Posted inGeneral

The Apple Watch, history and creativity

It’s a very good thing that TIME magazine’s tech writer, Lev Grossman, is an intelligent guy, even when he teams up with others, such as Matt Vella, in the writing of an article called “Wearing the Internet”, on Apple’s newly introduced Apple Watch (TIME, September 22 2014, pp. 28-33). Anyone less intelligent is likely merely […]

Posted inGeneralHealth

The cult of the toned female body

When Gilles Deleuze claimed that what Foucault had theorised as the panoptical, carceral society of disciplined, docile bodies — economically productive and politically impotent — had come to an end more or less with the Second World War, to be incrementally replaced by “societies of control”, he would probably not have been able to anticipate […]

Posted inGeneral

Is cinema fundamentally conceptual or perceptual?

Looking for different ways in which the human body has been thematised in film makes for interesting research. I was reminded of this recently when acting as examiner for a dissertation written by a master’s student, Martin Rossouw of UFS, in which (among other films) he analysed Charles Chaplin’s 1936 classic, Modern Times. Rossouw demonstrated […]