Luz e sombra: uma interpretação de suas significações imaginárias nas imagens do cinema expressionista alemão e do cinema noir americano

The present investigation proposes an approach of light and shadow and their imaginary significations in the images of both German expressionist movie and the American noir movie, whose aesthetic experience is expressed through a contrasting bright/dark photography, loaded with symbolism. The interpretation of the imaginary significations of this imagistic material is based on Gilbert Durand´s imaginary anthropological theories that deal with a myriad of symbols gathered according to their semantic isomorphism and linked to more general structures named as Daily and nightly Image Regime . There come to gravitate, around such regimes, symbols attached to division and purification, ascensional and spectacular, with imaginary significations homological to Light and Good, and symbols associated to night, fall and animalism, isomorphic of Shadow and Evil

Cinematografando o consumo :as narrativas e práticas culturais dos clientes de videolocadoras de Natal (RN)

The present work is an exercise of analysis of cultural practices related to movie consume by the clients of video rental stores in Natal city (Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil). With sociology of practice as support, especially that one which develops from the seminal works of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, we have searched, from the apprehension of the narratives build up by these actors from the movies they attend, to point the way they build exercises of reflexivity and creativity in the reception of works commonly identified as products of the so called mass culture . This path allows us, in the steps of Nestor Garcia Canclini, researcher in reception within Latin-American context, create and, somehow confirm the hypothesis that consume is also useful for thinking . In order to get to this result, we have carried out a camp research that used instruments and techniques both quantitative and qualitative. After the data analysis we came to the conclusion that consume of movies taken as commercial type and as not very noble in the environment of cultural production, also impels exercises of creativity and social reflexivity

Esporte como experiência estética e educativaEsporte educativa: uma abordagem fenomenológica

This paper deals with sport as a possibility of disclosing the sensible, and defends the idea that being a sportsperson equals living an aesthetic and educative experience in which one can interacts with the sensible by the athletic body s reverberation of sensations in the dimension of the experienced. We try to answer, in our work, basically three questions: what moves the athlete when practicing a sport? Which are the meanings and motivations for the practice of sports? At what measure the athlete s experience gains an educational character? Sport is debated in this work as an extension of the living, as long as it tries to understand the meanings inherent to sport itself as well as to the sportive experience as a kind of education. In support of our argument, we give a theoretic and philosophical approach to our thesis, based on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Mauss and Friedrich Schiller. For this purpose, we get support on the phenomenology of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Our reference is the living world of the athlete and his experience as a field of the sensible. Our point of departure is the analysis of the narratives of sport experiences, including five aesthetic elements; time and space of the body in the sports courts; the look on the sportive context; the contact with the adversary; victory and defeat; the technical gesture. Besides it, we worked out an aesthetic evaluation of the movies Olympia and Invictus , what let us discuss three thematic categories: sensibility, emotions and the play paradox. Subsequently, we point sport as an optimizer of the sensible education, present on the body s processes, like the body in movement. It was also made clear along this paper that we tried to accomplish an analysis on sports centered in the athlete s body as an outfit of the senses to things related to the sensible, whose aesthetic experience overpasses any deterministic conception that should sum up the sportive world to mercantilization, discipline practices and mechanicism. This approach franchises gateways to a Physical Education which, containing sports as one of its support, let pupils enjoy the pleasure of constructing common objectives, incorporating the capacity of replicating, re-making and playing as a field of possibilities offered by an education characterized as being moving, sensible and fitful to a body in movement

O futuro do presente: a mídia audiovisual e a sociedade contemporânea na ficção científica do cinema de animação

This research presents a study that seeks to analyze the images of the future in science fiction movies, specifically those made through animation techniques, exploring particularly the representation of audiovisual communication medias in its dialogue with the approached societies in the movies chosen to be analyzed. The proposed discussion seeks approximations in order to answer to the question that initiated this research: how are we thinking the future nowadays? It also seeks to, according to Morin (1997), comprehend aspects of the contemporary society by using the cinema, and at the same time, to understand the cinema, aided by a social analysis

