The Spider and the Fly in the Camera’s Eye
For the past two posts I’ve discussed where film can take humans with regards to entering or understanding animal worlds. This could lead to the assumption that I am proposing film as an extension of human faculties and, while this is to some extent true, it is important to also note the very non-human elements … Continue reading
Becoming-Balthazar?
In the very beginning film had trouble with the issue of inner-worlds. It was groundbreaking in the field of presenting action but attempts at characters lacked depth, audience members had trouble identifying with the onscreen personas. All those essential editing devices, which are so necessary to the integrity of film’s diegetic space, had yet to … Continue reading
The Zoopraxiscope
On the 15th of June 1881, approximately fifty years before Uexküll wrote his treatise on the Umwelt, (when he would have been 15 years old) inventor and artist Eadweard Muybridge publically ran his first Animals in Motion experiment. Consisting of a shed housing twelve cameras, a measured backdrop for horses to run through, and an … Continue reading
Bazin and Cinematic Realism
Any attempt to think through the implications of Speculative Realism for film and film theory would have to come to terms, at some point, with the work of the great French critic André Bazin, since cinematic realism is most typically evoked in conjunction with his writings on cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. This conjunction … Continue reading
Speculative Realism and the World Without Man
My first series of blog posts will examine a recent development in continental philosophy known as Speculative Realism or Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). I’m interested in the larger philosophical debates for and against realism (which will be the emphasis of this post), but I’m also interested in clarifying the relevance of realism for a discussion of … Continue reading
Uexküll’s Umwelt: a Primer
This post is meant to lay some of the basic conceptual groundwork for what is to follow. This means that some of the more enigmatic sections of Uexküll’s writing will be left out, to be returned to later. Living from 1864 to 1944, Uexküll operated in a time when specialization had not yet divided the … Continue reading
The Object's Gaze 