Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lesvos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and others, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.

Generic Fluency in Professional Subtitling:

This article evaluates the translation of neologies in professional subtitling of audiovisual science fiction from the point of view of genre-specific features. Neologies are seen to be the most important linguistic element of science fiction as they produce the science fiction genre-specific cognitive estrangement and hence cognitively estrange the viewer from reality. Evaluating the translation of neologies is thus used as a tool to evaluate the transfer of the source text genre to the target text and to hypothesise whether the target text meets the expectations of the viewers. When the neologies are retained as genre-specific features of science fiction, the target text genre is seen to be generically fluent and the target text meets the viewer’s expectations. Even though the translation solutions which render the genre unfluent (misplace the science fiction cognitive estrangement produced by the source text) are in minority in the study material, the neologies can be seen to normalise towards common language in the translation process. This means that as neologies are considered as one of the producers of the science fiction genre-specific cognitive estrangement, the source text genre becomes less accessible for the target text viewer. Lay summary Science fiction is one of the most popular contemporary film and tv-series genres. The audience has expectations on the content of a science fiction film or tv-series based on their previous experiences with the genre, in other words, the genre-specific features. This article evaluates the translation of neologies in professional subtitling of audiovisual science fiction from the point of view of these genre-specific features. Neologies are seen to be the voice of science fiction as they cognitively estrange the viewer from reality. Evaluating the translation of neologies is used as a tool to evaluate the transfer of the source text (the original tv-series) genre to the target text (the subtitled tv-series) and to hypothesise whether the translation meets the expectations of the viewers. When the dialogue’s neologies are retained in the subtitles, the target text is seen to meet the viewer’s expectations. The study revealed that the neologies can be seen to normalise towards common language in the translation process. This means that as neologies are considered as one of the producers of the science fiction genre-specific cognitive estrangement, the source text genre becomes less accessible for the target text viewer.

Buddies, Lovers, and Detours: America and its Road Movies

Is an open road also a democratic one? Zooming in on two films—Queen & Slim (2019) and Unpregnant (2020)—this article discusses American road movie genre from the perspective of 2021, and how contemporary film narratives intersect with race and gender. One movie often drives in another film’s lane, meaning the genre is self-referential. Unfolding in three parts, the article begins by introducing these two films and surveying how they contribute to the road movie genre. It then discusses cars and clothing as characters and concludes by considering surveillance and how these films, in tandem, take the temperature of contemporary American society.

Doświadczanie kina a dramaturgia neomodernizmu filmowego

This article is an attempt to investigate contemporary film theory highlighting the inseparable connection between cinema and the human body and seeing, in which sense this theory complements academic recognition about neomodernism. The author expands on the philosophical concept of experience, showing problems posed by its conceptualization, and also points to the connection of this term with the body and sensuality. In the next part, the main distinguishing features characterizing the dramaturgy of cinematic neomodernism are given. The author argues that the dramaturgy of this movement creates a different kind of cinema experience in general. The final part presents an analysis of two films which are examples of the theory of cinema as senses, as well as exemplifying the dramaturgy characteristic for neomodernism, and thus creating a specific type of experience in the viewer.

Tachyons, tactility, drawing and withdrawing: cinema at the speed of darkness

Longitudinal, quantitative analyses of cinema have established how Hollywood is getting ‘quicker, faster, darker’. While in some senses the ‘intensified continuity’ of contemporary Hollywood narration is a given, the increased darkness of contemporary mainstream cinema remains unexplored – especially with regard to how its speed and its darkness might be inter-related. If to darken the majority of the screen during a film helps to draw our attention to the salient aspects of the image that are better illuminated, then of course this also allows for a faster cutting rate: in principle, there is ‘less’ information for the viewer to have to take in during each shot, meaning that the film can then cut to subsequent images more rapidly. However, there are other ways in which we can interpret this ‘darkening’ of contemporary film narration. For example, it perhaps ties in with a widespread sense of disorientation with regard to the increasingly globalized and connected world that digitization has helped to bring about, and which is equally reflected in the rise of the contemporary ‘mind-game’ or ‘puzzle’ film that is a staple of contemporary Hollywood. The darkness in such films thus gives expression to uncertainty and disorientation. More than this, though, we might use physics to understand the darkness of contemporary cinema in a more ‘meta-physical’ fashion. While it is accepted that light is the ‘fastest’ phenomenon in the known universe, there nonetheless remain unilluminated aspects of the physical universe that defy light as the limit of speed – and which convey the interconnected nature of matter in the contemporary universe. For example, polarized particles have been proven simultaneously to respond to stimuli – at a speed faster than it would take light to travel from one particle to the other, a phenomenon that baffled Albert Einstein, who referred to this process as ‘spooky action at a distance’. Not only does this process suggest what Karen Barad might refer to as the entangled nature of all matter, but it also suggests speeds beyond, or at least different, to that of light. In this essay, then, I shall theorise a ‘speed of darkness’ that can help us to understand how the darkening of contemporary cinema ties in with the interconnected, invisible (‘spooky’) and ultra-rapid nature of the digital world. Perhaps it is not in the light but in the darkness that we can identify the key to understanding contemporary mainstream cinema and the globalized, digital world that produces it.

Vertigo

The chapter ‘Vertigo. Towards a Neurofilmology’ offers an introduction to the book’s contents and methods. The implementation of psychology of perception, philosophy of mind, and suggestions from cognitive neuroscience (in particular the role of ‘mirror neurons’ and the hypothesis of ‘embodied simulation’) has the capability to renew contemporary film theory and to reduce the distance between competing approaches (i.e. cognitivist and phenomenological film studies). ‘Neurofilmology’ adopts an enactive and embodied approach to cognition and provides interpretative tools for the exploration of contemporary cinema. Through a series of recurrent ‘aerial motifs’ in which the film character loses his/her equilibrium—acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift—the cinema offers an intense motor and emotional experience that puts the spectator’s somatosensory perception in tension. At the same time, it provides compensation by adopting embodied forms of regulation of stimuli and a dynamic restoration of gravity and orientation (the so called ‘disembodying-reembodying’ dynamic).