Partial Intentionalism

“Viimne reliikvia” ja “Kolme katku vahel”: ruumist eesti ajalookirjanduse ekraniseeringutes / The Last Relic and Between Three Plagues: On Space in Film Adaptations of Estonian Historical Fiction

The author examines the paradoxical dramatic dynamics of the Dreyer's masterpiece, according the Matte Blanco's theoretical model, as a tormented path of self awareness that consists in a progressive immersion in the unconscious. Anne, the young wife of an old Lutheran pastor, marginally involved in the witchcraft trial of a friend of her mother (now dead, but suspected to be a sorceress as well), falls in love for his son-in-law, leaving the child-wife position held so far. It's a new very strong vital drive for Anne, to which she adds the belief to own the magic powers of the witches: the ability to evoke the living and the dead, kill with thought and communicate through dreams. All the emotions are at an infinite level of intensity. Nevertheless, after she's left by her lover and after her husband's wished-upon death, the protagonist confesses her presumed witchcraft before the husband's coffin and, in the derangement of ambiguities, affective contradictions and shift of position, she attains a sort of mystic epiphany (significantly represented by the flow of filmic images): maybe a contact with the deepest layer of the mind where, according to MatteBlanco, the symmetrization is total.

Studies drawing analogies between the media of the premodern and early modern past (scrolls, manuscripts, books, tapestries) and the electronic and digital media of the postmodern present (computer screens, pdf, film, DVD) have by now become familiar.1 Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media follows in the tracks of this scholarship: I read the historical film, focusing chiefly on Day of Wrath (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943), El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann, 1961), Kingdom of Heaven (dir. Ridley Scott, 2005), and The Return of Martin Guerre (dir. Daniel Vigne, 1981), and a number of films I link to the "schlock of medievalism" (Burt 2007c), in relation to the history of the film by comparing transitions from manuscript to printed book to the transitions from celluloid to digital film. In so doing, my ambition is to put into dialogue scholarship on illuminated manuscripts, textual marginalia, and the history of the book in medieval and early modern literary studies with scholarship on the cinematic paratext in literary, film, and media theory.KeywordsDigital MediumHistoricist CriticismCritical PracticeForeign WordPragmatic FunctionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

While also encompassing Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classics, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and Day of Wrath (1943), this chapter analyzes in depth the unconventionally long scene at the end of the director’s Ordet (1955), which depicts the apparent resurrection of a main character who has died in childbirth. Usually attributed to the Catholic faith, miracles like the resurrection in Ordet foreground an oft-neglected strand in Protestantism—namely, the paradoxical Protestant credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd). Like the movies of Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007), the movies of Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968) epitomize the potential of film as a medium of spiritual-poetic exploration, especially of those areas where faith embraces mystery.

This chapter takes up two Hegel-inspired objections to moderate theses concerning film's philosophical value. One objection it that it is inappropriate to use art to advance ends other than those that are properly artistic. The second is a rationality objection inspired by Hegel's suggestion that it is an error to try to use a work of art to achieve an instrumental payoff whenever some more complete or effective means is available. By responding to these Hegel-inspired objections, the chapter strengthens the case for a moderate thesis concerning film's philosophical value. The chapter considers the conditions under which a sufficiently complex and determinate philosophical interpretation of an audio-visual display can be articulated. In one, non-intentionalist line of enquiry, it is the interpreter who shoulders the burden of creating or selecting assumptions and questions in relation to which claims about an audio-visual display's philosophical significance can be articulated. In the second type of approach, it is the film-maker whose ideas and questions are the target of the interpretation. The chapter applies results concerning the determination of a fictional film's content to the Hegel-inspired objections to the search for a film's philosophical significance.

This paper describes the reproductive behaviour of Aidablennius sphynx, which was studied in the field during four breeding seasons. Artificial nest sites were used for the determination of nest contents. The breeding season started at the end of April, when water temperature had just reached 14–15° C. The breeding season extended into August. Breeding males defended nests (crevices in the substrate), in which they cared for eggs laid by females. Female home ranges varied from narrow (about 10 m) to wide (about 45 m) stretches of shoreline. Females in narrow home ranges sometimes made excursions outside their home range. The number of males in nests that females could encounter was between 3 and 18. Individual males and females could have several sexual interactions per day with the same or different partners. Roughly 30% of the interactions led to nest entry by the female, and slightly less than 10% resulted in egg deposition by the female. Many different sequences of behaviour elements led to mating; for example male courtship display was not necessarily performed when mating resulted. Males defended the same nest and received eggs continuously throughout the breeding season; there were no nesting cycles. Broods contained up to 7000 eggs from different females in different stages of development. Males did not receive eggs every day. If any eggs were received on a day, the average number was 280, laid by one or more females. Females in aquaria laid on average 286 (range 1–897) eggs at intervals of on average 2.5 (range 1–13) days. This is probably a too high estimate of female egg production, since the fishes in the aquaria were well fed. In the discussion it is argued that detailed descriptions of the breeding biology of individual fish species are relevant to theoretical considerations of reproductive styles in fishes.

Speech is inextricably multisensory: both auditory and visual components provide critical information for all aspects of speech processing, including speech segmentation, the visual components of which have been the target of a growing number of studies. In particular, a recent study (Mitchel and Weiss, 2014) established that adults can utilize facial cues (i.e., visual prosody) to identify word boundaries in fluent speech. The current study expanded upon these results, using an eye tracker to identify highly attended facial features of the audiovisual display used in Mitchel and Weiss (2014). Subjects spent the most time watching the eyes and mouth. A significant trend in gaze durations was found with the longest gaze duration on the mouth, followed by the eyes and then the nose. In addition, eye-gaze patterns changed across familiarization as subjects learned the word boundaries, showing decreased attention to the mouth in later blocks while attention on other facial features remained consistent. These findings highlight the importance of the visual component of speech processing and suggest that the mouth may play a critical role in visual speech segmentation.