scholarly journals Plot vs Emplotment - Testing the narrative concepts of aesthetics and authenticity in the documentary short Far Away Land

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre O’Toole
Keyword(s):  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Original Story ◽  
The Relationship

This paper recounts the research and production of Far Away Land, a short documentary that uses recreations to illustrate a woman’s memory of drowning. The images used to illustrate the narrator’s experience will be interrogated to establish how they might enhance or take from the original story. The idea of plot vs emplotment will be explored in this paper to explore how the aesthetics and visualisations of recreations reflect, compliment and contrast with voice-over narrative. This paper also investigates the relationship between linking visual imagery to the narrator in the absence of an on-camera interview. Placing this short film in the lineage of documentaries that use recreation the efficacy of this style will be discussed in terms of delivering an authentic and aesthetic documentary film.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

The iAnimal Film Series

Screen Bodies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-61
Author(s):  
Holly Cecil
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Advocacy Organizations ◽  
Film Series

This article explores the innovative use of virtual reality (VR) technology in nonfiction documentary film formats by animal-advocacy organizations. I examine the potential of the VR medium to communicate the living and dying environments of factory-farmed animals, and to generate viewer empathy with the animal subjects in their short, commodified lives from birth to slaughterhouse. I present a case study of the iAnimal short film series produced by Animal Equality, which made its public debut at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Employing a critical animal studies framework, I engage Kathryn Gillespie’s work on witnessing of the nonhuman condition as a method of academic research, and apply to it the embodied experience of virtual witnessing through virtual realty.

Filming History and The Spanish Earth

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-156
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Relief Effort ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
The Relationship

Dos Passos was instrumental in initiating The Spanish Earth, a 1937 documentary film relief effort for the Republican fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, although he likely did not contribute to its writing. Yet the dangerous, divisive circumstances surrounding the film’s creation and his collaboration with its Communist director Joris Ivens and with colleague Ernest Hemingway during its production in Spain challenged Dos Passos’s beliefs about the relationship between politics and art and profoundly affected his subsequent career. The execution of a Spanish friend, José Robles, at the hands of Russian military personnel who were ostensibly Republican allies, and a subsequent coverup, led Dos Passos to re-evaluate his leftist political positions, his professional alliance with Ivens, and his longtime friendship with Hemingway. The film and its circumstances raised complex questions about the dynamics between fact and fictionalization in documentary and the artist’s ethical and aesthetic responsibilities. Dos Passos’s choices to report fully on the repercussions of factionalization in the Spanish anti-fascist cause, to represent multiple perspectives of the looming greater European conflict, and to articulate unequivocally his conviction that Communism was compromising both European and U.S. leftist movements earned opprobrium from literary critics who had theretofore lionized him.

scholarly journals Art, human rights activism and a pedagogy of sensibility: the São Paulo Human Rights Short Films Festival-Entretodos

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Eduardo C. B. Bittar
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Global City ◽  
Short Film ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses ways in which the São Paulo human rights short film festival-Entretodos developed between 2013 and 2016. It considers the festival from the perspective of a coordinator and promoter, discussing its achievements within the socio-political context of this global city, and of Brazil more broadly, where there has been resistance to advances in human rights culture (HRC). Data from the festival gave rise to an analysis of the relationship between art and emancipation, which is presented here from a philosophical perspective. The author illustrates how the experience of hosting a human rights short film festival in São Paulo has led to the development of a municipal human rights education (HRE) policy and to the conviction that art and citizenship, including learning for citizenship, human right and conviviality, can go hand-in-hand. The article argues for a pedagogy of sensibility, which centres learners’ humanity, as an approach to HRE.

