Between Copyright and Creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
Amanda Egbe
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Primary Form ◽  
Archaeological Approach

Focusing on Edison’s early cinematic apparatus and the optical printer, this chapter explores how copyright law intersects with creativity, providing an alternative to teleological accounts of moving-image technologies. Thomas Edison attempted to control the film industry through patents and copyright. Edison’s first film experiments were registered as a series of photographs on card by his assistant, W. L. Dickson. In protecting these contact copies as paper prints with copyright, the new medium of motion pictures was being formalized. The necessity to duplicate film to support the development of exhibition and distribution was also necessary for copyright purposes. An archaeological approach is utilized to explore how paper prints enabled innovation in the area of the optical printer, a primary form of duplication in cinema. In developing approaches that could bring to life the remaining examples of early cinema, novel solutions in the form of innovations were required. The overlapping concerns of the copyright clerk, the film entrepreneur, and the film historian thus provide a basis for new materials and new innovations in moving-image technology and film history.

scholarly journals Introduction: touch, click and motion: archaeologies of fashion film after digital culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Caroline Evans ◽  
Jussi Parikka
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Dynamic Form ◽  
Contemporary Practice

This article functions as the introduction to the Themed Issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film. The text introduces fashion film as a genre and as an historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression that we approach through fashion history, media archaeology and new film history. While introducing key concepts and approaches, the authors propose a form of ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging from Thomas Elsaesser’s work, that links different time periods from early cinema to recent digital platforms, even ‘post-cinema’. The introduction makes references to the contributions in this issue that address historical conditions of emergence, marginal voices in the historical record and unexcavated archival materials; and the issue shows how they all contain feedback loops or recursive traits that resonate in contemporary practice where infrastructures of platforms and data frame the moving image.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

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.

All Too Easy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John David Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Ayn Rand ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Richard Neutra ◽  
Josef Von Sternberg ◽  
The Way

Takes up the modernist house as it appears in films like A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954), House (Charles and Ray Eames, 1955), and more recent films and moving image media such as The Anniversary Party (Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001), A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009), and Stephen Prina’sThe Way He Always Wanted It, II (2008). The chapter also considers a strange site of coincidence between modernist architecture and the movies: the house designed by Richard Neutra for the director Josef von Sternberg that then passed into the hands of Ayn Rand, who was also working in the film industry.

Roads Not Taken in Hollywood’s Comic Book Movie Industry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Hassler-Forest
Keyword(s):  
Comic Books ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Dynamic Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
Movie Industry ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Archaeological Approach ◽  
Formal Features

Chapter 23 approaches the phenomenon of the comic book movie as a complex and dynamic adaptation process. While superhero movies and other comics-inspired franchises now dominate the global box office, it is rare that they adapt comic books’ formal features in a meaningful way. By foregrounding three comic book movies that have largely been considered failures, the essay discusses innovative ways of adapting comics to film through a media-archaeological approach to the genre. The films Popeye (1980), Dick Tracy (1990), and Hulk (2002) can be read, each in its own way, as provocative “roads not taken” by the Hollywood film industry.

Hollywood Aesthetic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film History ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Large Populations ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Artistic Achievement ◽  
Entertainment Value

Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The American film industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among large populations, translate into box office success. More than any other historical mode of art, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a mass scale. If the Hollywood film industry succeeds in delivering aesthetic pleasure both routinely and, at times, in an outstanding way, then we should ultimately regard Hollywood cinema as an artistic achievement, not merely a commercial success. Hollywood Aesthetic accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature in aesthetics, the book explains: (1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; (2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and (3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Offering a comprehensive appraisal of the capacity of Hollywood cinema to provide aesthetic pleasure, the book sets out to explain how Hollywood creates, for masses of people, some of their most exhilarating experiences of art.

American Women Screenwriters in the 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Muscio
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film History ◽  
World Market ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
American Film ◽  
Social Force ◽  
American Women ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
American Film Industry ◽  
Classical Hollywood

This chapter contextualizes the work of American women scriptwriters within the gendered liberalization of an emerging consumer capitalism during the 1920s. More specifically, it examines the major role played by women writers in the American film industry of the period to the development of “classical Hollywood narrative,” both as a social force and a form of storytelling. It suggests that women screenwriters contributed to the maturation of narrative construction—from its origins to the introduction of sound, when Hollywood completed the conquest of the world market. In addition to significantly contributing to film history, American women screenwriters played a crucial role in modernizing society, not only through the stories they wrote but also through their very presence in Hollywood.

scholarly journals The China Girl on the Margins of Film

October ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 153 ◽  
pp. 96-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Yue
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Film History ◽  
Role Of Women

The “China Girl” has appeared in more films than any actress, but she is almost never seen. Used in industrial film laboratories since the late 1920s, this image-nearly always a woman positioned next to color swatches and patches of white, gray, and black—is clipped to the leader of a film reel and used throughout the processing, developing, and printing of photochemical film to determine the desired exposure, density, and ideal appearance of the human body. This article addresses the China Girl's essential but often overlooked role in film history, specifically as it pertains to questions of race, gender, and visibility. It also surveys the work of various experimental filmmakers, including Owen Land, Morgan Fisher, Barbara Hammer, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Cécile Fontaine, and Mark Toscano, who have used the China Girl image to explore issues of celluloid materiality, the behind-the-scenes workings of the film industry, and the often marginal role of women both in front of and behind the camera.

scholarly journals The Success of Motion Pictures

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Keil ◽  
Tobias Mosig
Keyword(s):  
Potential Risk ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
The One

THE SUCCESS OF MOTION PICTURES – AN ECONOMIC GAMBLE: SELECTED MOVIE EXPLOITATION PHENOMENA More than 5,000 marketable movies are produced worldwide every year - a risky economic gamble running into billions. Despite the potential risk of commercial failure, film producers still try to achieve outstanding box-office results. There are also special movies that are able to preserve or even increase their intrinsic value due to the longevity of their commercial success. This article focuses on distinctive movie exploitation phenomena, which can be observed worldwide. These phenomena show the unpredictability of film success due to the fact that the cycles, the duration, and the progress of film exploitation are unforeseeable. MythSuccess is the big myth of the international film industry: on the one hand enormous profits, glamour, film stars, red carpet shows at Cannes, Berlin, and Venice - the big film festivals. And as climax - the Oscars in...

scholarly journals Remediating Past Images. The Temporality of “Found Footage” in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Judit Pieldner
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Modes Of Occurrence ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension ◽  
Film Making

Abstract Along Laura U. Marks’s thoughts on the “disappearing image” as embodied experience, the article proposes to bring into discussion particular modes of occurrence of “past images,” whether in form of the use of archival/found footage or of creating visual archaisms in the spirit of archival recordings, within the practice of the Hungarian experimental film making of the 1970s and 1980s, more speciflcally, in Gábor Bódy’s films. The return to archival/found footage as well as the production of visual archaisms reveal an attempt of remediation (Bolter and Grusin) that goes beyond the cultural responsibility of preservation: it confronts the film medium with its materiality, historicity, and temporality, and creates productive tensions between the private and the historical, between the pre-cinematic and the texture of motion pictures, between the documentary value of the image and its rhetorical dimension. The paper argues that the authenticity of the moving image in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso (Amerikai anzix, 1975) is achieved through a special combination of the immediacy and the hypermediacy of experience. Bódy’s interest in “past images” goes beyond the intention of experimentation with the medium; it is aimed at a profound, reconsidered archaeology of the image and a distinct sensing of the cinema.

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