quarta-feira, dezembro 30, 2009

Gnostic Flavor on "Slipstream"

Although the film does not deal explicitly gnostic themes, "Slipstream "is a" gnostic flavor " to adopt a self-reflective consciousness is not just as the reality of his own cinematic language. When making a direct reference to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, the film joins the tradition of "romantic irony" that studies the angst of being a prisoner of language can not grasp a reality that is lost in the bloody flux time.

Eric Wilson, in his seminal book on the "gnostic movie" Secret Cinema:Gnostic Vision in Film "(which advocates the emergence of a new genus film, the "gnostic movie"), classifies the presence of Gnosticism in films in four categories: films Gnostics proper (where the movies Gnostic theology and cosmology are explicit as in "Matrix" (Matrix, 1999) and Truman Show (Truman Show, 1998), Kabbalah movies (where the aspiration Gnostic transcendence passes by robots, prostheses and servo-mechanisms - the movie "RoboCop (RoboCop, 1987) would be an example, alchemical films (which describe how life emerges from death, the spirit grows from the body and truth arises out of chaos - "American Beauty" (American Beauty, 1999), and "Dead Man" (Dead Man, 1995) are examples of this category.

Wilson also talks about movies with "gnostic flavor," films that do not address proper subjects of Gnosticism, but contain the spirit or the Gnostic attitude towards reality. A question, as it were, front metalinguistic the real: can be a real plot within a plot? A narrative within another narrative?

The movie "Slipstream" ("A Dream Within A Dream" - portuguese title in Brazil), starring, directed and written by Anthony Hopkins certainly fits that category. Title in Portuguese could not have been happier. Retrieved from one of the lines dialogue of the film, is a reference to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe "Dream Within a Dream, "written when he was 18 in 1827.

As the literature of the nineteenth century Romanticism, the main topics of this film are the conscience "goal" of life and of art itself and the anguish the flow of time. As in Poe's poem where the protagonist can not hold the golden sand that vanishes between the toes ("O God! can I not grasp/Them with a tighter clasp?/O God! can I not save/One from the pitiless wave?").

Hopkins is Felix Bonhoeffer, a screenwriter who, next to the elderly, is hired to rewrite a murder mystery. In fact, try to solve plot problems arising from unexpected events in the film production. Felix begins to live in two different worlds that, throughout the film will confusing: the real (the movie's production and writing the screenplay) and its mind (references imagery of his life mingling with the characters script that tries to write).

With inspiration clearly Linchyan (as Mulholland Drive by David Lynch metalinguistic that deals with the intricacies of Hollywood), Felix faces with killers, wannabe actress and film producers, types suspects that, throughout the narrative, alternate between reality and the world parallel created by the script that tries to write.

The film is a puzzle. With a frenetic editing, there are constant exchanges of color images (black and white, sepia, color), it swaps the order of scenes, deliberate errors of continuity, it swaps the author of the speeches etc. In first half of the film the viewer is completely lost before a apparently random collage of scenes. It seems a film that has not been edited (This seems to be the purpose, since it is producing a film that does not ends).

The Romantic Irony

Once, the writer and researcher Stephan Hoeller said that every serious artist was already, unknowingly, through Gnostic. The survival and the constant "revivals" of gnosticism certainly are due to the parasitic character of a certain awareness or Gnostic attitude in the face of existence. A sort of conscience goal. In the case of art, the intrusion of the author figure in the literary work, ie, character self-reflexive awareness of the game and work on the project. This is the main characteristic of Romanticism: the "irony":
(...) The romantic irony does not end in mere interruption of the narrative flow with the narrator addressing the reader. It is much beyond that, a feature that is intended to stimulate a constant discussion and reflection about literature - a process which necessarily involved the reader. This participation is achieved in that the writer destroys the illusion of verisimilitude and lays bare the character's fictional narrative, drawing the reader's attention to how the text was constructed. (VOLOBUEF, K. Frestas and Edges. The prose fiction of romanticism Germany and Brazil. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 1998, p.99.

This attitude or awareness goal (self-reflective) to see both reality and art that attempts to represent reality as "construct" (contrived) seems to be the dominant theme of the movie "Slipstream". Insofar as the protagonist confuses the script and all its reference film (as the classic "Vampire of Souls") with reality itself (the production of a film), Felix, astonished, at a threshold of self-reflection: is life a screenplay, where, within it, produce new script? Or, rather, to produce scripts, artificially, we represent an unattainable reality?

This is the anguish that pervades not only the movie "Slipstream", but all the romanticism of the nineteenth century: the anguish that we have lost a full relationship with reality, an uncomfortable sensation of hiatus between man / world experience / representation. The use of literary irony (fictional works with constant self-reflection narratives, bringing uncertainty to both the protagonist and the reader about what the point of view of the story being told) is the reflection of a gnostic awareness about the existence: the mistrust artificiality of much of art as the actual reality that we want to represent.

The film's protagonist constantly repeats plans stunned, eyes wide and mouth open, helpless, watching the flow of events, frenetic editing and constant changing of the narrative voice. Felix tries throughout the film, without success, to understand or capture the flow of time. Fundamental anxiety of art: as a static representation can capture the flow of time? As in Poe's poem, like holding hands between the golden sand which ruthlessly fades?

The visual arts, through photography and film, it seems that fundamental anxiety that drives the technology of images. But when the film reaches its artistic and technological maturity and repeat the same phenomenon in the literature when it came to its climax: the anguish of self-reflection, metalinguistic the limitations of artistic representation in apprehending the flow of time and reality.

But that consciousness (or unconsciousness) Gnostic raises a suspicion deeper: what if this very flow of time is a cruel deception, a constructu in which we are caught? Just as Felix Bonhoeffer or Edgar Allan Poe in his poem, we would be stuck in this failure is that the cosmic flow of time?

This Gnostic flavor present in the film "Slipstream", this encounter between cinema and literary romanticism, makes us understand why the survival of Gnostic questioning throughout history: in addition to the cosmological and theological questions made by its thinkers , Gnosticism can not be limited to two dimensions of the paper. It goes further, in a constantly renewed attitude of irony and self-reflection on life and art.

