Representations of Racial Minorities in Popular Movies: A Content-Analytic Synergy of Computer Vision and Network Science

In the Hollywood film industry, racial minorities remain underrepresented. Characters from racially underrepresented groups receive less screen time, fewer central story positions, and frequently inherit plotlines, motivations, and actions that are primarily driven by White characters. Currently, there are no clearly defined, standardized, and scalable metrics for taking stock of racial minorities’ cinematographic representation. In this paper, we combine methodological tools from computer vision and network science to develop a content analytic framework for identifying visual and structural racial biases in film productions. We apply our approach on a set of 89 popular, full-length movies, demonstrating that this method provides a scalable examination of racial inclusion in film production and predicts movie performance. We integrate our method into larger theoretical discussions on audiences’ perception of racial minorities and illuminate future research trajectories towards the computational assessment of racial biases in audiovisual narratives.

The Colosseum in the film «Roman Holiday» (1953)

This article is dedicated to the Colosseum and a classic movie filmed in Rome "Roman Holiday” (1953, USA). It was the first Hollywood film to be filmed and processed entirely in Italy. The great thing about Rome is that not much changes in the historic city centre. The story is about princess Ann (played by Audrey Hepburn) who comes to Rome and slips out one evening from the Embassy, and an American journalist (Gregory Peck). Joe takes Ann around Rome for a "Grand Day Out" and we have loads of views of Rome, both the famous monuments and the streets, squares, and bridges. So when Audrey Hepburn surveys the Colosseum, she’s really surveying the Colosseum. In the film "Roman Holiday", Princess Ann holds on tight as they race through the roads past the famous Colosseum. The stars riding a Vespa made an iconic movie poster for the film, during an important era for Italian filmmaking. The authors of the article offer an innovative approach to the formation of a professionally oriented foreign language learning environment by studying the filming locations of the masterpiece of world cinema "Roman Holiday" (1953, USA), on the example of the Colosseum. It is a typical example copied throughout the empire: a highly decorative exterior, seats set over a network of barrel vaults, and underground rooms below the arena floor to hide people, animals and props until they were needed in the spectacles of the"Theatre of Death". Remembered the greatest English historian of all time Bede, Lord Byron’s poem"Child Harold's Pilgrimage", gladiators.

Solaris and the Dao: The Reception of Stanislaw Lem’s Novel in the Sinophone World

The most popular science fiction novel written by the Polish author Stanisław Lem, Solaris, was published in 1961. Although it was translated into English as early as 1970, the book was unknown to the Sinophone readers until 2003, when the first translation from English into Chinese was published, most probably following the popularity of the resounding Hollywood film adaptation from 2002. Still, Suolalisi Xing (which can be translated as ‘Solaris Star’) did not attract broader audiences in China or Taiwan, at least not until the third version of the novel, translated directly from Polish into Chinese, saw the light of day in 2010. The appearance of this translation coincided with the beginning of a New Golden Era of Chinese and Taiwanese science fiction, which undoubtedly had a significant influence on the positive re-reception of Solaris. In the paper, the author focuses on the philosophical aspect of Lem’s work and investigates which themes and concepts present in Solaris caught the imagination of Chinese-speaking readers. The author wants to show how this reception, while coming from a different historical, cultural, and linguistic background, can enrich our understanding of the novel and introduce a new way of looking at the important existential questions stated by the writer.

Rewriting the stars: Surface tensions and gender troubles in the online media production of digital deepfakes

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.

Culture Specific Items in Audiovisual Translation: Issues of Synchrony and Cultural Equivalence in the Lithuanian Dub of “Shrek the Third”

Audiovisual translation encompasses a number of dissimilar areas. To quote Frederic Valera Chaume, AVT “covers both well-established and new ground-breaking linguistic and semiotic transfers like dubbing, subtitling, surtitling, respeaking, audiosubtitling, voice-over, simultaneous interpreting at film festivals, free-commentary and goblin translation, subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, audiodescription, fansubbing and fandubbing” (2013, p. 105). This paper analyses the importance of culture-specific elements in audiovisual products and strategies of their transfer to the target culture. Practical investigation is based on a case study of an animated film “Shrek the Third” and its Lithuanian dub. The choice for the case study was determined by the fact that the history of dubbing animated movies in independent Lithuania started with “Shrek,” the first Hollywood film dubbed into Lithuanian, which has achieved unprecedented success and become an example for further dub localizations. The aim of the research was to determine the relationship between types of synchrony that should be maintained in dubbing and culture-specific items that should be localized in the target text. The study is complemented with a research survey that questions the importance of different types of synchronies in translation. As there is no consensus about the importance of lip synchrony in dubbing, and some scholars (Doane, 1980; Chaume, 2012) claim that it plays a dominant role in dubbing, whereas others (Herbst, 1994; Jüngst, 2010) declare its overestimation, the survey research attempts to answer this debatable question.