Search

In 2006, Canadian director Guy Maddin premiered a semi-autobiographical film at TIFF called Brand Upon the Brain!, which featured live Foley sound and orchestral accompaniment. Adopting the aesthetics of silent film, Maddin presents a warped version of his childhood traumas, filtered through the funhouse mirror of Sigmund Freud, Fritz Lang and the Brothers Grimm. Further emphasizing the discordances of recollection and actual event, Maddin's theatrical presentation divorces sound from screen, reimagining the film's soundscape (and by extension, that of his childhood) as an exaggerated live reproduction, mirroring the very process of replaying a memory. Two years after this film premiered, Maddin made a faux-documentary about the original Foley process called Footsteps (2008), which centres upon the sound artists themselves. Employing the same aesthetic conventions, this short film depicts the craft of Foley as a surreal science of the subconscious, an act of symbolic projection carried out by strange figures in lab coats. If watching and listening to these films is to be momentarily trapped inside 'the fevered brain of Guy Maddin', as one critic puts it, then this article sets out to interrogate the role of the sound artist in enabling and enacting such fantasies within the director's singular psychodramas. Maddin's foregrounding of the Foley artist is, I argue, analogous to the exhumation and display of unconscious material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foley sound effects – those sounds that are created in post-production through live performance and then added to the sound mix of films, television, video games and animation – are ubiquitous. But effective Foley should not be heard. It is one of those creative labours in the making of a film that, to be considered successful, must erase itself. While film studies has begun to redress theory and practice's bias towards the visual, film sound studies has yet to sufficiently acknowledge this hidden body in the sound process and fully reckon with the individual contribution made by the Foley artist to cinematic expression and cinema's capacity to represent the world in motion and the exertion of bodies on-screen. To the extent we consider sound cinematic, what does the Foley artist contribute when they supplement images of a rock, a chair, a phone with sound or pay attention to the way paper brushes wood, metal rattles against metal, sand pushes back against a finger? This introduction establishes how refocusing attention to Foley sound extends our understanding of cinema as a medium, as well as addressing the current cultural and scholarly 'visibility' of Foley sound. It outlines the way the issue seeks to open up new theoretical perspectives on Foley sound and explore its interdisciplinary potential for theories of the soundtrack and film theory more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines both industry-created and viewer-created paratexts of Disney’s new Mulan (2020) to shed light on the localization of industry-created paratexts for Chinese audiences, the reception of the film, and the tensions between industry-created and viewer-created paratexts in China. It reveals that Disney has localized the poster, trailers and promos of Mulan for Chinese audiences by highlighting the film’s all-star cast and creating an illusion of its faithfulness to The Ballad of Mulan, and the extolled virtues of filial piety and patriotism cherished in Chinese culture. The viewer-created paratext, danmu, of Mulan challenges the industry-created paratexts and demonstrates unfavorable reception of the film in China. It criticizes the film for its inauthenticity to The Ballad of Mulan, cultural appropriation, promotion of American values to meet the needs of English-speaking audiences for exoticness and cultural otherness. By investigating danmu as a viewer-created paratext, the present study has enriched paratextual research and reception studies in translation, media and film studies in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most crucial debates surrounding Islamic legitimacy and cinema rotate around the question of the permissible (ḥalāl) and prohibited (ḥarām) in Islamic law and how these function for Muslim theology and politics. Emerging from these debates, halal cinema has been one of the recent critical interventions in the field of Indian and Islamic cinema. Rather than making cinema Islamic from an ideological position, the new halal experiments with the visual language of cinema without compromising the popular dimensions of its viewership. This article looks at the politics of halal cinema within the context of the state of Kerala in South India and argues that the space of halal cinema shows the aspirations and negotiations of the Muslim community in Kerala. Halal cinema thus becomes an immanent critique of Islamic cinema by destabilizing the dominant practice that connects the relationship between Islam and cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has long been known for its film industry and remains by far the largest film producer in the world, surpassing other film-producing superpowers like the US and China. A major factor in India’s dominance in the global media landscape is the outsourcing of film production, especially within Europe. Although there are studies trying to explain the context and mechanisms of foreign settings being incorporated into Indian filmmaking, this knowledge remains scattered and unsystematic. The objective of this paper is to comprehensively examine the evolutionary, spatial, and collaborative dynamics of Indian filmmaking in Europe by analysing statistical data from IMDb as the world’s largest film database. Our findings show that Indian filmmakers appeared relatively infrequently in Europe until the mid-1990s. The British Isles and Western Europe, with London and the Swiss Alps as the main centres, became the first and most popular destinations for outsourcing Indian films. However, this trend has changed in the last two decades, with the focus shifting to other areas in Southern, Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe as well in recent decades. The initial wave of Bollywood productions has gradually been followed by other regional