FILM AND TEMPORALITY IN VISUAL ARTS

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Introduction of temporality – limited duration, movement, change – fundamentally changes the way a work of art functions: permanence, constancy, ‘eternity’ are no longer its implicit features; a work of art is not necessarily an object, but also a certain activity, process, experience. A work of art takes over the logic of fluids: its material component, such as shape, size, format, has become variable, while the method of functioning has become fluid. This change cannot be observed independently of the technical reproduction, primarily of film, which for the first time introduces movement in the once static, unchanging image. Temporality spreads through film and moving images in other areas of visual research as well, the effect of which is appearance of a number of new artistic practices: early in the 20th century, within avant-garde, through neo-avant-garde phenomena to the contemporary art in which such a way of functioning becomes dominant.

BREAKING FREE WITH HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS

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The author explores freedom and love in Baz Luhrmann’s movie “Moulin Rouge”! The author makes parallels between the way in which freedom and love, as basic human capacities, are addressed within the aesthetic framework of the movie, and the role that these capacities play in the Christian (especially Orthodox Christian) anthropology and ontology.

TWO OR THREE THINGS ON GODARD

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The paper studies the connection between social theory i.e. critical sociology and philosophy and the committed films of the French director and famous representative of the Nouvelle Vague – Jean Luc Godard. With a short review of his movies Two or Three Things I Know About Her, The Week End and La Chinoise – all three were made in 1967 – attention was drawn to the possibility of a “joint act“ of sociology, social philosophy and film art.

DECLINING OF POLITICAL CULTURE IN HOLLYWOOD

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The aim of this paper is to show a trend in which, by the 1990s, American media became more and more depoliticized. In that light, historical trend of media depolitization finds its expression in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, as well as in other areas of cultural life. The paper states that the vast majority of studio executives, altogether with directors, want little to do with projects that might be called political. Declining of political culture has become one of the most important features of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Even films that engage in politics usually do that in unhistorical and incorrect manner, vastly using irony. The major problem is the fact that when Hollywood deals with social problems such as class struggle, racism and poverty, it perpetuates the myth that hurdles in life can be overcome by means of either luck or hard work. Hollywood cinema fails to deal responsibly with today’s important social and political questions. On the other hand, we are facing the situation where most of the new films neglect political issues. Postmodern cinema represented in the works of Tarantino, Rodriguez, Coen Brothers, Stone, or many other film makers, take as their essential point the references from other films, using their images and recycling them. The images in those films function as the interchangable signs, with meanings of their own, a closed world of media-based references. The Baudrillard and Jameson theory of simulation is used to explain the process where signs lose any relationship with reality in contemporay media. Politics, if it exists in the cinema at all, becames more than ever a part of the entertainment culture, a sign with no meaning. The postmodern turn in culture enables us to encounter the spirit of antipolitics in the most developed form so far. While New Hollywood directors largely celebrated the liberal democratic legacy during the 1960s and the 1970s, postmodern pictures show tendency toward declining of political culture.

THEORY THAT EXCEEDS FILM: THE STOJANOVIĆ-TURKOVIĆ DEBATE

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The film theory of Dušan Stojanović went through the process of moving away from “the living structure of films” towards a more abstract structure of what we would today call, borrowing the term from David Bordwell – a “Grand Theory”. In addition to the idea that film is necessarily linked to the “illusionistic nature of the film scene”, two of Stojanović’s concepts are particularly important: (1) that the film system is modeled on a double articulation of language, and (2) that the viewer reaches the “top floor” of a particular movie, its connotations and meanings, by exceeding mere denotation of frames. Some issues related to the problems of these concepts are addressed in the correspondence of Dušan Stojanović and Hrvoje Turković, the key figures of film studies in Belgrade and Zagreb, published in 1976, in the journal Filmske sveske. This paper aims to examine some of the theoretical issues raised during the discussions, in both the synchronic context (the rise of Yugoslav semiotics in the mid-1970s) and the modern theoretical environment. The whole discussion is seen through the modern lenses of cognitivist film criticism and the notion of Post-Theory, and reframed as a valuable early contribution of Yugoslav film theory to the problems later raised in these critical approaches.

