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This article aims to highlight the role of embodied mental representations or embodied schemas in both perception and filmmaking/viewing by foregrounding three premises: (1) perception is inferential and relies on prior embodied schemas; (2) filmmakers (authors) do not merely reproduce reality but equally impose body-based schemas onto the parts of a film in order to convey meanings; and (3) these schemas, as presented by the formal design of the work, may enrich the viewers' experience by allowing them a privileged look into the embodied creative-thinking processes of filmmakers. It will be argued that viewers are prompted to peek into these processes because the representational embodied concepts, as cued by the films, are grounded in shared sensory-motor capacities that scaffold all abstract thinking and reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The rapport between religion and film is not only historical but also ontological. The Abrahamic faiths specifically (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) and the audio-visual medium of cinema share a complex affiliation with reference to two of their foundational elements: image and word. Building on the constitutive kernels of the Abrahamic religion of Islam (image and word), this paper will locate and define its formal manifestations in cinema; in other words, the way in which the conception of image and word at Islam marks film form. This endeavor will be sustained by calling upon some distinctive film cases of the so-called New Iranian Cinema. In particular, Offside (2006) and This Is Not a Film (2011) by Jafar Panahi, and Close-up (1990) by Abbas Kiarostami, as well as other films, will be utilized for analysis in order to delineate the qualities of the claimed religious film form in question. These films are selected as they foreground and thus play out the dialectic of image and word, their absence and their presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to propose an evaluation method for testing the mechanical strength of film-formed self-adhesive resin cements (SARCs) while reflecting cement layer thickness. Three commercially available dual-cure type SARCs were used for tensile and shear tests using specimens with varying thicknesses (0.05, 0.2, and 0.4 mm). There were no significant differences in tensile strengths among the various specimen thicknesses. In the shear test, there was a significant decrease in the strength with a reduction in specimen thickness. Stress distribution and fracture patterns were analyzed using in silico nonlinear dynamic finite element analysis. Finite element analysis demonstrated that stress distribution on the specimen surface was homogeneous even with different thicknesses in the tensile test, whereas it was inhomogeneous and induced different fracture patterns on the 0.05-mm-thick specimen in the shear test. These results suggest that the tensile test is useful for testing the mechanical strength of film-formed SARCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper traces a particular moment in the recent history of Malayalam Cinema when a shift in the representation of the private sphere was attempted. In the period after 2010, a set of new Malayalam films carried a shift in terms of aesthetics and narrative techniques and went on to unfold in a full-fledged manner by the end of the decade. The paper would look at Chappa Kurishu (Head or Tails, 2011), one of the early movies of this tide to shed light on the remarkable shift it achieves in representing the scenes of romantic and erotic intimacy on screen. As the narrative of the movie centers around the fight over a smart phone that ensues between two strangers in the city of Kochi, it gets entangled with questions of privacy, class and contest over the urban spaces. Bringing to the discussion contestations over the meanings of public and private manifested in certain urban-based movements in recent times like 'Kiss of Love' protests, it is argued that Chappa Kurishu can be read as a response to the contradictions arising out of the emergence of new subjects in the wake of urban transformations and the conflicting cinematic publics of multiplex and single hall theatre. The formal transactions between cinematic form and video form, the paper suggests, is one of the ways in which Chappa Kurishu attempts to respond to this situation in a way that signals the transitional position of the spectator subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between intimacy and ethics on the basis of the thematic preoccupations and aesthetic processes of the film, Touch Me Not, to re-visit the meanings of the body, beauty and sexuality in this context. Based on a discussion of how the skin–body (as an 'area before words') distinction maps onto the ethics-ontology relationship in Levinas, the article discusses the film's take on the skin as a semi-permeable border between the self and the 'other', treating touch both as a means of communication and as a metaphor for ethics. For Levinas' anti-ocular ethics opens up the possibility for a discussion of the visual image that can move beyond the classical ontology of the cinematic image. In this context, the article discusses the significance of the film's form in relation to the ethics of the visual in the cinematic space. Blurring the boundaries between the filmic and the non-filmic, reality and fiction, the film maker and the subject, the film disrupts the conventional spectators' gaze, which has come to be devoid of a moral stance in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Fonseca: Journal of Communication is the property of Revista Fonseca Journal of Communication and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article considers four films released in American independent cinema since 2000 that contain examples of female masturbation as linked with shame within the character constructs: Mulholland Dr. (2001; dir. Lynch), Secretary (2002; dir. Shainberg), Margot at the Wedding (2007; dir. Baumbach), and Black Swan (2010; dir. Aronofsky). Utilising formalist analysis of the relevant masturbation sequences in the films, along with psychoanalytic theory in relation to both masturbation and the concept of shame, this article aims to demonstrate how these films frame masturbation as negative and transgressive, and link autoerotic behaviour to the concept of shame within the development of the characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In his essay on Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet, P. Adams Sitney draws a parallel between the protagonist, Johannes, and John the Evangelist, author of the fourth gospel. He suggests that the delusional Johannes's sanity returns upon the recovery of his own name, turning on the invocation of his biblical namesake, John the Evangelist. Compelling as Sitney's is, however, I argue that we arrive at a more helpful interpretation by attending to an aspect that has been largely overlooked in critical discussion of the film: lighting. Careful analysis of the lighting yields a perspective in which Johannes is understood to be modeled not on John the Evangelist, but rather on John the Baptist. It does so, in part, by alluding to John 1:6-8, in which John the Baptist is described not as the light itself, but rather as a witness to the light of Christ. This alternative account of Johannine identity uncovers new meanings in the film, all revolving around the prophetic. Perhaps most intriguing is the possibility that Johannes may be understood to be a kind of stand-in for Kaj Munk, the prophet-like playwright of the original play of which the film is an adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trípodos is the property of Universitat Ramon Llull, Facultat de Comunicacio Blanquerna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Segunda parte de la (hasta ahora) oscura trilogía almodovariana sobre el deseo masculino, la “Mujer” objeto de ese deseo, y sus desoladores avatares (con Hable con ella [2002] y La piel que habito [2011]), Los abrazos rotos constituye una de las cimas de la filmografía de Pedro Almodóvar, conjugando la reformulación de ciertos temas formales provenientes del cajón de formas fílmicas hitchcockiano –pero también, y aquí muy especialmente, del mejor cine español (Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia)– con una sutilísima e intransferible destilación formal. Una escritura que, partiendo de imágenes en cierta forma “alejadas del mundo” por saturación gráfica y metacinemato-gráfica, lleva el proceso a tal grado de abstracción que es capaz de (re)activarlas mediante la frotación de cada una con otras semejantes, alcanzando una inusitada potencia emocional para hablarnos de las heridas del mundo y del deseo, para volver a tocar la realidad perdida a través de una ostentosa y extravagante pero a la postre fructífera hipertrofia formalista.

