scholarly journals Training in Accessible Filmmaking

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Romero-Fresco
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Audiovisual Translation ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Ken Loach ◽  
Current Proposal

Accessible filmmaking (AFM), that is, the integration of audiovisual translation (AVT) and media accessibility (MA) into the filmmaking process through collaboration between filmmakers and translators/MA experts, has developed significantly over the past few years. It has been endorsed by filmmakers such as Ken Loach and institutions such as the British Film Institute (BFI), which has decided to embrace it as a key element in the production of films and the training of future filmmakers. However, current training in AFM is at best anecdotal. This article aims to address this gap by proposing two different courses on AFM. By way of introduction, section 2 sets the background with an analysis of the reasons behind the division between film and AVT/MA. Special attention is paid to the invisibility of AVT/MA in Film Studies and to the new AVT/MA-aware notion of film that underpins the current proposal for AFM training. Sections 3 and 4 provide an overview of the training currently available in AVT/MA and film(-making). Finally, section 5 offers an account of the first pioneering attempts to provide AFM training and, most importantly, a proposed outline for two different courses designed to equip accessible filmmakers and translators/MA experts with the required skills and competences to apply the AFM model.

scholarly journals Dossier on Govan Young : Exploring children's historical consciousness through film and archaeology

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen T. Driscoll ◽  
Catherine Doherty ◽  
Mia Perry
Keyword(s):  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Film Making

Govan Young (2017) is a 30-minute documentary in which schoolchildren from Glasgow learn of the area's important but largely unknown medieval history. This dossier brings together four essays that reflect on the film from various academic perspectives – film studies, archaeology and education – to explore how schoolchildren might learn about the past, and develop a historical consciousness, by participating in film-making projects. The dossier also reflects on how educators can learn from those whom they are supposedly teaching, thereby highlighting that experimental pedagogical projects often bring unexpected learning outcomes into being. Consequently, educators must resist the pressures to predict the outcomes of projects, and must strive to keep the future open-ended.

Transforming the Schizophrenic through Cinematic Therapy

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Eileen Anastasia Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Mental Wellbeing ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Creative Project ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mental Health Patients ◽  
Film Making

The author shares her directorial experience in the making of her short film where she invited her aunt to participate in the production process. As her aunt had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the past and was going through depression when the film was planned, it was supposed that perhaps the film-making process would help improve her mental health with her being part of a creative project. From script-writing, to acting, and even animating, the author had fully engaged her aunt from start to finish. The essay documents the author’s reflections of her aunt’s participation and how her sense of mental wellbeing improved dramatically as the film project progressed. The issue of exploitation is also considered in the essay as there is a difference between engagement and empowerment as opposed to deception and participation. Though the film did not win any awards at the 48-Hour Film Festival; the cinematic therapy experience highlighted the potential of seeking new pathways in supporting mental health patients.

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Recording Device ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Copyright Laws ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Literature And Film

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Gustavo Procopio Furtado
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Film Archives ◽  
Point Of Departure

The introduction offers an overview of the documentary in contemporary Brazil and discusses the significance of archive concepts for the documentary in general and for Brazilian documentaries in particular. The archive has been undervalued as a heuristic concept in documentary film studies, which have tended to discuss it only in the literal sense of film archives and to speak of repurposed footage. The documentary, however, has an inherent affinity with the concept of the archive that becomes crucial in the work of many filmmakers. Taking Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked For Death/Twenty Years Later, 1964–1985) as a point of departure, the introduction argues that the documentary has a Janus-faced relationship with the archive, at once producing lasting records for the future and de-archiving materials from the past, returning what was hidden and stored away to the present.

The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Logical Extension ◽  
As If

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

Passenger in transit

1982 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Tito Valenzuela
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Mining Area ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
The Past ◽  
The University ◽  
In Transit ◽  
The Military ◽  
Film Making

This second piece by a Latin American about exile explores through that experience many aspects of his people's ‘personality’ and the events leading to exile. Tito Valenzuela is a 37-year-old Chilean poet and … now … novelist. After studying painting and graphic design at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Chile in Santiago, he worked during the years of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in film-making and television. A book of his poetry was published in 1971, and more appeared in an anthology of work by young Chilean poets in 1972. At the time of the military coup of 11 September 1973 he was working on a film on the nitrate mining area of northern Chile. During the coup the military raided his home, removing books and manuscripts. After living clandestinely for several months, Tito left the country for Peru. Unable to remain there he took up an offer by the United Nations to go to Rumania. Finding the atmsophere there restrictive and stifling, he left for Sweden, where he worked in a ham factory, then travelled on to Berlin and finally London in 1975. After a long battle with British immigration authorities he was given permission to stay. Pasajero en transito (‘Passenger in Transil’) is Tito Valenzuelas's first novel, as yet unpublished. It concerns a young Chilean photographer, Ignacio (García, who is exiled (like the author) first in Bucharest and then in Stockholm. The protagonist's profession is itself an image of his psychological state, where the past freezes in the present, tending to mystification and distortion. By tracing Ignacio's obsessions in exile and the deterioration in the past of his relationship with Soledad … who disappears during the first days of the coup … the novel explores the Chile of both Allende and the months following the coup, as well as exile itself. The extract we publish finds Ignacio in Bucharest, playing chess with another exile, Pedro ‘El Peluca’ Morales, whose situation is also producing crisis and domestic rupture. Certain references need explanation. Chileans make great use of nicknames, and most of the characters are referred to by these. El Peluca means ‘the wig’. Loco ‘crazy’ and El Caluga ‘the candy’ (as in sweet). Others have been translated - The Philologist, the Marquis. Coco is untranslatable. Huevón is the all-purpose Chilean interpolation, used incessantly, affectionately and in anger. Literally obscene, it means ‘big balls’. El Pedagogico is the Instituto Pedagogico, the Teacher Training Institute in Valparaiso. The Lebu was a ship used by the military as a prison during the military coup. Milico is slang for military. The tanquetazo was the attempted coup carried out by a tank regiment in June 1973.