KNOWLEDGE AND THE DIEGETIC WORLD OF FEATURE FILM

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In this paper we deal with the problem of how viewers interpret feature films. In elaborating the nature of human knowledge of the outside world, we used the P. F. Strawson’s ideas about the primary logical position of material bodies and persons. Our starting position is that in understanding film fiction, viewers build a diegetic world, whose perception carries strong correlation with how the humans perceive reality. This gave us an opportunity to understand the relationship between situation models that are used to categorize the multiplicity of objects on the film screen, or the basic particulars as Strawson named them. Our goal here is to account for sudden shifts in film narration, which often force viewers to radically reorganize their spatial-temporal grid, and the objects it comprises. We want to explain how the change of position and function of one object, or a series of spatially or causally connected objects are sufficient to cause a momentary wholesome change of the situation model, and consequently the perspective through which spectators organize the conceptual field related to the film narration they are facing. Recognizing sight gags as particularly complex narrative figure, the paper describes the doubling of situation models by viewers interpreting specific sight gags. A result of this doubling is the incongruity registered by the viewer, who thus gains an analytical insight into the structure and functioning of individual situation models. To achieve this we analyzed several segments of films made by Buster Keaton in the 1920s.

TOWARDS A BIOGRAPHY OF AGENT SMITH

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The article analyzes transformations of the character of Agent Smith in The Matrix trilogy against the background of Hegel’s ideas in his The Philosophy of History. The chain of events in the trilogy is understood as a progress of the consciousness of freedom and mutual recognition of humans and artificial intelligence. Agent Smith is a key figure in that process because thanks to him a) Neo becomes the One, b) humans realize that the right to live and to freedom do not imply destruction of the Matrix and the machines and c) artificial intelligence realizes that in order to achieve the balance of Matrix they have to recognize to humans the right of awakening from the Matrix into existence. Besides that, the article analyzes the role of the plexus Architect-Oracle as a creator of the plan that Neo and Smith carry out, bringing the virtual world into balance; also, a basis is shown for possible theodicy of the actions of that plexus.

MEDICAL ETHICS AND THE FUTURE: THE CASE OF PATIENT WAR

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This article raises the following questions: will the problems that are being addressed by contemporary medical ethics and bioethics change in the time to come and will their current conceptual frameworks become outdated or will imminent technological and social developments pose new challenges that will not have to be answered by the adoption of entirely new ethical concepts? These issues are being addressed on the basis of the materials that are offered to us by the science fiction serial Star Trek, which is taken as representative of the future. Special attention is given to one of its episodes (called Ethics), an episode that appears to test the physician-patient relationship, the conduct of medical research and the use of its results, the right to assisted suicide, as well as other traditions of moral thinking in medicine in the light of their future status. The moral dilemmas of this futuristic story appear strikingly similar to those we face nowadays. Moreover, it is apparently impossible to imagine a different discourse, in spite of the fact that characters and their environment in the story are very different from those we are acquainted with in real life. Hence, it can be concluded that moral problems related to scientific and medical problems from the future, if at all imaginable, are unlikely to differ substantially from the ones we currently know. In other words, new bio-technological developments might only radicalize some ethical questions, but the answers to them and the arguments in favour of their (un)acceptability appear available already.

IMAGE AND PASSION: RESEARCH ON FILM

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The relationship between image and passion is a privileged subject of Christian ascetic literature and Byzantine philosophy. This paper explores the consequences of such a relationship between image and passion on the issues of the film and the film image, from the perspective of the film theory, philosophy and the Christian theology, with an emphasis on the concepts of personality and communication.

THE USE OF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY AND FILM

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In this article the role of thought experiments in philosophy will be considered as well as the possibility to show these experiments on movie screens. Thought experiments as mental models can create a fertile connection between philosophy and film, mind and sight, concept and image. First, a short typology of thought experiments which are suitable for filmic interpretation will be given, especially those experiments which are dealing with the problems of annulling the difference between reality and fiction, problems of personal identity and ethical paradoxes. Some of these thought experiments will be illustrated on the example of three movies (Vertigo, The Matrix, and No Country for Old Men). Hitchcock’s Vertigo shows how one person who plays the role of another person can gradually lose sight of the difference between him/her and the taken personality – this identification has tragic consequences for the main characters in the movie. In their science-fiction trilogy, The Matrix, the Wachowski Brothers explore the possibility that human consciousness is manipulated by some intelligent machines and make implicit use of a philosophical thought experiment as presented in Hilary Putnam’s work Reason, Truth and History (the case of “brains in a vat”). The Coen Brothers are thematizing an ethical paradox in No Country for Old Men: Is it possible for a killer to act in accordance with categorical principles? If this is true, should we endorse such behavior? The end of the article briefly discusses a potential heuristic and didactic relevance of the filmic interpretation of thought experiments for philosophy.