never not thinking about what it means that the last shot of the terror is a tableau of crozier fishing <3

like. foucault voice the tableau vivant transforms confused multitudes into ordered multiplicities; the project of the tableau vivant, much like other scientific/artistic projects in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries, was a project of delineation, distribution, analysis.. it was about imposing an order, about containment and categorization of life and of living things in order to incorporate them into the political and cultural economies of empire... and so what does it MEAN that crozier puts down the logbook, walks out of the ship, outlives the expedition, changes his name, tells the empire he's dead... and yet at the close of the show is STILL situated within the framework of the tableau vivant!!! because the only thing i can think is that despite everything he's outlived, he will not outlive the cultural production of empire, and that despite walking out of england he never manages to walk out of its history. they can't control his life but they can control his cultural memory. anyway

[ID: One notices how the tableaux scenes frequently convey not a sense of the ephemeral but rather a certain quality of persistence through time: Samson among the columns in the hall of the Philistines; Thor with the World Serpent transfixed on a fishhook; Vidarr confronting the vengeance of the Fenris Wolf; Perseus holding out the head of Medusa. These lingering actions-which also play a large role in sculpture-possess the singular power of being able to etch themselves in one's memory. end ID]

axel olrik as cited by susan stewart

[ID: The tableau offers a type of contextual closure which would be inappropriate to genres rooted in the context of their utterance; the tableau effectively speaks to the distance between the context at hand and the narrated context; it is possible only through representation, since it offers a complete closure of a text framed off from the ongoing reality that surrounds it. Here we might think not only of sculpture but also of the photograph, which has made possible the dramatization and classicization of the individual life history. Such "still shots," say, before the family car or the Christmas tree, are always profoundly ideological, for they eternalize a moment or instance of the typical in the same way that a proverb or emblem captions a moment as an illustration of the moral working of the universe. Thus, while these photographs articulate the individual, they do so according to a well- defined set of generic conventions. It is not simply that the family album records an individual's rites of passage; it does so in such a conventionalized way that all family albums are alike. end ID]

MISS STEWART.......

One Year Anniversary
LOVE BETWEEN FAIRY AND DEVIL l 苍兰诀 (2022)

∟ 3.21 Graduation Day Pt 1
Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997 - 2003]

MDZS color wheel challenge!

oh i am absolutely obsessed with the way crowley assumes everyone falls in love exactly the way he did. what if a sudden rainstorm forces them beneath a canopy indeed, like oh, did you get caught in the rain once and fall head over heels in love with the angel giving you shelter, crowley? is that what happened? i love this show

Part 2: On Theatricality and how it transfers into Chinese/Eastern Dramas and Cinema

Part 1   Part 2

Here, I reference a fantastic article from the Asian Theatre Journal, 2008.

So to recap, the problem I’m exploring is this: Why do some East Asian dramas/movies look so over the top? Overacted? Overemotional? Why is it not more realistic?

My answer is in part 1, on the concept of mo, which is the traditional Chinese thought that emotional revelation is more important than accurate realistic depictions in art. Western audiences are more used to plot-heavy, realistic depictions of dramas, whereas traditional Chinese audiences are used to the opposite. They find the plot not so important, but focus more on the content of the work, the spirit of it, how it makes you feel.

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Part 1    Part 2

Mostly in ref to the Untamed/Word of Honor, but applies to a lot of East Asian works-

I’ve been getting the sense that people I know from the west (also being Asian-American myself) often interpret Chinese/Japanese/Korean drama and theatre to be too corny/cheesy/over-acted. A quick search on some internet forums confirms this. Maybe it’s because I used to watch a lot of C-dramas when I was a kid (Legend of the Condor Heroes/Return of C Heroes/Journey to the West/The Reincarnated Princess/etc), I personally did not notice that the acting was over the top. 

I don’t really speak for the quality of acting of these actors because I barely follow them in their careers, but I do know that some of them are immature actors or don’t have much formal training (which may cause the cheesiness above). However, Eastern dramatic acting in general does seem like a common complaint, so I decided to look into it - this is all coming from someone who JUST recently got back into watching C-dramas btw, doing my own research so don’t mind me if there’s some incorrect things down here, I am by NO means at all an expert in drama and theater (lol):

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The Goldfish Problem