Cinema Circuits Research Articles

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Semantic macro-structures and macro-rules in visual discourse processing

Semantic macrostructures, although strangely ignored or ruled outside most formal linguistics and even some methods of discourse analysis, define the general, overall meanings of discourse, informally called ‘topic,’ ‘theme,’ ‘gist,’ or ‘upshot’ and on the basis of the higher levels of the mental models of the social actors. Macro-structural (topical, crucial) information, according to Teun van Dijk, plays a fundamental role in discourse comprehension and recall― although other factors (such as remarkableness, vividness, etc.) may also affect attention, prominent representation, and hence recall. One can summarise a sequence of pictures by a title, like a summary of a movie. Similarly, a trailer serves to summarise the movie and to indicate what makes it different from other movies on the cinema circuit. But can we summarise a sequence of images by another (‘macro’) image or image-topic? This article discusses semantic macro-structures and processes of multimodal discourse comprehension, formulating the mapping rules underlying the global interpretation of political cartoons. The rules for multimodal discourse processing (involving group-specific knowledge) formulated in this study apply to Arabic-speaking audiences, which should be of interest for scholars in intercultural communication and cognition.

Getting Over the Woman Problem

In this interview with Mia Bays (Birds’ Eye View), we discuss the recent Reclaim The Frame project, a UK-wide touring programme that showcases female-directed or -scripted films, usually new or recent releases. The interview explores the idea that this kind of curation is a necessary feminist intervention in the contemporary British cinema circuit, one that offers audiences agency and acknowledges that initiatives in film production alone are not sufficient to shift structural inequalities in the film industry. The piece begins with some contextual detail before turning to my discussion with Bays.

Analysis of Correlation between Real-time Sales Ranking and Information Provided by Mobile Movie Platform: Focus on Non-descriptive Information in Google Play Store’s Best-selling Movies

The cinema circuit is facing a digital, network, and mobile age, which expands nontheater accessibility to movies. Application platforms are situated as the most competitive business model that provide digital content such as games, music, books, and movies. Consumers can acquire content-related information not just offline, but online as well. Therefore, item information provided by application platforms is required. The information provided by application platforms consists of richly descriptive information such as storyline summary, consumer reviews, and related articles, while non-descriptive normative information covers data such as sales ranking, release date, genre, rental or purchase cost, domestic/foreign classification, consumer rating, number of consumer ratings, film rating, and so on. In this study, we surveyed and analyzed statistically the correlation between real-time sales ranking and other comparable non-descriptive information.

The Portrait of “Alienated” Artist and Revisionist Historiography in the East-Asian Auteur Cinema Since 1980s

East-Asian auteur cinema since 1980s, acclaimed in the global art cinema circuit, has critically examined the idea of the nation-state and cultural identity. In order to put forward the critical discourses of postcoloniality, the East-Asian cinema from the PRC, Taiwan, and South Korea has framed a dialectical relationship between history (of the official version) and memory (of personal experiences). It is interesting to note that the auteur cinema of PRC, Taiwan, and South Korea, which has investigated the relationship between history and memory, often placed the biographical and mythical stories of artists’ lived experiences, which have been marginalized in the official accounts of history, at the center of their narratives. This article aims to discuss how the postcolonial and post-Cold War re-imagination and re-figuration of the national culture in the auteur cinema of the PRC, Taiwan, and South Korea found embodiment in the portrait of artists.

Divas down under: the circulation of Asta Nielsen's and Francesca Bertini’s films in Australian cinemas in the 1910s

ABSTRACTThe early Australian cinema market was a lucrative target for export-dependent European film producers, from the French Pathé Frérès to the Danish Nordisk Films Kompagni. By 1913, cinema attendance was a national pastime in Australia, with approximately 12% of the population going to the pictures every Saturday night. Australian film production was innovative but too limited to meet domestic demand. As a result of this disparity in supply and demand, coupled with the innovative artistry of European silent films, a significant percentage of the films shown in Australia in the pre-World War I years were imported from Europe. Initially, most of these films were advertised simply by their title and occasionally the production company. Despite such minimal branding, many of these films were in continuous circulation on urban and provincial cinema circuits for years at a time. However, with the emergence of the monopoly-distribution system and associated rise of the star culture that sold films on the strength of an actor or actress's name, several European stars began to develop an devoted Australian following. Most of the early European stars who made a name for themselves in Australia were women, notably the Danish actress Asta Nielsen and the Italian actress Francesca Bertini. This article maps the scope of these female European stars’ popularity in pre-World War I Australia and explores the circulation conditions that facilitated their stardom, particularly in relation to the transformation of Australian production, distribution, and exhibition systems in the early 1910s, as well as during and after World War I.

