Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers
This paper explores the possibilities of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical description of the ethical life for understanding the experience of viewing a film, and this with two related goals in mind. The first is to provide a sustained Levinasian reading of the Dardenne Brothers' Lorna's Silence as an alternative to political or traditionally ethical approaches. This is necessary because the sensuous quality of Lorna's moral conversion is best understood through a set of metaphors used by Levinas to describe his ‘pre-ontological’ ethical philosophy: metaphors of the caress, the feminine and maternity. A second goal is to account for how this film's formal qualities create an encounter between viewer and film that echoes Lorna's encounters in the fictional world. To this end, the paper squares Levinasian ethics with André Bazin's realism by trimming from Bazin's work the notion of a gathered, individual subjectivity and emphasizing themes of encounter and dislocation. Lorna's Silence gives a fresh illustration of the cinema's power to encourage viewers to strive toward an altruistic notion of human relations.
Meaning of 'Labor' and Aesthetic in Dardenne Brothers' Films
Dardenne brothers` films deals with minorities` issues who are shoved out to periphery of society, and especially takes interest in value-deprived human life in labor market of today. This study examines such social awareness of Dardenne brothers targeting their latest works awarded in Cannes Film Festival, , , , , . And analysis is attempted about Dardenne brothers` unique formal aesthetical style that exactly captures such social awareness. In Dardenne brothers` films a person shows up who faces abject matter of living. Their agony is closely connected to unemployment, and shows images of irresistible anxiety and alienation. Dardenne brothers` images are not only simple platform with contents embodied, but designed form showing essential thematic consciousness. Location and gaze, motion of camera capturing a character makes us to reflect the situation a character is facing in the world. There are almost no regard about plots, no dramatic devices, superficial and even straightforward, but Dardenne brothers` films have such independent formal aesthetic, which makes able to give endless tension.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.