Las ciudades fílmicas de Lisbon Story y Caro diario: construcciones íntimas de espacios públicos

In The Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino describes the fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Kan, where the Venetian describes invented cities to Mongol emperor. Throughout the report, He confesses that when he talks about cities, he introduces aspects of Venice. Cinema remakes cities in the same way, with aspects of reality added to the vision of the artists, creating a texture in film projection. The mise-en-scène brings up a catalogue of cities, which become filmic, being invisible outside the cinema.This research comparatively analyses two cities, captured by the camera at the same height, using the Aesthetics of the Materials as a Method: The Rome of Caro diario (1993) by Nanni Moretti and the Lisbon of Lisbon Story (1994) by Wim Wenders.The two views, that of the native (Nanni Moretti) and of the foreigner (Friedrich Munro), make the appearance of public space intimate and personal through a construction with audio (sound and music) and image (movie sets, settings and costumes). This vision shows an ontological appearance of the city within a relational texture, which can be translated as a Crystallization of the mise-en-scène in film projection. Bodies, sounds and objects are transformed by linking to the aspects evoked by the city: city and memory, city and desire, city and architecture…

THE KEY FEATURES OF THE AESTHETIC OF J. VAL DEL OMAR’S AUTHOR CINEMA (ON THE CASE STUDY OF THE FILM TRILOGY “ELEMENTARY TRIPTYCH OF SPAIN”)

The author analyzed the symbolic narrative of the films and the cinematic technologies, which were developed by J. Val del Omar for his film trilogy. This study revealed that the use of the suggestive metaphorics of Spanish poetry (St. John of the Cross, F. García Lorca, Rosalía de Castro) and the artistic heritage of Spanish mysticism dominates in his film aesthetics. As a result, the film director created an allegorical multidimensional narrative about the stages of the spiritual path of a person and as well as about the specifics of the national spirit of the Spain’s different regions. Such a multi-layered artistic image was modeled by the film director with support of creatively transformed transmedia techniques, as well as through the introduction of mystical-surreal strategies, which were implemented in the associative montage of metaphorical images and in the reactualization of the country's folklore heritage. To complete implementation of this artistic program, called by the film director “mecha-mystiс”, he developed immersive innovative cinematic technologies of multi-screen film projection, “tactile vision” and “diaphonic sound”.

Crafting the extraordinary: site-specificity and liveness

‘Experiential’ forms of exhibition use liveness and site-specificity as strategies to valorize the eventfulness of an engagement with film. This chapter explores different practices and intentions of eventful cinema. It first examines liveness as a power struggle between exhibitor and text, which needs to be understood in relation to the showmanship tradition of early and classical eras. It then discusses site-specific screenings, considering different ways to modulate the encounter between environment and film projection, from the diegetically immersive to the distracted and relaxed. Finally, it returns to intermediality as a creative opportunity generated by non-theatrical exhibition.

Film Projection and the Sacred Geography of Site-Specific Cinema in Contemporary Thailand

This chapter is about outdoor projectionists in Thailand and draws on in-depth interviews with four individuals running outdoor projection businesses and fieldwork observations of their work and that of others at different locations around the country: in the northeastern provinces of Khon Kaen and Udonthani, the central province of Samut Prakhan, and the suburbs of Bangkok. The chapter examines a widespread form of projection practice that is not embedded within institutions of commercial entertainment, but which thrives within a ritual economy of transactions between humans and a complex cosmology of supernatural personages. The chapter contributes to an expanded historiography of film projection and presentation that would include a wider range of locations and a more complex understanding of the diversity of projection and display technologies and practice. In particular it takes up Brian Larkin’s invitation to ‘take the religious field seriously as a determinant of the evolution of what cinema does’.

James Benning Goes Digital

James Benning’s turn from 16mm filmmaking to digital filmmaking after his RR (2007) released the already prolific Benning from his struggles with 16mm film projection and print damage and unleashed a new wave of digital productivity. This interview explores Benning’s many digital films, including the several films that are part of his Two Cabins project (focusing on the cabins, lives, and writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski), his Warhol-inspired portrait films—After Warhol (2011), Twenty Cigarettes (2011)—his three-hour-plus “single-shot” film, BNSF (2012), his cine-exploration of Vienna’s Naturhistorischesmuseum, and his personal epic, 52 Films (2015), an adventure into modifying a broad range of online postings from the internet—originally designed to be presented on fifty-two computers, but so far, shown mostly as interactive screenings with Benning present.

Sounds of the Projection Box: Liner Notes for a Phonographic Method

In order to document, investigate and analyse the soundscape of the analogue projection box before it passes into history, a series of audio recordings was made within functioning boxes, a selection of which have been released as an ‘album’. The recordings, made in UK boxes that maintain both 35mm film projection and digital projection, also capture the shifting sonic texture of this environment as it changes from primarily analogue to primarily digital operation. This article explores the role of phonographic field recording as a practical methodology within a film historical research project that investigates the role of the film projectionist and cinematic projection throughout the history of cinema exhibition in the UK. It proposes a set of systematic principles for approaching the use of phonographic field recording in this context, and shows how they may be applied. Through an analysis of both the recordings themselves and the experience of making the recordings, it extracts some observations regarding the character, history and culture of the projection box as a lived environment and workplace. Just as cinema-goers seldom get to see inside this hidden room at the back of the auditorium, these sound recordings also reveal it to be a soundproofed box, a noisy environment in which the interface between operator and machine takes audible form, in which noise of one sort indicates smooth operation, while another sort indicates faults that need to be addressed. The article considers the legibility of noise and proposes that the relationship between projectionist and machine is significantly aural as well as visual and tactile.

The Pagan-Christian Admixture in Romeo Castellucci's Oedipus the Tyrant

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci presented Oedipus the Tyrant at the Schaubühne in Berlin. His staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of 1804, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. In this article Keld Hyldig examines how Castellucci, in a response to Hölderlin's translation and commentaries on the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical and philosophical confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy was the basis of a metatheatrical complexity, which was reinforced through a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, making the relation between physical reality and fictional representation problematic. Keld Hyldig is an Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen. He has published several articles about the Ibsen tradition in Norwegian theatre and is currently working on a monograph on that subject.

Philosophical Theatricality: Castellucci’s staging of Hölderlin’s Oedipus the Tyrant

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci staged Oedipus the Tyrant at Schaubühne in Berlin. The staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. The article examines how Castellucci in continuation of Hölderlin’s translation and commentaries to the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical – and philosophical – confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy formed the base of a metatheatrical and philosophical complexity in and between different approaches to knowledge. The philosophical complexity of the staging was reinforced through other metatheatrical elements, as for example a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, which made the relation between physical reality and fictional representation an issue.

Philosophical Theatricality: Castellucci’s staging of Hölderlin’s "Oedipus the Tyrant"

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci staged Oedipus the Tyrant at Schaubühne in Berlin. The staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. The article examines how Castellucci in continuation of Hölderlin’s translation and commentaries to the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical – and philosophical – confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy formed the base of a metatheatrical and philosophical complexity in and between different approaches to knowledge. The philosophical complexity of the staging was reinforced through other metatheatrical elements, as for example a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, which made the relation between physical reality and fictional representation an issue.