The ‘impure’ auteur

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben McCann
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Film Production ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Historical Range

This opening chapter will contextualise the ‘Duvivier style’. It will look at his chief formative influence, André Antoine, whose influential theories on cinematic naturalism, location shooting, and performance authenticity was cultivated and developed by Duvivier throughout his career. The chapter will examine what makes a Duvivier film. Historians often make reference to Duvivier’s love of ‘work well done’ as his signature legacy and enduring film-making ethos. The chapter will introduce the key recognisable Duvivier traits: an expressive mise en scène, fluid camera movement and a complex negotiation of décor, strong central performances by stars and new actors, pessimistic narratives, incorporation of melodramatic elements (music, production design), and a film-by-film reliability. This analysis of Duvivier, beyond its historical range, also proposes to engage with key debates in film studies: notably auteurism, stardom and audience reception. The chapter will also look at how Duvivier fits into a history of both French national cinema and international film production. Duvivier’s genre eclecticism and lack of a coherent corpus should not be seen as a negative; instead, it is necessary to read Duvivier’s wide-ranging approach to genre and subject matter as a response to and engagement with important development in French and international film praxis.

The Classical Tradition in University Theatre

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari
Keyword(s):  
Art Education ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Greek Drama ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stage Performance ◽  
And Performance

This chapter surveys the history of classical Greek drama productions at the Department of Theatre Arts of Tel Aviv University as the basis for an exploration of the issue of theatre and art education. By analysing the students’ approach to classical Greek drama, we can see how they deal with the interpretative reading, translation, and performance of such texts on stage. We also see how the ancient works invite the students to delve more deeply into their distinctive content and forms; to draw links between theory and practice, and between text and context; to gain a deeper understanding of the issues of style and styling; and to engage in a richer experimentation with various aspects of stage performance—such as pronunciation, diction, voice, movement, music, and mise-en-scène.

Rob Roy: Britain’s First Feature Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Merz
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
English Language ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Film Making

What was the potential for the development of a Scottish film industry? Current histories largely ignore the contribution of Scotland to British film production, focusing on a few amateur attempts at narrative film-making. In this chapter, Caroline Merz offers a richer and more complex view of Scotland’s incursion into film production,. Using a case-study approach, it details a production history of Rob Roy, produced by a Scottish company, United Films, in 1911, indicating the experience on which it drew, placing it in the context of other successful British feature films such as Beerbohm’s Henry VIII, and noting both its success in Australia and New Zealand and its relative failure on the home market faced with competition from other English-language production companies.

VR technologies in docudrama

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-80
Author(s):  
Natalia G. Stezhko
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Music Score ◽  
Museum Guide ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
Artistic Image

The essay explores the implementation of VR technologies in film production, a development due to which audio-visual content, which is in high demand both in television and on the Internet, has taken a new direction, and which is a topical issue in contemporary film studies. VR technologies allow the viewer who sits on a swivel chair and wears a VR-helmet incorporating 360-degree rotating LCD monitors to watch different areas of action. A characteristic feature of VR content is a multi-sensory experience including sight, hearing, smell and touch. VR creates a digital reality with maximum sensory immersion. VR is different from cinema, theatre and 3D technologies: here the deception takes place not only at eye level but also at cerebral level. The essay argues that the use of VR technology is particularly successful in the genre of docudrama. A vivid confirmation of this argument is The Hermitage VR. An Immersion Into History (Russia,18 minutes). In this film, the dual nature of docudrama, which combines various elements of documentary and fiction cinema, allows to recreate historical eras, with the viewer becoming a witness to unique historic events. The films director Mikhail Antykov tells the history of the Hermitage Museum in a spectacular form, making the viewer empathize with the events they see through their VR glasses. The powerful artistic image is enhanced by the excellent acting of Konstantin Khabensky in the role of a mystical museum guide. Via facial expressions, gestures and gait, the actor conveys the emotions of a person walking through museum halls. Thoughtful re-enactment scenes representing various historical epochs, augmented by unusual camera angles, inventive lighting and music score, create a metaphor for time and give the viewer an illusion of participation in the unfolding events. Identifying the latest trends in film production, the essay demonstrates that VR technologies continue the evolution of screen arts which possess the potential to transform into an independent and profitable industry similar to traditional cinema. The author concludes that an increased interest in a national culture, little-known facts of history and the general historical heritage of a nation is a fertile source of content for the producers of VR-docudramas.

