Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Pitassio
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Stephen Monteiro

Cinema plays a major role in contemporary art, yet the deeper influence of its diverse historical forms on artistic practice has received little attention. Working from a media and cultural studies perspective, Screen Presence explores the intersections of film, popular media, and art since the 1950s through the examples of four pivotal figures – Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Mona Hatoum and Douglas Gordon. While their film-related works may appear primarily as challenges to conventional cinema, these artists draw on overlooked forms of popular film culture that have been commonplace, and even dominant, in specific social contexts. Through analysis of a range of examples and source materials, Stephen Monteiro demonstrates the dependence of contemporary artists on cinema’s shifting applications and interpretations, offering a fresh understanding of the enduring impact of everyday media on how we make and view art.


Author(s):  
E. W. Nikdel

With the advent of online distribution and the rise of multiple media devices, claims of the cinema’s imminent death have surfaced with greater intensity than ever before. Of course, with an ever-widening array of platforms these accounts have placed a newfound emphasis on the cinema as a distinctive physical space, one that plays host to a very particular and much cherished cultural activity. This article considers the substance of these claims by tracing a very particular historical route. Firstly, be revisiting Baudry’s notion of the dispositif, this article detects the importance of the physical environment in the process of film consumption. Secondly, I relate this emphasis on the physical to the traditional notion of the cinephile, a practice that ritualises the cinema experience. Many accounts across the spectrum of film history will attest to the profound ways in which the physical experience of the cinema summons a rich emotional response. Lastly, I consider how the cinema and the collective nature of film consumption provides an authentic trace to the past and a very certain time and place in history. In turn, despite competition from cheaper and more convenient platforms, this article will endeavour to show how the cinema retains its place at the centre of contemporary film culture. KEYWORDS Cinema, dispositif, cinephilia, cultural memory.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Daisuke Miyao

The process of modernization in Japan appeared as a separation of the senses and remapping of the body, particularly privileging the sense of vision. How did the filmmakers, critics, and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s respond to such a reorganization of the body and the elevation of vision in the context of film culture? How did they formulate a cinematic discourse on remapping the body when the status of cinema was still in flux and its definition was debated? Focusing on cinematic commentary made by different writers, this article tackles these questions. Sato Haruo, Ozu Yasujiro, and Iwasaki Akira questioned the separation of the senses, which was often enforced by state. Inspired by German cinema released in Japan at that time, they explored the notion of the haptic in cinema and problematized the privileged sense of vision in this new visual medium.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.


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