Vision and the Gaze

Abstract Consumer decision making process has always been a subject of interest for marketers. The present study examines the decision making process in respect of restaurant services in India. Restaurant sector is vibrant due to changing life style of people and ...

This article discusses Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from the perspective of the notion and the activity of looking or being looked at. It is argued that the power of the gaze and the particular semiotics of " ocular economy " , while to some extent linked to biographical contexts, can also be noticed in Walpole's text itself. What is studied is not only the way in which images are used in the text, i.e. what function they perform, but also how they structure the importance of an appeal to vision and images within hauntological perspective and the Gothic genre of literature. R

The expressiveness of use is of focal interest in fashion design, which makes the perspective of act design important in learning/teaching. The objective of the project presented here was to introduce interaction design methods in fashion design teaching to make act design explicit throughout the different stages of the design process in a systematic manner; to develop a general workshop curriculum in experimental fashion design focusing on the expressiveness of wearing and use. A series of test workshops were implemented to provide a foundation for reflection and critical discussions. The main results, motivated by workshop evaluations, consist of theoretical models for a systematic development of workshop exercises in fashion design aesthetics.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop ideas about photography as a consumer behavior and as a researcher practice, by examining social science research traditions,
photographers, and consumer research that utilizes photography. Photography is one stream of many in representing consumers. Interactions between photography and identity – personal identity, gender identity, ethnic identity -- are analyzed to demonstrate the functions of photography as an important site for discussing issues of representation. Through a selective, personal review of photography focused on the production and consumption of photographic representation I develop a framework for incorporating photography into consumer research that bears on questions of consumption, identity, and representation. The paper draws on photography writings, consumer research, social science research, and personal narrative to discuss the role photography plays in the construction and representation of identity. Mass media photography -- popular magazine photography, art photography, books, and popular film – is analyzed, employing concepts of the gaze, identity, and representation. Throughout, travel photography will provide illustrative examples. Consumer researchers might be considered 'tourists' in these matters, casting the 'tourist gaze' upon other methods, other fields, and research 'subjects' in our quest for new scholarly resources and frontiers. This metaphor will be explored through an analysis of travel photography, theories of tourism, and personal reflection. Through a discussion of photography and identity, I intend to sketch an outline of a theory of consuming representation.

The Greek world was full of the divine, and the imagined world of the ancient novels was no different. 1 Divinity and its worship pervade the novels' narratives, helping to unite, drive apart, and then reunite their protagonists. In this paper, I explore the relationship between ancient religion and literature, the transformation of literary tradition, and the place of the marvelous in the novels' narratives by examining the role that one aspect of the human experience of the gods, epiphany, plays in the genre. Although the novelists describe very few scenes of actual epiphany, 2 they make abundant use of the epiphanic metaphor in what I will call "epiphanic situations," when an internal audience reacts to the hero or, most often, the heroine of the novel as if he or she were a god or goddess. These epiphanic situations transform the common metaphor of divine beauty into a reality, at least as experienced by the internal audience, 3 and they offer the novelists an alternative to ekphrasis for expressing ineffable beauty.

The aim of this paper is to unravel further what the film The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain (Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain -Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) is saying about critical seeing and vision. Presenting a discussion of the film by depending on the concepts of gaze, look, screen and productive look by Kaja Silverman, this study focuses on the ways the film problematizes seeing by the way the society and culture demands. Perceiving the world with a critical eye and not accepting the visions provided by the society without questioning can be regarded as the idea underlined by the main character Amelie (Andre Tautou). Via locating its main concern on the issue about seeing and by displaying examples of productive look that Silverman defines, the film challenges the way people see through visual representations such as film, photography and video, which are discussed by depending of critical literature on visual culture. The paper argues that The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain is a film, which not only comments on seeing but also challenges the visual regime of societies by using everyday visual production tools.