Pop Culture/Visual Culture

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Wanzo
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Feminist Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Feminist scholars in fields as varied as art history, film studies, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, communications, and performance studies have made important contributions to discussions about representations of gender and sexuality in everyday life. This chapter examines themes and issues in the feminist study of popular culture and visual culture, including: the history of sexist representation; the gendered nature of the “gaze” and the instability of that concept; the question of whether or not representation has effects; the anxieties surrounding consumption of “women’s texts”; and the challenges in deciphering women’s agency and authorship given constraints produced by institutions and ideology.

Genesis 1-11 in the Qatsi Film Trilogy

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-308
Author(s):  
Gregory Allen Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Cultural Interpretation ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Story

This chapter explores the ways cinema appropriates biblical motifs and transforms them, and how those motifs might be received and experienced by viewers. Insofar as it engages more fully film criticism and theory and inquires about audience reception, it reflects the so-called third wave of religion and film studies. While films have taken their inspiration from biblical narratives and characters since the medium’s invention, this contribution, following Adele Reinhartz’s lead, directs our attention to films whose biblical elements may be apparent only to those familiar with the Bible and its cultural interpretation. It focuses on Godfrey Reggio’s critically acclaimed Qatsi trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi), which represent cinematic transformations of the primeval history of Genesis 1–11. The ordering of the Cosmos, God’s declaration of its goodness, the command to the first humans to conquer and hold sway over it, human disobedience, the devolution of the created order into increasing violence, and the transgression of boundaries, including the building of the tower of Babel, are all echoed in these films. The films are transformations in the sense that they do not merely allude to the Genesis story or touch upon it in passing; they stay with the passages to which they allude, drawing out the implications of the text, wrestling with interpretive possibilities, offering visual metamorphoses that tantalize the modern imagination. While the character of the original story remains recognizably familiar, the cinematic vesture provides for dazzling transfigurations.

From Contextualisation to Categorisation of Animated Documentaries

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Pascal Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Production ◽  
New Journalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
Artificial Nature ◽  
Live Action

This chapter provides a wide-ranging account of animated documentary cinema’s evolution, one which relates that ongoing history to analogous developments in related fields including live-action documentary, painting, photography and New Journalism. By their overt artificial nature animated documentaries seem to challenge the traditional documentary epistemology. Lefèvre considers the extent to which established Film Studies conceptual and analytical paradigms offer pre-existing tools that contemporary scholars can readily transpose to the study of animated documentary. This essay questions if the animated documentaries still fit in the six categories or modes of documentary film production that Bill Nichols defined: the poetic, the expository, the observational, the participatory, the reflexive, and the performative mode. This chapter highlights many of the critical and conceptual questions which that partially obscured history raises, laying out ten distinct sets of logistical, aesthetic and ideological issues that repeatedly manifest themselves across the history of animated documentary filmmaking.

scholarly journals Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Driscoll ◽  
Joshua Diaz
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Computer Game ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Technical Process ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Personal Computing ◽  
Music Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
And Performance

Chiptune refers to a collection of related music production and performance practices sharing a history with video game soundtracks. The evolution of early chiptune music tells an alternate narrative about the hardware, software, and social practices of personal computing in the 1980s and 1990s. By digging into the interviews, text files, and dispersed ephemera that have made their way to the Web, we identify some of the common folk-historical threads among the commercial, noncommercial, and ambiguously commercial producers of chiptunes with an eye toward the present-day confusion surrounding the term chiptune. Using the language of affordances and constraints, we hope to avoid a technocratic view of the inventive and creative but nevertheless highly technical process of creating music on computer game hardware.

scholarly journals Post-Communist Romanian cinema: context and the turn to realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Iliescu
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Romanian Cinema ◽  
Everyday Reality ◽  
History Of Analysis ◽  
Film Critic

