Mumbai Noir

2015 ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Omar Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Film Genre ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
Crime Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Slumdog Millionaire ◽  
Gangster Film ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies how, over the last ten years, Indian cinema has seen an explosion in urban-based crime films. A haunting and gripping study of the Mumbai underworld, Satya (1998) was the catalyst for the Mumbai noir film genre. Satya has influenced many recent films in terms of both style and tone, including most pertinently Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008). A cult film abroad, Satya was an unexpected commercial success at the box office. The chapter approaches Satya from a range of perspectives, including the rise of Ram Gopal Varma as a genre provocateur and producer; the production contexts, genre, and the relationship with the American gangster film; the gangster as tragic hero; and finally, the significance the film holds as heralding a new vanguard of talented writers, directors, and actors.

Representing Terrorism

2015 ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Omar Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
The Third ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Tamil Cinema ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores Mani Ratnam's 1998 film Dil Se (From the Heart) to engage critically with changing representations of terrorism in contemporary Indian cinema. Mani Ratnam is recognised by many critics and the Indian film industry as one of its finest and most commercially successful film-makers. Dil Se was Ratnam's first Hindi film and the third part in a loose trilogy of films dealing with the relationship between nationalism, terrorism, and urban violence. The chapter then looks at regional film-making in India, particularly Tamil cinema. It also considers Mani Ratnam's concerns as an auteur, the music of Dil Se and composer A.R. Rahman, and perhaps most importantly, the impact the film had at the UK box office with the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) audience.

scholarly journals Američki gangster: „Crnački don“ kao socio-kulturna kontradikcija

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Dragana Antonijević
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Gangster Film ◽  
Cultural Contradictions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Generic Analysis

The paper analyzes the film American Gangster (2007), directed by Ridley Scott. The film tells the story of the life of the black gangster Frank Lucas, an extraordinary, intelligent and capable man. At the beginning of the paper I give a comment on the reasons for choosing this particular film, after that I give a diegesis of the film which includes a brief biography of Frank Lucas which represents one of the contexts for the analysis and the basic synopsis of the film. After this, a generic analysis is applied – it gives the most important elements of the gangster film genre and their brief history, in order to convey which of these are present in the analyzed film. Within the confines of the genre, two specific issues are considered in detail: historical reconstruction and the mythologization of the gangster through the folklorization and popularization of the character. The contextual analysis is dedicated to the relationship between criminal activity, competition, aggression, and the "American dream" as an ideal and a way of life. On the other hand, the issue of ethnic and especially black criminal activity in American ghettos is considered as the context within which Lucas operated. The semantic analysis summarizes some of the basic socio-cultural contradictions in the movie, and determines its ideological framework and message.

Devotional Transformation

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Ravi Vasudevan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The Status ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on the specific Indian cinematic form of the Hindu devotional film genre to explore the relationship between cinema and religion. Using three important early films from the devotional oeuvre—Gopal Krishna, Sant Dnyaneshwar, and Sant Tukaram—as the primary referent, it tries to understand certain characteristic patterns in the narrative structures of these films, and the cultures of visuality and address, miraculous manifestation, and witnessing and self-transformation that they generate. These three films produced by Prabhat Studios between the years 1936 and 1940 and all directed by Vishnupant Damle and Syed Fattelal, drew upon the powerful anti-hierarchical traditions of Bhakti, devotional worship that circumvented Brahmanical forms. This article will argue that the devotional film crucially undertakes a work of transformation in the perspectives on property, and that in this engagement it particularly reviews the status of the household in its bid to generate a utopian model of unbounded community. The article will also consider the status of technologies of the miraculous that are among the central attractions of the genre, and afford a reflection on the relation between cinema technology, popular religious belief and desire, and film spectatorship.

