until proven otherwise

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"the liberal-capitalism currently making a bid for 'globalism' is not really an individuated ideology. It allows for consumer choice, but controls it carefully through marketing and thorough entrepreneurial forms of leadership. The result is new types of uniformity, not diversity. It safeguards an ideological position that, in common with so many other non-liberal ideologies, undervalues the maturity of individual citizens, in this case downgraded to the treasured capacity to shop till they drop."

- Michael Freedmen (2003, 125)

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Cite

BOOK  

Pond, Amy, and Rory Williams, eds. 2011. Latin Cinema. Translated by Steven Moffat. 2nd ed. Vol. 1, Brasil. Short Cuts. Cardiff: City Lights. [Kindle edition or URL].

-- CHAPTER  Pond, Amy. 2011. Chap. 4 in Tardis. Cardiff: City Lights.

-- CHAPTER IN EDITED BOOK  Pond, Amy. 2011. “I Dressed for Rio.” In Tardis, edited by Steven Moffat, 308-11. Cardiff: City Lights.

-- MULTIPLE CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOK  Moffat, Steven, ed. 2011. Tardis: Time and Relative. Cardiff: City Lights. AND Pond, Amy. 2011. “I Dressed for Rio.” In Moffat, Tardis, 308-11.

  JOURNAL 

Pond, Amy. 2011. “I Dressed for Rio.” "Clothing Supplement." Special issue, Tardis 27, no. 4 (Spring): 308-11. doi: 26-0610.

  -- BLOG  Pond, Amy. 2011. "I Dressed for Rio." Tardis (blog). New Yorker, May 1. URL. 

  NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINE  

Pond, Amy [or Tardis]. 2011. “I Dressed for Rio.” Tardis, July 1, Film section. URL.

-- REVIEWS  Pond, Amy. 2011. Review of The Eleventh Hour (DVD), [written by Steven Moffat/BBC/Reel DVD]. Tardis, July 1, Film section, 308.

-- INTERVIEWS  Pond, Amy. 2011. “I Dressed for Rio: Interview with Amy Pond.” By Steven Moffat. Tardis 27: 308.  OR Pond, Amy. 2011. Interview by Steven Moffat. Tardis, podcast audio, July 1. URL.

  ELECTRONIC SOURCES

WEBSITE 

Google Maps. [or Wikipedia.] "Privacy Policy." Last modified May 1, 2011. URL.

Pond, Amy. 2011. "I Dressed for Rio." BBC. Accessed OR Last modified May 1. URL.

Amy Pond's Facebook Page. Accessed May 2, 2011. URL.

BLOG  

Ile, Amy. 2011. "Pandorica." Tardis (blog). New Yorker. May 2. URL. 

EBOOK  

Whitman, Walt. 1855. Leaves of Grass. New York: Vintage. Kindle edition [or URL].

Whitman, Walt. 2011. Leaves of Grass. Reprint of the 1855 New York edition, Project Gutenberg. URL.

    FILM 

Moffat, Steven. 2011. Space/Time. DVD. Produced by Mark Gatiss. Cardiff: BBC. 

DVD / TV  

Moura, Wagner. "Commentary." Disc 2. Elite Squad, special ed. DVD. Directed by Jose Padilha. Produced by Marcos Prado. Los Angeles: Weinstein Home Pictures. 

[Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics; Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment. Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment. Universal City, CA: DreamWorks. Collingwood, VIC: Madman Entertainment.]

Television Episodes - no official style in guide

“Flesh and Stone.” Doctor Who, series 5, episode 5, broadcast May 1, 2010 by BBC Wales. Directed by Adam Smith and written by Steven Moffat.

Ball, Alan. 2008. "Strange Love." True Blood, season 1, episode 1. Directed by Alan Ball. Aired September 7. New York: HBO.

MULTIMEDIA  

Pond, Amy. 2011. "I Dressed for Rio." Filmed May 2008. TED video, 2:41. Posted July 1. URL.

