometimes sound and light effects. Showmen exhibited such panoramas in venues that ranged from opera houses to church halls, creating a market for mediated realities in both city and country. In the first history of this phenomenon, Huhtamo analyzes the moving panorama in all its complexity, investigating its relationship to other media and its role in the culture of its time. In his telling, the panorama becomes a window for observing media in operation. Huhtamo explores such topics as cultural forms that anticipated the moving panorama; theatrical panoramas; the diorama; the "panoramania" of the 1850s and the career of Albert Smith, the most successful showman of that era; competition with magic lantern shows; the final flowering of the panorama in the late nineteenth century; and the panorama's afterlife as a topos, traced through its evocation in literature, journalism, science, philosophy, and propaganda.

The reality of film

The reality of film PDF Author: Richard Rushton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847797784
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book

Book Description
In formulating a notion of filmic reality, The Reality of Film offers a novel way of understanding our relationship to cinema. It argues that cinema need not be understood in terms of its capacities to refer to, reproduce or represent reality, but should be understood in terms of the kinds of realities it has the ability to create. The Reality of Film investigates filmic reality by way of six key film theorists: André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. In doing so, it provides comprehensive introductions to each of these thinkers, while also debunking many myths and misconceptions about them. Along the way, a notion of filmic reality is formed that radically reconfigures our understanding of cinema. This book is essential reading for film scholars, students and philosophers of film, while it will also appeal to graduate students and specialists in other fields.

Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema

Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema PDF Author: Sylvie Magerstädt
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783482524
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book

Book Description
Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema looks at the power of cinema in creating ideas that inspire our culture. Sylvie Magerstädt discusses the relationship between art, illusion and reality, a theme that has been part of philosophical debate for centuries. She argues that with the increase in use of digital technologies in modern cinema, this debate has entered a new phase. She discusses the notion of illusions as a system of stories and values that inspire a culture similar to other grand narratives, such as mythology or religion. Cinema thus becomes the postmodern “mythmaking machine” par excellence in a world that finds it increasingly difficult to create unifying concepts and positive illusions that can inspire and give hope. The author draws on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Siegfried Kracauer, and Gilles Deleuze to demonstrate the relevance of continental philosophy to a reading of mainstream Hollywood cinema. The book argues that our longing for illusion is particularly strong in times of crisis, illustrated through an exploration of the recent revival of historic and epic myths in Hollywood cinema, including films such as Troy, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and Clash of the Titans.