Download or read book Cinematic Vitalism --- Theories of Life and the Moving Image written by Inga Pollmann and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation documents the influence of vitalist and life--philosophical ideas of life, movement, and temporality on early film theory and practice, and describes the ways in which cinema in turn contributed to vitalist conceptions of life in theoretical biology and philosophy. Vitalism is the biological-cum-philosophical claim that life is a creative and self-organizing force exceeding the explanatory frames of both physics and chemistry. Vitalism has played an ambivalent role in historical and theoretical accounts of the emergence of cinema (and, more generally, modernity). The cinema as apparatus, public space, and dispositif generally has been taken as emblematic of the mechanization and technologization of modern life. As a consequence, accounts of the historical contexts of early cinema, even where they acknowledge the influence of a vitalist philosopher such as Henri Bergson, frequently tie film more closely to a reductive mechanist paradigm than to vitalism. Cinematic Life demonstrates, however, that early theories of the cinematic image and vitalist discourses on life were inextricably intertwined. This was true both because late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vitalist positions on the creative and self-organizing potential of living matter were informed by the experience and phenomenology of the "living pictures" of cinema, and because these vitalist philosophies influenced emerging theories of film. In the encounter with the technologically produced temporality and naturalistic, yet ephemeral images at the cinema, vitalist ideas about the nature of life and its relationship to technology were modified to such an extent, in fact, that we can (and should) speak of "cinematic vitalism." Drawing on various vitalist texts from biology, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, Cinematic Life establishes a new theoretical framework and new contexts for both classical European film-theoretical texts (by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, and others) and select films from 1894 to 1929, including abstract films, films featuring animals, and popular science films. The final chapter pursues the trajectory of cinematic vitalism in the immediate post-WWII context, and includes a discussion of postwar films.