scholarly journals Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Independent Cinema ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Women's Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Kathryn Bigelow

Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers examines the significance of women’s contribution to genre cinema by highlighting the work of US filmmakers within and outside Hollywood – Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers, Karyn Kusama and Kelly Reichardt, among others. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz interrogates questions of ‘genre’ authorship; the blurring of the borders between commercial and independent cinema and gendered discourses of (de)authorisation that operate within each sphere; ‘male’–‘female’ genre divisions; and the issue of authorial subversion in film and popular culture in a wider sense. With its focus on close analysis of the films themselves and the cultural and ideological meanings involved in the reception of genre texts authored by women, this book expands critical debates around women’s cinema and offers new perspectives on how contemporary filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre.

From Altered States to Altered Titles: A Close Analysis of the Title Sequence to Ken Russell's Altered States (1981)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-571
Author(s):  
Jack Post
Keyword(s):  
Altered States ◽  
Thematic Structure ◽  
Personal Projects ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Film Images ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although most title sequences of Ken Russell's films consist of superimpositions of a static text on film images, the elaborate title sequence to Altered States (1981) was specially designed by Richard Greenberg, who had already acquired a reputation for his innovative typography thanks to his work on Superman (1978) and Alien (1979). Greenberg continued these typographic experiments in Altered States. Although both the film and its title sequence were not personal projects for Russell, a close analysis of the title sequence reveals that it functions as a small narrative unit in its own right, facilitating the transition of the spectator from the outside world of the cinema to the inside world of filmic fiction and functioning as a prospective mise-en-abyme and matrix of all the subsequent narrative representations and sequences of the film to come. By focusing on this aspect of the film, the article indicates how the title sequence to Altered States is tightly interwoven with the aesthetic and thematic structure of the film, even though Russell himself may have had less control over its design than other parts of the film.

The Art of Hearing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Close Analysis

This chapter examines the importance of preaching in godly culture, showing how sermons were popular, accessible, and affecting. This helps to explain the appeal of Puritanism. The chapter shows how sermon culture existed in different forms, exploring different listening practices and also demonstrates that printed sermons existed alongside, not instead of, the experience of attending sermons. A newly discovered sermon notebook charts Matthew’s preaching from Oxford to Durham and York, showing how he prepared and revised his sermons. Close analysis of his texts and annotations in his books, indicates how he used his library to prepare his sermons, as well as drawing on popular culture to make his sermons widely accessible and appealing.

Batman Returns

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-215
Author(s):  
Martijn Oosterbaan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Politics Of Aesthetics ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Academic Discussion ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Anthropological Literature

This article explores the aesthetic elements of sovereignty. Building on the anthropological literature on sovereignty and on contemporary work on the politics of aesthetics, the article analyzes contemporary appearances of Batman symbols and figures in Rio de Janeiro. Despite political debate and academic discussion about the Batmen appearing in mafia-like militias and popular street protests in Rio, the question of what these appearances tell us about the relations between popular imagery and political contestation has remained untouched. This article supports the work of writers who argue that superhero comics and movies present fierce figures that operate in the zone of indistinction, at the crossroads of lawful order and its exception. However, it adds to this literature an analysis that shows in what kind of sociopolitical contexts these figures operate and how that plays itself out. To understand the contemporary appearances and force of figures of the entertainment industry better, this article proposes the concept “popular culture of sovereignty.”

Vertical video: rupturing the aesthetic paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Orientation Model ◽  
Video Shot ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

Popular culture has critiqued ‘vertical video syndrome’, or video shot on smartphones in the portrait rather than landscape orientation, as something aesthetically unpleasing which should be avoided. But the design of smartphones seems to encourage shooting vertical video. This article examines the aesthetic desirability of vertical videos through applied media aesthetics. It traces the history of horizontal film and television orientations, as well as the image-centric orientation model found in still photography. It argues that vertical video, rather than a syndrome to be avoided, instead takes advantage of the technological innovations and embodied pleasures offered by the smartphone to rupture the visual paradigms and create a new visual aesthetic for phone-based moving images.

scholarly journals Contemporary Women Filmmakers in Myanmar: Reflections on a Visit in February 2019

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Valentina Vitali
Keyword(s):  
Motion Picture ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
National University ◽  
Women's Cinema ◽  
Development Department

Existing accounts of Myanmar’s film industry available to English speakers are more than twenty years out of date. Opening with a brief overview of cinema in Myanmar since 2000, this article is based on a recent visit to the Myanmar Motion Picture Development Department and the Yangon Film School, on conversations with staff, students and alumnae of these institutions and of the National University of Arts and Culture, and with local independent filmmakers. The purpose of my visit was to begin the groundwork needed to answer basic questions: Who are the women making films in Myanmar today? Where are they trained? What are the conditions in which they work? What kind of films they make? How do they fund production? How do their films circulate? And finally: Is there a women’s cinema in Myanmar? What follows thus outlines the context in which women in Myanmar make films today and introduces the work of a small number of them. I conclude with reflections on three short films: A Million Threads (2006, by Thu Thu Shein), Now I am 13 (2013, by Shin Daewe), and Seeds of Sadness (2018, by Thae Zar Chi Khaing), two of which can be found online (at http://yangonfilmschool.org/___-free-yfs-film / and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX0LUZQcMCQ ).