cinematographies. The increasing presence of Indian film shooting in Europe has also led to growing co-production between filmmakers on both (sub)continents. The paper provides a solid basis for further exploration of socio-economic linkages between India and Europe, especially in terms of job creation, local economic development, tourism, and cultural exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the experimental found footage film recycles Hollywood films so that the outcome may radically differ from the original story, there are no accounts on how it adapts images from mainstream cinema to represent human–animal relations, linking to gender and masculinity. To fill this gap, I discuss how experimental film Horsey recycles footage from three Hollywood productions— Reflections in a Golden Eye , The Swimmer , and The Black Stallion —to construct a new narrative, which displays a very close conformity to the prior text, shifting the focus to human–horse interactions. Raising questions about the traditional understanding, scope, and limits of adaptation in avant-garde film studies, Horsey fits in with the broader tradition of cinematic recycling of mainstream cinema as it exemplifies intertextuality as a direct form of quotation, taking quotation as appropriation through cuts, detournement, compilation and free association. Particularly, following Guy Barefoot's understanding of adaptation as an intertextual form of recycling, Horsey is distinctive in its sole use of found footage from the three Hollywood films as it fully acknowledges the recycled material, strongly alluding to the original stories, and simultaneously re-processes them through a collage of pre-used footage, slow motion, washed-out colours, and an altered soundtrack. Despite appearing to merely extract images and sounds from Reflections , The Swimmer , and The Black Stallion , Horsey emerges as a productive site for recycling Hollywood cinema, placing it into new contexts and audio-visual configurations and offering more complex, engaging ways of looking at how humans connect to horses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the scholarship on Japanese director Miike Takashi, who has gained increasing international recognition over the past two decades. Through a case study of Miike's manga-inspired live-action film, Crows Zero (2007), I delve into specific aspects of the film's settings, especially poetry and linguistic sings, to explore authorship from a comparative perspective and its manifestation in transmedia adaptation. This analysis draws upon Thomas Leitch's concept of adaptive authorship and rethinks the historical dichotomy between the auteur and the metteur-en-scène , as originally delineated by François Truffaut. By arguing that Miike's role in the film is neither a mere adapter lacking creativity nor a consistent artist, and by highlighting instances of directorial authorship in the film's nuanced details, I question the tendency in film studies that adaptive authorship is often overshadowed by, and eventually integrated into, auteurship to the point where it can only be examined within broader auteurist analyses. Thus, this case study underscores the advantages of an adapter-based approach over an auteurist one, suggesting that moving beyond the doctrines of consistency and coherence may facilitate the identification of authorship from different perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ana M. López, a pioneer in Latin American film and cultural studies, made significant contributions to the field by highlighting the importance of classical Mexican melodrama and Latin American telenovelas. Her work broadened the scope of Latin American film studies to include cultural studies perspectives and emphasized the transnational nature of Latin American cinema. López's research challenged previous assumptions and provided new avenues for research in the field. She also mentored and created a community of young scholars, leaving behind a substantial body of work and lasting relationships. [Extracted from the article]

This document is a review of three books that examine the relationship between race and suburban life in America. The first book, "The Changs Next Door to the Diazes" by Wendy Cheng, focuses on the experiences of diverse residents in California's West San Gabriel Valley, challenging the dominance of whiteness in suburban narratives. The second book, "Citizen Brown" by Colin Gordon, explores the struggles of African Americans for citizenship and equality in St. Louis, particularly in relation to segregation and policing. The third book, "Race and the Suburbs in American Film" edited by Merrill Schleier, delves into the role of race in the construction and representation of suburban neighborhoods through film. These books offer valuable insights into the complexities of race in suburban America. The text also discusses the issue of racial segregation in St. Louis, examining its impact on housing, education, and the justice system. It explores the historical factors that have contributed to segregation, such as zoning policies, white flight, and urban renewal projects. Additionally, the text explores how these issues are reflected in American films, particularly those set in suburban areas, and how cinema can both perpetuate and challenge racial exclusion. The authors argue that understanding the connections between race, suburbia, and neoliberalism is crucial for addressing and dismantling systemic racism. [Extracted from the article]

