Suspense

Analysis of early cinema in England and the United States of America. Aesthetic commentary on the plastic advantages of silent films over sound films in terms of an effective melodrama. Beginnings of Hitchcock's cinema in Great Britain. Strategies, influences, and characteristics borrowed by Hitchcock from Griffith's American cinema, German expressionist cinema, and Eisenstein's montage.  Birth of suspense cinema in terms of a gap between space and time. Stagnation of cinema in its theatrical form. Silence in Mies van der Rohe's architecture of the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona 1929 Pavilion. Silent suspense cinema and silent and monochrome architecture.

Este texto narra a história melancólica de Buk, um homem de 59 anos que, após ser diagnosticado com uma doença terminal, decide passar sua última noite sozinho em uma cabana nas gélidas florestas da Noruega. À medida que as horas passam, Buk revisita memórias dolorosas de sua vida—amores perdidos, relacionamentos fracassados, e os erros que o levaram à solidão. O relógio na parede marca o tempo que resta, enquanto Buk reflete sobre seu passado, sentindo o peso de arrependimentos e escolhas que o levaram a um fim solitário.


Traduzido por AI, escrevi primeiramente em inglês.

Nicht einmal die größten Optimisten scheinen unter den gegenwärtigen Bedingungen weiterreichende Ambitionen zu haben, als abzuwenden, was droht. Wenn noch eine gewisse Aussicht darauf besteht, dass 2024 wider Erwarten ein gutes Jahr wird, dann allenfalls durch das, was in ihm dann doch nicht geschehen wird. Auch Jahrhundertprojekte sollen sich in der Sorge erschöpfen, dass es zu einem CO2-Ausstoß erheblichen Ausmaßes doch nicht kommt, man die Rate der Auslöschung der Arten verlangsamt, den Energieverbrauch pro Kopf reduziert.Wie kommt es, dass keine anderen Geschehnisse vorstellbar sind als drohende? Warum gibt es kein größeres Vorhaben als deren Verhinderung oder auch nur Vertagung?

I first show that even minimalist narratives (in any formulation of minimalism that can encompass the views of Lamarque, Carroll, Currie and Jureidini, and Velleman) there are sufficient resources both for generating a basic level literature and for sustaining serious philosophical inquiry. However, I do not adopt (pace, for example, Mag Uidhir and many others) a "fiction-first" strategy, in which we learn the lessons about narrative per se from studying fictional narratives first, and only then apply those lessons to nonfictional narratives. Accordingly, I adopt a different methodological strategy in which I assume, for argument, that no narratives were ever offered as fictional, and that instead all the narratives that ever were are believed to be attempts to accurately record or order the facts and are assessed both as to their narrative structure and effects and as to their truth or falsity. On that assumption, our task is to determine what mental mechanisms, if any, w...

In this text, the author analyzes the convergence between Christian culture and relevant films of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense filmography. Rather than focusing on Hitchcock’s status as a Catholic director, he makes an empirical analysis that allows him to find certain visual analogies between the Christian imaginary and the frames of certain films of the master of suspense. This article understands cinema as a kind of mental, psychological, or spiritual cartography/geography, and this is how it connects to the theme of space, where cinema is not just as analogous to physical space but the experience of viewing as a space. The Christian iconography of death, understood as participation in an eternal time, helps to understand the projection of the concept of suspension of judgment in constructing suspense that is not only iconographic but also spatially ontological. The author also suggests an epistemological connection between the mysterious nature of space in medieval art and architecture and the aesthetics of perfect crime in films. The allegory of Christ’s Passion will be seen as a recurring thread in Hitchcock’s visual analogies. His cinema and his particular way of seeing reality through space continue to demonstrate the validity of his art in writing new episodes in Western culture.

Lorena busca incansablemente a su bebé de tan solo nueve meses en un escenario apocalíptico. En esta novela, Villafáñez busca problematizar tanto los paradigmas culturales contemporáneos como aquellos históricamente consagrados, a través de un estilo que oscila entre el humor, el sarcasmo y un respetuoso tratamiento conceptual.

RECOMENDADA PARA PÚBLICO ADULTO.