Above, the Edgar Allan Poe's Poem:

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Credits:
  • Film: Slipstream (A Dream Within A Dream - Brazil)
  • Director: Anthony Hopkins
  • Screenwriter: Anthony Hopkins
  • Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Tambor, John Turturro, Kevin McCarthy, Stella Arroyave
  • Production / Distribution: Strand Releasing
  • Year: 2007
  • Country: USA

Drugs, Disco and 3D: The Pop Embodiment of The Mystic and Sacred

Of the first multimedia sensory areas of the 70 clubs to 3D cinema today, followed the materialization of all neo-Platonic a mystical and metaphysical dimension sacred: the embodiment of all archetypal symbolism of the species before our senses through
convergence of media to digital technologies. What is the fate of ancient religious and mystical aspiration for transcendence in an environment high tech under the control of large corporations?


In a classroom discipline Visual Communication at the University Anhembi Morumbi discussed with my students the visual references of each decade. Regarding 70 years, presented the visual disco music: fashion, behavior, and especially the multi-sensory areas that were nightclubs. Strobe lights, dance floors with lights in motioncreating random geometric shapes, dry ice etc.. In terms of behavior, we know that over the decades the drugs with each trend in pop culture. In the era of disco music to accompany decay and the rise of the drug lysergic drug "speed" as thecocaine. Faced with so much sensory stimulation, the important thing was to get connected and dance all night.

A student raises an important consideration: in environments like the disco were no longer needed drugs lysergic: apparatuses multisensor already reproduced the effects of acid trips. Therefore, the most important was to remain connected to extend the trip organized by technologies sensory.

This is perhaps the crucial question to understand why the decay of lysergic drugs and the rise of the drug "speed" (from cocaine to ecstasy) that followed the successive trends in fashion and behavior of the last decades. And more than that. This question is embedded in another: if the state altered consciousness of lysergic was already present the possibility of religious or mystical experiences, is the secret of motivation sensory and multimedia technologies would not be the materialization of this possibility in a commodified and controlled? In other words: virtualization of religious and mystical experiences through a catharsis multimedia technology.

At the end of his life neuroscientist U.S. Thimoty Leary (Considered the guru of LSD in the 60s) had believed that the software computers were going to replace the LSD as the induction medium altered states of consciousness. For him, televirtualidade was the key word: with helmet and Velcro gloves, "smart drugs" in the head and programs that convert the screen ideas we present in the brain to release psychic where each individual create your own reality.

It is no coincidence we follow the growth of smart drugs parallel development of computer technology and virtual spaces multisensory entertainment (the usual clubs to raves) and electronic music which artists make constant associations between sound, trance new age and esoteric.

That seems to be the essence of tecnognose: through the development of a technology that seeks to improve the ultimate interface (the connections between neural networks and electronic networks), creating a kind of shorthand for sacred aspiration for transcendence. Under the pretext that the technologies offer a channel "cleaner" and less "chemical" than drugs lysergic,
tecnognose to create the conditions for solipsism (where each individual creates his narcissistic own horizon of experience) and at the same time, promotes control through surveillance systems.

Materiality of Images

All the technologies of imaging, audio-visual film will follow the movement of materializing the experience of the mystical and the sacred. For example, in the movies followed a profound change in the cinematic apparatus itself.

With the evolution of digital resources, chroma key etc., gradually the film or the camera itself are becoming disconnected from reality. If in the past, the device film stemmed from the real object (actors, set design, lighting, etc.). Today, increasingly, it lacks a reference "realistic." All the features of digital editing, montage, special effects, in that it virtualizes, are increasingly materializing the imaginary (mythology, fantasies, etc.).. The viewer is in front of him, the transformation of images of all the myths, dreams and fantasies.

Improved technological capabilities such as 3D help materialize a whole universe of archetypal our collective unconscious. If in the past, it was necessary to asceticism, the discipline of meditation, mastery of techniques and philosophies hermetic or inducing mystical experiences through hard drugs, now all we were looking through these instruments is materialized before our eyes on a screen .

While our bodies lie inert in a comfortable armchair in a multiplex, our eyes see the archetypal embodiment of our aspirations.

So what is the fate of all metaphysical dimension of the sacred and the transcendent in the technological media? If we witness an era where the whole neo-Platonic metaphysics is embodied not only in our eyes, but kinesthetically, for all the senses, what is the fate of the mystical experience and the sacred?

All the euphoria of Thimoty Leary, who saw a road with computer technology psychic liberation, he did neglect one important detail: the large corporations which, after all, the monopoly of technological development and manufacture of software and hardware.

If the future of cinema points to the end of the support itself (the film) replaced by digital files sent to the streaming movie theaters (performing the convergence of all media to computer technology), then do we have the dangerous tendency of the concentration media in a few corporate giants.

According as any archetypal symbolic material (dreams or aspirations for transcendence of the species) is materialized for the purpose of pure entertainment or catharsis and transcendence in immanence is lost: the political and social control of large corporations. Or, put another way: if the drugs could produce heavy and lysergic not transcendence or enlightenment, but addiction and self destruction, just as the materialization of the images may create a progressive addiction addictive forms of entertainment sponsored by a system socio-political motivation that the very mystical and sacred sought to transcend.

In the Beginning was the Crisis: the ontology of Evil in the Gnostic Film

The narrative structure of the film symbolically represents the Gnostic drama described by the cosmic narratives of Gnosticism: Creation and Fall in a single Act. A corrupted cosmos since the beginning of Creation, Evil as an element principal of a written one which traps its protagonist in exile true spiritual origins.

If a Gnostic writing a bible, his first verse would be "and beginning was the crisis. " Since the crisis in the beginning was the Word and not the world physical was a product terminal in crisis and decline since its inception. For Gnosticism, the creation of the world is already Fall by the presence of evil in the ontological its own constitution, existence and dynamism. Identify with the evil material existence does not mean incurring the traditional religious conception the opposition between matter / spirit, Truth / Lie, Good / Evil etc.., a dualism in which matter is considered morally bad because it is the source of sin and spiritual decay. In contrast, the Mal for Gnosticism has a ontological conception, not moral, that is, evil is the essence of the constitutive physical cosmos itself. That means he has something corrupt and false from the beginning.