scholarly journals UK/European Co-productions: The Case of Ken Loach

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-389
Author(s):  
Huw David Jones
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
Transnational Cinema ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Media Distribution ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Ken Loach ◽  
Box Office Performance

Ken Loach stands out as one of the few British directors whose films are regularly co-produced with European partners. Of the nineteen films he has directed since 1990, fourteen have been UK/continental European co-productions. This article draws on interviews with Loach's long-term producer Rebecca O'Brien, content analysis of his films and the statistical analysis of box-office data to examine how and why Loach came to work with continental European co-production partners and how these partnerships have affected the cultural identity of his films and their box-office performance. It argues that while some of Loach's co-production partnerships were initiated for creative reasons, most have proceeded on a ‘finance-only’ basis, whereby the partners have had very little creative input into his films. Co-production has therefore allowed Loach to continue making ‘culturally British’ films without the creative interference which often comes with this mode of film-making. This creative freedom has been vital in terms of maintaining Loach's reputation as one of Europe's leading auteurs and attracting the attention of film festivals like Cannes and Berlin, which in turn has played a key role in the marketing of his films and increasing their admissions in key continental European territories. Co-production has also boosted the performance and circulation of Loach's films in mainland Europe by making it easier to access EU MEDIA distribution support. These findings not only offer new insights into Loach's films in terms of their production, content and reception, but also contribute to wider debates surrounding co-production and transnational cinema.

scholarly journals Harnessing the power of fusion? A valiant but flawed effort to obviate the need for a distinct mental health law

2014 ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Paul S. Appelbaum
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Differential Treatment ◽  
Health Law ◽  
Involuntary Hospitalization ◽  
Mental Health Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Medical Disorders ◽  
Current Proposal

<p>When it comes to involuntary interventions, the notion that people with mental disorders should be treated identically to persons with general medical disorders has an undoubted appeal. As Dawson and Szmukler have argued previously, principles of fairness and non-discrimination would appear to be well served by basing involuntary hospitalization and treatment in both contexts on incapacity to provide consent. In this commentary, I take note of some of the intellectual forebears of the Szmukler, Daw, and Dawson proposal, and ask why – despite the formidable intellects that have lined up behind similar approaches in the past – they have not been adopted. I also consider some aspects of the current proposal itself, including the unresolved tensions between equal and differential treatment of persons with mental disorders, and the potential practical consequences, especially for persons with general medical disorders. I conclude that the rationale for fusing two disparate bodies of law may itself be irremediably flawed, and the undesirable consequences significant.</p><p> </p><p> </p>

scholarly journals Ken Loach and the Comedians: The Politics of ‘Acting’

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-302
Author(s):  
Neil Archer
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Ken Loach ◽  
Theoretical Considerations

This article explores a gap in the scholarship on Ken Loach's film-making, focusing on his casting of comedians in central roles and the specific impacts of such casting strategies across Loach's work. While the relevance of such casting to Loach's project has been anecdotally acknowledged in criticism, this article recommends a more systematic historical and aesthetic approach. After summarising the theoretical considerations around acting as a practice and its ‘problem’ within Loach's terms, I consequently look at the broader institutional and political contexts of actor preparation training and casting in British television and film since Loach's emergence as a director in the 1960s, and the relevance of comedian casting within these. Drawing on a sample of Loach's films, I then offer a more systematic analysis of how the comedian's body, voice and action signify, examining how such ‘realist’ performances respond to the cultural conventions of ‘trained’ actor practice, as well as the narrative and broader institutional conventions of comedy performance in mainstream film.

scholarly journals The virtual cultural tourist: Film-induced tourism and Kubo and the Two Strings

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Dennis Yeo
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Tourist Destination ◽  
The Past ◽  
Culture History ◽  
Destination Choices ◽  
Cinematic Experience ◽  
Stop Motion ◽  
Cultural Tourist

Over the past two decades, there has been growing research in film-induced tourism. Much of this research is focused on how film influences tourist destination choices. There has been less emphasis, however, on the nature and types of movies that may induce this attraction to such locations. By examining Kubo and the Two Strings (Knight, 2016), a stop-motion animation produced by Laika Studios, this paper aims to apply film studies to explore current understandings of film-induced tourism. This paper argues that Kubo is itself a form of film-induced tourism by positioning the viewer as a virtual cultural tourist whose cinematic experience may be likened to a veritable media pilgrimage through Japanese culture, history and aesthetics. The movie introduces the viewer into an imagined world that borrows from origami, Nō theatre, shamisen music, obon rituals and Japanese symbolism, philosophy and mythology. The resulting pastiche is a constructed diorama that is as transnational and postmodern as it is authentic and indigenous.

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