Phenomenology of film music

This is a revised version of a paper written for Professor David Raksin's class in film music, Fall 1976, at the University of Southern California.     

Identification with film characters, covert aggressive verbalization, and reactions to film violence

To determine some conditions governing the aggressive aftereffects of identification with aggressive film characters, men were first angered by a confederate and then exposed to a film clip of a violent boxing match. Subjects instructed to identify with the winner of the prize-fight were subsequently more aggressive toward the confederate than subjects instructed to identify with the loser or subjects not asked to identify with a film aggressor. Apparently, viewers must perceive their identificand incur reinforcement for his aggression before they become more aggressive themselves. However, requiring subjects to make implicit aggressive verbalizations during the film completely eliminated any aggressive aftereffects of identification. This finding was opposite to prediction and suggested that covert verbalization interfered with subjects' ability to make the vicarious aggressive responses which mediate increased subsequent aggression.     

Elusive narrators in literature and film

Subjunctivitis is the doctrine that what is distinctive about knowledge is essential modal in character, and thus is captured by certain subjunctive conditionals. One principal formulation of subjunctivism invokes a ``sensitivity condition' (Nozick, De Rose), the other invokes a ``safety condition' (Sosa). It is shown in detail how defects in the sensitivity condition generate unwanted results, and that the virtues of that condition are merely apparent. The safety condition is untenable also, because it is too easily satisfied. A powerful motivation for adopting subjunctivism would be that it provides a solution to the problem of misleading evidence, but in fact, it does not.     

Indexing space and time in film understanding

We investigated the extent to which understanders monitor shifts in time and space during film comprehension. Participants viewed a feature‐length film and identified those points in the film in which they perceived a change in situation. We performed an a priori analysis of the films to identify the shifts in time, the movement of characters, and region. The relationship between the theoretical analysis of the films and the participants judgements of situational change was assessed. The results provide support for the Event Indexing Model and suggest that situation models for filmed events are indexed along multiple dimensions of situational continuity. Furthermore, the pattern of results was similar for narrative film as they are for narrative text. This finding suggest that there are general mechanisms for event understanding that operate independently of medium or mode of experience. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inversion domain boundary in a ZnO film

Transmission electron microscopy has been used to investigate the (1100) and (1103) inversion domain boundaries in a ZnO film prepared by molecular beam epitaxy. The inversion domain was revealed by dark-field images and confirmed by convergent-beam electron diffraction. Interacting with a (0002) stacking fault, the inversion domain boundary in the (1100) plane alters its orientation from the [0001] direction and climbs on the (1103) plane to release the strain energy. These features are characterized and analysed by high-resolution electron microscopy and the geometric phase method. The findings are significant for understanding the formation and propagation of inverse domain boundaries in epitaxial ZnO films.     

Active imagination and the analysis of film

The emotions aroused by the pleasure-generating mechanisms of the cinema are usually benign because they refer to a virtual world. Experiencing affects aroused by fictions can resemble being drawn into a rehearsal for a possible, imagined future that just might (but more likely never will) occur in the individual's life in the real world. Movie-goers, no less than the readers of novels, actively engage with the symbols that film makers inscribe in the screen text. In so doing, they take a measure of control over elements of the fiction. Screened fiction has thus the potential to help the individual grow in self-awareness. Shifting its focus to the work of the film critic, the paper argues that, suitably adapted to the requirements of working with a pre-recorded film or tape, Jung's concept of the active imagination helps us to model, license, limit and endorse the subjective element in textual analysis. Because the method proposed makes it possible formally to recognize that the interpretation of fiction is inevitably integrated with the analyst's personality, interpretation is always a matter of a reader bringing a text into being rather than disinterring a pre-existing object.     

The Routledge companion to religion and film

This paper concerns U.S. evangelical Christian mission practice in the Muslim world. Interests in and support for mission work among Muslims have increased – shifts that evangelical church leaders and missiologists attribute to the impacts of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed – and the short-term segment, which fuses voluntarism, tourism and evangelism, represents the newest paradigm in these undertakings. While the overall popularity of short-term mission is recognised by scholars and church leaders, its role in mediating interactions between Christians and Muslims has received little attention. This paper documents short-term mission engagement with Islam by showing how Islam is represented by agencies and how volunteers interact with Muslims. I argue that styles of representing and engaging with Islam, while arising from a range of theological orientations, are also products of changing contexts and practices of mission, both the routinisation of short-term mission and the expanded opportunities for mission under rubric of faith-based development. This paper is based on research in Southern California between 2009 and 2012, including visual and textual content analyses of sending agencies' websites and guidebooks, and interviews with 57 short-term mission participants.