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The impact of digital media and technology on performance arts is evident when digital visual effects (VFX) filming techniques are introduced on a film set. Digital technologies influence the film actor's approach to be congruent to and authentic within the circumstances of the scene. Actors require an effective skillset and strategies to successfully deliver an embodied performance aligning with the various digital VFX techniques. Focusing on imagination, action and emotion that would facilitate such an embodied performance, we drew on relevant neuroscientific notions such as neuron reactivation, conceptual blending, as-if body states and affordances. Additionally, we incorporated relevant embodied performance concepts from Stanislavski, Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies, Effector Patterns including the Emotional Body Approach and Lessac Kinesensics to the development of a digital acting programme, advancing the actor's required skills and providing on-set digital acting strategies to support congruency with digital VFX and authenticity within the diegetic reality. The efficacy of this programme was determined by assessing pre- and post-intervention recordings of both a control and an experimental group of trained actors. Reflection-on-action journals from participants supplemented the assessment. The assessments and journals indicate that the acquired skillset and on-set digital acting strategies effectively improve the actor's performance with digital VFX filming technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article discusses a special journal issue on Asta Nielsen, a Danish actress known for her work in German films. The issue contains eight contributions that focus on Nielsen and related themes, such as the advent of the star system and the introduction of long feature films. The articles make extensive use of digitized newspapers and film trade journals as sources, providing valuable information on Nielsen's films and their marketing. The review also highlights the neglect of other early film stars and the presence of women in the silent cinema, suggesting that future research should take a more statistical and vernacular approach to provide a comprehensive understanding of the early film industry. [Extracted from the article]

Dubbing refers to the procedure of recording characters by professional voice actors in films and games. It is more expressive and immersive than conventional Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies and requires synchronization and style consistency of audio and video. Previous dubbing methods use video to provide either a global style vector or a local prosody embedding, limiting the expressiveness of the predicted waveform. To generate more expressive audio with precise visual temporal alignment, we propose a multi-modal multi-scale expressive speech synthesis method, namely multi-modal multi-scale TTS (M 3 TTS), which introduces an auxiliary video input to provide style embeddings. Specifically, M 3 TTS adopts a memory network to bridge heterogeneous modalities and further solve the training-inference style mismatch in conventional multi-modal TTS. To enhance the expressiveness of synthesized audio, a multi-scale style modeling scheme is used for recovering style characteristics at different scales. In addition, M 3 TTS can convert the style of speech by choosing different reference videos. We conduct extensive experiments on the public GRID corpus, where our proposed M 3 TTS can generate high-quality video-aligned speech. It also shows superior performance over the other comparable methods, both subjectively and objectively. • Adding a video to guide the model in generating audio-visual synchronized speech. • Introducing a key–value memory into the TTS model to connect the video and speech. • Extracting style from video, M 3 TTS can generate high-quality expressive speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examine the silent era of Western films and maintain that the cowboy hero has a complex and nuanced pedigree in film industry. Topics include how Western stars presented the cowboy in distinct fashion with a valuable cultural resource; and Mississippi River topography maintained a second identification with Western films.

This article examines Hsia Moon and her momentous transition from a celebrated movie star emblematic of the Hong Kong leftist cinema in the 1950s and 1960s to a prescient and resourceful producer who returned to the film circle and founded Bluebird Movie Enterprises to produce three important pieces in 1982 to 1984: Touben nvhai (Boat People , Ann Hui), Zigu yingxiong chu shaonian (Little Heroes , Mou Dunfu), and Sishui liunian (Homecoming , Yim Ho). Through a close analysis of the film texts and production background alongside an original research of the historical documents and interviews with the filmmaker, I argue that Hsia Moon's Bluebird productions, ephemeral but highly influential, serve as conjuncture films at the crossroads of the post–Cold War and Sino-British negotiation era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life and suicide of Chicana film star Lupe Vélez have been the subject of many fantastic speculations and retellings, the most famous of which imagines her dying facedown in the toilet while vomiting up her last supper. In this article, I throw myself headfirst into the vertiginous uncertainties and mythologies surrounding Vélez as a public figure. In order to excavate the cross-generational queer assumptions and attachments through which she has been remembered and re-cited, I look to the 1960s underground film Life, Death and Assumption of Lupe Vélez, by José Rodriguez-Soltero, and the 2012 performance/film Fuck My Life from artist Xandra Ibarra. These works are examples of what I call recuperative re-citations, built through acts of empathetic queer/trans engagements with Vélez’s excesses. This process produces the potential for connection and healing through acts of embodied citation and storytelling. When we understand suicide as agential queer performance, Vélez’s death becomes an opening for radical expressions of pleasure and empathy based in shared pain. Exploring the various iterations of her early death and mining the complexity of her humanity, queer scholars and artists of color facilitate the assumption of Vélez as both saint and devil of queer Brown femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their address to a predominantly female readership, fan magazines of the 1930s asserted that Hollywood was