Leeds Film Festival and Thought Bubble

Big Man Japan Director:Hitoshi Matsumoto

Big Man Japan has been to Leeds before it's a hoot, dont miss its screening as part of the film festival.

It’s nearly time for the Leeds Film Festival again. This is an event so easy to miss out on. My suggestion is to go through the programme and be selective, if not you can get really lost as there is so much on offer. So, what am I going to prioritise?
Simply because I’m someone who spends a lot of time drawing narratives, the Thought Bubble event on the weekend of the 19th and 20th of November, is an event I won’t miss. http://thoughtbubblefestival.com/
It’s a chance to catch up on small press offerings and see if there are any people out there making comics that deal with subject matter outside the norm. Last year Darryl Cunningham http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/ was a hidden star. His graphic novel ‘Psychiatric Tales’ is a brilliant series of observations made when he was working in a psychiatric ward. You can see his work on-line and it was his on-line presence that started to alert publishers that here was a major talent that needed publishing.



Darryl is a classic case of an artist experiencing the world and then processing it through his work. He demonstrates that all our experiences have potential to be source material for creative art. When I was giving a lecture the other day on comics I was thinking of Darryl when encouraging everyone to look at underground and independent press publications. The last thing the world of transmedia needs is yet another superhero, the gold dust in terms of character development is always hidden in the fantastic complexity of real life. Darryl’s latest work looks at science, a potentially boring subject elevated by his clear treatment and focus. Again not a subject you would normally associate with comic books, but that’s the point.


The other area I’m always interested in is the Fanomenon section. The Méliès d’Argent competition has a whole mix of shorts and odd things that are usually 70% rubbish but 30% are gems. I’m really looking forward to what could be a post-modern classic. The Last Screening by Achard, is a French film that is set in a little one-screen arthouse picture palace that plays Renoir’s ‘French Can-Can’ on loop. In between screenings the proprietor recites passages of dialogue with the patrons. But the screen is set for closure, so some of the proprietor’s more violent pastimes may have to be curbed. I’m told Achard’s film is out-and-out preposterous, a soulless essay that’s livened by a smattering of striking imagery and a few neat juxtapositions. Sounds good to me.


The Last Screening

I’m also intested in seeing ‘Mystics in Bali’ which is a 1981 Indonesian horror film directed by H. Tjut Djalil. The film revolves around the Balinese mythology of the leyak and was originally banned in Indonesia, but pirated copies found their way onto VHS first locally and then internationally. The film eventually gained cult status, particularly after the proliferation of the internet. The way this film has slowly become popular is a great example of accidental viral marketing.
There is also some classic Japanese horror; including a screening of one of the Ghost Cat films. The Ghost Cat story was first filmed in the silent era (1918) and the first Japanese talkie was Kazuo Mori's Ghost Cat & the Red Wall, (1938), so it has a long history and is comparable to Murnau’s Nosferatu which first aired in 1922.


Poster for Ghost Cat

I’ll be interested to see how many reviews get posted over the period. Getting to see films that position themselves outside of the normal conventions is another way of helping build up a wider range of visual references and it really helps when it comes to making decisions when you are looking through the camera lens and deciding how to frame and what to do with the lighting.

The Brothers Quay and Light Night

Friday night was light night in Leeds. In the basement of Leeds Town Hall was a wonderful exhibition of the work of the Brothers Quay. Any animation student, anyone thinking of using stop motion film techniques, anyone thinking about how to create sets for film and anyone who just wants to see some of the best creative imaginations working in this country should get there right now. The work is stunning.
Not only this but the Brothers Quay have been invited to come and play with the canvas that is Leeds, to create something that will alter the way we see the city, something people will remember as part of the myth of Leeds. They have proposed a large-scale work called ‘Overworlds & Underworlds’ which will place in May next year, and will explore the flow of people and water through the city. It’s hard to believe that Leeds has been brave enough to take the risk of letting their dark imaginations lose on the city. All praise whoever brokered this.



