This article argues that Palestinian cinema can collectively be understood as adopting a crip aesthetic that gives expression to how, after Jasbir K. Puar (2017), Palestinians are routinely and systematically rendered disabled, or debilitated, by the Israel Occupation Forces. It is through the twin lenses of disability theory and critical race theory that I propose the concept of cinephilistinism, a term that attempts two things: firstly, to express an essayistic opposition to both a cinematic settler-colonial occupation and the support, be that tacit or explicit, lent to that occupation by various purportedly cinephilic institutions; and, secondly, to function as a means for currying what Steven Salaita might term, apropos of Indigenous and Palestinian relations (but here applied to Palestinian solidarity networks more generally), “inter/nationalism” or “solidarity, transnationalism, intersectionality, kinship, or intercommunalism” with Palestine at this moment of intensified Israeli state brutality. What is more, the article will latterly pitch cinephilistinism against a western theological Zionist myth regarding the (Second) Coming, which has Palestine as its focus, such that the battle for Palestinian freedom becomes the battle for the future of humanity, with cinema playing a key role in this struggle.
Artificial people, far from embodying the false promise of a post-racial future, come to be inscribed with signifiers of race across science fiction film and television. However, like Western philosophy’s theorisation of technology, on-screen imaginations of artificial people are overwhelmingly white. With the help of critical race theory and critical philosophies of race, this article explores what it means for an artificial person to be Black. It brings a comprehensive account of the racialisation of technology, both off- and on-screen, into conversation with the work of Afrofuturist musician Janelle Monáe. Together, these complementary frameworks form the basis from which to consider Monáe’s performance as a Black android in the television series Electric Dreams (2017–18) episode “Autofac” (2018), adapted from the work of Philip K. Dick. Reading “Autofac” through Monáe’s crossover stardom enables negotiated cultural tensions of race and technology to emerge from a text that opts out of explicitly addressing the issue of race. In doing so, this article elucidates how film and television draw upon, contribute to and actively shape the inextricability of technology and race.
Cultural Heritage documentation of small artifacts with complex geometry processed in photogrammetry has to deal with narrow depth-of-field inherent to optics. The focus-stacking method is traditionally employed to overcome this issue, but has to be deployed on a stable environment in terms of movement and light. It requires a very large number of photographs which are modified in colors and geometries, depending on focus-stacking algorithms, to be able to generate the focus-stacked images needed by Structure from Motion (SfM) processes. This article proposes a more flexible method, suitable for unmovable artifacts or acquisitions in the field where tripods for lights and cameras are excluded. The proposed method uses multiple single-shot photographs, as in traditional photogrammetry of larger items, improved with paired masks on areas suffering from optical blur. These masks are automatically generated using Laplacian Pyramid after an operator reviews the settings to fit the full set of the acquisition pictures. The case study is a Strasbourg’s Cathedral ornament carved in red sandstone in the Flamboyant Gothic style. This delicate sculpture presents a complex geometry with recesses and protrusions. Three processes leading to photogrammetric 3D dense clouds are described and evaluated: the proposed method with masks, the same method but without masks and a focus-stacking approach. These models are compared with a reference acquired using a metrology laser scanner, demonstrating the benefits of masking blur for accuracy and noise. When assessed relative to the focus-stacking approach, the proposed method with masks achieves similar accuracy while offering greater speed and adaptability.
Pensar a Dança além da forma… é outra maneira de dizer: pensar o(a)s bailarino(a)s além da forma como dançam. Neste espaço proponho-me abordar a autobiografia como um processo de catarse sobre vivências que oscilam entre 1974 e 2023, durante aproximadamente meio século. Aproveitando o momento que atravesso, inspirada pelo percurso de Walter Benjamin, bem patente na obra Diários de Viagem (2022) em que nos é dado a conhecer o processo de escrita no exílio, entre e durante guerras, através de textos que relatam as vivências desse período e onde não faltaram conversas com Bertolt Brecht, parti para a reflexão. Passar à prática, em “estúdio” foi apenas mais um passo impulsionado pela vontade de desenhar uma vida através do movimento, utilizando o vídeo como registo. Este procedimento, diferente de um registo escrito pela possibilidade de captação imediata da imagem em movimento, proporciona-nos um olhar diferente e, com isso, uma nova visão sobre o trabalho em curso. Este fator tem, junto do ator (aquele que dança, que regista o processo e que depois observa e analisa) um valor e impacto diferente de um registo escrito por mais completo que seja. Neste processo acompanharam-me dois elementos sem formação em Dança, [...].
Aaron Smuts argues that the holiday film It's a Wonderful Life should be understood as both an illustration and a cinematic vindication of objective list theories of worth. This article argues that he is right about the first point but wrong about the second. It's a Wonderful Life is an excellent illustration of objective list theories. However, it also exposes a problem for them – their susceptibility to sceptical anxieties about whether we can know if our lives are worth living. More specifically, I argue that It's a Wonderful Life shows how our lives are vulnerable to two sceptical anxieties, one arising from our potential inability to confirm our successes in promoting the good, the other from our potential inability to ascertain which goods can properly be said to be in our lives due to gaps in our self-knowledge and our potential for self-deception.
This article offers an analysis of one small-nation market’s perspective on the current and expected changes of digital distribution and its intermediaries. It demonstrates how key stakeholders in the Czech audiovisual distribution sector are reacting to regulatory processes at the EU level and how they are reconsidering their existing business practices, strategic plans, and structural positions vis-à-vis new global trends and competition in the evolving sphere of digital distribution. The article is not a full- edged analysis of the Digital Single Market’s (DSM) potential impacts: instead, it considers DSM as just one factor in the strategic thinking of stakeholders, a factor that functions as a catalyst and a focal point in both business operations and policy-making.
The return of realism that followed the Postmodern years, marks an ontological “turn” which is not free of consequences also in relation to theories on cinema. This essay aims at analysing the existing relationship between the aesthetic-perceptive experience – through the notion of “immediate experience” – and the notion of “reality” in the cinematographic image. The link image-reality is considered here as a “phenomenon” in itself. If the phenomenal experience could be intended as such, without a subject, the cinematographic image too could be intended as a look without subjectivity. Cinema takes us beyond phenomenology, or rather, inside a “heretic” phenomenological perspective.
Chiang-Mei Chen, Yin-ming Huang, Jia-Rui Sun
et al.
In this paper, we suggest that there are two different individual 2D CFTs holographically dual to the Kerr-Newman black hole, coming from the corresponding two possible limits — the Kerr/CFT and Reissner-Nordstrcorrespondences, namely there exist the Kerr-Newman/CFTs du- alities. A probe scalar field at low frequencies turns out can exhibit two different 2D conformal symmetries (named by J- and Q-pictures, respectively) in its equation of motion when the asso- ciated parameters are suitably specified. These twofold dualities are supported by the matchings of entropies, absorption cross sections and real time correlators computed from both the gravity and the CFT sides. Our results lead to a fascinating "microscopic no hair conjecture" — for each macroscopic hair parameter, in additional to the mass of a black hole in the Einstein-Maxwell theory, there should exist an associated holographic CFT2 description.