The “Trickality” of Listening in Early Musical Trick Films

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-117
Author(s):  
Julie Brown
Keyword(s):  
Film Genre ◽  
Sound Reproduction ◽  
Distinct Body ◽  
Audio Technologies

This chapter considers a small but distinct body of music-themed “trick films” that involve imaginative visualizations of music, sometimes also of the marvels and problems associated with new audio technologies. Exponents of the early “trick film” genre Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón saw the potential for film to facilitate both visual and audio-visual tricks, despite the medium’s material silence. The chapter suggests that the ubiquity of musical and vocal themes in early films, with sound visually materialized in imaginative ways, may reflect the fact that film-makers were struck by the inherent joke of the audio-visual incongruity created by a silent medium that displayed scenes taking place in a hearing world. These films often focused on new audio technologies, for which the opposite audio-visual relationship was true: sounds (re)produced by audio technologies lacked their visual source. For films involving sound reproduction subjects, there was a double incongruity—and perhaps, double the pleasure.

Differential effects of film genre on viewers’ absorption, identification, and enjoyment.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline M. Thompson ◽  
Ben Teasdale ◽  
Sophie Duncan ◽  
Evert van Emde Boas ◽  
Felix Budelmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Differential Effects ◽  
Film Genre

Devotional Transformation

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Ravi Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The Status ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on the specific Indian cinematic form of the Hindu devotional film genre to explore the relationship between cinema and religion. Using three important early films from the devotional oeuvre—Gopal Krishna, Sant Dnyaneshwar, and Sant Tukaram—as the primary referent, it tries to understand certain characteristic patterns in the narrative structures of these films, and the cultures of visuality and address, miraculous manifestation, and witnessing and self-transformation that they generate. These three films produced by Prabhat Studios between the years 1936 and 1940 and all directed by Vishnupant Damle and Syed Fattelal, drew upon the powerful anti-hierarchical traditions of Bhakti, devotional worship that circumvented Brahmanical forms. This article will argue that the devotional film crucially undertakes a work of transformation in the perspectives on property, and that in this engagement it particularly reviews the status of the household in its bid to generate a utopian model of unbounded community. The article will also consider the status of technologies of the miraculous that are among the central attractions of the genre, and afford a reflection on the relation between cinema technology, popular religious belief and desire, and film spectatorship.

AN INNOVATIVE CORRECTIVE WAY IN THE PRACTICE OF THE SOUND REPRODUCTION

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
E.A. Spiridonov ◽  
◽  
T.A. Gosteva ◽  
V.A. Markova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sound Reproduction

Groped and Gutted

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-55
Author(s):  
Samantha Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Slasher Film ◽  
Sexually Violent ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
Feminist Identification

The realm of horror provides a creative space in which the breakdown of social order can either expose power relations or further cement them by having them persist after the collapse. Carol Clover proposed that the 1970s slasher film genre—known for its sex and gore fanfare—provided feminist identification through its “final girl” indie invention. Over three decades later, with the genre now commercialized, this research exposes the reality of sexual and horrific imagery within the Hollywood mainstay. Using a mixed-methods approach, I develop four categories of depiction across cisgender representation in these films: violent, sexual, sexually violent, and postmortem. I explore the ways in which a white, heterosexist imagination has appropriated this once productive genre through the violent treatment of bodies. This exposes the means by which hegemonic, oppressive structures assimilate and sanitize counter-media. This article provides an important discussion on how counterculture is transformed in capital systems and then used to uphold the very structures it seeks to confront. The result of such assimilation is the violent treatment and stereotyping of marginalized identities in which creative efforts now pursue new means of brutalization and dehumanization.

Intuition, Evidence, and Carroll's Theory of Narrative

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-57
Author(s):  
Jonathan Frome
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Audience Engagement ◽  
Film Genre

AbstractOver the last thirty years, Noël Carroll has elaborated his theory of erotetic narration, which holds that most films have a narrative structure in which early scenes raise questions and later scenes answer them. Carroll's prolific publishing about this theory and his expansion of the theory to issues such as audience engagement, narrative closure, and film genre have bolstered its profile, but, despite its high visibility in the field, virtually no other scholars have either criticized or built upon the theory. This article uses Carroll's own criteria for evaluating film theories—evidentiary support, falsifiability, and explanatory power—to argue that erotetic theory's strange position in the field is due to its intuitive examples and equivocal descriptions, which make the theory appear highly plausible even though it is ultimately indefensible.

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