A mídia dos outros somos nós: a experiência audiovisual do Ponto de Cultura Cinema para Todos

This research aims to identify the process of appropriation of audio visual (in digital video) for collective symbolic production (participatory video practice that expresses popular culture) in a socio-cultural context where the minorities are. Therefore, we based this study on the students‟ experience of the film and video workshops held by Cinema para Todos (Culture Point Cine for All), in Natal, RN. Culture Point is the basis of the project Programa Nacional de Cultura, Educação e Cidadania Cultura Viva (National Program of Culture, Education and Citizenship - Living Culture) of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. In 2010, the Cine for All developed three film and video workshops in the state of Rio Grande do Norte (Northeastern of Brazil), in the municipalities of Açu, Lajes and São Gonçalo do Amarante, within a public policy project of socio-cultural inclusion. These three workshops are the focus of this empirical investigation. To support the analysis of this research we consider that the spaces of workshops are sites of the social practices origin, assuming they show the development of the changes of actions that generate new practices. In this socio-cultural context the students as interlocutors process the communicative culture mediation, where come from the logics of action (using digital video) to become a mediatic practice (video auto ethnographic). With the overall goal set and the field of investigative action delimited we considered the methodology of case study suitable for the observation of the object, because it is a phenomenon of modernity, occurring in a context of real life and with little or no control over events. Participant observation and interviews was also applied to this case study. The analytical theoretical support comes from the notion of mediation by Jesús Martín-Barbero and the concept of habitus by Pierre Bourdieu. The research found that a new way of communicating has been developing by this social group, and this reflects the technological change experienced by them. The auto ethnographic videos, short movies, reveal an allegorical trial of the mainstream media, because while they use the mainstream format, they rework the aesthetic, but without revising the history, in fact they proposing to retell the history of themselves full of colorful details and with richness of their forgotten popular culture.

Cinema itinerante no Rio Grande do Norte: aspectos da recepção

In itinerant film projects made in Brazil, the unique experience of watching movies on the big screen is held in open spaces, through the establishment of a contemporary ritual, under which the presence of spectators is primordial. Considering this dynamic of the performance of itinerant cinema, the main objective of this research is to analyze the process of reception of the spectators of the sessions of Cine Sesi Cultural, conducted by the Social Service Industry - Sesi, in Rio Grande do Norte state. The body of research was composed by the audience of the movie sessions of the edition developed in 2010. Analyses were made from the look on the specific audience of open sessions of this cinema project throughout a case study. Theoretical authors of Latin American as Jesus Martin-Barbero, Guillermo Orozco, Eliseo Veron and Nestor Garcia Canclini, which have important theoretical basis for the analysis of research on the cinematographic reception of the spectators, were taken as a basis. In this discussion are associated with contributions from Brazilian authors as Roseli Paulino, Fernando Mascarello, Mauro Wilton Souza, Nilda Jacks and Carolina Escostesguy. Besides the reception study, the research focuses on aspects that relate to and explain the circumstances in which itinerant cinema emerges as an alternative exhibition, for example, the context of the exhibition of films in the country, lack of public policies in the audiovisual sector, and mainly the closing of movie theaters in the inner cities of the country and the consequent migration of these rooms to the malls. Seeking to reduce the existing gap in the studies of the reception of spectators to the cinema in the country, this research presents a deeper analysis of the reception of the public of the itinerant cinema as a contribution to an important database for the diagnosis of projects such as the Cine Sesi Cultural

