Najambitniejszy film Wima Wendersa [Wim Wenders’ Most Ambitious Film]

Wim Wenders’ Most Ambitious FilmUntil the End of the World by Wim Wenders was a large project. This essay discusses the slow process of the film’s creation, its distribution, its content and critical response, in order to point at failure as the question key to each of those topics. Purpose, success, resolution, ending, the end of the world – those notions appear either irrelevant or impossible in the context of this film. The research material consists mainly of reviews and director’s comments. Content analysis displays many references to classic film genres, references which, however, prove dysfunctional. An important theme of the movie is wandering. This is a recurring motif in Wenders’s work, which some interpretations derive from the identity-seeking typical of his generation. In his case, this search is often expressed by crossing state borders. Central Europe is nevertheless poorly represented in his work.Najambitniejszy film Wima WendersaAż na koniec świata w reżyserii Wima Wendersa to wielkie filmowe przedsięwzięcie. Tekst omawia powolny proces powstawania filmu, historię jego dystrybucji, treść i recepcję, by wskazać na niepowodzenie jako kwestię kluczową dla każdej z tych sfer. Celowość, sukces, rozwiązanie akcji, zakończenie, koniec świata – te pojęcia w kontekście omawianego filmu jawią się jako nieistotne lub niemożliwe. Główny materiał badawczy stanowią recenzje oraz wypowiedzi reżysera. Analiza treści wykazuje obecność licznych odniesień do klasycznych gatunków filmowych, które jednak okazują się dysfunkcyjne. Ważnym tematem filmu jest błądzenie, tułaczka. To motywy powracające w twórczości Wendersa, co czasem interpretuje się jako efekt poszukiwań tożsamości właściwych jego pokoleniu. W przypadku reżysera poszukiwania te wiążą się z częstym przekraczaniem państwowych granic. Nieliczne są jednak w jego twórczości i refleksji odniesienia do Europy Środkowej.

When the World Laughs. Film Comedy East and West – William V. Costanzo

While film genres have risen or declined along with the times and its trends, according to Aldredge (2019), comedy has remained steady in high popularity through all the years since 1910, which is practically to say throughout the whole history of cinema as an industry. Furthermore, it can be said that comedy stands as the second genre in the number of films produced. Furthermore, it can be said that comedy stands as the second genre in number of films produced when considering only a single genre tagging. However, [...]

Retro-Series About the Artists of Soviet Popular Music: Between Conventions, Past and Reality

The article deals with the dramaturgical and aesthetic patterns of the Russian TV series of the 2000s–2010s, which provide insight into the lives of famous Soviet pop music artists. The main characters in the biopics studied were inspired by Leonid Utyosov, Pyotr Leshchenko, Lyubov Orlova, Anna German, Lyudmila Zykina, Valentina Tolkunova, Alla Pugacheva, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Edita Piekha, Valery Obodzinsky and Muslim Magomaev. The article gives an overview of the similarities in the development of historical and biographical film genres in Hollywood and Soviet cinema. Moreover, a brief introduction to Soviet films about musicians is provided. The main part of the research is devoted to the issues of adaptation of Hollywood conventions of the music biopic genre In Russiania. Through the interaction of the Soviet past, Hollywood standards and contemporary Russian realities, the specific features of different narration types are revealed, the issue of authenticity is considered, and the status of pop music in the past and present is outlined. In addition, the types of dramatic conflicts and types of heroes are analyzed, questions of the commercial component in relation to Soviet popular culture are raised.

The B&C Kinematograph Company and British Cinema

This book sheds new light on the under-researched period of early British cinema through an in-depth history of the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company – also known as ‘B&C’– in the years 1908-1916, the period when it became one of Britain’s leading film producers. It provides an account of its films and personalities, and explores its production methods, business practices and policy changes. Gerry Turvey examines the range of short film genres B&C manufactured, including newsworthy topicals and comics, and series dramas, and how they often drew on the resources of urban Britain’s existing popular culture – from cheap reading matter to East End melodramas. He discusses B&C’s first open-air studio in East Finchley, its extensive use of location filming, and its large, state-of-the-art studio at Walthamstow. He also investigates how the films were photographed and ‘staged’, their developing formal properties, and how the choice of genres shifted radically over time in an attempt to seek new audiences.