During the second half of the 1940s and into the 1950s, attendance at French films at the French box office was at its peak. The genre spectrum of the leaders of the “golden ten” of the French film distribution was diverse, but in general it was based on films of entertainment genres, which starred the favorites of the French public. Beginning in the mid-1960s, attendance at French films began to gradually decline (largely due to competition from television and Hollywood productions). An even greater decline in cinema attendance in France began to be felt in the 1980s. This was affected not only by strong competition from Hollywood products and television, but mainly by the massive distribution of household video equipment, which riveted millions of French people to their home screens, who previously preferred to watch films in cinemas. In the second half of the 1940s, there were very few French films in Soviet film distribution. This was largely due to the fact that it was during this period that so-called trophy films (mainly American and German) were shown on USSR screens. Due to the fact that by the mid-1950s the screening of so-called trophy films (mainly American and German) in the USSR was completed, in the second half of the 1950s more new European films, including French ones, began to be released in Soviet cinemas. The “thaw” that came to the USSR brought significant changes to procurement policy. For example, of the top ten leaders in French film distribution in 1958, exactly half were shown on USSR cinema screens. The work of the Soviet film purchasing commission in the 1960s was quite liberal, which (especially after the start of the “Prague Spring” of 1968) could not escape the conservative wing of the “ideological front”: a number of articles were published in the Soviet press with sharp criticism of the distribution policy regarding Western film products, “promoting the bourgeois way of life.” Among the reasons why French films were not included in Soviet film distribution are the following: – Taboos on erotica, accentuated religious and Jewish themes; – The fear that Soviet viewers might somehow misunderstand shocking plot twists from the point of view of official Soviet morality, which were often found even in artistically significant films; – Exclusion from candidates for the purchase of films with an interpretation of Russian and Soviet themes (and accordingly, Russian and Soviet characters) that is unacceptable for Soviet ideology; – The struggle of Soviet censorship with incorrectly (from its point of view) ideological accents on military topics; – Undesirability for Soviet censorship of films “promoting the bourgeois way of life”; – The undesirability of images of charming criminals appearing on Soviet screens; – The unacceptability of purchasing new films with the participation of famous actors who publicly criticized the policies of the USSR; – Too high prices offered by copyright holders; True, in the Soviet film distribution in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, French films began to increasingly appear, one way or another violating former censorship taboos. This was due to the fact that with the advent of perestroika, the work of the purchasing commission of the USSR State Cinema Committee became more liberal and in many ways began to focus on the purchase of highly artistic foreign films, and the former strict ideological and moral prohibitions ceased to apply.... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Doxa Comunicación is the property of Fundacion Universitaria San Pablo - CEU and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Metaphor transcends its role as mere embellishment and emerges as a pivotal process within both language and cognition. This article ventures into uncharted territory within film studies by exploring the potential application of Max Black's interactional theory of metaphor and cognitive metaphor theory to analyze metaphor in film language. This perspective, though hitherto unexplored in film studies, proves indispensable for dissecting complex metaphorical structures within film texts and offers a precise framework for understanding associative language in film. Initially, this study delves into the description of the metaphorical process as delineated by interaction and cognitive metaphor theories, applying them to the analysis of film texts. Special emphasis is placed on elucidating how ideology intricately intertwines with the construction and reception of both conventional and non-conventional metaphors. In the article the final segment, meticulous analyses of Roland Emmerich's "2012" is conducted, spotlighting the interplay of structuring, personification, and displacement metaphors in shaping the ideological discourses embedded within the films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary adaptation into cinematic terms has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. In such a way, it brings about the intersection of the literary and the cine-text working towards assessing the intertextual resonances between the two. However, narratives can be subjected to several omissions and slippages which the artist intentionally devises. Formulating such gaps in between, the artist attempts to engage the attention of the readers/viewers and invites them to mend the fissures complying with the interpretive scope offered in the text. Venturing in a similar direction, the paper comparatively evaluates Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man with Deepa Mehta's Earth. In doing so, it analyses the art of gap management as adopted and adapted from the literary precursor to the cinematic successor. To this end, it problematizes the creative approaches of the two artists involved. To put it differently, the perusal determines to what extent the writer and the director converge and diverge in the treatment of narratorial fissures by adopting the methodological tools of inclusion, omission and modification in the management of gaps in their respective renderings. Interestingly, such a perspective complicates the discourse around adaptation studies and offers a new insight into the process of adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of essays explores the ways in which Iberian cultural production has constructed kings and queens since 1975. Our focus is the royal figure who inherits their status and power through 'blood' and justifies their power invoking the transcendental mystique of monarchic sovereignty. In one way or another, the figures of Juan Carlos I and his son Felipe VI permeate all cultural representations of monarchical rule produced during the democratic period; and these representations shape our political understanding of the two kings and become a site to contest hegemonic understandings of Spanishness, post-Francoist Spain and Iberian political communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish process of addressing Euskadi Ta Askatasuna's (ETA) violent past has not followed a single transitional justice model or