The place of nature in Godard's late films

David Bordwell, <i>The Cinema of Eisenstein</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993: S.M. Eisenstein, <i>Selected Works, Volume 1: Writings 1922-34</i>. Edited and translated by Richard Taylor. London: British Film Institute, 1988: S.M. Eisenstein, <i>Selected Works Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage</i>. Edited by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor. Translated by Michael Glenny. London-. British Film Institute, in 1991/1994 cloth

This study explored nature connectedness among children in a Western context through focus group interviews and open-ended questionnaires with children in four primary schools in The Netherlands. Our study defined nature connectedness as a combination of individuals' images of nature and their emotional affinity towards nature. The results show that most participating children have rather dualistic and human-centered images of nature. Most of the children enjoyed being in nature, but showed limited emotional affection toward the natural world. Moreover, images of humans and nature as enemies and of humans as having lost their oneness with nature ("Paradise lost") emerge from this study. The nature/culture divide and marginal affection found in this study are worrisome for future care for the Earth.

Adaptation to Natural Binocular Disparities in Primate V1 Explained by a Generalized Energy Model

Author(s): Zhu, Hongru; Yuille, Alan; Kersten, Daniel | Abstract: Perceiving 3D structure in natural images is an immense computational challenge for the visual system. While many previous studies focused on rigid 3D objects, we applied a novel method on a common set of non-rigid objects—static images of the human body in the natural world. We investigated to what extent human ability to interpret 3D poses in natural images depends on pose typicality and viewpoint informativeness. We tested subjects on matching natural pose images with synthetic body images of the same poses given viewpoint changes. We found that performance for typical poses was measurably better than atypical poses; however, we found no significant difference between informative and less informative viewpoints. Results suggested that human ability to interpret 3D poses depends on pose typicality but not viewpoint informativeness. Further comparisons of 2D and 3D pose matching models suggested that humans probably use prior knowledge of 3D pose structures.

Perceiving 3D structure in natural images is an immense computational challenge for the visual system. While many previous studies focused on rigid 3D objects, we applied a novel method on a common set of non-rigid objects—static images of the human body in the natural world. We investigated to what extent human ability to interpret 3D poses in natural images depends on pose typicality and viewpoint informativeness. We tested subjects on matching natural pose images with synthetic body images of the same poses given viewpoint changes. We found that performance for typical poses was measurably better than atypical poses; however, we found no significant difference between informative and less informative viewpoints. Results suggested that human ability to interpret 3D poses depends on pose typicality but not viewpoint informativeness. Further comparisons of 2D and 3D pose matching models suggested that humans probably use prior knowledge of 3D pose structures.

Reviewed by: Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection Martin L. Johnson (bio) Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection by Vanessa Toulmin; British Film Institute, 2006 Click for larger view View full resolution The title of Vanessa Toulmin's latest work on the films made by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon in fin de siècle Britain tellingly refers to this treasure trove as the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection. The author, herself, played a principal role in turning what was an unlikely discovery of hundreds of local, fiction, and military films made by a previously unknown film production and exhibition company into a meticulously restored and researched collection. Noting the span and reinvigorated public life of the collection in her acknowledgments, she lists "a three-part BBC 2 series, two DVDS, many publications, a book of collected essays, [and] over eighty film shows throughout the world" (vi). This book, which collects a decade of research and intertwines it with the histories and cultural contexts of these films, might seem to the final word on the subject; however, Toulmin peels back enough layers of cinema exhibition and distribution history to attract future inquiries on these fascinating films for years to come. Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon operated what was one ofmany film production and exhibition companies in Britain in the early years of cinema. With backgrounds in photography and entertainment, respectively, the two started making and exhibiting films in 1897, entering what had already become a competitive emerging market. By 1901, the company had developed experience in three genres of films—actualities, fiction films, and historical reconstructions—and set itself apart from the competition by producing and exhibiting films that showed audiences themselves. More than 90 percent of the films comprised by the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection are these local films, including films of everything from civic occasions to "phantom rides" on tram lines to the very popular "factory gate" films of workers leaving industrial mills. Although local filmmaking was a widespread practice in this period, it has received less scholarly attention because it was seldom covered in trade journals of the period and is underrepresented in film archives, the latter of which is changing, in part, due to Toulmin's efforts. When Mitchell & Kenyon films were discussed at all in previous studies, the focus of the conversation was on the company's historical reconstructions of events in the Boer War and other foreign battles. Although Mitchell & Kenyon continued to make films until 1913, the bulk of their known output took place between 1900 and 1905. By 1903, the company had already started to emphasize its fiction films, which Toulmin explains by suggesting that the novelty of the local film, like that of its relative, the actuality, had worn off. Because the business records of the company were not recovered along with the films when Peter Worden found them in June of 1994, Toulmin had the difficult task of reconstructing the history of the films with very less information. Although much of the research into the films was collaborative, Toulmin does an incredible job here of integrating her archival research about the films with the social and political contexts in which the filmswere made. After several detailed introductory chapters on the company, its films, and their exhibition, Toulmin shows how the films reflected and were shaped by leisure and entertainment practices, sports, urban life, industrialization, [Begin Page 55] and the military. The book is handsomely illustrated with film stills and other materials that allow for the reader to closely examine the documents ably described in the text. Although scholarship on early cinema has benefited enormously from studies that place it in the context of other cultural practices of the time, Toulmin reverses the equation by showing where cinema, particularly the local film, fit in within the existing social and cultural order. For example, Toulmin shows how the increase in leisure time led to the development of seaside resorts in the northwest of England, each of which became associated with a particular town or region where its visitors lived or the socioeconomic status they held in society. Through careful analysis of five films in the collection, Toulmin is able...