EL CÁLIZ DE SU IRA
El cáliz de su ira / José Alejandro de Jesús Villafáñez /
ed. Virtual. Archivo PDF / 151 pp.; 21 x 14 cm.
Editor: Martín Guagnini (Taller de Corte y Corrección,
Buenos Aires).
Ilustración de portada generada en
www.copilot.microsoft.com, empleando tecnología
DALL-E 3.
Ilustración interna: Lic. Daniel F. Sarmiento.
Publicación independiente.
ISBN 979-885-7764-25-1

Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone.

This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner examines how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s LA CAPTIVE, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA, Jonathan Glazer’s UNDER THE SKIN, Kelly Reichardt’s NIGHT MOVES, Lucrecia Martel’s ZAMA, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CREEPY, and David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. THE REBIRTH OF SUSPENSE develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.

CONTENTS

Introduction //
1. Suspense in Slow Time //
2. Minimal Thrills //
3. The Ambient Landscape //
4. Ailing Bodies on the Threshold of Action //
5. Gothic Uncertainty, Bordering on Horror //
6. Streaming the Undead Energies of "Film"

Jeder Mensch erlebt in seinem Leben eine Reihe sehr verschiedener emotionaler Zustände. Wir ärgern uns über die S-Bahn, die uns vor der Nase wegfährt, freuen uns spontan über ein Tor im Fußball oder über den Besuch eines Freundes, haben Angst vor dem Nachbarhund, sind wegen zu viel Arbeit frustriert, wir beneiden den Kollegen um das neue Supersmartphone und es ist uns peinlich, dass wir den Geburtstag einer Freundin vergessen haben. Manchmal sind diese Emotionen ganz stark, manchmal einfach nur als allgemeine Stimmung beim Spazierengehen bemerkbar, manchmal sind sie schrecklich und manchmal schlicht nur wunderbar. Sie kommen und gehen, ohne dass wir viel Einfluss auf sie zu haben scheinen, manchmal stören sie geradezu, wir wünschen sie uns weg, sind ihnen aber anscheinend machtlos ausgeliefert. Oft können wir gar keinen Grund für eine bestimmte Emotion benennen. Auf jedem Fall spielen sie eine große Rolle für unser Leben (Newen & Zinck 2008). Daher ist es zentral zu klären, was Emotionen sind und wie wir sie am besten klassifizieren sollten, wobei letzteres die folgende Frage meint: Wie sollten wir Emotionen klassifizieren, um den größten Erklärungswert zu erreichen?

El neoyorkino Alan J. Pakula es un director cinematográfico que hizo de la gestión del secreto el elemento central de su filmografía. Su inicial experiencia como productor le ha llevado a desarrollar un estilo propio en el que lo comercial no está reñido con la calidad del relato, buscando en el suspense y la acción atractivos añadidos para el espectador. Cuenta en todas sus películas con grandes estrellas que aseguren el éxito de taquilla. Este artículo se centra, sin embargo, en el análisis de las zonas oscuras, las sombras de la versión oficial, las tramas de poder, los monstruos del subconsciente, la violencia inconfesable y otras urdimbres narrativas de su cine, que convierten la gestión del secreto en el cemento narrativo que sustenta el intrigante mundo de su filmografía.

This article considers Alfred Hitchcock’s work in relation to the connotations of “fallacy” within conventional settings of modern Western society. Focusing on two films, Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window (1954), we point to the phenomenon of the incidental push that leads toward an inextricable entanglement of characters, events, and psychic forces in what appear to be logical courses of action. We name this push “the Hitchcockian nudge.”

Responding to recent conversations surrounding the maturation of Tobias in the tale, the essay applies recent advancements in masculinity studies to examine the portrayal of Tobias in the book of Tobit as a coming-of-age story. In so doing, the essay offers one of few full length treatments devoted to Tobias in the tale. Analyzing the terminology used to refer to Tobias in conjunction with the shifts in characterization he experiences over the course of the story, the essay proposes that as Tobias advances from being a child, to young manhood, and finally matured manhood, he comes to replicate the model of masculinity passed down to him from his father. As such, his maturation proves less a matter of individuation and more a matter of social conformity than anything else.

