Ficção e fricção: imagens da Amazónia no cinema internacional

Explored by foreign travellers in different periods, the Amazon rainforest has long dwelt in the imagery of western countries. This trend is naturally extended to its numerous representations in cinema, often in a stereotyped perspective, full of clichés that respond to entertainment demands or to superficial foreign curiosity. This paper proposes to analyse its presence in some feature films produced mostly (but not only) in Hollywood along the last five decades. It aims at investigating how, in mainstream cinema, the features and characteristics that are supposedly typical of the region are shown, along with the demands of the respective film narratives, and at pinpointing the inevitable mismatches that emerge when facing the complexity of the ‘continent’ that effectively constitutes the region. In genres that run from adventure to comedy, fantasy or horror, film productions have set their plots there – partially, at least, and artificially or effectively – with varying approaches and degrees of depth to the region’s peculiarities. The choice of productions with so-called commercial appeal is due to such films having greater reach and international circulation. Thus their features are interesting for their capacity of spreading such imaginary, often with a shallow or distorted bias. The present is not a precise, socio-anthropological comparison between the ‘real’ Amazon region and that which is shown on the screens as a lost tropical paradise or a ‘green inferno’, for instance, but rather to point out how the logics of entertaining may assimilate a complex and multifaceted imaginary and present it in a simplistic, schematic, one-dimensional way.

Interseções entre Cinema e Pintura em Maria Antonieta de Sofia Coppola

The scene of Sofia Coppola’s movie, Marie Antoinette, is made in dialectic with pictorial works, which occur primarily in three forms: classical painting within diegetic space, as an element of scenography; painting as a scene, when the film picture incorporates the pictorial aesthetics of a canonical work; and the re-appropriation of a canonical painting according to the aesthetic molds of the fictional universe of the film in question, which was placed as scenic object.

O movimento das coisas: Jodie Mack e as animações experimentais em looping

Since 2003, the english experimental director Jodie Mack has used primordial resources of cinema to produce cinematically powerful and entertaining works. With looping as the main artifice, her films explore different speeds, textures, colors, cuts, reflections, compositions and points of view. In movies like “Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project” (2013) and “The Grand Bizarre” (2018), the musical background is a constant. In the first, the director makes a rock opera adapting The Dark Side of The Moon to record the fall of the poster market, transforming the cultural products accumulated in her mother’s store into discard and consequently into raw material for her abstractions. The second is a roadmovie that moves around the raw material, mainly fabrics, tapestry pieces and maps that move around accompanied by music. Her movies stand out in contemporary experimental cinema for the uniqueness of having fun; experimentation is a great joke. Our aim is to analyze how Mack’s works dialogue with the looping of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey’s pre-cinema, with Stan Brakhage’s experimental provocations that encourage the exploration of movement, colors, textures and with animated GIFs. Despite the cinema’s proximity to GIF, it is not an easy task to point out names in contemporary cinema that relate to GIFs. Mack’s films are one of the few that can be seen as a series of GIFs and possibly the only one that, through a range of visual stimuli, manages to create movies as GIFs.

Monumentos Virtuais: projeto audiovisual colaborativo para formato fulldome

This article presents the “Virtual Monuments” project that explores alternative modes of video production and projection, investigating other media, formats and practices. Our fulldome project is a collaborative interdisciplinary project jointly produced by the Federal University of Santa Maria/Labinter (Santa Maria, Brazil), Durban University of Technology/ Interdisciplinary Lab (Durban, South Africa) and the Federal University of Ceará (Fortaleza, Brazil). The aim of this project is to use the planetariums or different surfaces in these cities as sites for the projection of digital monuments collaboratively produced and shared between the three participating cities. Monuments are usually considered structures that occupy public spaces as cultural symbols commemorating important figures, events or elements of a culture´s heritage. Monuments can also be seen as sites where power can either be enforced or contested. The Virtual Monuments project was produced jointly as an experiment in multi-sited, collaborative, interdisciplinary creation between the three participating institutions in order to expand our understanding of the dynamic collaborative processes of ideation, creation, production, participation exhibition and reception. Each site contributed and participated in the creation of the others’ artworks, each one sharing their creativity and know-how to collectively realize these monuments as a tentative siting of dissolution of hierarchies and power structures within institutional creative environments. The project has been showcased in international events such as “Understanding Visual Music - UVM” at the Galileo Galilei Planetarium of Buenos Aires, “DIGIFEST” at Durban University of Technology, and “EFEMERA” at the UFSM Planetarium in Brasil.

