Motion Of Film Research Articles

Halit Refig's I Lost My Heart to a Turk: Woman, Islam and Modernity in Turkish Cinema

Defined by some critics as the ultimate national cinema movement piece, Halit Refiğ’s I Lost My Heart to a Turk(1969), the love story of a German woman and a Turkish worker in the ancient town of Kayseri becomes an allegory for the Turkish nation’s identity crisis. This paper identifies the parameters used by Refiğ to position the Turkish identity in his film and emphasize the special role of women in Turkish modernization.

Tracing Kolkata's cinephilic encounters: An analysis of alternative cinema in the city

Abstract This article attempts to delineate the cartography of alternative cinematic productions in the region of Kolkata, which, being a nodal juncture that shapes the cultural milieu of Bengal, offers the technological and cultural infrastructures and the scope for cinephilic engagement crucial to the production of non-mainstream cinemas. To explore the gradual development of independent and amateur films in Kolkata, this article emphasizes the cinephilic tradition of the city that not only triggered cinematic movements (such as the film society movement and the Super-8 movement) but also ushered in the institution of film festivals in the region. Despite the mutations due to technological shifts, both film societies (in altered forms) and film festivals occupy central positions in the contemporary city's cinephilic culture. This article analyses the cinephilic legacies of the film society and the Super-8 movements that have historically fostered the contemporary cinephilic ecology of Kolkata, spurring peripheral media products.

Wild Animation: From the Looney Tunes to Bojack Horseman in Cartoon Los Angeles

In this paper, I trace themes of the animetaphor. I interpret Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term as a moving image of the re-membered animal that projects a collective anxiety of oblivion for all animals, including humans. I begin with an exploration of this theme with respect to early cinema and the philosophical and psychological movements that accompany it. I then investigate more contemporary examples of these models in three case studies—Chuck Jones’ characters in the Looney Tunes, the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the Netflix series BoJack Horseman—to explore the imagined city of Los Angeles as a cartography of animal ghosts, invented and reinvented as semiotic machines, which force us to look at animals as ourselves and at ourselves as animals. Mechanisms of mass cultural memory are at work in the cinematic history of Los Angeles, and animation is often a projection of those memories. The link between psychoanalysis, the emergence of cinema, and modernism during the early part of the twentieth century serves as the philosophical-aesthetic background for my approach to social and artistic themes that haunt cinematic and real space in Los Angeles through the movement of animated animals. I argue that the fascination with animal movement of early cinema and cartoon animation suggest a particular function of cinema, and even more so cartoon animation, to remind us of repressed sensations and images from our collective unconscious.

Criticism of Feministic Malayalam Movies: Discourse Analysis

Cinema movement, the replication of society when conformism and pro-slavery ideology hegemonizes and slaking contemporary state. Movement on the screen has different credo which grasps humanism, equalism, rationalism, and feminism in a dynamic sense over the world. When a cinema echoes these, later it is being criticized in centralized and decentralized platforms with opinions, perceptions, and ideologies which would be associated with the concerned society. Howbeit, gender equality, women empowerment, and anarchism had perceived since when the feminist movement has emerged evidently, and also, it's pertinent even in the present democratic society like India. Whenever, the government, elites, constitution, and society failed in humanity. After, cinema rebound it, uncovers it and also edify it. Further, India has unity in diversity, since Kerala has a unique tradition and culture, and it has always reflected in Malayalam cinemas. Among various language cinemas, Malayalam has popular and critical heed at international level owing to the celluloid world films acutely centered Malayalam literature and also seen many creative features and virtuoso in the mediocre movies even in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. Further, the present study focused on modern world Malayalam cinemas and women.

A Cinema of Movement

In this article, I consider some of the aesthetic and temporal forces that give us the opportunity to rethink the relationship between movement and perception in cinema and new media practice. Following Bergson and Deleuze, I offer an idea of the moving image that considers how we can move with the image’s movement. Through a discussion of my own media arts practice, I suggest a new approach to the creation of images that create movement, one where we feel rather than see imperceptibility. Considered in relation to other artistic and scientific deployments of imperceptibility revealed in the use of slow motion in contemporary moving images, this “feeling” of movement summons a kind of time that is neither atemporal nor a subdivision of time but rather a time of moving with images.