Far from the “romantic” label that her novels erroneously carry, Daphne du Maurier’s short stories evince a macabre and cruel strain of which the writer was perfectly aware and occasionally wrote. Wishing to understand the prevalence of such a distinctive feature, this article starts by analysing the source and semantics of du Maurier’s macabre. It then lays stress on the bitter facts and ironic twists of fate which punctuate the five crime stories studied here, namely “The Little Photographer,” “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” “No Motive,” “The Alibi” and “Don’t Look Now.” The complex rapport of both victims and villains with reality is then underlined, together with the problematic refuge they seek in make-believe. It is then suggested that du Maurier’s cruel and macabre strain is a response to her own unease with the sexual taboos and gender bias dictated by a patriarchal society.

'This is it. I need to shit and I need to cry and I can do neither." How the subject of MJ Hyland's outstanding third novel comes to be thrust into a shared prison cell, physically and emotionally paralysed by inner trauma and external circumstance, is a narrative that seems as inevitable and arbitrary as life itself: it reminds us that there are some truths only fiction can carry....'

The rise of the internet horror can be found online, in particular as a type of stories called the “creepypasta”. There seems to be a few studies on creepypasta that focus on the narrative structure. An American philosopher Noël Carroll who explains the structure of horror narratives and how it can be used to produce the desired horror effect. The theory used in this research is the plot structure and suspense as stated by Carroll. The central question of this research is how to explain the structures of plot and suspense in a creepypasta story, in light of Carroll’s theory.
The creepypasta selected for this study is “Abandoned by Disney” by Christopher Howard Wolf. The analysis is conducted using qualitative content analysis method. The findings show that the plot structure corresponds to Carroll’s complex-discovery plot, with a longer onset stage, where the story’s monster is foreshadowed, and a shorter discovery stage, where the monster is revealed. The suspense, in the form of story questions generated in the reader, corresponds to the plot stages; the longer onset stage generates more questions to sustain suspense, and the discovery stage generates fewer questions as the monster is revealed.

Las campañas de prevención de la DGT consolidan un tipo de publicidad institucional persuasiva que ha experimentado grandes transformaciones a lo largo de sus 60 años de existencia. La actual publicidad de la Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT) reivindica la utilización de la denominada «línea dura» con especial énfasis en el aspecto emocional, que ha sido objeto de notable polémica. La Estrategia de Seguridad Vial 2011-2020 (DGT, 2011) es la que durante la última década ha marcado las bases de la comunicación de la entidad, siendo sus campañas audiovisuales las más llamativas. En este trabajo se pretende clarificar el funcionamiento de la «línea dura emocional» y su apreciación psicológica en detrimento del impacto escópico que venía caracterizando a la línea dura anterior. Utilizando la metodología del análisis textual de la campaña emitida en España Vivo o Muerto (DGT, 2018), se investiga la existencia de una variante de la «línea dura» de tipo emocional gracias a un desarrollo di...

Much of the talk leading up to, and following, the release of Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of the Alfred Hitchcock fi lm Psycho (1960) was an expression of outrage and confusion at the defilement of a beloved classic. For fans and critics alike-for reviewers the Psycho remake was nothing more than a blatant rip-off: not only an attempt to exploit the original film's legendary status, but (worse) a cheap replica of "one of the best and best known of American fi lms" ("Psycho: Saving a Classic"). These viewers consistently privileged the "original" Psycho over its remake, or measured the success of the Van Sant remake according to its ability to realize what were taken to be the "essential" elements of the Hitchcock text. This type of reaction seems consistent with a vast majority of critical accounts of film remakes which understand remaking as a one-way process: a movement from authenticity to imitation, from the superior self-identity of the original to the debased resemblance of the copy. Rather than follow these essentialist trajectories, some more recent approaches to cinematic remaking suggest that the remake, in its most general application, might (more productively) be regarded as a specific aspect of a broader and more open-ended intertextuality (see Frow, Mazdon, Stam, Stern, Verevis, Wills). As David Wills puts it: "The remake is [but]. .. a precise institutional form of the structure of repetition. .. that exists in and for every film" (148). Understood in this way, remaking might refer to any number of cultural and industrial activities, ranging from practices of allusion and quotation, to the repetition effects which characterize the Hollywood genre film, to the cinema's ability to repeat and replay the same fi lm over and again.

