Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media

Nearly from the start, cinema has registered, dramatized, and produced images of migration and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, movies have been fuelled by the movements of peoples thanks to the striking stories and images these always engender. After glancing at two distinct efforts in the 1960s in which cinema aimed to capture a mass phenomenon for a mass audience (one from Classic Hollywood, the other from the periphery of India), I will interrogate 21st-century strategies to come to terms with what the art form’s limitations may be. Can cinema get its arms around something so complex, multidimensional, and contested as migration? Jia Zhangke’s success in bringing internal Chinese migration to light may not be easily replicated by filmmakers in other nations faced with migration issues that cluster at their borders. Perhaps other art forms are naturally more capable in this regard. To isolate what cinema has done best, however, I will draw attention to films set on the edges of Europe.

Restricted vision: Censorship and cinematic resistance in Thailand

Film censorship screens the nation as a ‘way of seeing’ that is both fundamental to the art of governance and vulnerable to the flexibility of contemporary global images. In Thailand, this historically-conditioned regime arose in the geopolitics of the 1930 Film Act, the Motion Pictures and Video Act of 2008, and a coterminous regulation of visuality as a form of cultural governance. I pursue a close reading of two banned films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nontawat Numbenchapol, respectively, to illustrate the aesthetics of film censorship in light of the development of a national cinema, especially to consider the strategies that film-makers use to negotiate the governance of vision.

Instrumentation of Freud’s Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Semiotic, Iconic & Realism in context of Politics & Class Struggle in Modern Day Arts & Motion Pictures

This project-based research in the form of a visual essay along with reflective summary will gaze into the political aesthetics of art and history collaborated with its communicative approach and correlation in the global appearance. The motto of this essay is the representation of political aesthetics and class struggle through modern day arts, images and graphic from Psychoanalytic, semiotic, iconic, realism and Marxist viewpoint and their impacts on the communication and correlation. As images could be read from various perspectives, how the formalism and visual form of art alongside psychoanalytic and connoisseurship point of view could encounter the reflection as a limitation, would also be elaborated. In order to perform that and to achieve a concrete establishment according to the finding, thirteen images will be evaluated in relation to their political aesthetic to find out their influences, political aesthetics and class-struggle perspectives on global-scale appearances from Psychoanalytic, semiotic, iconic, symbolic, realism and Marxist viewpoint. Apart from the accomplishment of the evaluation of their nature of communication, this essay would also enlighten the theoretical dimension of arts and images in contrast to the point of interests.

Challenging the Roma Structural Discrimination: Deterritorialization Practices in Romanian Cinema

This paper examines the cinematographic reworking of memory spaces associated with power relations and structural injustice. The way in which space is represented and used as a medium that reflects power relations allows to question the space itself in cultural productions from Central-Eastern Europe when associated with Romani people (space and power relations, memory of slavery and discrimination, space and freedom, territoriality, space and its inhabitants, non-belonging, segregation, etc.). The paper focuses on motion pictures produced in the last decade in Romania, a prolific period due to the increasing interest for memory activism and to the multiplication of the cultural exploration of challenging topics. It aims to identify narrative, visual, and aesthetic expressions used as deterritorialization practices to stimulate relational remembrance and engagement with ongoing social inequality and structural injustice. Two short films – Alina Șerban’ s Bilet de iertare (Letter of forgiveness) and Adrian Silișteanu’s Scris/Nescris (Written/Unwritten) – and a western type film – Radu Jude’s Aferim!, winner of the Silver Bear for Best director at Berlinale in 2015, are analysed here.

UTICAJ AUTORSKOG PRAVA I PRAVA KONKURENCIJE NA ZAČETKE I USPON AMERIČKE FILMSKE INDUSTRIJE

In the period prior to the inclusion of motion pictures in copyright law in 1912, film producers had built their businesses on copying each other's films. Film pioneers were inventors, holders of patents right on equipment who did not perceive motion pictures as art, but as a scientific experiment. With the increasing growth of new media, protection of piracy became necessary. The Sherman Act of 1890 was the first Federal antitrust act. However, at the beginning it did not outlaw monopolistic business practices of film producers, which gave a major contribution to the formation and rise of Edison's trust and later, the Independent producers as well. During the First World War feature film became a standard in the film industry. Progresive increase of costs of production determined the decline of the European film industry, which could not catch up to US dominance.

