74 research outputs found
Organisation
No full textThis record was harvested from a previous catalogue system and will be withdrawn in 2025. Information in this record may be superseded or incomplete. Visit this record in UMA's new catalogue at: https://archives.library.unimelb.edu.au/nodes/view/6050
The visceral screen: Between the cinemas of John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg, a Barthesian perspective
No full textThe thesis discusses two directors who are never considered together in academic discourse. Cassavetes’ perceived focus on events led by the dynamics of performance and his looseness of technique opposes the calculated compositions of the Cronenberg film, with its aesthetic of horrific images and its gallery of emotionally detached protagonists. Yet it is between such opposing methods of cinematic expression that the ineffable qualities of film aesthetics can be discovered. Cassavetes’ cinema achieves this by revelling in a surplus of activity that exceeds narrative, while the indescribable characteristics of the Cronenberg oeuvre is achieved through a systematic emptying of the image’s meaning through a simultaneous commitment to paring back emotion and portraying of images that are controversial and inconceivable. Taken together, the thesis identifies these aspects of film as ‘the visceral,’ a facet of the moving image that most certainly exists, but is resolutely, and disturbingly resistant to interpretation.
Roland Barthes’ writings are integral to a theory of the visceral. His re-evaluation of Saussurean semiology as a method of analyzing and undoing ideologically-imposed meanings informs readings of sequences from Cassavetes and Cronenberg’s films. Following Barthes, the thesis suggests that the existence of the visceral is realized as a resistance to ideological interpretations of the image, and so cannot be described. Ultimately, the inability of semiology to fully grasp certain aspects of the filmed image is put forward as a rejoinder to theories of the fiction film as principally a narrative medium
A necessary fiction: The ritualisation of stakeholder practices in New Zealand cinema
No full textThis thesis argues that stability of the concept ‘national cinema’ is located in the discursive positioning of individual films in such a way that they are connected to a national ‘common ground’, one which is ritually accessed via engagement with media such as cinema. This positioning, however, is not quantifiable and may not be identified as arising from any particular production practice, dimension of popularity, theme, style, characteristic of production personnel, and so on. By synthesising the work of several theorists and applying this synthesis to a selection of films, a framework of ideas (around the ritualised ‘flagging’ of the national via the expression of stakeholder interests) is applied to cinema in New Zealand. In particular, an ideoscape is ultimately mapped as a result of applying this framework of ideas. The normative assumptions of national cinema are examined in this way and found to be lacking despite the weight that the term ‘national cinema’ continues to have
What! Is this science?
No full textIt is easy to find that science teaching gets bogged down in content. This is what occurred to the author in teaching science to her Year 9 classes. She describes the planning and implementation of a unit on alternative energy sources that involved making animated films with Slowmation, using models and a still camera. Sounds and special effects were added using MovieMaker and Audacity. The outcomes included not only the innovative application of technology but also the difference between an \u27instructivist\u27 approach to teaching and a student-centred, hands-on discovery-learning approach which generated excitement and engagement. [Author abstract, ed
Coming to terms with the National Socialist Past in teamWorx's TV Event Movies: 'Dresden' (2006), 'Nicht alle waren Mörder' (2006) and 'Die Flucht' (2007).
No full textThis thesis examines three made-for-television ‘Event Movies’ from the German production company teamWorx, made between 2006 and 2007 – Dresden (2006), Nicht alle waren Mörder (2006) and Die Flucht (2007) – within the context of contemporary debates of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ or ‘coming to terms with the past’ in Germany. It will deal with specific debates in memory of the National Socialist past, namely representations of Germans as victims of the Second World War and memory of the Holocaust. Although in recent years the importance of teamWorx’s television films has begun to be acknowledged by scholars in both Germany and the UK, this thesis represents the first attempt to analyse these three Event Movies as a unit and to explore in-depth the teamWorx company and its attitudes to historical film. As such, two interviews will be relied on throughout this thesis, with chairman of the board Nico Hofmann and Die Flucht’s director Kai Wessel.