established a truth commission akin to those in South Africa, Latin America or Eastern and Central Europe. Instead, the case of Spain is marked by diverse legal, political and civic endeavours, sparking distinct discussions and artistic depictions regarding the dialectic between justice, forgiveness and reconciliation when addressing past crimes. By drawing on Hannah Arendt's influential perspective on reconciliation and its critiques (in particular, by Jacques Derrida), this article combines philosophy and film studies to contribute to the interpretation of Icíar Bollaín's recent film, Maixabel (2021). The film explores real-life instances of reconciliatory transformation that were part of the short-lived 'reparatory encounters' between ETA criminals and their victims. Bollaín's realist directorial intent notwithstanding, the significance of the encounters and reparatory justice leading to personal healing and social reconciliation is not self-evident but a matter of debate and legitimately different standpoints and experiences. This article sheds light on the hidden cracks of the cinematic mirror of the reparatory encounters by analysing the directorial intent, Maixabel, and Maixabel Lasa's testimony, the key inspiration for the movie. Bollaín's understanding of her film and the reparatory encounters echoes the Arendtian vision in that it separates reconciliation from forgiveness. In contrast, the film, and the real-life Maixabel Lasa's self-understanding, construct alternative views of reparatory reconciliation that embrace both public and personal acts of forgiveness. This leads to a phenomenologically richer depiction of reconciliation, forgiveness and transitional justice, one that does not conform to the rigid constraints of philosophical prescriptivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies is the property of Associacao Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scenes as vivid in our cinematographic memory as Tara's views in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), the oppressive sewers in the final sequence of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), the vistas of Rome in Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) or the famous final shot on the beach in Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), all place the viewer, without their awareness, in front of an image produced using the mechanism known as matte painting. It is a resource to which cinema has turned with considerable frequency over the course of its history, albeit one which has received little to no analytical attention from film studies. With a view to redressing this omission, this essay will aim to create a conceptual framework within which a rigorous analysis of this technique can be carried out in the context of film aesthetics. For this, it will be useful to start by reviewing the existing definitions of this term and proposing not one but two updated ones. This will then allow us to conceptualize this practice as a mechanism for assembling spaces, employing analytical tools used for editing in order to understand the way in which matte painting performs its unique construction of the cinematographic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Covid-19 pandemic posed fundamental challenges for the cinema industry, encouraging potentially lasting changes in the ways films were delivered to and consumed by audiences. In light of this, this article evaluates the impact of an earlier pandemic, the waves of influenza that affected the United Kingdom in 1918–1919. The flu struck as cinema was establishing itself as a distinct entertainment form, although still subject to criticism for its perceived effects on the moral and physical health of those attending. Consequently, the exhibition of film became a prime focus of ameliorative action, many health professionals and local councillors seeing it as a prime vehicle for the transmission of disease. For all that, the impact of any regulations proved to be uneven: attention centred primarily on the threat to children and servicemen in uniform, and what restrictions were imposed proved highly localised, reflecting systems of health administration inherited from the previous century. Finally, compared to experiences elsewhere, the duration of controls proved brief. An assessment of the flu's impact is offered for both the short term, reflected in the finances of individual businesses and aggregated tax returns, and the longer term, in challenging or reinforcing perceptions of cinema's social worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay begins with a brief account of the French linguistic structuralism and very briefly some aspects of the post-structuralist critique of it, here represented by Lacan and, Deleuze, and Guattari as a response to it. Against this backdrop, the purpose of the essay is to show a critique of structuralism that came earlier than the post-structuralist one, namely that of the Russian philosopher of the dialogic speech and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1920s. The concept of the dialogical word has had a major influence in cultural semiotics, literary – and film studies and existential psychotherapy. A second purpose of this essay is to briefly show in what way the ethics of the dialogical word is important in the latter, in existential psychotherapeutic work. Translations from Swedish and French are mine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a purely academic exercise of interest, and spurred by a curious debate in a blog entry over a decade ago, the purpose of this paper was to appreciate the incidence of select movie (film) titles in the titles of papers indexed in Scopus. Using 11 of the first 20 titles of a top 100 list of movie classics at the "Rotten Tomatoes" website, we assessed (January 2024) how frequently they appeared in the titles of those papers. While the vast majority of movie titles referred to the movie (or book version) itself, except for "The Wizard of Oz", which had 74.6% positive results for a software with this name, we found that some authors may have employed such titles to draw attention to their papers because readers would likely to be drawn to them due to familiarity with the movie title, or name recognition. To