tailieunhanh - Information, secrets, and enigmas: an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics for cinema

Yet with all the intensity of the emotion, the figure is given a strict, symmetrical form. It is a severe, rectangular shape with a head as large as the torso, supported on short, stocky legs. The arms, held close to the sides, terminate in hands that join at the fingertips, appearing rather meek, even as they accent the rectangle. The feet, too, accent this regular, geometric shape. Within the severity of the form, the body is decorated in swirling patterns and angular chevrons. The nose, formed of curving shapes comes to a sharp, hooked point | Part 2 Information secrets and enigmas an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics for cinema LAURA U. MARKS 1 On the avisual see Akira Mizuta Lippit Atomic Light Shadow Optics Minneapolis MN University of Minnesota Press 2005 . 2 Rob Moss This documentary moment Media Ethics vol. 19 no. 1 2007 . 3 Including touch taste and smell by image I mean what is perceptible to the senses not the visual image alone. 4 For a discussion of the psychological effects of the shift from perceptual culture to information culture through the concepts of Charles Sanders Peirce and Henri Bergson see Laura U. Marks Immigrant semiosis in Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault eds Fluid Screens Expanded Cinema Digital Futures Toronto University of Toronto Press 2008 pp. 284-303. What kind of film is it whose protagonists are forbidden to speak whose surfaces are avisual often consisting only of paragraphs of text or tables of numbers 1 whose climactic moment is the receipt of a file of old documents whose director laments Nobody wants to talk to me . There is nothing to see. . What is there to film in any case 2 The chances are that it is a film about information. These days many of the images that appear to our senses3 are no more than the effects of the information that generated them. The graphical user interface GUI of computers - a set of images that index actions of information manipulation - is directed to our eyes and ears but this perceptual experience is simply the medium through which we receive information. The functions and aesthetics of GUI have been adapted to many other screen-based media like telephones games advertising and - retroactively - cinema. Moving images made for small screens including television and movies for computers and handheld devices often require to be read rather than perceptually experienced. Cinema itself insofar as it invites us to scrutinize it for signs rather than fully perceive it with our senses is often more like an interface to information than a .