In today’s world, frequent cultural exchanges among nations have made film a vital vehicle for cultural communication. Consequently, the importance of film subtitle translation has become increasingly prominent. The American film Flipped, with its fresh and warm style, tells an innocent and budding love story between the protagonists, conveying simple, pure, and heartwarming values and insights into personal growth. Based on Newmark’s theories of semantic and communicative translation, this paper finds that the film’s Chinese subtitles flexibly employ methods such as literal translation, free translation, addition, and conversion of parts of speech. These strategies not only effectively convey the original text’s meaning and emotions but also help broaden the film’s reach.

ABSTRACT Between 1950 and 1962 Hollywood film companies moved many of their productions to European studios, including Cinecittà in Rome. Doing so was more economically profitable and allowed them to capitalise on location shooting. Among the films that Hollywood realised in Italy, several were romantic comedies featuring US tourists visiting the country as protagonists. Focusing on the holiday experience, these comedies reflected the growing and relevant presence of American tourists in 1950s Italy. Working from a film history perspective and integrating movie analysis with information from archival documents and printed sources, this article makes three primary arguments. First, the afore mentioned Hollywood romances were a means of promoting Italy to the American public, as part of a broad media network supported by the tourism industry. Second, depicting postcard-like Italian scenarios and stereotypical portraits of local people, they cast an external gaze on the country, superimposing the mediatic image of Italy as a destination onto the complexity of Italy as a nation, i.e. a historic, political, and social construction. Finally, they metaphorised the political and diplomatic relationship between the two countries in the post-war period, when Italy steadily entered the US sphere of influence.

Since the establishment of the Hollywood film industry system, character portrayal has always been a core issue in narrative creation. From the rebellious Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, to Andy who adheres to hope in The Shawshank Redemption, and then to Arthur who succumbs to madness and despair in Joker, American films have constructed emotional connections across cultural barriers through a series of vivid character images. Traditional character analysis mostly focuses on characters' behavioral performances and personality labels, but ignores the logic of character formation constructed by screenwriters behind the scenes. This paper proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework of "Concealment-Conflict-Value", aiming to uncover the methodological black box of character portrayal in American films: Concealment represents the dynamic growth trajectory of characters' personalities, highlighting the iterative realization of roles; Conflict, as a touchstone for personality traits, reveals the essence of characters through the analysis of three dimensions: self, others, and environment; Value is the soul of characters' personalities, determining the direction and realm of roles. The results indicate that applying this framework to analyze classic characters in American films can not only extract replicable creative experiences, but also offer a glimpse into the understanding of human nature and spiritual demands within the context of American culture.

Abstract Educational videos have become central to learning environments, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the need for optimized design to enhance learning outcomes. Concurrently, research on film cognition has provided valuable insights into how viewers process dynamic visual narratives in Hollywood cinema. This paper explores the parallels between Hollywood cinema and educational videos to determine how film cognition research can inform educational video design. We analyze how cinematic techniques align with educational principles (i.e. signaling, spatial and temporal contiguity) proposed by Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. Additionally, we examine social cognition aspects, drawing connections to the learning principles (i.e., embodiment and image principles) in educational contexts. We propose that educational videos can enhance learner engagement by adopting attention-guiding methods and social cues used in film. We also suggest that compiling a shared collection of example videos and reusable materials could help teachers and researchers reuse and adapt resources more easily.

Several intellectuals and activists have been consistently warning about the harmful effects of contamination of air, water and land. The climate change and biodiversity deterioration that we face today is largely the result of our own behavior. Efficient waste management strategies are required to minimize the impact on environment. Several waste management technologies have evolved in the recent years. The integration of technology and robotics to handle the ‘dirty’ task can significantly lower the risk of harm to workers involved in this dangerous profession. The present study is based on 2008 American animated romantic science fiction film WALL-E directed by Andrew Stanton. The film discusses several themes including human environmental impact and concern, consumerism, corporate control, technology, hope, renewal, love, emotional connection and waste management. The story is set on a deserted Earth in 2805 where a solitary robot named WALL-E is left to clean up the garbage. He falls in love with another robot EVE, sent from the starship Axiom to detect life. The study examines the way by which love and care function as catalyst for ecological restoration. The paper aims to analyze the representation of environmental degradation and the possibility of renewal in a technologically mediated future in WALL-E.

