Archive

Representation of Alcoholism in The Master

August 30, 2013 (article)
In looking at the depiction of alcoholism within Paul Anderson’s “The Master” it is worth considering 4 aspects:Diagnosis

Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Other Direction'

August 30, 2013 (article)
Some movies bust a gut to capture the spirit of a particular time and place, not simply in order to convince the audience of the authenticity of their story or for some other instrumental purpose, but because someone behind the movie believes it is simply worth recording what people’s lives were like then and there. Is The Master trying to capture some aspects of post-war America that are worthy of remembering?

Viewing The Master through different lenses

August 30, 2013 (article)
As part of a panel asked to consider Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master my role was to appraise the film from a filmic perspective or as a film text.

Animate Earth and Us

August 30, 2013 (article)
How do people in industrialised, technological societies relate to nature? Do we recognise ourselves as part of nature, our societies embedded within living systems that surround and sustain us, or do we view ourselves as separated from a natural world that is nothing but malleable matter to be put to whatever use we wish?

Soylent Green

August 30, 2013 (film)
Following a screening of Soylent Green at Chapter Arts Centre – a film about a radical future food stuff – Dr Neil Stephens of Cardiff University gave a sciSCREEN lite talk at Chapter Arts Centre on Tuesday June 18th about what could be the closest thing we have to Soylent Green today, pointing to how close it might be, and whether we need it.

Memory and Identity in Robot and Frank

August 29, 2013 (article)
A major point of interest for medical sociologists is the relationship between public understandings of illness and disease and the wider cultural preoccupations of our society.  Memory problems and cognitive impairment in later life represent two of contemporary western societies’ biggest anxieties: old age and mental illness.  Often representations of illnesses in popular culture, politics and the media can tell us more about the society we live in than the nature of the disease itself.  Accounts of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, particularly from politicians and in the

Tackling the Causes of Alzheimer's Disease

August 29, 2013 (article)
Set in the near future, the film “Robot and Frank” deals with how Frank and his family deal with his decline into dementia. With only the options of robot care or being placed in the ‘Brain Centre’ available to Frank, clearly in this future, a cure or an effective treatment for dementia has not yet been developed. Unfortunately, this is a major problem that we’re facing right now, with 35 million dementia sufferers worldwide, and as a result of increasing longevity, this figure is set to double every 20 years.

The Stories We Tell About Ourselves: Narrativity, Episodicity and Identity

August 29, 2013 (article)
     Robot: The truth is I don’t care if my memory is erased or not.     Frank: But how can you not care about something like that?     Robot: Think about it this way: you know that you are alive. You think therefore you are...in a similar way I know that I am not alive. I am a robot.

Who and what is Robot? Attachment, identity and the uncanniness of things

August 29, 2013 (article)
Why does Frank wipe Robot’s memory? This is a central question in a film which, in many ways, is about a man’s relationship with an ambiguous, even uncanny object – and therefore is a film that invites us to think about what philosophers might call the phenomenology of objects, that is, how objects of certain help to structure our conscious experience of the world, and their meaning within it.