Rhetoric of Belonging and Transnational Appropriation in the Development and Marketing of the Bulgarian Popular Feature Love.net

This article focuses on issues of representation and belonging, in an attempt to uncover how popular cinema in Bulgaria caters to national sensitivities while at the same time making the link with the global film industries. The Bulgarian popular feature Love.net (Ilian Djevelekov, 2011) is an example of the shift towards treating filmmaking in Bulgaria as a business as much as a cultural venture. It emerged as part of broader European trends, which put an emphasis on film development, marketing and stars, with the aim to counter Hollywood’s dominant market position. Love.net focuses on the role of the Internet as facilitating love, relations and communication in the contemporary world. On a textual level, and similarly to Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), it explores the six degrees of separation theory, implicitly advocating for a world of interconnectedness. Contextually, Love.net created a sense of virtual belonging among the local online community, allowing them to participate in the film’s development and engage with its interactive marketing. Transnational stars provided a further point of contact and involvement. Through its mixed cast featuring home-grown and locally popular foreign actors, Love.net both channelled and challenged Hollywood, positioning European cinema as similar in glamour and attraction but different in identity.

Three Filmmaking Practices That Guide Our Attention to Popular Cinema

Popular movies are constructed to control our attention and guide our eye movements across the screen. Estimates of fixation locations were made by manually moving a cursor and clicking over frames at the beginnings and ends of more than 30,000 shots in 24 English-language movies. Results provide evidence for three general filmmaking practices in screen composition. The first and overriding practice is that filmmakers generally put the most import content ‒ usually the center of a character’s face ‒ slightly above the center of the screen. The second concerns two-person conversations, which account for about half of popular movie content. Dialogue shots alternate views of the speakers involved, and filmmakers generally place the conversants slightly to opposite sides of the midline. The third concerns all other shots. For those, filmmakers generally follow important content in one shot by similar content in the next shot on the same side of the vertical midline. The horizontal aspect of the first practice seems to follow from the nature of our field of view and vertical aspect from the relationship of heads to bodies depicted. The second practice derives from social norms and an image composition norm called nose room, and the third from the consideration of continuity and the speed of re-engaging attention.

A Cognitive-Affective Approach to Foregrounding Categorical-Thematic Patterns in Popular Cinema

The article sets out to discuss disruptions of the embodied flow of movie perception triggered by foregrounded categorical-thematic patterns. First, categorical-thematic patterns are framed in a cognitive perspective and tied to categorical (or parallel) information processing as opposed schematic (sequential). I argue that the former are not prototypical of embodied movie perception and tend to be disruptive if foregrounded, as they are more prevalent in art cinema. Next, I indicate how categorical-thematic patterns may encourage a type of non-habitual pattern recognition producing a number of emotional and aesthetic effects: delight at pattern isolation, wonder emotions, emotional focus of a story theme, and intensification or modulation of global and empathetic emotions. Finally, I turn to illustrate these points using Pan’s Labyrinth, a film that systematically foregrounds categorical-thematic patterns yet naturalizes them, alleviating disruption of movie perception. This, I believe, marks an effective strategy of importing avant-garde film techniques into popular cinema.

The Discourse of Independent Animation in the Contemporary Chinese Context

Independent animation is a marginal media form in China, and studies describe how both Chinese artists and scholars of film studies have only started to practice or construct this genre and popular cinema since the 1990s, especially after the Shanke (Chinese Flash animators, 閃客) phenomenon. In this article, the existing discourse of independent animation in contemporary China is critically analyzed by studying mainly what is said and written by the local practitioners and scholars in China. The author’s analysis is based on the assumption that animation should be taken ‘as an art form’, which should be able to express itself freely without any external constraints or intervention by others. Hence, the focus should be placed on the ultimate purpose and meaning of art along with the form. Among the various types of discourses constructed by practitioners, the author argues that the discourse constructed by the contemporary Chinese art scene should be encouraged to keep the nature of independent works so as to give voice to true, personal and inner values, and expressions that are outside the institutionalized and dominating discourse or framework.