test this hypothesis, we assessed citation counts relative to the average of other papers published in the same journals and in the same years, finding that 83% of the 95 papers assessed had lower citation counts than the average of papers published in the same journal and in the same year. We also considered the ethics of the verbatim use of movie titles, especially of movies that may be copyrighted, when quotation marks are not used, or the absence of a note within the paper itself to indicate the source of the title's inspirational wording. Although we are cognizant of several limitations to this study, which serves as an initial springboard for additional future multidisciplinary studies, we suggest some additional research ideas to popularize the intersection between film studies, basic academic sciences, bibliometrics, and publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Hong Kong filmmakers, co-productions with mainland China are transborder assemblages characterized by increasing territorialization and coding that impart to them a palpable crisis of losing locality. However, this crisis does not necessarily mean the loss of a critical perspective. Johnnie To's three co-produced action films demonstrate his struggles to evade or even take advantage of the disadvantageous status of dislocality and work under restricted creative conditions to carve out a space for critical expressions. Drug War not only brings to the screen the arbitrary nature of state sovereignty by telling the story of a cross-border crime—one in which narrative doubling plays a key role—but also offers reflections on Chinese urbanization in its visual composition, which takes the style of a kind of suburban realism. Three and Chasing Dream represent To's latest efforts to develop an aesthetics of the studio defined by a tendency toward abstraction such that he uses his dislocality as a basis for a critical perspective on Hong Kong society and, especially, contemporary Chinese neoliberalism. Intertextual allusions, whether large-scale plot structures and visual styles or small-scale features of characterization and dialogue, are pervasive in To's co-productions. These allusions can and should, I argue, be drawn into the new context of To's transborder assemblages for a better understanding of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores toxic masculinity in Indian cinema through an analysis of Arjun Reddy. It examines how film perpetuates patriarchal norms and reinforces gender inequality. By examining the portrayal of the protagonist and society's reactions, it reveals the impact of film representations on real-life attitudes. The study highlights the need for alternative narratives that challenge traditional gender norms and promote diversity in masculinity. It advocates a critical analysis of film discourse to promote a more inclusive portrayal of gender identities in Indian cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB) is a pioneering inquiry into memories of 1930s cinemagoing conducted in the 1990s by Annette Kuhn. Its research design, incorporating questionnaire surveys and interviews involving male and female participants in various parts of Britain, has become a benchmark for methods of exploring everyday practices during a golden age of cinemagoing. CCINTB's successor project, Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive (led by Professor Richard Rushton), has facilitated the creation of an accessible online infrastructure that has opened up CCINTB's data and findings for further research possibilities. CMDA's co-Investigators Annette Kuhn and Sarah Neely spoke to Dario Llinares, host of the Cinematologists Podcast, about the scope and objectives of the two projects, reflecting on questions of methodology in historical audience research; on the uses and value of digital tools in gathering, recording, analysing and presenting the findings of this kind of investigation; on strategies for making these findings accessible for a range of users; and on the future of cinema memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Selcuk University Social Sciences Institute / Selçuk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi is the property of Journal of Selcuk University Social Sciences Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the wake of such blockbuster films as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) film-related travel from India has become an important economic factor in the tourist industry in Switzerland, to the point where the luxury suite in one of the most prestigious five-star hotels in the country is now dedicated to the style and memory of pioneer producer Yash Chopra. Tracing the romance between commercial Hindi cinema and Switzerland from the 1980s to 1990s onwards, the Chopra suite in the Viktoria Jungfrau hotel in Interlaken can also be read as an indicator of an important cultural constellation: a composite style in visual and design culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the foreword to Architecture, Film, and the In-between: Spatio-Cinematic Betwixt, Mark Foster Gage opines that the architectural discipline has reached an ideological and creative “wall”. Devoid of a dominant ideological force in architecture to subvert or rebel against, and competing for the attention of an increasingly overstimulated public, he asserts that modern architecture lacks a taboo, set of building materials, language, or style that is revolutionary enough to make people pay attention to innovative design. However, Gage and the book’s editors Vahid Vahdat and James F. Kerestes suggest that the future is not entirely bleak: one simply needs to look inside the liminal spaces—whether between literal walls or academic disciplines—to find meaningful and engaging solutions. The central organising theme of this collection is “the betwixt”, a concept first coined by the Scottish cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner. Originally used as a term to explicate his theory of liminality, particularly as used to describe rites of passage within different cultural systems, the editors and contributors of this volume find numerous challenging and insightful ways of applying “the betwixt” to both architectural and cinematic design.

