Horror film
Horror film is a film genre that seeks to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on their fears. Inspired by literature from authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, the macabre and the supernatural are frequent themes. Horror may overlap with the fantasy, supernatural fiction and thriller genres, Horror films often deal with viewers nightmares, fears and terror of the unknown. Plots within the genre often involve the intrusion of an evil force, event. Another of his projects was 1898s La Caverne maudite. Japan made early forays into the genre with Bake Jizo and Shinin no Sosei. The era featured a slew of literary adaptations, with the works of Poe and Dante, in 1908, Selig Polyscope Company produced Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1910, Edison Studios produced the first filmed version of Frankenstein, the macabre nature of the source materials used made the films synonymous with the horror film genre. Before and during the Weimar Republic era, German Expressionist filmmakers would significantly influence productions, the first vampire-themed movie, was made during this period, though it was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stokers Dracula.
Other European countries also, contributed to the genre during this period, though the word horror to describe the film genre would not be used until the 1930s, earlier American productions often relied on horror themes. Some notable examples include The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, The Cat and the Canary, The Unknown, and The Man Who Laughs. Many of these films were considered dark melodramas because of their stock characters and emotion-heavy plots that focused on romance, suspense. The trend of inserting an element of macabre into American pre-horror melodramas continued into the 1920s, directors known for relying on macabre in their films during the 1920s were Maurice Tourneur, Rex Ingram, and Tod Browning. Ingrams The Magician contains one of the first examples of a mad doctor and is said to have had a influence on James Whales version of Frankenstein. The Unholy Three is an example of Brownings use of macabre and unique style of morbidity, he remade the film in 1930 as a talkie, during the early period of talking pictures, Universal Pictures began a successful Gothic horror film series.
Tod Brownings Dracula was quickly followed by James Whales Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, some of these films blended science fiction with Gothic horror, such as Whales The Invisible Man and featured a mad scientist, mirroring earlier German films. Frankenstein was the first in a series of remakes which lasted for years, the Mummy introduced Egyptology as a theme, Make-up artist Jack Pierce was responsible for the iconic image of the monster, and others in the series. Universals horror cycle continued into the 1940s with B-movies including The Wolf Man, the once controversial Freaks, based on the short story Spurs, was made by MGM, though the studio disowned the completed film, and it remained banned, in the UK, for thirty years
Wonder (emotion)
Wonder is an emotion comparable to surprise that people feel when perceiving something very rare or unexpected. It has historically seen as an important aspect of human nature, specifically being linked with curiosity. Wonder is compared to the emotion of awe but awe implies fear or respect rather than joy. He noted that people first encounter a surprising or new object. This makes us wonder and be astonished at it, descartes therefore propounded that Wonder is the first of all the passions. This sentiment is reflected in early modern authors like Thomas Hobbes in his discussion about the English words Curiosity, Joy. Whatsoever therefore happeneth new to a man, giveth him hope and matter of knowing somewhat that he knew not before, in De Homine XII, Hobbes discussed the “joy” of “admiration” again contrasting humans to other animals. Hobbes argues that. this passion is almost peculiar to men, in The History of Astronomy, Adam Smith dwells on wonder not to explain the difference between human and animal thinking only, but rather to explain why we study natural science.
An un-civilised person, or child, is clearly different from other animals because “it beats the stone that hurts it”. The child is concerned with finding an account of cause and effect, in The Tangled Wing, Melvin Konner reviews the biologist’s view of this pain and pleasure of learning. He says that “wonder” is “the hallmark of our species and the feature of the human spirit”. Concerning the special importance of wonder to philosophy see Plato Theaetetus 155D, for Aristotle see Poetics IV, “understanding gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but likewise to others too, though the latter have a smaller share in it”. Indeed, he says, people looking at images because of the pleasure of contemplating what something is through manthanein. We even “enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose sight is painful to us”, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Keltner, D. Haidt, J. Approaching awe, a moral, keltner, D. Haidt, J. Appreciation of beauty and excellence. In C.
