Decision making based on hybrid modeling approach applied to cellulose acetate based historical films conservation

Preserving culture heritage cellulose acetate-based historical films is a challenge due to the long-term instability of these complex materials and a lack of prediction models that can guide conservation strategies for each particular film. In this work, a cellulose acetate degradation model is proposed as the basis for the selection of appropriate strategies for storage and conservation for each specimen, considering its specific information. Due to the formulation complexity and diversity of cellulose acetate-based films produced over the decades, we hereby propose a hybrid modeling approach to describe the films degradation process. The problem is addressed by a hybrid model that uses as a backbone a first-principles based model to describe the degradation kinetics of the pure cellulose diacetate polymer. The mechanistic model was successfully adapted to fit experimental data from accelerated aging of plasticized films. The hybrid model considers then the specificity of each historical film via the development of two chemometric models. These models resource on gas release data, namely acetic acid, and descriptors of the films (manufacturing date, AD-strip value and film type) to assess the current polymer degradation state and estimate the increase in the degradation rate. These estimations are then conjugated with storage conditions (e.g., temperature and relative humidity, presence of adsorbent in the film’s box) and used to feed the mechanistic model to provide the required time degradation simulations. The developed chemometric models provided predictions with accuracy more than 87%. We have found that the storage archive as well as the manufacturing company are not determining factors for conservation but rather the manufacturing date, off gas data as well as the film type. In summary, this hybrid modeling was able to develop a practical tool for conservators to assess films conservation state and to design storage and conservation policies that are best suited for each cultural heritage film.

Traditional Images of National Consciousness as the Basis for Understanding the Works of Art of Another Culture

The article analyzes the reasons for the popularity of historical films created in South Korea among contemporary Russian audience. The author claims that the basis for understanding the work of art of another country lies in the proximity in understanding the images of traditional folk thinking. The images of the sovereign, the people, the people’s defender, and the ungrateful Motherland are considered as examples.

Modern Historical Film: Genre and Dramaturgic Features

The aim of the article is to explore of genre and dramaturgic features of a modern historical film. The research methodology is based on the systematic use of materials from the scientific branches of art and cultural science, cinema theory and history, psychology, etc. The empirical basis of the study included a series of historical films of the XXI century, a detailed analysis of genre and dramaturgic features was carried out. The results. Historical drama is the leading genre of a film based on real events, which grinds the past, turning it into a mirror image of the present. Thus, the theme of the film, its newsworthiness has the equal importance along with the genre, which ensures the integrity of the material, director’s and cameraman’s methods and techniques and the style, which forms the aesthetic expressiveness of the film. Films based on real events, which premiered in the XXI century, were chosen as the empirical basis of the study. As the core of the plot were chosen issues of human rights violations, social discrimination and injustice. These problems have their origins in ancient times and have long been the main obstacles for the establishment of democratic values in society. We found that modern historical drama has significant morphological differences from the XX century drama: lack of epicism, abandonment of the tragic component in favor of a happy ending, the transition from melodramatics to hybridization of drama with more dynamic genres: action, road movie, western. At the same time, we see that modern historical drama has signs of genre elasticity and syncretism, which allows forming new multi­genre constructions that have not yet entered scientific circulation in the domestic press (action drama, crime drama, western drama, kidnap drama, etc.). The dramatic features of modern historical films are closely related to the genre construction of the films. The genre of autobiography determines the priority of using the “plot of growing up” and “plot of the experience”, when the main characters grow up psychologically and fight for their rights: life, freedom, personal inviolability. The hero — is dominated archetype, a person who serves others, sacrifices himself or puts himself in constant danger for the sake of others. The issue of social inequality in the historical context, when realities separate the viewer from the depicted events for a significant period of time, is reflected in the historical film more often and has a proper response from the viewer. At the same time, the modern issue of human rights, which demonstrates the principle of “democracy for the elect” is not so popular among modern fans of historical cinema. Novelty. The scientific novelty of the article is to identify the modern morphology of historical film, the actualization of the relationship between the genre, the magnitude of the theme of historical film, its dramatic solution and the value expectations of the audience. The practical significance. The main theses and results of the research may be useful for practicing screenwriters of historical films. The recommendations in this article contribute to the creation of a commercially successful and psychologically powerful film product. In addition, the article can be used for academic disciplines in film schools in Ukraine and abroad.