The Gothic genre aims to expand the reader or viewer’s consciousness by encouraging them to suspend their disbelief and by shocking them out of the boundaries of their everyday lives not by confronting them with explicit violence or physical or psychological dissolution, but simply by suggesting the horror through obscurity and leaving its manifest form to the imagination of the readers or viewers. In this way, gothic fiction produces the kind of anxious suspense similar to the kind of psychical and psychological uncertainty and disorientation that Jentsch believed to be how uncanny feelings come about and which, according to Freud, can indeed increase and multiply the effect of the uncanny, especially if reinforced by elements of silence, darkness and solitude. This condition of suspended anxiety is at the core of what Todorov considered to be the fantastic genre, characterized by the suspense, ambiguity and hesitation nature of the uncanny events presented in the narrative, doomed to dissolve at the very end with a final exposition. Few texts are able to maintain the suspense beyond the narrative itself, by centring on an elusive absence, which becomes the real haunting force in the text, increasing the ghostly effect of the narration, as in the case of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), as well as their respective screen adaptations, The Innocents (1961) and Rebecca (1940).

Umbi paku atai merah (Angiopteris ferox Copel) merupakan tumbuhan paku yang berasal dari suku Dayak yang digunakan sebagai obat tradisional yang berpotensi sebagai antioksidan karena memiliki kandungan senyawa metabolit sekunder meliputii alkaloid, steroid, flavanoid, tanin serta saponin. Penggunaan umbi paku atai merah di masyarakat masih menggunakan cara tradisional yaitu diseduh dengan air panas, diminum air rebusannya dan meninggalkan rasa yang tidak enak, sehingga tujuan dari penelitian ini yaitu untuk memformulasi sediaan kapsul ekstrak etanol umbi paku atai merah yang memenuhi karakteristik fisik. Penelitian ini dilakukan pembuatan sediaan kapsul yang berisi granul dengan variasi konsentrasi aerosil FI 5%, FII 7% dan FIII 9%. Granul dibuat dengan metode granulasi basah, lalu dilakukan evaluasi karakteristik fisik granul dan kapsul. Hasil yang diperoleh dari ketiga granul tersebut memenuhi karakteristik fisik granul dengan parameter uji organoleptik, kandungan lembab, susut pe...

Seit der Wende hat die Erforschung der DDR-Übersetzungsliteratur einen starken Aufschwung erfahren. Zahlreiche Forschenden haben sich mit diesem Thema beschäftigt und dabei vor allem die Zensur in den Vordergrund gerückt. Dabei wurde das gesamte Spektrum der Zensur - von der Streichung einzelner Passagen bis zum Totalverbot - diskutiert. Siegfried Lokatis stellt in seinem Aufsatz über Erinnerungsorte der DDR-Zensur allerdings fest, dass »die Folgen der Zensurpraxis nicht jedem Buch aus der DDR sichtbar eingeschrieben sind« und nennt als Beispiel unter anderem den »auffällig späten Erscheinungstermin« als typische »unsichtbare Spur der Buchzensur«. Lokatis weist zudem auf zwei mögliche Formen einer solchen Verspätung hin, die Hinweise auf einen Zensurvorgang geben können. Erstens kann ein längerer Zeitraum zwischen dem Antrag auf Genehmigung bei der Zensurbehörde Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel (HV) und dem endgültigen Erscheinungsdatum auf zensorische Handlungen hinweisen. Zweitens wurden in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren beantragte Bücher zunächst verboten, dann erneut beantragt und schließlich in den 1980er Jahren doch noch veröffentlicht. Anhand der beiden Romane Dolle Dinsdag und Wolfszeit des niederländischen kommunistischen Schriftstellers Theun de Vries soll hier gezeigt werden, dass es noch eine dritte Möglichkeit für eine außergewöhnliche Verzögerung geben kann.

This essay will cover some of Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent movies up to and including Blackmail (1929), of which he filmed both a silent and a sound version simultaneously. Hitchcock’s success with sound was directly linked to his training in silent technique. Silent movies actually allowed him to explore how they were capable of sound. This essay will consider how silent movies were able to induce an acoustic experience without the aid of extra-diegetic practices that added live – and sometimes gramophonic – soundtrack to films. What I am interested in is the aural effect of the visual experience of the screen alone. In the early days of cinema, the frame was silently read for all kind of sounds heard in the head of the spectator.