ABSTRACT This study examines the transmedial trajectory of Menschen im Hotel, the 1929 bestselling novel by Austrian writer Vicki Baum, with particular attention to its Hollywood adaptation Grand Hotel, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1932. After outlining the various adaptation processes that took place between the novel’s publication in Berlin and its transformation into a Hollywood film, the paper situates the setting of the Grand Hotel as a modern transmedial and transatlantic topos. The subsequent analysis focuses on specific transatlantic encounters depicted in Baum’s novel and on their negotiated adaptation in Hollywood. These dynamics highlight, on the one hand, the reception of American culture in the Weimar Republic, and on the other, the complex transcultural negotiations that shaped Baum’s work across media and national contexts.

The trope of the “captive woman” in domestic spaces has been a recurring motif in American and British horror films, evolving alongside women’s changing social status and economic independence. This essay examines how this trope has transformed over time, from the emotionally captive woman confined by societal norms that restrict her autonomy to the physically trapped woman whose emotional confinement manifests as literal imprisonment, even as she gains apparent independence from male figures. By analyzing films across decades, such as Rebecca (1940), Silent House (2011), and Men (2022), this article explores how women’s confinement reflects broader societal dynamics and their relationships with men. Early depictions often tied women’s entrapment to economic reliance and societal expectations, portraying domestic spaces as both refuge and prison. Contemporary narratives, however, frequently depict independent women trapped by trauma or residual patriarchal control, illustrating how progress does not equate to full liberation. The article concludes with an analysis of Never Let Go (2024), which represents a shift where conservative ideologies and societal pressures push women back into traditional domestic roles. This new form of captivity reflects the complex interplay of autonomy, societal expectations, and resurgent patriarchal structures, underscoring the evolving dynamics of gender in horror cinema.

Situated within contemporary feminist explorations of materiality and visual culture, the concept of “body-territory” offers a compelling framework for reimagining the interconnectedness of bodies, land, territory, and capital. Emerging from communitarian feminisms and further developed within Latin American movements, body-territory underscores and rethinks the profound ties between gender violence, and the accumulation of capital. The article examines the relationship between the concept of body-territory and visual representations of nature, technology, and extractivism, exploring how Latin American feminist theory and film use these images to elaborate on the material effects of colonization, capitalism, and ecological destruction—and to envision alternatives. It considers what it means to “see” the body-territory and analyzes its visual representation in Claudia Llosa’s Distancia de rescate. The first section addresses the relationship between body-territory and visual culture in two main aspects: how the concept broadens “our way of seeing,” as Verónica Gago writes, and the extent to which the film brings this idea to life visually. It shows how the film enables a critique of the nostalgic longing for a return to an unalienated past, often masked by the idea of “nature.” The second section explores the critical questions surrounding the materiality of body-territory raised by the film and proposes a dialogue between body-territory’s critique of extractivism in contemporary capitalism and cyborg ontology’s rejection of the mystification of nature. Finally, the article underscores the importance of understanding how films, cultural objects, and artworks engage with the complex dynamics among nature, technology, and capital accumulation amid ecological crises.