Hystoria

Aleksei German’s recollections of his time at Lenfilm emphasize his own marginality and beleaguered status. The documentary record does not bear this out. However, the conviction that he had endured discrimination and misery was, for German, creatively energizing. Whether in relation to his own life or in relation to history more broadly, German sought not to establish facts in order to challenge or undermine myths, but to use myths of his own to challenge official myths. In other words, he tried to combat official war history on its own terms, rather than searching for alternative, antimythic narratives. Hence the provocativeness of German’s historical films with the agencies that were charged with protecting the integrity of official memory. Added to this, it was the emotional resonance of German’s historical films that made them problematic, their frequent recourse to hysteria not just in the sense of uncontrollable weeping, shrieking, and laughter, but in the technical, Freudian, sense, where hysteria applies to a specific worldview and set of discursive principles. This chapter traces these elements with particular reference to My Friend Ivan Lapshin, perhaps German’s greatest film, which also represented a decisive break with the “Lenfilm style” of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the start of a new artistic era.

Postmodern Slave Narratives

This chapter considers the representation of time in postmodern slave narratives. It argues they work through a style of black humour within which the politics of slavery are mediated in complex and ambiguous ways. Starting from the comic fiction of Ishmael Reed, it discusses how scientific discourses turn racial politics into a complicated affair in the novels of Octavia Butler. It finds a similar tension in the recursive fictions of Toni Morrison, where time frequently circles back on itself. This chapter’s second section considers how such inversions are played out in the films of Quentin Tarantino, arguing the disjunctive temporality of his historical films is marked by systematic invocations of antipodean space. Such strategic forms of anachronism and disorientation are associated with the politics of the Obama era, which combined traditional pragmatism with recognition of how transnational pressures were pushing questions about slavery’s historical legacy in a new direction.

Memory Wars on the Silver Screen: Ukraine and Russia Look Back at the Second World War

In post-communist Russia the state has been supporting the production of historical films reflecting the official politics of memory, in which primacy is given to the victory in World War II. Often filmed in Ukraine, where the national cinema industry was nearly extinct until recently, these films project an imperial stereotype of modern Ukrainian identity as a fake and Ukrainian patriots as traitors. In contrast, the Ukrainian patriotic war narrative has only been reflected in straight-to-DVD films celebrating the nationalist insurgency. This article focuses on three recent films: two Russian films set in Ukraine during the war, which caused protests in Ukraine, and the first full-length Ukrainian war film to receive mass distribution, Mykhailo Illienko’s Firecrosser (2012), interpreted here as an attempt to merge Soviet historical mythology with the Ukrainian one.

Modeling and Perceiving

The aim of this chapter is to develop a theory of how filmic figurations are already fused with conceptions of history during the mise-en-scène process, and thereby enable historical experiences. The first section will therefore examine the theoretical concept of figuration and the special relation between cinematic illusion and historical reference. The second section analyzes the strategies used by historical films to create filmic spaces and model an internally consistent, temporally arranged historical world. Building on this, the third section proposes that, for historical films, the film theory concept of mise-en-scène should be supplemented by a concept of mise-en-histoire: the imaginative referentialization of the historical worlds constructed by a film.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the term histosphere to refer to the “sphere” of a cinematically modeled, physically experienceable historical world. The prefix “histo-” denotes here not just (popular conceptions of) history, but also a particular bodily dimension. In the phenomenological space between audiovisual figurations and historical experience, a histosphere functions—in the manner of histology—as an innervated tissue that relays the potential semiotic meanings of the cinematically constructed past via physical-sensory stimuli. Against the general assumption that the constitutive feature of historical films is that they represent history, it is instead their audiovisual modeling and figuration of a historical world, which enables an immediate experience of history.