one place in which women were not subordinated to men as female stardom was superior to that of male stardom. The magazines' representations of male actors were both compliant with, and resistant to, the tough‐guy image of hegemonic masculinity. The personas of most 'leading men' who led the supporting casts of female stars were represented as softer forms of masculinity than that of the majority of male stars. The on‐screen hard forms of masculinity of male stars were softened by the magazines' reports of their off‐screen personas, and the personas of some actors were presented as a bipolar masculinity that combined soft and hard forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the overlooked history of Sue Lyon and her experiences as a child film star. Lyon was fourteen years old when she was cast in the role of Dolores Haze in Lolita (1962) by James B. Harris and Stanley Kubrick. The article considers how critical feminist archival methods can be used to analyse documents in the Stanley Kubrick Archive (SKA) to uncover the conditions of production in which Lyon found herself. In the few instances that Lyon spoke out in the later stages of her life, she cited her involvement in Lolita as having had a detrimental impact on her mental health. More recently, there have been allegations of a sexual relationship between the film's producer—Harris—and Lyon during the production. The article considers the ways in which a critical feminist approach to the use of the SKA can be used to uncover the experiences of Lyon during the film's production and can reframe understanding of the conditions of production in Hollywood that led to the sexualisation and exploitation of a child star. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes social network analysis in addition to a measure of genre diversity to quantify the quality and capacity of actors in the Malay language film industry. We built a dataset by collecting data from various websites pertaining to Malay films. The data consists of 180 Malay films released from 2015 until 2020. The actor network is then built by connecting actors co-starring in a movie together and is compared to small world networks. We quantified the quality of actors in the network using five measures: number of films (TFA), degree centrality (DC), strength centrality (SC), betweenness centrality (BC), and normalized Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (NHHI). TFA, DC and SC indicate experience in the industry, since a high TFA shows that an actor has acted in more films. A high DC shows an actor has worked with many co-stars, and a high SC reflects an actor's frequency of co-occurrence relationship. Actors with high TFA, DC, and SC are popular in this sense. Meanwhile, BC highlights the social importance of an actor in the network where they are the middlemen that connect actors from different genres of movies in the network, and we found that high BC actors are voice actors that may not have a high TFA, DC, or SC. NHHI highlights the actor's capability to work with different types of film, and it serves as an important measure of an actor's versatility. Moreover, we also calculated the average shortest path in the network to search for the "Kevin Bacon" of the Malay language film actor network. Using NHHI as an indicator of genre diversity, we also show that most of the actors diversify their work over the years and that genre diversity is an important benchmark for an actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to clarify the place, meaning, and functioning mechanism of kinesthetic perception in the art of a theatre and film actor. Research methodology. Analytical and logical methods have been used to understand the peculiarities of the actor's kinesthetic perception in the role, a comparative analysis of the actor's play with active kinesthetic perception and an actor with dominant auditory and visual perception has been used. Scientific novelty. For the first time, the phenomenon of kinesthetic perception in the actor's art was investigated. The mechanism and method of involving this perception in the acting technique of reincarnation was revealed. An analysis of the features of the creative state of the actor in the role under the influence of kinesthetic perception was conducted. Conclusions. The method of comparative analysis of the actor's play proves the need to involve the phenomenon of kinesthetic perception in the actor's skill. We have proved why the activation of the actor's kinesthetic perception in the role is a necessary condition for the creation of an artistic act. The mechanism of shifting the actor's attention from external visual and auditory information to the movements of their own body has been revealed. It was determined that as a result of such a shift of attention the actor feels the movements of their own body and their image in the viewer's eyes. The method of setting up and activating kinesthetic perception in acting is motivated and explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical physical systems with large numbers of molecules can show universal and scaling behaviors. It is of interest to know whether human societies with large numbers of people can show the same behaviors. Here, we use network theory to analyze Chinese history in periods 209 BCE–23 CE and 515–618 CE) related to the Western Han–Xin Dynasty and the late Northern Wei–Sui Dynasty, respectively. Two persons are connected when they appear in the same historical event. We find that the historical networks from two periods separated about 500 years have interesting universal and scaling behaviors, and they are small-world networks; their average cluster coefficients as a function of degree are similar to the network of movie stars. In the historical networks, the persons with larger degrees prefer to connect with persons with a small degree; however, in the network of movie stars, the persons with larger degrees prefer to connect with persons with large degrees. We also find an interesting similar mechanism for the decline or collapse of historical Chinese dynasties. The collapses of the Xin dynasty (9–23 CE) and the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) were initiated from their arrogant attitude toward neighboring states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To control and think about death through cinema is perhaps one of the possibilities offered by Emmanuelle Bercot's feature film starring Benoît Magimel and Catherine Deneuve. De son vivant tackles head-on the question of fate, through the life-and-death story of a young man