  THESES 

Pond, Amy. 2011. "I Dressed for Rio." PhD diss. University of Cardiff. ProQuest (AAT #) or URL.

FOREIGN TITLES & TRANSLATIONS  La niña que esperaba [The girl who waited]. 

  Where MULTIPLE CHAPTERS in an EDITED BOOK are referenced, they may be listed in the bibliography, along with the book itself, as follows:

Moffat, John, ed. 2000. Architecture: Birth of a Metropolis. Munich: Art Institute Press.

Gillan, Karen. 2000. “International.” In Moffat, Architecture, 189–207. 

Smith, Matt. 2000. “Paris by the Lake.” In Moffat, Architecture, 107–19.

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George Kennedy notes that for Aristotle, rhetoric builds its argument, “on commonly held opinions [endoxa] and deal[s] only with the probable (not with scientific certainty)” (Aristotle 2006, 26).

“humans have a natural disposition for the true and to a large extent hit on the truth; thus an ability to aim at commonly held opinions [endoxa] is a characteristic of one who also has a similar ability to regard to the truth” (Aristotle 1.1.11/ 2006, 33).

“rhetoric is useful [first] because the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites” (Aristotle 1.1.12/2006, 34). [NB. Aristotle believed that truth was grounded in nature [physis] and capable of apprehension by reason.”]

“Now, clearly, an opposite syllogism can be made from the same topics [as the opponents’ but drawing the opposite conclusion]; for the syllogisms [of rhetoric] are derived from commonly held opinions [endoxa], and many opinions are opposed to each other” (Aristotle 2.25.2/2006, 211).

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“the empire of bang-bang” (2000, 87)

 “Death is slick in film, it has become tongue-in-cheek” (2000, 91). “Deathliness is in the mise-en-scene. Think of the killings in The Godfather: Isn’t the consciousness observing them that of a Corleone? These deaths are not messy or untidy. The attitude is proud, masterful, in love with meticulous detail. Nothing in the sensibility disturbs the remorseless efficiency of vengeance, or departs from the managerial pleasure in seeing intricate plans work sweetly” (2000, 92).

"With death so climatic or constitutional, ghastliness becomes a subject for movies” (2000, 94).

“The bulltet goes in, and life goes out. Movie prefers it as an instant, switchlike adjustment, without suffering or waiting. Yet so much of death is in those two grim departments. How do we stand up for the very few deaths, and corpses, we may meet in our lives? They are unscripted, no matter the anticipation; and they are not there for slo-mo analysis. Are there moments in film when we have a better than bang-bang understanding of what cessation means for the passer-on and those left behind?" (2000, 95). 

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The limit to death in most of our films is that it shows what poor attention they pay to life (in Prince 2000, 98).

David Thomson

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“Style and subject might be indicators of documentary status, as clarity and potability are indicators of water, but they are not defining features” (Currie 2006, 141).

“a photograph is a trace  of its subject, while a painting is a testimony of it. It is that thought which Andre Bazin, the French film theorist, was struggling to express when he likened photographs to footprints, to death masks… what is the similarity between the photograph, the footprint, and the death mask? All these things are traces left of the world by their subjects themselves. A painting, on the other hand, is not a trace, however much it tells us about the appearance of its subject, and however reliable what it tells us is. (Currie 2006, 142).

“Between traces and testimonies lie simulations… crucial to the reliability of the information is the assumption of causal isomorphism between the simulation and the process it simulated (Currie 2006, 143).

“photographs are traces, and events that do not happen… cannot leave traces. So the documentary film cannot present us with a record of events the filmmaker thinks occurred but which did not in fact occur, though the events can be recorded and presented to us in a way that misleads us about, say, their antecedents and consequences” (Currie 2006, 144).

“But do not photographs – and certain films – represent fictional things? I think they do: those images from Casablanca represent Rick and Ilsa as well as representing Bogart and Bergman. But they do so only secondarily: by representing the real. That way the asymmetry between these representations and paintings is retained; a painting can represent the mythical without having along the way to represent the real. And if photographs represent the fictional, they are not photographs of fictional things. There is a difference between what a photograph is of, and what it is about; a photograph can be about things other than the thing it is of. What it is of is just the thing it is a trace of, something we can identify by examining brute causal connections. But if the photograph is part of a fiction, then it may also be about things – fictional things – other than those things it is of.” (Currie 2006, 144).