Since the late 1970s, the identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have made a unique contribution to stop-animation. Each Quay film is riveting, using attention to detail in sets and characterization to draw you into a strangely convincing other world. Look at their work through the lenses they embed in the side of their miniature sets, then experience how these images are animated to music and movement, evoking half-remembered dreams and long-suppressed childhood memories, fascinating and deeply unsettling in turn. Their films are often described as surreal, moody and macabre, representing a world frozen in time, full of cobwebs and dust, mirrors and strange machines. One of their best-known films, ‘Street of Crocodiles’ was adapted from a short story by Polish novelist, Bruno Schulz and selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the top 10 best animated films of all time. The set of Street of Crocodiles is on display in the ‘Dormitorium’ exhibition and when I went in they were screening some of their films too. In fact film critic Jonathan Romney included Street of Crocodiles in Sight and Sounds best 10 films of all time. They are that good. They also work on music videos. See His Name is Alive ‘We are still married’ and ‘Cant go wrong without you’. Because they work in such a classic style, I believe these videos are timeless, their own vision is so powerful, The Quay Brothers’ use of black and white and shadow is so intense that these music videos transcend the genre. Perhaps for music fans the work is too powerful and I know some find their work hard to take. However all the best art is difficult, in the case of the Brothers Quay they tap deeply into the dark side, but do it with exquisite craftsmanship, control of lighting and texture and a terrific knowledge of how to frame and pace an animation.



Check out their films in the collection, ‘Phantom Museums: The Short Films Of The Quay Brothers’.
Watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7u3lPcDh50

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsMYOeOIZYE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gIb0bTWj6w Street Of Crocodiles

Those hats

The Fedora Hat

So why did I get interested in hats in my last blog post. At the core of this year’s contextual studies is transmedia theory and one aspect of this is the concept of migratory characters. Migratory characters need to be easily recognisable and in the game world of course scalable. Making a character identifiable when it’s only a half inch high is a tricky business and a good hat can do the job for you. Characters need to remain consistent over the course of their transmedia development, because narratives themselves change and will be less easy to recollect. Within prolonged engagement with a narrative, stories can begin to merge and become indistinguishable from each other, characters however are easier to identify and recall, especially if they have a good hat.
This indicates the importance of character in establishing audience engagement with a transmedia concept. It is the characters that remain a constant point of contact for the audience. Regardless of what is happening within story episodes on TV, plots in film or situations within games, the characters should be recognisable and familiar and therefore should help orient the audience within whatever aspect of the narrative they find themselves.
Perhaps each component of a transmedia story should be designed as canonical from the outset. Therefore a hat needs to signify this. Going back to the Indiana Jones model, his hat is a fedora and its wide brim means it’s not far off a cowboy hat. Early cowboy films established the hat as a way of distinguishing good from bad. White hats for the good guys, black for outlaws. Even the Lone Ranger had a white hat. These types of hats signified excitement, adventure, the outdoors etc. basically you wouldn’t wear a hat like that indoors. Most importantly though it made the protagonists easy to spot.
Jones’ hat belongs to a family of ‘hunter’ hats, such as Crocodile Dundee’s or the one Hugh Jackman wears to hunt vampires in Van Helsing. If you go on-line to buy a similar hat you end up having to go through stuff like the Bounty Hunter Outback collection, in fact you can even get Crocodile Dundee hats, this is text directly taken from the website:

“There’s something about a crocodile hunter hat that speaks of adventure and the great outdoors. The most famous wearer of this stylish yet practical form of headgear was of course Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, and anyone choosing one now as their hat of choice risks comparison with the original croc hunter himself.”

It would appear that the hat can also signify a world. ‘A world’ that is a setting for any transmedia character is also important, is it big enough to be developed, would the audience want to spend time in it? These type of hats suggest big adventure worlds, so they work yet again. Besides being scalable, can these hat characters be watched as well as played? I suppose the issue here is can they be intellectualised for a passive audience (film/TV) and can they be actualized for an active audience? (Game player experience) Yet again yes to both things. Why does SuperMario wear a hat? (Sonic’s hair effectively becomes a hat).