An experimental investigation of the role of different types of iconic gesture in communication

Gesture ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Beattie ◽  
Heather Shovelton
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Accuracy Score ◽  
Iconic Gesture ◽  
Reliable Effect ◽  
Fundamental Conception ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Original Story ◽  
The Relationship

Respondents, who had either seen or not seen a sample of the iconic gestures that encoders produce when narrating a story, answered questions about the original story and it was found that the overall accuracy score for respondents who saw the iconic gestures in addition to hearing the speech was 56.8% compared to 48.6% for speech only. This was a highly reliable effect and suggests that iconic gestures are indeed communicative. Character viewpoint gestures were also significantly more communicative than observer viewpoint gestures particularly about the semantic feature relative position, but the observer viewpoint gestures were effective at communicating information, particularly about the semantic features speed and shape. There were no significant correlations between the amount of information that gestures added to speech and the amount they conveyed in its absence, which suggests that the relationship between speech and gesture is not fixed but variable. The implications of this research for our fundamental conception of iconic gestures are considered.

Push-pull for the video clip: a systems approach to the relationship between the phonogram/videogram industry and music television

Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Wallis ◽  
Krister Malm
Keyword(s):  
Systems Approach ◽  
Video Clip ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Music Television ◽  
Music Recordings ◽  
The Relationship

Using pictures to sell music is hardly a new concept. Examples of pictures being set to pre-recorded music with the aim of producing a piece of audio-visual entertainment can be found as early as the first decade of this century. At the Paris World Fair in 1900, stars of the theatre appeared in short film sketches with synchronised gramophone sound (Olsson 1986). From 1905 through to about 1914 in Sweden, a number of commercially available music recordings were used as the basis of short films which were shown in cinemas with various types of mechanical inventions and much human ingenuity being applied to ensure, though not always achieving, synchronisation. Those portrayed in the films were often actors who mimed the songs (Furhammar 1985, 1988).

Reliance on Visual Imagery and its Relation to Mental Rotation

1997 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doris C. Weatherly ◽  
Steven E. Ball ◽  
James R. Stacks
Keyword(s):  
Mental Rotation ◽  
Response Latency ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Visual Imagery ◽  
Learning Effect ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Computer Screen ◽  
The Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship of habitual use of visual imagery and mental rotation was investigated. Reliance on Visual Imagery scores were used to define subjects as high frequency or low frequency visualizers. During the mental rotation task, subjects indicated if a pair of 2-dimensional stimulus figures displayed on a computer screen were identical or mirror-images. Figures on the right were rotated in relation to those on the left by 0, 60, 120, or 180°. Data supported the prediction that subjects who report high use of imagery would perform the task with greater accuracy ( z=1.97, p<.05) than subjects who reported low use. The imagery groups did not differ in response latency ( z = .91, p<.36). A comparison of performance on Trials 1 to 24 with performance on Trials 115-138 indicated a learning effect in both accuracy ( z = 7.58, p<.01) and latency ( z = 9.72, p<.01) for all subjects.

Framing as a method of creating a film's metaphorical context

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-86
Author(s):  
Roman V. Korobko
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Logical Thinking ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Emotional Language ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Abstract Language ◽  
The Relationship

This essay continues the study of the semiotics and synergetics of Framing in the Art of Cinematography which substantiates the hypothesis that framing (perspective) constitutes one of the most important codes of screen communication in its cinematographic and metaphorical contexts. Thus, framing is represented by two hierarchical levels of representation of contextual semiotic connections: the connection between mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scne (the level of the cinematographic form of film sign); and the relationship between cinematographic imagery, action and meaning (the level of the cinema sign). Framing consolidates the process of cinematography divided by the artistic and production dichotomy, which is especially important in the context of mass culture determined by the total industrialization of all areas of life, including cinema. The essay is based on the statement of Sergei Eisenstein that each high film work has the unity of two dialectical categories: the content (abstract language, part of logical thinking) and the form (emotional language, part of emotional-sensory thinking). It identifies and analyzes the spatial-temporal and linear-tonal features of cinematic framing as a method of expressing the metaphorical existential context of the crisis of Russian self-identification, using as examples a number of expressive episodes of the documentary film Anna: 618 (1980-1993; dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, DOPs: Pavel Lebeshev, Vadim Yusov, Vadim Alisov, and Elizbar Karavaev). This film work is explored as a study of the socio-cultural situation in modern Russia undertaken from a multi-faceted and multi-level authorial perspective associated with expressive cinematographic framing.

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