This paper attempts to rethink the concept of the filmic gaze through a comparative analysis of three films, namely, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Krótki film o miłości (A Short Film about Love, 1988), Ferzan Ozpetek’s La Finestra di Fronte (Facing Windows, 2003), and Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012). ‘Filmic gaze’ here refers not to the production of the filmic/discursive self through suture but, by merging the Lacanian and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of intersubjectivity, to the whole fabric of the film, which is construed as a looking subject. Kaja Silverman’s cinematic suture theory and Descartes’s dark room parable are employed to illustrate how the passivizing filmic gaze of classical narrative cinema confines the spectator to the position of the voyeur, who observes rather than creates the scene that pleases her. A Short Film about Love is analysed to demonstrate conventional film-audience dynamics and is then compared with two contemporary auteur films, Facing Windows and Moonrise Kingdom, which, by addressing viewers through the characters’ telltale eyes, keep reconceiving suture as they go along, blurring the boundary between intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic looks, and thus offering spectators a more active and varied spectatorial agency than that of the voyeur.

Per gli studi di genere in campo cinematografico il masochismo e le sue dinamiche hanno costituito una delle linee di ricerca più significative nel costruire un’ipotesi alternativa al modello teorizzato da Laura Mulvey nel suo saggio fondativo “Piacere visivo e cinema narrativo”. Se Mulvey vede nel sadismo la dinamica psichica fondamentale nel definire il rapporto di subordinazione del femminile al maschile – dinamica che nel cinema ha gli esempi più alti nell’opera di Hitchcock – il masochismo vede proprio un rovesciamento di tale rapporto. In effetti, il masochismo – nella versione proposta da Gilles Deleuze in Il freddo e il crudele – è caratterizzato da una reversibilità delle posizioni di genere, prevede lo scambio continuo dei ruoli di potere: in ultima analisi esso mette in scena questioni riguardanti la bisessualità.

Ma il masochismo è anche un’estetica particolare, in quanto presuppone strutture narrative circolari e ripetitive e attiva un regime visivo sensuale. Partendo da questi presupposti, il saggio affronta le diverse teorie psicoanalitiche sul masochismo (Freud, Deleuze, Silverman, ecc.) per passare poi a studiare le molteplici forme del masochismo cinematografico ed in particolare la sua declinazione nelle dinamiche del piacere visivo prodotte dal genere horror.

When approaching Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), either from a film-analytical or film-historical standpoint, there are a number of aspects to and surrounding the film, discussion of which seems inexorable. Namely, the psychological exploration of the serial killer, the psychoanalytical issues surrounding voyeurism and its alleged inverse, exhibitionism, and the implications that a study of scopophilia has on the subject of cinema as a whole. Put also in the context of the extreme negative reaction Peeping Tom received when it first came out, the aforementioned topics are given an even weightier sense of importance and immediacy. It is these contexts in which I am going to consider Peeping Tom in this essay.

A partire dal triplice intreccio con cui lega insieme filosofia hegeliana, psicoanalisi lacaniana e cultura di massa, Slavoj Žižek si propone sin dai suoi primi lavori di indagare i fenomeni sociali, allo scopo di disvelare le dinamiche che intervengono nel processo di costruzione della soggettività e con esse il significato politico delle fantasie ideologiche, fantasie di controllo, di completezza ed esclusione, che determinano il funzionamento della società in cui tale soggetto si colloca.
Pensatore più che filosofo, per dirlo in termini deleuziani, ovvero figura nomadica che muove concetti continuamente riarticolandoli, con i suoi scritti Žižek offre alla teoria psicoanalitica dell’ideologia un contributo capace di dare un’interpretazione persuasiva di molte formazioni culturali contemporanee, prima tra tutte il cinema, che egli erige a privilegiato oggetto di riflessione e terreno di verifica del proprio paradigma teorico.
“Arte perversa per eccellenza”, il cinema più che proporre al soggetto la gratificazione del suo desiderio, punta invece ad indicargli “come desiderare” , in virtù della sua peculiare capacità di metterci direttamente a confronto con le pulsioni più nascoste, rimosse e negate dall’individuo e dalla società, consentendo così di passare al setaccio le relazioni tra sguardo e desiderio, fantasia e realtà (entrambe in senso lacaniano), ovvero di indagare il declinarsi della dialettica da cui deriva il soggetto stesso, quella tra i tre assi del simbolico, dell’immaginario e del reale. È infatti dall’avvicendarsi di queste tre dimensioni, o meglio dall’intrecciarsi infinito di simbolico e immaginario (dimensione del linguaggio e della cultura, e dimensione costitutiva dell’io nella relazione con l’altro) intorno alla dimensione traumatica del reale (dimensione pre-simbolica della jouissance) 2, che si evidenzia con chiarezza il continuo scambio in atto tra dinamiche individuali e formazioni socio-simboliche, tra soggettività e Grande Altro, quali istanze inscindibilmente legate tra loro da una comune “struttura ontologica”, che Žižek, come Lacan, individua nella dinamica psichica del fantasma (fantasia). Da “idiosincrasia soggettiva”3 quindi, com’era in Freud (ossia una formazione ausiliaria derivante dal trauma dell’impossibilità di realizzazione dei propri desideri), il fantasma diviene qui “struttura ontologica”, la quale in definitiva, costituisce il soggetto, ma lo costituisce in senso negativo, ovvero come “frustrazione nella sua essenza”

