Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Issue 09: Deviate!

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Prescribing Deviate! as a special theme is not to suggest that to deviate must always be an inherently radical action: deviational change often presents as a slight shift or a series of such shifts and transitions. Hence, the moving image is rethought and reworked incrementally; these small, persistent changes giving rise to new ways of seeing the world, which enhance our understanding of it and often challenge that understanding. Edited by Jill Murphy and Nicholas O'Riordan, University College Cork.

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    Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences, by Sarah Atkinson
    (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2015) Wroot, Jonathan; Power, Aidan
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    Inf(l)ection of the medium: Sándor Kardos’s films in between eye and hand
    (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2015) Dánél, Mónika
    Slitfilm (Résfilm, 2005) and The Gravedigger (A sírásó, 2010) are two Hungarian experimental films made using a slit camera. The director/photographer Sándor Kardos’s adaptations of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “The Handkerchief” and of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Gravedigger” expose a particular “physiognomy” of the filmic medium through the use of this technique. Likewise, the face as the privileged medial surface for emotion becomes an uncanny, stretched painting with grotesque associations, similar to Francis Bacon’s paintings. The sharp, clear narrator’s voice, layering the literary texts “onto” the moving image further emphasises the colour-stained plasticity of the visible. Both films attempt to articulate a liminal experience: the cultural differences between the East and the West that are inherent in expressing and concealing emotions (Slitfilm) or the questions relating to life and death, the speakable/conceivable and the unspeakable/inconceivable (The Gravedigger) that are embedded in the communicative modalities of social interaction. Through the elastic flow of images, the face and the hand become two uncovered, visible, corporeal surfaces engaged in a rhythmic, chromatic relationship (due to the similar skin tones of face and hand), and thus gradually uncover the medium of the film as a palpable skin surface or violated, wounded flesh. The article approaches the fluid, sensuous imagery that displaces the human towards the inhuman uncanny of the unrecognisable flesh through Deleuzian concepts of fold and inflection.
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    “Gas her”: deviant paradigms of identification in interactive spectatorship
    (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2015) Hassapopoulou, Marina
    The notion of identification in visual media that require user participation is problematic. When images become clickable and navigable, then the viewer is no longer a viewer but a participant in the unfolding of the narrative. Theories of visual representation and cinematic spectatorship cannot fully account for modes of interactive spectatorship because the more the viewer is kinesthetically implicated into the formation and progression of moving images, the more the interactive action moves towards the literal realm. In this article, I explore emerging forms of interactive spectatorship through Stanton Audemars’s controversial Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love (2008), and connect those to a broader critical history of the sociological aspects of cinema. Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love challenges the boundaries of a voyeuristic subjectivity that is free of the tension associated with acting out desires elicited by the images on the screen, by inviting the viewer to become complicit in the virtual performance of sadomasochistic acts. An exploration of the processes of conditioning and reorienting spectatorship in interactive films can offer profound insights into the pedagogical potential of interactivity, especially through examples that push the boundaries of both interactivity and cinematic representation.
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    Disembodied perspective: third-person images in GoPro videos
    (2015) Bédard, Philippe
    Used as much in extreme-sports videos and professional productions as in amateur and home videos, GoPro wearable cameras have become ubiquitous in contemporary moving image culture. During its swift and ongoing rise in popularity, GoPro has also enabled the creation of new and unusual points of view, among which are “third-person images”. This article introduces and defines this particular phenomenon through an approach that deals with both the aesthetic and technical characteristics of the images in question. An analysis is presented of the peculiar and unfamiliar appearance of third-person images, in which the head of the user remains fixed in space while the world around it moves independently. Technical descriptions are provided to explain why the perception of the world presented in third-person images differs so radically from our own “first-person” mode of perception. Throughout the article, descriptions and analyses of GoPro videos are supported by parallels to theories of movement and perception in the cinema, specifically Vivian Sobchack’s film phenomenology.