cinesthetic memory: CineMenu at The Dirty Truth

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

CineMenu at The Dirty Truth

As a means of marking the anniversary of the CineMenu at The Dirty Truth, I'm providing a listing of the weekly themes, films, and descriptions for what has been showcased on Sunday evenings at the fabulous pub-restaurant, The Dirty Truth, in Northampton, Mass.

Here's the gig: Basically, four to five films are projected on Sunday evenings at this venue. The films are shown without sound (MOS, for those in the know) but the visuals are coordinated with Shane (or one of the other key staff members at TDT) so that the music played on the sound system complements the films.

Come on by on Sundays for a viewing of some rather obscure, or uniquely visual, motion pictures -- and a pint, of course.

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Terminology

Cinesthetic Memory can be defined as follows: corporeal and cognitive resonance existing during and retained after the film viewing process. This concept draws, theoretically and linguistically, on two other terms: kinesthetic memory and synaesthesia. Kinesthetic memory refers to bodily knowledge of how to do something, derived, in part, from memory retained in the body due to the repetition of motions, such as those learned in dance, playing a musical instrument, or craftwork (Seitz 1989); or bodily memory (ghost memory) sustained through a traumatic injury, such as the sudden, unprovoked feeling of localized pain long after an injury has healed. In essence, kinesthetic memory is the way in which the body “remembers” and “memorizes” a particular somatic experience.

The second foundational term is both phonetically and conceptually linked to the cinesthetic. The phenomenon of synaesthesia, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), is defined as a “sensation in one part of the body produced by a stimulus applied to another part.” For example, synaesthesia exists as the cross- and inter-stimuli process where by glancing at a photograph of dew saturated pine needles can arouse in the viewer the undeniable scent of pine, or when a particular sound or musical pitch causes us to “see” a distinct color in our mind’s eye.

Conceptually, cinesthetic memory is akin to Laura Marks’ (1999) notion of “haptic visuality” and Vivian Sobchack’s work on the phenomenology of film viewing, and particularly her notion of the “cinesthetic subject” (1992). Crossbreeding the synaesthetic with the kinesthetic, by fusing the etymology and the phonetics of “cinema”, makes the necessary heuristic link between movement and sense in order to discuss the inter-stimuli process of film viewing.

The etymological roots to the word cinematographe, the name the Lumiere brothers assigned to their late-nineteenth-century motion picture camera-projector, derives from the Greek kinema: meaning motion. The Greek term kinetikos (of or resulting from motion) is the etymological root to the term kinesthetic, i.e. “The sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body” (OED 1989). The cinesthetic, therefore, refigures the relationship between motion and cinema; originally pertaining to the perceived movement of photographic images on the screen, cinesthetic memory is concerned with the phenomenon of the affectivity associated with film viewing: the movement of the audience.

If the process/experience of viewing motion pictures has lasting effects on an individual that are later acted upon in private and social settings, it requires us to examine the preconscious domains of body and mind initially affected by this experience in order to better understand the outward, enacted and consciously demonstrated acts (in thoughts, conversation, mimicking, etc.) that occur in various environments, thus creating affectivity and, in part, shaping our understandings of cultural phenomena.

cinesthetic memory

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

CineMenu at The Dirty Truth

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Terminology