An Uncompetitive Cinema: The British Fiction Short Film in the 1960s

This article offers a historical study of short films and their place in the British cinema programmes of the 1960s as a way of exploring the monopolistic practices which characterised the film industry during this period. Focusing on the short fiction/entertainment film is a particularly useful way of studying competition in the industry because the problems of financing, distribution and exhibition which characterised film production were felt more keenly by those working on short films than they were by those working solely in the feature film sector. The 1960s, and more specifically the mid-1960s, represented a key moment in the history of the short fiction film in Britain. The year 1966 saw the publication of the Monopolies Commission report into the dominance of the cinema circuits by Rank and ABC, a document which heralded recognition of the problems facing short film-makers (and film-makers in general). This article will tell the story of how the producers and distributors of short films in the 1960s jostled to find a space for their products among cinema programmes already replete with Rank and ABC’s Look at Life and Pathé Pictorial lifestyle documentary serials, and this history will in turn highlight the ways in which the conservative nature of the industry hampered the growth of a healthy, creative short film sector in Britain.

Esperantic Modernism: Joyce, Universal Language, and Political Gesture

Esperantic Modernism: Joyce, Universal Language, and Political Gesture Nico Israel (bio) Incubation Period In the 1965 movie Incubus, a pre-Star Trek William Shatner plays, with characteristic avidity, the role of Marc, a wounded soldier who comes to the village of Nomen Tuum in search of curative water. While there, he is seduced by a beautiful young succubus, whose appointed task is to prevent Marc’s recuperation and instead deliver his soul to hell. What transpires is a bit too complicated, or silly, to merit recounting in detail, but suffice it to say, in Hollywood-speak, that the film is an arena where Twilight meets The Twilight Zone meets Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. The director of Incubus, Leslie Stevens, creator of the recently cancelled Outer Limits television series, was seeking a way to make the low-budget black-and-white film distinctively eerie and to market it to the burgeoning art house cinema circuit. He settled on a clever strategy: Incubus’s dialogue would be in the constructed international auxiliary language, Esperanto. Asserting his newly found auteur status, Stevens would not allow the film to be dubbed into any single national language; it would thus always require subtitles. In this case, Esperanto was viewed not as a means of communicating across national borders and promoting universal brotherhood, but of preserving those boundaries, of maintaining an uncanny and succubus-like kernel of foreignness in language itself.1 Ne ĉiam estis tiel—or, to translate Esperanto into English, this was not always so. Esperanto emerged in 1887 with the publication of Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof’s Unua Libro (First [End Page 1] Book). Zamenhof, who lived from 1859 until 1917, was a Bialystok (Russian Empire)-born Lithuanian-Jewish ophthalmologist and amateur philologist, who spoke Russian, Yiddish, Polish, and German as a child and taught himself French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English in early adulthood. In Unua Libro, writing under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor One-Who-Hopes), Zamenhof created the language that would surpass its early rival Volapük to become the world’s best-known and most widely spoken constructed international tongue.2 Zamenhof’s fervent “hope” was to create an auxiliary language that would be easy to learn and could combat the parochialism of national languages that in part generated inter-ethnic and international conflict, these linguistic differences obscuring more fundamental similarities and connections between peoples.3 Almost a decade before the publication of Unua Libro, a teenaged Zamenhof and his friends “canonized” the “universal tongue” by writing and—it is claimed—enthusiastically singing a four-line anthem in proto-Esperanto, expressing the fundamental aims of the movement: Malamikete de las nacjes, Kadó, kadó, jam temp’ está! La tot’ homoze in familje Konunigare so debá. (Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 14) (Hostile barriers between peoples, Fall, fall, it is time! The whole of humanity Must come together as one family.)4 Within a dozen years of the anthem’s creation, and a mere three years after the initial publication of Unua Libro, Zamenhof’s booklet had been translated (often by Zamenhof himself, sometimes by Esperanto aficionados) into Polish, French, German, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, and Czech. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the language’s popularity grew rapidly, especially among European intellectuals. It was spoken by Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry (1904), Physics (1906), and Peace (1911); it was also advocated by well-known politicians, including French socialist Jean Jaurès, and celebrated writers such as Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw.5 As indicated in its anthemic embrace of “the whole of humanity,” Esperanto from its inception was associated with a progressive democratic socialism and internationalism that defended such universal humanist principles as women’s suffrage, freedom of expression, and widespread literacy. Many of these principles would eventually form the political basis for the League of Nations, where there was sustained debate about making Esperanto an official language of the League.6 It is noteworthy that Zamenhof was an opthalmologist, as Unua Libro draws heavily on the rhetoric of clear vision propounded throughout Western Enlightenment discourse: if one could only see clearly the root causes of international conflict, the argument went, then one could...

