In-Sight from Excursions: action movies, neuroscience, dreamscapes, intermediality and spectatorship

Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)

The image seems to be a way of marking such a potential separation between exterior and interior while belonging to both. Moreover, that condition of holding ‘in sight’, as a means of externalisation as belonging to the image, is realised in the easy conceptual slippage from ‘in sight’ to ‘insight’- originally ‘internal sight’ or seeing with the eyes of the mind, that later becomes a seeing into a thing or subject. To bring an object within sight is to affect the ‘inner eye’, to re-formulate the relationship of the visible to the invisible, presence to absence.  Lindsay Smith, 'Foreword: In-Sight', Excursions, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (June 2010), i-ii

Thanks to the regular updates to Jurn, the excellent search-engine that Film Studies For Free uses in its every waking hour (and then dreams of every night), FSFF found its way to a newish e-journal -- Excursions -- with a first issue replete with interesting and, yes, insightful items on film.

Its Mission Statement reads as follows:

Excursions is an invitation to journey into the unfamiliar, a space in which to reflect upon the travels of concepts, beyond the boundaries of one’s discipline. An on-line peer-reviewed journal, Excursions is designed to showcase high-quality, innovative and inventive postgraduate research. Run by postgraduates in the School of English at the University of Sussex, we aim to encourage work that plays with the permeable nature of academic disciplines. As such, our interest lies in the interdisciplinary. Each issue of the journal has a theme which contributors can interpret as they see fit. We welcome critical papers or creative pieces and seek to place cultural, political, artistic and scientific discourses together in surprising combinations and illuminating moments of collision.

And here is the table of contents:

Articles

• Foreword Lindsay Smith

• The Eye, the Brain, the Screen – What Neuroscience Can Teach Film Theory Paul Elliott

• Hard bodies and sidelong looks: Spectacle and fetish in 1980s action cinema Nicky Falkof

• Through the Arendtian Lens: Developing Statelessness through Gregor Schneider's 'Weisse Folter' Suzy K. Freake

• Waking Life: The Destiny of Cinema’s Dreamscape; or the Question of Old and New Mediations Markos Hadjioannou

• The Embodied Spectator and the Uncomfortable Experience of Watching Romance and The Piano Teacher Sara Elisabeth Sellevold Orning

• Invoking The Spectral Body: A Study of Potential Corporealities in the Work of Marina Abramovic and Francesca Woodman  Prema Purigali Prabhakar

• The Problem of Film Theatre Intermediality in Jesus of Montreal Laura Sava

• Writing the world: photographing the text of the landscape Gina Wall