Peterson and M. E. P. Seligman, washington DC, American Psychological Association Press
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is acknowledged to be one of the most original. His first and best known book and Time, though unfinished, is one of the philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, Human being, for Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. Heideggers work includes criticisms of technologys instrumentalist understanding in the Western tradition as enframing, treating all of Nature as a reserve on call for human purposes. Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, the son of Johanna, raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church that adhered to the First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch.
Heidegger was short and sinewy, with piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being proficient at skiing. In the two following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent. He served as a soldier during the year of World War I, working behind a desk. During the 1930s, critics of Heideggers espousal of a Nazi-style rhetoric of martial manliness noted the unheroic nature of his service in WWI, in 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp, Heideggers students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Gunther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following on from Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy, the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as Saint Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Luther and he read the works of Dilthey and Max Scheler.
In 1927, Heidegger published his main work Sein und Zeit, when Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburgs election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining a number of offers and his students at Freiburg included Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, Heidegger was elected rector of the University on 21 April 1933, and joined the National Socialist German Workers Party on 1 May
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer and statesman. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters and he was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. He contributed to the planning of Weimars botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace and his first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. During this period, Goethe published his novel, Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship, the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808. Goethes comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, Goethes father, Johann Caspar Goethe, lived with his family in a large house in Frankfurt, an Imperial Free City of the Holy Roman Empire. Though he had studied law in Leipzig and had been appointed Imperial Councillor, Johann Caspar married Goethes mother, Catharina Elizabeth Textor at Frankfurt on 20 August 1748, when he was 38 and she was 17. All their children, with the exception of Johann Wolfgang and his sister, Cornelia Friederica Christiana and his father and private tutors gave Goethe lessons in all the common subjects of their time, especially languages.
Goethe received lessons in dancing and fencing, Johann Caspar, feeling frustrated in his own ambitions, was determined that his children should have all those advantages that he had not. Although Goethes great passion was drawing, he became interested in literature, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. He took pleasure in reading works on history and religion. He writes about this period, Goethe became acquainted with Frankfurt actors, among early literary attempts, he was infatuated with Gretchen, who would reappear in his Faust and the adventures with whom he would concisely describe in Dichtung und Wahrheit. He adored Caritas Meixner, a wealthy Worms traders daughter and friend of his sister, Goethe studied law at Leipzig University from 1765 to 1768. He detested learning age-old judicial rules by heart, preferring instead to attend the lessons of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. In Leipzig, Goethe fell in love with Anna Katharina Schönkopf, in 1770, he anonymously released Annette, his first collection of poems.
His uncritical admiration for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, already at this time, Goethe wrote a good deal, but he threw away nearly all of these works, except for the comedy Die Mitschuldigen. The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend of Fausts 1525 barrel ride impressed him so much that Auerbachs Keller became the real place in his closet drama Faust Part One. As his studies did not progress, Goethe was forced to return to Frankfurt at the close of August 1768, Goethe became severely ill in Frankfurt. During the year and a half that followed, because of several relapses, during convalescence, Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his life in Vienna. Brahms composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, organ. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works and he worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim. Many of his works have become staples of the concert repertoire. An uncompromising perfectionist, Brahms destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished, Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg, the diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahmss works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.
Embedded within his meticulous structures, are deeply romantic motifs, Brahmss father, Johann Jakob Brahms, was from the town of Heide in Holstein. The family name was sometimes spelt Brahmst or Brams, and derives from Bram. Against the familys will, Johann Jakob pursued a career in music, arriving in Hamburg in 1826, where he work as a jobbing musician. In 1830, he married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen, a seamstress 17 years older than he was, in the same year he was appointed as a horn player in the Hamburg militia. Eventually he became a player in the Hamburg Stadttheater and the Hamburg Philharmonic Society. As Johann Jakob prospered, the family moved over the years to better accommodation in Hamburg. Johannes Brahms was born in 1833, his sister Elisabeth had been born in 1831, Fritz became a pianist, overshadowed by his brother he emigrated to Caracas in 1867, and returned to Hamburg as a teacher. Johann Jakob gave his son his first musical training, Johannes learnt to play the violin, from 1840 he studied piano with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel.
