Onstage/Onscreen

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-134
Author(s):  
Landon Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Film Production ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Nonfiction Film ◽  
Film Studios ◽  
Direct Cinema ◽  
Image Representations ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Case Basis

The link between alternative film production and rock culture continued in the subgenre of the music festival documentary, which came into being through the direct cinema documentary movement. The transition from the recording studio to the live stage was a defining one for rock culture at the end of the 1960s, and the aesthetics of presenting dynamic concert performances—communicated widely by audio and moving image representations of concerts—displayed ideals of rock authenticity. Exploring four feature documentary projects organized around the countercultural space of the rock festival, my third chapter demonstrates how emergent means of nonfiction film production shaped the onscreen spectacle of a rock musician performing live onstage. Through concert documentaries, a rock star no longer had to go to the studio lot to appear onscreen; instead, their stage labor could be preserved and extended through new camera and sound recording technologies. However, while the technologies (and filmmakers’ philosophies) that informed direct cinema seemed to offer a uniquely uncompromised means for representing rock culture onscreen, the production histories of concert documentaries also reveal how rock stars’ control over their own representation was not distributed equally, ranging from the option of refusing to be filmed to the power to determine whether a film project even saw the light of day. Produced in the absence of major film studios, arrangements of power between filmmakers, rock stars, and festival organizers existed on a case-by-case basis, and rock stars operated on a spectrum between observed subjects and controlling gatekeepers of moving image depictions of their performances.

Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Seguí
Keyword(s):  
Entire Range ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shed Light

This article contextualizes and characterizes production practices in political cinema in Bolivia and Peru between the 1960s and 1990s, reading them as a communitarian endeavor that included many more women than official history acknowledges. It also documents the work of two overshadowed filmmakers—the Bolivian Beatriz Palacios and the Peruvian María Barea—mainly in their roles as film producers and managers of small producing companies, but also as directors. In order to effectively incorporate women into Andean cinema history, I advocate for a nonhierarchical historiographical methodology and the academic consideration of personal relationships as one of the driving factors in artisanal political production cultures. A non-auteurist approach to unearthing Andean women filmmakers is central to this revisionist project that aims to shed light on an entire range of women's labor in collaborative film production, not only directorial work.

scholarly journals ‘IT'S NOT SOMETHING ONE CAN DELIBERATELY SET OUT TO DO’: CHRISTIAN WOLFF IN CONVERSATION

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (283) ◽  
pp. 56-79
Author(s):  
James Gardner ◽  
Christopher Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The Political ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S

ABSTRACTIn 2002 Christian Wolff was a guest composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and during the course of the festival he was interviewed by Christopher Fox and by James Gardner. Fox's interview took place before an audience in the Lawrence Batley Theatre on 25 November; Gardner's interview was recorded in private in the George Hotel, Huddersfield on 27 November, and edited excerpts from that recording were subsequently used in a programme produced by Radio New Zealand. The conversation presented here has been compiled by James Gardner from his transcriptions of the two interviews and presents a wide-ranging discussion of Wolff's musical preoccupations across every phase of his compositional career, from the early piano pieces of the 1950s, to his involvement with indeterminacy in the 1960s, to the political concerns evident in his music after 1970, to the works of the last three decades in which indeterminate and determinate methods of composition are combined.

‘They wanted a bigger, more ambitious film’: Film Finances and the American ‘Runaways’ That Ran Away

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-197
Author(s):  
Llewella Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Film Production ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Karel Reisz

From the early 1960s, the British film industry was increasingly reliant on American studio financed ‘runaway’ productions. Alexander Walker identifies United Artists and Universal Pictures as two of the major players in the trend he dubbed ‘Hollywood England’. This article offers a close examination of the role of two studios in the financing of British film production by making extensive use of the Film Finances Archive. It focuses on two case studies: Tom Jones (1963) and Isadora (1968), both of which had completion guarantees from Film Finances, and will argue that Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, two of the key British New Wave directors, lost their previous ability to direct films to budget and within schedule when they had the financial resources of American studios behind them. It will analyse how, due to a combination of ‘artistic’ intent and Hollywood money, Richardson and Reisz separately created two of the most notorious ‘runaways’ that ran away during the 1960s.

Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Psychological Problems ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Image Movement ◽  
Projection Device ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Experimental Films

A rotating shutter interrupts the light of a projection device, breaking up the succession of image movement and creating the appearance of motion. This technology, essential to cinematic and even some pre-cinematic devices, creates an effect of flicker. In the early era of cinema, the flickering of cinematic images was claimed to damage viewers’ eyesight and even to produce psychological problems. In the 1960s, however, filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad and Ken Jacobs explored the flicker as an aesthetic device. This chapter traces the effects of flicker, focusing on the invention of the moving image in the latter part of the 19th century, its initial reception, and the use of flicker in experimental films and projections from the 1960s on.