Sound in the Mise-en-jeu: Conveying Meaning through Videogames’ Mediated Space

Mise-en-jeu is the ontological equivalent of film’s mise-en-scène. As such, mise-en-jeu is a cinematographic language through which game designers communicate. It offers designers the ability to create and shape the aesthetics of videogames’ mediated space, the space of the cinematographic presentation.Our prior work on mise-en-jeu focused on the visual aspects of videogames. With that in mind, starting with an analysis of mise-en-scéne, this paper provides an understanding of how sound is relevant for meaning-making through mise-en-jeu. Since videogames make use of some of motion picture’s filming techniques, we first studied practitioners and academics in the history of film, approaching videogames afterwards.The results of this research show that sound in mise-en-jeu allows designers to provoke emotions in players and to assist those players in formulating meaning as intended by the designers. We also found that mise-en-jeu allows for the deconstruction and interpretation of the characteristics of various variables of videogames’ mediated space. Therefore it allows us to understand better the relationship between videogames as audiovisual artefacts and the potential meanings that emerge from playing them.

A Visual Rhetorical Analysis of Narges Abyar’s 2013 Film Track 143 (Shiyar 143)

As a significant stratum of film audiences, adolescents are often more susceptible to influence by film characters. Motivated by the question of what types of role models are presented to Iranian adolescents via the medium of cinema, we aim to study Narges Abyar’s 2013 film Track 143 (Shiyar 143 2013) to figure out how the rhetorical mechanisms of the film persuade adolescent audiences to identify with the protagonist and imitate the positive aspects of the main character as their role model. To this end, we draw on the visual rhetorical method as our analytical framework and employ Albert Bandura’s notion of observational learning to interpret the data. We hope to identify the rhetorical techniques employed effectively in Track 143 for persuading adolescent girls to follow a female protagonist of their own choosing as their role model. According to our findings, the film does not rely on logos or discursive reasoning. In this sense, the female protagonist overcomes her problems not through her own personal characteristics, which could have been taken up by female adolescent audiences, but through merely random and miraculous incidents.

Tempos de streaming. Implicações na produção audiovisual no Brasil

This research addresses a recent period of the trajectory of Brazilian audiovisual production and its relationship with contemporary platforms of distribution and consumption of video on demand, VoD. National production of films, soap operas, series and other audiovisual consumer goods, prior to digital technologies, remained in closed and limited models. The advent of the internet and streaming technologies have enhanced the opening of the market to new forms of business, untying the productions of these limits. The objective of this work was to verify, through analytical data provided by companies, data obtained from qualitative research and content from personal interviews with market professionals, in addition to the referenced bibliography, as this new market for online distribution of videos implied expansion of the Brazilian market, especially when we focus on production. This trajectory has shown us that VoD has effectively become another window of opportunity for the dissemination of national productions alongside public investment policies for the script development phase.

O significado da cor azul no filme Bleu de Kieslowski.

The objective of this study is to analyze the significance of the color blue in the film “Liberty is Blue”, by the Polish director and screenwriter Krzysztof Kieslowski and the imagetic result reached through the interface between cinema and arts. This is the first film of the Three Colors Trilogy.In order to develop this analysis, semiotic concepts will be used, for the understanding of image as icon and color as symbol. The methodology consists in selecting images to analyze the meaning of the blue color in certain moments of the work where color gains relevance. The theoretical from of reference includes concepts of Charles Sandres Peirce, Lucia Santaella and Luciana Martha Silveira.

The Influence of Science Fiction in Healthcare Technology

With technological advances, the human being becomes more and more reliant on technology. We use it to work, to enhance our social experience, to learn, and healthcare, is no exception to this. We are used to hearing concepts originated on Science Fiction coming to life in areas such as spatial exploration or even communication and see how it helps those teams know what consumers were expecting for the future. However, we rarely hear about it influencing the technologies that keep us alive. Has healthcare also benefited from Science Fiction worlds to create new or enhance their technological devices? This literary and cinematic genre pushes the boundaries of what is thought “possible” by idealizing artifacts that go beyond what is conceivable in their time. It is an outlet for those who want to imagine what the future might be like, without forgetting to distinguish possible or plausible from fantasy. In this article, I will go through why it is important to look to Science Fiction as a guide when it comes to conceptualizing new ways of incorporating technology in our healthcare, as well as how it has been done before.

O Western - Mito e propaganda

This work aims to analyze Western cinema and the potential it has as a vehicle for political discourses and historical conceptions. The political booklet present in Westerns is articulated with historical dynamics circumscribed to a specific chronological and geographic space, making this genre stylize historical phenomena and historical memory itself. The purpose of this study is not so much to characterize the political ideologies that inflate, or can inflate, the cinematographic works in question but the potentialities existing in the genre that make it able to transform itself into a platform of the most varied, and sometimes opposed, political-ideological ideas. The aim is therefore to identify Western (the era to which it reports, with all its historical and political implications) as the commonplace of essentially antagonistic discourses.