The Libidinal Dwellings of Bhojpuri Media

This chapter provides an account of Bhojpuri popular culture, highlighting its standout features and tendencies. Historicizing the libidinal solidarity of assertive masculinities, the chapter recounts the history of Bhojpuri cinema from the origins to the contemporary period, in which it has emerged as a public scandal. Engaging at length with three particularly iconic Bhojpuri films – Sasura Bada Paisawala (2004), Nirahua Rickshawala (2007) and Jaan Tere Naam (2013) – the chapter navigates a formal grammar shifting from rural melodramas towards action cinema, celebrating the eruption of masculine energy and the increasingly scandalous portrayal of the female body. The chapter also highlights recurrent exchanges between Hindi and Bhojpuri film industries, and their interdependence on infrastructure, personnel and locales, with particular stress on gender politics and male stardom. In summary, the chapter argues that the libidinal economy of Bhojpuri cinema is anchored within a twin-logic which toggles between moralizing and scandalizing imperatives.

Spectacle in Contemporary Mainstream Action Cinema

The following article traces the historical development of the notion of spectacle. It first provides an outline of theoretical research on the subject, pointing out various interpretations and approaches. Secondly, comparative-quantitive analysis is used to compare several film series (Die Hard, Fast and Furious, Mad Max, Predator) in order to find what changes spectacle has undergone in mainstream action-adventure cinema, and to what extent these permutations have impacted the relationship between narration and spectacle. Finally, key takeaways are summarised and additional questions for future research posed.

Fist to Face

In his recent Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, Michel Chion coins the term “corporeal covibrations” to describe the much discussed but imprecisely defined phenomena of sound’s corporeal impact. From low and high frequencies to intense loudness, sound has direct vibratory impact on the body, an association that aligns with the recent “sensory turn” in criticism. This chapter considers covibratory corporeal listening as crucial to the impact aesthetics of the cinematic punch in action cinema today. Tracing the sonic history of the cinematic punch, it interrogates the corporeal, haptic, and uncanny effects of this hyperreal sound object. With the cinematic punch, violence on screen is heard, never fully seen: and yet, in the digital era, the punch has taken on a meatier, louder, more complex role in audiovisual violence, a shift that transforms this sonic effect into a fleshy, material, and corporeally felt object.

Change and Continuity: The Making of Contemporary Hollywood Animation

In setting the scene, the opening chapter does four things. First, it surveys production trends in Hollywood feature animation from the 1930s to the present. Second, it presents an overview of the major changes in the Hollywood film industry since the 1970s, contextualising the resurgence of animation within developments in live-action cinema, family entertainment and multimedia conglomeration. Third, it examines the stylistic continuities and changes in post-1990s Hollywood animation, particularly with regards to the rise of computer animation. And fourth, it weighs the recurrent narrative structures and mythological influences on the form against more recent changes in storytelling conventions.

O Imaginarium Diegético na Animação e no Cinema: a representação de momentos de sonho, memória, devaneio e psicadelia no Audiovisual

This article has the purpose of discussing about the representation of dreams, memory, reverie or psychedelic moments of the character – diegetic imaginarium – by the Audiovisual (Live-action Cinema and Animation) for the development and understanding of film analysis. With this objective the adopted borders to the imaginarium (the caracter mental image) are approached; its role in the construction of narratives, its representations, and how it favors the abstraction and deepening of the public in the stories. Thus, it is developed a particular looking over the animated image, when it is responsible for the representation of the illusional image, while the filmed one represents the reality of the same diegese. The paper is based on studies about mental image in relation to Animation (Sifianos, 2012), the perception of the cinematographic image (Metz, 1975a, 1994; Morin, 1956) and of the mental image (Arnheim, 1971, 2004). The subject is also developed with evaluations and considerations on some Psychology concepts, about mental images and their representations by the audiovisual. This text was developed during the doctoral research, The Representation of the Diegetic Imaginarium for Animation, in the Cinema Live-action, presented at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon in 2018.