Caicó: uma cidade entre a recusa e a sedução

This research has as object of study the city of Caicó, Rio Grande do Norte State, between the middle part of the decade of 1920 and the beginning of 1930. It intended to perceive the projects thought to the city of Caicó as well as the challenges due to the new ideas of modernity that were circulating around the contemporary world. So it consists in an important historical exercise about the relation between history and space in to the extent that itself comes to surface a city deals by diverse angles whose perspectives can be read in several "fragments of memory", such as newspapers, trials-crime, reports, memories, books, etc., those show the tension between the traditional and the modern way of life one. In this way, it´s tried to transform the space, giving it a new reference, inspired in what occurs in the Brazilian big cities and around the world, through the use of the techniques, of the electricity, of the movies, of the press, cars, medicine and so on. At the same time in that is necessary-itself deal with the permanencies such as the old manners and the droughts and theirs "flagellated" people. Therefore, it is in this difficult phase that is tried legitimize the city of Caicó as the "Capital of the Seridó", in the threshold between the refusal and the seduction

Encoding mechanisms based on fast oscillations in the retina of the cat and their dependencies on anesthesia

Processing in the visual system starts in the retina. Its complex network of cells with different properties enables for parallel encoding and transmission of visual information to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and to the cortex. In the retina, it has been shown that responses are often accompanied by fast synchronous oscillations (30 - 90 Hz) in a stimulus-dependent manner. Studies in the frog, rabbit, cat and monkey, have shown strong oscillatory responses to large stimuli which probably encode global stimulus properties, such as size and continuity (Neuenschwander and Singer, 1996; Ishikane et al., 2005). Moreover, simultaneous recordings from different levels in the visual system have demonstrated that the oscillatory patterning of retinal ganglion cell responses are transmitted to the cortex via the LGN (Castelo-Branco et al., 1998). Overall these results suggest that feedforward synchronous oscillations contribute to visual encoding. In the present study on the LGN of the anesthetized cat, we further investigate the role of retinal oscillations in visual processing by applying complex stimuli, such as natural visual scenes, light spots of varying size and contrast, and flickering checkerboards. This is a necessary step for understanding encoding mechanisms in more naturalistic conditions, as currently most data on retinal oscillations have been limited to simple, flashed and stationary stimuli. Correlation analysis of spiking responses confirmed previous results showing that oscillatory responses in the retina (observed here from the LGN responses) largely depend on the size and stationarity of the stimulus. For natural scenes (gray-level and binary movies) oscillations appeared only for brief moments probably when receptive fields were dominated by large continuous, flat-contrast surfaces. Moreover, oscillatory responses to a circle stimulus could be broken with an annular mask indicating that synchronization arises from relatively local interactions among populations of activated cells in the retina. A surprising finding in this study was that retinal oscillations are highly dependent on halothane anesthesia levels. In the absence of halothane, oscillatory activity vanished independent of the characteristics of the stimuli. The same results were obtained for isoflurane, which has similar pharmacological properties. These new and unexpected findings question whether feedfoward oscillations in the early visual system are simply due to an imbalance between excitation and inhibition in the retinal networks generated by the halogenated anesthetics. Further studies in awake behaving animals are necessary to extend these conclusions

Medo de dentista em cena: uma análise de produções cinematográficas

The fear related to dental procedures can be acquired through disturbing experiences and/or negative cultural influences related in experiences of previous generations. Such influences may be present in diverse forms of cultural expression: in the cinema, plastic arts, music, literature, and diverse vehicles of printed and visual media. This research aimed investigates the images of fear related to the dental service and dentist in motion pictures. The study has qualitative approach, which used the documentary analysis of movies. The data collection was accomplished through research in the Internet by means of the Google tool (http://www.google.com.br), using the describing words filme and dentista . A total of 44 films were found. Of these, after selective criterion for films with scenes showing interaction between dentist and patient in the execution of clinical procedure, only 24 films were enclosed. Then, these were registered in data base created for this research. After second selective criterion of inclusion (scenes with suggestion of dental anxiety), 15 films remained. As regards cinematographic gender, the films with scenes showing "dental anxiety" varied between comedy (8), horror (3), drama (2), thriller (1) and childish (1). Of these films, scenes with images of situations that suggest fear of the dentist and his job were selected and described. The images were categorized by the identification of negative characteristics that incite "dental anxiety". Then, the classification of the categories was proceeded detaching the most recurrent characteristics in the scenes: situation of fear in the waiting-room; pain; instrument coarse/rudimentary; coarseness of the dentist; torture; and low qualification technique. The waiting-room was observed as a place of great tension, due to the noises coming from the dental attendance. The pain related to the Dentistry was the predominant subject in the majority of films (14), associated to others negative characteristics. The rudimentary aspects of procedures and instruments, and the coarse attitudes of the professional could be observed too. The dentist was characterized as confused, sadist, violent, insensitive, incompetent person and disturbed. Such results suggest that, despite the technological advances of the profession, the image of the dentist and his job is still transmitted in a negative way aspect and reinforces the dental anxiety