Профессор кафедры антропологии Калифорнийского университета в Беркли ПО СЛЕДАМ ЖЕНСКОГО ОБРАЗА Cимволическая работа нового рекламного дискурса В сборнике: «Женщина и визуальные знаки », ред. Анна Альчук, М.: Идея-Пресс, 2000 Это эссе посвящено анализу того, как новая реклама успешно использует в своих целях идеи заимствованные из критического анализа традиционных общественных стереотипов и отношений. При этом заимствованные идеи, преломляясь в рекламе, часто работают на воспроизводство тех самых социальных стереотипов, которые эти идеи первоначально критиковали. Конкретнее, здесь рассматривается как реклама, заимствуя идеи из дискурсов критикующих социальное неравенство полов («гендерное» неравенство), преломляет эти идеи в своих интересах так, что они воспроизводят это неравенство на новом уровне. Мы начнём с теоретической части, рассмотрев в каком смысле можно анализировать идеологическую функцию рекламы вообще, затем перейдём к анализу новой «активной» рекламы, и в заключении рассмотрим на примерах как российская активная реклама воспроизводит гендерные стереотипы.

Denkt man über die Differenz von Singular und Plural der Bilder nach, mag einem als elementare Größe eine Einheit aus zwei Bildern in den Sinn kommen. Keine Konstellation scheint für eine Definition dessen, was das Bild im Plural sein könnte, elementarer und prägnanter als das Zusammentreffen zweier Bilder. Näher besehen und genauer durchdacht erweist sich diese Annahme zwar nicht als falsch, aber als ein wenig zu einfach. Schließlich kann eine Einheit aus zwei Bildern nicht den gleichen Zugewinn an relationaler Komplexität erbringen wie eine Verbindung von drei oder mehr Komponenten. Nicht ohne Grund, so scheint es, kannten und kennen einige Sprachen den Dual, der den besonderen Status der Zwei grammatikalisch markiert und ihn von Einzahl und Mehrzahl unterscheidet. Freilich bietet ein solcher Dual, auf Bilder bezogen, seine ganz eigenen Komplikationen, die aus dem fehlenden Abstand zwischen Singular und Plural resultieren: Ist das Bilderpaar ein Bild, zwei Bilder oder gar drei? Im nachfolgenden Beitrag wird diese Frage an repräsentativen Beispielen der Bildgattung des Diptychons durchgespielt, dessen bildgeschichtliche Schlüsselposition sich erst seit einigen Jahren abzeichnet. Das Diptychon der niederländischen Malerei des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts überrascht durch die außerordentliche kombinatorische Vielseitigkeit, mit der die Zweierstruktur der klappbaren Doppeltafel variiert wurde. Die zunehmende Erforschung der Objektform führt zu einem neuen Blick auf die ars nova der Altniederländer, die bis dato als Kunst des neuen Eintafelbildes und großformatiger Klappretabel für die Altäre der Kirchen galt. Gegenüber diesen Bildformen kann das Diptychon jedoch mehr beanspruchen als eine bloß numerische Zwischenposition. Das Scharnier, das die beiden Bildtafeln verbindet, verweist uns zurück auf eine lange intermediale Symbiose von Buch und Bild. Spätmittelalterliche Praktiken einer buchgestützten Imagination entdeckten im Mechanismus des Öffnens und Schließens das ideale Vehikel für den angestrebten Bildtransfer vom Buch ins Herz. Ausgehend von der Analogie zwischen Imagination und Malerei konnte das Diptychon dann zu einem starken Modell für den künstlerischen Prozess der Bildproduktion werden. Mit der Beweglichkeit des Scharniers und der daraus resultierenden Variabilität der Bildanordnung besaß es aber auch eine technisch-spielerische Komponente, die anschlussfähig ist für die Frage nach der modernen und postmodernen Praxis der Mehrbildlichkeit.