Encountering Inheritance in Vivek Shraya's I want to kill myself

Encountering Inheritance in Vivek Shraya's I want to kill myself

Iranian Cinema’s ‘Quiet Revolution,’ 1960–1978

This article analyzes the movies produced in the two decades prior to the 1979 Revolution in Iran. It argues that these films influenced a cultural transformation we call a ‘quiet revolution.’ The Quiet Revolution refers to a new ‘national imagination’ fashioned around the idea of gharbzadegi [Westoxification]. The gharbzadegi discourse grounded an identity based public movement. It countered the autocratic modernization of Iran, in the guise of a ‘spiritual’ or pastoral other. It also positioned its own narrative as the ‘transcendent’ other of secular and modern Iran. This article focuses upon the Iranian New Wave cinema movement. It particularly discusses the works of Daruish Mehrjui, a pioneering Iranian film director of the 1960s and 1970s.

Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash JoeStreet. University Press of Florida, 2016.

Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash Joe Street. University Press of Florida, 2016.Astonishingly, Clint Eastwood was not the first casting choice for Don Siegel's Harry (1971), but after Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne (among others) turned it down, Eastwood would transform into a role that would be his most iconic of a sixty-plus-year career. In four sequels (Magnum Force [1973], The Enforcer [1976], Sudden Impact [1983], and The Dead Pool [1988]), the character's wisecracks became catchphrases (most notably, Go ahead, make my day). Indeed, Harry Callahan remains one of the most (in)famous characters in Hollywood history. Audiences loved him, even as some critics (such as Pauline Kael) pointed to the character's not-so-subtle fascist tendencies and attitudes. In Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash, surprisingly the first dedicated monograph devoted to the landmark film, Joe Street examines the political climate that birthed a film like Harry and how the titular character became a near-perfect representation of modern American conservatism (136).Street first details the specifics of the EastwoodSiegel collaborative partnership, as Siegel helmed four other films with Eastwood as his lead. The first two chapters cover Eastwood's arduous rise to stardom before briefly addressing the genres and cinematic movements that made a film like Harry possible. Street also sets the film in sociocultural context, especially in how it reflects Californian politics of the 1960s, while confronting the associated with its Bay Area milieu. Harry's commonsense approach to crime, in addition to expressing a greater concern for the rights of victims over the rights of criminals, partly explains his appeal to conservative viewers. This is not to say that Harry can appropriately be labeled right-wing propaganda, but the film was suspicious of bureaucratic liberalism and the counterculture. Harry's city, San Francisco, was especially emblematic of where culture had gone wrong: Dirty Harry, then, reveals that the conservative backlash responded not only to liberal lawmaking but also to urban transformation and the perceived problems brought to the cities by the counterculture which itself emerged in part as a consequence of social liberalism (90). Consequently, Street devotes an entire chapter to how San Francisco functions as a character, including a scene-by-scene textual analysis of the film, scrutiny that never grows tedious. …

Subterranean Mexican Blues: Guillermo Fadanelli and the Genesis of Trash Literature

This article examines the notion of literatura basura (trash literature) via the work of Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli: literary renegade and creator of the trash literature movement. Fadanelli’s trash literature project, which he developed alongside the Moho project in the late 1980s, involved a hypothetical relinquishment of the ideas of literary longevity, academicization, and good literary manners. Fadanelli has described his invention of the term as “la abierta carcajada del condenado a muerte.” This irreverence, however, belies a more sobering message: trash is the consummate affliction of our times; it clogs our landfills and our airwaves, failing to nourish our minds or our bodies; like death, it is forced underground, confined to the peripheries of our ever-expanding societies. By virtue of its ubiquity, however, it tells us a great deal about the sensibilities of postmodern culture. This article examines the (anti)ideological origins of Fadanelli’s trash literature project and situates it within the dynamic counter-culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, mapping the ways in which it intersects with (and departs from) other literary, cinematic and artistic movements of its time. From this analysis, Mexico City—a site of unparalleled sprawl and saturation—emerges as an apt symbol of the trash paradox: the hopelessness of the urban wasteland, I suggest, contains both the grim confidence of the death drive and the possibility, however unexpected, of complete renewal.

