Archive

Beasts of the Southern Wild

November 4, 2012 (film)
Faced with both her father's fading health, melting ice-caps and ancient aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy must learn the ways of courage and love.

Welcome to the Cardiff sciSCREEN website

Who are we?Cardiff sciSCREEN is a Cardiff University public engagement programme organised by members of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG), Cardiff School of Biosciences, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, the School of Social Sciences and Cardiff School of Medicine.

Inception: Corporate Ethics in Mind

July 19, 2012 (article)
Spying for Queen and Country in movies, and the spy as a stock movie character, has a long tradition dating back nearly 100 years to silent movies produced during the First World War. Spy movie milestones since then include Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Spies, several Hitchcock Cold War spy movies, decades from the JB Franchises (Messrs Bond and Bourne) and no shortage of spy spoofs from Get Smart to Austin Powers.

Some Questions of Lucid Dreaming and Inception

July 19, 2012 (article)
What is a lucid dream? It is a dream in which you realise that you are dreaming.How often do they occur? In about 1 in every 200 dreams.How do we know people are really asleep when they have a lucid dream, they could be just half awake and drowsy? You can signal with your eyes from a lucid dream, and monitoring of sleep shows that sleep at this point is in the stage called Rapid Eye Movement sleep. However, there is recent debate about this.

Thought Insertion, Agency and the Ownership of Thoughts

July 19, 2012 (article)
Compare the question: ‘Someone left the oven on. I wonder whether it was me’ with the question: ‘Someone in this room is thinking about making tea. I wonder whether it is me’ (or the question ‘Someone in this room is in pain. I wonder whether it is me’). The first question makes perfectly good sense, but the second does not. It is often said that the reason why the second question is absurd is that although one might be mistaken about what one is thinking, one cannot be mistaken whether it is oneself that does the thinking.

The Architecture of Urban Reality

July 19, 2012 (article)
My research is, in a broad sense, concerned with the city and the ways in which people navigate, interpret, and make sense of the urban environment.

Take Shelter: Inheritance, Surveillance and Being Normal

July 19, 2012 (article)
Inheritance (of land, fortune, title) and inheritance of madness is a common plot device and this film gives a contemporary take on this story. The key themes I want to discuss are inheritance and surveillance, but also the competing versions of being ‘normal’ presented and challenged throughout the film.

Risk and Take Shelter

July 19, 2012 (article)
This excellent film poses some important questions. For instance, is the young man experiencing paranoid delusions, or is he in tune with the premonitions of a forthcoming apocalyptic event? Those of us who appreciate science fiction films, will be aware how often that kind of question is posed.To me, some fundamental questions are raised in the film:What’s really going in the world?What are the threats that we face?How should we define these?What should we do about them?

Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: Three Phases of a Cultural Encounter

July 18, 2012 (article)
We might say that psychoanalysis and Buddhism are both therapies; diagnosing and alleviating our psychological or existential suffering. But the productive, one hundred year dialogue on the margins of these traditions did not begin quite so auspiciously.Phase 1: OrientalismFreud and Jung famously fell out over the issue of spirituality.

Gender and Agency in A Dangerous Method

July 18, 2012 (article)
It can be argued that Cronenberg’s movie is doubly fascinating for film scholars, since it is not only a text that can be read from a psychoanalytic perspective, but is also a movie about psychoanalysis. Given that recent screen theory research has begun to criticise many of the key arguments in the field for their narrowly phallocentric approach, it is also interesting that this theme is itself mirrored in the film’s narrative through Jung’s criticisms of Freud’s analytic work, in which everything is always and ultimately “about sex”.