Undisclosed Desires of the Images: The Medusa Effect

The article explores the power of fascination of images and its connection to the mythological Medusa figure. What are the secrets of certain captivating images? Why are some images more powerful than others? Image's ability to create a vortex than can absorb the beholder and to arrest its movements literally killing the life, is a sign of power or weakness? What creates a very profound communication between the image and the beholder? I will try to answer these questions under the teachings of Lacan, Diderot, Aristotle and by a vast research of literature.

From The Selfie to The Spiritual: Contemplating Female Self-Representation in a Digital Age investigates a central question: how might seeing the self through a spiritual lens expand the contemporary field of female self-representation in which the digital selfie reigns?

My studio project springs from and engages with existing research into selfie culture, contemporary self-representation in art and spirituality in art. Through my artworks, I seek to discover alternatives to a visual culture obsessed with exteriority, object-hood and surface representations of the self. In suggesting such alternatives, my project advocates for greater critical awareness and potential transformation of female objectification and self-objectification in visual culture including social media.

Deploying sculpture, video, light and photographic work, my project prompts a re-imagination of female self-representation. The art works propose a parallel symbolic relationship between sight and a search for self-understanding. This connection between seeking and vision is referred to via a range of spiritual and religious references to meditation, pilgrimage, worship, baptism and rebirth and ocular motifs including irises, contact lenses, crystal balls and mirrors.

Through a spatial installation of objects and images reflecting interiority, symbolic narrative and inward focus, I explore the potential to express a layered and complex spiritual account of the self from within an increasingly commodified, networked and disembodied digital age.

This chapter investigates Palestinian and Babylonian "visual eros" by considering the gendering of vision in the realm of desire. Tracing through different themes ranging from: "genitalia and the gender of the gaze," to "visual asceticism," and then to "beautiful men," the chapter situates rabbinic desire across Palestine and Babylonia and in conversation with Greco-Roman and Christian trends.

Just as visions of God triggered anxieties about sexuality and idolatry, so too did the rabbis construct a visual opposition, in certain circumstances, between the erotic and the sacred in the field of vision. Even if looking at  the  divine  was  dangerous,  it  was  laudatory  in  ways  that  looking  at sexually arousing entities was not. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that the rabbis thought in highly gendered terms about seeing sexually. Rabbinic ideas about visual erotics, particularly in the context of prohibition and visual asceticism, seem at first glance to rest on a basic binary: a gendered distribution of visual labor, with a masculine, penetrative gaze and a feminine visual object. Yet, the concerns triggered by the sexual gaze and the possible solution of male visual asceticism themselves had curious consequences. Withdrawing from the world of visual eros turned unseeing rabbis into visual objects desired by women, by other rabbis, and by gentile men and women. This effectively troubled a simple binary division of visual and erotic labor. Amidst these sexual dramas, we see that just as the visualization of God was shaped by the politics of a post-temple world and life under the Roman Christian imperium, so too did their cultural and political circumstances impact the rabbis’ sense of their own visible desirability.

Colonial discourse is duplicitous and illogical, yet retains an illusion of univocity, consistency, or truth, in the mind of the colonising authority. Bhabha's conceptualisation of stereotype as simultaneously phobia and fetish is applied to depictions of Maori in colonial-period artworks and exhibition. These polyvalent depictions add weight to Bhabha's claim that disavowal and fetishisation of the Other are mutually reinforcing. I also discuss the possibility, in the post-colonial situation, of destruction of the colonial logic through a plurivocal, hybrid dissolution of Otherness rather than a one-dimensional 'Indigeneity' as prescribed by some critics, the latter of which has the potential to reinforce the logic's definitional power.

