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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > General
With the advancement of cybernetics, avatars, animation, and
virtual reality, a thorough understanding of how the puppet
metaphor originates from specific theatrical practices and media is
especially relevant today. This book identifies and interprets the
aesthetic and cultural significance of the different traditions of
the Italian puppet theater in the broader Italian culture and
beyond. Grounded in the often-overlooked history of the evolution
of several Italian puppetry traditions - the central and northern
Italian stringed marionettes, the Sicilian pupi, the glove puppets
of the Po Valley, and the Neapolitan Pulcinella - this study
examines a broad spectrum of visual, cinematic, literary, and
digital texts representative of the functions and themes of the
puppet. A systematic analysis of the meanings ascribed to the idea
and image of the puppet provides a unique vantage point to observe
the perseverance and transformation of its deeper associations,
linking premodern, modern, and contemporary contexts.
A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a
fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the
drift of an astronaut in the void... Analysing a wide range of
films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic
motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then
restores the spectator's sense of equilibrium. The 'tensive motifs'
of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our
fears and dreams and offer embodied forms of transcendence of the
limits of our human condition along with an awareness of their
insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of 'Neurofilmology'-an
interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual
psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into
dialogue-this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in
a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.
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