“Brute causal connections” – the indexical relationship of the image to reality in Peircian semiotics.

 “Bazin [has] claimed that photography and cinematography do not provide us merely with a distinctive form of representation: rather, they reproduce reality for us. On this view, photographs are… like windows, mirrors, and telescopes: aids to sight” (Currie 2006, 144-45).

“By virtue of being traces of things, [documentaries] offer us special epistemic and emotional access to the things they are documentaries of” (Currie 2006, 145).

“a photograph or film image has, potentially, at least two representing functions. It represents in virtue of being a photograph, and in thus representing, it represents the things and events of which it is a trace. But a photograph can also have another representing role: a role imposed on it by its association with some narrative. That is how it is with photographs and film images that function to present to us either fictional stories or recreations of actually occurring events” (Currie 2006, 145).

“It is a condition on a film being documentary that its constitutive images have only that first, causally induced, representing role.” (Currie 2006, 145).

“At times we are intended to assume that what the film depicts really did occur, but only in general outline. Each morsel of assertion is thickly coated with fictional detail” (Currie 2006, 151).

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We might, therefore, modify this definition of documentary by saying, "Documentary films speak about actual situations or events and honor known facts; they do not introduce new, unverifiable ones. They speak directly about the historical world rather than allegorically." Fictional narratives are fundamentally allegories. They create one world to stand in for another, historical world. (In an allegory or parable everything has a second meaning; the surface meanings therefore may constitute a disguised commentary on actual people, situations, and events.) Within an alternative fictional world a story unfolds. As it does so it offers insights and generates themes about the world we already inhabit (2010, 7).

Bill Nichols

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Historical poetics

Most broadly and basically, I suggest that the questions of composition, function, and effect that interpretive criticism sets out to answer are most directly addressed and best answered by a self-conscious historical poetics of cinema. I conceive this as the study of how, in determinate circumstances, films are put together, serve specific functions, and achieve specific effects (1989, 266-7).

A historical poetics can fruitfully start with the assumption that no a priori device or set of meanings can serve as the basis of an invariable critical method (267).

In a given film, any item may bear an abstract meaning; or it may bear none. It is all a matter of conceptual scheme, intrinsic context, and historical norms. Some films may make meaning their "dominant," as do allegories like The Seventh Seal and Thriller. In other films, narrative referentiality forms the basis of the film's composition and effects; abstract meanings remain secondary. This is the case with most popular commercial cinema (267).

For the poetician, such conventions and skills become the centre of attention. Since poiesis means "making," poetics could profit from a pun of its own: it focuses on the work - the film as an object, but also the regulated effort that produces and uses it. Filmmakers aim to make certain sorts of objects, which in turn produce more or less predictable effects when used in conventional ways (268).

On the compositional side, the film poetician concentrates on those processes that enable films to come into being... most textual effects are the result of deliberate and founding choices, and these affect form, styles, and different sorts of meaning. Just as a poet's use of iambic pentameter or sonnet form is unlikely to be involuntary, so the filmmaker's decisions about camera placement, performance, or editing constitute relatively stable creative acts whose situational logic can be investigated (268-9).

As a historian of forms, genres, and styles, the poetician starts from the concrete assumptions embedded in the filmmaker's craft. Sometimes these are articulated by practitioners; sometimes they must be inferred from the product and the mode of production. The poetician aims to analyze the conceptual and empirical factors - norms, traditions, habits - that govern a practice and its products. Poetics thus offers explanations, of an intentionalist, functionalist, or causal sort (269). 

The poetics I would propose rests upon an inferential model, whereby the perceiver uses cues in the film to execute determinable operations, of which the construction of all sorts of meaning will be a part (270).

