From Conan the Barbarian to Gunan il guerriero: Re-contextualizing spaghetti sword and sorcery

In Rowthorn’s words, Marx’s basic theoretical approach differs from Ricardo’s in that Marx used the concept of a ‘mode of production’ (Rowthorn, R. (1974) ‘Neo-Classicism and Marxism’, New Left Review , 86: 74) and accordingly envisaged capitalism ‘as a mode of production and distribution’, and not as a mere ‘mode of distribution’ as Ricardo did ( op. cit. , 83). As his quotations from Marx show ( op. cit. , 80, 83-7), Rowthorn appears to mean here what Marx expressed as follows:the laws concerning surplus-value – with a given working day and labour intensity – were rigorously formulated, for the fi rst time, by Ricardo [but] he knows no change either in the length of the working day, or in the intensity of labour.

Direct-to-Video (On Demand): New Industrial and Cultural Valuations of Nontheatrical Film Releases

Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Creative Communities after Television: The Collective Authorship of Channel 101

Italian national cinema developed quickly between the last decade of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I (particularly in Turin and also in Rome), and it won a sizeable share of film audiences around the world for, in particular, its epic films set in classical settings. The outbreak of the war virtually destroyed the industry, but with the coming of sound and the advent of the Fascist government, support for the industry grew before World War II broke out, with the building of the film studio complex at Cinecittà (“Cinema City”), the establishment of Luce (the government agency charged with producing documentaries and newsreels), and the opening of an important national film school in Rome, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Unlike its counterparts in totalitarian Russia or Germany, the Italian industry was not completely dominated by government propaganda, and in fact some of the major Fascist figures in the industry wanted to imitate the entertainment of Hollywood rather than support a completely ideological cinema. Major directors emerged during this period, such as Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, and Vittorio De Sica (all of whom continued to work after the end of the war), and the cinema during the Fascist period trained a great many people involved in basic film production who were to play a vital role in the dramatic rebirth of Italian cinema after 1945. With the end of the war, Italian neorealism burst on the international scene. Such figures as Roberto Rossellini, De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Giuseppe De Santis won international acclaim for their “realistic” portrayal of contemporary Italian social and economic problems. During the 1950s, many young directors (Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Pietro Germi among them) sought to move beyond the kind of programmatic social realism Marxist critics in Italy and France championed, and in the 1960s a second generation of even younger figures (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Francesco Rosi) looked both backward to their Italian neorealist heritage and abroad to French cinema for inspiration. During the same time, but less beloved by film scholars and critics, Italian cinema began to produce an enormous number of highly profitable works that might be described as genre films or, to use the Hollywood term, B films. First, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the peplum or “sword and sandal” epic film starring foreign bodybuilders became immensely popular and was quickly exported. This genre was followed closely by the spaghetti western, an incredibly successful genre that produced almost five hundred films in a very short time and revolutionized the face of a classic Hollywood genre almost overnight. Subsequently, in the 1970s and 1980s, the thriller (known as a giallo in Italy) and the spaghetti horror film (with its zombie and cannibal variants) were also extremely popular. Perhaps the most popular genre of all, one that continued to thrive during the entire postwar period, was the so-called commedia all’italiana or “comedy, Italian style,” a form of comic film indebted not only to the traditional commedia dell’arte but also to a collection of brilliant actors and scriptwriter-directors who combined humor with a biting and often cynical vision of Italian culture, providing a type of social criticism that Italy’s politicians often avoided. The period between 1945 and around 1975 thus witnessed an Italian cinema that managed to combine popular entertainment in a variety of film genres with art films, box office power with critical acclaim at film festivals and among auteur-oriented critics and film historians. Nevertheless, directors and technicians of genius continued to work, and in the last decade some new faces have added luster and box office appeal to the national cinema’s treatment of new themes (racial and gender identity in a multiethnic and multicultural Italy, terrorism, crime, and the Mafia), themes that have evolved in Italian cinema’s reflection of everyday reality in the peninsula. Italian film scholarship has evolved dramatically in the recent past, moving from a focus on postwar neorealism and the art film toward a broader definition of film history that encompasses an interest in multicultural themes, more film theory imported from abroad (especially from the United Kingdom and the United States), and more interest in two periods (the silent era and the Fascist period) that have long been neglected in comparison with postwar Italy.