New forms of masculinity in Western films: The end of the Marlboro Man?

Westerns are one of the most masculine and stereotypical of film genres. In a social and film context where gender equality is increasingly important, it is worth looking at the evolution of the genre in recent years. Especially because, as André Bazin said, the Western is “cinema par excellence” (1966) and its analysis allows a reflection on cinema itself. Taking the figure of the Marlboro Man as a prototype, this study carries out an analysis of three selected case studies: Brokeback Mountain, Jane Got a Gun and Godless, two films and a miniseries with main characters that do not follow heteronormative masculinity. Ang Lee’s work broke new ground not only in Westerns but also in industrial cinema by making homosexuality visible, while Gavin O’Connor’s showed the possibility of a woman playing the leading role in a classic Western. The miniseries produced by Netflix combines both by giving leading roles to female characters, some of them gay, while reflecting on homosexuality. It was noted that the portrayal of masculinity in Western films remains valid in all three cases, but it allows women and homosexuals to access leading roles, often by acquiring typically masculine attributes.

A computational lens into how music characterizes genre in film

Film music varies tremendously across genre in order to bring about different responses in an audience. For instance, composers may evoke passion in a romantic scene with lush string passages or inspire fear throughout horror films with inharmonious drones. This study investigates such phenomena through a quantitative evaluation of music that is associated with different film genres. We construct supervised neural network models with various pooling mechanisms to predict a film’s genre from its soundtrack. We use these models to compare handcrafted music information retrieval (MIR) features against VGGish audio embedding features, finding similar performance with the top-performing architectures. We examine the best-performing MIR feature model through permutation feature importance (PFI), determining that mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and tonal features are most indicative of musical differences between genres. We investigate the interaction between musical and visual features with a cross-modal analysis, and do not find compelling evidence that music characteristic of a certain genre implies low-level visual features associated with that genre. Furthermore, we provide software code to replicate this study at https://github.com/usc-sail/mica-music-in-media. This work adds to our understanding of music’s use in multi-modal contexts and offers the potential for future inquiry into human affective experiences.

Gun violence, phenomenal reality and parallel worlds: Christina Kallas’s multi-protagonist narratives in The Rainbow Experiment

The second film in writer–director Christina Kallas’s New York trilogy, which includes 42 Seconds of Happiness (2016) and Paris is in Harlem (forthcoming), The Rainbow Experiment (2018) portrays the powerful but flawed American experiment. Its script chronicles the desires and tawdry failures of teachers, administrators, parents and students of many hues, ethnicities and gender preferences tearing at each other on one horrific day, beginning with an explosion and ending with a double shooting – or so it seems. The implication is that gun violence has become so familiar that it almost fades into the background of collective despair. However, with a world-view that recalls David Lynch and a narrative that imbeds this school saga within its densely urban setting, Kallas counters the seemingly inevitable choices available in this fractured system. An evolving alternative scenario rests its faith on the arrogant but potentially redemptive young. The comically inflected, tragic linear story is scripted in non-linear flashbacks, crosscuts and elaborate split-screens. The film provides portals to an internal reality that posits that life choices, like a movie plot, can be reversed. Overall, The Rainbow Experiment reinforces Kallas’s emergence as a potent and bold voice, redefining and recontextualizing modern film genres.

Perspectiva comparada de una poética visual mística. La tradición a través de Paradjanov y Val del Omar.

The paper reaches to confirm the existence of ethnographic cultural tradition in the works of the film directors Serguei Paradzhanov and Jose Val del Omar through poetry, cinematographic techniques and traces of theoretical and practical mystique. Subsequently, two major issues are analysed: identifying signs of ethnographic tradition, and confirming clear examples of mystical visual poetics. The analysis of their films unearths topics such as the discussion of unique film genres with features from others, the concept of Pathosformel, or the use of mystical literary structures as a cinematic narrative technique.For its creation and development, the nature of poetic films with a mystical component requires specific and complex techniques to illustrate the depth of the poetic message seen in the technical and aesthetic cinematic treatment on the chosen movies –we will focus to find similarities between the works of the Armenian and the Spanish filmmakers.