The distribution of Soviet films in the United States began in 1926 with the screening of Eisenstein’s Potemkin, managed by Amkino, a company registered in the U.S. but closely aligned with the Soviet government’s Sovexportfilm agency. Amkino facilitated the circulation of Soviet films, documentaries, and newsreels, targeting Russian-speaking audiences and American communist sympathisers. This initiative was part of the USSR’s broader strategy to spread communist ideology globally by directly engaging with the masses.Renamed Artkino in 1940, the company sought to penetrate the American film market, which was largely dominated by Hollywood studios until 1948. This essay examines the history of Amkino/Artkino and its role in distributing Soviet films in the U.S. from its origins through the early Cold War, a process that remained on the fringes of the industry. The study also explores the company’s decline following the 1958 U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange agreement and the death of its president in 1960. By then, Soviet efforts had shifted towards engaging with the Motion Picture Association of America, having lost faith in Artkino’s abilities to access major Hollywood theatres.Drawing on archival materials from the Artkino collection at the Berkeley Film Archive, the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI) and other sources, this research highlights Soviet attempts to challenge Hollywood’s dominance and gain access to mainstream American cinema.

In this article, based on the evidence brought by TRAFFIC - Tracing American and Foreign Funds in Italian Cinema (1945-1962), a research project we were involved in the last few years and focused on the Italian case, we advance a set of methodological and operational hypotheses for the study of international relations in post-war cinema, developed in dialogue with the contributions collected in this issue. Our central claim is that a multipolar model of productive, distributive, and cultural relations was in place, in the years surrounding the Second World War, with timelines and durations that varied across geographical contexts and in relation to the specific challenges faced by different film industries. This model places under strain a fixed conception of centre-periphery relations, already questioned in transnational approaches to European cinema, as well as a monolithic understanding of the cultural and industrial dominance of American cinema, which nevertheless remained the key reference point in the global system.After having summarized the scientific discussion on transnational cinemas to determine which elements can be retained and what new tools are needed to outline and study what we consider a multipolar system, in the following section we delve into the Italian case, focusing particularly on the trade association ANICA. During the post-war period, ANICA was structured as an interface between different systems, managing current practices such as export and co-production instructions and film credit guarantees, as well as strategic actions such as defining agreements and conducting periodic revisions. Two specific examples relating to the definition of exchange and co-production agreements with the film industries of Mexico and Yugoslavia illustrate ANICA’s concrete functioning in relation to other national and foreign entities, including public and private stakeholders. Finally, we reflect on the concept of borders as a key element in the relationship between film systems and infrastructures.

Center-periphery perspectives have been challenged recently by transnational studies that provided more nuanced perspectives beyond Hollywood’s predominance in the international market. Shifting the focus to the transnational interactions within other regions opens up a multipolar and decentralized story of Latin American cinema, a region that was distant from the WWII scenario, with its internal dynamics and exchanges, and where the Cold War’s impact was delayed. This article looks into one of these cases by examining the commercial and industrial ties between Argentina and Chile in the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on the relations between their leading studios, Argentina Sono Film and Chile Films. It examines the commercial and industrial links between Chilean and Argentine cinemas, not just economically but as a space where modernization and nationalism ideologies conditioned the emergence and sustainability of their film industries. The article shows how film production in Latin America’s Southern Cone generated its center-periphery dynamics, beyond Hollywood’s undisputed dominance, challenging standardized periodizations and calling for a multiperspective that acknowledges global asynchronicities.

Leadership studies in recent decades have increasingly shifted away from transactional command-and-control models toward transformative and socially situated leadership frameworks that emphasize empowerment, inclusion, ethics, and systemic equity. However, the intersection of transformative, critical, and intersectional frameworks within an integrated analytical framework is missing; although it is significant in the context of politically fragmented and historically unequal societies. Films, as cultural texts, provide a powerful medium for exploring how leadership is constructed and interpreted in real-world sociopolitical contexts. Moreover, biographical political films serve as the mass media through which historical leaders become mythologized, humanized, or reinterpreted for later generations. Against this background, this study interrogates the portrayal of Nelson Mandela, the first Black president of South Africa, as a transformational leader in the 2009 film Invictus. Using text-interpretive and multimodal analyses, this study concludes that the transformative leadership of Mandela in Invictus does not preclude critical and intersectional issues; rather it should be viewed as an overarching strategy that steadily opens the doors to mitigate the complex issues of uneven power, systemic inequality, and multilayered exploitations in the long run and in a harmonious way.

