Genre and Narrative

2015 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Emily Hughes

This chapter studies the genre and narrative of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). The narrative of Talk to Her flits between a double- and single-stranded plot line, plays with time with sometimes careless abandon, and contains coincidences that verge of the ridiculous. But yet, far from alienating the spectator, the narrative of Talk to Her pleasingly draws one in and lures the spectator into a position where they are able to suspend their disbelief, enjoy and engage with the plot. The spectator familiar with Almodóvar's films somewhat expects an unconventional narrative and thus is likely to find it unobtrusive. Meanwhile, like most Almodóvar's films, Talk to Her is hard to classify in terms of genre. Unlike the Hollywood system that relies heavily on either star or genre marketing, the marketing for Almodóvar's films relies heavily on his own status as an award-winning auteur film-maker. Talk to Her is thus not bound by generic convention in the way that many Hollywood films are.

1982 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. Morris-Jones

Those who kindly invited me to give this lecture showed some resistance to its sub-title. I insisted on ‘a view from the sidelines’ because I wished to emphasize that my remarks would be based on my own presence at the events of 1947 and confined to those matters with which I had direct acquaintance. This is still largely true: mine is in part an undisguisedly personal tale. But the matter is rather more complicated. For one thing, while I was certainly a spectator I was also able for a couple of months in 1947 to scamper on to a segment of New Delhi's field of fateful play, even to get a touch or two of the ball, before returning to my place on the terraces. But for the purpose of this lecture I could not content myself with recollections; I have, as it were, examined the slow re-plays of the television cameras. In trying to match my memories, diaries and letters from 1947 with the files at India Office Records, there have, I confess, been phases of bewilderment on the way to such modest and provisional enlightenment as I can offer. It is not simply that in the 34 years the world has moved on, the perspective has changed; that is a problem which the historian's whole skill is devoted to overcome. The difficulty is aggravated when the spectator cum minor actor in the drama of yesteryear puts on the historian's robe; for not only the world but he with it has changed.


Author(s):  
Sue Clayton

Sue Clayton worked with separated refugee youths between 2006 and 2017 as a film-maker and academic, and as more recently as a consultant for the BBC, ITV News and Channel 4 News. She has interviewed over 200 young refugees. This preface draws out themes from these interviews and uses the young people’s own words to tell their stories. The participants have been anonymised for reasons of privacy. These narratives are told in the way the young people wished to tell them. Together they present a collective picture of typical life journeys - hopes, fears and aspirations - which can be read to inform and inflect the chapters that follow which focus on young people’s experiences within immigration and welfare systems.


Comunicar ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (25) ◽  
Author(s):  
María-del-Rosario Fernández-Falero

The challenge of the electronic commerce for the new century is going to be the step to the digital television, so that we go away to having to adapt at the rate of a television been founded on the diffusion, to a set of services of digital video based on the access. Of this form, the spectator of television is going to meet the possibility of interacting with the way, which supposes a change in the industry of the broadcast, so then though till now they were the distribution companies of information and entertainment the only ones with possibilities of controlling such events, the possibility of interaction the way on the part of the spectators of the digital television it will allow them intervening in the diffusion of information, which supposes a significant change for the hearing of the television. The companies must elaborate contents directed a users who are going to have access to will: it is necessary to offer them what want, when they want - this is VOD (video on demand) - Then the digital television not only is going to modify the way of doing television, but also the way of seeing television. The electronic market is guaranteeing positions in the commercial Spanish panorama, growth that becomes clear in the increase so much of the number of users as of the volume of business, of the number of economic operations by Internet and of the number of web pages of companies dedicated to the trade across the Net. This positive evolution of the market shows how a way technologically so new as it is Internet, has allowed that in only 15 years it could speak about a historical evolution of the same one. This makes foresee that the step and evolution of the electronic market from Internet to the digital television could have a similar evolution in acceptance and consolidation. Finally, the future of the electronic commerce not only is subject to the appearance of new commercial models, but also to the technology; this way, the following step, technologically speaking, it is that of the digital television, which interactive and to allow to the user a use similar to that of Internet, does to the being that the challenge of the electronic trade is to go on to this way and to evolve in agreement with the characteristics of the same one. The first problem to which one is going to face this market is that of the user's change: in Spain the Internet user (according to the AECE, Spanish Association of Electronic Trade) is for the most part a male, with an age understood between 25 and 34 years; the television, nevertheless, is a very spread way and within reach of all, which will suppose a change both in the content and in the way of presenting the information (definitively, the product that is wanted to sell). El reto del comercio electrónico para el nuevo siglo va a ser el paso a la televisión digital, de manera que nos vamos a tener que adaptar al cambio de una televisión fundada en la difusión, a un conjunto de servicios de video digital basados en el acceso. De esta forma, el espectador de televisión se va a encontrar con la posibilidad de interactuar con el medio, lo que supone un cambio en la industria de la teledifusión, pues si bien hasta ahora eran las empresas distribuidoras de información y entretenimiento las únicas con posibilidades de controlar tales eventos, la posibilidad de interacción con el medio por parte de los espectadores de la televisión digital permitirá a estos intervenir en la difusión de información, lo que supone un cambio significativo para la audiencia de la televisión. Las empresas deben elaborar contenidos dirigidos a un usuario que va a tener acceso a voluntad: hay que ofrecerle lo que quiera, cuando quiera -es decir VOD (video on demand)- Luego la televisión digital no sólo va a modificar la forma de hacer televisión, sino también la forma de ver televisión. El mercado electrónico está afianzando posiciones en el panorama comercial español, crecimiento que se hace patente en el aumento tanto del número de usuarios como del volumen de negocio, del número de operaciones económicas por Internet y del número de páginas web de empresas dedicadas al comercio a través de la Red. Esta evolución positiva del mercado muestra cómo un medio tecnológicamente tan joven como es Internet, ha permitido que en apenas 15 años se pueda hablar de una evolución histórica del mismo. Esto hace prever que el paso y evolución del mercado electrónico desde Internet a la televisión digital pueda tener una evolución parecida en aceptación y consolidación. Finalmente, el futuro del comercio electrónico no sólo está sujeto a la aparición de nuevos modelos comerciales, sino también a la tecnología; así, el siguiente paso, tecnológicamente hablando, es el de la televisión digital, la cual por ser interactiva y permitir al usuario un uso parecido al de Internet, hace que el reto del comercio electrónico sea pasar a este medio y evolucionar de acuerdo con las características del mismo. Uno de los primeros problemas a los que se va a enfrentar este mercado es el del cambio de usuario: en España el usuario de Internet (según la AECE, Asociación Española de Comercio Electrónico)es mayoritariamente varón, con una edad comprendida entre 25 y 34 años; la televisión, sin embargo, es un medio muy difundido y al alcance de todos, lo que supondrá un cambio tanto en el contenido como en la forma de presentar la información (en definitiva, el producto que se desea vender).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Atkinson ◽  
Farzad Parsayi