The main mythical narrative of the genesis of the Creation / Fall and design Emanationist: the creation of the physical world came through a series of developments from top to bottom with gradations of deprivation and loss. The spatial axis of movement are the various spheres or eons. This affects the very dynamism divinity that the rest of his eternal pre-existence is thrown in History world. This means that the Demiurge, while trying to reproduce the fullness of Pleroma in the lower spheres, incurred subsequent dispersion of the "A" in listed mirrors or successive emanations, a chain of irradiations going to result in a weakening cosmos false or evil in essence.

Two practical consequences result from this ontological condition of Evil:

First, from the standpoint of Gnosticism Cathar French thinker Jean Baudrillard, the world is taken by a "symbolic reversibility": every action results in its opposite - Peace in War, in destroying the building, the usefulness in the waste, etc. Good in Evil. Each new birth of Results in a reversal, return.

Second, the absolution of humanity because she was not to blame for the state of things. There never was an original sin, except in the divinity demiurge who created this world. Therefore, the "salvation" would not waiver himself, the denial of the individual as the source of sin or evil For Otherwise, look through the Gnosis within each of us the particles of Light that is scattered with the chaotic dynamics of the chain of emanations created this physical cosmos. Salvation is knowledge of what was lost. To know is to remember, from the awareness that we all exiles are.

The presence of Evil in the Gnostic Film

The film's narrative gnostic will symbolically represent the mythical narrative of the genesis of Evil This will make the movie Gnostic structurally distinct from the typical Hollywood movie or commercial.

What is the structure of a prototypical movie hoolywoodiano "or a" product monopoly "? Who gives us that answer is a synthetic form of the German researcher Dieter Prokop which identifies the following development of public awareness on the structure of the product of monopoly ":
"Articles of a monopoly dominates the scheme of questioning and reconstruction of the order. Valid values are abused, attacked, and again restored. It is a necessary game of fantasy, as is repeated every time the product structure and expectations, is an attempt to become aware of what it costs the deviation of the rules. "(PROKOP, Dieter," Fascination and Boredom in Communication : monopoly products and conscience "IN: Dieter Prokop (Collection Great Social Scientists), Sao Paulo: Atica, 1986, p. 178

We have this analysis of the structure-Prokop cliche of "break-the-order-and-returns-to-order." The screenplay for the film begins by presenting an ordered cosmos, with the duration of standards and normal (first act: a happy family, a group of friends, society in its daily routine etc...) Suddenly we have the breakdown of order with the outburst of Evil (turning point for the second act unfolds where Evil: Serial Killer, bank robber, terrorists, explosions, fires, murders, etc.).. And finally restoring the original order described in the first act (the third act: the final duel between good and evil, with the victory of the characters representing the Good and the return to order).

This is the profound meaning of Paradigm called Sydfield the three acts of a typical screenplay.

Instead, the film begins with the Gnostic Crisis, Fall, once in the first act: the protagonists are already in a situation inauthentic, corrupt, conspiratorial. They feel that something is wrong, a feeling of uneasiness, of not belonging to that world. Presentiment of evil within their own reality and not as a result of sins of his own actions.


In Donnie Darko (2001), for example, the film begins with the protagonist waking up from a somnambulist state in the middle of a road with your bike on the side. How to stop there? The film starts in disarray. And in the Gnostic European film The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme Mannem, 2006), whose film opens with the protagonist down a bus in a strange and inhospitable place, not knowing what is there or how he got there. Or Stay (2005) where not only the psychiatrist protagonist, but the viewer himself (through photography "burst") feel, from the first scene, there is something wrong in that town where the actions take place.

Evil is in reality itself, which involves the protagonist, not the acts 'sinful' character (actions in order to break the "good"). For example, in the movie "monopoly" Evil is present in every action "wrong" character that destabilizes the order and is punished for it: the boy who disobeys his mother goes to the camp where the lurking Jason (Jason from Friday Fair 13 is not evil, but the angel who punishes the sinners), the terrorists punished in the end Die Hard for having broken the harmonious world of a shopping center.

The film depicts this symbolically Gnostic cosmogony and corrupted in the Fall. Players find themselves tossed into a plot that does not know when it started, the reason for their existence and what they do there. The whole is false is the only true seed can be found within. Therefore, the Gnostic narratives require paranoid characters, incensed at the edge of psychosis, schizophrenia and madness. It is the uprising of truth present in an individual against all false from the beginning:
"In the beginning was the crisis' - so would the first sentence of a Gnostic bible, if they could feat to be content with a single Scripture. And since the beginning was the crisis, not the Word, the world body is the end product of this epic of decline. The drama in one act, Creation and Fall, requires players to match: exorbitant, impulsive, expressive, noisy. (...) Intensity at the edge of hysteria, hype, promiscuity of impulses, desires and affections fey. "(Fiorilli, Marília. The God Exiled - brief history of heresy. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2008, p. 119 .)

The distinction between film and the film gnostic "commercial" goes beyond the aesthetic and thematic differences: lies in the different conceptions of Evil In the movie "monopoly" Evil is this the guy who "play" (breaking of the order in their ignorance, wickedness, vice, corruption, selfishness, etc.). shall be punished in order to redeem and show the viewer how much it costs to destabilize the Order.

Unlike in the movie Evil Gnostic leaves the field to achieve a moral ontological status: the protagonist prisoner of a drama in one act, the victim of an offshoot of a mistake of cosmic dimensions.

Death and Resurrection in "Riverworld"

Despite the obvious problems of production and script, when dealing with classics elements of Gnostic symbolism Riverworld (pilot of a possible series) becomes a candidate to succeed the series Lost. Death / resurrection is the theme center, accompanied by the symbolism of the Gnostic Sophia and the division Kabbalah / alchemy in search for the exit from the nightmare that represents the world Riverworld.

Displayed by the SciFi Channel, Riverworld is an adaptation by Robert Hewitt Wolfe (Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Andromeda and The Dresden Files) from a series of science fiction books written by Philip Jose Farmer. The story revolves around a photojournalist, Matt and his girlfriend Jessie. After die in a terrorist attack on a nightclub are transported to the mysterious world of Riverworld, place to which people who have lived in Land are taken in a kind of resurrection.

