Transcultural engagement with Polish memory of the Holocaust while watching Leszek Wosiewicz's Kornblumenblau

Kornblumenblau (Leszek Wosiewicz 1989) is a film that explores the experience of a Polish political prisoner interned at Auschwitz I. It particularly foregrounds issues related to Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in its diegesis. Holocaust films are often discussed in relation to representation and the cultural specificity of their production context. However, this paper suggests thinking about film and topographies, the theme of this issue, not in relation to where a work is produced but in regards to the spectatorial space. It adopts a phenomenological approach to consider how, despite Kornblumenblau's particularly Polish themes, it might address the transcultural spectator and draw attention to the broader difficulties one faces when attempting to remember the Holocaust. Influenced particularly by the writing of Jennifer M. Barker and Laura U. Marks, this paper suggests that film possesses a body ¬¬- a display of intentionality, beyond those presented within the diegesis, which engages in dialogue with the spectator. During the experience of viewing Kornblumenblau, this filmic corporeality draws attention to the difficulties of confronting the Holocaust in particularly haptic ways, as the film points to the unreliability of visual historical sources, relates abject sensations to concentrationary spaces and breaks down as it confronts the scene of the gas chamber

The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Senescence and aging – causes, consequences, and therapeutic avenues

Aging is the major risk factor for cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disorders. Although we are far from understanding the biological basis of aging, research suggests that targeting the aging process itself could ameliorate many age-related pathologies. Senescence is a cellular response characterized by a stable growth arrest and other phenotypic alterations that include a proinflammatory secretome. Senescence plays roles in normal development, maintains tissue homeostasis, and limits tumor progression. However, senescence has also been implicated as a major cause of age-related disease. In this regard, recent experimental evidence has shown that the genetic or pharmacological ablation of senescent cells extends life span and improves health span. Here, we review the cellular and molecular links between cellular senescence and aging and discuss the novel therapeutic avenues that this connection opens

Make Believe: Marie-José Mondzain and Cinema's Christian Economy

This article seeks to highlight the relevance of Marie-José Mondzain's trailblazing writings on Byzantine image theory and its modern legacy, with particular reference to Image, icône, économie (Image, Icon, Economy, 1996) and Homo spectator (2007), to the revived debate about belief in cinema. Like André Bazin's and Christian Metz's classical accounts of this subject, Xavier Giannoli's film L'Apparition (The Apparition; 2018) grants a privileged role to a holy shroud and other visual fetishes; it also deals, like Mondzain, with their relations to invisible authority. I argue that Mondzain's writings and Giannoli's film enrich our appreciation of cinema's affinity with belief by staging complementary critiques of the empowerment of institutions by images. </jats:p

Apocalyptic Stillness: The Self-Immolators

In accounts of two widely reproduced photographs of Thich Quang Duc’s protest by self-burning (Malcolm Browne, 1963), film of Vietnamese Buddhist monks, nuns and laypeople who followed his example usually feature at most as a footnote. But these pieces of footage also reached global audiences, initially through cinema newsreels and television. This chapter explores what moving images reveal about the iconicity of those who immolated themselves in objection to South Vietnamese governance and American imperialism. It questions the traditional opposition of the iconic still to the forgotten moving picture by pursuing images of these burnings through the first generation of European and North American films that incorporated them, including newsreels, documentaries and art and experimental cinema. In dialogue with theorisations of photography’s invasion of cinema in the 1960s, the chapter argues that the elevation by Western films of these shockingly still activists into apocalyptic icons risks eliding their anti-imperial and pacifist politics.</p