While Nietzsche offers resources for thinking about the post-truth politics of Donald\nTrump, this is not because Nietzsche gives up on truth but because he is prescient in realizing\nwhat is at stake in our esteem for it. Nietzsche argues that the specifically unconditional value we\nattribute to truth raises the spectre of nihilism. Trump is a harbinger of this nihilism because he\nflaunts our shared social practices of valuing truth. While Nietzsche’s accounts of truth and\nobjectivity appear to make room for Trump, Nietzsche also praises epistemic virtues—honesty,\ncourage, curiosity, and responsibility—that Trump surely fails to express.

A comparatively new medium, film can be used for a range of discussions about the ways in which history is recorded, edited, shaped, and remembered; it is also useful for teaching contemporary interpretation of older literatures. Like historical fiction – or works of art more generally – movies with historical themes are most productively studied in their broader contexts, alongside, and in conjunction with, written sources. The classroom provides a perfect venue for such study. While reading and analyzing older texts, students can also be taught to read films for their authenticity, their accuracy or inaccuracy of detail in portraying the past, and for effective (or ineffective) use of purposeful or intentional anachronism, among other approaches. Film enhances the study of texts; careful reading of texts may, in turn, lead to more critical evaluation of film.

Reviewed by: An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck Chambers, Ross. An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise. New York, Fordham UP, 2015. Pp. 208. $35.00 US hardcover. Ross Chambers's penetrating essay focuses on Baudelaire's late works: the major verse poems of Tableaux parisiens, which were included in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal in 1861, and the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, an unfinished project at the time of Baudelaire's death in 1867. While still holding artistic beauty as a transcendent value (what Chambers terms "fetish aesthetics") like his contemporaries Gautier and Nerval, Baudelaire evolved in these late works towards a new conception of "supernaturalism" that moved from the natural world and the sublime to the artificial city and its strident chaos. The "natural supernaturalism" that, according to M.H. Abrams, characterizes Romantic aesthetics is thus subverted into a paradoxical "urban supernaturalism." Historically, this turn in Baudelaire's poetics corresponds with the poet's disenchantment with politics, after the brutal crushing of the 1848 revolution and Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of 1852; it also coincides with Paris's increasing overpopulation and poverty, and with the dramatic destruction of old neighbour-hoods under Haussmann's modernization project. Ever present in Baudelaire's late verse and prose poems, noise is an overwhelming fact of daily urban life, which anchors the works in the harsh reality of the poet's time. Chambers reads time in Baudelaire's poetry on several interwoven levels: as the inner experience of ineluctable passing; as the continuous weight of violent historical events on that experience; and as absolute Evil, the destructive force of "le Mal," which Chambers strikingly equates with entropy. In Baudelaire's poems, he argues, subjective time and historical time are metaphorically interconnected with the weather, which, as scorching sun or violent storm, bears down on urban activities (notably on the flâneur's walks) and moods-a connection Chambers encapsulates in the phrase "the weather of time." Far from neutral, this connection is permeated with unease, [End Page 673] the diffuse sense that the everyday, though familiar, is strange and inscrutable. The inability to know what is familiar, precisely because it is familiar, a notion Chambers borrows from Hegel, saturates the atmosphere of the city: an alienating otherness lurks in the physical, emotional, and moral milieu that surrounds its inhabitants. In making the reader aware of this secret otherness, the poetics of noise, Chambers argues, has a disalienating effect. In the great poems of Tableaux parisiens written between 1859 and 1861, the agent of disalienation is allegory, a trope that, in itself, enacts otherness. Chambers offers complex readings of some of these enigmatic and often discussed poems, "Le Cygne," "Les sept vieillards," and "A une passante" in particular, and shows how specific formal disruptions function as poetic noise, unsettling our reading and alerting us to the limits of our understanding. In these poems, fleeting encounters with perturbing figures amongst the deafening din, disorder, or stormy weather of the city weave together noise, atmospheric phenomena, and emotional shock into a melancholic recognition that the "empty sky" leaves us at the mercy of the malevolent action of time and death, the downward movement of history. The prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris move from supernaturalism to irony. God's withdrawal from the world, Chambers argues, has abandoned it to an invisibly ironic and impenetrable immanence. Anonymity governs daily social relations. This "cruel but transparent irony that haunts the everyday" is made visible in the prose poems, in which seemingly transparent anecdotes of urban life turn ironically on to themselves, introducing interfering noise into interpretation. In "Perte d'auréole" and "Le Mauvais vitrier," for example, Chambers shows how, in the course of the poem, irony shifts undecidedly between the poet and the man he encounters (a fellow poet, a glazier), so that the lofty figure of the poet, and our reading assurance, end up lost in the gutter or shattered. Social distinctions are tumbled in a "poetics of anonymity." Chambers pays particular attention to the fact that...

