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Fabienne Liptay: Capturing Motion, Shaping Time
Capturing Motion, Shaping Time
(p. 235 – 254)

Fabienne Liptay

Capturing Motion, Shaping Time
From Chronophotography to Digital Film

PDF, 20 pages

  • gaze
  • history of science
  • physiology

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Fabienne Liptay

is a professor of film studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She studied film and theater studies as well as English language and literature at the University of Mainz, Germany, where she earned her doctorate in 2002. From 1999 to 2001, she worked as an assistant editor on the TV program 3sat Kulturzeit. She was a lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Mainz from 2002 to 2007 and assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Munich from 2007 to 2013. She is coeditor of the quarterly journal Film-Konzepte and has published extensively on the aesthetics, history, and theory of film. Her research primarily focuses on film imagery and picture theory; on audio-visual narrative; and on the interrelations between film and the other arts and media.
Other texts by Fabienne Liptay for DIAPHANES
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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