The Beginning: Towards a Mass Entertainment

Author(s):  
Dong Hoon Kim

This chapter examines early film culture prior to the 1920s in order to offer a detailed historical background for the book’s exploration of the major advancement of Joseon cinema since the late 1910s. The first half of the chapter critically scrutinizes socio-political and cultural conditions that influenced the formation of early film culture in pre-colonial and colonial Korea. Equal attention is given to the collective efforts of early film entrepreneurs and exhibitors in creating film exhibition sites, including movie theatres, defining social and cultural functions of theatre space for a society devoid of theatrical tradition, and cultivating film audiences. The second half traces the activities of the first film production entity of colonial Korea: the Moving Picture Unit (MPU) of the colonial government. The author’s attempt to uncover the forgotten history of the MUP ultimately reveals the problematic of Japanese and Korean film historiographies that have pushed this crucial film unit of the empire onto the margin of film history.

Author(s):  
Dong Hoon Kim

In this ground-breaking investigation into the seldom-studied film culture of colonial Korea (1910-1945), Dong Hoon Kim brings new perspectives to the associations between colonialism, modernity, film historiography, and national cinema. In its attempt to reconstruct lost intricacies of colonial film history, Eclipsed Cinema explores the under-investigated aspects of colonial film culture such as the representational politics of colonial cinema, the film unit of the colonial government, the social reception of Hollywood cinema in relation to emerging Korean nationalism, Japanese settlers’ film culture, and gendered film spectatorship. By filling a significant void in Asian film history, Eclipsed Cinema greatly expands the critical and historical scopes of early cinema, Korean and Japanese film histories, modern Asian culture, and colonial and post-colonial studies.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley

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.


Author(s):  
Martin P. Botha

THE HERITAGE OF FILM: PERSPECTIVE ON FLEMISH CINEMA AND FILM CULTURE THROUGH SOUTH AFRICAN EYES I assisted the Locarno Film festival in 2005 with a retrospective of short films by young South African directors. There I met a very talented, young Flemish director, whose film was by far the best in the one section.(1) It moved me immensely with its honest portrait of alienation and racial discrimination. We had a long discussion on film history, aesthetics and film cultures. We also talked about the history of film in Belgium and it was noted that while the French speaking side of Belgian cinema had recently received international acclaim (for example, the work by the Dardenne Brothers), Flemish cinema was struggling. In fact, the young filmmaker made the statement that there was little to be excited about in the history of Flemish cinema. He felt especially that the films about...


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Judith Thissen

Beginning and ending with the question “what is a cinema?” and with a reconsideration of the notion of cinema’s second birth, this article examines the economic and socio-cultural dynamics of film exhibition and film-going in small-town and rural Western Europe, in particular in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Emphasis is placed on the history of itinerant film exhibition in multifunctional venues in the period after the era of the fairground shows—an important aspect of European film culture which has long been overlooked by cinema historians. Insights from these particular experiences of the cinema can help us to reconceptualize the place of cinema in both rural and urban contexts. A crucial aspect of film-going in multifunctional venues is the fact that it was located in spaces that were used for a wide range of commercial and community activities. The author thus advocates a new cinema historiography that breaks away from the fixation on the medium’s singularity to include its relation with the surrounding socio-cultural contexts in which cinema happened.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hester Baer

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.


Author(s):  
Dong Hoon Kim

The introduction presents the main conceptual framework and historiographical methods of the book, detailing the author’s efforts to redefine the concept of the cinema of colonial Korea or “Joseon (colonial Korea) cinema.”


Author(s):  
E. W. Nikdel

With the advent of online distribution and the rise of multiple media devices, claims of the cinema’s imminent death have surfaced with greater intensity than ever before. Of course, with an ever-widening array of platforms these accounts have placed a newfound emphasis on the cinema as a distinctive physical space, one that plays host to a very particular and much cherished cultural activity. This article considers the substance of these claims by tracing a very particular historical route. Firstly, be revisiting Baudry’s notion of the dispositif, this article detects the importance of the physical environment in the process of film consumption. Secondly, I relate this emphasis on the physical to the traditional notion of the cinephile, a practice that ritualises the cinema experience. Many accounts across the spectrum of film history will attest to the profound ways in which the physical experience of the cinema summons a rich emotional response. Lastly, I consider how the cinema and the collective nature of film consumption provides an authentic trace to the past and a very certain time and place in history. In turn, despite competition from cheaper and more convenient platforms, this article will endeavour to show how the cinema retains its place at the centre of contemporary film culture. KEYWORDS Cinema, dispositif, cinephilia, cultural memory.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Aleksi Järvelä ◽  
Tero Tähtinen

In this paper, we explore the historical background and the semantic underpinnings of a central, if marginally treated, metaphor of enlightenment and transmission in Chan discourse, “silent accord” 默契. It features centrally in Essentials of the Transmission of Mind 傳心法要, a text that gathers the teachings of Chan master Huangbo Xiyun (d. ca. 850), a major Tang dynasty figure. “Silent accord” is related to the concept of mind-to-mind transmission, which lies at the very core of Chan Buddhist self-understanding. However, Chan historiography has shown that this self-understanding was partially a product of the Song dynasty lineage records, historically retroactive syncretic constructs produced by monks and literati as efforts towards doctrinal and political recognition and orthodoxy. There are thus lacunae in the history of Chan thought opened up by the retrospective fictions of Song dynasty, and a lack of reliable, dateable documents from the preceding Tang dynasty era, possibly fraught with later additions. We situate the metaphor “silent accord” in the history of Chan thought by searching for its origins, mapping its functions in Chan literature, arguing for its influence and thereby its role in helping to bridge the 9th century gap.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 132-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toby Dodge

Even before its hundredth year anniversary on 16 May 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement had become a widely cited historical analogy both in the region itself and in Europe and the United States. In the Middle East, it is frequently deployed as an infamous example of European imperial betrayal and Western attempts more generally to keep the region divided, in conflict, and easy to dominate. In Europe and the United States, however, its role as a historical analogy is more complex—a shorthand for understanding the Middle East as irrevocably divided into mutually hostile sects and clans, destined to be mired in conflict until another external intervention imposes a new, more authentic, set of political units on the region to replace the postcolonial states left in the wake of WWI. What is notable about both these uses of the Sykes-Picot agreement is that they fundamentally misread, and thus overstate, its historical significance. The agreement reached by the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, in May 1916, quickly became irrelevant as the realities on the ground in the Middle East, U.S. intervention into the war, a resurgent Turkey and the comparative weakness of the French and British states transformed international relations at the end of the First World War. Against this historical background, explaining the contemporary power of the narrative surrounding the use of the Sykes-Picot agreement becomes more intellectually interesting than its minor role in the history of European imperial interventions in the Middle East.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Yaping Ding

Abstract The practice of film history highlights the value and significance of the researcher. A more comprehensive view of the situation of film history raises several issues. General research into the history of film is directly related to the production of film history. The question of how to reinvent general film history research is necessarily connected to ideologies, cultures, systems and concepts, as well as the broad scope and complexity of film history. Writing a general history of Chinese film demands a combination of innovation and continuing tradition, with an emphasis on the construction of a rational and scientific discipline of film history and historical empiricism. The aim should be a more rational history. The paper expresses my own thoughts and efforts with respect to relevant issues and attempts to deepen and open up general research into the history of Chinese film.


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