Vittorio Mathieu investigates Kant's reflections in the opus postumum against the background of critical transcendental philosophy. On the one hand, he identifies the problems in Kant's earlier writings that might have motivated his later reflections, taking his point of departure from the Critique of Judgment being particularly impressive. Second, Mathieu traces various topics treated by Kant (ether-deduction, self-affection, existence, organism, unity of philosophy) and offers an interpretation of the relevant passages in the opus postumum. Mathieu's book remains one of the most important on Kant's posthumous work. It is still widely cited today and rightfully so. There is hardly a treatise on Kant's late work that fails to deliver its take on Mathieu.

Never simply itself, the exceptional body betokens something else, becomes revelatory, sustains narrative, exists socially in a realm of hyper-representation. (Thomson, “From Wonder to Error” 3) The title of Chris Lilley’s television mocumentary We Can be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year (ABC television, 2005) begs the question that is the source of much of the humour of the series: What does it mean to be a hero in contemporary Australia? The series explores the efforts of six “ordinary” Australians who are vying for the title of “Australian of the Year” and brings a satiric lens to choosing the individual winner. Lilley, who plays all the lead characters, depicts characters both with and without disability, and this mix of ability and disability is key to his satiric vision of what it means to be Australian. In the course of nearly four decades of debate about disability and its representation, there have been significant changes in how disability is theorised. By moving a focus from the individual to the social, disability scholarship has sought to uncover the following: the history of the representation of disability, in literature, film, television and non-fiction narrative;the beliefs that underpin and are fortified by those representations (Barnes and Mercer; Corker and Shakespeare; Covey; Cumberbatch and Negrine; Longmore; Mitchell and Synder; Norden; Stiker). Uncovering the social regulation of disability, that is, the disablement of individuals and groups by environments, social custom and cultural norms, enables activists and social commentators to question the way disability is represented and argue for the inclusion of people with disabilities in the making of these cultural artefacts (Hevey 209). However, whilst this work has been vital, it remains unclear as to whether the representation of people with disabilities has become something other than the site of entrenching and reinforcing the cultural norm of the able body. There is no doubt, in the Australian context, that in the history of representation, characters with a disability are present, and at times those images seem to proliferate (Ferrier 65-7). Nevertheless, as Katie Ellis argues, these representations may not result in a significant alteration in the way disability is perceived, except in terms which make it marginal to, or an exception of, the able body as a cultural figment of national identity. The social model provides the point from which questions about disability can be asked (Thomas 26). The social model may tend to assume homogeneity among people with disability and can ignore the real personal implications of “pain, medication or ill-health” (Humphrey 174-5). Carol Thomas has also argued that the study of disability that universalises the experiences of people with a variety of impairments misses particular social effects specific to an impairment (42-4). This debate about marking disability in terms of the particular and/or the universal, runs parallel to debates within cultural studies about the place of the individual in the construction of national identity. Individuality (and particularity) is both the site from which national identity arises and the source of much of the anxiety (and questions) about that identity. The relation of individual to national is, as Graeme Turner argues, paradoxical, and in the Australian context, leads to an ambivalence about the individual, even as the individual is continually evoked (87). The following analysis of Lilley’s series draws on both the analysis of disability as a complex interplay of individual experience and social regulation, and the analysis of the individual in the development of national identity, to account for the series’ potential critique of the presence of disability in Australian cultural production. Illness, impairment and injury are present in representations of Australia – in literature, film, television and non-fiction narrative – but their presence can also be continually erased in the dominant cultural conception of what it means to be Australian. This paradoxical erasure occurs because of four features of the representation of illness, impairment and injury, which are key to the narrative of We Can be Heroes: it is predominately sited in representations of individuals; it is subsequently only the concern of those individuals, and their identity as individuals; it is hidden or lessened at times of cultural scrutiny;it is used as a metaphor for the deficiencies of the cultural representations of other identity categories (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class). This essay is divided into three sections. The first section explores the contention that the able body is constructed within narratives about Australian identity, and suggests that the series We Can Be Heroes draws attention to the interdependence of “ability” and “disability”. The second part underlines some of the ways in which “disability” is always in relation to “ability”. The last section, explores how the heroic is used in the series to critique the place of disability in the maintenance of Australian national identity. “Ability” and National Identity “I didn’t want to be average.” Phil Olivetti – Queensland State finalist for “Australian of the Year”. National identity is a classification based, to a lesser or greater extent, on discourses and policies of exclusion (Meekosha and Dowse 54). While the critique of exclusion has focussed attention on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and class (Pettman; Wilton and Bosworth), the intersection of these and disability requires continued investigation. To unmask and undermine the dominance of the able body in conceptions of the “typical” Australian requires a re-thinking of “ability” in the construction of national identity. The use of the word “typical” deliberately evokes Russel Ward’s defence of his thesis in The Australia Legend where he seeks: …to trace and explain the development of the Australian self-image – of the often romanticized and exaggerated stereotype in men’s minds of what the typical, not the average, Australian likes (or in some cases dislikes) to believe he is like. (vi) The opening montage of We Can Be Heroes exhibits the series’ narrative interest with an Australian ideal. Moving quickly through images of young Surf Life Savers, a male cricketer, a female zoo keeper, a swimmer, an older suburban couple, a farmer, ballet dancers, firemen and finally indigenous children in an outback setting, it establishes Australia as geographically, socially and ethnically diverse. Providing a mix of characters from around the country, Lilley seems to be going out of his way to emphasise the idea of the vastness of Australia and the ideal of Australian identity as encompassing people so geographically isolated. The constant use of a satellite image of the Australian continent, which then zooms down to the place in which the main characters of the series live, reinforces the connectivity left unspoken in the stitching together of the disparate character specific sequences in each episode. Ward’s thesis about the development of a “national mystique” of Australian identity has been criticised for its limited view of the origins of a type based in the experiences of stories of the bushman (Reynolds 24-5). This critique of Ward’s omissions of class and gender also requires the identification of a foundational aspect of national identity, namely the bodies, in concert with the environment, that form and regulate the terms of national identity. As Carol Thomas states: Human bodies possess a materiality which exists in a relationship of dynamic interaction with its social and physical environment. Put simply, bodies shape these environments through their (purposive) activity, and these environments shape the body – giving rise both to some bodily variations themselves, and to meanings and significance which these variations come to have. (8-9) “Struggle and sacrifice” is given value in the development of an – albeit white, male – Australian identity (Barnes 41) but the body of the idealised Australian is an able body, which is then subsequently impaired. For example, in Arthur Adams’ poem “The Australian”, Australian identity is personified in a figure: Pallid of face and gaunt of limb,The sweetness withered out of him. Sombre, indomitable, wan,The juices dried, the glad youth gone. The dried, withered body that is envisioned is depicted as an alteration of a vibrant youthful body, transformed through its encounter with a harsh landscape. More significantly, the lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem “The Fallen”, recited at every Anzac Day ceremony: “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. /Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn”, reinvests the body of the young soldier, an icon of Australian virtue, as a body that does not decay, acquire impairment or become ill. That bodies are impaired, injured and acquire illnesses is often viewed as the consequence of an engagement with the environment – both natural and built – rather than more central to understanding what it is to be Australian. As Ellis notes of the films of the 1990s, which feature disability: By locating disability within a ‘problem body’… films are again valuing strength and perfect bodies in a similar way to the male ensemble cycle that excluded a number of marginalised groups. Significantly, in the opening montage of We Can Be Heroes, is the absence of any obvious physical or psychological impairment. This is in marked contrast to the characters that are the focus of the narrative. Of the five contenders for the award – Ricky Wong, Ja’ime King, Phil Olivetti, Daniel Sims and Pat Mullins – Pat was born with a congenital leg defect and has breast cancer, Daniel Sims’ brother is deaf, and Phil has apparently suffered a workplace injury resulting in the loss of

