On Embodiment and the Body: New Issue of CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image

Above, a recording of composer Simon Fisher Turner and sound artist Black Sifichi's live performance of SFT's score for Derek Jarman's 1994 film Blue at Glasgow's Tramway Theatre in 2008.  Below, a brief excerpt from Vivian Sobchack's article 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Today, most graduate students are in such a hurry to “professionalize” and “talk the talk” of their disciplines that they often forget to attend to their own experience of “seeing” and “listening” — or they devalue it. Instead, they rush to quote others, and describe their objects of study through a range of “floating signifiers” that tend to overdetermine and foreclose their objects and their descriptions before the latter have even really begun. Hermeneutically sophisticated yet overly dependent upon “received knowledge,” these students are also secretly insecure and worried that everyone else ‘knows’ more than they do — and intellectually aware of “the death of the subject,” they are highly suspicious of their own “subjective” experience. They ignore, mistrust, and devalue it as trivial, mistaken, or irrelevantly singular — this last, a false, indeed arrogant, humility that unwittingly rejects intersubjectivity, sociality, and culture. Thus, ignoring the apodicticity (or initial certainty) and presence of their own lived-bodies engaged in being-in-the-world (and in the cinema), their thought about the world (and cinema) has no existential ground of its own from which to empirically proceed. Phenomenological inquiry affords redress to this contemporary situation: it insists we dwell on the ground of experience before moving on to more abstract or theoretical concerns, that we experience and reflect upon our own sight before we (dare I pun?) cite others. [From Vivian Sobchack, 'Fleshing out the image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue', CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF]

Happy new year to all of Film Studies For Free's readers! FSFF has unfortunately been slowed up in its efforts to bring you its list of Best Online Film Studies Resources in 2012. That should now be published around the end of next week.

But, in the meantime, there are a few new journal-issues to catch up with, including a strong contender for the category of Best Single Issue of an Online Film Studies Journal in 2012: the below, latest offering from CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image on Embodiment and the Body. And, in this blog's humble opinion, Vivian Sobchack's article, from which FSFF has cited above, would be a shoo-in for Best and certainly most important 2012 Article...

CINEMA: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, No. 3 (2012) PDF

EMBODIMENT AND THE BODY edited by Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco

• EDITORIAL: CINEMA, THE BODY AND EMBODIMENT, 1-9 PDF 
• ABSTRACTS, 10-18 PDF

Articles

• FLESHING OUT THE IMAGE: PHENOMENOLOGY, PEDAGOGY, AND DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE, 19-38 PDF  by Vivian Sobchack
• SEDUCTION INCARNATE: PRE-PRODUCTION CODE HOLLYWOOD AND POSSESSIVE SPECTATORSHIP, 39-61 PDF by Ana Salzberg 
• A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RECIPROCAL SENSATION IN THE MOVING BODY EXPERIENCE OF MOBILE PHONE FILMS, 62-83 PDF by Gavin Wilson
• CINEMA OF THE BODY: THE POLITICS OF PERFORMATIVITY IN LARS VON TRIER’S DOGVILLE AND YORGOS LANTHIMO’S DOGTOOTH, 84-108 PDF by Angelos Koutsourakis
• THE BODY OF IL DUCE: THE MYTH OF THE POLITICAL PHYSICALITY OF MUSSOLINI IN MARCO BELLOCCHIO’S VINCERE, 109-123 PDF by Marco Luceri
• EIJA-LIISA AHTILA: THE PALPABLE EVENT, 124-154 PDF byAndrew Conio
• UPSIDE-DOWN CINEMA: (DIS)SIMULATION OF THE BODY IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE, 155-182 PDF by Adriano D’Aloia 
• EMBODYING MOVIES: EMBODIED SIMULATION AND FILM STUDIES, 183-210 PDF by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra 
• EXISTENTIAL FEELINGS: HOW CINEMA MAKES US FEEL ALIVE, 211-228 PDF by Dina Mendonça 
• THE BODY AS INTERFACE: AMBIVALENT TACTILITY IN EXPANDED RUBE CINEMA, 229-253 PDF by Seung-hoon Jeong

Interview

• A PROPOS D’IMAGES (A SUIVRE): ENTRETIEN AVEC MARIE-JOSE MONDZAIN [FR.], 254-271 PDF Conducted by Vanessa Brito

Conference Reports

• CONFERENCE ROUND-UP SUMMER 2012: POWERS OF THE FALSE (INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, LONDON, 18-19 MAY), SCSMI CONFERENCE (SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE/NYU, NEW YORK, 13-16 JUN.), FILM-GAME-EMOTION-BRAIN (UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM, 14-21 JUL.), AND FILM-PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE (QUEEN MARY – UNIVERSITY OF LONDON/ KING’S COLLEGE LONDON/KINGSTON UNIVERSITY, 12-14 SEPT.), 272-283 PDF by William Brown

Special Section

• CÍRCULOS E POÉTICAS EM FILMES LITERÁRIOS DE FERNANDO LOPES, 284-300 PDF by Eduardo Paz Barroso