Graça P Correa

Drawing on philosophy in film (Deleuze, Carroll), and on emotional engagement theory (Panksepp, Plantinga), this article compares three different sensory landscapes of dictatorship in film: Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Luis Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2005). Although the three films deploy diverse aesthetic modes—Expressionism-Noir (Lang), Psychological-Realism (Llosa), and Gothic (del Toro)—they mutually reveal the existence of an ethics of resistance and insurgency during historical periods of oppressive rule.

Tendo como perspectivas de análise a teoria da emoção (Panksepp, Plantinga) e estudos da filosofia no cinema (Deleuze, Carroll), este artigo compara três paisagens fílmicas da ditadura: O Testamento do Dr. Mabuse de Fritz Lang (1933), A Espinha do Diabo de Guillermo del Toro (2001), e A Festa do Bode de Luis Llosa (2005), revelando como através de modos estéticos distintos—Expressionismo Noir (Lang), Realismo Psicológico (Llosa) e Goticismo (del Toro)—os três filmes revelam uma ética semelhante, de resistência e insurgência, aos regimes de opressão a que se reportam.

US film director David Lynch states that films should have “the power of good and the power of darkness, so you can get some thrills and shake things up a bit”. In this article I argue that a most distinctive characteristic of Lynch’s oeuvre—particularly apparent in Eraserhead (1977), Twin Peaks (1989-91), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006)—is its Gothic aesthetic quality, evident in the use of the motif of the “double” in settings, theme, plot and characterization. Through the interplay between dual opposites and reduplication of mirroring effects, Lynch’s works not only engender uncanny sensory landscapes, but also highlight the existing tension between normative social surfaces and subconscious individual desires, thus performing a political and ecocritical critique of contemporary western culture.

Portuguese dramatist Bernardo Santareno (1924­1980) has been practically ignored by the English­speaking critics and theatre practitioners, most likely because only two of his nineteen plays have been translated into English. One of these is the author's first drama, The Promise (A Promessa), written during the year he spent aboard a Portuguese fishing boat along the coast of Newfoundland and Greenland, immediately after having graduated from medical school at the University of Coimbra. The play was published in 1957, in an edition sponsored by the author, and produced in November of that same year by Teatro Experimental do Porto. After ten days of performance, however, the production was closed down by the government censors, on the grounds of immorality raised by the Portuguese Roman Catholic Church. Arguably, the play's narrative focuses on marital quarrels with no overt political implications to justify its ban during Salazar's fascist regime in Portugal. This aspect is confirmed by the fact that the text was authorized for performance by the same official censors that later closed down the production. Differently, I suggest that it is not the narrative but rather Santareno's shaping of the material in melodramatic form that made evident in performance, because of the genre's characteristic theatricality and Manichean conflicts, the author's oppositional views to the prevailing political and religious regime.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary critical approaches to landscape in the field of performance studies, and adopting phenomenological methods of sensory analysis, this paper explores the cityscapes expressed in three fictional works that share a Symbolist/post-Symbolist aesthetic: in the novel Bruges-la-morte (1892) by Belgian Georges Rodenbach, in the novel A Caverna (2000) by Portuguese José Saramago, and in the film Inland Empire (2006) by North-American David Lynch.
Instead of examining the three fictional cityscapes in terms of the usual modernist/post-modernist, industrial/post-industrial oppositional categories, this presentation adopts a micropolitical and ecophilosophical perspective—in the light of concepts by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jacques Rancière—to demonstrate that there are more aesthetic/political continuities than discontinuities among the three urban scenarios. All three urban fictions are striking examples of how physical space—as a medium of cultural and symbolic production—not only creates and sustains social identity, but also fosters micropolitical imaginaries. The co-existence of the three fictional cityscapes in existing cities suggests a large number of fragmentary possible urban worlds, as well as creative gaps in our understanding of contemporary city space.

