Locating the Storyteller in Silent Waters: Sabiha Sumar’s Cinematic Tale of Shared Histories and Divided Identities

In her multi award-winning feature film Silent Waters (2003), Pakistani woman filmmaker Sabiha Sumar connects the socio-political traumas of the Partition of India and creation of Pakistan (1947) with the onset of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization period (1977-1988) in Pakistan. Presenting a story based on real-life events, the film focuses on the impact of religious fundamentalism and nationalism on women in particular. Examining Silent Waters as an example of “history on film/film on history” (Rosenstone 2013), and film as an “agent, product, and source of history” (Ferro 1983), the discussion identifies and analyzes the filmmaker’s own tacitly embedded location and participation in the filmic narrative as an experiential ‘auto/bio-historiographer’, arguing for the value of this new paradigm in Cinema Studies.

Subjectivity, the Emotions, and the Movies

This chapter contrasts the cognitive approach to the way movies engage audiences psychologically with the dominant approaches in cinema studies especially in terms of cognitivism’s account of the emotions in general and the moral emotions in particular.

Advertising and Avant-Gardes: A History of Concepts, 1930–1940

The chapter takes advertising as an umbrella term for persuasive communication. Looking at screen advertising as a specific type of communication – one that is made to persuade – the documentary, educational films, and avant-garde works of the 1930s and early 1940s come into view together under the label of advertising. Focussing on the work of John Grierson, Paul Rotha, and Hans Richter, the chapter shows how debates among intellectuals, pedagogues, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic revolved around concepts of propaganda and education to promote democracy. The chapter contributes to the field of useful cinema studies by mapping the transnational network of people, ideas, and materials involved in using moving images as tools for shaping the human mind.

Advertising and the Apparatus : Cinema, Television, and Out-of-Home Screens

In this chapter, the notion of the dispositif serves as a conceptual framework to both theorize and analyse the programming of moving image advertising on three types of screens: cinema, network-era television, and digital out-of-home displays. The chapter shows how screen ads stitch together different forms of intermittent movements – of bodies, images, and objects – and thus help create flows. In bringing the programme in conversation with the dispositif, the chapter also draws attention to the programme, which in cinema studies, if not to the same extent also in media studies, is an extremely under-researched category despite its importance for production as well as for reception. Any study interested in the pragmatics of screen advertising as well as screen media cannot do without the programme.

The space between photography and film : an object study from the Warner Bros.-First National Keybook collection

Historically and conceptually, film stills occupy a precarious position between two academic disciplines: cinema studies and the history of photography. They are overshadowed in collections by more prominent and "valuable" cinematic or photographic objects competing for the same space and money; and they have received relatively little attention in scholarship, exhibitions and publications. The film still is a unique and distinctive genre of object, possessing its own history, physicality, and aesthetic. After establishing a historical and descriptive context for understanding the film still as an object with multiple incarnations - commercial, nostalgic, historical, educational, artistic - this thesis transitions into an analysis of actual stills. By examining the physical and aesthetic characteristics of a small selection of stills from George Eastman House's "Warner Bros.-First National Keybook Collection," drawn from the keybooks of Other Women's Husbands (1926), Lights of New York, and 42nd Street, an argument emerges for the establishment of the film still as a genre of photographic object distinguishable by its physical and aesthetic characteristics as much as by its origin.

The space between photography and film : an object study from the Warner Bros.-First National Keybook collection

Historically and conceptually, film stills occupy a precarious position between two academic disciplines: cinema studies and the history of photography. They are overshadowed in collections by more prominent and "valuable" cinematic or photographic objects competing for the same space and money; and they have received relatively little attention in scholarship, exhibitions and publications. The film still is a unique and distinctive genre of object, possessing its own history, physicality, and aesthetic. After establishing a historical and descriptive context for understanding the film still as an object with multiple incarnations - commercial, nostalgic, historical, educational, artistic - this thesis transitions into an analysis of actual stills. By examining the physical and aesthetic characteristics of a small selection of stills from George Eastman House's "Warner Bros.-First National Keybook Collection," drawn from the keybooks of Other Women's Husbands (1926), Lights of New York, and 42nd Street, an argument emerges for the establishment of the film still as a genre of photographic object distinguishable by its physical and aesthetic characteristics as much as by its origin.