Optimization of Mixed Collaborative Distribution with Different Production Modes

문화적 할인은 할리우드 영화가 해외 관객의 수용자의 문화적 취향에 따라서 수용이 다르게 나타남을 강조하고 있다. 이와 같은 이해를 바탕으로 이 연구는 한국 내에서 할리우드 영화의 수용이 장르별로 어떻게 다르게 나타나는 지를 분석하였다. 분석대상은 2008년부터 2010년까지 미국에서 1백만 달러 이상의 흥행실적을 거둔 할리우드 영화이며, 이들 영화 중 한국에서 개봉된 영화의 비율 및 흥행성과 등을 중심으로 장르별 수용이 어떻게 차별화되는 지를 고찰하였다. 분석결과를 보면, 할리우드 영화가 한국에서 개봉된 비율은 59.6%이며, 평균보다 낮은 비율로 개봉된 장르는 코미디(46.2%)와 다큐멘터리(20%)뿐이었다. 제작비와 장르의 특성을 고려하면, 할리우드 영화 중 제작비 투자가 많은 장르의 경우 한국 내 개봉비율 또한 높게 나타났다. 또한 미국에서의 흥행실적이 높을수록 한국에서도 흥행실적이 높게 나타나며, 제작비 투입이 높을수록 1개의 영화에 다양한 장르적 요소를 포함하여 제작하는 복합장르화 현상이 발견되었다. 이와 같이 제작비, 미국에서의 흥행실적, 복합장르화 등의 영향력을 통제할 때 할리우드 영화의 수입 후 수용자 수준에서는 문화적 할인이 흥행성에 미치는 효과가 통계적으로 유의미한 나타나지 않았다. 연구의 의의와 한계가 같이 논의 되었다. This study has examined genre tastes of Hollywood movies in Korea. A concept of cultural discount suggests that Hollywood film in foreign countries would be received differently according to its specific attributes. Following the suggestion of cultural discount, this study examines how local reception of Hollywood movies is different in Korea, focusing on film genre, production budget, and U.S. box office. The results show that genres are useful variables for such analysis, indicating that certain film genres are indeed suffering from relatively high cultural discount at the level of Hollywood movie import/distribution. Comedy, specifically, constitutes the crucial particularistic movie genre. However, this study does not find out any significant effect of movie genres on the box office in Korea, controlling the effect of U.S. box office and production budget. As Hollywood studios have recently produced multi-genre movies rather than genre-specific movies to induce a variety of audience who have different movie tastes, the influences of cultural discount disappeared among imported Hollywood movies in Korea. This study also reveals that Hollywood movies of high production budget and of successful U.S. box office are more preferred in Korea.

PurposeMovies critics believe that the diversity of Iranian cinematic genres has decreased over time. The paper aims to answer the following questions: What is the impact of the continuous cooperation between the key nodes on the audience's taste, uniformity of the cinematic genres and the box office? Is there any relationship between the importance of actors in the actors' network and their popularity?Design/methodology/approachIn the artistic world, artists' relationships lead to a network that affects individuals' commercial or artistic success and defines the artwork's value. To study the issue that the diversity of Iranian cinematic genres has decreased over time, the authors utilized social network analysis (SNA), in which every actor is considered a node, and its collaboration with others in the same movies is depicted via edges. After preparing the desired dataset, networks were generated, and metrics were calculated. First, the authors compared the structure of the network with the box office. The results illustrated that the network density growth negatively affects box office. Second, network key nodes were identified, their relationships with other actors were inspected using the Apriori algorithm to examine the density cause and the cinematic genre of key nodes, and their followers were investigated. Finally, the relationship between the actors' Instagram follower count and their importance in the network structure was analyzed to answer whether the generated network is acceptable in society.FindingsThe social problem genre has stabilized due to continuous cooperation between the core nodes because network density negatively impacts the box office. As well as, the generated network in the cinema is acceptable by the audience because there is a positive correlation between the importance of actors in the network and their popularity.Originality/valueThe novelty of this paper is investigating the issue raised in the cinema industry and trying to inspect its aspects by utilizing the SNA to deepen the cinematic research and fill the gaps. This study demonstrates a positive correlation between the actors' Instagram follower count and their importance in the network structure, indicating that people follow those central in the actors' network. As well as investigating the network key nodes with a heuristic algorithm using coreness centrality and analyzing their relationships with others through the Apriori algorithm. The authors situated the analysis using a novel and original dataset from the Iranian actors who participated in the Fajr Film Festival from 1998 to 2020.