In Riverworld young people wake up and free from any disease or genetic problems. Ageless, they are able to regenerate. There are the souls of those who one days have passed by Earth in all History. A place that is a kind of second chance or maybe a kind purgatory.

In Riverworld found from anonymous to great historical figures they cross the path of the protagonist Matt, such as writer and novelist U.S. Mark Twain or the Spanish explorer and conqueror Francisco Pizarro. Despartarem to this world (people agree submerged and adrift in a river to emerge and swim to the banks), find themselves, unwittingly in the middle of a war fought by two groups of beings: the called "Salvationists" who want to destroy that world and release all souls, and another group that wants to maintain the status quo. With his powers, these beings (with faces in blue suits monk) interfere in the course of events, creating a sort of chess game.

As stated Jeff Kripal (Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, Houston Texas), the comic books and science fiction novels became the gospels of postmodern Gnosticism (about this click here and read "The Postmodern Gnosticism & Gnosis "Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio).

Excluding the glaring problems of script and production (production of low budget, many clichés and unnecessary dialogue, narration in several moments dragged etc.), the story is full of classic Riverworld mythical elements of Gnosticism.

To start, the ambiguous nature of where the story happens (Riverworld) is ambiguous: is a purgatory of souls? Another planet? Human souls imprisoned by extraterrestrials? Or simply a collective nightmare? That ambiguity gives the story a character of fable, a fable about the Gnostic man trapped in a cosmos, serving as a pawn in a battle between gods not love him. Where death is not output. After he died, almost immediately is raised to return to the game.

We see, then, after death or suicide of someone desperate (talk of "suicide express"), a vast area where bodies in a state of dormancy that are kept as deposited (visually reminiscent of The Matrix) to be awakened by the beings who govern Riverworld according to their conveniences tactics in the game.

Perhaps this is the mythical Gnostic main theme explored by the film: the hopeless vision of death and reincarnation. As discussed in previous post, Gnosticism see reincarnation as a perverse strategy of the Demiurge to keep humanity trapped in an endless circle. At death / reincarnation there is no evolution, learning. There oblivion, doomed to start again from scratch.

But Riverworld, this Gnostic myth of reincarnation as a prison and is taken to the ultimate despair. Sthephen King on one of his books of suspense and terror said that hell is repetition. Well, that's exactly what we have in the movie: there is at least the illusion again, the hope of a new day. All are resurrected to resume from where they died. The game has no end.

In the gnostic movie Alex Proyas, Dark City (1998), this same theme was explored: ETs that imprison humans in a city to fake, every midnight, being placed in a state of dormancy for the identities are exchanged with the aim of finding the human essence in transition.

In Gnostic mythology, a female character is of vital importance in human history in hostile cosmos: Sophia. One of the most important Gnostic aeons mythology that character is explored in movies Gnostics in three aspects: as one who has fallen under the yoke of the Demiurge, as one who awakens in the protagonist and the necessity of gnosis as the one who secretly gives her love and wisdom to help men with major archetypal patterns to creation.

In Riverworld the character Jessie is one that encourages Matt to go ahead and fight in that strange world. The character meets the first two items listed above: it falls under the yoke of "villain" Burton (becomes his girlfriend, after losing hope of finding Matt), who wants at all costs, have blown through that world a bomb with nuclear power. But the search for Jessie Matt is the key to understanding the nature of that world. Symbolically, the protagonist will go to meet the "source" of the river, the trapped souls living on its banks.

Finally, the ambiguity of the character Burton. Apparently it is the "villain" (makes use of violent methods to achieve your goal), but in the end, he intends to destroy that world to release all imprisoned human souls. Blow everything through a sort of atomic bomb does not seem to be the best solution: he actually wants a "suicide express" final, no returns, breaking the hell of repetition. Is the proposal for a Kabbalistic Gnosticism: transcending soul by the annihilation of matter, not redeem it.

All Gnosticism harbors a hatred for the subject, seeing it as a prison created by the Demiurge to trap the Light But the form of trasncendê it is controversial: on one side Kabbalistic Gnosticism (a quick shortcut to the escape of the spirit) and on the other, Gnosticism alchemical (transcendence is possible only after redeeming the matter, that is, to rescue the sacred elements in it that help gnosis).

Riverworld, dealing with all these gnostic symbolism, this dichotomy resembles cabal / alchemy to oppose the characters Matt / Burton: the first wants to rescue Jessie / Sophia that cosmos. The second, just want to have everything in the air.

Credits:
  • Movie: Riverworld
  • Director: Stuart Gillard
  • Writers: Phillip Jose farmer (livro) e Robert Wolfe e Randall Badat (roteiro)
  • Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
  • Cast: Tahmoh Penikett, Mark Deklin, Peter Wingfield, Jeananne Goossen.
  • Year: 2010
  • Production: Reunion Pictures, Riverworld Productions
  • Distributors: SyFy TV
  • Country: EUA
Related Posts:

"To Infinity and Beyond: The Buzz Lightyear's Gnosis

The Toy Story trilogy explores a rich sacred symbols whose origins are in antiquity with Theurgy Alchemy and Gnostic involving the relationship with the human simulacra (dolls and puppets, and in modern times, automatons, androids and replicants). However, in an ambiguous way in which the Gnosis is dominated by Episteme.

Once Prof. Marcelo Tassara, one of the lessons of the Master in Communication Anhembi Morumbi University, spoke about the ability of the animations NorthAmerican, directed for children, making fun themes tragic, heavy and adults.

From Bambi (where the protagonist loses her mother in a cruel way) until Wall-E(Science fiction dark and cynical) animations of American studios exercise this ability to make children laugh at the cruel and tragic.

The Toy Story trilogy is no different. Toys desperate not to loselove and attention from their owner Andy (the mythical plot Freud's relationshipchild and the mother in infancy), sadistic children that displacecruelly toys (another Freudian plot, the drama of child cruelty unresolved oedipal) and a character, Buzz Lyghtyear, who believesfully inserted in the script in its chip industry's manufacturers, theidentity of intergalactic hero. Buzz does not think a toy, but a hero within a spatial narrative epic.

