scholarly journals Aki Kaurismaki: Two Films in Close-up(to the history of "New Finnish Cinema")

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Valeriy Nikolaevich Turitsyn ◽  
Valery Nikolayevich Turitsyn

Since the French "nouvelle vague" of the late 1950s the world cinema has experienced a succession of "waves" which first rolled around some European countries and by blowing up cinematic traditions to this or that extent, led to the birth of the so-called "new cinema" (e.g. in Czechoslovakia or in Germany in the 1960s - 1970s). In Finland the similar process in its local variant occurred in the 1980s. For the most part it was connected with the Kaurismaki brothers' films, primarily with the works of the younger brother, Aki. By the early 1990s he became one of the renowned masters of not only Finnish but the "new European cinema". This article doesn't aspire to give a full detailed analysis of Aki Kaurismaki's film career. Instead, by concentrating on two "polar" films made by this original director, it presents an attempt to line out the range of his creative work and some characteristics of his poetics

Author(s):  
Kenneth Bertrams ◽  
Julien Del Marmol ◽  
Sander Geerts ◽  
Eline Poelmans

AB InBev is today’s uncontested world leader of the beer market. It represents over 20 per cent of global beer sales, with more than 450 million hectolitres a year flowing all around the world. Its Belgian predecessor, Interbrew, was a success story stemming from the 1971 secret merger of the country’s two leading brewers: Artois and Piedboeuf. Based on first-hand material originating from company and private archives as well as interviews with managers and key family actors, this is the first study to explore the history of the company through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The story starts in the mid-nineteenth century with the scientific breakthroughs that revolutionized the beer industry and allowed both Artois and Piedboeuf to prosper in a local environment. Instrumental in this respect were the respective families and their successive heirs in stabilizing and developing their firms. Despite the intense difficulties of two world wars in the decades to follow, they emerged stronger than ever and through the 1960s became undisputed leaders in the national market. Then, in an unprecedented move, Artois and Piedboeuf secretly merged their shareholding in 1971, though keeping their operations separate until 1987 when they openly and operationally merged to become Interbrew. Throughout their histories Artois, Piedboeuf, and their successor companies have kept a controlling family ownership. This book provides a unique insight into both the complex history of these three family breweries and their path to becoming a prominent global company, and the growth and consolidation of the beer market through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


Author(s):  
Oonagh McDonald

This chapter provides a brief history of LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, tracing both market developments and the macro-economic and regulatory environment in which it was created. Beginning as an informal measure used in the London Eurodollar market of the 1960s, LIBOR made the transition to a formal benchmark in the mid-1980s, eventually becoming the most widely used benchmark in the world by the late-1990s.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn Stokes ◽  
Matthew Jones

During the 1960s, European cinema became increasingly available to British audiences. The expansion of university film societies and art-house cinemas meant that domestic and US productions, which made up the vast majority of films screened in this country, were now in competition with the work of directors such as Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut. Using responses from nearly a thousand participants in an investigation of cultural memory and British cinemagoing in the 1960s, this article explores how these encounters with European cinema are now remembered. While audiences tend to characterise these films as innovative, unusual and cerebral, they are also often thought of as obscure and baffling. This article argues that, however the films are now remembered, British cinema audiences sensed that they were having their eyes opened to new perspectives on the world through their exposure to films from other countries.


Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 230-250
Author(s):  
Abdulkader Tayob

Abstract Ismāʿīl Rājī al Fārūqī (1921–1986) played a considerable role in the academic study of Islam as it was developing in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper is a critical examination of how he employed the categories of religion and religious studies in his scholarly, dialogical, and Islamist work. The paper follows his ideas of religious traditions, their truth claims, and ethical engagement in the world. For Al Fārūqī, these constituted the main foundations of all religions, and provided a distinctive approach to the study of religions. Al Fārūqī was critical of the then prevailing approaches, asserting that they were either too subjective or too reductionist. He offered an approach to the study of religions based on a Kantian approach to values. Al Fārūqī’s method and theory, however, could not escape the bias and prejudice that he tried to avoid. Following his arguments, I show that his reflections on religion and its systematic study in academia charted an approach to religions, but also provided a language for a particular Islamic theology that delegitimized other approaches, particularly experiential ones, in modern Islam.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 71-80
Author(s):  
Z.N. Novlianskaya