The study examines how the discourse of an era relates to wider systems of power and how it is intersected through the narrative genre of film. The key concern of the paper is the examination of forces within and through which people conduct and participate in the construction of power relations. American film maker John Sayles explores the intricate web of power dynamics in his films, revealing how social, economic, and cultural factors construct individual and collective experiences. This paper attempts to read how the institutional power structures such as corporations, governments, and the military, maintain control and exploit marginalized communities in the select films. The study also looks into how the characters are portrayed, navigating hierarchies, challenging dominant narratives, and resisting oppressive systems.

This work focuses on the so-called MI VIDA PROJECT, developed by the Cinematheque of Andalusia since 1990 in a first phase and redesigned in 2016, which is still in effect today, centered on the recovery, cataloging, and digitization of home films made in this autonomous community. With clear language free of technical jargon, it explains what a family and amateur film is, the characteristics that make up this type of cinema, its historical origins, and subsequent development. It discusses the work of the Cinematheque of Andalusia in this area since it has access to the film material, its subsequent processing, and completion. The dissemination it carries out with this material, with concrete examples, and its impact on the media. The importance of this as an archival and study resource of the shared history of the Andalusians over the last hundred years, the evolution of society, customs, landscapes, cities, cultural events, and everyday life. familiar. The private core from which these recordings arise and transcends from that sphere to reach the general public. Filming with numerous formal and structural defects that stem from their spontaneity, freshness, and freedom, characteristics that define it. Ultimately, it poses a series of challenges and obstacles that this institution faces in order to move forward, including technical, material, and human aspects. The growing need for specialization and the demands placed on all personnel, combined with the different access possibilities available to the public through the multiple distribution channels that currently exist.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the film Rafai Fakirs, made by Edmund Henderson Hunt, the Chief Medical Officer of Nizam State Railway in Hyderabad, in South India, to study the role of camera, as a scientific instrument in the hands of a physician turned anthropologist. Rafai Fakirs was a four-part film made in 1928, documenting the ‘self-mutilation practices of Muslim sect in Hyderabad,’ which the British Film Institute categorises as amateur film. The film at the first impression seems anthropological in nature, however, a critical reading of the colonial archive and the film archive: the film, and Hunt’s personal papers, exposes the complex interplay between colonial scientific rationality and early film, beyond the domain of representation. Studying such films expands our understanding of early film practices. It presents a rare insight into the colonial anthropological encounter, its processes, the relative agencies of the actors involved.

This paper examines portrayal of queer desire, secrecy, love, and survival through the survival off the protagonist, Evelyn Hugo in Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017). Though, the novel highlights fame and scandal in Hollywood, at its core, it tells the queer love affair between Evelyn and Celia. It uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory from Epistemology of the Closet (1990) to understand how the "closet" shapes Evelyn’s life and her decisions. Her seven marriages are presented as acts to save her career and public image in front of the media, with her true love because of Hollywood environment. By linking the novel to the wider context of American queer literature, the paper claims that Reid’s work introduces queer existence into modern culture while still depicting the suffering of before queer lives. Ultimately, the novel tells the reader about the struggles faced by queers in American society especially in context of Hollywood industry.

This paper analyzes the use of sounds displaced from their sources in classic film noir. Often understood as a dark and solipsistic moment in American cinema, interpretations of noir frequently emphasize isolated individuals who are physically, psychologically and socially displaced from their environments. Although scholarship on noir has examined this alienation through various sonic motifs such as music and voice-over, I investigate how several noirs draw attention to the act of listening through acousmatic sound – that is, sound heard without a visible source. Far from being an ephemeral auditory experience, I argue that the separation between sound and image invites characters and spectators to seek out the shared material basis of sound as well as our own embodied relation to the sonorous. I analyze case studies of voice-over in Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) and sounds both seen and unseen in Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955). Through the lens of phenomenology, I implement Edmund Husserl’s method of bracketing, in which our judgment of everyday experience is suspended, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intersubjectivity, to show how the foregoing uses of sound draw our attention back to the material and embodied nature of sonic experience.