In order to place the films within the context of contemporary debates on memory of the Nazi past in Germany, the thesis will undertake a filmic analysis of the Event Movies, supported by both the intentions of the filmmakers and critical responses in the contemporary press. Of primary importance for the thesis will be the twin concerns of the authenticity of teamWorx’s productions, as claimed by the filmmakers and the Event Movies’ borrowing of filmmaking devices from Hollywood genres, in particular the melodrama. Following this analysis it will be asked to what extent the Event Movies affect and reflect contemporary debates on the legacy of National Socialism and how these films contribute to the normalisation of the Nazi past in Germany
Coming to terms with the National Socialist Past in teamWorx's TV Event Movies: 'Dresden' (2006), 'Nicht alle waren Mörder' (2006) and 'Die Flucht' (2007)
No full textThis thesis examines three made-for-television ‘Event Movies’ from the German production company teamWorx, made between 2006 and 2007 – Dresden (2006), Nicht alle waren Mörder (2006) and Die Flucht (2007) – within the context of contemporary debates of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ or ‘coming to terms with the past’ in Germany. It will deal with specific debates in memory of the National Socialist past, namely representations of Germans as victims of the Second World War and memory of the Holocaust. Although in recent years the importance of teamWorx’s television films has begun to be acknowledged by scholars in both Germany and the UK, this thesis represents the first attempt to analyse these three Event Movies as a unit and to explore in-depth the teamWorx company and its attitudes to historical film. As such, two interviews will be relied on throughout this thesis, with chairman of the board Nico Hofmann and Die Flucht’s director Kai Wessel. In order to place the films within the context of contemporary debates on memory of the Nazi past in Germany, the thesis will undertake a filmic analysis of the Event Movies, supported by both the intentions of the filmmakers and critical responses in the contemporary press. Of primary importance for the thesis will be the twin concerns of the authenticity of teamWorx’s productions, as claimed by the filmmakers and the Event Movies’ borrowing of filmmaking devices from Hollywood genres, in particular the melodrama. Following this analysis it will be asked to what extent the Event Movies affect and reflect contemporary debates on the legacy of National Socialism and how these films contribute to the normalisation of the Nazi past in Germany
Epstein’s and Godard’s reflections on the film landscape : Refleksje Epsteina i Godarda na temat krajobrazu filmowego
No full text
Reflections on landscape constitute a special subject of interest for artists dealing with the nature of image in culture and the status of film. The function and meaning of landscape as an independent aesthetic or meaning-generative unit become an important area of theoretical considerations for Jean Epstein and Jean-Luc Godard, among others. My intention is to look at the ways in which the directors’ theoretical insights are employed in their deeds being theoretical essay films treated on an equal footing with texts. While interpreting the artists’ attitude to landscape issues expressed in both their writings and films, I conclude that the author of Passion (1982) falls into the category of image-landscape thinking, whereas the director of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) tends to explore reality by means of the film landscape.
Reflections on landscape constitute a special subject of interest for artists dealing with the nature of image in culture and the status of film. The function and meaning of landscape as an independent aesthetic or meaning-generative unit become an important area of theoretical considerations for Jean Epstein and Jean-Luc Godard, among others. My intention is to look at the ways in which the directors’ theoretical insights are employed in their deeds being theoretical essay films treated on an equal footing with texts. While interpreting the artists’ attitude to landscape issues expressed in both their writings and films, I conclude that the author of Passion (1982) falls into the category of image-landscape thinking, whereas the director of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) tends to explore reality by means of the film landscape.
Refleksje na temat krajobrazu stanowią szczególny przedmiot zainteresowania artystów zajmujących się naturą obrazu w kulturze i statusem filmu. Funkcja i znaczenie krajobrazu jako niezależnej jednostki estetycznej lub wytwórcy znaczenia stają się ważnym obszarem rozważań teoretycznych między innymi dla Jeana Epsteina i Jeana-Luca Godarda. Proponuję skonfrontować teoretyczne spostrzeżenia reżyserów na pejzaże filmowe oraz ich wykorzystywanie w praktykach artystycznych, traktując tym samym eseje filmowe na równi z teoretycznymi wypowiedziami.
Interpretując stosunek artystów do kwestii krajobrazu, wyrażony zarówno w ich pismach, jak i filmach, dochodzę do wniosku, że autor filmu Pasja (1982) reprezentuje myślenie krajobrazem jako obrazem (w kontekście estetyki), podczas gdy reżyser filmu Upadek domu Usherów (1928) ma tendencję do badania rzeczywistości za pomocą krajobrazu filmowego (narzędzie poznania)
Voices of inheritance : aspects of British film and television in the 1980s and 1990s
No full textDuring the 1990s the notion of the heritage film has become a taken for granted
category of British cinema. Rather than dispute the merits of particular films that lie
within this genre I question the construction of the relation between the idea of
heritage and contemporary British film and television. Using the critical literature
established by the contending cultural histories that address the rise of heritage in
British culture, I highlight other, frequently personal and national engagements with
inherited pasts. The concentration upon inheritance lends a greater emphasis to
what is passed on from the past and endures in the present.