So as you do I did a bit of research on Google, the Hero's Hat I now find out is a Vanity Item from the action-packed adventure game Terraria. It's part of the Hero Outfit, the other parts being the Hero's Shirt and Hero's Pants. You can even get an Archaeologist's Hat. To quote; “The Archaeologist's Hat is a Vanity Item that is dropped by Doctor Bones. It is the head slot component of the Archaeologist's Outfit. The outfit's appearance resembles the clothes of famous archeologist Indiana Jones. The Hat sometimes disappears when dropped by player; this is presumed to be a bug.”


The Archaeologist's Hat from Terraria

It’s all of course part of the hero’s journey and all heroes have their identifiable characteristics, Hercules had his Lion head, knights and Captain America have their helmets and Dick Tracy his yellow wide brim fedora, which takes me straight back to Indiana Jones. The fact is because of that hat we don’t need to explain where Indy came from, or show how he got embroiled in a conflict with the Nazis. It’s evident from the start that this is a man who goes on exciting adventures, that he has probably been on lots of similar adventures in the past, and is likely he will go on plenty more adventures in the future – perfect for Transmedia franchising.


Hercules


Dick Tracy

Troll Hunter

One of the things all of you as students will be asked to do is review things you have seen. So perhaps I should at least have a go myself. I went to see André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter at the Hyde Park over the weekend. So some thoughts.

I was a bit worried during the opening 10 minutes. The cinema vérité style has been used so much since The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and for me it had reached its most comedic effect in ‘Never Been Thawed’ and ‘A Day without a Mexican’. It’s almost impossible to go back to those days when a hand held camera kept running seemed to heighten the reality of horror, hand held cameras now just seem to increase my awareness of sea sickness. They are just another convention and when used had better be used thoughtfully and with purpose. However after a while I started to think that the technique itself was been used as a joke and this was done to reflect the content, which itself was another joke. Shaky-camera, green night-vision, cameras still running after being dropped, the shattered lens shots, long-lost footage; all played off against the monster in the dark, government conspiracy theories, young people trapped in a horror situation that they can’t seem to escape. But then the details start adding up. A shot of miniature trolls as tourist souvenirs, connected with something, I realised this film has a history that goes all the way back to the troll doll. My sister had one in about 1965, The Trollies Radio Show, had trolls singing ‘Wooly Bully and Manfred Man’s ‘Do Wah Diddy’, the Trolls are well known within the world of Kitsch culture and had a track record of being marketed by the Norwegian tourist board. It was their hair I couldn’t stand, or was it my sister’s preoccupation with platting it? Whatever, Trolls are not just part of nursery time culture any more, but even I must admit the ‘Three Billy Goat’s Gruff’ used to scare the hell out of me and the scene of the sheep and the Troll coming out from under the bridge brought it all back.
I must get back to the tourist thing. Part of the format was clearly a reference to tourist board films, like those we get celebrating Scotland’s wild beauty and rough wilderness. I’m sure Norwegians are inundated with these and film-makers probably cut their teeth on them, shot after shot of fjords, mountains and forests do start to wear you down after a while, but again, I was starting to get the humour; a particular type of Nordic humour, but it was definitely funny in a not laugh out loud sort of way.


