Jill Greenberg captures the uncanny. Her photographs are intriguing and captivating overall. The perfectly executed photographs showcasing the perfection of its target in a not so perfect behavior is quite remarkable. The photo shopped/airbrushed quality to the figures allow viewers to engage in their perfectly displayed skin and/or fur, all in while knowing that no one has skin like those figures anywhere in the world. It's the enjoyment of believing that one could actually obtain that perfection. My views on the Uncanny lie in the realm of mental consciousness opposed to acts. The way Greenberg executes these photographs of perfectly smiling monkeys and peeing apes just mocks the Uncanny that one may have experienced through picture books or cartoons, instead with a more profound stamp on it. The uncanny humanness of the animals are displayed in a way that cannot be ignore but, at the same time how many cartoons involve human like animated characters. Also the angelic quality relates to dream like realms which also screams uncanny. Crying children aren't uncanny at all neither are little blonde girls doing gymnastics. The execution, the composition reads Uncanny.

Do not read this if you do not want to get creeped-out, spooked, and uneasy

Just in time for Halloween:

Thought Catalog presents us with:
50 Quotes from Children That Will Send Shivers Down Your Spine
 
I warned you.

Vampyr - Obscurity, Intensification, Narrative Instability

Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr is surely one of the strangest of the classic horror films.
We briefly discussed how this strangeness represents what Paul Schrader has called "the transcendental style in cinema"; that is, a tendency to see through representations (that often do not advance the central plot) to a Mystery of Being that denies the ultimate reality of material things.
The strangeness also represents lyricism or even what some people call poetic style--again, a concentration upon elements of composition, camera effects, characterization, and even plot that rejects the principle that film should create a coherent, focused presentation that tells a story, and instead promotes mood, atmosphere, tone. 
Given this emphasis on atmosphere, many film critics would say that Vampyr offers an example of cinematic impressionism -- in contrast to the expressionism we associate without many other classics of horror and the uncanny: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the 1931 James Whale Frankenstein. (American horror classics were influenced by the many German silent films on uncanny themes, but also reflect the exportation of German film culture to Hollywood with an influx of refugees from Nazism in the early 1930s).

Another way to characterize Uncanny Style in Vampyr:

Obscurity - Consider what appears deliberately indistinct and unclear -- visually and aurally, but also in the conceptual elements of cinema (plot developments, setting, characters' roles in the story . . . ). What is dark, washed-out, missing?

Intensification - Consider what is exaggerated, overdone.

Narrative Instability - Consider how the basic story information is conveyed. Do we know whose point of view we are perceiving, and when the point of view shifts? Do we know what is "real" in the story and what is "fantasy" or "hallucination"?

--These issues are discussed to some extent in the reading on Vampyr by S. S. Prawer.

If you do choose to offer a comment on Vampyr in advance of discussion on Wednesday, Oct 30 -- it's not required -- you might follow one or more of these topics.
Post your response here as a comment, or if you wish, as a separate blog post.