Week 4 The embodied mind

Peter Kubelka: Schwechater Film still

Thinking about how we use our own bodies to develop an understanding of the world reminded me of meeting Austrian film-maker Peter Kubelka. He gave a fantastic talk/performance about how he thought about film as part of the Evolution Festival in 2007. He started to talk about his film making by walking about trying to measure out lengths of film which he had wrapped around his arms. He would link seconds of running time to how far he could extend the film by using his hands and feet. Holding the film down with his toes he would stretch out, so that his body was contained in the film loop. He would then lay the film across the floor and walk along it, each stride being linked to a time and rhythm that would be of course part of the film run time as it would be when eventually put through a projector. In order to get his audience to remember to digest the information he was delivering he gave out donuts, which not only reminded him of a sun symbol (therefore light) but the looping of film and the cosmic circularity of all things, as well as the fact that once information is digested it is absorbed and unwanted elements become waste.
That soft shape we get when we round edges off has set up another embodied train of thought. Why is it that so many people hate Comic Sans typeface? Is it just too 'babyish'? See link below: Death to this typeface.

Week 3 No session this week

We dont have a session this week, but I hope things can still move forward. Those of you that havnt started your Critical Studies blogs this is a good time to do that. You could write up your notes, do an analysis of a chosen film's opening sequences/credits and annotate a section taken from the Film Theory text book that is one of your resources.
The next session's close reading will include a passage from a book called the 'Corporeal Turn', by Maxine Sheets-Johnson. It's from the chapter, Thinking in Movement. The book introduces terms such as the 'mindful body' and suggests that moving organisms create kinetic melodies. (See section above, which you could enlarge to read) The reason we will be looking at this is so that you can develop a theoretical language that can be used to illustrate how moving images (including moving typography) make meaning and relate that meaning to how you yourself feel when you experience something. Sheets-Johnson often refers to a body of theory called Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are the key writers in this area that we will discuss) and theorists such as Johnson and Lakoff who write about the embodied mind.
So if you are not having to work on putting up your blog or catching up on tasks, have a read through and try and annotate/make notes.
We should be back doing a live session next week.

Second session Cinema as door

Just a few thoughts on the session. I hope everyone got something out of doing a close reading of the cinema as door section from the film theory set text. A couple of things were mentioned and I thought I'd elaborate in order to make sure we were clear as to what was being said.
The set task this week is to annotate a text.
One of the words mentioned in connection with this was 'hermeneutics'. This can mean either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation and it was started by monkish scribes writing between the lines of their bibles. I suppose for you your bibles are the theoretical texts introduced. If you look at the image above you will see that in some bibles the annotations were longer than the actual text. The other thing is that the typographic layout is an integral part of the way it works. Perhaps when approaching the task you may want to consider this?
Another interesting thing that came up was in relation to the film 'Synecdoche, New York' when we were thinking through what was the meaning of diegesis. (The fictional world in which the situations and events narrated within a film occur) A synecdoche is a rhetorical term that describes a figure of speech in which part of something is used to refer to the whole thing. This is a type of metonymy (something we will be looking at soon) Metonymy can be applied to something that is visibly present but which represents another object or subject to which it is related but absent. Therefore an opening sequence can function metonymically for the whole of a film. E.g. the beginning of Hitchcock's Vertigo.
One other thing. I mentioned semiotics and a good primer is the web-site Semiotics for beginners. I'll put a link in at the bottom.