Indiana Jones


Alan Quartermain


Ray Winstone Tracker


Otto Jespersen Troll Hunter

Jespersen's performance as the troll hunter is essential to the film's success. He is a well known comedian in Norway, so it’s a bit like Jack Dee playing Indiana Jones as far as Norwegians are concerned. That straight faced acting method he uses is part of his comedy ‘act’ and we are meant to see the link between the hero’s costume, (bush hat, boots, belts etc) and the tight lipped, manly man’s man of action movies. See Sean Connery’s Allan Quartermain in ‘The League of Victorian Gentlemen’ or even Ray Winston in ‘Tracker’. Do the clothes make the man? In this instance they at least make the connection.
Jesperson’s performance just about saved the film from the exhausted and overused mockumentary format, and allowed the film to play off subtle humor with physical tension. That tension was often due to footage that had been a product of ‘night vision’ filming, which had then had grain added in post-production to make it even more realistic night vision footage. That peculiar green and quality of otherworldliness is just right if you are going to construct a world within which horrors can grow and suddenly arrive out of the dark. Perhaps this is why so many early black and white films still affect us. Old tricks, like never show the audience the monster, but show tree movement, shadows, make us feel and hear vibrations from heavy footfalls, were all used well. The moving trees in Kurosowa’s ‘Throne of Blood’ still being the best tree image; the forest in Disney’s Snow White is out of the same visual history, which goes all the way back to Altdolfer’s ‘St. George in the Forest’ or the forest of Fangorn in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’. In fact when we see the Troll, it’s as always a bit of a disappointment, but in this case it’s OK, because it’s a joke and the troll is easy meat for the hunter. Just turn the light on and the troll is turned to stone. It would have been a good moment to suddenly turn the light on in the cinema at that point and watch the pale audience reaction. Somewhere the light as tool to remove darkness myth is still more resonant in the movies. We still gather together for comfort in the dark, listening to stories around that single point of illumination. In this case it being the Hyde Park Cinema, people had twigged the joke early and were chuckling along as the film went through its various acknowledgements to other cultures.
So how was it? Part horror movie, part social satire, part Norwegian travel documentary, part monster movie, part vehicle for one of Norwegian’s best known comics, it was a film that I found slightly confusing as how to react. Mildly funny, very knowing, too long and at times just poor, it did ask some questions and keep me in my seat, so it can’t be bad, or can it?
Comments welcomed.

DFGA First Post of the Academic Year 2011 / 12

Greeting to this year’s Contextual Studies blog.
Last year I was only working with level 5 (year 2) students, this year I’m working with both year 1 and 2, therefore posts will be applicable to both years. I will signpost things if they are targeted at one year or another.
So why and how can the content of this blog be useful to both years?
There are two basic issues that will hold things together. One is the notion of transmedia and associated concepts such as migratory characters and media convergence, the other is medium specificity or what makes one technology so special and how does this affect the way information is shaped?
For year 1 (level 4) students this will be a general theme and will be used to take a particular stance to the understanding of the first year lecture programme. For year 2 (level 5) transmedia will be at the core of what is being looked at, in particular how narrative (storytelling) is used across different platforms, (film, theatre, games, novels, radio, on line etc.)
So for instance the issue that will be looked at in relation to the first lecture for year 1 students will be how Modernism used the concept of medium specificity. For year two students the first transmedia character to examine will be Gilgamesh, simply because it is the oldest story we have. It’s also interesting because it comes in episodes.
The story of Gilgamesh was recorded in the Sumerian language in cuneiform on stone tablets, and it was passed down orally before then. The story is of how the kingdom of Uruk has fallen under the shadow of a great evil monster (Humbaba) Gilgamesh is given special magic weapons to help him in his quest to defeat the monster and after a long hazardous journey he finally confronts the monster and in an epic battle kills it.
Read a review of the talking book here:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/186612602

It’s the back story that grabs you. The way that the actions of the main character start to impact on what goes on, you know what he should do but he doesn’t, and in these actions a complex narrative of very human proportions evolves.

The issue of media specificity is fascinating so how is Gilgamesh being shaped across the media?



Here we have an epic struggle frozen in relief, the simple outlines suggest a moment that will be fixed for all time, compare this to a post Jack Kirby deep perspective comic book page.



In both cases we are introduced to the character beforehand and then because of the costume we know who is who.



You can tell there was little research done by the Marvel comics people beforehand.

The first people to come across the story however would have heard it, listen to this version in English and think about how the characters are introduced and verbally set up to be remembered.