To understand any aspect of being-in-the-world in general or cinematic experience in particular, both reductionist and holistic approaches are needed. Psychological accounts can give us only functional explanations of human behaviour or responses to signifying artifacts such as art. To understand the significance of these experiences the psychological must be complemented by a study on a level which may be termed spiritual. This line of thought is applied to analyses of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, starting from David Bordwell's formalist and cognitive account of why many people experience this film as religious despite there being no explicit reference to religion. Paul Schrader's analysis of the formal structure of this film in terms of his notion of transcendental style in film goes a step forward by explaining how the formal structure as he analyses it suggests a transcendental dimension which cannot be addressed directly. This approach connects in an illuminating way with Slavoj Žižek's notions of the imaginary and the symbolic sphere. Bordwell's approach, functioning on the psychological level, is basically reductionist, while Schrader's, boosted with Žižek's ideas as appropriated for the purposes of this article, is holistic and operative on the spiritual level. This two-tiered analysis reveals how cinematic form in Pickpocket serves as an indirect expression of faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers some reflections on the development of Spanish and Latin-American media studies, especially in English-speaking countries, over the last twenty years focusing on the research of its author. It takes the following fields as its main foci of discussion: journalism, film form, theory, industry, television, institution, internet, Spain/Mexico, crisis, affect and Hispanism. The article ends by suggesting that the future of the discipline lies between the humanities and social sciences in a more sophisticated discussion of fiction content and media form than has hitherto been possible within Hispanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand any aspect of being-in-the-world in general or cinematic experience in particular, both reductionist and holistic approaches are needed. Psychological accounts can give us only functional explanations of human behaviour or responses to signifying artifacts such as art. To understand the significance of these experiences the psychological must be complemented by a study on a level which may be termed spiritual. This line of thought is applied to analyses of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, starting from David Bordwell’s formalist and cognitive account of why many people experience this film as religious despite there being no explicit reference to religion. Paul Schrader’s analysis of the formal structure of this film in terms of his notion of transcendental style in film goes a step forward by explaining how the formal structure as he analyses it suggests a transcendental dimension which cannot be addressed directly. This approach connects in an illuminating way with Slavoj Žižek’s notions of the imaginary and the symbolic sphere. Bordwell’s approach, functioning on the psychological level, is basically reductionist, while Schrader’s, boosted with Žižek’s ideas as appropriated for the purposes of this article, is holistic and operative on the spiritual level. This two-tiered analysis reveals how cinematic form in Pickpocket serves as an indirect expression of faith.

By foregrounding the formal choices through which it depicts its image of violence, Wind forces us to consider how the image might ethically respond to violence. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this article argues that Wind positions the viewer to understand time as a force for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text will reply to eight reviews of my 2006 book Filmosophy: Alexia Bowler in New Cinemas, Mark Cousins in Sight and Sound, Ils Huygens in Scope, Tony McKibbin in Senses of Cinema, Brian Price in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Richard Rushton in Screen, Robert Sinnerbrink in Projections, and David Sterritt in Film International. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to propose an evaluation method for testing the mechanical strength of film-formed self-adhesive resin cements (SARCs) while reflecting cement layer thickness. Three commercially available dual-cure type SARCs were used for tensile and shear tests using specimens with varying thicknesses (0.05, 0.2, and 0.4 mm). There were no significant differences in tensile strengths among the various specimen thicknesses. In the shear test, there was a significant decrease in the strength with a reduction in specimen thickness. Stress distribution and fracture patterns were analyzed using in silico nonlinear dynamic finite element analysis. Finite element analysis demonstrated that stress distribution on the specimen surface was homogeneous even with different thicknesses in the tensile test, whereas it was inhomogeneous and induced different fracture patterns on the 0.05-mm-thick specimen in the shear test. These results suggest that the tensile test is useful for testing the mechanical strength of film-formed SARCs.