Screening Europe in Australasia

This book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as always having dominated global film culture through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, and brings it vividly to life. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema, Francesco Pitassio (2019)

Review of: Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954: Rome, Open Cinema, Francesco Pitassio (2019) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 384 pp., ISBN 978-9-08964-800-6, h/bk, £99.00

Planetary Cinema

The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.

Poświęcić niepewność – prolegomena do badań nad kinem postsekularnym

This article undertakes the issue of defining film phenomena which put forward questions of a primary religious nature (about the meaning of life, source of evil, life after death, the existence of Absolute, etc.) in a way that is independent from major religious traditions. The author posits that describing this phenomenon in the case of European film culture is done best by employing the philosophical thought of postsecularism. Utilizing Mieke Bal’s method of cultural analysis, the author takes as an example the term “sacrifice” to point to the existence of different models by which religious topics are undertaken by the cinema. This leads to a preliminary typology of the phenomenon which differentiates between ‘apologetic’ and ‘critical’ films and, furthermore, between films that refer to particular religious traditions and those expressing a postsecular perspective.

Things in cinema as a phenomenon of cultural reality

The objects, items, things that are most often used in the film texts of modern Russian cinema require close attention from the film culture point of view. The material world helps to realize the value of an object and its influence on the subject. The attitude to things and objects characterizes modern society from the point of view of order-chaos. Contemporary domestic film texts are interpreted by specialists and spectators, intended for a wide audience of the audience. A person is immersed in a system of symbols, and in cinema he seeks confirmation of this or that stable element of the virtual world, which he correlates with his real experience. Things, objects and objects can tell about the main thing, so they cannot be ignored, pass by this or that symbolic object.

Introduction: Late Hammer

This introduction to a dossier of short pieces on Barbara Hammer locates the work of the late filmmaker in the context of feminist film culture and the journal Camera Obscura. It briefly reviews several phases of the artist's career before focusing on the output of the last decade of the filmmaker's life. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Hammer made work dealing with her body; gave footage she shot over the years to several filmmakers to finish as they wished; set up a grant for lesbian experimental filmmakers; and collaborated with curators, archivists, and her partner, Florrie Burke, to shape her own legacy. Pieces by the collaborators who contributed to this dossier are introduced.

Scene, Aesthetics and Industry Chain: Postmodern Cultural Thinking of Films in 5G Era

With the in-depth influence of 5G technology on film art, the postmodern culture contained in it is also becoming more and more obvious. Understanding the context of the 5G era and clarifying the origin of film postmodernism culture will help us deeply analyze the cause of the rise of postmodernism film culture, especially the important influence of the expansion of film application scenes, the innovation of the whole industry chain and the evolution of film aesthetics on the rise of postmodernism film culture. In addition, we should also think deeply about the film culture under the post-modernism of 5G era, and explore the way to stick to the benign development of film creation and film industry. To enhance our cognition and appreciation of post-modern film culture, to give play to the positive factors of post-modern film culture, and to promote the healthy and prosperous development of Chinese film production, creation and industry.

Jill Craigie, Post-war British Film Culture and the British Film Academy

This article seeks to locate the socialist feminist film-maker Jill Craigie in the British film culture of the post-war period. Long regarded in scholarly accounts as something of an outsider, a woman who was effectively shut out of the industry during the 1950s, this article seeks to position Craigie rather differently. While acknowledging the obstacles she undoubtedly faced, it details aspects of her achievements and her visibility in the British film culture of the immediate post-war period. Craigie's politically driven documentaries and realist film practice accorded with prevailing discourses of ‘quality’ and she acquired the status of what would today be termed a media personality who worked across film, radio, television and print media. Considering Craigie as a figure embedded in the British film establishment, this article gives particular emphasis to her role in the British Film Academy (BFA), arguing that the significance of this practitioner-led organisation has yet to be fully recognised in British film history. The argument draws on archives held at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) to begin a discussion of how the BFA, and Craigie as the first woman to be elected to its Management Council, played its part in the development of British film culture.

CRÍTICO, COMISARIO Y CINEASTA EXPERIMENTAL: NÉSTOR ALMENDROS EN NUEVA YORK, 1957-1959

El reconocimiento internacional de Néstor Almendros (1930-1992) como director de fotografía ha eclipsado, dentro de la historia convencional del cine, otras dos facetas fundamentales de su trayectoria: la de crítico cinematográfico y la de director de cine experimental y documental. Este artículo analiza las actividades profesionales de Almendros durante el comienzo de su carrera en Nueva York, entre 1957 y 1959, y estudia con detenimiento su producción como comisario (para el cineclub de Vassar College), como crítico (para Film Culture) y como director de cine experimental (con los cortometrajes de vanguardia, El monte de la luna y 58-59). A su vez, y a través de un estudio crítico de materiales de archivo inéditos, propone una nueva lectura de la obra de Almendros que tiene en cuenta su carácter multidisciplinar y resitúa al cineasta como una de las figuras principales del cine español en el exilio.

‘How to pack a hall’: Civic Film Culture in Wartime Britain and MoI Mobile Film Shows for the Women's Institute

In the 1930s, the documentary film movement had experimented with non-theatrical distribution and this was championed by John Grierson, who claimed that the ‘future of cinema … may creep in quietly by way of the YMCAs, the church halls and other citadels of suburban improvement’. This article explores the wartime evolution of this idea by expanding on the Ministry of Information's (MoI) organisation of mobile film shows in practice: uncovering archival evidence of Helen de Mouilpied's work organising the regional film exhibition scheme, and focusing on the programming of film shows for women, including those held on a regular basis for the Women's Institute (WI) in the ephemeral spaces of village halls. By taking into consideration records of de Mouilpied's distribution work at the Ministry and the often insubstantial, fragmentary and regional traces of film shows in Ministry records, the local press and the WI journal Home & Country, this article offers a new view of the non-theatrical operation's role as ‘useful cinema’ in the MoI Films Division's propaganda programme, and its encouragement of a civic film culture on the home front that has been overshadowed in histories of British documentary and wartime cinema.