According to Fredric Jameson,
Burke’s problem as he confronted […] the sublime was to find some explanation [...] not for our aesthetic pleasure in […] “beauty”, in what could plausibly gratify the human organism on its own scale, but rather for our aesthetic delight in spectacles which would seem symbolically to crush human life and to dramatize everything which reduces the individual human being and the individual subject to powerlessness and nothingness (2016: 235).
Assessing this particular aesthetic experience, Jameson continues, Burke identified a particular connection to being as essential, detecting an ontological link, glimpses of a force that transcends human life. Through the sublime, the subject encounters a barely detectible force, one that generates a sense of acute vulnerability (2016: 236). ... More
One of the pressing questions that the filmmakers, who participated in the Q&A of Cyprus Short Film Day 2016, were repeatedly asked concerned the essence and merits of short film. “What is a short film?”, CSFD artistic director Dr Marios Psaras asked the audience in his opening speech. “Is it just a stepping stone for filmmakers before they make their way to the making of feature films? Or is it a kind of art in its own right?” The filmmakers admitted that while shorts are, indeed, a necessary pathway to follow in order to gain experience and expertise in the field before embarking on the making of features, it soon becomes evident that short film has a life of its own. It is not merely a matter of temporality, though precisely because of that it emerges as a completely different kind of storytelling, with its own rules or lack thereof, its own platforms of funding, production, distribution and exhibition. The latter was the topic that naturally dominated the discussion. ... More