<p>This essay is a product of the author’s interest in silent films from Soviet, especially, documentary films. Before the 1920’s documentary filmmaking had mostly been limited to newsreels and short scenes. Only occasional feature-length documentaries had been made. During the 1920s, documentary film achieved new status, not only because of its use as propaganda; it was also identified as artistic cinema. Discussions how to use this genre were taking place all over Europe, and in the US. In France, many different journals on cinema were started. In Soviet the discussions later became politicised. It was a good climate for groundbreaking cinema, and Esfir Shub was one of the film pioneers in Soviet. The ambition with the essay is to give Esfir Shub theoretical approach to non-fiction film a greater acknowledgement. The thesis is how Esfir Shub combines titles and pictures with cutting in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) and to theorise the film with Shub’s own conceptual ideas. The method is close reading of the film and the articles written by Shub. The conclusions made by the author, is that Shub uses titles and pictures, in a dynamic cross-cutting between the oppressor and the oppressed. She is faithful to her own theories. She is only using authentically material and not played scenes; otherwise she would distort historical facts. The montage is built in two different ways. Firstly Shub use an ironic tone in the titles when she introduces the oppressors from the old regime, and comment these images widely. Secondly she uses pictures of typical symbols of capitalism and does not need to comment in such matter as earlier, because the film material she had captured speaks for itself.</p>

Zugl.: Magdeburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2009.

This dissertation theorizes the genre of the urban database documentary, a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems to uncover new perspectives on the lived experience of place. While particularly prominent in recent decades, I argue that the genre of the urban database documentary arises at the turn of the 20th century in response to the rise of the metropolis and the widespread adoption of new media technologies such as photography, cinema, and radio. This was a time when the modern city engendered significant disorientation in its inhabitants, dramatically expanding horizontally and vertically. The rampant pace of technological development at this time also spawned feelings of dehumanization and the loss of connection to embodied experience. The urban database documentary emerges as a symptomatic response to the period's new cultural conditions, meeting a collective need to create order from vast quantities of information and re-frame perception of daily experience. The design of structural systems became a creative method for simultaneously addressing these vast new quantities of information, while attending to the particularities of individual experience. For media artists, building a database into the aesthetic design of a work itself offers an avenue for creatively documenting the radical multiplicity of urbanized environments, preserving attention to the sensory experience of details while aspiring to a legible whole. Crucially, I argue that the design of these systems is a vital form of authorial agency. By reading these artists' work in relation to contemporary practice, I aim to make transparent the underlying, non-technical ambitions that fuel this distinctive mode of media art practice.

This essay is a product of the author’s interest in silent films from Soviet, especially, documentary films. Before the 1920’s documentary filmmaking had mostly been limited to newsreels and short scenes. Only occasional feature-length documentaries had been made. During the 1920s, documentary film achieved new status, not only because of its use as propaganda; it was also identified as artistic cinema. Discussions how to use this genre were taking place all over Europe, and in the US. In France, many different journals on cinema were started. In Soviet the discussions later became politicised. It was a good climate for groundbreaking cinema, and Esfir Shub was one of the film pioneers in Soviet. The ambition with the essay is to give Esfir Shub theoretical approach to non-fiction film a greater acknowledgement. The thesis is how Esfir Shub combines titles and pictures with cutting in The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) and to theorise the film with Shub’s own conceptual ideas. The method is close reading of the film and the articles written by Shub. The conclusions made by the author, is that Shub uses titles and pictures, in a dynamic cross-cutting between the oppressor and the oppressed. She is faithful to her own theories. She is only using authentically material and not played scenes; otherwise she would distort historical facts. The montage is built in two different ways. Firstly Shub use an ironic tone in the titles when she introduces the oppressors from the old regime, and comment these images widely. Secondly she uses pictures of typical symbols of capitalism and does not need to comment in such matter as earlier, because the film material she had captured speaks for itself.