"Romanian cinema needs to start again from scratch. It has to regain a sense of everyday reality and it has to render truthfully an important slice of recent history which has been horribly falsified. A blast of Neorealism is practically a moral obligation for our cinema at this time in its history." - Eugenia Voda, film critic, 1995. Romanian film critic Eugenia Voda has made this nearly prophetic statement only five years after the end of Romania's communist regime. Yet more than prophetic, her remark was an appeal to filmmakers, and their conscious as well as conscientious sense of truth. Although more than ten years have passed since, her words often resonate in close association with recent Romanian films and their honest representation of social reality, unique in the history of Romanian cinema. But to what extent is recent Romanian cinema a national cinema? Given the Western history of analysis of foreign cinematic productions, any current examination of non-Western films within a Western theoretical context must be carried out in relation to the prior theoretical developments, debates, and conclusions within the national cinema framework. Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community' resides as foundation in the process of defining what is national (Anderson, 1983). When speaking of nationalist media, Anderson claims that while a nation is portrayed as a community, it is only an imagined one. Members of a nation do not all know each other, "yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 1983, p.6). From this perspective, cinema's popularity and ease of distribution has led to films becoming part of mass communications, and thus it can easily play a role in disseminating both national and nationalist ideals. persisted as a theoretical framework during the development and establishment of film studies as a Western academic discipline.

scholarly journals Рroduction and distribution of author's cinema in Ukraine as a state problem. Part 1. Film рroduction and problems of state administration of film industry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galina Pogrebniak
Keyword(s):  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Film Production ◽  
State Support ◽  
System Method ◽  
State Administration ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Distribution State ◽  
Film Making

The purpose of the article is to identify the problems of film production and distribution in Ukraine and to identify scientific guidelines that contribute to a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of Ukrainian authors’ cinema in the intercultural space. Research methodology. Methods of scientific analysis, comparison, generalization were used in the development of the topic. In addition, analytical and systematic methods were used in their unity, which is necessary to study the art aspect of the problem. The scientific novelty of the study is that the problem of author's film production and distribution in Ukraine in the context of the functioning of state support programs first appeared as the subject of a special study; the content of the concept of "film production" as certain specific integrity and unity of interconnected elements is argued; the works of Ukrainian film directors-authors, whose films were created with state support, are singled out and characterized; the expediency of using the system method in studying the peculiarities of the film-making process in Ukraine is proved; a comprehensive analysis was carried out and the features of author's film production in Ukraine and abroad were identified. Conclusions. Acquaintance with the materials presented in the article expands the arsenal of knowledge about the specifics of the author's film production and distribution in Ukraine and makes their use in training courses on the theory and history of cinema and directing. Keywords: Ukrainian cinema, film production, distribution, state support, director-authors.

scholarly journals Post-Communist Romanian cinema: context and the turn to realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Iliescu
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Romanian Cinema ◽  
Everyday Reality ◽  
History Of Analysis ◽  
Film Critic

"Romanian cinema needs to start again from scratch. It has to regain a sense of everyday reality and it has to render truthfully an important slice of recent history which has been horribly falsified. A blast of Neorealism is practically a moral obligation for our cinema at this time in its history." - Eugenia Voda, film critic, 1995. Romanian film critic Eugenia Voda has made this nearly prophetic statement only five years after the end of Romania's communist regime. Yet more than prophetic, her remark was an appeal to filmmakers, and their conscious as well as conscientious sense of truth. Although more than ten years have passed since, her words often resonate in close association with recent Romanian films and their honest representation of social reality, unique in the history of Romanian cinema. But to what extent is recent Romanian cinema a national cinema? Given the Western history of analysis of foreign cinematic productions, any current examination of non-Western films within a Western theoretical context must be carried out in relation to the prior theoretical developments, debates, and conclusions within the national cinema framework. Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community' resides as foundation in the process of defining what is national (Anderson, 1983). When speaking of nationalist media, Anderson claims that while a nation is portrayed as a community, it is only an imagined one. Members of a nation do not all know each other, "yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 1983, p.6). From this perspective, cinema's popularity and ease of distribution has led to films becoming part of mass communications, and thus it can easily play a role in disseminating both national and nationalist ideals. persisted as a theoretical framework during the development and establishment of film studies as a Western academic discipline.

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