But the filmmaker cannot control all the semantic fields, schemata, and heuristics which the perceiver may bring to bear on the film. The spectator can thus use the film for other purposes than the maker anticipated. There is nothing mysterious or surprising about this; any product of human labor can fulfill various functions... A historical poetics will thus study not only the practices of production but also those of reception (270). 

...the most promising avenues for poetic analysis are those opening onto the compositional processes of form and style... Such work, which puts interpretation at the service of more global investigations of conventions of filmic structure and function, lies firmly within the purview of poetics (271).

While the interpreter makes the film interpretable, the poetician may also display the film as intriguing or challenging, perhaps because its operations lie beneath or beyond interpretation.

A poetics of effects will also be led to a study of comprehension. If historical scholarship can disclose referential and explicit meanings, a historical poetics can study the principles whereby viewers construct such meanings (271). 

Adequate explanations of comprehension will invoke several quite diverse explanatory frames: biological capacities of the human organism (for example, the mandatory perception of apparent movement), acquired but very basic perceptual processes (for example, ballistic eye movements, object recognition), acquired but culturally widespread cognitive skills (for example, means/end analysis, personification), and acquired and culturally variable processes (for example, particular notions of personal identity, historical conventions of narrative construction). It seems likely that a tenable theory of this sort will have recourse to perceptual and cognitive research in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and aesthetics (272).

A historical poetics should show how such interpretive inferences constitute viewing conventions (272).

In its broadest compass, it is a conceptual framework within which particular questions about films' composition and effects can be posed... Its empirical generalizations and conceptual distinctions supply assumptions, hypotheses, and enthymematic premises that neither criticism nor theory could do without. Analytical editing, the notion of the protagonist, character-centered causality, the long take, on-screen versus off-screen space, the concept of the scene, crosscutting, and diegetic sound are middle-level concepts which survive changes in theoretical fashion because they mesh tightly with the phenomena. They are our primary analytical instruments, and their usefulness lies in the fact that they capture real and significant choices faces by filmmakers and viewers (273).

Empirical without being empiricist, emphasizing explanations rather than explications, poetics can enrich criticism by putting cinema's social, psychological, and aesthetic conventions at the center of inquiry (274).

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psychological research has found that people are more amenable to therapeutic change when an empathetic atmosphere is created in which their fears, desires, and even their most neurotic fantasies are taken seriously and accepted, rather than sternly dismissed. The same principle no doubt applies to film (See S. Blatt, J Schimek and B. Brenneis 1980, cited in 1988, 274).

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Rhetoric, the question of which figures will be used to represent and construct the world, shifts to the center of analysis.

No aspect of film merely reveals or depicts "reality." Rather, films construct a phenomenal world and position the audience to experience and live the world in certain ways... differing political interests construct the social world in different ways through representation (1988, 274).

Michael Ryan & Douglas Kellner

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flashback provides the preconditions for understanding what we have already seen in the present (in ML Ryan 2004, 216)

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An Esthetic of Hunger

It is for this reason that the hunger of Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it is the essence of our society. There resides the tragic originality of Cinema Novo in relation to world cinema. Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood.

Cinema Novo shows that the normal behaviour of the starving is violence; and the violence of the starving is not primitive (1965; in Michael T. Martin 1997, Vol. 1, 60). 

Wherever one finds filmmakers prepared to film the truth and oppose the hypocrisy and repression of intellectual censorship there is the living spirit of Cinema Novo.

This is the definition of the movement and through this definition Cinema Novo sets itself apart from the commercial industry because the commitment of Industrial Cinema is to untruth and exploitation. The economic and industrial integration of Cinema Novo depends on the freedom of Latin America.

Cinema Novo is not one film but an evolving complex of films that will ultimately make the public aware of its own misery (ibid., 61).

Glauber Rocha

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film directors are excellent practical psychologists, exploiting not only our abilities to perceive and comprehend and infer but also our deficiencies (in Marie-Laure Ryan 2004, 216)

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[Soap opera] plots seem to expand rather than unfold in a linear fashion (2005, 121).