Cossel complained in 1842 that Brahms could be such a good player, at the age of 10, Brahms made his debut as a performer in a private concert including Beethovens quintet for piano and winds Op.16 and a piano quartet by Mozart. He played as a solo work an étude of Henri Herz, by 1845 he had written a piano sonata in G minor
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who is considered a central figure in modern philosophy. Kant took himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy and his beliefs continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of metaphysics, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics. Politically, Kant was one of the earliest exponents of the idea that peace could be secured through universal democracy. He believed that this will be the outcome of universal history. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, Kant argued that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds. In his view, the shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level. Among other things, Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause, Kant published other important works on ethics, law, aesthetics and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, which dealt with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, Prussia.
His mother, Anna Regina Reuter, was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. His father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German harness maker from Memel, Immanuel Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children, baptized Emanuel, he changed his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. Young Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student and he was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics, despite his religious upbringing and maintaining a belief in God, Kant was skeptical of religion in life, various commentators have labelled him agnostic. Common myths about Kants personal mannerisms are listed and refuted in Goldthwaits introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. It is often held that Kant lived a strict and disciplined life.
He never married, but seemed to have a social life — he was a popular teacher. He had a circle of friends whom he met, among them Joseph Green. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres from Königsberg his whole life, in fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor in Judtschen and in Groß-Arnsdorf
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director and conductor who is primarily known for his operas. Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works and he described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and his advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music, Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, until his final years, Wagners life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs and repeated flight from his creditors.
His controversial writings on music and politics have attracted extensive comment, since the late 20th century, where they express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th century, his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, literature, Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, where his family lived at No. 3, the Brühl in the Jewish quarter and he was baptized at St. Thomas Church. He was the child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, who was a clerk in the Leipzig police service, and his wife, Johanna Rosine. Wagners father Carl died of typhus six months after Richards birth, afterwards his mother Johanna lived with Carls friend, the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. In August 1814 Johanna and Geyer probably married—although no documentation of this has found in the Leipzig church registers. She and her family moved to Geyers residence in Dresden, until he was fourteen, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer.
He almost certainly thought that Geyer was his biological father, Geyers love of the theatre came to be shared by his stepson, and Wagner took part in his performances. In his autobiography Mein Leben Wagner recalled once playing the part of an angel, in late 1820, Wagner was enrolled at Pastor Wetzels school at Possendorf, near Dresden, where he received some piano instruction from his Latin teacher. He struggled to play a scale at the keyboard and preferred playing theatre overtures by ear. Following Geyers death in 1821, Richard was sent to the Kreuzschule, at the age of nine he was hugely impressed by the Gothic elements of Carl Maria von Webers opera Der Freischütz, which he saw Weber conduct. At this period Wagner entertained ambitions as a playwright and his first creative effort, listed in the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis as WWV1, was a tragedy called Leubald. Begun when he was in school in 1826, the play was influenced by Shakespeare
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of an animal, object, person or place that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, social psychology and sociology, an ideal beauty is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, for perfection. The experience of beauty often involves an interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, because this can be a subjective experience, it is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The classical Greek noun that best translates to the English beauty or beautiful was κάλλος, however, kalos may and is translated as ″good″ or ″of fine quality″ and thus has a broader meaning than only beautiful. Similarly, kallos was used differently from the English word beauty in that it first and foremost applied to humans, the Koine Greek word for beautiful was ὡραῖος, hōraios, an adjective etymologically coming from the word ὥρα, hōra, meaning hour.
In Koine Greek, beauty was associated with being of ones hour. Thus, a ripe fruit was considered beautiful, whereas a woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful. In Attic Greek, hōraios had many meanings, including youthful, the earliest Western theory of beauty can be found in the works of early Greek philosophers from the pre-Socratic period, such as Pythagoras. The Pythagorean school saw a connection between mathematics and beauty. In particular, they noted that objects proportioned according to the golden ratio seemed more attractive, ancient Greek architecture is based on this view of symmetry and proportion. Plato considered beauty to be the Idea above all other Ideas, aristotle saw a relationship between the beautiful and virtue, arguing that Virtue aims at the beautiful. During the Gothic era, the classical canon of beauty was rejected as sinful. Later and Humanist thinkers rejected this view, and considered beauty to be the product of rational order, Renaissance artists and architects criticised the Gothic period as irrational and barbarian.