Until, a sequence rich in symbolism, Buzz sees himself (or morea copy of his series) on television advertising, where the manufacturerBuzz Light year announce the product to your specifications, packaging and discoursepre-programmed to Buzz repeats as their own. Featured in a commercial phrasedecisively that deconstructs Buzz: "This product does not fly." Perplexed,
disappointed and impotent, yet Buzz attempts to fly by jumping from a high ladder to esburrachar then. A sad sequence, as well as loss of childhood innocence, forced a metalanguage that every childwill have to do to find that the scripts of their children's games are contained in a world bigger and incomprehensible.

Toy Story explores an archetypical symbolism of dolls and puppets, ie the symbolism of the mystical and sacred human simulacra where, in actuality, we continued with Replicants, cyborgs and human characters hybrids. An essentially gnostic symbolism where man projects in its simulacrum, their own condition as a prisoner in the physical reality created by a Demiurge or puppeteer. In popular culture of the twentieth century have increased the fascination with dolls and automatons with the appearance of the puppet-master concept (Human or divine) inserted into a Gnostic cosmology relations between human-robot and human / god. This fascination with robots or puppets within that scheme Gnostic symbolize the way in which we can evaluate
human experience, ie how we see ourselves as prisoners within a hostile cosmos.

Theurgy and Alchemy

The human fascination for dolls, puppets (which would later become children's toys) and other human simulacra have their origin in the Hellenistic philosophers and priests. Plato spoke of a being called the Demiurge, creator of the visible world, a character widely used in antiquity to explain the origin of the human soul from a Divine form and Original: Anthropos. World of Forms Anthropos descended to the material world, causing the man.

Despite being a lower form, human beings have within themselves divine sparks of their origin (Anthropos). Therefore, objective of its existence would climb the steps to do so to return to their divine origins. We humans do not pass by the simulacra of Human Primal, and the world of our senses is a simulacrum of the World of Forms. Through self-knowledge or gnosis could then return to the Light is eternal life possessed by Antropos, this essential human.

Theurgy arises in the Hellenistic world as the first way to achieve this through the manipulation of matter where, just as the Demiurge, we can give life and soul to make a material and bottom. If you have within us a part of the Anthropos, he can return to exercising the same skills reserved for gods: imitatio dei by generatio animae, imitate God by creating life.

For Victoria Nelson ("The Secret Life of Puppets") that's the secret origin of the timeless fascination for dolls and puppets throughout history. For the author, is the alchemy that we have this meeting decisisivo between gnosis and episteme, between experimental science and religious practice through successive operations that reproduce the steps of creating the physical cosmos by the Demiurge to the redemption of matter represented by the creation of the "Stone Philosopher "or" child / homunculus "(" little man ", also known as" mannikin ").

In modernity, these sacred origins are relegated to the world of childhood and, in literature and film, the genre of horror: Frankenstein, murderous dolls and puppets that come to life itself and dominate its creator, voodoo dolls, etc..

In the merger between the toy and infant child, where the soul of the object absorbs the best qualities of its owner (tenderness, kindness, courage, etc.). We have this timeless symbolism of the sacred dimension of human simulacra. If the adult world to espisteme represses gnosis (rationality overcomes the Sacred), will be in childhood and the last stronghold of that dimension transitional lost.

As we saw in previous post, are children's games in which the child laughed Evil (random, random, accident) present in the physical cosmos. Likewise, the update of the manipulation of human simulacra in childhood is the survival of these myths theurgical and alchemist of old. Fusion doll / child (the projection in inanimate matter of the manifestations of the particles of divine light within each one of us) repeats, for viewing adult, so childish and irresponsible, the whole drama of mythic steps to take to ascend in order to gnosis.

Human Simulacra in the Entertainment Industry

Returning to the sequence in which Buzz Light year finds itself as one toys, Toy Story and updates explores this fascination by Gnostic human simulacra: Just as in Gnosticism the starting point of gnosis is the discovery that the real world is nothing but a veil of illusions , Buzz discovers that his entire existence was merely a pre-manufactured by the toy industry.

But there is an ambiguity in this gnosis of Buzz Lightyear.

We know that since Toy Story, 1995, of the screenplays Wall Studios Disney animations are driven by so-called "Memorandum of Vogler": a corporate memo written by Christopher Vogler proposing a structure of formulas for a roadmap for success based on the ideas of the historian Joseph Campbell Myths as a solution to overcome the studio the successive failures of the animation studio in the '80s. From there originated the successful "Paradigm Disney" screenplay based on the archetypal "Hero's Journey."

But just that does not support a structure-cliche of an entertainment product. It takes more: archetypal contents speaking background to the human soul. Like Buzz gnosis which brings the timeless fascination of the drama dolls and puppets that fight for freedom (see, for example, in Blade Runner - 1982 - and Being John Malkovich - 1999).

In fact governed by a gnosis episteme (all the technology of producing digital images and cliché-structure of the scripts). If the Theurgy Alchemy and Gnosis, Episteme and seek a meeting here in the entertainment industry we have the submission of Gnosis, the Sacred and the whole mystical dimension to the Episteme: seeking financial results for the studio, the scientific calculation of the emotional reactions of the public etc. . Toys that are no longer manufactured by the child, but by the entertainment industry that, like the Drama of Buzz, the script requires a child's fantasy.

Disney XD Freestyle Football: There is a Techgnostic Project for Football?

A techgnostic project hovering over the football. The video of the channel Disney XD which has undergone a football telemetry reflects an imaginary regressive project which aims to confine the Game and Play within a technology that aims to eradicate the Evil (error, failure, chance) as a human weakness. It's what lurks behind every claim for sport technologisation every error of soccer judges.

While typed one more posting to this blog Secret Cinema, my son watched the Disney XD channel. Among the many ads which litters the intervals of the program (and as there are breaks in cable TV!) a caught my attention and I stopped typing. The video is titled "Disney XD Freestyle Football ", alluding to the event's World Cup in South Africa (Watch the video at the end of that post).

In the video we see a teenager juggling and juggling with a ball football. With clipped editing features, it appears teenager successively in several urban environments (soccer field, court sports, etc. within a deposit.) continuing their maneuvers with the ball.