In the study of film, Nöel Carroll (2001) coined the term the “paradox of suspense” to refer to a situation in which rewatching a film continues to invoke suspenseful feelings. According to the paradox, the tension associated with anticipation and uncertainty persists even though the spectator definitely knows what will happen (Carroll 2001). Many of the articles on the paradox and suspense examine the narrative events shaping spectator or player knowledge (Branigan 1992; Gerrig 1997; Ortony, Clore, and Collins 1988; Prieto-Pablos 1998; Smuts 2008; Yanal 1996), however, this paper takes a slightly different approach by addressing factors that contribute to the feeling of suspense irrespective of the awareness of specific narrative events. By examining videogames, we also shift the frame of reference from narration to gameplay and the way players prepare for suspenseful events. We argue that videogames require a particular attitude manifest in the gameplay that continues to foster suspense even in the replaying of a game.


Author(s):  
Claudia Schumann

AbstractThe paper explores the portrayal of social relations among youth in the popular Norwegian TV-series Skam and places this analysis in relation to Anne Imhof’s award-winning performance piece Faust, which received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale for the German Pavilion. As expressions of how today’s youth experience social relations under the conditions of late capitalism, I examine the way in which the TV-series and the performance work respectively explore when and how ‘we’ is shaped. I argue that they provide particular insight into the limits and possibilities for the formation of relations of solidarity today.


Author(s):  
Brian Willems

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009) sets up a dialectical situation which it then disrupts. This is important for two reasons. First, dialectic formations are often also assemblages or networks, meaning that their constituent parts are defined by how they interact with each other rather than by the essence which is withdrawn from such interactions. In the previous chapter, symbiosis was seen as a powerful tool for change. However, the way it was described often bordered on a dialectical structure, as did the doubling of double-vision and the contradiction of crisis energy. The Windup Girl offers a different strategy, the short circuit. In brief, this means that one of the terms of a symbiosis disrupts the symbiosis. This disruption takes the form of spatial and temporal tensions, as described above and developed below.


Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley

This chapter focuses on political passing, in which the specter of passing was utilized in Hollywood films produced in the context of the Cold War. Films about political passing called into question who was who and the nature of identity. The notion that somebody could pass politically mirrored fears about racial passing, complicated by postwar obsessions with Communism. The chapter examines how anti-Communist films such as My Son John and Woman on Pier 13 tackle the “enemy within” and portray Communists as caricatures, either gangster-like or hyperintellectual, thus making visible what was supposed to be an invisible threat. It also considers the way anti-Communism in Hollywood exploited anxieties that were linked to postwar ideas about identity.


2022 ◽  
pp. 252-272
Author(s):  
William Paul Bintz

This chapter describes recent research findings on homelessness in the United States and its relationship to poverty and other related factors. It also provides an introduction to text clusters, a curricular resource that includes high-quality and award-winning picture books and is anchored in the Way-In and Stay-In books. It continues by presenting a text cluster on the topic of homelessness, along with a variety of research-based instructional strategies that K-8 teachers can use with this text cluster, as well as with other text clusters on controversial issues. It ends with some final thoughts.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Emőke Simon

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial


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