The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema


Book Description

'Magical', 'out of this world', 'an experience you'll never forget': Peter Weir's films have enthralled audiences around the globe. Whether in iconic Australian works such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli or international mainstream thrillers such as Witness, Weir has deliberately created mystical movie experiences. Modern cinema studies is used to dissecting films on the basis of gender, class or race: now, for the first time, Richard Leonard shows that a mystical gaze also exists and is exercised in the secular multiplex temples of today. The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema is a meticulous and accessible book that uses a psychoanalytic approach incorporating the insights of Jung, film theory and theology to break new ground in what continues to be a hot topic in cinema studies: the spectator/screen relationship. Leonard provides a fresh and innovative perspective on what happens when we behold a film.




The Greatest Mirror


Book Description

The idea of a heavenly double—an angelic twin of an earthbound human—can be found in Christian, Manichaean, Islamic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Scholars have long traced the lineage of these ideas to Greco-Roman and Iranian sources. In The Greatest Mirror, Andrei A. Orlov shows that heavenly twin imagery drew in large part from early Jewish writings. The Jewish pseudepigrapha—books from the Second Temple period that were attributed to biblical figures but excluded from the Hebrew Bible—contain accounts of heavenly twins in the form of spirits, images, faces, children, mirrors, and angels of the Presence. Orlov provides a comprehensive analysis of these traditions in their full historical and interpretive complexity. He focuses on heavenly alter egos of Enoch, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, and Aseneth in often neglected books, including Animal Apocalypse, Book of the Watchers, 2 Enoch, Ladder of Jacob, and Joseph and Aseneth, some of which are preserved solely in the Slavonic language.




Archangel's Lineage


Book Description

New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh’s dangerous and beautiful world of archangels, vampires, and mortals has never faced a threat this cataclysmic… Raphael and Elena are experiencing their first ever year of true peace. No war. No horrors of archangelic power. No nightmares given flesh. Until…the earth beneath the Refuge begins to tremble, endangering not only angelkind’s precious and fragile young, but the very place that has held their most innocent safe for eons. Amid the chaos, Elena’s father suffers a violent heart attack that threatens to extinguish their last chance to heal the bonds between them and make sense of the ruins of their agonizing shared history. Even as Elena battles grief, Raphael is torn from her side by the sudden disappearance of an archangel. But worse yet is to come. An Ancestor, an angel unlike any other, stirs from his Sleep to warn the Cadre of a darkness so terrible that it causes empires to fall and civilizations to vanish. This time, even the Cadre itself may not be able to stop a ticking clock that is counting down at frightening speed…




Primal Sight


Book Description




Production of the 'Self' in the Digital Age


Book Description

This book investigates the relationship between the self and screen in the digital age, and examines how the notion of the self is re-negotiated and curated online. The chapters examine the production of the self in postmodernity through digital platforms by employing key concepts of ubiquity, the everyday, disembodiment and mortality. It locates self-production through ubiquitous imaging of the self and our environments with and through mobile technologies and in terms of its ‘embeddedness’ in our everyday lives. In this innovative text, Yasmin Ibrahim explores technology’s co-location on our corporeal body, our notions of domesticity and banality, our renewed relationship with the screen and our enterprise with capital as well as the role of desire in the formation of the self. The result is a richly interdisciplinary volume that seeks to examine the formation of the self online, through its renewed negotiations with personalised technologies and with the emergence of social networking sites.




Large-Scale and Distributed Optimization


Book Description

This book presents tools and methods for large-scale and distributed optimization. Since many methods in "Big Data" fields rely on solving large-scale optimization problems, often in distributed fashion, this topic has over the last decade emerged to become very important. As well as specific coverage of this active research field, the book serves as a powerful source of information for practitioners as well as theoreticians. Large-Scale and Distributed Optimization is a unique combination of contributions from leading experts in the field, who were speakers at the LCCC Focus Period on Large-Scale and Distributed Optimization, held in Lund, 14th–16th June 2017. A source of information and innovative ideas for current and future research, this book will appeal to researchers, academics, and students who are interested in large-scale optimization.




Olivofonics


Book Description

Olivofonics (Oh-Lee-Vo-Fawn-Ecks) Small Business Management & Philosophy for Beginners. Small business management is nothing more than philosophies. It covers business ethics, business reality, marketing philosophies, logic, and much more. As individuals, the only thing that we own is our beliefs. If you believe something to be true, you consider it to be your knowledge. If, however, you don't believe something to be true, you have very little knowledge of it. So knowledge is power, but only if you believe it to be true. If one side of the coin says, "Man has no guarantees in life," then it's safe to assume that the opposite side of the coin guarantees man one thing, "No individual can live forever." Yet, people flip the coin every day. Even though I cannot offer you any guarantees, we already have our guarantee. Let me say that if you believe the philosophies in this book, then my philosophies will become your knowledge. If, however, you don't believe the philosophies in this book, you'll have very little knowledge of small business management. Regards, Frank.




Spiritual Guides


Book Description

In Spiritual Guides: Pathfinders in the Desert, Fred Dallmayr challenges the "desert character" of modern culture. Political and economic corruption, incessant warmongering, spoliation of natural resources, and, above all, mindless consumerism and greedy self-satisfaction are all symptoms of what he contends is an expanding wasteland or desert where everything creative and nourishing decays and withers. Through an alternative interpretation of Nietzsche's saying "the desert grows," this book calls for spiritual renewal, invoking in particular four prominent guides or pathfinders in the desert: Paul Tillich, Raimon Panikkar, Thomas Merton, and Pope Francis. What links all four guides together is the view of spiritual life as an itinerarium, a pathway along difficult and often uncharted roads. Dallmayr begins by drawing a connection between Nietzsche's characterization of the desert in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the present culture of consumerism, in which a nearly-exclusive emphasis on productivity, efficiency, profitability, and the transformation of everything valuable into a useful resource prevails over all other goals. He also draws attention to another sense of "desert," namely, as a place of solitude, meditation, and retreat from affliction. Aptly defined, it becomes a place where spirituality arises from a painful "turning-about": a wrenching effort to extricate human life from the decay of late modernity. Spirituality is not a possession or property but rather the contemplation and radical mindfulness that we develop through engaged practices as we search for pathways to recovery. Spirituality becomes critical in the dominant political and cultural wasteland because it provides a bond linking humanity together. In the spirit of global ecumenism, Spiritual Guides also includes a discussion of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist forms of spirituality. This book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, political theory, and religion.




Film as Social Practice


Book Description

Turner provides a clear introduction to major theoretical issues in the history of film production and film studies, examining the function of film as a national cultural industry, and its place in our popular culture.




Racial Castration


Book Description

DIVA psychoanalytic study that argues for the centrality of sexuality in the construction of Asian-American identity, and of racial identity in general./div




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