The Kuleshov Effect
"Technique which demonstrates the inherent power of montage as a primary tool in the manipulation of the viewer's perception. According to Kuleshov, cinema consists of fragments and it is their combination rather than their content that is essential in evoking and triggering different emotions. His original experiment consists of using the same shot of the character's face, frozen in a neutral emotion while editing it next to different objects he appears to be glancing at: a girl in a coffin, a bowl of soup, and a woman. The audience interpreted the three situations as expressions of sadness, hunger and lust."
(Laura Minca)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis
"Many critics see the electronic age as heralding the end of books. I think this view is mistaken. Books are far too robust, reliable, long–lived, and versatile to be rendered obsolete by digital media. Rather, digital media have given us an opportunity we have not had for the last several hundred years: the chance to see print with new eyes and, with that chance, the possibility of understanding how deeply literary theory and criticism have been imbued with assumptions specific to print. As we continue to work toward critical practices and theories appropriate for electronic literature, we may come to renewed appreciation for the specificity of print. In the tangled web of medial ecology, change anywhere in the system stimulates change everywhere in the system. Books are not going the way of the dinosaur but the way of the human, changing as we change, mutating and evolving in ways that will continue, as a book lover said long ago, to teach and delight."
(Katherine Hayles, 2004)
Katherine Hayles (2004). "Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media–Specific Analysis" Poetics Today, Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 67–90.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Interpretation is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly and stifling
"Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub–text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning –the latent content –beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art) –all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.
Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling."
(Susan Sontag, 1966)
Susan Sontag (1966). "Against Interpretation: And Other Essays". Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