Suddenly, a feature clearly inspired metalinguistic games in the computer: the movements of the player are shown in slow motion and trajectory of the ball and player movement are scanned by rows geometry as a kind of telemetry, showing the degrees of the angles and curvatures. The ball did not fall once, no failures, the telemetry lines show the perfection of movements. In the latest plan gives the player a teenager a powerful shot into the air, the ball goes up and the camera follows the movement showing the high, the player jumping with fists clenched like a winner in a packed stadium and a shower of shredded paper.

Of course the skill of the adolescent is the result of assembly of successive plans, giving an illusion of continuity of actions. But for a child, still oblivious to the technical capabilities of editing and assembly of a video, the effect realistic is obviously strong. More than the illusion created by editing and assembly, there is something deeper and significant in that video. A paradigm shift for football, reflecting a trend involving all media: the rationalization and neutralization Evil

As already discussed in previous posts, from the standpoint of the Gnostic cosmos physical, since its inception, consists in essence by The Evil manifestations of this ontological nature of evil are in chaos, random, imperfection, "symbolic reversibility" (cf. Baudrillard: Peace tends to War, the Good the Bad, the move to entropy etc..) Accident.

As stated by Stephan Hoeller (in the book "Gnosticism: the hidden tradition"), the scientific breakthroughs like the Chaos Theory and Uncertainty in the field of Physical confirmed thesuspicion of the Gnostics in relation to the physical cosmos: the field of imperfection and evil, a sort of chaotic order and symmetry and non-linear, where each act results in an opposite effect on dimensions exponential.

Certainly the game is in play, in Fantasy and erotic nature that manifests itself clearly. It is these fields that experience a pleasure ironic and paradoxical pleasure in error, at fault. Explaining the pleasure the game is not in maximized performance that eliminates all possibilities of errors, resulting in full transparency. Rather, pleasure is on the road, in danger, the unexpected must be bypassed, exceeded or not.

But the entire complex media or entertainment industry refuse to accept that the nonlinear nature of the game and Recreation. Rationalize and counteract the presence of evil through idols who never fail, skilled stars in 100% of the time.

"Performance Principle" and "Total Whiteness"

Reflected two thinkers, each starting from different assumptions about this media trend: the German Herbert Marcuse and Frenchman Jean Baudrillard.
Starting from the benchmark call Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse thematized in the 60's ideology of "performance principle" that was behind the apparent liberation of sexuality in the culture of late capitalism. Sexuality was not being released from his own terms (fantasy, eroticism, gambling, etc..), But the principles from the world of work and merchandise: effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, result, rational world of logic and linearity . Sex hyperbolized, maximized, steroids (penis size, number of orgasms achieved, and so on). The field of playful and erotic sex jumps to the field of performance and maximizing linear.

Jean Baudrillard part of references Gnostic Cathars and Manichaeism (as explicitly stated in interviews near his death) to denounce the media's tendency to create a kind of "total white": a world de-symbolized, without errors, crashes, dirt, waste . Through a progressive technologization create a world with full transparency, sterilization and cleanliness. Denying the "symbolic reversibility", where every act produces its opposite: the transparency of Evil

A Techgnostic Project for football?

Returning to the sticker Disney XD, we have entered into this video the aspiration of the denial of evil in the game: football extract its most playful (the fault, mistake, accident) through the imaginary technology (telemetry lines of an imaginary). Football leaves the field of play to insert themselves in performance and "total whiteness."

Maybe an ongoing project tecnognóstico (in the sense cabalistic and alchemical not - on this important distinction within Gnosticism see links below) for football. The growing protests by the specialized press cons "flaws" of the arbitration and the claim by technology in football (chips or sensors on the ball, referrals for videos etc..) Certainly express this anti-trend to play the sport. Aspiration kabbalistic Tecnognose to impose on the world ugly and chaotic binary code to impose an authoritarian order, linearity, predictability, a cosmos, in its essence is exactly the opposite.

But the pleasure of every game is the opposite: pleasure in circumventing the telemetry that the Demiurge wants to impose its flawed cosmos and laugh ironically, every failure, every accident. Or, as spoken by the Heath Ledger' s Joker: "Why so serious?".

Related Posts:

Disney XD Freestyle Football:

A Brief Gnostic History of the Spontaneity in the Entertainment Industry (Part 2)

After the Star System, Celebrities, pin ups, children and animals, the entertainment industry will seek the spontaneity in more invasive and pernicious ways in which the private perversions are transformed into public virtues.

We finished the first part of the post about the entertainment industry and spontaneity approaching the trap that the media themselves ended up creating for themselves: the vicious cycle of pseudoeventos. Celebrities and political and economic events replicate images, themes and languages developed by the media, creating a huge effect that authors such as Baudrillard would call hyper: the reality starts to copy images, ie the precession of the images on all present and real events future (the falls of the towers in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 did nothing to materialize the imagination of Hollywood disaster on New York - after all, how many times New York has already been destroyed in the movies?)

The result of this vicious cycle is boredom in front of the media who can no longer show spontaneous events, but people producing events, gestures, attitudes to attract the attention of the media, following scripts and languages developed by themselves.

Stars, celebrities, pin-ups, children and animals in film, TV and advertising no longer sufficient to inject something spiritual and spontaneous structures cliche of the various media genres.

But something new was on the horizon of culture with the literary tradition of American realism. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway have presented their works in the intellectual rebellion with the disillusionment caused by wars and economic depression: characters who experience the splendor and despair as in "The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, tough players (soldiers, bullfighters, athletes) and intellectuals disillusioned.

This search for authenticity and realism flows into the blossoming of the individual in American literature with names such as Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg. Emotional disorders within the family in Williams and "spontaneous bop prose" of Ginsberg with reports of wandering lives, characters and tuned at the same time mystical and reject the conventions fired the imagination of young readers, preparing the ground for the counterculture in the decade to come 60.

