Final Scene Research Articles

Barbie Land as cyberfeminist utopia

I explore Barbie (2023) through the lens of cyberfeminism to argue that Barbie Land can be conceptualised as a cyberfeminist utopia. I draw specifically on Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg, and Sadie Plant's literature, to examine how Stereotypical Barbie herself is produced as a cyborg in the film and how Barbie Land draws parallels to utopian fantasies of cyberspace. Themes of glitching, boundary blurring and transgression are central to this discussion, and I apply these concepts to key moments in the film such as Stereotypical Barbie's existential crisis, her travels between the Real World and Barbie Land and the final scene with Barbie visiting her gynaecologist. By placing the film in conversation with cyberfeminist thinking, I demonstrate how Barbie sits within a tradition of texts that place transgression and subversion at the core of feminist politics.

Waga rzeźnikiem. Co w tym śmiesznego? Astrologiczny humor w Uczcie Trymalchiona Petroniusza

The astrological references in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’ Dinner) serve an important function in establishing the comic mood. They appear as a theme in the menu, are used in a humorous way to describe human characters, and contribute to the suspense of the final scene. A critical examination of the astrological descriptions reveals inconsistencies with the ancient astrological system. This may indicate that the author intentionally used this stylistic device to create the impression of a broken and damaged world.

SEMANTICS OF SILENCE IN POETICS OF O. F. BERGHOLZ

The phenomenon of silence in the creative heritage of O. F. Bergholz has not been studied to date. The category of silence is considered in the article as a nonverbal communicative act, a nonverbal form of spiritual experience and a behavioral strategy. In the center of attention is the poem “Except” (“Reached mute despair…”), written by Bergholz after a trip to the construction site of the Volga-Don Canal. The text mentions the icon of the Savior “Good Silence,” thanks to which the category of silence acquires axiological characteristics: forced silence is a strategic means and is realized as salvation from lies (good silence). At the same time, the lexeme silence rhyming with despair in a socio-political context means that the cowardly silencing of the people’s suffering deserves censure. In the poem “Except” with an allusion to Tyutchev’s “Silentium!” and in direct reference to true knowledge (“He knew”), the limitations of the verbal capabilities of language are noted (“no consonance/what he saw cannot be conveyed”). In the poem “February Diary,” silence is actualized as “the identity of speaker, the listener and the topic,” the expressiveness of silence as highest point of communication is emphasized, its conventionality is noted. In the poem “No, not from our meager books…,” the semantics of silence goes back to the author’s religious memory: in the final scene, the chain of generations closes in Christian silence/reconciliation. Silence as a special communicative behavior acquires a ritual character in a number of other texts: the heroine’s meeting with her father in the story “Day Stars” (chapter “The Secret of the Earth”) is saturated with silentium vocabulary; the call to silence on the eve of mortal battles in the poem “The hand pulls to the heart of the Motherland…” determines the normative behavior of a person in a borderline situation. Silence as conscious and effective resistance to the actions of the authorities (an act of disagreement) is manifested in the diary discourse of the poetess and the late cycle “Anna Akhmatova.” An extensive semantic palette of silence is revealed on the basis of Bergholz’s poetic, prose and diary texts.

Multi-View Metal Parts Pose Estimation Based on a Single Camera.

Pose estimation of metal parts plays a vital role in industrial grasping areas. It is challenging to obtain complete point clouds of metal parts because of their reflective properties. This study introduces an approach for recovering the 6D pose of CAD-known metal parts from images captured by a single RGB camera. The proposed strategy only requires RGB images without depth information. The core idea of the proposed method is to use multiple views to estimate the metal parts' pose. First, the pose of metal parts is estimated in the first view. Second, ray casting is employed to simulate additional views with the corresponding status of the metal parts, enabling the calculation of the camera's next best viewpoint. The camera, mounted on a robotic arm, is then moved to this calculated position. Third, this study integrates the known camera transformations with the poses estimated from different viewpoints to refine the final scene. The results of this work demonstrate that the proposed method effectively estimates the pose of shiny metal parts.

Listening to First Quartos: The Women of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V

ABSTRACT The so-called ‘bad’ quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays have long been treated as superfluous. However, recent debates suggest that these publications are not corrupt but may instead be Shakespeare’s early drafts, opening up a conversation about how to treat the textual disparities between the early quartos and the 1623 folio. This article examines two variant texts in light of this assessment. The early quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Henry V (1600) offer moments where female characters display an agency that is silenced and controlled in the more canonical texts of the folio, suggesting that, as he revised the plays, Shakespeare moved to restrict women’s behaviour. For example, the titular Merry Wives design and orchestrate the final masque in the quarto text of that play, while they cede artistic control to their husbands in the later folio version. So too, in Henry V, Katherine’s final scene in the quarto gives her the opportunity to speak more and to assert an equality with Henry in a passage unique to that text. Attention to the gender dynamics of revision demonstrates that, to understand the full range of feminist potential within Shakespeare’s canon, scholars must explore his plays’ textual variation.

