School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemMuscles, hybrids and new bad futures( 1994)Since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made their respective debuts onto the cinematic screen the muscle phenomenon has become a dominant factor in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Muscle, in all its hard and sweaty glory, has found a market especially in the big budget extravaganzas whose narratives centre around the spectacle of the built bodies of male stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, Van Damme, Snipes and Seagal, and the more padded forms of actors such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. This new brand of cinema whilst harking back in part to an American tradition of genre cinema (the Western, Detective films, War Films etc.) appears to owe more to genres that emerged outside America: the Italian `gladiator' pictures of the 1950s and 1960s which retold the adventures of Hercules and other mythic heroes via the forms of bodybuilding stars such as Steve Reeves and Reg Park; and the martial arts action films popularized by Hong Kong Cinema and which found a very profitable market in the West ‐ and which also saw the migration of the genre into American cinema starring a series of martial arts experts including Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jean‐Claude van Damme. Both genres revealed an unabashed display of the spectacle of action and the spectacle of the male body in action. The camera found any excuse to unapolegetically caress the bodies of the stars with pans, tracks and close‐ups of various fragmented body parts in ways that always denoted strength, agility and power.
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Item'Hail to the King!' – the return of doom( 2004-12)It was back in 1993 that the horror was unleashed in the form of the DOOM: EVIL UNLEASHED. Developed by the Texas-based company id Software, this computer game was to introduce radical innovations not only to the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre, but also to the soft and hardware technology that drove gaming. In 1994, the sequel DOOM II: HELL ON EARTH was to push the envelope further still. Drawing upon the science fiction and horror conventions of cinematic examples like ALIEN (Ridley Scott, 1979), ALIENS (James Cameron, 1986) and EVIL DEAD II (Sam Raimi, 1987), both DOOM games upped the ante in game culture by transferring experiences familiar to the horror and science fiction film spectator over to the gamer. Discussing DOOM's influences, Jay Wilbur, the then chief executive officer of id stated that id ‘wanted to make an ALIEN-like game that captured the fast-paced action, brutality and fear of those movies’, while also amplifying the action and horror with EVIL DEAD II, whose ‘chainsaws and shotguns are an unbeatable combination’. It would not be an understatement to say that these two games are up there with the most popular and influential games in game history. Significantly, one of the concerns of the games’ creators – John Carmack and John Romero – was to transfer the dread, suspense and terror that was familiar to film audiences into the game environment. Fast forward to 2004: a new breed of game horror is born again in the form of the PC-game DOOM 3 (to be released in December 2004 on X"Box). Like its addictive predecessors, DOOM 3 introduces an even greater ‘filmic’ quality to its game space and, yet again, a new standard of gaming aesthetics and technology is created. Todd Hollenshead, head of id Software has stated that ‘DOOM 3 is a video game experience unlike any before it… From the cinema quality visuals and the incredible 5.1 sound, to the terrifying atmosphere and hyper-realistic environments, the whole game screams “interactive horror film”.’ In particular, the DOOM games typify a strong tendency amongst game developers towards fetishizing the film object, and what is perceived as the cinema’s convincing illusion of ‘realism’. But the cinema is by no means the only media form that has impacted upon games. Through an analysis of DOOM 3 and its heritage, this essay will address the question of games and their history, arguing that their reliance on past sources does not detract from their uniqueness. The creators of games like DOOM 3 deliberately place their creations within a rich, diverse tapestry of media history not in an admission of their lack of originality, but rather so that they can flag their innovation. In fact, as will be argued below, the ways in which John Carmack (Lead Programmer of the DOOM trilogy) and the rest of the production team at id Software arrange and reshape their influences has a story to tell us about how these games situate themselves within the arena of competing entertainment media.
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ItemDeleuze's kiss: the sensory pause of screen affect( 2005)Imagine, if you will, that screening on the wall in front of you is American artist Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Kiss. Warhol’s anthropological documentary-style fifty minute film is of fixed camera head-shots of same and opposite sex couples french-kissing; passionately. The duration of the kiss on screen is dependent upon the length of 16mm film that Warhol had in his silent Bolex camera at the time, usually 100 feet – enough to make four minutes of screen kiss time. Kiss invokes the screen issues for the reading of this essay: desire, gender, duration, spectatorship, and affect.