Film, Media and Music
Time-lapse photography—the extremely accelerated recording and projection of an event taking place over an extended duration of time—is almost as old as the movies themselves. (The first known use of time-lapse dates from 1898.) In the early decades of the twentieth century, cineastes, not to mention scientists, artists, and poets, waxed eloquently on the promise of time-lapse photography as a means for revealing “things we cannot see,” and expanding human perception. This essay examines time-lapses tremendous initial imaginative appeal for such figures as Ernst Mach, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Rudolf Arnheim, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Collette, and speculates about the possible reasons for its diminution over the course of the century.
This article examines the paradoxes inherent in filmic time, with particular reference to the autobiographical work of the British director Terence Davies. Analysing ways in which film, itself constructed from still images, can create, reverse or freeze temporal flux, confuse and blend multiple and conflicting temporalities, and create the spatial dimensions of an ‘imaginary’ time, it argues that the relationship between film and music may well provide a fundamental key to the understanding of filmic time.
This essay deals with the temporality of film through an examination of narrative, structure and image in Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (2000), referring to both Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson‘s work on time. I argue that the repetition of formal elements (images, settings, colours, shapes, and textures) creates a kind of internal rhyme that is suggested appeals to human aesthetic rhythmic sensibilities and invites the spectators imaginative interplay. This temporal pattern speaks of a particularly human rhythmic design, and provides an escape from the ‘standardised, context free, homogeneous’ clock time ‘that structures and times our daily lives’.
This essay interweaves an analysis of Raymond Depardons short documentary film, 10 minutes de silence pour John Lennon (1980), with some broader reflections on time, cultural history, and silence. Shot in a single take, the film records the expressions, movements, and reactions of some of 200,000 mourners who gathered in Central Park to commemorate Lennons life six days after his death in December, 1980. Despite its observational form and aesthetic reticence, 10 minutes de silence renders unexpected coincidences of colour, perspective, gesture, and noise, spontaneous formations and patterns that resonate beyond the films actual moment and journalistic raison dêtre.
In this paper, I examine the role of emotional contagion in our affective engagement with narrative fiction film, focusing in particular on how spectator responses based on emotional contagion differ from those based on more sophisticated emotional processes. I begin by explaining emotional contagion and the processes involved in it. Next, I consider how film elicits emotional contagion. I then argue that emotional contagion responses are unique and should be clearly distinguished from responses based on other emotional processes, such as empathy. Finally, I explain why contagion responses are a significant feature of spectators engagement with narrative fiction film.
One key aspect of characterization is the construction of character psychology, the attribution to fictional representations of beliefs and desires, personality traits, and moods and emotions. Characters are products of social cognition, the human propensity for making sense of others. However, they are also products of artists who fashion them to appeal to our nature as social beings. Through an analysis of Todd Solondz‘s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), this paper describes three processes of social cognition which are crucial for audiovisual characterization: folk psychology, causal attribution, and emotion expressions.
This essay explores the elicitation of disgust in movies, focusing on the major rhetorical uses of such elicitation. The essay first defines disgust and shows the means and nature of its elicitation in the movies. Drawing on a distinction between physical and sociomoral disgust, the essay goes on to show how filmmakers either conflate and confuse the two (as in Don Siegel‘s Dirty Harry) or maintain a strict separation between them (as in David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man), in each case to serve the rhetorical purpose of the film. Finally, I discuss the ironic use of disgust in John Water‘s Polyester.