“The Golovlevs” by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in A. A. Ukhtomsky’s Critical Works

The previously unpublished notes by A. A. Ukhtomsky in the margins of the first volume of the Complete Works of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1905–1906) are proposed to be interpreted as critical presentation material for the novel “The Golovlevs” and as a road map to expand the intertextual boundaries of this work. The marginalia by A. A. Ukhtomsky open up the prospect of reading the text of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in the context of literary and patristic traditions. First and foremost, the former is identified by the scientist with Gogol’s tradition. A. A. Ukhtomsky calls the parallel “Plyushkin — Golovlev” one of its manifestations, which is explained through the prism of the “things/persons” antinomy. The features of the second are revealed by an Orthodox thinker when comparing the novel by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin with the precepts of the ven. Isaac the Syrian: the marks record the echo of those most important semantic nuances in the final scene that the St. Father highlighted when comprehending the “Last Judgment” and “Repentance” categories. The study of the corpus of readers’ marginalia by A. A. Ukhtomsky to the novel “The Golovlevs” contributes, first of all, to clarifying the characterology of Judushka-Porfiry in general and the causes of his pre-death suffering in particular; and secondly, to recreating the features of the spiritual portrait of the author, explicated in the work.

‘Fairest show’: Dramatic entrapment in Macbeth and Measure for Measure

This article reconsiders metatheatre in Macbeth and Measure for Measure, examining how characters find themselves entrapped in scenarios not of their own making, and how the creators of such scenarios can lose control of them. It examines the plays’ metatheatrical language, with a particular focus on the word ‘show’; argues that Macbeth's cauldron scene and the final scene of Measure for Measure function as these plays’ equivalents of the familiar ‘play-within-the-play’; and tentatively suggests how the two plays’ engagement with dramatic entrapment might resonate with the manipulative control facilitated by twenty-first-century social media platforms.

This Woman’s Memory Work: Futurity, Family and Photography in Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas (2021)

Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas (2021) is arguably his most politically engaged work yet, with the protagonist Janis (Penélope Cruz) leading a project to exhume a Civil War mass grave. This essay begins by exploring previous engagement by Almodóvar with memorialization practices, including the short film Cultura contra la impunidad (2010). The analysis of Madres paralelas tackles the privileging of memory work and familial inheritances, with attention to the role of photography and the final scenes at the exhumed graveside. Ultimately, Almodóvar’s film, diegetically and as material object, intervenes in the current ‘memory economy’ as an act of justice.

Marriage, comedy, and the patristic tradition in the first Ptochoprodromic poem

The present paper deals with the first Ptochoprodromic poem's treatment of the early patristic tradition. Its focus is on the conjugal life of the Ptochoprodromic couple, whose interaction is compared to the precepts of the Byzantine Fathers on the ideal Christian marital life. Evidently, the poet parodies the tradition to which the said precepts belong, offering a comic image of the ideal Christian couple in which gender roles have been reversed. Moreover, the final scene of the poem, where the husband disguises himself, is linked to the hagiographical tradition of cross-dressing women, as well as of male saints in disguise.

The Scene of the Council Hall: the Storyline and the Structure of the Grand Final Scene in the Second Edition of Verdi’s Opera Simon Boccanegra

The comparison of different authorial redactions of operas presents one of the through themes of world Verdi studies. The opera Simon Boccanegra holds a unique position, since the second version of the opera was created by Verdi almost a quarter of a century following the first. The depth of the changes, first of all, in the final scene of the first act, for which a new interpretation of the content was found is stipulated by such a temporal distance. Also important is the fact that the edition of Simon Boccanegra became the first large-scale collaborative work of Verdi and Arrigo Boito. In the two versions of the opera, the interconnection between the storyline and the structural laws is examined in the context of the general evolution of Verdi’s pivotal final scenes. In the original version, the composer still followed the conventional traditions, having created the most conservatively structured scene of that kind of all of his works from the 1850s. In the version of 1881, the final scene was transformed into one of the boldest and most original mass scenes in Verdi’s music. While initially the introduction of the episode missing in the play by Antonio García Gutiérrez (the festivities in honor of the anniversary of Simon Boccanegra having been elected as the doge of Genoa) was stipulated by the tradition of the mass grand final scene, the typical structure of which was in many ways “prompted” the scenario, in the second redaction, already the storyline and the verbal text of the scene of the Council session predetermined its musical-dramaturgical structure. However, even in this innovative final scene, Verdi does not abandon certain attributes of the typical structure. The result was a paradoxically organic combination of tradition and innovation of the scene in the Council Hall, which has become one of the pinnacles of the combined artistic work of the outstanding musician and the playwright.