"The New American War Film" by Robert Burgoyne explores the changes that have occurred in the war film genre over the 21st century. The book argues that traditional war film conventions have been subverted and no longer recognizable, with the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 accelerating these changes. Burgoyne uses case studies to illustrate his arguments, including the depiction of children in war films. The book also highlights the privileged position of Western figures in the narrative and the affect shift from victims of warzones to agents of war. The observations made in the book can be extended to other mediums such as prestige TV and war-themed video games. Overall, "The New American War Film" provides valuable insights into the understanding of violence and framing within the genre. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses three films directed by Joko Anwar between 2015 and 2019: A Copy of My Mind (2015), Satan’s Slave (2017), and Impetigore (2019) within the context of gender philosophy to address the gender issues in the film. Joko Anwar is a well-known Indonesian director whose works are box-office hits and range from horror to drama, but typically feature marginalized members of society, especially women. Impetigore was the first horror film to receive Citra Award, the highest film award in the Indonesian film industry, as the best film of 2020. He was also the winner in the Best Director category based on the same film. These three films were chosen for qualitative analysis, as each features a major female character struggling against societal norms. This issue is examined by closely focusing on the films’ cinematography and mise-en-scène, including the shot types, camera angles, framing, and dialogue. The obtained findings reveal Joko Anwar’s gender philosophy that champions non-normative female characters willing to challenge the accepted norms and closely aligns with the concepts promoted by radical feminism. While his work emphasizes the universal value system of patriarchy as the source of oppression and subordination toward women, the main female protagonists’ performance continuously reproduces double meaning in the context of challenging patriarchal and societal norms.

ABSTRACTSeveral television scholars have objected to the frequently made claim that TV drama in recent decades have become “more cinematic”, partly because cinematic-ness is such an ill-defined concept. This article seeks to make the concept less ambiguous and more useful by offering some basic distinctions between different meanings invoked by “cinematic”. I propose two meanings associated with production values, which are moderately evaluative, and two where “cinematic” serves as a higher compliment, one related to craft/skill, the other to notions of medium specificity. I also relate these meanings to the idea that TV series have grown increasingly cinematic. Here I argue that “film” and “television drama” are far too voluminous and heterogeneous categories to bear comparison in general, but that they can be meaningfully studied when framed as contingent creative practices grounded in time and place. The particular context for my discussion of “cinematic television” is American TV drama since the turn of the millennium. The article does not merely seek to clarify the connotations of “cinematic”, but to use cinematic-ness as a prism to through which important stylistic shifts in American TV drama can be examined. As such, the conceptual-theoretical discussion also serves historiographic purposes: The different meanings of “cinematic” highlight different industrial developments, which offer complementary perspectives on the aesthetics of American TV drama since the late-1990s.

This article examines Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, which depicts a slave rebellion and mutiny on a Cuban slave ship in 1839, as a lens through which to view the origins of the Black Legend. The Black Legend emerged in 1830s in the U.S. to depict Latin American instability as the result of Spanish oppression, violence, cultural inferiority and Catholicism. The narrative served to benefit the ideology of white supremacy and the myth of American (read U.S.) "exceptionalism" by drawing global attention away from the maintenance of slavery in the U.S. and highlighting Spanish and Cuban involvement in the clandestine slave trade in the nineteenth century. The article analyzes a variety of secondary and primary sources that place blackness at the center of the construction of the Black Legend, from contemporary accounts of the Amistad revolt to subsequent references to blackness in histories of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1830s and 1840s. The article shows how Spielberg inserts Christianity as a force for racial equality and holds up the judicial branch of the U.S. government as a model for Latin America to follow, echoing the inherent contradictions of the Black Legend in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the article argues that U.S. history must be examined in relation to the history of Latin America, and narratives of blackness in the Atlantic world shaped national mythos and identities in similar ways. Examining the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as the subsequent national narratives of race and national identities, helps to deconstruct narratives of exceptionalism and reveal political motivations and contradictions in the Black Legend narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines some of the social contexts underlying the Supreme Court's decision in the seminal case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Since the Court's decision in that case established that whiteness in the U.S. was based on 'common' sense, this essay examines how this 'common' sense was created in the public sphere. This essay presents arguments on how film, and in particular, the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, helped cement popular understandings of whiteness. Through these arguments, this essay provides further context to some of the social and political underpinnings of the Thind case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the efforts to promote the serious study of Arab cinema and film scholarship at the Insaniyyat Forum 2022 in Tunisia. The forum included eight panels on various topics related to Arab cinema, such as critiques of orientalism, refugee and migration cinema, and queer Arab film theory. The article also highlights five papers from the forum that challenge prevailing understandings of Arab cinema, including discussions on language, US cultural hegemony, cultural diplomacy, queer theory, and displacement in Tunisian film. The authors hope that these articles will contribute to a more vibrant and inclusive discussion of Arab cinema and its dilemmas. [Extracted from the article]