in his forties suffering from a disease whose prognosis is grim. We follow Benjamin, in the last year of his life, as he faces the inevitability of his finitude announced in this clearly stated time frame: from six months to one year. In so doing, he finds himself and his family plunged radically into the heart of his existential questions, faced with a series of choices that he must make, despite - or thanks to - the reality of his death. The many ethical issues encountered throughout his journey are exposed for all those involved: caregivers, patients and relatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the stardom of Ranveer Singh in the light of Queer Theory. In the last decade, Ranveer Singh has established himself as the superstar of the Bombay film industry. Not only has he acted in a range of challenging films, thereby proving his versatility as an actor, his quirky sense of clothing and style, as well as his eccentric personality and over the top public gestures, have been subject to endless public conversations and debates. In this essay, I argue, that Ranveer Singh's aesthetics – both, on-screen and off-screen – mirror an aesthetics of queerness that militate against the normative expectations of a male star in the Bombay film industry. The characters that he plays on screen, his fashion, as well as his public conduct, together, are responsible for the construction of such an aesthetic. Rather than using 'queer theory' to examine the stardom of Ranveer Singh, this essay will look for ways in which Singh's aesthetics allow the spectators to read queerness in non-identitarian ways. Singh's body of works and his body-as-text repeatedly sabotage normative heterosexual tendencies, thereby, revealing that queerness need not always flow out of LGBTQ marked bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how social media presence and platform engagements inform and affect creative workers' sense of professional agency and craft. Focusing on Finnish theatre, film and TV actors' perceptions of their social media interactions, the article proposes the concept of platformed intimacy to capture the simultaneous importance and ambivalence of mobile attachments that characterise actors' platformed lives. The research participants consisted of 15 freelancers and theatre employees, aged between 29 and 64 years. The analysis was based on the diary-interview method and close reading. In this article, we suggest that to understand the complexities involved in creative workers' presence on social media platforms, it is important to broaden the investigation from self-promotion to questions of professional identities and communities. The concept of platformed intimacy captures how actors experience social network sites and apps, such as Instagram and Facebook, as 'grey areas' in which they deal with the frequent uncertainty about the meaning of social media visibility for their employability and future collaborations. For actors in our study, social media presence is intimately entangled with their sense of professionalism and desire of to belong to a professional community of peers. As such it articulates senses of proximity and reciprocity as well as feelings of discomfort and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Michèle Morgan's films of the 1960s, the last phase in her long career, and one hitherto ignored by film history, largely on account of the dearth of auteur films in the star's late filmography. Morgan's 1960s films are explored against three contexts: the impact of the New Wave on popular cinema (in particular the arrival of youth culture); the changing social context, especially as it affected women; and the importance of age, given that Morgan was 40 at the beginning of the decade. Morgan's films are shown to divide into two main strands: on the one hand, large-budget omnibus or ensemble films, mostly in light comic mode, and on the other hand, smaller-scale dramas in which she is systematically paired with a younger actor in a romantic relationship that is on the whole doomed. The article argues that the films' deployment of Morgan's star persona as the elegant bourgeois woman opposite younger actresses betrays society's ambivalence towards the younger generation. At the same time, while Morgan is depicted as an attractive, sexually active, desiring woman in practically all the films, the narratives articulate a recurrent unease with the 'older' woman's sexual identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws on popular press and oral histories to examine moviegoing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during the 1970s. It interrogates the memories of cinema and their relationship with the conditions of life in the burgeoning metropolis and makes explicit connections between ethnicity—or, more precisely, linguistic proficiencies—as forces structuring the experiences of moviegoing. Many participants' memories oscillate around American films and stars, attesting to the global appeal of Hollywood at the time. Ultimately, if cinematic sites were entrenched in racial dynamics of the city, they were also physical manifestations of their leakiness, of penetrability between diasporic affiliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proactively and naturally guiding the dialog from the non-recommendation context (e.g., Chit-chat) to the recommendation scenario (e.g., Music) is crucial for the Conversational Recommender System (CRS). Prior studies mainly focus on planning the next dialog goal (e.g., chat on a movie star) conditioned on the previous dialog. However, we find the dialog goals can be simultaneously observed at different levels, which can be utilized to improve CRS. In this paper, we propose D ual-space H ierarchical L earning (DHL) to leverage multi-level goal sequences and their hierarchical relationships for conversational recommendation. Specifically, we exploit multi-level goal sequences from both the representation space and the optimization space. In the representation space, we propose the hierarchical representation learning where a cross attention module derives mutually enhanced multi-level goal representations. In the optimization space, we devise the hierarchical weight learning to reweight lower-level goal sequences, and introduce bi-level optimization for stable update. Additionally, we propose a soft labeling strategy to guide optimization gradually. Experiments on two real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach. Code and data are available here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media is a powerful force