PREDMET SUKOBA U DRAMAMA ZA DJECU BRANKA STEVANOVIĆA

In his three plays for children: The Alarm in Savazo- nia (Uzbuna u Savazoniji), The STory of The Single-Child Prince (Priča o princu jedincu) and The TaTTleTale Sparrow (Vrabac Tužibabac), Branko Stevanović treats conflicts differently for each one. The main methods of this research are analytic (in terms of each play) and comparative (in terms of all three Stevanović’ plays). Regardless of the analytical approach, conflict represents an important focus for children’s attention in the theater. In the case of The Alarm in Savazonia, Stevanović constantly transfers conflict from one subject to another. The result of this method is a play most akin to vaudeville, where the viewers’ attention is riveted by various elements that look similar to our reality, but differ from it slightly. In The STory of The Single-Child Prince Stevanović uses the clas- sical Aristotelian method of a story well told, with many fairy-tale elements. The main character, the Prince, is well-motivated, and the whole adventure is initiated with his wish to deserve his parents’ respect. Along with his maturation, the object of his desire relocates from one subject to another, but the conflict which will escalate in the final scene is focalised during the play. The TaTTleTale Sparrow is a short monodrama, where the conflict is set behind the stage. In order to hold the audience’s attention, the playwright indicates possible interactive elements of the performance.

Simbolismo del puente en The Man Who Would Be King de Huston y Kipling

This article studies the presence of the bridge in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), a John Huston’s representative film shot, as is usually the case, from an adapted screenplay (signed by himself). The meticulous analysis carried out reveals a considerable presence of the bridge (beyond the famous final scene) that activates many of its symbolic associations, especiall those linked to the ideological background of the Kiplingian hypotext, and contributes to interconnect the entire network of signifiers that assemble the film text.

(анти)колоніальні стратегії художнього мислення Євгена гребінки В поемІ «богдан»

(анти)колоніальні стратегії художнього мислення Євгена гребінки В поемІ «богдан»

Roman comedy and the final dance

Dance pervaded Roman theater, and in Plautus’ Persa, Pseudolus, and Stichus characters refer explicitly to their own dancing very near the end of the play. Of the remaining twenty-three extant plays of Plautus and Terence, twenty include scenes of lively motion performed in accompanied meters either in their final scenes or just before, or at the moment of the play’s climactic crisis or its resolution. These scenes of lively motion near the ends of plays often share metrical features with the scenes of explicit dance, and some plays may include metatheatrical allusions to a final dance. It therefore seems very likely that Roman comic playwrights almost always made a point of including an exuberant dance at a significant moment at or near the ends of their plays.

The Transformative Magic of Education in Walt Disney’s <em>The Sword in the Stone</em>

The Transformative Magic of Education in Walt Disney’s <em>The Sword in the Stone</em>

The Parable of the People's Faith and the Motive of the Crusade Fraternization in F.M. Dostoevsky's Novel "The Idiot".

The author studied the episode of fraternization by Myshkin and Rogozhin in several aspects: 1) as a specific literary transformation of folk’s legends about fraternization with Christ 2) both as the central episode of the novel’s plot and a reference to its final scene 3) ideologically as a spiritual unit between the protagonists and the Russian folk 4) as a symbolic description of internal contradictions of the Russian national character. The episode is closely connected with the preceding talk about belief in God, in whose course Myshkin refusing to directly answer if he believed in God, tells about his meetings with “common people” and arrives at a conclusion about the chaotic and enigmatic depths of the folk’s consciousness. This was the only discourse about religious belief in the whole Dostoevsky’s Pentateuch preceding “the Brothers Karamazov” which makes Myshkin conclude that religious belief can be obtained from Russian folk as a bearer of religious mission, notwithstanding the dark abyss in his soul. The conclusions based on the analysis lets us rethink and reconstruct Myshkin’s ideological evolution in the whole novel. The article traces Dostoevsky’s reliance on folk legends about fraternization with Christ. It is a pioneering research as it points to parallels with the novel’s final in terms of symbolic gestures, paradoxically completing the rite of exchanging crosses in the second chapter of the novel. Myshkin’s thoughts are proved in the next episode when Rogozhin attempts to kill Myshkin – which would have seemed impossible after the characters exchanged their crosses. Thus the imminent catastrophe outlined in the episode dooms the novel’s final, yet not in terms of religious belief and the author’s dependence on Russian folk.