Comparative Study of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca Film Adaptations. Chronotope of a “Castle”

The article performs the comparative study of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca film adaptations. It investigates motion pictures by A. Hitchcock (1940), R. Milani (2008) and B. Wheatley (2020). The analysis of the narrative-discursive techniques used by these authors aims to consider the problem of screen representation of the Rebecca’s specific spacetime model. The main investigated subject is the screen image of Manderley estate, its impact on diegesis, plot and symbolism in these movies. Manderley as an aesthetic complex corresponds to the chronotope of the “castle” in the interpretation of M. Bakhtin. Accordingly, the comparative study of the operations performed with it reveals the most important characteristics and traits of this spacetime model and shows how it applies with the detective genre or plots with a detective component. The “castle” as a spacetime structure that outlines the external boundaries and sets the internal laws of diegesis; its role in the “mystery” logics and the development of detective intrigue; “castle” as a plot-forming principle and metacharacter — all these questions concerned in terms of screen arts.

Coloured Views: Images of the New Zealand City and Town, 1880-1930

<p>"Coloured Views" is a comparative and multidisciplinary examination of the motives and methods of New Zealand's urban boosters between 1880 and 1930. It looks at the positive image of the country's cities and towns rendered in the literature and art of the period, and compares it with other British Dominions as well as with America. Such optimistic images were considered vital to urban growth by promoters who were intent on inducing increased immigration, tourism and investment to their cities and towns. In addition to economic motivation, it will also be argued that the boosters in New Zealand were imbued to an unusual degree by dreams of creating an urban utopia in their New World, one that was free from the influences of vices typically associated with the Old World. In examining perceptions of urban New Zealand, this thesis also attempts to revert the imbalance in New Zealand historiography which has generally ignored cities and towns or which has assumed that all debate about them was negative. It undertakes a study of a wide array of promotional sources, including material which has never before been examined, such as motion pictures and foreign language texts. "Coloured Views" attempts to show that cities and towns had their ardent defenders in New Zealand as well as their critics. The study concludes with an examination of modern booster techniques in order to emphasise the topicality of the subject matter.</p>

Coloured Views: Images of the New Zealand City and Town, 1880-1930

<p>"Coloured Views" is a comparative and multidisciplinary examination of the motives and methods of New Zealand's urban boosters between 1880 and 1930. It looks at the positive image of the country's cities and towns rendered in the literature and art of the period, and compares it with other British Dominions as well as with America. Such optimistic images were considered vital to urban growth by promoters who were intent on inducing increased immigration, tourism and investment to their cities and towns. In addition to economic motivation, it will also be argued that the boosters in New Zealand were imbued to an unusual degree by dreams of creating an urban utopia in their New World, one that was free from the influences of vices typically associated with the Old World. In examining perceptions of urban New Zealand, this thesis also attempts to revert the imbalance in New Zealand historiography which has generally ignored cities and towns or which has assumed that all debate about them was negative. It undertakes a study of a wide array of promotional sources, including material which has never before been examined, such as motion pictures and foreign language texts. "Coloured Views" attempts to show that cities and towns had their ardent defenders in New Zealand as well as their critics. The study concludes with an examination of modern booster techniques in order to emphasise the topicality of the subject matter.</p>

Humour in Film as a Method of Expression

Living in a social world, we experience feelings and react to others’ feelings as they appear to us. For instance, we have all smiled since we were babies. The first “genuine” social smile typically occurs sometime between weeks 6 and 8, as a response to recognizing someone very special: Mom or Dad (Kail, V., Robert & Cavanaugh, John C., 2019). We see, we are happy, we smile. We are born with the desire to be happy. Humankind has searched for different revelations of happiness, and this is how humour was born. From ancient times to the present day, humour has been an instrument of communication, a social behaviour that is an integral part of mass media and social interaction. Humour provides a reciprocal influence. It is a way to interpret information as well as a specific media that can be used to convey this information. What happens to the media once it is "infected" by humour? Does humour necessarily satisfy the need for entertainment? Can humour have a "serious face"? Is it true that "Humour is always a monopoly of the semi-literate" (McLuhan, 2016)? This essay will explore the above-mentioned topics from the perspective of the humour applied in motion pictures, during the interwar era. It will specifically discuss the genre of satire using as a case study the humour found in Latin America during that time as evidenced in the movie Tararira, the film of Benjamin Fondane produced by Falma Film in Buenos Aires in 1936.