The modes of articulating these inherited pasts are formally distinctive and
constructed out of the vocabulary of documentary and fiction. The corpus of texts
begins with the apparently radical avant garde film-making of Derek Jannan and
moves through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective to the apparently
conservative television documentaries of Alan Bennett. These key voices are then
situated in relation to the hegemonic definition of heritage and current debates
concerning British film and television. The persisting opposition which defined
British cinema during the 1980s posits an unofficial cinema characterized by dissent
and urban decay against an official cinema represented by the heritage film. My
corpus of texts challenges this opposition. The different engagements with inherited
pasts take place from different speaking positions and represent a diminishing
publicly funded tradition of film and television production. The range of positions
from margins to centre reveal that there was a contestation of the cultural sources
which are aggregated into the construction of heritage during the 1980s and 1990s
Modeling of mechanisms affecting the growth and breakdown of iron sulfide films
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 2016.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-169).Modeling the behavior of ionic materials in electrochemical environments is a topic of great scientific interest for important systems like like fuel cells, batteries, and catalysts and corrosion passive films. However, existing analytical and numerical models of such electrochemical systems like passive films are derived from mathematical expressions for the growth and degradation of the ionic material that are not derived from the rates of underlying physical processes and are instead merely benchmarked to experimental data. These models are intrinsically empirical and fall short of providing mechanistic insights into the physical processes occurring in the passive film that are required to design better-performing electrochemical materials. In this thesis, based on our understanding that overall film behavior is a collective outcome of several atomic-scale phenomena like defect formation and ionic diffusion that contribute to the growth and/or breakdown of the passive film, we construct a construct a novel multiscale modeling framework that explicitly models atomic scale phenomena and couples it to higher-length- scale description of the microstructure to estimate passive film behavior in a mechanistic way and we further demonstrate this capability on an ionic system of FeSx phases on a steel substrate. The primary contributions of the thesis are two-fold: We identified the atomistic mechanisms responsible for the growth and breakdown of iron sulfide phases, and also quantified non-empirically the kinetic parameters that govern the rate of these unit processes. We constructed a novel multiscale modeling framework that couples accurate modeling of atomic-scale unit processes to efficient modeling of the micron-scale behavior of the passive film that captures phenomena at multiple length scales ranging from point defect dynamics to microstructure formation and evolution. The thesis is divided into three sections, the first of which is devoted to investigating two unit processes (surface sulfidation and ionic diffusion) that contribute to the growth of iron sulfide phases and is primarily focused on quantifying the kinetic parameters involved in the sulfidation (adsorption energies and dissociation barriers) and ionic diffusion (diffusivities and migration barriers) processes. In this section, we use a combination of ab initio density functional theory and kinetic Monte Carlo to quantify the surface-defect-induced changes in the electronic structure (0.4 eV reduction in the band gap and the introduction of mid-gap states) that increase the reactivity of and the rate of sulfidation on FeS₂ (100) surfaces. We also use the d-band theory to explain the effect of surface coverage and surface charge (or electric potential) on the reactivity of the reactivity of the surface, and provide guidelines for more accurate calculation of reactivity metrics in realistic electrochemical conditions. Finally, through the use of high-accuracy hybrid DFT and NEB methods, coupled with kinetic Monte Carlo calculations, we resolve the influence of magnetic and vacancy ordering transitions on ionic migration barriers and diffusivity of pyrrhotite, Fe₁-xS. Specifically, we identify that the ionic migration barrier is unaffected by the local vacancy configuration in different pyrrhotite polytypes, but is strongly influenced by the local magnetic order imposed by strong antiferromagnetic superexchange interactions that exist in pyrrhotite, which is a finding that is also important for other scientifically important material systems like NiO. The next section of the thesis discusses the mechanistic pathways and kinetic parameters of two processes involved in the local degradation of iron sulfide passive films (vacancy agglomeration-induced pit initiation and hydrogen-evolution-assisted debonding). For the first process, we use first-principles modeling to explain experimental observations of non-Arrhenius vacancy concentrations and nanoscale pitting on the FeS₂ surface. We identify a mechanistic pathway comprising of concerted vacancy formation and diffusion unit processes that leads to the formation of vacancy agglomerates that serve as sites for nanopit initiation. We then use the same set of computational tools to identify another mode of failure in the layered iron sulfide phase, mackinawite. We identify through computational stress-strain curves that cathodically generated H2 molecules are detrimental to the mechanical stability of the mackinawite phase and cause localized degradation of the passive film and act as a precursor to pitting corrosion. The final section of the thesis describes the formulation of the multiscale modeling framework that incorporates the kinetics of film growth and breakdown mechanisms identified in previous sections. This novel coupled kMC and phase-field model is capable of describing the macroscale morphology, passivity and protectiveness of the passive film while also possessing sufficient resolution to simulate atomic scale dynamics occurring at the film interfaces, and represents a significant improvement in terms of mechanistic detail over existing analytical corrosion models especially for sour systems. We demonstrate the capability of the model in constructing kinetic stability diagrams, which extend the information contained in phase and Pourbaix diagrams by accounting for the relative rates for formation and dissolution of different iron sulfide phases. We also demonstrate the calculation of degradation maps, that help identify the dominant mechanisms behind the localized failure of the passive film at different environmental conditions (temperature, partial pressure of H₂S, electrode potential, pH etc) and thus identify environmental conditions where the passive film is stable against localized degradation. Finally, the direct coupling between atomic scale processes and overall film passivity allows us to identify the impact of different material properties (like vacancy formation energy and diffusivity) on the resistance of the passive film to pitting and localized corrosion.by Aravind Krishnamoorthy.Ph. D
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