Renderizações não fotorealísticas para estilização de imagens e vídeos usando areia colorida

Non-Photorealisitc Rendering (NPR) is a class of techniques that aims to reproduce artistic techniques, trying to express feelings and moods on the rendered scenes, giving an aspect of that they had been made "by hand". Another way of defining NPR is that it is the processing of scenes, images or videos into artwork, generating scenes, images or videos that can have the visual appeal of pieces of art, expressing the visual and emotional characteristics of artistic styles. This dissertation presents a new method of NPR for stylization of images and videos, based on a typical artistic expression of the Northeast region of Brazil, that uses colored sand to compose landscape images on the inner surface of glass bottles. This method is comprised by one technique for generating 2D procedural textures of sand, and two techniques that mimic effects created by the artists using their tools. It also presents a method for generating 21 2D animations in sandbox from the stylized video. The temporal coherence within these stylized videos can be enforced on individual objects with the aid of a video segmentation algorithm. The present techniques in this work were used on stylization of synthetic and real videos, something close to impossible to be produced by artist in real life

Mapeamento de recifes no Rio Grande do Norte: Touros e Macau/RN

Studies on the Brazilian continental shelf were developed between Touros and Macau-RN (NE Brazil) with the aim to mapping carbonate buildups, and especially, reef ecosystems. Remote sensing, submarine movies, bathymetric survey and diving were the methods used. This paper will focus on three main aspects of the Rio Grande do Norte reefs: 1) characterization of the coral fauna; 2) the classification and, 3) the distribution of the main northriograndense carbonate buildups. Reefs environments are found predominantly on the inner shelf adjacent to Touros, at depths shallower than 10 m. These reefs generally show NW-SE orientation parallel to the coastline and constitute groupings of knolls and patch reefs. A prominent carbonate buildup, where the corals are almost absents and algae incrustation is thin, occurs in average depths of 25 m, along the northern part of Rio Grande do Norte State and is classified as sandstone bank. Others sandstone banks, with smaller lengths and heights were mapped around 10 m depth. They should be related to an ancient coastline; however the corresponding litostratigraphic unit was not defined. This work is a contribution to the mapping of coral reef, in particular, and carbonate buildups, in general, on the Rio Grande do Norte coast

Desenvolvimento de um sistema de captura de baixo custo destinado a determinação da cinemática humana

The motion capture is a main tool for quantitative motion analyses. Since the XIX century, several motion caption systems have been developed for biomechanics study, animations, games and movies. The biomechanics and kinesiology involves and depends on knowledge from distinct fields, the engineering and health sciences. A precise human motion analysis requires knowledge from both fields. It is necessary then the use of didactics tools and methods for research and teaching for learning aid. The devices for analysis and motion capture currently that are found on the market and on educational institutes presents difficulties for didactical practice, which are the difficulty of transportation, high cost and limited freedom for the user towards the data acquisition. Therefore, the motion analysis is qualitatively performed or is quantitatively performed in highly complex laboratories. Based is these problems, this work presents the development of a motion capture system for didactic use hence a cheap, light, portable and easily used device with a free software. This design includes the selection of the device, the software development for that and tests. The developed system uses the device Kinect, from Microsoft, for its low cost, low weight, portability and easy use, and delivery tree-dimensional data with only one peripheral device. The proposed programs use the hardware to make motion captures, store them, reproduce them, process the motion data and graphically presents the data.