It is widely accepted that Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema revolves around the representation of the gaze. Many critics argue that he should be considered a late modernist who repeats the self-reflexive gestures of
modernist European cinema decades after they were first introduced. The present paper will contradict this assertion by investigating the problematic of the Kiarostamian gaze and analyzing the perceptual side of the act of looking. I will argue that instead of focusing on the gaze of the spectator directed towards the filmic image, he exposes a gaze that is fully integrated into the reality to be captured on film. The second part of the paper will explain this by linking the concept of gaze to the Lacanian concept of the order of the Real. Finally, I will contextualize all this by discussing the Iranian director’s position between Eastern and Western traditions of representation.

This paper investigates moments of presence that are realised when photographing ‘the poetics of empty space’ and argues that awareness of these poetical spaces/places can lead to ‘entropia’, a term I conceptualise as the combining of utopia (the longing for paradise) and entropy (the loss of energy from a system), present in the language of the collective gaze of some contemporary australian photographers. Their gaze seems to be directed towards the naming, longing for, and solidification of, a ‘poetic space’, a formal construction of space that immobilises Barthes ‘punctum’ through awareness, possibly in order to deny the fluidity and fragmentation of space present in the ephemeral images of a media-rich informational society.

The first time I conceptualised the term 'entropia'.

SISÄLTÖ
ALKUSANAT 6
1 Johdanto 9
1.1 TAVOITTEET 9
1.2 NÄKÖKULMIA JA MUOTOILUN KÄYTÄNTÖJÄ 13
1.3 TEEMAT 17
2 Kuluttajakuvia 31
2.1 BRÄNDI, TARVE JA ARVO 34
2.2 ELÄMÄNTAPOJEN KUVAUKSIA 45
2.3 MUOTITRENDIEN VISUAALISUUS 56
2.4 OSTAMMEKO IDENTITEETTIMME? 66
3 Makuja ja kaipauksia 71
3.1 MODERNI MAKU 71
3.2 MODERNIN MUOTOILUN MAKU 89
3.3 MASSOJEN MAKU 101
3.4 POISSAOLEVAN KAIPAAMINEN 112
3.5 MAKU KAIPAUKSENA 123
4 Katseet esineissä 129
4.1 KATSE JA OMAKUVA 130
4.2 OMAKUVAN NÄYTTÄMÖT 135
4.3 ARJEN ELÄMYSNÄYTTÄMÖITÄ 138
4.4 KUVITTEELLISTEN PERSOONIEN VISUAALISET MAUT 148
5 Visuaalisuus ja muodon kieli 165
5.1 MUOTOILUN KIELET 166
5.2 NÄKEMISEN AISTIMUKSELLISUUS 176
5.3 VISUAALINEN JÄRJESTYS 190
6 Visuaalinen kuluttaminen 211
6.1 KÄYTTÄJÄKOKEMUKSEN KUVITTAMINEN 212
6.2 MUOTOILIJAT MIELTYMYSTEN KARTOITTAJINA 224
6.3 SUOSITTELUA JA PERSONOINTIA 242
6.4 VISUAALISUUS SOSIAALISESSA MEDIASSA 249
6.5 VISUAALISUUS SÄHKÖISESSÄ KAUPASSA 258
6.6 INNOVAATIOITA VISUAALISISTA MAUISTA 262
Lähteet
PAINETUT LÄHTEET 266
VERKKOLÄHTEET 270
SUULLISET JA JULKAISEMATTOMAT LÄHTEET 278
KUVALÄHTEET 278
ASIASANAT 283
HENKILÖHAKEMISTO 286
SUOSITELTAVAA KIRJALLISUUTTA 290

Nowadays the images from our recent Soviet past become more distant—not only in terms of time, but the context becomes less and less obvious as a consequence of time passing. The ability to understand the meanings of images and distinguish between Soviet and non-Soviet is determined not only by the content of a photograph, but also by the viewer’s experience. The fashion photographs from the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is a good example on that score. Specific soviet cultural experiences appearing through borrowed Western patterns can be recognized through the small details like a pose, a gaze and a backdrop, as well as through the materiality of the print itself. The attempt to fix one’s gaze and make one’s way through the many layers of the image, conditioned both by its content and its material characteristics, gives another opportunity to interact with the recent past.

