scholarly journals Fundido en negro

Neuróptica ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-176
Author(s):  
Julio Santamaría Alonso

Resumen: La serie Blacksad, del guionista Juan Díaz Canales y el dibujante Juanjo Guarnido, ha cosechado un gran éxito internacional desde su aparición a finales del año 2000. La apuesta de los autores, ganadora a la postre, fue crear una historieta protagonizada por animales en un universo realista noir de los EE. UU. de los años 50 del pasado siglo. Si bien Blacksad nació de la admiración por las grandes novelas y películas de serie negra, la vinculación de los álbumes del gato detective con el cine va más allá, sin embargo, de esta relación directa. En sus páginas es posible encontrar alusiones y homenajes a películas de diferentes géneros que han ayudado a conformar el decorado, los personajes e incluso las tramas de las aventuras del protagonista a lo largo de los cinco volúmenes publicados hasta el momento. Abstract: The Blacksad series, by scriptwriter Juan Díaz Canales and illustrator Juanjo Guarnido, has enjoyed great international success since its creation in late 2000. The authors took a chance – and eventually succeeded – on creating a comic novel starring animals set against a realist, noir, 1950s America background. Blacksad was born out of the authors’ admiration for great noir novels and films, but the link between the cat detective albums and the cinema goes well beyond this point. Throughout the albums’pages we find hints and tributes to many genre films in aspects such as the general background, the personae, and even the plots of the main character’s adventures, which span five volumes so far.

Author(s):  
Philip Tew

This chapter studies the comic novel. If British and Irish culture in the post-war decades underwent some radical social and political upheavals, the novel registered and critiqued these transformations in part through the development of a particular comic mode. Comedy in British and Irish novels published from 1940 to 1973 often turned around the difficult intersection of class and nation. Alongside this overarching attention to class and nation, a number of other recurrent motifs can be traced in the comic novel of the period, such as the representation of cultural commodification, the decline of traditional values, and the emergence of new forms of youth culture. In the context of such widespread changes to the narratives that shaped public life, the comic novel expressed an ironic scepticism concerning the capacity of any cultural narrative to offer an adequate account of contemporary identities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu

Abstract The international recognition of Romanian literature faces a double challenge: first, the limited circulation of the Romanian language; second, the small number of translations and the non-systematic branding that this literature has enjoyed so far. This article discusses (1) the meanings of “branding”; (2) the ways in which the nationalist imp keeps hindering the branding of Romanian literature abroad, and highlights the historical and contemporary shortcomings of the branding of Romanian literary texts and authors; and (3) the current state-of-affairs, followed by a scenario for future action. The last section suggests ways of improving this branding by piggybacking on the international success of Romanian cinema and on a few award-winning Romanian writers, but especially by attempting to help create a class of professional middle-persons (cultural managers, literary agents and advertising professionals) who would systematically promote Romanian literature.


1967 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-106
Author(s):  
R. C. Andrews
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Anna Podemska-Kałuża

Marzena Sowa’s Comics. Marzi Talks About Childhood in PRLPolish screenwriter Marzena Sowa is the author of the comics’ cycle about Marzi, which was published in the years 2005–2011 and was an international success (the drawings prepared by Sylvain Savoia). The storiesabout the red-haired girl, the daughter of the workman and the resident of industrial city are the forms autobiographical, that show the reality of life in Poland in the 1980s. The prospect of a child, who is a careful observer of the adult world, has allowed the presentation of history of country in Central Europe at the end of communism. The cycle of Marzi presents an evocative picture of experience “last generation of PRL”, is the witness to the contemporary culture and the record of the struggles of society with the problems of everyday life in “difficult times”. Since its debut in 2005, the critic compares this comic diary from the time of puberty to the famous Persepolisof Marjane Satrapi. For the modern reader the books of Marzena Sowa is a valuable source of knowledge about Poland in the days of “Solidarity” and Lech Wałęsa, as well as the iconic comics that has a big power of social and cultural impact.


Author(s):  
Michael Barth ◽  
Arne Güllich ◽  
Eike Emrich

The study addresses two questions that are under debate in the literature and exemplifies their examination in alpine ski racing. Firstly, are successful athletes the product of a long-term continuous intervention and/or socialization process or do they rather emerge via repeated selection processes? Secondly, to which extent is a nations’ collective success composed of many athletes’ singular successes or of a few athletes’ multiple successes?The study involved the national squad of the Austrian Ski Federation. Data collection comprised membership in a national squad and World or Olympic medal success and was carried out via document analysis (seasons: 1986-2016).The mean annual athlete turnover rate ranged from 24-57% across squad levels while the turnover rate varied substantially over time within each squad level. Among all national squad athletes, the incidence of being a successful (i.e., medal winning) National Team athlete was 8.9% (95% CI: 6.0%; 12.5%). Twenty-eight athletes won a total of 112 medals, 21 athletes achieved winning two or more medals. The six most successful athletes won 56 medals, comprising 50% of all medals won.The study suggests that successful elite athletes emerge from repeated selection and filtering processes. The observation of multiple medalists and a high concentration of exceptional success among a few athletes is reflected with regard to potential causes that rest on characteristics of the individual athlete, on social mechanisms (e.g., Matthew mechanism) of the elite sports system, or both.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Buck

