Was Swift correct that “reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired” (Letter to a Young Gentleman)? If so, what recourse is there to change attitudes especially among those who continue to fervently believe unjustified claims and act upon them in a way that affects other people? I will answer the…[Read more]

According to Manuel Davenport, “The best humorists–Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Bob Hope, and Mort Sahl–share [a] mixture of detachment and desire, eagerness to believe, and irreverence concerning the possibility of certainty. And when they become serious about their convictions–as Twain did about colonialism…they cease to be humorous”. I agree…[Read more]

This chapter will focus on the overlap and benefits of a humorous and philosophical attitude toward the world and our place in it. The first part of this chapter’s title borrows from Kierkegaard and before him the Christian apologist Turtullian, who once quipped about the central contradictory tenets of Christianity, in putatively ironic f…[Read more]

I argue that the overt subjugation in the system of American slavery and its subsequent effects offer a case study for an existentialist analysis of freedom, oppression and humor. Concentrating on the writings and experiences of Frederick Douglass and the existentialists Simone De Beauvoir and Lewis Gordon, I investigate how the concepts of…[Read more]

No tenemos tiempo; nunca como ahora la productividad había dominado cada aspecto de la vida. Nuestras experiencias personales se apropian como bienes extractivos de la industria de datos. El arte crítico hoy aún permite imaginar un tiempo que no pueda ser apropiado por el relato del progreso y el aprovechamiento del tiempo, que posponga la ut…[Read more]

Review of Mike Wayne’s “Marxism Goes to the Movies”.

This article examines the link posited by Virilio and others between the camera shot and gun shot, arguing that this link operates differently in the context of Soviet vs. Western fantasies of agency, community and technology. Comparing THE LOST PATROL (USA 1934, John Ford) with TRINADTSAT (THIRTEEN, UdSSR 1936, Mikhail Romm), it asks what kind of…[Read more]

Nöel Carroll has been one of the most eloquent proponents of an anti-essentialist view of art, in particular, of cinema. He seems to think that Stanley Cavell holds an essentialist view of film, put forward in his foundational work, The World Viewed, and developed in later essays and books. While Carroll admires Cavell’s philosophical readings of…[Read more]

Paper on performance and personal identity in the television series “Battlestar Galactica”.

En este texto se analiza la relación entre mirada y memoria en el cine como una serie de interacciones que tienen lugar en las superficies de sus imágenes y recuerdos. Ante aquellas experiencias empobrecidas por la aniquilación del pasado en la guerra, por la desesperanza e imposibilidad de imaginar el porvenir o la desazón por la desconexión del…[Read more]

I analyze the strategies used in Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz 2010), Enrique Buchichio’s Behind the Truth (Zanahoria 2014) and Nicolas Pereda’s Summer of Goliath (Verano de Goliath 2010) to expose the political uses of landscape images in concealing and reconstructing forced disappearances and the violence surro…[Read more]

El texto explora el uso del tiempo y la producción de lo cómico en “El discreto encanto de la burguesía” (“Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie”, Luis Buñuel, Francia, 1972) y Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, Estados Unidos/Japón/Italia, 2003).

While found documents have long been marshalled as evidence in documentary, several recent films have interrogated the found document’s evidentiary status and raised questions about the ethics of appropriation. This essay examines two films — Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) and Jane Gillooly’s Suitcase of Love and Shame (2013) – in rela…[Read more]

This paper explores the ways in which Natalie Bookchin’s video loop installation entitled Mass Ornament (2009) both replicates and diverges from the notion of the mass ornament articulated by Siegfried Kracauer in the 1930s. By appropriating YouTube videos of many anonymous amateurs dancing alone in their homes and synchronizing them so that the d…[Read more]

Found footage filmmaking often generates novel juxtapositions and produces new meanings unintended by the footage’s original makers – meanings that are, in other words, “inappropriate.” One response to many such films is laughter. Through an examination of several experimental found footage videos made in the past decade, this chapter explore…[Read more]

Contemporary developments in the medium of the moving picture, particularly in relation to the general digitisation of media, are bringing about substantial changes to long-held conceptions of both its theory and its practice. This thesis asserts that a significant factor in these, both historically and in terms of potential development, is the…[Read more]

The fourth issue of “Cinema” addresses the topic of philosophy of religion and its connections with cinematic art. Film and religion have been fruitful research topics taken in conjunction. Researchers in this specific field have focused on particular periods (like the censorship era in the USA), on representations of religious traditions and pra…[Read more]

If Guy Maddin were a scientist, he would be a mad scientist. Perhaps, then, he is a mad artist, effusively mixing images that appear to come from the silent era and sounds that seem to come from the first talkies. The metaphor is apt—and not just because of the weird, frenzied scientist father in “Brand upon the Brain!” (2006). It is apt becau…[Read more]

The encounter in the 1960s and 70s between Marxism and film studies, as an institutionally recognised academic field, was a radically incomplete and perhaps even a rather superficial and unsatisfactory affair. The work of cross-fertilisation between Marxism and film and their critical sifting of concepts and perspectives had hardly begun when for…[Read more]

The split screen is a well-known multi-frame technique used in film, television, and video. This essay focuses on cases in which this denomination seems incorrect, but that are currently classified under the same heading. In these instances, images of usually distinct characteristics are arranged on screen. The aim is to explore and define this…[Read more]