Quiet eye training (QET) may be a more effective method for teaching children to catch than traditional training (TT)
methods, but it is unclear if the benefits accrued persist in the long term. Thirty children were randomly allocated into a
QET or TT group and, while wearing a mobile eye tracker, underwent baseline testing, training and two retention tests
over a period of eight weeks, using a validated throw and catch task. During training, movement-related information was
provided to both groups, while the QET group received additional instruction to increase the duration of their targeting
fixation (QE1) on the wall prior to the throw, and pursuit tracking (QE2) period on the ball prior to catching. In both
immediate (R1) and delayed (R2, six weeks later) retention tests, the QET group had a significantly longer QE1 duration
and an earlier and longer QE2 duration, compared to the TT group, who revealed no improvements. A performance
advantage was also found for the QET compared to the TT group at both R1 and R2, revealing the relatively robust
nature of the visuomotor alterations. Regression analyses suggested that only the duration of QE1 predicted variance in
catch success post-training, pointing to the importance of a pre-programming visuomotor strategy for successful throw
and catch performance.

1. We look through the mind and we gaze within awareness…becoming aware of awareness is the path of gazing (whether eyes or open or closed)…we can gaze into awareness and we are immediately the field, the field of being. If we look and look for awareness with our mind only blankness arises, a blank state. Sunyata, primordial knowingness is not blankness, it is not blanking out. As we become aware of awareness we enter the gaze, we become the place of the gaze…this gazing from within awareness opens the multidimensionalness….the different dimensions of the field manifest within the gaze, within us. The gaze is both within us and beyond us. Within the gaze, there is neither simple inside nor simple outside. The gaze is place...a vast place beyond inside and outside.

An introductory speculation, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle is a consideration of the epistemological, ontological and metaphysical downfalls of film theory’s understandings of the spectator and the spectacle; with particular emphasis directed towards the neurobiological implications of the spectator’s body.

The thesis will argue that these shortcomings are representative of wider ranging issues of complacency engulfing the film industry and film exhibition as a whole. Furthermore, the fundamental disruptions of the digital upgrade of cinema, and the expanding means through which film content can be experienced, will be explored in relation to the pressing need for film theory to reassess itself.

Drawing on a plethora of empirical and non-empirical research, this dissertation is a highly progressive expression of how film experience has always been about transcendence and, as a result of its digital re-birth and diversifications, it is now becoming even more so.

This paper is a survey on different strategies used by Roman artists to produce meta-figurative effects. It deals with four questions: 1/ how relieves on a couple of Augustan altars managed to perform a mise en abyme, 2/ how famous works of art were “quoted” on a Pompeian fresco (house of Venus in the Shell), 3/ if Roman painters explored self-portraiture and 4/ how they varied reflections on painted mirrors considering the gender of the reflected subject. This first survey throws light on the way Roman image-makers have explored a large panel of meta-figuration: they comment their own technique through these images that must be studied considering the time they were performed by the gaze of their different viewers, and the time they were perpetuated through ages.

"Jaime" è un mediometraggio dedicato al caso clinico di Jaime Fernandes, un contadino nato in un villaggio del nord-est del Portogallo che fu internato all’ospedale psichiatrico Miguel Bombarda di Lisbona nel 1938, con la diagnosi di schizofrenia, e vi restò per 31 anni. Gli ultimi anni della vita di Jaime furono caratterizzati da una frenetica attività di pittore e disegnatore, di cui il film si propone di dar conto partendo dalle opere sopravvissute. Il film esprime in modo esemplare il clima culturale degli anni Settanta, in cui il tema della follia era al centro di riflessioni filosofiche, politiche e mediche, dagli studi di Foucault al movimento internazionale dell’antipsichiatria, fino ad alcuni film militanti come "Matti da slegare" (1975).

