Cinematic “pas de deux”: the dialogue between Maya Deren's experimental filmmaking and Talley Beatty's black ballet dancer in A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer

A semi-proximal-based strictly contractive Peaceman-Rachford splitting method

The Peaceman-Rachford splitting method is very efficient for minimizing sum of two functions each depends on its variable, and the constraint is a linear equality. However, its convergence was not guaranteed without extra requirements. Very recently, He et al. (SIAM J. Optim. 24: 1011 - 1040, 2014) proved the convergence of a strictly contractive Peaceman-Rachford splitting method by employing a suitable underdetermined relaxation factor. In this paper, we further extend the so-called strictly contractive Peaceman-Rachford splitting method by using two different relaxation factors, and to make the method more flexible, we introduce semi-proximal terms to the subproblems. We characterize the relation of these two factors, and show that one factor is always underdetermined while the other one is allowed to be larger than 1. Such a flexible conditions makes it possible to cover the Glowinski's ADMM whith larger stepsize. We show that the proposed modified strictly contractive Peaceman-Rachford splitting method is convergent and also prove $O(1/t)$ convergence rate in ergodic and nonergodic sense, respectively. The numerical tests on an extensive collection of problems demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method

Global Optimization with Polynomials

The class of POP (Polynomial Optimization Problems) covers a wide rang of optimization problems such as 0 - 1 integer linear and quadratic programs, nonconvex quadratic programs and bilinear matrix inequalities. In this paper, we review some methods on solving the unconstraint case: minimize a real-valued polynomial p(x) : Rn â R, as well the constraint case: minimize p(x) on a semialgebraic set K, i.e., a set defined by polynomial equalities and inequalities. We also summarize some questions that we are currently considering.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Towards to a modern higher education institutions in Poland

Since the dawn of time, universities have contributed significantly to the economic development. However, presently operating higher education institutions are characterized by a significant diversity of goals, missions and functions, which significantly go beyond the ones traditionally assigned to this type of institution

The Argument for Anomalous Monism, Again

It is frequently argued that Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism implies property epiphenomenalism: that it renders the mental properties of events irrelevant to causal relations, so that rather than being a solution to the problem of how mental events cause physical ones, it actually denies that they do. Whilst this may be an appropriate criticism of the non-reductive physicalist theses that anomalous monism has inspired, I argue that it is an inappropriate criticism of Davidson’s position. Specifically, the extensional character of causation and the ontology on which the argument for anomalous monism is based preclude the possibility of levelling this kind of criticism at Davidson. I argue that such criticisms are made only by forcing onto anomalous monism an ontology that it actively seeks to deny; it is only by appreciating Davidson’s approach to metaphysics and causation in general that we can understand why the claim that anomalous monism implies property epiphenomenalism is so misguided