The article describes the theoretical grounds and structure of a literature course as a part of aesthetic education at school, based on the concept of developmental learning by D.B. Elkonin and V.V Davydov. This course became a first attempt to create a program from the first to the final year at school, which required finding a solution to a complicated problem of transferring the practice of developmental learning from primary to secondary school. The conception was innovative in that it considered literature as a part of Arts rather than Philology. The purpose of the course is to educate a cultured reader who would be able to engage in a text-mediated dialogue with an author. The course is based on the ‘author – literary text – reader’ relation (M.Bakhtin). It is shown that a child’s experience of creative work in literature (as the author) is essential for fostering the cultured reader. Learning happens through acquiring and interchanging the positions of the author, reader, critic and theorist, and furthermore, on different educational stages these positions play different roles in literature development of schoolchildren. The main educational paths are: “Readers’ practice and creative work of children” and “History of the world literature”.


Afrika Focus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Premesh Lalu

In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the extent that we might develop a history of a critical humanities across hemispheres, this paper asks what it might mean to return to a concept of freedom formed through a sustained effort at reckoning with the worldliness specific to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. There, a critical humanities may discover the sources of a creative work in which Africa is not merely bound to the binary of blind spots and oversights, but functions as that supplement which gives itself over to a liveable future.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147035722091245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn L Kane

In the first quarter of the 20th century, luminous neon signs paved the way for the multiscreen aesthetics now punctuating major intersections in metropolises around the world. And yet, these epicenters of spectacle currently bear little or no neon themselves. This article draws from visual studies and histories of electricity to chart a unique material history of neon from novelty to norm, to obsolescence. The article begins with neon’s introduction in France in 1910, followed by its travels across the Atlantic in 1923, when novel neon quickly became definitive of a new urban aesthetic. The best illustration of this is 1940s Las Vegas, where neon flourished as a symbol of glamour and modern progress until, less than a decade later, it lost ground to cheaper and more efficient backlit plastic, fluorescent, and eventually, LED lighting systems. By the 1960s, neon was abandoned to inner cities, noire film, and New Wave journalism, and yet, we still refer to the mega-screen spectacles in numerous cities around the world as bearing this same ‘neon aesthetic’. This article charts this visual journey, demonstrating how neon holds a special significance to urban visual cultures that extends beyond survey histories of electricity and basic light and color theories heralded in traditional visual communications courses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 23-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney E. Laemmli

In 1965, the American folklorist Alan Lomax set out on a mission: to view, code, catalogue and preserve the totality of the world’s dance traditions. Believing that dance carried otherwise inaccessible information about social structures, work practices and the history of human migration, Lomax and his collaborators gathered more than 250,000 feet of raw film footage and analyzed it using a new system of movement analysis. Lomax’s aims, however, went beyond the merely scientific. He hoped to use his ‘Choreometrics’ project as the foundation for a universally available visual and textual atlas of human movement. This article explores how Lomax’s archival ambitions supported his efforts to enact a wholesale ‘recalibration of the human perceptual apparatus’ and situates Choreometrics at the nexus of new techniques of data-gathering and the cultural ferment of the 1960s.


Author(s):  
Jurjen A. Zeilstra

Chapter 8 deals with Visser ’t Hooft’s lengthy campaign to have the Roman Catholic Church join the World Council of Churches. It traces developments from the beginning when Protestant ecumenicity was firmly rejected, to the later history from the 1960s onwards. It explores Visser ’t Hooft’s contacts with the Dutch Roman Catholics Jo Willibrands and Frans Thijssen and early attempts at rapprochement, including the creation of the Joint Working Group. The chapter discusses the difference in agendas, and developments during and arising from the Second Vatican Council. It then relates the history of ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church in connection with the Roman Catholic movement under successive popes away from membership of the World Council.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document