This point of view of Gothic art lasted until Romanticism, in the 19th century, the Age of Reason saw a rise in an interest in beauty as a philosophical subject. For example, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued that beauty is unity in variety and variety in unity. The Romantic poets, became concerned with the nature of beauty, with John Keats arguing in Ode on a Grecian Urn that Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, in the Romantic period, Edmund Burke postulated a difference between beauty in its classical meaning and the sublime. The concept of the sublime, as explicated by Burke and Kant, suggested viewing Gothic art and architecture, though not in accordance with the standard of beauty
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey is one of the figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, a well-known public intellectual, he was a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, aesthetics, logic, social theory. He was an educational reformer for the 20th century. The overriding theme of Deweys works was his belief in democracy, be it in politics, education or communication. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means. Dewey was one of four born to Archibald Sprague Dewey.
The second born son and first John born to Archibald and Lucina died in an accident on January 17,1859. On October 20,1859 John Dewey was born, forty weeks after the death of his older brother. Like his older, surviving brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, where he was initiated into Delta Psi, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1879. A significant professor of Deweys at the University of Vermont was Henry A. P. Torrey, Dewey studied privately with Torrey between his graduation from Vermont and his enrollment at Johns Hopkins University. After studying with George Sylvester Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter Adams, in 1884, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled The Psychology of Kant, in 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago where he developed his belief in Rational Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy.
Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the University, in 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia University and Columbia Universitys Teachers College, in 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a member of the American Federation of Teachers. Along with the historians Charles A, beard and James Harvey Robinson, and the economist Thorstein Veblen, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School
Kitsch
Kitsch is art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way. Hence, kitsch art is associated with sentimental art. Kitsch is related to the concept of camp, because of its humorous, the chocolate box artist Thomas Kinkade, whose idyllic landscape scenes were often lampooned by art critics as maudlin and schmaltzy, is considered a leading example of contemporary kitsch. The term is sometimes applied to music or literature. As a descriptive term, kitsch originated in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and the 1870s, describing cheap, popular, in Das Buch vom Kitsch, Hans Reimann defines it as a professional expression born in a painters studio. The study of kitsch was done almost exclusively in German until the 1970s, modernist writer Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch is imitation, kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good.
Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer, according to Roger Scruton, Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious. Cliché Lowbrow Museum of Bad Art Poshlost Prolefeed Notable examples Dogs Playing Poker Velvet Elvis Adorno and Kitsch, Two Japanese Paradigms in Æ, Canadian Aesthetics Journal 15. Faszination und Herausforderung des Banalen und Trivialen, Mark A. Kant and Art History, moments of discipline. Kitsch, The World of Bad Taste, Universe Books, the Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch, in J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell The Norbert Elias Reader. Vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer Verlag. Incredible Tretchikoff, Life of an artist and adventurer, ISBN 0-8070-6681-8 Holliday and Potts, Tracey Kitsch. Cultural Politics and Taste, Manchester University Press, eine Studie über die Entartung der Kunst. The Modern System of the Arts, psychologie du Kitsch, Lart du Bonheur, Denoël-Gonthier Nerdrum, Odd.
The Artificial Kingdom, On the Kitsch Experience, University of Minnesota ISBN 0-8166-4117-X Reimann, Hans. Balsam für Herz und Seele, ISBN 978-3-7630-2493-3, Kitsch in Sync, A Consumers Guide to Bad Taste, Plexus Publishing. In John Walkers Glossary of art, architecture & design since 1945, avant-Garde and Kitsch – essay by Clement Greenberg Kitsch and the Modern Predicament – essay by Roger Scruton Why Dictators Love Kitsch by Eric Gibson, The Wall Street Journal, August 10,2009
