The rise of the new information technologies, and corresponding proliferation of signs, images, and information, has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and dislocation. For many, the contemporary moment is an unending and disorienting sea of sensory-symbolic excesses. Lost in Translation is a film addressed to these anxieties. Engaging the film as a sensual experience, we argue that Lost in Translation equips viewers to confront the feelings of alienation and dislocation brought on by the sensory-symbolic excesses of (post)modernity by fostering a sense of choric connection. This sense, we demonstrate, is elicited primarily by the film's material (nonsymbolic, aesthetic) dimensions. Drawing on an analysis of the film's aesthetic elements, we conclude by reflecting on the implications for film studies, rhetorical studies, and everyday life.

Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience

The discourse of ‘the white man’s burden’ that originated in the nineteenth century with missionaries and colonialism still underpins much of the development ideology towards Africa today The overwhelming assumption that rich Western countries can and should address ‘underdevelopment’ through aid only stigmatizes African reality, framing it to mirror the worldview of the international donors who fund most non-profit interventionist documentaries 

In the ‘parachute filmmaking’ style that results, facilitated by financial resources and reflecting the self-serving intentions of the donors, the non-profit filmmaker functions simply as an agent of meaning rather than authentic author of the text Challenged by limited production schedules and lacking in cultural understanding most donor-sponsored films fall back on an ethnocentric one-size-fits-all template of an ‘inferior other’ who needs to be ‘helped’ This study sets out to challenge the ‘donor gaze’ in documentary films which ‘speak about’ Africa, arguing instead for a more inclusive style of filmmaking that gives voice to its subjects by ‘speaking with’ them The special focus is on black African women whose images are used to signify helplessness, vulnerability and ignorance, particularly in donor-funded documentaries addressing HIV/AIDS Through case studies of four films this study asks: 

1 How do documentary films reinforce the donor gaze? (how is the film speaking and why?) 

2 Can the donor gaze be challenged? (should intentionality always override subjectivity of the filmed subjects?) 

Film studies approach the gaze psychoanalytically (eg Mulvey 1975) but this study focuses on the conscious gaze of filmmakers because they reinforce or challenge ‘the pictures in our heads’ Sight is an architect of meaning Gaze orders reality but the documentary gaze can re-order it The study argues that in Africa, the ‘donor gaze’ constructs meaning by ‘speaking about’ reality and calls instead for a new approach for documentary to ‘speak with’ reality

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Decoding the donor gaze: documentary, aid and AIDS in Africa

Carl Jung's notion of contrasexuality allows women to embrace the masculine as well as feminine aspects of their personality. This creates a sense of complementarity or balance that is often lacking in the established psychoanalytic interpretation of female representations within mm texts. The 'animus,' or masculine complex, is an empowering theory in understanding representations of women within the filmic text as embarking on a process of self-realisation, self-acceptance, and the discovery of their own authority in the context of their relationships with men. Furthermore, the animus has been credited as Jung's greatest contribution to the study of the female psyche. As such, this thesis will examine the theories of Jungian analysts Emma Jung (1931), M. Esther Harding (1933 & 1965), and Polly YoungEisendrath and Florence Wiedemann (1987), to demonstrate how this concept has been developed and can be employed to empower and transform women by understanding the masculine principle within. An analysis of the dynamics of both the negative and positive influences of the animus on women will be conducted using the films Sweetie (1989), The Pi.mo (1993) and Holy Smoke (1999), written and directed by Jane Campion. By employing the concept as a theoretical tool to Jane Campion's films, she can be understood as an auteur who significantly contributes to the liberation of the female psyche, progressing an understanding of women through the film text.

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The Animus : A Jungian Perspective on the Films of Jane Campion

This thesis examines the shifting conditions of the material and technological properties of the object of film and subsequently of the idea of cinema, in the light of the transition from analogue to digital technologies. I suggest that this technological transition has ontological dimensions, which I examine by looking at spaces and places that encompass this transition, materially and conceptually. The study argues that the nature of film and cinema is multiple, in continuous states of ‘becoming’. The anchor of this study is post-Actor Network theorist Annemarie Mol’s philosophical argument that objects ‘come into being’ according to the practices and sites in which they are placed. The thesis examines situated practice-based interactions between the two technologies, which shape relationships of power, replacement, exchange and collaboration. I explore those issues at four specific institutional sites: the gallery, focusing on three moving image exhibitions in London, the British Film Institute’s Archive in Berkhamsted, LUX, the UK agency of artists’ moving image distribution and collection, and the movie theatre’s projection room that gradually displays only digital films.

This survey examines the situated practices of presentation, exhibition, print checking, archiving, restoration and theatrical projection of film. The aim of this study is to present a multiple object and a multiple idea that is defined not merely by technology, but rather by sites and in particular their operational practices, objectives and organization. By evaluating how analogue and digital technologies interplay in these sites, the study aims to highlight issues of film’s and cinema’s multiplicity that unfolds and shifts both in space and time. The investigated practices evolve in electronic spaces, physical sites and particular locations. Furthermore, they expose different temporalities for analogue and digital film and indicate cinema’s virtual nature to be transcending in time. The situated practices unite and divide the analogue and digital technologies, exposing a manipulative relationship between tangible space, formed by the mechanical apparatus of projection and network space, marked by the digital’s temporal and spatial ubiquity. At the same time, cinema is actualized in measurable time, while its phenomenon is formulated in the continuous movement and differentiation of duration.

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The Film Multiple : Technologies, Sites, Practices

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Marc Vernet

Papers

Movies and Methods, Volume II