This study aims to examine and analyze the forms of neo-colonialism depicted in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, which was first published in 1990. The novel was chosen because it explicitly depicts Western influence on the postcolonial Philippines, particularly in cultural and economic aspects. This research uses a qualitative approach with a descriptive-analytical method, with the text of the novel as the main data source. Additional data were obtained from secondary sources, such as literary theory books, scientific journal articles, as well as online and offline literature sources relevant to the topic of neo-colonialism and postcolonial studies. The data collection process was conducted through a thorough reading of the novel and noting important elements related to the issue of neo-colonialism. The findings were then categorized and analyzed using postcolonial literary theories, especially those related to the cultural domination and economic dependence of former colonized countries on former colonizers. The analysis shows that neocolonialism in Dogeaters is manifested in two main aspects: cultural and economic. The cultural aspect, American and Spanish influence is seen through the use of English and Spanish, the consumption of cultural products such as Hollywood movies, music, the worship of Western technology, Westernized lifestyles, and the shift in local art values. Economic aspects include the dominance of Spanish and American products in the local market and the dependence on these foreign products. Through a satirical and fragmentary writing style, Hagedorn sharply criticizes the global power structure that continues to prevail in the postcolonial era.

This study is an attempt to analyse educational racism in the discourse of movies, critically and multimodally. Van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, namely the ideological square and the micro-macro analysis, is used to critically anlyse the movie and Leeuwen and Kress’s visual grammar approach is applied to the movie to analyse it multimodally. Qualitative method is used to analyse the data which consist of shots and scenes that manifest discrimination in education from Miss Virginia, an American movie (2019) that focuses on a single African American mother who tries her best to provide a high-quality education for her only child. The study aims to unmask how the low-income, mostly African American, parents suffer from discrimination as they cannot afford school tuition that ensure a bright future for their children, even when they do their best and have more than one job. The significance of the study lies in studying class discrimination in movies and sheds light on the way the politicians could participate in raising the quality of public schools. The main result can be stated as the discrimination is apparently based on class difference rather than race difference. The truth is that African Americans constitute the majority of the lower class who are not allowed to access high quality education easily in comparison with the privileged Whites. Politicians are not only racists against another race but also against their own people depending on their benefit. Educated, active citizens, and democracy are the bases of sustainable education in multicultural societies.

Abstract This article argues that Louisa Wei’s Golden Gate Girl s and Havana Divas articulate a transpacific method grounded in queer kinship to rethink the frameworks of world cinema. Drawing on feminist film historiography, the article shows how Wei’s films expose the limits of transnational and transborder models that remain shaped by Euro-American epistemologies. Instead, the mobility traced in both documentaries activates a transpacific critique, one that foregrounds the geohistorical conditions linking Chinese American and Chinese Cuban communities across the Pacific. Central to this method is queer kinship, a heterogeneous relationality that exceeds bloodlines and normative genealogies. Golden Gate Girls reconstructs the life of Esther Eng, whose androgynous gender expression and lesbian relationships intersected with anti-colonial cultural work, while Havana Divas documents the homosocial stage sisterhood formed through Cantonese opera’s gender-crossing conventions. Wei also spatializes queer kinship by navigating sites of absence and deterioration, Bo Bo Restaurant in New York and the Golden Eagle Theater in Havana, where multiple temporalities converge. Finally, the serendipity embedded in Wei’s documentary encounters extends queer kinship beyond sexuality, revealing overlooked histories and reframing Asian American film genealogy, as exemplified when Bruce Lee emerges as an incidental footnote within Eng’s cinematic legacy.