German Dadaists, Italian and Russian Futurists and Constructivists created in their experiments multi-medial orthopedic bodies as products of collage and montage. Sergei Eisenstein, who was influenced by these experiments, organized his theatrical productions as a chain of independent fragments capable of entering any possible combination/recombination and labelled this method “montage of attractions”. He used the same montage principle not only for a new theatrical or cinematic narrative but also to conceptualize the expressive movement of the theatrical or cinematic body created on stage and on screen. Finally he conceptualized montage not only as a means of conveying movement, but also of conveying a way of thinking. This inspired him to create a new form of scientific narrative in his two unfinished books. The subject to be analysed in the first book from 1929 – montage – inspired him to look for a new structure by organizing different texts in the form of a sphere. This form defined the method of writing his second project on the theory of the arts as a hypertext. Eisenstein gave this book the title Method (1932–1948).

The article analyses Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), a cinematic essay by Jean-Luc Godard, and in particular it focuses on the controversial montage in which the French director aligns extracts from a pornographic film, Tod Browning’s Freaks, and footage from the concentration camps. With this sequence Godard inquires his own theory of montage: the idea of a productive reconciliation between opposing realities. This shocking sequence (the violence of images) is compared to a similar shock (the violence of asking to witness) produced by a scene of the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. The trauma of Godard’s editing choice induces the viewer to examine the issues of the degradation of the indexical status of the film, the limits of representation and the ethics of the gaze.

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s &lt;em&gt;The Night Manager&lt;/em&gt;

This study looks at two poets that they grew up in&amp;nbsp; different worlds&amp;nbsp; - Chinese poet Guo Mo Ruo(郭沫若) and Turkish poet – and they studies how each of them , in his own way, they uses images of the earth end nature to tell something&amp;nbsp; meaning of human life.In looking at Guo MoRuo’s (郭沫若) poet “The Earth , My Mother!”and Aşık Veysel’s “ My&amp;nbsp; Faithful Beloved is the Dark Soil”the two poems show that themes such a nature ,soil, culterel memory and&amp;nbsp; the emotional ties between people and the natural world. Although the two&amp;nbsp; poets come from different&amp;nbsp; calturals background , For each of them&amp;nbsp; see nature as somethıng more than a place in the literature world and more than the places where life happen. Guo MoRuo’s (郭沫若) poetry that is “ Eart Mother ” represents the soıl like beginning of life , as syembol of vitality and freedom shared by all being.&amp;nbsp; Aşık Veysel , on the other hand refers to the earth as “faithful beloved ”highlighting hummility , fate and&amp;nbsp; the way that all&amp;nbsp; living things eventualy return to soil and live again in different form. Although the two poets come from distant cultures , both poets uses meaningful&amp;nbsp; and clear language to&amp;nbsp; show that a deep ling between&amp;nbsp; people and nature world.Their poems brings together the sacred values of their traditional and seggests that humanity’s bond with the earth reflects a return to our orıgins and the universal experiences was share. This study looks at two poets that they grew up in&amp;nbsp; different worlds&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; - Chinese poet Guo Mo Ruo(郭沫若) and Turkish poet – and they studies how each of them , in his own way , they uses images of the earth end nature to tell something&amp;nbsp; meaning of human life.In looking at Guo MoRuo’s (郭沫若) poet “The Earth , My Mother!”and Aşık Veysel’s “ My&amp;nbsp; Faithful Beloved is the Dark Soil”the two poems show that themes such a nature ,soil, culterel memory and&amp;nbsp; the emotional ties between people and the natural world. Although the two&amp;nbsp; poets come from different&amp;nbsp; calturals background , For each of them&amp;nbsp; see nature as somethıng more than a place in the literature world and more than the places where life happen. Guo MoRuo’s (郭沫若) poetry that is “ Eart Mother ” represents the soıl like beginning of life , as syembol of vitality and freedom shared by all being.&amp;nbsp; Aşık Veysel, on the other hand refers to the earth as “faithful beloved ”highlighting hummility , fate and&amp;nbsp; the way that all&amp;nbsp; living things eventualy return to soil and live again in different form. Although the two poets come from distant cultures , both poets uses meaningful&amp;nbsp; and clear language to&amp;nbsp; show that a deep ling between&amp;nbsp; people and nature world. Their poems brings together the sacred values of their traditional and seggests that humanity’s bond with the earth reflects a return to our orıgins and the universal experiences was share.