Monstrous Masculinities: Characters' Reactions to Abjection Point to Conflicted Truths in Historical Memory and Gender in Insensibles (2012)

Abstract: Critics read the children with congenital insensitivity in Juan Carlos Medina's Insensibles (2012) as an allegory for Spaniards born into democracy. Just as the film's children cannot feel physical pain, later generations cannot comprehend the trauma of living through the civil war and/or ensuing dictatorship. This article expands this interpretation to note how the postmemory thriller's use of traditional gender markers and abjection offers further insight into the film's disputed ending. Feminine-presenting characters react to abjection (confrontations of the non-self) in ways that exemplify Matt Hills's pleasures of horror and reflect how Spain perpetually grapples with its fascist legacy. These characters react to abject's pain and violence with simultaneous attraction and repulsion, much like Spain's morbid fascination with reexamining its past. In contrast, masculine-presenting characters' disengagement speaks to politically conservative efforts to stymie historical memory campaigns. Protagonist David's "feminization" appears to support these efforts to recover memory. However, the final scene erases all affiliations between gender, abjection, and memory in a timeless, spaceless void, containing David's symbolic confrontation of the past to the hypothetical.

"It Is Enough": St. Ogg and Caring Through the Gap

ABSTRACT: This essay argues that the understudied micronarrative of St. Ogg in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss serves as a hermeneutic key to the significance of the novel's affectively perplexing conclusion. In this way, it also offers a productive, if difficult, model for ethical action in the world beyond the text. Integrating Talia Schaffer's insights on the ethics of care with narratological analysis and personal reflection, I show that care—as an action, not an emotion—can both catalyze and result from the narratively informed recognition of the gaps in one's knowledge about the lives of others. In the tale of Ogg's beatification—a passage regularly overlooked by critics of the novel—he aids a stranger precisely because he recognizes that he does not understand the reason for the needs she expresses. "It is enough that thy heart needs it," Ogg declares, and he is divinely rewarded when he accepts her unknowability and provides the material care the stranger requests. In this process, which I call "caring through the gap," Ogg's narratively informed awareness of his lack of knowledge stimulates, rather than stymies, his care-action. Caring through the gap is further developed as a flexible, intersubjective narrative process in the wrenching final scene between protagonists Maggie and Tom Tulliver. By refusing an affectively satisfying conclusion, Eliot's novel enacts the realist truth that giving and receiving care is ethically meaningful, even—perhaps especially—when resolution remains elusive. This dynamic also illuminates how the adaptable process of caring through the gap becomes urgently relevant in today's divided social worlds.

Analysis of the fusion development of traditional culture concept and interior art design based on 3D scene analysis

Abstract In this paper, by collecting a large number of 3D scenes with traditional cultural styles, after pre-processing, the style analysis task of 3D scenes is realized through two stages of model style element discovery and scene style pattern mining. In the style pattern mining stage, the maximum frequent pattern mining algorithm is used to get the style pattern of the final scene, and the part is visualized. To reduce the user’s selection time, a 3D interior layout recommendation system based on style rule mining is designed using collaborative filtering. Based on the previous work on scene style pattern mining, the style association rules are further mined, and the user is provided with candidate layouts and furniture dynamically and in real-time by introducing user interaction. Comparing the text-improved recommendation algorithm with the traditional recommendation algorithm, the accuracy rate of the traditional algorithm starts to saturate to 65% after TopN>20, while the algorithm in this paper is higher than 80%. In the analysis of traditional cultural contexts of interior art, in terms of the aesthetic acquisition, the highest proportion of aesthetic association is 63.7%. In terms of emotional expression, the proportion of symbolization of emotion is 73.1%. In terms of object comparison, the highest proportion of plurality and flexibility of combinations was 57.5%. Therefore, this paper provides good research ideas for how to better integrate traditional culture into interior design.

Rewriting the Indian other

Abstract This article reexamines the colonial representation of Indians in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Story of Muhammad Din” through a postcolonial resistant translation from English to Arabic. Set in India, Kipling’s short story depicts the buried Anglo-Indian conflict between the world perspectives of an adult Englishman and an Indian child. To this Indian child, Muhammad Din, existence is situated at the crossroads of an intense personal and national struggle for power, freedom, and independence. The dominant presence of the colonial law, which is embodied in the English doctor’s presumed authority and strict medical discourse in Kipling’s narrative, fashions a negative and inferior representation of Muhammad Din and his father Imam. Moreover, the impersonal style of narration, which is noted in the final scene of Muhammad’s death, enhances a colonial desire of the English to accentuate a rigorous sense of Englishness and national superiority that cannot be compromised. By offering a postcolonial translation of Kipling’s story in Arabic, however, Arab readers re-conceptualize or re-imagine othered Indians – here Muhammad Din – as central post-colonial agents who also function as vital sources of artistic or creative power that is necessary to deflate colonial authoritative agency in Kipling’s colonial text.