Radio as a medium uses conventions such as short snatches of music to remind us of where we are what the action is supposed to be about. See Peter and the Wolf by Prokofief. Audio books do the same. If you have ever listened to a story teller, they usually vary the tone and level of their voice to give dramatic weight to certain scenes or to introduce particular characters.
So what would be a Modernist version of Gilgamesh be like?

More essay titles

Mario

Why certain game structures are used over and over again

Christopher Booker in his book The Seven Basic Plots suggests that all our stories are variations on the following themes; Overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth. Booker sets out at the beginning of the ‘Overcoming the monster’ chapter to make a clear comparison between the oldest story we have, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and a story filmed 5000 years later Dr No. This is booker’s description of this James bond movie vehicle.
“The Western world falls under the shadow of this great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure….who lives in an underground cavern on a remote island. The hero James Bond, goes to the armourer who equips him with special weapons. He sets out on a long and hazardous journey to Dr Nos distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster.” (Booker, 2004)
From Booker’s description we can see that Dr No follows exactly the same formula as the Epic of Gilgamesh. These deep seated mythic stories are compelling, and lie behind many comic book, film and game narratives.
However gameplay or “how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes." (Rouse 2001, xviii) is also vital and can be seen as independent of graphics or narrative. This can be linked to the human need to play games as an essential element of what it is to be human. (See Huizinga’s Homo Ludens)
The perfect game could therefore be one that followed a basic mythic storyline, engaged the player in a subtle enough manner to ensure that ‘life type’ choices were constantly being made within a context of play that supported a willing suspension of disbelief.

Bibliography
Half-Real: A Dictionary of Video Game Theory. http://www.half-real.net/dictionary/#game. (Accessed December 17, 2010.)
Aarseth, Espen. "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation". In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 45-69. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Frasca, Gonzalo. "Ludology meets Narratology: Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative." 1999. http://www.ludology.org/articles/ludology.htm
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950.
Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.
Rouse, Richard. Game Design: Theory & Practice. Plano, Texas: Wordware, 2001.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman,. Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
Booker, C (2004) The Seven Basic Plots London: Continuum

The introduction to an essay based on this could be:
The integration of game and narrative lies at the centre of games design and in order to achieve this certain game structures are used over and over again. This essay seeks to examine the key elements to go into the most successful games and to propose reasons for why these elements will remain constants no matter how technology develops.

Starting an essay

It was good to hear that all of you had ideas as to what you could write about. Not just because it means that I can expect a range of interesting essays but also as course development.
Communication theory implies learning from the receiver by using feedback mechanisms. Your feedback is that the content of the lectures and seminars so far doesn’t yet match up with your particular interests. In some cases there are overlaps, but in others the content is still outside of the theories so far introduced. There is nothing wrong with this and it partly reflects our age differences and backgrounds. As a way of addressing the issue what I’m therefore going to do is develop the next series of blog posts as responses to the issues and areas of interest that students as a group are interested in.
Please prompt me to reflect on your own interests, in the meantime I shall start with the themes discussed as I remember them.



The Superhero
The classic text on Superman is that written by Umberto Eco.
Eco points to Superman’s mythic status as being something that relates back to the need we have to relate to beings like gods, and he sees the split personality of Superman/Clark Kent in particular as being important as this signifies something new. It is a way of illustrating how humans can be ‘normal’ but at the same time they can internally mythologize their lives, the drama of the Greek Gods being played out with a very human dimension.
The comic format also fascinates Eco. In particular he is interested in "retroactive continuity" This is the ability of comic book stories to keep going back and adding aspects of the story. For instance, every time a new Superman film comes out his birth story will be re-visited and on each re-telling something new will emerge that wasn’t there before.
Bibliography
The suggestions below could be used to start a literature search, see the handout on essay writing that explains how to do this.

