“Uncanny”

“The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything which is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation cannot be inverted. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny.” (Freud 1919:2) From: The “Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud (found at http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf)

(First published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte Folge. [Translated by Alix Strachey.]

Ringu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x38nTGcSLr4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VP5jEAP3K4

The Uncanny Valley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdAIPoh8a4

Graphics and the uncanny: http://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/graphics-and-the-uncanny

Uncanny Surrealism and Graphic Design: http://www.kunsthal.nl/en-22-689-pers-Uncanny.html

Jan Svankmajer and the Graphic Uncanny: http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/jan-svankmajer-and-the-graphic-uncanny/30398/

Alice by Jan Švankmajer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bosvfUoO0DU

The Uncanny and the Fantastic:

“The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment. It seems to be located on the frontier of two genres, the marvellous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous genre.” Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975) Found at: http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html

What is the Fantastic?

"The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work--in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations (Todorov 1975:33)." From: The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975), Tzvetan Todorov http://www.unc.edu/~bardsley/ghosts/todorov.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7ztJ3NUMI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7ztJ3NUMI

The Shining by Stanley Kubrick: http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id80.html