that can affect the welfare of the domiciled dog population. Dogs have long been in human stories and their depictions can create demand for the breeds shown. While previous research has found that this effect can last for up to ten years after the release of a movie, how this phenomenon occurs is unknown. This paper examines if how a dog is portrayed in a movie is associated with a subsequent change in American Kennel Club breed registrations for that breed. Following a systematic literature review, four key themes were identified in how dogs are portrayed in the media; dogs portrayed as heroes, as anthropomorphised, as embodying the ideals of Western societies (Whiteness and heteronormativity) and as boundaries between wilderness and human society. Forty movies from between 1930 to 2004 were analysed, resulting in 95 dog characters scored, and hierarchical multiple linear regression was run. Movies with dogs portrayed as heroes were followed by significant increases in the number of American Kennel Club breed registrations for the breed shown, while anthropomorphised dogs were followed by significant decreases in the number of dogs registered for up to five years after a movie's release. These results indicate that how dogs are portrayed may be an important driver of demand for breeds. Future work should investigate whether these portrayals may have negative welfare implications for real dogs by leading to owners having unrealistic expectations for dogs or increasing demand for dogs with in-breeding related disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We can portray or take on the role of someone whom we are not. For example, a professional actor can play the role of a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, although she believes she is not that person. This behavior is named "acting." My aim here is to locate the necessary and sufficient conditions of acting. In my view, acting is a process of communication between actors and audiences. One of its necessary components is that actors use their own features to represent those features that their characters have; another is that actors intend to make their audiences imagine that they are themselves identical to their characters. In this article, I specify these two components, critique other views of the definition of acting and distinguish acting from other similar processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Bucharest’s cinema-going public perceived the Nazi influence on Hollywood in the 1930s. The aim is to identify how Nazi propaganda was disseminated and consumed in interwar Bucharest and its similarities to the idea of glamour, relevant both to fashion and cinema. Considering the links between Goebbels’ propaganda machine and certain entities or individuals in Hollywood, US cinematography becomes a more complex medium of dissemination beyond a mere promoter of modernity’s technological and consumerist ideas. Romania’s situation in the 1930s, especially the increasing leaning towards the extreme right then inform movie star image, particularly through a gendered lens, as perfect tools for propagandists. The interwar cinemacentered Romanian discourse involves a triple filtration, through Hollywood, Berlin, and Bucharest, as a complex depiction of the Romanian public’s ideals and views. To illustrate these points, I will analyze relevant written and visual texts from the interwar era, including fiction, memoirs, essays, nationally and locally spread cinema-centered and general periodicals, postcards, or photographs. The interdisciplinary research will include cultural studies (fashion, media, cinema, gender), history, and discourse analysis. This innovative perspective on fashion and cinema in an interwar Romanian context adds to the existing knowledge by opening new research topics and subjects in the fields of fashion studies and Romanian studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the time Paul Robeson lived in Britain he became a global star: a singer, film and stage actor, and in due course a political activist. It is to this time that scholars attribute his political awakening, which entailed, a broadening of his outlook to encompass an internationalist perspective. The Spanish Civil War galvanized the singer to action. His involvement in the war, which included regular appearances at rallies in Britain and singing to the troops in Spain in early 1938, was, by the singer's own estimation, a turning point in his life, and a catalyst for the singer's turn to activism. The claim I make is that Robeson's internationalist politics was not only expressed in song but emerged through it. I identify several strands to Robeson's musical internationalism, showing how the field of war provided a platform for the song strands to coalesce into a meaningful statement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that 'youth' bears within itself the desire to transcend the gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman's body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to discuss the varying perceptions and interpretative responses of Jat Sikhs and Dalits of a Punjabi village with respect to Sunny Deol, the popular Hindi film star, and relates these variations to certain salient aspects of their respective identity constructions, in the context of their day-to-day patterns of being, including such identities as caste, class, gender, religion, age, education, exposure to media relating to ideas or values about masculinity, femininity, honor, shame, as well as propriety and morality. These factors become significant as Sunny Deol enters politics and attempts to make a transition from reel to real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how old age aligns with ideals of hegemonic masculinity and generic conventions of the action film through the performance of strenuous heroics. Whereas it is commonly assumed that action films omit many characteristics which reference the geriaction hero's age in order to safeguard his masculine status, aspects of age and aging are in many contexts instead emphasized. The ailments and efforts that come with old age provide a potent source of melodramatic scenarios that set up the action hero as a morally right victim in pursuit of heroic restoration. Using the films The Last Stand, 3 Days to Kill, and Taken 3, an illustration is offered of how action films engage their heroes in an economy of exertive situations to draw power from this victimization and frame the violent actions of the characters as pleasurable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]