The Cinematic Kon-Tiki Expeditions: Realism, Spectacle, and the Migration of Nordic Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 378-385
Author(s):  
Benjamin Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
16Mm Film ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Nordic Cinema ◽  
High Seas

This chapter investigates cinematic strategies used to depict Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 on screen. The critical discourse surrounding Heyerdahl’s 1950 documentary film has centered on the ontology of its images, which film history’s most influential theorist of realism, André Bazin, famously praised in Kon-Tiki. Despite Bazin’s enthusiasm, both expedition and documentary were highly mediated and staged promotional events from the beginning. The only reason a film could be cobbled together at all from the waterlogged 16mm film that Heyerdahl brought home with him was because of the intervention of a Swedish film technician who resized and repaired the badly damaged sequences. In 2013, Norwegian directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg turned to Heyerdahl’s expedition for their own film. In their take, the sedate source material of the documentary has given way to spectacular visual effects and scenes of peril on the high seas. All the absent scenes of danger in the original take center stage in the latter film. Subtext has become text, as Rønning and Sandberg transform the source material into cinematic spectacle.

scholarly journals Shane and the Language of Men

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-88
Author(s):  
Jesse Gerlach Ulmer
Keyword(s):  
Middle School ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
Language And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractJane Tompkins has argued that a deeply conflicted relationship exists between men and language in the Western. Deploying too much language emasculates Western heroes, men who privilege action over talk. For support, Tompkins turns to a number of moments in Shane, the 1953 film adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same title by Jack Schaefer. Tompkins argues that the film constructs a model of masculinity that wholly rejects language, a move that is destructive and exploitative to self and others. However, a close reexamination of the novel reveals a model of masculinity that is more positive and flexible towards language and gender than Tompkins’s views on the Western suggest. A close rereading of the novel shows that men in Westerns do not always use talk and silence to subjugate women and others, and that the valuing of language over action does not always end in violence or exploitation. Furthermore, the film adaptation of the novel will be examined, a work that occupies a more cherished place in American culture than the novel, a situation that is the reverse of traditional cultural hierarchies in which the literary source material is privileged over the film adaptation. Ultimately, the novel and film are engaging in different ways, yet Schaefer’s novel, rather than being relegated to middle school literature classrooms, rewards serious critical and scholarly attention, particularly in the context of the film adaptation and critical discourse on the representation of masculinity in the Western.

The Documentary Version of Film History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry K. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film History ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Negative Response ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
The City

The overwhelmingly negative response of members of the British documentary film movement (the ‘documentarists’), Grierson very much included, to Cavalcanti’s compilation film Film and Reality (1942) has been taken as a crystallization of a split between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘purposive’ drives within the documentary film movement. Without rejecting this broad characterization, this chapter treats the version of film history advanced by Cavalcanti’s film as largely consonant with that which Grierson and others around him had promoted in the late 1930s, about the time Film and Reality was conceived and commissioned. Both Cavalcanti and Grierson saw in the studio story-film the betrayal of film’s ‘natural destiny of discovering mankind’ (Grierson); both agreed on the realist canon of (principally) Flaherty, the city symphonists, and the Soviets; and both put the documentary movement at the pinnacle of the medium’s progress in the 1930s. Cavalcanti differed from Grierson’s trajectory by introducing Jean Renoir at the climax of his film, but their disagreement over this particular issue was to a large degree a matter of institutional politics and positioning, rather than of theoretical substance. After exploring these issues, the chapter then proceeds to relate the ‘documentarist conception of film history’, which was influential at the time, to others then in circulation, such as what David Bordwell has described as the ‘Basic Story’ account. The chapter concludes by relating the documentarist model of film history to that elaborated later by Andre Bazin.

scholarly journals “I'm very Good at and maybe that's Why I'm Center Stage…”: Pronominal Deixis and Trump

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nydia Flores-Ferrán
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Town Halls

Researchers have noted that when delivering speeches, politicians tend to evoke solidarity through the use of linguistic forms such as personal pronouns. This article presents an analysis of pronominal choices (e.g., person deixis I, you, we, they) issued by Donald Trump during 10 presentations (e.g., town halls, victory speeches). The study uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework in analyzing his speeches using mixed methods. The findings suggest that redundant uses and shifts in deitic expressions were employed as persuasive tools to identify, garner support, and polarize audiences. 

scholarly journals The Filmic Fugue of Ken Russell's Pop Goes the Easel

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 438-451
Author(s):  
John Wyver
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
The Individual

First broadcast as an episode of BBC Television's Monitor in 1962, Ken Russell's documentary film Pop Goes the Easel profiles four young artists: Pauline Boty, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Peter Blake. With an exuberant and varied approach to filming, Pop Goes the Easel is a rich and revealing document of early Pop Art in London. This article situates the film within the context of television's engagement with the visual arts in the medium's first 25 years. It is argued that part of its significance within the tradition of the visual arts on television is its resistance to the determinations of an explanatory voice and that its achievement combines and develops approaches of photojournalism, documentary and art cinema from the mid and late 1950s. It is further proposed that Pop Goes the Easel is especially noteworthy for its finely tuned balancing of tensions between discourses traditionally understood as oppositional: the stasis of artworks versus the linear narrative of film; the indexical qualities of documentary versus the inventions of fiction; the mass-produced elements and images of popular culture versus the individual authorship and authority of high art; the abstracted rationality of critical discourse versus explosions of embodied sensuality; and the determinations and closure of a singular meaning versus polysemic openness.

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