A sense of impending global catastrophe and a critique of anthropocentric progress mark Lars Von Trier latest film, Melancholia (2011). At the light of Gothic-Romantic theory and aesthetics, as well as of recent ecocritical approaches to film, this paper explores the spatial settings and sensory landscapes of von Trier's work. The feeling of melancholy was particularly present in Gothic-Romantic literature, fine arts, music, and philosophy. Originating as a reflection on the inadequacy of logical and discursive knowledge in a larger-than-human world, melancholy fuses the experience of a heightened self-consciousness with the quality of a pessimistic gloomy feeling. Gothic-Romantic aspects of Melancholia's cinematic landscapes include its settings (a castle with vast surrounding gardens); the use of the motif of the double in its characterization (two sisters: one light, one dark); its hyper-subjectivity, apparent not only in the unsteady handheld camerawork but also in the overstated quality of its sound; its manifestly Romantic soundtrack (Wagner's overture of Tristan und Isolde); its melodramatic structure; its Pre-Raphaelite visual tableaux; its dystopian depiction of civilizational collapse in the intimate scope of family relationships; and its suggestion of the sublime (contradictory emotions of pleasure and fear) through supernatural phenomena. By invoking Gothic-Romantic aesthetics, Melancholia equally summons its pessimistic (albeit vitalist) philosophy, exposing the limitations of an anthropocentric civilization and the fragility of its normative human bonds.

Drawing on the recognition that science refers to various ways of knowing (among them the " soft " or social sciences), and that both " hard " and " applied " sciences may be included into the sphere of humanities (because they involve human situatedness), this article argues for the key ethical role that academic spaces of interdisciplinary learning can assume in the future of our societies. Accordingly, it examines the theoretical approaches, methodologies, and dissemination strategies of a Science-Art-Philosophy Laboratory recently created at the Center for the Philosophy growth, leading to a mounting investment, both public and private, in the research and production of patents, and a Although techno-science commands recognition because of its prodigious power of performance, it should not turn into a privileged area of knowledge dictating human progress. In effect, not only do the humanities and social advancement has tended to aggravate, but they also prove indispensable towards a dialogue on the future scenarios of human development.

Etymologically derived from a combination of the Greek syn, for together, and aisthêsis, for perception through the senses, the term synesthesia (also spelled synaesthesia) denotes a process of inter-sense analogy, whereby one sense modality experiences what usually belongs to one or more of the other senses. This paper explores the distinct approaches that Art, Science, and Philosophy have assumed towards the concept, and discusses how an awareness of synesthetic bodily-mental-sensory processes opens up new perspectives of research that may interrelate the arts with cognitive neuroscience, as well as transform other fields of contemporary knowledge.

A playtext is a compositional score of ideas, sensations, and emotions, which is open to new configurations through an interaction with the imaginative activity of the dramaturg, director, designer, performer. Although each playtext evokes a singular world and must therefore be approached specifically, there are nonetheless basic tools and methodological procedures of dramaturgical analysis that can be adopted towards its performance. In this chapter I argue that without dramaturgical operational readings playtexts risk being used not for their own material qualities and the world that emanates from them, but as pretext for extraneous motives, connotations and effects.

Within the emerging interdisciplinary scope of landscape theory, and taking as its object of study the work written for the stage by contemporary British playwright Harold Pinter, this book is the first sustained in-depth study that relates Pinter’s dramatic images and sensory landscapes to Symbolist theatre and theory, so as to disclose several unexplored ecocritical and micropolitical resonances of his theatre for our times.
Ecocritically, Pinter’s landscapes evoke a sense of warning against the end of “nature,” or against the ending of vital connections between human and extra-human realities. Micropolitically, his sensory images expose a concern with the ethical dimension of individuals, and with the ecology of their relationships within a commonly shared space.

This study argues for a phenomenological experience of playtexts, and for a transdisciplinary reading of their landscapes not just in terms of their actual spatial and sensory features, but also by examining their aesthetic interactions with other authors’ drama, fiction, philosophy, poetry, and paintings. Accordingly, it activates a dialogue between Pinter’s landscapes and those found in works by Symbolist and Decadent artists/thinkers Mallarmé, Rilke, Briusov, Maeterlinck, Rachilde, Patrício, Yeats, Munch, Sacher-Masoch, and Kafka.
Adopting phenomenological views of subjectivity (suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Stanton Garner, among others), it invokes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of micropolitics, as well as the latter’s concept of a combined ecology—mental, social, and environmental—to discuss how a study of sensory scapes reveals the presence of ecophilosophical and political concerns all through Pinter’s dramatic oeuvre.

http://www.amazon.com/Sensory-Landscapes-Harold-Pinter-Ecocriticism/dp/3846545147

Book Review by Ann Marie Drew
Published in June 2017 in Harold Pinter Review, vol.1, no.1

Professor Ann Marie Drew is department chair and faculty senate president at US Naval Academy. She has published works on Shakespeare, Beckett and modern drama.