Cinema's bodily illusions : flying, floating, and hallucinating / Scott C. Richmond.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Richmond, Scott C., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Aesthetics.

Motion pictures.

Illusion in motion pictures.

Cinematography--Special effects.

Cinematography.

Motion pictures--Psychological aspects.

Perception (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

215 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2016]

Summary:

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, "Cinema?s Bodily Illusions" demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema?s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you?re flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers? embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad?s The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp?s Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick?s 2001, Godfrey Reggio?s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón?s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty?s phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson?s ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema?s perceptual, rather than representational, power.

Contents:

Introduction: proprioceptive aesthetics, or the cinema

The unfinished business of modernism: anemic cinema

Beyond the infinite, at home in finitude: 2001

Ecological phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Gibson

Proprioception, the øcart: Koyaanisqatsi

The body, unbounded: Gravity

Aesthetics beyond the The flicker

Conclusion: the technicity of the cinema.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780816690961

0816690960

9780816690992

0816690995

OCLC:

928750668