História para "ver" e entender o passado: cinema e livro didático no espaço escolar (2000-2008)

This study aims to diagnose and analyze the use of film in school space, more precisely, in the teaching of history, from the theoretical perspective of the German historian Jörn Rüsen and thus try to observe together with the assumptions of the Didactics of History elements such as public uses that are made for cinema history. In this sense, research propositions movies found in textbooks of history, paths to offer insights about the impacts caused by learning the historical film narrative, this being a learning also occurs in everyday life of students and not just in school space. For both, the textbooks present in Memorial do Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD), approved in the following editions PNLD/2005 and PNLD/2008 were used. To perform this diagnostic use, in addition to books, the Call Notices and Guides Textbook PNLD as a way to understand how to perform the theoretical and methodological discussions and recommendations about the potential of cinematic narrative for history lessons and these possible approaches to the theory of history.

Matizes de cultura de massa na obra de Caio Fernando Abreu

The Brazilian writer, Caio Fernando Abreu, was strongly influenced by a period of changes in social values and perspectives. When he enters the Brazilian literary scene using a writing style free from form and content, he applies in his works all the affliction of the contemporary values. His work embodies all the spirit of a generation that, despite its anxiety for freedom, was still suffocated by the military dictatorship period. Abreu’s narrative also reveals an author with an extreme ability to shift between the erudite and the popular. In his short stories, he develops a performative language mingled by references that turns his text into a sort of Pop Art iconography. Just like Pop Art paintings, full of Coke images, cigarettes, tooth paste and food cans, Abreu’s literary discourse is painted by many symbolical references to modern consumerism, as well as to movies, music and to pop stars. This trace in the writer’s works exerts a great deal of attractiveness on the contemporary reader. In this work, we attempt to analyze this resource in Abreu’s literature under the concepts of cultural studies; thus, we aim at analyzing the various forms of the mass culture expression inside Abreu’s literature, recognizing his allusions as a stylish resource in his writings and highlighting its relevance in the study of the author work. In order to do so, we are based essentially on the reflections of theoreticians: Lipovetsky (1996) and Adorno (2011) who debate the culture and social formation in contemporaneity.

O figurino na narrativa dos filmes de Guel Arraes: O Auto da Compadecida (2000) e O Bem Amado (2010)

This research focuses on the course of Guel Arraes, moviemaker, and picks two movies for analysis: O Auto da Compadecida (2000) and O Bem Amado (2010), as well as their costumes. The focus on the costume is based on Semiology and aims to decode the meanings that stem out of the clothes. Three of the movies characters will have their costumes analyzed based on Roland Barthes’ theory, mainly considering semiology elements (language and speech), (significant and meaning) and (system and syntagma). The influence of the Armorial movement into the movie O Auto da Compadecida and the Kitsch aesthetic in O Bem Amado deserve consideration, aside from the study on costumes function within narrative, supported by Roland Barthes’ structural analysis of the narrative. We sought to highlight the balance between characters’ lines and the image of the costumes in the movies. Adding to the study on how costumes strongly accounts to narrative, we observed characteristic traits of director and scriptwriter Guel Arraes present in his works, which are the northeastern man identity, a presentation of the Northeast and popular comedy. We believe that his choices when creating and his life influences are not separate from one another. Our research was movie-appraisal centered and had a thorough investigation all over language. The main considerations are supported by the following theories: Barthes (2007), Figueirôa and Fechine (2008), Moles (2001), Stuart Hall (2005) and Mikhail Bakhtin (2013).