Cinematic Appeal Research Articles

Drifting, cruising, leaving: the ecological intimacies of Boys in the Sand (1971)

ABSTRACT Wakefield Poole’s 1971 pornographic arthouse film Boys in the Sand stages a lavish cruising encounter in Fire Island’s Meat Rack, a globally rare ecosystem now threatened by rising sea levels and erosion. Shadowing Glyn Davis – who maps the erotic convergences between the Situationist dérive and practices of homosexual cruising – I locate the Meat Rack’s sexual and cinematic appeal in its knotted spatiality as both passage and destination. This article glances back and forth between the verdant gay Brigadoon mythologized in Poole’s film and the erosive terrain of the Island’s precarious future, in order to test Sarah Ensor’s theorization of cruising as ‘an unexpected model for a new ecological ethic’. Ultimately, this article underscores the ambivalence of Boys in the Sand as a pornographic requiem for an Island at risk, and a nature trampled by the steps we take to satiate our ‘natural’ desires. Touching the material and metaphoric textures of the Island’s leaves and sand, I consider the potential of ‘cruising’ pornography as both an erotic and an ecological archive.

Feminist psychogeography long after May 1968:Whatever Happened to My Revolution

Whatever Happened to My Revolution offers a French feminist perspective on the impact today of the uprising by the left in Paris in May 1968. The continuing appeal of the events of ‘68 are considered to be in decline, yet the film suggests that the energy of 50 years ago continues to mobilize cultural politics through cinematic appeals that amount to the radical recuperation of some of the ambitions of the day, a continuation of the past in the present. Whatever Happened to My Revolution is explored with reference to Guy Debord's concept of psychogeography, which suggested new phases of discovery in social life for remaking urban life, cross-referencing aspects of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical approach that appear in the film, especially the concept of desire, informing its feminist psychogeography. The challenges facing the current generation can be described as a desire by the French left, in this film defined and described by women, for the realization of May ‘68s cultural transformations in public and private culture.

Fast and scalable turbulent flow simulation with two-way coupling

Despite their cinematic appeal, turbulent flows involving fluid-solid coupling remain a computational challenge in animation. At the root of this current limitation is the numerical dispersion from which most accurate Navier-Stokes solvers suffer: proper coupling between fluid and solid often generates artificial dispersion in the form of local, parasitic trains of velocity oscillations, eventually leading to numerical instability. While successive improvements over the years have led to conservative and detail-preserving fluid integrators, the dispersive nature of these solvers is rarely discussed despite its dramatic impact on fluid-structure interaction. In this paper, we introduce a novel low-dissipation and low-dispersion fluid solver that can simulate two-way coupling in an efficient and scalable manner, even for turbulent flows. In sharp contrast with most current CG approaches, we construct our solver from a kinetic formulation of the flow derived from statistical mechanics. Unlike existing lattice Boltzmann solvers, our approach leverages high-order moment relaxations as a key to controlling both dissipation and dispersion of the resulting scheme. Moreover, we combine our new fluid solver with the immersed boundary method to easily handle fluid-solid coupling through time adaptive simulations. Our kinetic solver is highly parallelizable by nature, making it ideally suited for implementation on single- or multi-GPU computing platforms. Extensive comparisons with existing solvers on synthetic tests and real-life experiments are used to highlight the multiple advantages of our work over traditional and more recent approaches, in terms of accuracy, scalability, and efficiency.

Book Review: Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

Book Review: Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies by Ariel Rogers (review)

Jacobson reviews Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies by Ariel Rogers.

Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies

Cinematic appeals: the experience of new movie technologies

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Moving Machines1. Smothered in Baked Alaska: The Anxious Appeal of Widescreen Cinema2. East of Eden in CinemaScope: Intimacy Writ Large3. Digital Cinema's Heterogeneous Appeal: Debates on Embodiment, Intersubjectivity, and Immediacy4. Awe and Aggression: The Experience of Erasure in The Phantom Menace and The Celebration5. Points of Convergence: Conceptualizing the Appeal of 3D Cinema Then and NowNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

On the Overland Trail: Sheet Music, Masculinity and Travelling ‘Country’

On the Overland Trail: Sheet Music, Masculinity and Travelling ‘Country’

Moving Explosions: Metaphors of Emotion in Sergei Eisenstein's Writings

In one of his most famous categorizations, Sergei Eisenstein creates a hierarchy of cinematic means from the simplest physiological stimuli (in metric montage) to a primitive emotional appeal (rhythmic montage) to the pinnacle of cinematic achievement: intellectual montage. (W 186-194) In this arrangement, one type of montage forms the basis for the next higher form. One can only rise to the heights of intellectual montage by standing on the shoulders of emotion, rhythm, and meter. Thus emotion is a helpful tool fully congruent with a cinematic appeal to humanity's highest faculties (the cognitive).

"Ficcion, aficion y seducion": Ana Caro's Valor, Agravio y Mujer

Ignored in most comparative studies of Don Juan, Caro's play offers a treatment of the story from the perspective of a professional seventeenth-century female writer. The development of Caro's Don Juan can be said to follow closely that of the mujer esquiva plays in which a woman who eschews marriage is ultimately "tamed" often (but not always) through the force of an irresistible love. In this play, however, we witness the domestication not of an independent woman but of a man—and of one who belongs to a long-lived lineage of seducers still commanding cinematic appeal in our days. Caro's play rewrites the Don Juan story as that of a seducer who is ultimately seduced by the only woman he had tricked and from whom he had tried to escape. This Don Juan thus departs significantly from the masculine prototype embodied by his namesake to join his destiny as loving husband and perpetuator of the species. His characterization can be seen to conform to a sort of seventeenth-century romantic, feminine fantasy which, I will argue in this essay, runs counter to the notion that there was a monolithic idea of "man" and "woman" during the Spanish "Golden Age." This paper suggests that the masculinism embedded in the tradition of the libertine seducer whose conquests inscribe women as signs is foregrounded and questioned throughout Caro's play. By altering the traditional pattern of relationships and roles Caro manages to propose an alternative paradigm for women which is, nevertheless, well-bounded by the conservatism of the comedia 's happy marriage denouement. Caro's gestures of rapprochement and distancing from the Donjuanian tradition, I will propose in this paper, are framed by a pattern of mimesis and indistinctness that not only surrounds the histrionic geography of her characters, but is also part of their own make-up.