En dépit des coûts de société élevés attribuables aux lésions des tissus conjonctifs, plusieurs de leurs causes demeurent incertaines. Notamment, les grands taux de déformations que subissent ces tissus lors d’accidents, de sports ou de chutes pourraient expliquer certaines lésions. L’hypoThèse à l’origine du projet est que de grands taux de déformation pourraient induire un changement de raideur aux tissus conjonctifs, favorisant ainsi une lésion du tissu en extension. Ce projet de maîtrise avait pour objectif de développer les outils nécessaires pour effectuer les premières validations expérimentales de cette hypoThèse. Le modèle animal choisi pour les tests est le ligament capsulaire d’oursin de mer. Une base de connaissances concernant les oursins de mer a donc d'abord été construite pour mieux planifier les essais expérimentaux. Ensuite, comme la raideur du ligament capsulaire risque de changer au cours d’un même essai, un protocole d’identification à paramètres variable a été développé. Ce protocole utilise la base polynomiale de Tchebychev pour paramétrer le système à paramètres variables. L’identification peut ensuite se faire sur un nombre restreint de paramètres à partir desquels il est possible de reconstruire, par exemple, la raideur en fonction du temps. Le protocole d’identification a été validé avec des simulations numériques et avec un montage expérimental d’un système à raideur variable. Le montage consistait en une barre de section triangulaire équilatérale en torsion dont un des points d'appui était déplacé en fonction du temps. Enfin, un manipulateur a été conçu, fabriqué et validé pour imposer de grands taux de déformations au ligament capsulaire. Plusieurs outils ont donc été développés au cours de ce projet pour servir lors des tests sur les oursins de mer. Les prochaines actions à entreprendre sont la validation du montage avec les oursins de mer et la planification des essais expérimentaux.

Un montage d'usinage est un outillage indispensable pour fixer solidement la pièce à la bonne position dans l'espace de travail de la machine outil. Les travaux précédents ont permis de mettre en place un modèle de prise de pièce et de prendre en compte les contraintes liées à la prise de pièce en conception de gammes d'usinage. Dans ce travail de thèse nous nous intéressons à la conception du montage d'usinage de manière à passer du modèle prise de pièce retenu à la solution technologique qui sera utilisée sur le poste de travail. Ce travail aborde le problème de conception du montage d'usinage modulaire du point de vue technologique; c'est-à-dire le choix et le placement des éléments technologiques en tenant compte de toutes les contraintes de qualité, d'accessibilité et de comportement mécanique du système pièce-montage d'usinage-outil de coupe durant l'usinage.

In this dissertation I investigate the stylistic shift in the cinema of selected filmmakers whose work is rooted in Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic theory: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier. Through the work of these filmmakers, I trace the ongoing change in the cinematic applications of the theory. By and large, the change consists of a lessening of the role of montage – a technique that occupies a paramount place in Brecht’s theatrical and filmic practice – in favour of the objects within the camera’s field of view and the sounds within the microphone’s range. Since the ultimate effect for which the Brechtian filmmaker aims is that of Verfremdung, theatrical stylisation – itself estranging within the context of cinema – appears as a natural corollary of the described shift in emphasis. I also suggest a causal connection between the aforementioned shift and the growing self-consciousness of the style employed by meainstream cinemas (of which Hollywood is the foremost representative), which often manifests itself in the use of unorthodox editing patterns. Accordingly, I propose that we can attribute the contemporary Brechtian filmmaker’s growing reliance on mise-en-scène elements as a source of Verfremdung largely to the major film industries’ adoption of montage and other specifically cinematic codes that make a film’s style overt. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Brechtian filmmaker – whose political stance is inherently antagonistic to that exemplified by most mainstream cinema, reacts to the normalisation of foregrounded film style by employing the opposite strategy.

Zugl.: Erlangen, Nürnberg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

Zugl.: Erlangen, Nürnberg, Univ., Diss., 2005

Zugl.: Bayreuth, Univ., Diss., 2007