Shi-nematic afterimages: semiocapitalism and Chinese cine-cities

In this essay, we revisit our interdisciplinary approach to the “becoming-cinema” of Chinese life and cities in the contemporary era, while critically revisiting our notion of “shi-nema” (which combines the Chinese concept of “shi” (势) with a detoured notion of “cinematicity”) which we forward as a provocative “image for thought” that explodes the concerns of modern film studies. Revisiting our multi-scalar fractal method, on this outing we specifically engage with a nexus of new semiocapitalist images and urban sites/sights that foreground how rapidly the psychogeographic circumstances in post-socialist Chinese cine-cities evolve and mutate. Our essay opens with a fresh film-philosophy conceptualisation of “afterimages”, blending cinematic, city and conceptual varieties before moving on to critically engage with a new constellation of interviews and images drawn from Chinese film, television, streaming platforms, social media and commercial real estate apps.

Sweet Suburbia and the Bustling City

This paper focuses on the representation of Wellington in New Zealand tourism films in the decades preceding the establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941. While critically engaging with current discourses about early New Zealand film production, New Zealand film history, New Zealand human geography and the cinematic city, it performs the textual analysis of eight case studies also examining archival materials related to their production, circulation and reception. This article aims to demonstrate how the cinematic depiction of New Zealand’s capital city in the analysed time frame was a complex and multi-layered process driven and characterised by the coexistence and intertwining of tourism marketing, national publicity and colonial agenda.

Mapping The Cinematic City. Adana In Yilmaz Güney's Film

As a structural element of cinema narration, space has always been a part of the film. On the other hand, the film and cinema studies have been the subject of interdisciplinary studies because of its layered and holistic structure. The cinematic geographies tend to use cartography, which has a novel method in the context of cinematic narration. This is because the director does not only use cinematic cityscapes and cinematic landscapes as a background but as the narration itself. This study aims to look at what cinematic geographies are and how its methodology can be applied to a specific director, namely Yılmaz Güney and to an understanding of locality. In this study, a Yılmaz Güney’s film, Seyyit Han: Toprağın Gelini (Seyyit Han: Bride of The Earth, 1968), shoot in Adana are mapped by the cartographic method and then are analyzed contextually. Findings will be discussed through a triangulation of data collected from oral history and cartographic methods. In the conclusion part, cinematic Adana in the frame of Güney’s the movie and present physical Adana as a form of memory will be evaluated by the contextual film analysis method.

Emotional branding analysis for the Korean Drama-based tourism locations

City branding is an effort to build a particular image of a city. Semarang is one of Indonesia’s big cities that has not yet succeeded in finding the right brand to represent it. The researcher has conducted a pilot research study that aims to build Semarang’s city branding as The Cinematic City. It is due to Semarang’s background of often becoming a shoot location for famous movies. South Korea is well known because of its pop cultures, such as drama. Drama is one of the main factors that contribute to the increasing number of foreign visitors. They mostly visit popular drama shooting locations as their destinations. These kinds of tourism site are successful at developing emotional branding in the visitor’s minds. Looking at the similarity of South Korea and Semarang will help Semarang to learn a lot from what South Korea has done. This research aims to analyse how emotional branding represented through the Korean drama-based tourism site gimmicks. This research used the Emotional Branding theory by Marc Gobe. It assumed that emotional bonding is an essential thing in terms of engaging the customer and product in a particular phase. The main subjects of this research are the gimmicks in Nami Island. The result shows that the Relationship Aspect fulfilled by changing the theme and properties according to the season. For the Five Senses Experience, it only employs the sense of sight and touch by creating many gimmicks that can be a photo-taking hot spot. The Imagination aspect fulfilled by the unique design of the Emotional Identity put forward, such as the snowman.

Drones over Pompeii: cinematic perspectives on antiquity in the digital era

Cityscapes have always been an important part of films set in antiquity, but little attention has yet been paid to the way in which digital cinema uses the ancient city to offer different kinds of access to the past. This article explores how twenty-first century cinema sees the city and apprehends history in new ways in films including Pompeii (2014), Agora (2009), and Gladiator (2000). It focuses on how digital cinema affords the opportunity to ‘see’ the past from above, a quintessentially modern perspective which prompts a range of important questions about the viewer’s relationship to history. The aerial view of the cinematic city encourages reflection on our familiarity with an ancient city, by utilizing the imagery and techniques of digital mapping and virtual reality reconstructions; and it explores our ability to gain mastery over the past, privileging godlike omniscience over the immersiveness that usually characterizes contemporary film. Finally, adopting the perspective of the drone, it suggests a more disturbing, dehumanized version of the past – and future. The discourse around these cinematic cities prompts important and timely consideration of whether digital technology necessarily improves our access to the past, or rather compromises it.

Metrópoles em crise e formação de uma cinecidade nos cinemas brasileiro e argentino // Metropolises in crisis and formation of a cinecity (cinecidade) in the Brazilian and Argentine cinema

O artigo busca elucidar como as representações das metrópoles, na cinematografia contemporânea do Brasil e da Argentina, chegam a formar uma paisagem simbólica contínua e um único ambiente imaginário: a cinecidade, que se refere à significação resultante da produção de um sentido cultural próprio e comum para as cidades tematizadas cinematograficamente. A ideia resulta da articulação dos conceitos de cidades contínuas (CALVINO, 1990), cidade cinemática (COSTA, 2002) e cidade imaginária (PRYSTHON, 2006) e aplica-se, aqui, à análise de duas cidades: São Paulo e Buenos Aires, onde o espaço urbano fílmico surge como distópico e marcado por problemas sociais como desemprego, corrupção e violência, compondo assim uma cidade comum em crise. Entre os filmes comentados na análise estão – Mundo Grúa, Pizza, Birra, Faso, Linha de Passe e O Invasor. This paper seeks to elucidate how the representation of metropolises in the contemporary cinematography from Brazil and Argentina form a continuous symbolic landscape and a single imaginary environment: the cinecity. Addressing the signification resultant from creation of a cultural meaning proper and common to the cities cinematographically approached, this idea derived from an articulation of three concepts: continuous cities (CALVINO, 1990), cinematic city (COSTA, 2002) and imaginary city (PRYSTHON, 2006). Here, it is applied to two cities: São Paulo and Buenos Aires, where the urban filmic space emerges as dystopian and is marked by social problems as unemployment, corruption and violence, comprising a single city in crisis. Among the movies analysed are: Mundo Grúa, Pizza, Birra, Faso, Linha de Passe and O Invasor.