Cantinflismo and Relajo’s Peripheral Vision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nilo Couret
Keyword(s):  
Peripheral Vision ◽  
Spatial Arrangement ◽  
Mexican Cinema ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood

This chapter revisits the popular comedies of Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno from the golden age of Mexican cinema and argues that these films are not simply escapist and ideologically suspect but represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center. Cantinflas’s humor is characterized by his linguistic contortionism, or cantinflismo, in which he says plenty without saying anything, a verbal nonsense that sidesteps narrative registers and affords a bodily engagement through laughter that relies on particular cultural codes and learned structures of feeling. This chapter provincializes classical Hollywood cinema by arguing for a peripheral vision modeled on the comedic practice of the relajo, which plays with the classical spatial arrangement of screen and theater space. This chapter examines the comedian’s quick verbal play in addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative structures that “sidestep” on multiple levels.

scholarly journals «Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Raffaele Chiarulli
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Narrative Conventions ◽  
Classical Hollywood

The Hollywood Golden Age was a revolutionary moment in the history of cinema and is pivotal to understanding the historical passage of a peculiar new art form –screenwriting. This early film period, from the Tens to the Sixties, was determined by key interactions between the respective forms of cinema and stage. Together, these interactions form a wider screenwriting “discourse.” There are reoccurring disputes in film scholarship over the paternity of the conventions and techniques of screenwriting. One solution is that techniques of theatre playwriting persisted extensively in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema. Whether or not its professionals were aware of this is at the heart of this dispute. It is possible to identify the contribution of screenwriting manuals from Hollywood’s Golden Age toward the standardization of screenwriting techniques. The article aims to examine in the screenwriting manuals of this period some statements by practitioners who document the normalization and codification of the narrative structures used in screenwriting over time –in particular, the three-act structure. The validity and origin of the three-act structure are constantly debated among screenwriters. While this formula was known to the early writers of the Silent Era due to its legacy throughout centuries of playwriting and literature, it reappeared in the Seventies in the guise of a new theory. This article attempts to fill in certain gaps in the history of the theorization of screenwriting practices by juxtaposing statements found in screenwriting manuals and the statements of scholars and educators of this field. Ultimately, narrative conventions belonging to the tradition of theatre, as well as technological exigencies were integral in shaping the cinema techniques in use today.

Rewriting Ibsen for the big screen

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audun Engelstad
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the champion of realist theatre. In the early days of cinema, there were several silent film adaptations of Ibsen’s plays. One would think, given his standing as a playwright, that there would be a continuous interest in Ibsen’s work after the conversion to sound. This article examines how the realist theatre – heralded by Ibsen – relates to classical (Hollywood) cinema and how Ibsen in various ways has been rewritten and has recently re-emerged within contemporary cinema.

The Sentimental Chaplin: Comedy and Classical Narrative

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Burnetts
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
The Way ◽  
Film Comedy

Chapter Three focuses on the critical functions of comedy in relation to sentimental narrative structures in the early and classical Hollywood eras, focusing on how humour is both celebrated and critiqued in terms of its counter-balancing, compensation for, or even negation of the sentimental in film. Charles Chaplin’s early work is analysed with reference to the critical opposition to his features on the part of intellectuals wedded to a more ‘naturalistic’ cinema or to Chaplin’s more ‘anarchic’ deployment of slapstick, such as the American writer Gilbert Seldes and the early work of Siegfried Kracauer. The discussion turns to the classical genres of Hollywood’s 1930s and 1940s period, using sequences from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as an exemplary negotiation of sentiment and slapstick. Focus is maintained on the way that such categories are influenced by sentimental codes, particularly in terms of the persistence of genteel sensibilities and/or moralistic narrative structures. The chapter draws in such respects on key theorists of film comedy of that era, such as Stanley Cavell, Henry Jenkins and Lea Jacobs.

The Thematic Lens

2020 ◽  
pp. 88-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas DeGloma ◽  
Max Papadantonakis
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Great Promise ◽  
Theory Construction ◽  
Empirical Inquiry ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Patterned Structures ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis

This chapter outlines a comparative framework for ethnographic analysis that combines contributions from formal sociology, symbolic interaction, and the strong program in cultural sociology. Building on the methodological perspective that Eviatar Zerubavel has termed “social pattern analysis,” the authors show how underlying formal properties, including patterns of social interaction, foundational narrative structures, and formulaic modes of performance, tie otherwise quite disparate cases together. Moreover, actors in different contexts merge these social forms with widespread cultural codes, resulting in patterned structures of meaning. Otherwise different cases thus emerge as variant manifestations of a common social theme. Using such social themes as analytic lenses offers great promise for theory construction and serves as a guide for expanding empirical inquiry to a greater range of contexts and cases. Drawing on research pertaining to various topics, the chapter shows how using a thematic lens provides a compelling foundation for comparative multicase analysis while honing the interpretive and descriptive strengths traditionally associated with ethnography on the underlying properties and processes that tie such cases together.

Classicism and Deviation in His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Cognitive Challenge ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Double Indemnity ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitive challenge in classical Hollywood cinema with extended analyses of His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity. These films combine classical narrative, stylistic, ideological, and genre properties with artistic devices that complicate formal patterning and thwart audience expectations.

scholarly journals Remembering Pokémania: Memory, Cognitive Assemblages, and Augmented Reality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Grandinetti ◽  
Taylor Abrams-Rollinson
Keyword(s):  
Augmented Reality ◽  
Distributed Memory ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Sociotechnical Systems ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Constant State ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
Short Time

Introduced in July 2016, Pokémon GO is widely considered the killer app for contemporary augmented reality. Popular attention to the game has waned in recent years, but Pokémon GO remains enormously successful in terms of both player base and revenue generation. Whether individuals experienced the game for a short time or remain dedicated hardcore players, Pokémon GO exists as memories of time and place, imbuing familiar sites and routes with new meaning and temporal connection. Attending to these complex interrelationships of place, space, mobility, humans, technologies, infrastructures, environments, and memory, we situate Pokémon GO as what Hayles (2016) calls a cognitive assemblage—sociotechnical systems of interconnectivity in which cognition is an exteriorized process occurring across multiple levels, sites, and boundaries. In turn, we conceptualize cognition (and specifically memory) not as confined within a delimited hominid body, but instead operating through contextual relations, at multiple sites, and in a constant state of becoming. By reflecting on our own experiences as part of the distributed memory of Pokémon GO, we situate memory as momentary convergence of signals made possible by infrastructures, inscribed on servers and silicon, and made part of algorithmic suggestion and learning AI. Additionally, our own memories and experiences serve to highlight the experiential complexity of cognitive assemblages in relation to structures of feeling, as well as new temporal and spatial relations.

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