scholarly journals The Influence Of Popular Culture On The Visual Music Album Cover

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Citra Kemala Putri
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
The Aesthetic

Mass culture and popular culture is one of the important phenomena that was born after the postmodern era. In a society that lives in the midst of mass culture and popular culture, will grow consumer communities that produce new cultural symbols and activities. This discourse then influenced various aspects, for example, the emergence of popular music and popular art movements which soon became a commodities that was consumed by many youth people. This study discusses the influence of popular culture on the visuals of music album covers which take several album covers of international musicians from different time periods as samples to compare the similarities or friction caused by various art developments as their response toward happening trends. This study uses qualitative method. This study of various visual images was considering the aesthetic idioms of postmodernism, including Pastiche, Parody, Kitsch, Camp and Schizophrenia, as well as the concepts of several art movements, such as Pop Art and Lowbrow Art. The final result of this study reveal that several music albums using the Pop Art and Lowbrow Art style contained postmodern aesthetic idioms. Each album cover can contain one or several aesthetic idioms simultaneously.

Ageing and romance on the big screen: the ‘silvering romantic comedy’ Elsa & Fred

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 2257-2265
Author(s):  
Núria Casado-Gual
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Western World ◽  
Ageing Population ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Cinematic Narratives ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
Last Stage ◽  
Complete Transformation ◽  
Critical Consideration

AbstractThe radical demographic change produced by the ageing population in the Western world has entailed a complete transformation of its popular culture. The cinema is one of the popular arts to have been especially affected by the so-called ‘longevity revolution’. In fact, an important part of Hollywood celebrity culture and the mainstream film audiences belong to the same ageing demographic. The increasing necessity to tell and consume stories of ageing for the big screen is not only reflected in the growing number of films that feature older characters in their lead roles, but also in the changes produced in the cinematic narratives themselves. Film scholars within the inter-disciplinary field of cultural gerontology have started to address this phenomenon from various perspectives. Building on from their critical consideration, this article focuses on the particular case of Michael Radford's Elsa & Fred, a contemporary film released in 2014 that, paradoxically enough, helps renovate the youth-oriented genre of the romantic comedy through a ‘silvering’ romance. Taking into account contemporary manifestations of the romantic comedy genre, the essay proves that Radford's comedy contributes to the development of the ‘gerontocom’ as a new sub-genre in which old age is central to the protagonists’ characterisations and storylines. By considering the interaction of the generic rules of the genre with the hyper-visibility of the protagonists’ agedness, this article also shows the ways in which the film overcomes polarised views of ageing and enhances the figures’ own process of becoming in the last stage of their lives.

The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary W. Blanchard
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Collective State ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Renaissance Art ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Change Perceptions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Military

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.

Going Round in Circles: Popular Speech in Ancient Rome

2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
And Control ◽  
The City ◽  
Popular Speech ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
General Culture

This paper offers a close analysis of the usage of the term circulus to refer to groups of Romans gathered together for various reasons. I identify such groupings as primarily non-elite in character and suggest that examination of their representation in our sources offers insight into popular sociability and communication at Rome. While circuli and the related figure of the circulator are often associated with what is considered to be a debased popular culture, they can also be seen as part of a more general culture of popular sociability which is politically threatening to a Roman governing class that desired to monopolize and control speech and communication and in whose interest it was to channel popular political participation into the official political institutions of the city. This paper also looks at some of the strategies developed by Roman elites to maintain, in response to such unauthorized activity, their moral, intellectual, and political hegemony over the rest of the population.

scholarly journals Retrolugares, definición, formación y repetición de lugares, escenarios y escenas imaginados del pasado en la cultura popular y el videojuego

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
Alberto Venegas Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Cultural Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultura Popular ◽  
The Aesthetic

Resumen: La intención de este artículo es presentar el concepto “retrolugar” como la repetición de lugares imaginados del pasado dentro de la cultura popular debido a razones sociológicas, políticas y comerciales asociadas a la nueva cultura del capitalismo. Para lograr este objetivo insertaremos el concepto dentro de un marco historiográfico más general y situaremos ejemplos tanto de su concepción como de su desarrollo. Todo ello nos conducirá a la idea de empleo o utilización estética del pasado con razones políticas, sociales o comerciales. Usos del tiempo pretérito alejados del oficio del historiador, pero alojados extensamente entre la población debido a la integración de estos dentro de las manifestaciones culturales más populares.Palabras clave: Retrolugar, Usos públicos de la Historia, Cultura Popular, Mitohistoria, Industria cultural.Abstract: This article introduces the ‘retroplace’, the concept of recreating imagined places of the past within the popular culture on the basis of sociological, political and comercial reasons associated with the new culture of capitalism. To achieve this goal, the concept is examined within a more general historiographic framework, and examples of both its conception and its development are given. This analysis reveals the employment or the aesthetic use of the past for political, social or commercial motives. Although these uses of the past tense are far removed from the trade of the historian, they are widely accepted among the population due to their integration within the most popular cultural manifestations.Key words: Retroplaces, Public use of History, Popular Culture, Mythistory, Cultural industry.

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