In his 2005 film The Willow Tree (Bīd-i Majnūn), Majid Majidi offers a complex moral commentary on the faculty of sight. To do so, the filmmaker draws from Sufi theories of gazing, in which desire must be for ultimate meaning (maʿnā), as conveyed through the vehicle of perceivable form (ṣūra), a distinction with both metaphysical and ethical implications. Majidi presents sight, when devoid of contemplation, as a sort of voyeurism, especially in contrast to the privacy and immediacy of speech and especially within the context of the modern city. Moreover, his use of a blind protagonist whose sight is suddenly restored makes Jacques Lacan’s (d. 1981) psychoanalysis an especially useful tool for understanding the implications of Majidi’s film: In Majidi, much as in Lacan, the gaze undoes barriers and a sense of self-mastery, arousing the protagonist’s obsession with the void and an insatiable desire. Through references to Sufi ethical writings and a protagonist morally defeated by the image-centric media of contemporary urban Iran, The Willow Tree explores problems of representation and commodity fetishism. The resolution is a response to what might be called “moral voyeurism” that highlights and laments the artificiality of modernity’s objects of desire.

INFORMATION: Zargar, Cyrus A. (2020) "The Gaze and a Sufi Ethics of Vision in Majidi’s The Willow Tree: Form, Meaning, and the Real," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 24 : Iss. 1 , Article 55. AT:

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol24/iss1/55/

Although the representation of vision in Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions draws on a literary tradition dating back more than a millennium, the Neo-Assyrian period shows evidence of unprecedented innovation in the use of vision vocabulary. Because of the relative wealth of surviving textual, art historical, and architectural evidence from the Neo-Assyrian period, this stage of Mesopotamian history also presents an outstanding opportunity to compare how phenomena like the senses were represented across media and genres. This presentation will give an overview of the Akkadian vision vocabulary and examine how the use of this terminology was transformed in the epigraphy of the Neo-Assyrian period by comparison to earlier sources. These findings will be compared to evidence from Neo-Assyrian letters and art to better understand how concepts of vision and visibility were strategically employed in the royal inscriptions to impress upon their intended audience the might of the Neo-Assyrian king and the divine sanction of his authority.

The lucidity of awareness is experienced directly through the doorway of our subjectivity as our own innermost awareness. As we gaze into our own interiority we can experience the unfolding of the manifestation of this field of radiance and this lucidity of awareness. The invisible field of luminous knowingness becomes experientially visible. Lucidity of Phenomena Experientially visible means seeing the flashes of light, sensing light, experiencing the presence of the radiance within us and beyond us. Experiencing the presence of the radiance means feeling the luminous experience of the light and the energy of the light in everything and anything, in anyone and everyone. As we experience the visibility of luminous knowingness within us as us, we are empowered to experience the manifestation of the lucidity within the appearance of all phenomena. Lucidity is not only within us but within all phenomena, all appearance has lucidity and all appearance is lucidity. All phenomena are the manifestation of primordial radiance. When we are experiencing the radiance of phenomenon, our inner light is meeting the outer light, and thus there is only one indivisible light. In truth there is only primordial luminous radiance that is manifesting our mind, our body and our innermost awareness, as well as the infinitely vast universal context of phenomena that we are placed within in time and in space. Our capacity to experience the radiance of the field of awareness within our own embodied subjectivity opens for us the ability to gaze into the subjectivity of all phenomena. By gazing into our own subjectivity there arises this intersubjective gaze that is direct and inside to inside. This intersubjective gaze allows us to experience the luminous openness of all phenomena and context. This intersubjective gaze opens the innermost openness of all phenomena. Subjectivity is the openness of our being to Being itself within all beings.

Version française du texte paru dans Senses of Cinema (ed. Bérénice Reynaud) en 2015, traduit par Bérénice Reynaud.

Le cinéma de Chantal Akerman est en moi. Depuis la première fois, la séance de cinéma inaugurale, en l'occurrence pour ce qui me concerne celle de Je Tu Il Elle (1974), les films de Chantal Akerman font partie de moi.