Pitchfork’s authenticity problem: the critical reception of Vampire Weekend and Lil Wayne

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Murray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article turns a critical eye on the arguments deployed by Pitchfork, one of the most popular music websites, when reviewing two artists: Vampire Weekend and Lil Wayne. Rhetorically analyzing the reception of these two artists is illuminating because both had indie breakouts in 2008, both release genre-spanning music, and both have had over a decade of commercial success. However, Vampire Weekend’s whiteness enables them to benefit from authenticity tropes that are unavailable to Lil Wayne. The analysis will show how Lil Wayne is essentialized as a rapper who is unauthorized to move beyond that genre. Overall, this article examines authenticity as the rhetorical move by which exclusion is constructed and highlights how assumptions about the relationship between race and performance are key to arguments about artistry.

Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Neve
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cooperative Activity ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.

Criminal Undertakings: Nicolas Winding Refn, European Film Aesthetics, and Hollywood Genre Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 370-377
Author(s):  
Björn Nordfjörd
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
Box Office ◽  
American Films ◽  
The World ◽  
Gangster Film ◽  
Film Aesthetics

This chapter explores Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Refn’s first feature Pusher (1996) was a local box-office success that helped usher in the era of the Nordic crime film, which includes his own follow-up Bleeders (1998) and two Pusher sequels (2004 and 2005). His American crime and gangster film, Drive (2011), is set in Los Angeles and is indebted to notable American classics of the genre. Reunited with Hollywood star Ryan Gosling, Refn continued to explore the international pedigree of the crime thriller in Only God Forgives (2013), where Gosling plays an American struggling to stay afloat in the Bangkok underworld. In Neon Demon (2016), Refn returns to Los Angeles, this time the world of fashion, where Hollywood gloss and European film aesthetics meet head-on. His three “American” films thus offer a striking blend of Hollywood genre and European art cinema traditions helping to explain their wildly mixed receptions.

The Trauma of Partition

2015 ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Omar Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Indian Cinema ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Satyajit Ray ◽  
Indian Art

This chapter shifts the focus to Indian art cinema with the Marxist work of Bengali director and iconoclast Ritwik Ghatak. The impressive Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star, 1960) is his best-known film. Dealing directly with the trauma of partition and its effects on a Bengali family, Ghatak's cinema is bold, uncompromising, and occupies a unique position in Indian cinema. Although his work is still somewhat overshadowed by that of Satyajit Ray, another masterful Bengali film-maker, and though many of his films are still sadly unavailable on DVD in the UK, Megha Dhaka Tara is now recognised as one of the key works of Indian art cinema. The chapter discusses numerous aspects, including Ghatak's position as a film-maker; the wider historical context such as the partition of Bengal; the relationship between melodrama and feminist concerns; the film's categorisation as an example of 1960s counter cinema; and the thematic importance of the family to the film's narrative.

scholarly journals Movie Production Efficiency Moderating between Online Word-of-Mouth and Subsequent Box Office Revenue

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 6602
Author(s):  
Sangjae Lee ◽  
Joon Yeon Choeh
Keyword(s):  
Production Efficiency ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Linear Regression Analysis ◽  
Ensemble Methods ◽  
Prediction Performance ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
K Nearest Neighbors ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Online Word Of Mouth ◽  
The Relationship

The studies are almost nonexistent regarding production efficiency of movies which is determined based on the relationship between movie resources powers (powers of actors, directors, distributors, and production companies) and box office. Our study attempts to examine how efficiency moderates the relationship between eWOM (online word-of-mouth) and revenue, and to show the difference in prediction performance between efficient and inefficient movies. Using data envelopment analysis to suggest efficiency of movies, movie efficiency negatively moderates the effects of review depth and volume on subsequent box office revenue compensating negative effects of smaller box office in previous period while efficiency exert a positive moderating effect on the influences of review rating and the number of positive reviews on revenue. This shows that review depth and volume are affected by the slack of movie resources powers for inefficient movies, and high rating and positive response for efficient movies to affect revenue. The results of decision trees, k-nearest-neighbors, and linear regression analysis based on ensemble methods using eWOM or movie variables indicate that the movies with the inefficient movie resources powers are providing greater prediction performance than movies with efficient movie resources powers. This show that diverse variation in the efficiency of movie resources powers contributes to prediction performance.

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