Salisbury Stakes: Twentieth Century-Fox, Segregated Cinemas, and the Making of an International Crisis in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1959–1961

Examinations of Hollywood’s influence overseas often center on its film distribution and marketing operations in foreign markets. There is, however, scant research analyzing the influence of the hundreds of cinemas Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, MGM, and Warner Bros. operated around the world between 1925 and 2013. This article examines Fox’s ownership of the largest cinema circuit in Africa, its enforcement of racial segregation, and the diplomatic crisis it created for the Eisenhower administration. Focusing on the 1959 opening of the Royal Cinema in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, this article examines how Hollywood’s exhibition practices in Africa undermined the State Department’s public relations mission.

Exhibiting the Exhibitors: Spatial Visualization for Heterogeneous Cinema Venue Data

Cinema data is characteristically complex, heterogeneous and interlinked. Rather than relying on simple information retrieval techniques, researchers are increasingly turning to the creative exploration and reapplication of data in order to more fully explore the meaning of newly available and diverse data sets. In this context, the cinema historian becomes the creator of visual texts which can be assessed for both their interpretive insight and their aesthetic qualities. This paper presents four research projects that use different spatio-temporal visualization techniques to understand the industrial dynamics of post-war film exhibition and distribution in Australia. The research integrates work by a group of inter-disciplinary investigators into the effectiveness of techniques such as dendritic mapping, Circos circular visualizations, animation, cartogram mapping, and multivariate visualization for the study of cinema circuits and operations at a number of scales.

African Mirror: The Life and Times of the South African Newsreel from 1910 to 1948*

African Mirror, the South African-produced and world's longest running commercial newsreel, was a regular item in cinema programmes and on other exhibition circuits in South Africa from its inception in 1913. The importance of cinema newsreel has been recognised for its role as propaganda during wartime and its presence in everyday life, reaching wide audiences with representations of national and public events. The digitisation of Movietone, Pathé and other well-known newsreels has enabled scholars to access archive material and has generated detailed histories of newsreels' impact in the public realm. This article extends this analysis to African Mirror. The archive of the South African newsreel constitutes a substantial body of film, produced weekly over 70 years. Its operations extended across southern and eastern Africa, as well as North Africa during the Second World War. It was screened on cinema circuits to mainly white, but also Indian and ‘coloured’ South African audiences, the latter a category which incorporated some African audiences, and its footage was supplied to newsreels such as Pathé. This article highlights the similarity of African Mirror to other newsreels and argues that it played an important role in promoting ‘South Africanism’ in the first decades of Union. Providing an overview of its coverage of South African events, it details the conditions of production, distribution and exhibition of African Mirror, and describes how it became established as part of the cinema-going experience in South Africa between 1913 and 1948.

2012 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (May 10-20 2012)

2012 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (May 10-20 2012) Patty Ahn (bio) In May of 2012, Visual Communications hosted its 28th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF), offering ten days filled with feature-length films, short programs, panels, and social events that formed a cross-section of the current state of Asian American media. Visual Communications (VC), a Los Angeles-based media collective founded in 1970 by four UCLA EthnoCommunications students, launched the festival in 1983 to promote Asian and Asian American cinema in the U.S. Initially offering a program of twenty films, LAAPFF now features more than 150 and has grown into a cultural and intellectual forum where filmmakers, producers, audiences, and critics discuss what they see dramatized on-screen: the challenges and potential futures for a minority media struggling to survive at the margins of a risk-adverse Hollywood. Strikingly, even though the modern studio system is based in Los Angeles, a city that houses one of the country's largest and most diverse populations of diasporic Asians we have yet to see a significant increase in Asian and Asian American industry workers. LAAPFF thus aims to showcase the work of filmmakers emerging from the local L.A. communities as well within the international arena. LAAPFF 2012 seemed to portend progress as the West Hollywood-based Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Koreatown's CGV cinema complex spilled over with excited moviegoers. At the same time, it animated, for this attendee at least, a number of uncertainties and contradictions that inevitably accompany a media environment in the midst of a major transformation around how content is produced and distributed. Abraham Ferrer, who has served as VC's curatorial director since 1987, notes in an interview that across its name changes-"Asian American International Film Festival" (1983), "The Los Angeles Asian Pacific American International Film Festival" (1987), "VC FilmFest" (2000)—the festival has always aimed to facilitate a variety of production models and cater to multiple audiences.1 He identified three major, sometimes intersecting, trajectories in the festival's history: one driven by independent artists, a second steered by a steadily-increasing number of filmmakers aspiring to break into the mainstream industries, and a third which emerged in the 1990s when practitioners began to experiment with online digital technologies (Ferrer). Throughout its history, LAAPFF has carefully navigated Southern California and the Asian-Pacific region's cultural geographies while facing a shrinking pool of state resources, an increasingly cutthroat media marketplace, the differing tastes of the international art cinema circuit and global Hollywood, and the ascendance of affordable digital productions. While these pressures have been present since the festival's inception, this year's event highlighted some of the anxieties the neoliberal marketplace has activated within the Asian American media landscape. I offer here a critical review of LAAPFF 2012 that teases out some of these tensions and shares insights offered by VC's veritable living archive, Abraham Ferrer, about the historical trajectories of VC and its festival. LAAPFF's unwavering support of independent filmmakers grows out of the political groundwork paved by its founding organization. VC began in 1970 with the explicit aim of empowering members of the Asian American community to re-represent their own history and experiences. This media collective aligned with the decolonization and Third Cinema movements taking place in Africa, Asia, and especially Latin American throughout the 1960s. The term "Third Cinema," coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, encompassed a growing international commitment to creating films that would lead to the radical liberation from a U.S.-led first world capitalism, epitomized by Hollywood's corporatized, hierarchical studio system (Mimura 30). Thus, VC built educational programs aimed at transforming filmmaking into an accessible, self-sustainable, and collaborative process (Mimura 37). These foundational commitments continue to inform curatorial choices made by LAAPFF's programmers today, such as the decision to spotlight Musa Sayeed's feature film debut, Valley of Saints (2012, India), at an opening night screening. Shot on location on a shoestring budget, using only DSLR cameras, no script, and non-professional actors, Valley belongs to a filmmaking tradition once embraced by VC and Third Cinema...