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, Objects of the Mind: engaging publics in the material cultures of media and mental health (AH/W002140/1), which was co-investigated by academics at the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester and curators from across the Science Museum Group (SMG). Through this coinvestigation we sought to tap into public interest in the SMG object collections and the accessibility of popular films (supplied by partners StudioCanal) to engage new audiences for our research on the interactions of psychiatry and cinema. From the museum perspective, we sought to use this research to ask new questions and tell new stories about the SMG objects, and to foster crosscollection dialogue between medicine (Science Museum) and media (National Science and Media Museum) collections. We discuss a range of events, activities and outputs we delivered towards these aims, but focus particularly on three new films we produced that (re)combined museum objects, feature film clips and expert interviews to tell new, enhanced or entangled stories about and across the collections. We will use these three short films to demonstrate three dialogues the project fostered: between museum collections; between histories; and between academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate it. Specifically, this paper considers two forms of embodiment—being and being with—in order to highlight some of the shortcomings of the 'empathy machine' discourse. In doing so, I also offer an alternative analogy: a tool for empathy, rather than a machine. Finally, an analysis of two key VR productions that invite users to be with characters—rather than putting users 'in the shoes' of a character—allows me to demonstrate how a more productive path towards empathy in VR might instead lay in experiences that create space—or 'make room'—for the work of empathy to be undertaken by individuals who know and want to use VR as a tool, rather than as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commonly associated with the cinema of Béla Tarr and Gus Van Sant, walking on screen has received relatively little attention from researchers despite the ongoing popularity of wayfaring films and videos. Unsurprisingly, even less is known about how walking functions in experimental film and video or responds to avant-garde storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on walking to discuss the pedestrian's embodied experience in a few stylistically distinct works: Crowdog (Vanessa Renwick, 1984/1998), A Walk (Jonas Mekas, 1990), Ordinary Matter (Hollis Frampton, 1972), and Death Songs & Car Bombs (Brendan and Jeremy Smyth, 2013). Despite having different formats and narrative foci, which, respectively, explore walking in a structural-diaristic framework and as a trance state or turn it into a social commentary on female liberation and the culture clash, all of these films echo the phenomenological turn in film studies, demonstrating how pedestrians relate to the multisensorial, kinaesthetic practice and space of walking. Compared to the itinerant mode of art cinema, experimental film and video usually challenge the representational nature of walking and present it as a more complex, disorientating, and unconventional experience, linking the sensation of walking to social mobility, personal freedom, feminism, or place and urban memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By taking a close look at the forms and cinematic strategies of Tsai Ming-liang's 1998 film The Hole, this article intends to identify the nostalgic subtext that emerges from the tensions generated by different temporal/diegetic levels of representation. Using proper citation mechanisms, the film dialogues with the memory of the century that ends, while projecting into the near future--the overly symbolic year 2000--the anxieties of the present, ultimately proposing a way out through human unmediated connection. Relying on scene analysis, the text will invoke thinkers from cultural studies, film studies, politics, history, philosophy and sociology as well as objects from the visual arts and fiction literature, to create an ample mesh of references that can help contextualize Tsai's gesture as a filmmaker of its time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between film and games as forms of audio-visual play from the perspective of media theory and game studies. Initially, I discuss the research into mimetic audio-visual play, media and genres with their affordances and the transformation brought about by digitization to the mediascape. The comparative analysis starts with an outline of the evolution of films and games, followed by an investigation into their unique modes of representation, narration and audiovisualization. Research findings conclude that the cinematic mode of representation captures external movement, while games model systems dynamically; films present time-based narrative syntagms, whereas games offer space-based multilinear paradigms for playful selection; films still work primarily with indexical recordings, games with non-indexical procedural animations, although hybridization of recording and animation characterizes contemporary media practice. In sum, the relation between films and games can be defined as alterity, an interrelated, reciprocal and mutually influential otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new paradigm, Sino-American film, that is centered on Chinese language in American films. Sino-American films comprise two generations. The First Generation includes Pushing Hands (1993), Take