The in-depth critical theory text is:
Eco, U (1972) The Myth of Superman Diacritics. Vol. 2, No. 1. (Spring), 14-22.
Find an on-line copy of Eco’s text here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11466209/Eco-Superman
Find a commentary on the text here: http://staticred.net/four-colour/archives/002653.html
The Eco text is the one that you ought to read as it links different theories together and could be the text that in particular connects with what we have been looking at during seminars.
An easy to read short history is Superman: A Mythical American by Michael A Rizzotti
Available at: http://netage.org/2010/03/01/superman-a-mythical-american-2/
The name Superman comes from Frederich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
For initial thoughts on psychology of superheroes: http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/35714
The classic texts are:

Rosenburg, R (2008) Psychology of Superheroes, The: An Unauthorized Exploration London: Ben Bella

Morris, M & Morris, T (2006) Superheroes and Philosophy New York: Open Court
Kaveney, R (2007) Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films London: Tauris
White, M. D. (2008) Batman and the Philosophy of the Dark Knight London: Wiley
Irwin, W & Housel, R (2009) X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse London: Wiley

Also see: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11472706245

So how would you start the essay?
Something like this:
The superhero has been part of popular culture since the mid 1930s. However the last decade has seen a proliferation of film/comic crossovers that suggests that their interest stems from something much deeper rooted than that of children’s entertainment. This essay seeks to explore the ways in which the role of superheroes within contemporary culture can be understood. It will use sociological, psychological and philosophical methodologies in order to develop a holistic understanding of the issues uncovered.


John Martin The Great Day of His Wrath 1851-3

The Sublime, the Liminal and moments of Epiphany.

These subjects came up as a consequence of a conversation around why certain images hold our attention in such a powerful way that they seem to take us beyond our everyday experience and provide an entry into higher states of consciousness.
In order to understand how this might be theorised and how an understanding of this could lead to a method for elevating everyday experiences or images towards this state, three separate areas of theory can be combined. The sublime, liminality and the concept of a moment of epiphany.
Definitions.
In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis "sloping up to the lintel, uplifted, high, lofty, elevated, exalted") is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic.
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes.
An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something.
There are several definitions of the sublime but the writings of Burke in particular point to the fact that the sublime can be discussed in terms of its effects upon the perceiver. This was an important change in how aesthetics were thought of since the reactions of the perceiver became, for the first time, more important than the formal qualities of the object. However the ability to stand back from this was perhaps more clearly developed by Kant in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime who termed the phrase, “disinterested interest”. Ruskin, who discusses the sublime within the context of his own 19th century culture, proposed that nature worship, delight in the picturesque etc. all derive from urbanization. I. e. when people find themselves living in cities and cut off from nature they began to romanticise it. However the main pictorial thread for the sublime was developed by John Martin, his paintings were and still are powerful indicators of what we regard as sublime visions.
The concept of liminality can be used to explore the state between things. For instance the 'trickster (a type of shaman), stands in the liminality between the sacred realm and the profane. In religion it is when the individual experiences the revelation of sacred knowledge where God imparts his knowledge to ordinary humans.
James Joyce coined the term ‘epiphany’ to describe a moment of intense insight, which briefly illuminates the whole of existence. His novel Ulysses which is set in one day in Dublin, is meant to evoke the levels of myth within Homer's Odyssey.
Bibliography
Turner, V (1967) Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage, in The Forest of Symbols New York: Cornell University
Turner, V (1975) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors London: Cornell University
Homas, P (1995) Jung in Context London: University of Chicago Press
Douglas, M (1984) Implicit Meanings London: Routledge
Joyce, J (1922) Ulysses London: Penguin
Shaw, P (2006) The Sublime London: Routledge
The Bible (Acts 9:1-31)

So how would you start the essay?
Certain images hold our attention in such a powerful way that they seem to take us beyond our everyday experience and provide an entry into higher states of consciousness. This essay will explore the possible theoretical interpretations of this situation and will in particular seek to provide an understanding of how an awareness of this could lead to a method for elevating or enlightening our experiences of everyday images. In order to research these issues three separate areas of theory will be investigated; the sublime, liminality and the concept of a moment of epiphany.