These changes of the cultural scene make the entertainment industry look at the spontaneous "authenticity", no longer in the representation of emotions, but on "authentic emotions," "gross" and hampering all paradigms of the Star System and celebrities. Perhaps the embryo of this paradigm shift is in the famous "Method" of the Actors Studio.
The entertainment industry will create the most invasive and damaging to prospect and capture the spontaneity: the blurring of boundaries between public and private

Built in New York in 1947, from a particular reading of the theory of Stanislavsky actor in the Actors Studio creates the proposal that the actor must not only represent, but being the character itself from a complex method consists of physical exercises or psychological. To give authenticity to the genuine spirit and thought-forms which are characters, the actor should boot from your psyche several archetypal personas. The brilliance and magnetism revolutionary Marlon Brando and James Dean (graduates of the Actors Studio) in the 50 expose a kind of animism of the actor: as in Spiritualism is called animism interference of the spirit and feelings of the medium in communication (in fact, are the personas that speak of the medium and not a spirit), we see movies in theaters and characters whose strength comes from the actor's own psyche. We have here the model of the binding energies Gnostic soul ("productive spontaneity") by moving to the thought-forms and structures created by the Demiurge.

The result can be both schizophrenic behavior of the actor (the identity is diluted in the range of archetypal personas needed to give life to different characters) or the actor who plays himself.

The entertainment industry creates the most invasive and damaging to prospect and capture the spontaneity: the blurring of boundaries between public and private, fiction and reality. Henceforth, private perversions will be transformed into public virtues. If the scheme of celebrity scandals events were designed to methodically gain visibility in the media, these scandals now earn spontaneity and authenticity: when interpreting themselves, actors, presenters, and different characters to extend media fiction to privacy.

For example, actors like Jack Nicholson (also graduate from the Actors Studio), Juliette Lewis and Mickey Rourkey extend privacy problems of misfit characters and potentially psychotic experienced by them on screen (and are keen to expose this on channels like E! Entertainment ). Or is it the opposite, the "authenticity" of their performances fiction being fed by the dark aspects of their psyches?

Reality Show: The Last Frontier

In 1991 NASA put into practice the Oracle project. This experiment consisted of putting in huge glass hangar, built in an area in Tucson, Arizona desert, four men and four women, 3,800 plant and animal species and simulations of the five major biomes of planet Earth. There he stayed for two years monitored for two thousand electronic sensors and attended by 600 000 payers.

This experiment fired the imaginations of the entertainment industry. It is the embodiment of Gnostic mythology that narrates the Demiurge trapping the man in reality artificially constructed to monitor it, scrutinize it, to systematically monitor the expression of spontaneous and authentic (particles of light) to seduce him, and finally isolate it and exploited it.


Themed films critically as Gnostics City of Ember (Dark City, 1998) and Truman Show (Truman Show, 1998) the rapid growth of Realities Show (and variations such as "MythBusters," "VCR" or "The People Speak "), inspired by the Oracle design expands the trend of merging public / private, fiction / reality: scan all perversions to expose publicly how private virtues, authenticity, spontaneity. Compulsion, impulsivity, hypocrisy, alienation, paranoia, psychosis, etc.., Emerging media of individuals in environments artificially created, is the spiritual spontaneity (particles of light) converted into productive and regressive ways to maintain the entertainment industry.

The complex media is ultimately the cheapest solution, fast and profitable to capture the spontaneity: no actors, methods or complex strategies scenic or theatrical. Pick up ordinary people or celebrities and candidates in confined environments or artificially constructed and exposed on camera, caught by surprise.

In the end, the audience is identified and laughs sardonically these situations because, after all, is the materialization of all the Gnostic mythology of the human condition in this world, exiles and prisoners, observed by a Demiurge that seduces with the possibility of purchasing power who withdraws from the situation.

Spontaneity or Sensationalism?

The traditional criticisms of the entertainment industry as "sensationalist" and "unethical" are that way, moralists and innocuous. The hype is nothing more than to become productive spontaneity, that is contained in structures or cliche scripts predefined. The sensationalism tends to turn on the spontaneous and genuine grotesque. Should become regressive and perverse to encourage thought-forms that make us laugh at ourselves, to confirm something we already suspect about our existence: we are prisoners in a giant cosmic reality show. The irony is that this confirmation does not back criticism or outrage, except sardonic laughter.

Ethical spontaneity would be free themselves in the game and play. But that would explode the logical structures of entertainment designed to channel these energies to a spiritual purpose and lucrative market. Perhaps, as provocatively claimed the French critic Jean Baudrillard, in actuality the only spontaneity is in absolute terror for political or strategic futility of these acts: do not seek the seizure of power, not to be to attract the concentric waves of media blasting (literally) scripts of the motivations of rational policy.

Related Posts:

terça-feira, dezembro 29, 2009

Carthography and Topography of Mind: From "Vanilla Sky" to Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland"

A set of films of this new century is going to "Vanilla Sky" to the recent version of Tim Burton for "Alice in Wonderland" shows that current cinema reflects a new techno-scientific agenda: psychocartographies and psychotopography. The mobilization of the neurosciences and cognitive sciences for Mapping the mind and consciousness. Mapping of imaginary worlds is not a novelty in the history of culture. But in actuality, these tropes have a more practical purpose: control and social engineering.

What does the movies "Vanilla Sky" (2001), "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind "(2004)," The Good Night" (2007) "Science of Sleep (La Sceince Des Rêves, 2006)," Alice in Wonderland (2010) Tim Burton's, "Inception" (2010) and the series TV "The Prisoner" (2009) have in common? The latest discussions presented in this blog about this whole film seems to point to two Gnostic tendencies of the film in the beginning of new century:

First, the end of the model of Gnosticism pop that marked the end of the century past in films like The Matrix and The Truman Show: the protagonist prisoner in a reality that is actually a counterfeit technology, a world manufactured, virtual. It's the classic tale of a Gnostic world created by a Demiurge (the technology) to trap human beings. We see an explicit and dramatic confrontation of the divinity of man against a power-crazed spiritual and technological. In the beginning of new century, the Gnostic narrative (Fall, imprisonment and redemption) is brought into the protagonist: the I demand a true hidden trapped or lost by forgetfulness, in a parallel world dream or limitations that prevent the self-knowledge.

Second, all these movies seem to undertake a mapping, a mapping and topography of the mental world. A real allegory of geography mental processes (dreams, daydreams, thoughts, emotions, etc.).. For example, seen in Vanilla Sky, near the end of the movie, the revelation that the David Aymes protagonist lives in a "lucid dream" created from a mapping of affective and emotional references made within the repertoire His imagery: favorite movies, music, rock bands and fragments many of pop culture. The "lucid dreaming" as the protagonist would be a sentimental journey through his memories.