Indian Cinema: Making Departure from the Stereotypical Presentation of Women in Nuptial

In the late 20th and 21st century various movements took place which challenged the stereotypical notions of gender in society. #MeToo movement gave a momentum to the society where people started talking about any kind of violence, sexual assault and harassment against women. Many government policies and laws were framed and implemented to provide equal opportunities to women in every field. Vishakha Guidelines and Internal Complains Committee are made mandatory at work place and education institutions to assure a safe and healthy environment for females. Now the issues brushed under the carpet for long have been brought into light. Issues which were considered taboo even to talk about are now discussed on public forums and academia, penned down in literature and projected in media and cinema. Women and their concerns and point of views found space in popular cinema and were acclaimed too by the critics as well as spectators. Bollywood has made deviations from the stereotypical portrayal of women and broke the silence on issues like sexual consent and female sexuality. It also showed the role of woman in marriage and how it’s changing with woman becoming economically independent and realizing her real worth. The present paper will deliberate on the institution of marriage and the role of woman in it in the Indian society especially in the context of Indian cinema. It will discuss recent Indian cinema which came with stories in which decision-making power has been exercised by women in a nuptial and consent of a girl in a marriage has been considered. Gender roles in a marriage will also be analysed which has been shown deviating from the stereotypical notion especially in the movies Ki & Ka and Tumahari Sulu. It will include the movies which have at the centre the idea that the courage of a woman can put a full stop to the deep-rooted patriarchy of centuries in our society. The paper will include only popular cinema made in Hindi language film industry known as Bollywood in the last decade like Dil Dhadkane Do, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Secret Superstar, Parched and Tumhari Sulu.

Godzilla (1998) as camp de-extinction narrative

Godzilla is one of the most famous de-extinct monsters in global popular cinema. Fan loyalty to the original Toho Studios conception of the creature as a super-powered, dinosaur-like creature helps explain the negative response to Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood version, which re-imagines Godzilla as a giant, irradiated twentieth-century iguana. Emmerich’s film is plotted around the monster’s attempt to use subterranean New York City as a spawning ground. The creature lays eggs that later hatch into baby Godzillas that look suspiciously like Jurassic Park-style velociraptors. Indeed, the movie plays like an expanded version of the last twenty minutes of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): a dinosaur-like creature runs amok in a major American city and is eventually defeated by a plan involving its offspring. Emmerich’s Godzilla is famous for being ‘Godzilla in name only’, yet its extensive intertextuality with The Lost World foregrounds de-extinction themes and imagery. Furthermore, Godzilla (1998) emphasises human action - in this case, 1950s French nuclear tests in French Polynesia - as the cause of the mutant creature’s emergence. Humans causing de-extinction is a key feature of the entire Godzilla franchise and of similar creature features from the 1950s to the present. Akin to its 1950s predecessors, Godzilla’s light, intentionally (and sometimes unintentionally) comedic tone open it to camp readings of the kind analysed by Bridgitte Barclay, who writes that the narrative and aesthetic shortcomings of schlocky sf B movies ‘disengage the audience from the filmic world and expose the mechanics of storytelling, making the master narrative a story and thereby resisting it by showing it as such’. Godzilla does just that, deflating its own anthropocentrism and rampant pro-militarism via its blatantly derivative story, shoddy digital effects and ham-handed dialogue.

Gender, Genre, and the Idea of the Nation

This article examines the construction of and contestation over the idea of the nation through contemporary popular cinema in India. Building on his experience of discussing the Bollywood spy thriller Raazi (2018) in an English class, the author proposes that “reading” the film in terms of gender and genre can not only help students apply modes of textual analysis to narratives in other media but also alert them to the location of such narratives within larger discursive frameworks of defining national identities. Raazi presents a critical and ideological counterpoint to the generic conventions of the spy thriller within the increasingly polarized sociopolitical context of the Indian subcontinent. The film presents an unlikely female protagonist as both the physical agent and the psychological subject of the violence integral to the “action” of an espionage film. It also interrogates the oppositional relation between the patriotic “self” and the foreign “other” that lies at the basis of the militaristic conception of the nation and ultimately reveals the shared human vulnerability of both to the traumatic effects of pursuing the idea(l) of nationalism at the expense of individual moral integrity. Thus a close reading of the film's narrative structure and conventions, as well as a critical engagement with the historical context of its production and reception, can be pedagogically fruitful ways of understanding and critiquing the processes through which a nation is collectively imagined into being.

The Web and Flow of Popular Cinema

Rhythm is a much-discussed term in film theory. This chapter examines the patterns of shot durations, motion, luminance, and clutter across the length of movies in two ways. First, it averages across a century’s worth of movies adjusting for their differential lengths. Results reveal patterns that map well onto the larger narrative parts of movies. Moreover, these patterns have evolved only relatively recently—since the 1960s for shot durations and motion, and perhaps only since the 1990s for luminance, clutter, and syntagmas. Second, it focuses on patterns within each movie. Many accounts of cinematic rhythm refer to human movement, which provides an entrée into understanding the rhythms, indeed polyrhythms, of whole movies. Walking, breathing, and heartbeats all have a fractal rhythm—and so do movies. This suggests that the skills of filmmakers are attuned to rhythms in movies that are not unlike those of the human body.