The exhibition of B-movies on television in the early 1950s is an area that has largely gone unnoticed in most literature surrounding the origins of television. Perhaps the most thorough account of...

In recent years, Israel’s military practices have increasingly been described as “humanitarian,” entrenching the narrative that the State of Israel is at war with a “hostile” and “terrorist” Palestinian population. Taking the notion of “humanitarian warfare” as my point of entry, this article critically examines the relationship between the identification and documentation of sexual violence in conflict and Israel’s notion of liberal warfare. Palestine/Israel is often absent from international reports and scholarship on sexual violence in conflict, where attention is increasingly focused on non-state actors. The article argues that this absence functions to both obscure the sexual violence of Israel’s settler colonial occupation and bolster the notion of Israel as a modern liberal democracy engaging in a conflict against a population deemed terrorist. Against this narrative, the use of sexual torture against Palestinians held in Israeli prison and detention facilities is documented, as are the sexually violent structures of militarized settler colonialism and occupation more broadly. Exploring these sites of humanitarian and feminist complicity with war, colonial occupation, and sexualized violence, the article contends, can help us to better grapple with the complexities of sexual violence in conflict and reminds us of the necessity of incorporating anti-imperial and anti-colonial politics into feminist analysis. This article contains descriptions of sexual torture.

This chapter examines precariousness as represented in the two twenty-first century emblematic Venezuelan films, Pelo malo and Brecha en el silencio, and precariousness as a condition for the films’ modes of production, exhibition, and distribution. Undoubtedly, film-production conditions in the first seventeen years of the twenty-first century in Venezuela have been extremely challenging due to sweeping sociopolitical transformations initiated in 1999 that have polarized Venezuelan society. These two texts are suited for the examination of these transformations as well as of the contrasting reception of texts at international film festivals and critics’ forums, which privilege certain ideologies. All these intersections between the global and the local make Venezuelan cinematic culture an indispensable object for the study of the precarious in contemporary cinema.

Although often described as a rural dialect of Modern Standard Hindi, in the last five years Bhojpuri has emerged as the language for a new cinema industry, complete with superstars, superhits, and media speculation about the particular ‘rural values’ that have catapulted the industry into success. But despite Bhojpuri's reputation as a ‘rustic’ way of speaking, Bhojpuri cinema critically inhabits both urban and rural spaces. While Bhojpuri speakers generally consider Bihar and Uttar Pradesh their homeland, millions have migrated into urban centers seeking work, and the films' modes of production, narrative themes, and distribution have followed them from Bihar to Mumbai. Understanding these films solely in terms of ‘rural values’ thus dismisses the interplay between city and countryside that gives meaning to ‘ruralness’ in the first place. This article traces the movement of capital, people, and films along the Bhojpuri cultural circuit, illuminating how rural and urban identities, technologies, and audiences constitute one another.

There has been an emerging group of filmmakers of Asian descent whose films instantiate diasporic filmmaking in the New Zealand context. In the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2 (2015), this nascent body of films has been conceptualised as ‘Asian New Zealand film’ as their diegeses are primarily based on various aspects of diasporic experience and life in New Zealand. This article examines the modes of production of this group of films within the context of the New Zealand film industry and society, and explores some of this work as examples of the interstitial and collective modes of production that for noted scholar Hamid Naficy demarcate diasporic filmmaking – or what he terms as ‘accented cinema’. Asian New Zealand films both do and do not fit interstitial and collective filmmaking, as they have been made within a variation of modes of production and distribution conditioned by the social, cultural, historical and national regimes that regulate the processes of cultural production in New Zealand. Examining the forces that regulate production and distribution of these films offers us new ways of thinking about the effects of the underlying relationships that can be developed to facilitate diasporic filmmaking as a potential benefit to the economy and also a way to respond to cultural diversity in New Zealand.