In "The Prisoner" a true mapping the collective mind of people that need to be "fixed" through a radical technique neuroscience: the Ego to carry a parallel reality consensual ("The Village "). All have a double life: while their "egos" conscious inhabit real world, while its "egoss" unconscious living everyday life bucolic village. Thus their "egos" unconscious are "fixed" in The Village through a values agenda "positive" carried out by the leader of city.

In the movie "Inception", we have developed a topography of mental geography: different levels of dreams overlap, each with its own time zone separate, producing an architecture similar to a hypertext narrative or a computer game with several levels as steps.

This trend observed in recent Gnostics films seems to reflect the a techno-scientific agenda of this new century: the agenda tecnognóstica the multidisciplinary effort involving the neurosciences and cognitive sciences to unravel one of the last great mysteries of science: the functioning of human mind and the nature of consciousness. At the end of last century, the film reflected Gnostic, critically, the rise of notions of cyberspace, virtual reality and simulated worlds by through computational models, design tecnognóstico Today is another: Looking for a simulation, a computational model, a graphical interface that allows not only to understand the dynamics of mental processes and consciousness, but mainly, manipulate it and control it.

Where is the "soul"?

If the philosopher Descartes in the seventeenth century, formulated this question (epigraph that opens the film "Souls for Sale," a film that critically thematizes tecnognóstica this agenda - see links below), now the search for the answer to that question (the "soul" is replaced by the word "consciousness") is taken to its ultimate consequences if the endeavor to produce a true or a psychocartographies psychotopography.

Maps, mapping and topography of imaginary lands are not new in the history of culture. Maps as "ThePilgrim's Progress" or "Map of the Various Paths of Life" (see figures on the side - click on them to enlarge them) of the nineteenth century are allegories of symbolic events, metaphysical, as the trials of faith of a pilgrim or paths of life from birth to death. These strange looking old maps serve as personal guides to help rationalize and understand the psychological and religious phenomena. Can be considered the forerunners of a techno project initiated by the rationalism of Descartes and that in actuality, blossoms with computer technologies.

The book "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll can be considered an example of the zeitgeist of the nineteenth century where the development of maps of imaginary countries wanted to make an allegory about the real. As in Plato's allegory of the cave (the world as a simulacrum of the perfect ways of the world of Ideas), Carroll will create the allegory of "Wonderland" to search for the origins of metaphysical simulacrum of reality. The real-life Alice in England would be nothing more than a copy of distorted or impoverished Wonderland. In this imaginary land the paradoxes, ironies, absurdities and nonsense would be more explicit than in the real world where the ultimate nature is hidden or distorted by rationalism.

In the Alice in Tim Burton have a new kind of allegory, tecnognóstica: Alice crosses the territory of a Wonderland that is no longer the allegory of Carroll. The path is made by Alice through a mental map for self-knowledge, the pursuit of real Alice and not a metaphysical reflection of reality. His interest is instrumental: self-knowledge and motivation to take his father's business and be a courageous entrepreneur.

The Wonderland Tim Burton is a reflection of this agenda tecnognóstica: creating mappings, models and interfaces to visualize the mental processes as a geography of the mind. Each region (the ante-room entrance to Wonderland, the Red Queen's castle, the mountains surrounding it, the queen's castle located on a plain white, the giant chess board at the sea where the final battle is done so on. ) is an allegory of mental processes, psychological and cognitive.

For example, the monster has Jaberwocky his severed head on top of a ruined palace on the edge of the sea. It's like Alice from deleting their fears, ghosts and restrictions that prevent it from being the real Alice. It is the yearning of all the technologies of the mind (self-help, motivational techniques) to eliminate the constraints that prevent the development potential of I. If Freud wanted to understand the symbols, with the Allegories is easier: cut up their heads!

Wonderland is no longer an underground kingdom as envisioned by Carroll. Now are memories. Memories that need to be mapped, charted, so that we can locate the regions inhabited by the memories "bad" areas (Trevose, swamps, palaces in ruins - unfinished works that have turned rubbish - meanders in landlocked mountainous areas etc.). Not to understand them, but to delete them, like in the movie "Eternal Sunshine ..." where from a graphical scans of the brain, could track the bad memories that should be deleted to make customers more light, assertive, without guilt or indecision that hinder the goals of the Self

The Map of "The Prisoner"

In the television series "The Prisoner" (The Prisoner, 2009), remake the U.S. channel AMC Cult of the British series of the '60s, we have the flagship creation of an interactive map of the "Village". Results of a technology of social control ("Social Engeneering") undertaken by the company Summakor, "The Village" is another one of these imaginary places, a mapping of mental life made to "fix broken people." Upon induction by heavy drugs, the Village is building a "consensual hallucination" (defined as the writer William Gibson gave to cyberspace) where they are sent to the Selfs of people with dysfunctional social order (paranoid, angry, depressed etc. ..) There they live in a village in pastels in a routine idyllic, simple and innocent.

One product of this series is an interactive map on the site of the station where AMC can make a visit to various institutions and neighborhoods in the Village (and prohibited areas virtuous). Mapping ironic mind of the characters in the series, but, basically, is a reflection of contemporary techno-scientific agenda (click here to visit the map).
"There are maps´to anywhere: chromosomes, galaxies, the brain, the cell, the spaces between atoms, cracks in the double helix, the edges of time. If maps invitations travels, these new maps inspire journeys of an altogether different, more associative sort. At the same time, they still connect to our traditional geographies, and are potential destinations of the orientating process; They lend themselves to a form of bushwhacking that is more interior, philosophic, imaginative" " (HALL, Stephen. "I, Mercator, IN: HARMON, Catherine. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, p. 17.)
As allegory, the maps have that capability Neoplatonic or Gnostic philosophy of a journey or imaginary, by taking the reality backwards, as it did in the lands of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. But the project tecnognóstico is much more practical and instrumental: to make the map match the territory, be a guide to procedures, a control panel as icons on a desktop. When we click them control mental processes, psychological and cognitive. In the end, a techno project control, management, engineering, social and psychological.

Related Posts:

Tecnologia do Blogger.

 
Design by Free WordPress Themes | Bloggerized by Lasantha - Premium Blogger Themes | Bluehost Review