Hammer and British Cinema

2016 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Victoria Grace Walden
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The Press ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between Hammer Films and British cinema. The history of British cinema has been characterised by a strong dedication to realism, in its many forms. From the documentaries of the 1930s with a focus on social responsibility to the gritty kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s, and even the naturalistic aesthetic of television police dramas, the British moving-image industries have a strong heritage of realism. If this is the case, Hammer horror, despite its international fame as a specifically British brand of filmmaking, does not seem characteristic of British national cinema at all. On one hand, Hammer's horrors are clearly fantastical; on the other hand, they amalgamate infrequent and abrupt moments of gore with a 'neat unpretentious realism'. Moreover, the films were lambasted in the press for not exhibiting 'good taste' or restraint. The chapter then assesses to what extent Hammer horror can be understood as British.

The Cinema Centaur

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-160
Author(s):  
Catriona Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Work Culture ◽  
Corporate Values ◽  
Direct Relevance ◽  
Film Editing ◽  
Soviet Film ◽  
Western Films ◽  
Film Studios ◽  
The World ◽  
Generous Support ◽  
The 1960S

The 1960s witnessed the transformation of “film factories” from metaphor to lived reality. Lenfilm’s output rose once more to the levels its predecessor studios had reached in the 1920s, but the conditions of production were now far more complex and demanding, with staffs more than ten times the size. And while the 1960s was an era of optimistic emphasis on the Soviet film industry’s capacity to equal and surpass the world in technological terms, during the 1970s, the conviction took hold that the technological superiority of Western films was of direct relevance to audience share. Increasingly, ambitious filmmakers petitioned Goskino for permission to shoot on Kodak and to use Arriflex cameras; criticism of inferior Soviet film stock and GDR-produced film editing tables mounted, both across the USSR and at Lenfilm itself. Yet investment in studio infrastructure and technology remained at best haphazard, particularly at Lenfilm, which enjoyed less generous support from the center than Mosfilm, but also more limited resourcing than film studios in the capitals of Soviet republics. At the same time, Lenfilm had an unusually diverse, energetic, inventive, and loyal workforce, with corporate values that inspired manual workers and porters as well as “creative” personnel. Hierarchical at some levels, the work culture was egalitarian at others, and the frenetic process of scrambling to finish films in trying circumstances created strong bonds. The chapter explores the various conflicts and contradictions, but also rewards, that this situation generated.

Producing an Oligopoly

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
Thomas Barker
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
New Order ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Television Production ◽  
The 1960S

Even with the entry of new filmmakers, production companies, and investors, the Indonesian film industry remains dominated by an oligopoly of old producers. In identifying this group, this chapter traces their connections back to the 1960s and their consolidation throughout the New Order. With significant presence in television production, these producers are both now wealthy and well-connected, allowing them to reassert themselves in the reformed post-1998 film industry. Largescale capital has been important to the systemisation of film production for the mainstream market but speaks to the legacy structures of the New Order.

scholarly journals Learning from the professionals: film tourists’ “authentic” experiences on a film studio tour

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Wohlfeil
Keyword(s):  
Production Process ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Visitor Experience ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Real ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Film Studios ◽  
Camera Perspective ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers perceive, experience and engage with the art of filmmaking and the industrial film production process that the film studios present to them during their guided film studio tours. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on the author’s own film tourist experiences, observations and participatory interactions with fellow visitors at a major Hollywood film studio, this paper takes an autoethnographic “I’m-the-camera”-perspective and a hermeneutic data analysis approach. Findings The findings reveal that visitors experience the “authentic” representation of the working studio’s industrial film production process as an opportunity and “invitation to join” a broader filmmaker community and to share their own amateur filmmaking experiences with fellow visitors and professionals – just to discover eventually that the perceived community is actually the real “simulacrum”. Research limitations/implications Although using an autoethnographic approach means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the gain in depth of insights allows for a deeper understanding of the actual visitor experience. Practical implications The findings encourage film studio executives, managers and talent agents to reconsider current practices and motivations in delivering film studio tours and to explore avenues for harnessing their strategic potential. Originality/value Contrary to previous studies that have conceptualised film studio tours as simulacra that deny consumers a genuine access to the backstage, the findings of this study suggest that the real simulacrum is actually the film tourists’ “experienced feeling” of having joined and being part of a filmmaker community, which raises question regarding the study of virtual communities.

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