A Rose for Emily is a typical Gothic-style novel, intimately associated with the characteristics of Gothic literature: 1. Ghostly and horrible environment; 2. The tone of death; 3. Uncanny character images. Generally speaking, Gothic literature reveals the gloomy, dark, sad and mysterious literary styles, but what fascinates us most is the creation of atmosphere—being horrific, thrilling and intensive, which give people different kinds of sensory touches—Visually, physically and even spiritually. This Gothic style places emphasis on both emotion and a pleasurable kind of terror, thus embodying the senses of a quest for a horrible atmosphere, and an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion as well as the thrills of fearfulness to readers.

Suspense is known to play a crucial role in storytelling phenomena in general, and computational storytelling systems in particular. While several story generation algorithms have addressed suspense, they have usually done so either by focusing on the narratology-related aspects, or by providing functional approximations of the potential response. In this paper, following the overall objective of devising a cognitive model of suspenseful stories, we have adapted a story generation system so that it includes elements represented by affective terms extracted from experiments. In this way, we put the focus on the cognitive aspects. The obtained results suggest that the generation model works and that evaluators perceive levels of suspense comparable to the ones obtained in the previous contributions.

*Sambre* d'Alice Géraud paraît à point nommé en 2023, tandis que l'offensive réactionnaire contre la vague #MeToo gagne partout du terrain. Le fait divers que traite l'autrice y apparaît en effet comme un cas exemplaire de la réalité sociale dénoncée par le mouvement féministe. L'intérêt de cette approche est en particulier de faire ressortir la responsabilité de nos institutions dans la perpétuation des violences sexuelles à l'encontre des femmes. Tel que conçu par l'autrice, l'art du reportage est ainsi une arme très efficace qui nous fait mesurer le chemin encore à parcourir pour résoudre ce problème de société systémique.

Umbi paku atai merah (Angiopteris ferox Copel) merupakan tumbuhan paku yang berasal dari suku Dayak yang digunakan sebagai obat tradisional yang berpotensi sebagai antioksidan karena memiliki kandungan senyawa metabolit sekunder meliputii alkaloid, steroid, flavanoid, tanin serta saponin. Penggunaan umbi paku atai merah di masyarakat masih menggunakan cara tradisional yaitu diseduh dengan air panas, diminum air rebusannya dan meninggalkan rasa yang tidak enak, sehingga tujuan dari penelitian ini yaitu untuk memformulasi sediaan kapsul ekstrak etanol umbi paku atai merah yang memenuhi karakteristik fisik. Penelitian ini dilakukan pembuatan sediaan kapsul yang berisi granul dengan variasi konsentrasi aerosil FI 5%, FII 7% dan FIII 9%. Granul dibuat dengan metode granulasi basah, lalu dilakukan evaluasi karakteristik fisik granul dan kapsul. Hasil yang diperoleh dari ketiga granul tersebut memenuhi karakteristik fisik granul dengan parameter uji organoleptik, kandungan lembab, susut pe...

Die vorliegende Arbeit "Politik, Ästhetik, Kulturidentität. Melancholische und humoristische Ansichten Ost- und Mitteleuropas in ausgewählten Prosatexten von Andrzej Stasiuk und Jurij Andruchovyč" beschäftigt sich hauptsächlich mit den folgenden Werken der beiden Autoren: der gemeinsamen Publikation "Mein Europa. Zwei Essays über das sogenannte Mitteleuropa" (2000, dt. 2004) als auch Stasiuks Reiseskizzen "Unterwegs nach Babadag" (2004, dt. 2005) und "Fado" (2006, dt. 2008) sowie mit Andruchovyčs Roman "Zwölf Ringe" (2003, dt. 2007). Zur Straffung der Argumentation stützt sich die Verfasserin auch auf zwei frühere Werke Andruchovyčs: "Moscoviada" (1993, dt. 2006) und "Perversion" (1996, dt. 2011). Zum übergreifenden analysierten Motiv wurden die unterschiedlichen Auffassungen Ost- und Mitteleuropas im historischen Moment des EU-Beitritts Polens (2004). Dementsprechend misst die Verfasserin Stasiuk eine melancholische, und Andruchovyč dagegen eine humoristische Geisteshaltung bei. Die beiden Geisteshaltungen lassen sich entsprechend als ein ‚Gemeinschaftlichkeitsbruch‘ und ‚Gemeinschaftlichkeitsaufbau‘ im europäischen Kontext auffassen. Melancholie und Humor werden in der Arbeit als Maßstäbe der ost- und mitteleuropäischen Ideenwelten und der literarischen Ästhetisierungstypen betrachtet.