Out (2004), and Saving Face (2004) and is characterized by independent production, limited distribution, and creation during a period when Asian Americans were rarely represented on film. The Second Generation includes The Farewell (2019), Tigertail (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and is characterized by a Hollywood production model, widespread distribution across streaming services, and creation during a period of growing Asian American cultural representation. Sino-American films negotiate both Chinese-language film and Hollywood by focusing on overlooked characters— Chinese-language-speaking Americans. This article contributes to conversations in Chinese film studies and Asian American studies by bringing Asian American film into exchanges with three Chinese film studies paradigms: transnational cinema, Chinese-language film, and Sinophone film. This cross pollination uncovers new areas for further study. Sino-American film demonstrates the importance of Sino-American language, ethnicity, and culture within the subsuming category of Asian American film. Furthermore, pairing Sino-American films with Chinese film studies uncovers a new category of Chinese-language film outside assumed contexts and paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Expressionism is often regarded as the first purely American art movement and the first to gain mass cultural recognition. Prior to the 1940s, the consideration and appreciation of abstract art belonged to a certain intellectual elite, but the intimidating complexity of Abstract Expressionism, the daring allure of its artists, and the particularities of mid-century American culture converged to transform the avant-garde into consumer spectacle. This shift represented, and was symptomatic of, a larger societal rearrangement: information and commodity superseded industrialized labor as the core of American culture. Jackson Pollock, America's first avant-garde superstar, stood at the center of this shift, at once representing both active creative labor and the commodification of the idea of that labor. Hans Namuth's photographs and films of Pollock placed him and his art firmly in the realm of consumable popular spectacle, underlying further connections to Hollywood film and prominent print media. This article examines how Pollock became a paradigmatic figure in the avant-garde's proliferation into mass culture and asserts that mass culture did not simply subsume the avant-garde. Rather, the two realms engaged in a mutual construction that pushed the avant-garde across numerous social boundaries. The artistic, critical, and popular receptions that grew out of this convergence erased distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places Toni Cade Bambara at the center of a history of Black feminist culture and its radical politics of repair through a close reading of Bambara's and Louis Massiah's film treatment Come as You Are. In its depiction of a group of poor, unhoused Philadelphians taking over a luxury apartment building for a live-in, Come as You Are posits taking over and living-in as practices of refusal of the state care offered through social workers, the housing authority, welfare agencies, and the police. Bambara's cinematic work points to Black feminist representations of state violence and contra-state forms of repair that complicate how feminist theory encounters the problem of reparative appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the material culture of Urdu action heroine films released in the era of Pakistan's Islamization (late 1970s through 1980s) by a woman-led company called Shamim Ara Productions, which was headed by the illustrious female star, director, and producer of the Urdu screen Shamim Ara. With titles such as Miss Hong Kong (1979), Miss Colombo (1984), Miss Singapore (1985), Lady Smuggler (1987), and Lady Commando (1989), the action films released by Shamim Ara Productions bear the imprint of a traveling culture of production roving through urban South and Southeast Asia. Not only do we find here a mobile industry, headquartered in Lahore, fostering collaborations between smallscale film and tourism entrepreneurs strewn across South and Southeast Asian cities (Colombo, Dhaka, Manila, Hong Kong), but we also encounter a hybrid cinema led largely by women and cross-fertilized by global images of female action and public mobility flowing into Pakistani cities with the video trade and its piracy, and satellite television (video and VCR having come to the country in the late 1970s). In this article, I situate the gender politics of the ensemble heroine narrative Lady Smuggler (1987) in its material culture of production and reception, with attention to the diverse locations of that culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the notion of "the people behind the scenes" is used to build a bridge between the cognitive framework of film studies and migration research to describe those who are discursively categorized as "illegal" or "irregular" migrants and whose lives are exploited in the workforce and at risk in "Fortress Europe". As a natural southern border of the Schengen area, the Mediterranean region sometimes offers fleeting encounters between "illegal" migrants excluded by this border regime and foreign travellers courted by the tourism industry. These ephemeral juxtapositions of people with contrasting political and economic stakes create what we call "visual clashes", gathering in one frame antithetical human lived experiences of this maritime area. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff's concept of the "right to look", which the visual culture theorist and activist uses as a bulwark against a dominant Western regime of visuality, this essay analyses a series of visual texts that bear witness to unwanted encounters by this dominant regime's visual system of classification and separation. The essay examines two press photographs and television images alongside Elleke Boehmer's short story "Synthetic Orange", and analyses a cartographic experiment and a film; each case opposes the authority of Western visuality and makes a claim for the autonomy of the right to look. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]