Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and - download pdf or read online

Do modern big-budget blockbuster movies like Gravity stream anything in us that's essentially similar to what avant-garde and experimental movies have performed for greater than a century? In a strong problem to mainstream movie thought, Cinema’s physically Illusions demonstrates that this is often the case. 

Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and sessions via focusing, such a lot palpably, on cinema’s energy to awaken illusions: feeling like you’re flying via area, experiencing 3D with out glasses, or maybe hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, initially, a know-how to modulate conception. He provides a idea of cinema as a proprioceptive know-how: cinema turns into paintings via modulating audience’ embodied experience of area. it really works essentially now not on the point of the mind yet on the point of the physique. Richmond develops his idea via examples of direct perceptual phantasm in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, eerie intensity results in Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma, the appearance of physically flow via onscreen house in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of conception and James J. Gibson’s ecological method of notion. the result's his targeted ecological phenomenology, which permits us to refocus at the cinema’s perceptual, instead of representational, power.

Arguing opposed to modernist conduct of brain in movie thought and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s dying or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an pressing website of up to date inquiry.