Subjectivités en mouvement et déplacements identitaires dans les « cinémas africains » contemporains

African films, poorly distributed within commercial cinema circuits, are still sometimes seen from an anthropologic and ethnographic perspective, rather than as artistic expressions. For this reason, reviews of movies such as Un homme qui crie (Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Chad, Belgium, France, 2010), mainly deal with the situation in Chad rather than with the cinematographic aspects themselves. Likewise, for a long time, African filmmakers were prisoners of their origins, compelled to bow to foreign expectations. Today, many directors openly deal with their subjectivities, their complex and shifting identities that are an integral component of their lives and experiences. They put into play their complex and yet rewarding hybrid existence, mirroring the complexities of reality. The present article deals with the central role that the theme of the search for identity, in a constant state of flux and re-definition, plays in the lives, and notably in the works, of these African filmmakers that are thus placed within a wider, universal context.

Albany Ward and the development of cinema exhibition in England

Prior to 1914, Albany Ward (1879–1956) was the operator of the largest cinema circuit in England. He had entered the film business with Birt Acres in 1896, but soon branched out on his own as a traveling exhibitor, eventually acquiring 29 theatres in the western part of England and Wales. Using newly available materials in the collection of the Albany Ward family, this paper documents the pre-war career of one of Britain’s most significant early motion picture showmen.

Twice born: Dionysos Films and the establishment of a Greek film circuit in Australia

From the late 1940s until the late 1970s Melbourne was home to a dynamic Greek cinema circuit made up of some 30 different inner-city and suburban venues operated by a handful of vertically integrated exhibition/distribution businesses. Dionysos Films was amongst the first Greek film exhibition/distribution companies to form in Australia and from 1949 until 1956 it operated with little significant competition, establishing the parameters for a diasporic Greek film circuit that stretched across regional and metropolitan Australia and into New Zealand. This article measures the shadow cast by Dionysos Films (and its charismatic proprietor Stathis Raftopoulos) over the history of Antipodean Greek film experiences and the implications that this neglected aspect of Australian and Greek film history has for our understanding of the national cinemas in both countries.

The Development of British Colonial Film Policy, 1927–1939, with special reference to East and Central Africa

From the 1920s the British government sought to manipulate the powerful new propaganda weapon of the cinema to the advantage of the Empire. Unsuccessful attempts were made to break the American stranglehold on the colonial cinema circuit which was thought to pose a threat to British commercial and political interests. Attempts to control what were seen as the harmful effects of the commercial cinema were made through strict censorship. The Colonial Office provided guidelines for policy and organization. South Africa set precedents for racial discrimination in censorship and segregation in viewing which were adopted in much of East and Central Africa. The Colonial Office and the British Film Institute were both anxious to see an experiment using the film in adult education. Progress was held back through lack of money until 1935 when the Carnegie Corporation decided to finance the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment, a project of the International Missionary Council. The B.E.K.E., an experiment in the production of films for the educational and cultural adjustment of Africans to western society, was conducted in East and Central Africa between 1935 and 1937, with the Colonial Office playing an advisory role. No permanent organization developed out of the B.E.K.E. due to lack of finance and lack of interest among the East African governments. When the British government created the Colonial Film Unit in 1939, its purpose was to make war propaganda films for the colonies. Later in the war, the work of the C.F.U. was extended to the making of instructional films, which became its main function once the war had ended.