Cinema

Theodore F. Rippey, Advisor
ABSTRACT
While popular movies are often overlooked in film studies, the action-adventure genre in the 1980s has drawn considerable academic attention. The consensus among the literature is that a conservative backlash (spurred on by Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office) against a resurgent equality movement gave rise to hypermasculine movies like First Blood and Predator and hypermasculine stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. While this still holds true, a closer look at the movies and the era reveals a much more nuanced picture. A thorough examination of the culture, the movies, and the male bodies on-screen in the 1980s—through the lens of affect theory, cinematography, and spectacle, among others—uncovers a number of significant cultural phenomena that have the potential to shape future academic work.
This study not only elucidates and reconstructs the conception of filmic spectacle to include the male body on-screen, it also identifies two types of male bodies on-screen in the 1980s—the muscle-bound, aesthetically spectacular body and the lithe, kinesthetically spectacular body. Additionally, this study argues that filmic spectacle (as experienced by viewers) is actually made up of two discrete dimensions, a physical dimension composed of massive scale and explosions and a physiological one composed of affect and emotion. Unpacking spectacle in this way ultimately produces a number of new tools for film scholars while reimagining, in a significant way, American culture in the 1980s, the action-adventure movies of the decade, and the greater cultural currents in the Reagan era.

A number of Pulfrich 3-D movies and TV shows have been produced, but the standard implementation has inherent drawbacks. The movie and TV industries have correctly concluded that the standard Pulfrich 3-D implementation is not a useful 3-D technique. Continuously Adjustable Pulfrich Spectacles (CAPS) is a new implementation of the Pulfrich effect that allows any scene containing movement in a standard 2-D movie, which are most scenes, to be optionally viewed in 3-D using inexpensive viewing specs. Recent scientific results in the fields of human perception, optoelectronics, video compression and video format conversion are translated into a new implementation of Pulfrich 3-D. CAPS uses these results to continuously adjust to the movie so that the viewing spectacles always conform to the optical density that optimizes the Pulfrich stereoscopic illusion. CAPS instantly provides 3-D immersion to any moving scene in any 2-D movie. Without the glasses, the movie will appear as a normal 2-D image. CAPS work on any viewing device, and with any distribution medium. CAPS is appropriate for viewing Internet streamed movies in 3-D.

Minha esposa Flo e eu então começamos a esfregar perspectivas próximas junto com um sistema de dupla projeção que chamei de O Sistema Nervoso, que produzia loucas visões, oscilando entre o reconhecível e o inimaginável. E foi aqui que surgiu o Eternalismo. (...) Uma alternância constante e a repetição de fotogramas próximos em sequência, mais um intervalo de preto entre as repetições, não apenas faz a profundidade aparecer como também cria movimento, um movimento 3D que permanece unidirecional, não retornando e então seguindo mais uma vez; um movimento capturado, indo para lugar nenhum, o Eternalismo.

Malcolm Turvey: We are here to discuss the various ways digital technologies have, and have not, impacted experimental filmmaking. There was a time, in the mid-1990s, if not before, when some people argued that digital technologies were revolutionary and that they would fundamentally change filmmaking. Now that the dust has settled, or at least started to settle, and we can look back over the last fifteen or twenty years, the "digital revolution" might not seem like a revolution at all. We want to talk about both what has stayed the same and what has changed in experimental filmmaking thanks to the advent of digital technologies. Ken Jacobs: I think those people were right, but they were premature. They first made that argument about analogue video. But analogue video was not the way. There were people, like myself, who saw it as a great but transient medium. We saw good things being done, but now those things have gone. Turvey: Are you talking about video art? Ken Jacobs: Yes. Federico Windhausen: When video art emerged, was it being discussed as something that experimental filmmakers would have to address? I have always had the sense that experimental filmmakers in the era of analogue video art felt that they could keep their distance from it pretty easily. Flo Jacobs: That's because the film-developing labs were still functioning. Windhausen: So it wasn't a threat? It was something you could easily avoid? Ken Jacobs: That's right. Windhausen: Do others recall the situation in the same way? Mark Street: I remember the discussion about who was a video artist and who was a filmmaker, and how they had different purviews. You said the advent of analogue video art-so you're talking about the early 1960s? Windhausen: The moment of wider dissemination of the technology in the late 1960s and '70s. Street: In the 1980s, when I went to film school, there was still that distinction, but it started to mean less. People were making choices about shooting on analogue video based on economics, not based on content or aesthetics. When I

AMERICAN CROSSROADS Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sanchez, and Dana Takagi 1. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, by Jose David Saldivar 2. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton ...

Precinct was a site-specific art project/ performance/ exhibit put on by SITE: Buffalo Artist Collective, an organization devoted to a nontraditional approach to art emphasizing the experiential and the value of spectered memories contained in found objects and images. With the aid of the Buffalo Arts Commission, the abandoned police precinct (now destroyed) on Niagara Street on Buffalo\u27s West side was open to the public, occupied and interacted with for a one-day event. This venue was specifically selected in order to bypass the gallerycentric mode of display which tends to dominate the world of art. By doing so, SITE made their work more accessible to a wider range of people than would typically attend an art event held at a commercial art space and thus emphasized the blur that occupies the space between art and lived life. The police were no longer using the building and it was an immobile block of concrete on a busy street, a corner convenience store next door. This paper ex...

could swim Like dolphins Like dolphins can swim But nothing Can keep us together We can be heroes Just for one day We're gonna be ourselves Just for one day 1 "[f]ilm is somehow capable of showing an inner world that is otherwise invisible. That's what my profession is… celluloid will save us"-Werner Herzog 2 Leaving a mark, a trace, becoming a remnant: what is to become of a life? Some of us who prefer not to judge, judge life lived by another based on our own fantasies and fears. Can a life be an ecstatic truth lived, or not: how close to jouissance 3 can we take it? How do we even come close to knowing 4 such life is possible? What is there to take us there? "I think the bears redeemed him more than he redeemed the bears,"-Werner Herzog 5

The social change implicit in Shary Boyle's paintings, sculptures, and drawings points to a negotiation of sexual difference that both illustrates Freud's concept of the castration complex's potential consequences for women, and envisions a world where it seems not to exist, thus becoming a form of resistance to the repressions of the symbolic order as based on language. In reading Freud's essay das Unheimlich through its absence of an emphasis on the visual triggers and experiences of the Uncanny, this paper is a critique based on the potentiality of a Feminine Uncanny that is implicitly embedded in das Unheimlich itself. In focusing on the visual nature of the Uncanny, Shary Boyle's artwork helps us to understand-to seethe power of a conceptualization of the feminine as a force present in our culture, yet rendered invisible through its veiling and curtailing by traditional psychoanalytic theories.

The social change implicit in Shary Boyle's paintings, sculptures, and drawings points to a negotiation of sexual difference that both illustrates Freud's concept of the castration complex's potential consequences for women, and envisions a world where it seems not to exist, thus becoming a form of resistance to the repressions of the symbolic order as based on language. In reading Freud's essay das Unheimlich through its absence of an emphasis on the visual triggers and experiences of the Uncanny, this paper is a critique based on the potentiality of a Feminine Uncanny that is implicitly embedded in das Unheimlich itself. In focusing on the visual nature of the Uncanny, Shary Boyle's artwork helps us to understand-to seethe power of a conceptualization of the feminine as a force present in our culture, yet rendered invisible through its veiling and curtailing by traditional psychoanalytic theories.