Christopher Nolan’s Inception

Writing about an individual film is fine as long as the writer can reference a wider set of theories or can open out comparisons with other films. Christopher Nolan’s Inception, is a film set in a world where technology exists that can enter the human mind through dream invasion. Nolan builds a construct and then plays within that construct in order to interrogate narrative, visual symbolic codes, and the rules and limitations of physical laws. The dreams used in the film are recreations of familiar conventions, from recognisable urban landscapes to car chases and gunfights: these could be read as documentary elements inserted into a genre (science fiction or action adventure) film. The people invading the subconscious of the target mind keep up the appearance of reality, of verisimilitude, to keep the dreamer unaware of the dream. This echoes the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ or "willing suspension of disbelief" which is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literature. It was first used in English by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative. The film also references the craft of film making itself. Ariadne the architect is set design, Arthur functions as a producer, Eames is their star (taking on other identities beyond his own) and Yusuf the projectionist, providing the venue for the dream movie to occur.
Cinema has often been compared to dreams. It is interesting to compare Inception with Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) which has a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.
The area of theory that could be used of course is psychoanalysis. Read: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/jun/17/features.review this review picks out the importance of Freud’s ideas on how we can read cinema. “The birth of cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny: the images on screen were both familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet lifeless, real but illusory.”
From Wikipedia: In a film theory context, the term oneiric ("pertaining to dream") refers to the depiction of dream-like states in films, or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state to analyze a film. The connection between dreams and films has been long established; "The dream factory" “...has become a household expression for the film industry”. The dream metaphor for film viewing is “one of the most persistent metaphors in both classical and modern film theory”, and it is used by film theorists using Freudian, non-Freudian, and semiotic analytical frameworks.

Bibliography
Van Sijll, J. (2005) Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know London: Michael Wiese
Botz-Bornstein, T (2008) Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai London: Lexington
Freud, S. (1997) The Interpretation of Dreams London: Wordsworth
Jung, C. G. (1995) Memories, Dreams, Reflections London: Fontana

Hobson, J. A. (1980) Film and the Physiology of Dreaming Sleep: The Brain as a Camera-Projector. Dreamworks 1(1):9–25.

So how would you start the essay?
Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010) can be used to illustrate a range of approaches to thinking about the interrelationship between reality and fiction. In particular the relationship the cinema has with its own construction and the notion of the dream factory. This essay will attempt to reveal how the film Inception operates as a structure within which the very nature of the cinematic experience is conceptualised. This will include a discussion of genre, the importance of the willing suspension of disbelief and the relationship between film and psychoanalysis.