A distinctive red ceramic known as Cheshmeh Ali Ware, which dates to the Transitional Chalcolithic period (c. 5200–4300 BC), has been found at sites on the Central Plateau in northern Iran, stretching from the Gorgan plain in the east to the Qazvin plain in the west. Geochemical and petrographic analyses were performed on samples collected from sites in the Qazvin and Tehran plains to investigate the mode of production and distribution. The results suggest local rather than centralised production of Cheshmeh Ali Ware ceramic vessels. Using discriminant analyses, geochemical groupings have been established that differentiate samples of vessels from the two plains, and also samples from different sites within the Qazvin plain. This has significance for our understanding of the mode and scale of ceramic production and distribution in this important formative period.

Going with the Flow: On the Value of Randomness, Flexibility, and Getting Students In on the Conversation, or What I Learned from Antoine Dodson Jonathan Nichols-Pethick (bio) Let me start with an obvious fact: we exist in an era of media production, distribution, and consumption vastly different from the one in which most of us came of age as viewers and learned our trade as students and teachers. Perhaps because of this fact, we often teach [End Page 182] at a distance from our students’ own media experiences. Of course, there are good reasons for this distance: primarily, we challenge our students by confronting them with texts and ideas they haven’t encountered before. But new conditions should also force us to rethink our core ideas and to reconsider the texts we use in our teaching. For example, we once again need to reconsider the concept of “flow” as a foundational principle of the television experience. Raymond Williams’s seminal idea has, of course, been thoroughly reworked by any number of prominent media scholars in order to account for the variety of everyday viewing practices as well as changing modes of distribution and reception.1 And yet the basic idea of some sort of organizing principle of media flow persists, even if it is characterized today more by DVR menus or the scattershot, hyperlink-driven availability of the short clip via YouTube or Facebook than by the neater contours of the channel or the viewing strip. In what follows, I want to explore the tension between random and planned access that defines contemporary media distribution and consumption practices as a model for how we might structure our own pedagogical practices in a multiplatform media environment. My approach responds to several interconnected trends in the era of convergence and neo-network structures, an era defined at least in part by two trends that point in opposite directions. On the one hand, it is characterized by more flexible technologies that allow for new modes of production and distribution, increased abundance of products across platforms and over time, and extended access to products from a variety of often interconnected outlets. On the other hand, it is also characterized (as part and parcel of these same institutional and technological factors) by tighter corporate control of products in terms of intellectual property rights and by the drive to safeguard the interests of vertically and horizontally integrated conglomerates. As Henry Jenkins has argued, ours is a “convergence culture” in which “old and new media collide, grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”2 What Jenkins points to is the need to attend to new and emerging forms of media production, distribution, and consumption without losing sight of media history or the theoretical and critical ideas about power that have animated studies of media for at least the past four decades. With this in mind, I want to highlight the value of randomness, flexibility, and nonofficial voices, as a way of understanding both Media Studies itself and Media Studies as a pedagogical process—a process that is also necessarily grounded in specific historical, theoretical, and critical contexts. In a class I taught during the fall of 2010, a student asked, “Have you seen this video on YouTube? You have to see it! Oh my God, it’s so hilarious! Can we watch it now?” [End Page 183] She was referring to a YouTube posting of a news story out of Huntsville, Alabama, about an attempted rape. The news report detailed the information about the attempted rape, and then featured the victim’s brother, Antoine Dodson, addressing the perpetrator and the viewing public by looking directly into the camera and venting his frustrations. The news video went viral in a matter of days, spawning a song by the Gregory Brothers (now available on iTunes) and an accompanying music video (which also went viral). The viral nature of these videos points to the fact that, while the production of these videos, and our access to them, has an arbitrary quality, the viewing of them (via Internet buzz and word of mouth) crystallizes...