Historically, drag is a taboo which has been marginalized in the face of centuries of repression against non-heteronormative activity. Yet today drag has become highly visible in popular culture, and this is in large part attributable to the international success of American reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present). Its bold representation of drag on a mainstream television show is unprecedented and the selection of drag queen competitors by the show’s producers has demonstrated a plethora of representations as Drag Race showcases a diverse range of identifications from the world of drag performance. The blossoming of Drag Race’s success comes at a historical moment in which we are seeing a huge proliferation of queer representations (re)produced in US television and other media over the last decade. However, as I will argue, the apparent liberalization of drag queens in popular culture is not simply a celebration of so-called ‘progress’ in the recognition of the marginalized, but may also be prompting the promotion of other value changes within late capitalism’s ideals of consumerism and entrepreneurship. Contestants are increasingly pressured to construct their drag performances to conform to a recognizable brand to reach the heights of their own private ‘success’. Mainstreamed depictions of queer subjects are susceptible to co-option, particularly in televisual forms such as Drag Race which prospers by channelling the emancipatory and subversive desires of the subculture. Through trans-textual considerations and historical contextualizations, I show how the representation of drag in Drag Race is depoliticized through neoliberal discourse as the show’s continual demand for competitors to ‘work it’ privileges and maintains the impetus for competitive profitmaking above the needs and demands of disempowered groups.


Author(s):  
Edīte Tišheizere

The young actors of Liepāja theatre who graduated from Klaipeda University can serve as an excellent sample of successful interaction between cultures, traditions, and schools. Having acquired acting skills both in traditions of Lithuanian theatre and in the paradigm of so-called ‘fantastic realism’ by Evgeny Vakhtangov developed in the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute, proposed by their pedagogues Vytautas and Velta Anužis, they can perform as actors of psychological theatre as well as postdramatic theatre performers. Evidence of this is the international success of their work in Konstantin Bogomolov’s post-dramatic chronotopic experiments “Stavanger (Pulp People)” and “My Blaster is Discharged”, and Sergey Zemlyansky’s non-verbal searches for psychological plasticity in Rainis’s tragedy “Indulis and Ārija”, and Nikolay Gogol’s comedy “The Wedding”.


Author(s):  
Keith Howard

K-pop, Korean popular music, is a central component in Korea’s cultural exports. It helps brand Korea, and through sponsorships and tie-ups, generates attention for Korea that goes well beyond the music and media industries. This essay traces the history of Korean popular music, from its emergence in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the influence of America on South Korea’s cultural development and the assimilation of genres such as rap, reggae, punk, and hip hop, to the international success of Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and the idol group BTS. It explores the rise of entertainment companies, how they overcame the digital challenge, and how their use of restrictive contracts created today’s cultural economy. It introduces issues of gender and sexuality, and outlines how music videos and social media have been used to leverage fandom.


2018 ◽  
pp. 215-232
Author(s):  
Stefano Baschiera

This chapter investigates transnational co-productions, regional funding, film commissions and European locations in the new wave of European horror cinema of the new millennium. Since the international success of Hostel (2005) European locations have once again become appealing settings for Horror films, contributing to a new flourishing of the genre in Europe. In particular, we have witnessed a new development of the so-called 'road horror movie', a sub-genre traditionally characterized by border crossing, touristic activities and exotic locations. Film such as Frontier(s)(2006), Calvaire (The Ordeal, 2004), Manhunt (Rovdyr 2008), Ils (Them 2006) and The Pack (Le Meute, 2007) show traveling as a crucial theme. This chapter will engage, first of all, with the production features of these films, focusing on the involvement of regional film commissions and European co-production agreements, in order to investigate the local/global dimension of these productions, generally aimed at an international audience. Secondly, it will analyse the use of locations and how it mirrors European film policies as well as the idea of "Europe" and a “post-industrial” identity.


2019 ◽  
pp. 106-116
Author(s):  
David MacDougall

This chapter addresses the problem of portraying space in the cinema and the position the film viewer imagines himself or herself to occupy when watching a film. Beginning with the rendering of depth in early films, the author argues that this was never the important question; rather it was the question of how the viewer related to sensations of being included or excluded by the images on the screen. The sense of exclusion was partly resolved through editing techniques such as the shot/counter-shot technique that incorporated the viewer into the action and also by employing deep focus and proximity to close objects, as in the films of Orson Welles. Equally important were narratives that involved the viewer through identification with the characters, as well as the culturally-constructed ‘cinema of familiarity’ of genre films and the work of certain filmmakers such as Ozu. Although none of the methods employed fully succeeded in overcoming the problem of cinematic space, the author argues that at least in nonfiction cinema filmmakers can limit it by being more open about their own intentions and the limitations of the medium.


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