The B Movie
The continuing interest in B Movies suggests that they hold a fascination for us beyond the fact that they are so bad they are funny. B movies can be seen as a type of kitsch and as such their reuse within popular culture could be read as a typically post-modernist gesture. Baudrillard states, "To the aesthetics of beauty and originality, kitsch opposes its aesthetics of simulation”
Wikipedia definition: Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal. Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are aesthetically deficient (whether or not being sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative) and that make creative gestures which merely imitate the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Excessive sentimentality often is associated with the term.
The B movie can also be examined from the point of view of the uncanny, the other, the abject and as a particular reading of the sublime.
The Uncanny is a Freudian concept where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the person who experiences the sensation due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. The ‘monster’ is not really there, this isn’t really happening to me etc. This helps rationalise why when we follow a horror film we accept the plight of the characters. We have all been there before and experienced the way logic goes out the window when we are faced with these situations.
The Abject: According to Kristeva, the abject is situated outside the symbolic order. Being forced to face the abject is an inherently traumatic experience. For example, upon being faced with a corpse, a person would be most likely be repulsed because he or she is forced to face an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world. The body when alive can be seen as a subject, but once dead becomes an object. This repulsion from death, excrement and rot is itself the start of a new symbolic order and the B movie fascination with these areas of experience is perhaps part of the reason for their continuing popularity.
The Other has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude 'Others' whom they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. The concept of 'otherness' is also integral to the comprehending of a person, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an 'other' as part of a process of reaction that is not necessarily related to stigmatization or condemnation. It often involves the demonization and dehumanization of groups so could be used to think about those large crowds of zombies B movies can be sometimes peopled with.
You could compare many B movies with ‘The Other’ a 1972 psychological horror film directed by Robert Mulligan.
The Sublime: Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused.” While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Therefore one aspect of the sublime is the possibility of facing death without having to actually experience it. E.g. in a horror movie.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, J (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage
Burke, E (2010) A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful London: BiblioBazaar
Calinescu, M (1987) Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism London: Duke
Creed, B. (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York, Routledge.
Creed, B. (1990). "Review Article: Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie." Screen 31.2: 236-42.
Jancovich, M. (1992). Horror. London, B.T. Batsford, Ltd.
Neale, S. (1980). Genre. London, BFI.
Tudor, A. (1997). "Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre." Cultural Studies 11.3: 443-63.
Royle, N (2003) The Uncanny: An Introduction Manchester: MUP
There are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness", the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness.
Douglas, M (2002) Purity and Danger London: Routledge
Kristeva, J (1984) The Powers of Horror London: Columbia

So how would you start the essay?
The continuing interest in B Movies suggests that they hold a fascination for us beyond the fact that they are so bad they are funny. This essay intends to investigate the reasons why they still have this fascination for us and sets out to examine this from a psychoanalytical perspective and as an aspect of post-modernism.




Zen and film
The experience of film has often been cited as being something that equates to a religious experience and it has been argued that popular film has become a significant venue for meaning-making in modern society. (Niemi, 2003) Like religion, film provides models for understanding and behaving within the social world, it also acts to reinforce this content through emotional resonance. Film could therefore be seen as presenting an alternative mechanism for the transmission and processing of “religious” ideas and ideals.
One way of interpreting the film Fight Club (1999) is to see it as a story of a man’s spiritual journey and the need to break his cycle of suffering and achieve enlightenment. This narrative sits at the core of many religions but there are aspects of the film that indicate that it is Zen Buddhism in particular that we should examine if we are to reach an in depth understanding of the film’s interpretation. However within a Western culture, images of bleeding half naked men are hard to separate from those of Christ crucified, hence the gospel according to Fight Club.

Bibliography
Jones, C. B. (200) Zen and the Art of Being Jedi http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/sf_and_society/40320 accessed on 16. 12. 10
Reed, C (2007) Fight Club: An Exploration of Buddhism Journal of Religion and Film Vol. 11, No. 2 October
Niemi, A (2003) Film as religious experience: Myths and models in mass entertainment Critical Review, Volume 15, Issue 3 & 4 , pages 435 - 446
Yool, George R. 1992, April. “Glossary of Zen and Buddhism: An Introduction to Zen Thought.” 12 Oct. 2005. 12.
Herrigel, E (1971) Feb. Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Vintage Books. 11.
Mccarty, Pat. 2005, Aug. “Experts explain how we are ‘One’ in film.” The Seattle Times, Religion Section, B5.

So how would you start the essay?
The experience of film has often been cited as being something that equates to a religious experience and it has been argued that popular film has become a significant venue for meaning-making in modern society. (Niemi, 2003) Like religion, film provides models for understanding and behaving within the social world, it also acts to reinforce this content through emotional resonance. Film could therefore be seen as presenting an alternative mechanism for the transmission and processing of “religious” ideas and ideals. This essay seeks to examine the interrelationship between film and religious experiences, in particular it will highlight the relationships and similarities between the venues for both (the dark interiors of temples, churches, caves and cinemas) and the potential for individual transformation through spiritual journey narratives in film.

Look out for further blog posts, but do remember to remind me of your possible essay titles/areas of interest.