Filming Critical Female Perspectives: Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers

From his first film—a twenty-minute short, “Expectations” (1982)—to his last—a three-hour masterpiece, Yi Yi (2000)—Edward Yang, one of the leading figures of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, devoted his career to portraying the impact of neoliberal capitalism on the lives of the citizens of Taipei. Interestingly, Yang’s films often employ female perspectives to criticize Taiwan’s education system and transnational corporations for perpetuating neoliberal capitalism’s ideology of self-fulfillment and upward mobility. This paper draws upon feminist film theory to investigate the ways in which Yang’s third feature, The Terrorizers (1986), utilizes various innovative cinematic languages to engender a multitude of women’s perspectives to expose male voyeurism and ultimately criticize the impact of neoliberal capitalism in Taipei.

Seized in Beirut: The Plundered Archives of the Palestinian Cinema Institution and Cultural Arts Section

One of the biggest acts of plunder by Israel was of a vast Palestinian film archive looted by Israeli military forces in Beirut in 1982. The films are managed under the repressive colonial control of the Israel Defense Forces Archive, which thus conceals many of them and information regarding their origin. This article documents my efforts to disclose the films and locate their institutions in Beirut, to chart their history, name their film-makers and open a discussion about returning them. It also provides a deeper understanding of colonial mechanisms of looting and truth production. I discuss the Third Palestine Cinema Movement and the various institutions that were part of the Palestinian revolution in the 1970s, with a focus on the Cultural Arts Section managed by Ismail Shammout.

Women as Tireless Goddesses, Super-Humans and Geniuses in the African Alternative Cinema

Given male domination of the cinema medium, women portrayal in films has dominantly been stereotypical. This trend has been observed even in the African cinema. To counter this trend, a number of theorists and feminist schools of thought have proffered the African alternative cinema movement which insists on women writing their story by themselves so as to correct patriarchal portrayals of women in films. This paper seeks to critically examine this movement with respect to realism. Based on observation and a critical analysis of some Ghanaian and Nollywood films directed by females, it argues that the alternative African cinema may orchestrate a portrayal of women which is more utopian than realistic. Though having the potential to pertinently question the status quo – which is still highly detrimental to women – such a cinematic movement may somehow depart from factual or empirical reality about African women to rather construct and sell a dreamed – but unrealistic – image of the African woman.

Alternative Networks of Globalisation: Latvian Neorealism in the Films of Laila Pakalniņa

Abstract This paper examines the development of neorealist tendencies in the oeuvre of contemporary Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina. Her work is positioned within the global dissemination of cinematic neorealism, and its local manifestations, which, it is argued, develop in specific national contexts in reaction to dramatic societal and political changes. Pakalniņa’s films are examined as a documentation of the change from a communist satellite state to an independent democratic, capitalist country. Heavily influenced by the Riga School of Poetic Documentary, a movement in Latvian cinema that adhered to the conventions of poetic documentary filmmaking, the article analyses how her films replicate and further develop the stylistic and aesthetic devices of the Italian neorealists and the succeeding cinematic new waves. In doing so the argument is put forth that Pakalnina has developed neorealism Latvian style.

Three Times: Chu T'ien-wen on Writing, Screenwriting, and New Taiwan Cinema

The following conversation between Chu T'ien-wen and Michael Berry is distilled from Berry's Chinese book, Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien's Memories of Shadow and Light. Chu's reflections on her early career as a writer and on her involvement in the New Taiwan Cinema movement lead to some surprising and candid revelations. This fascinating discussion is the longest and most in-depth author interview that has ever appeared in the pages of CLT.

Gabriel García Márquez’s Scriptwriting Workshop: Screenwriting pedagogy and collective screenwriting in Latin America

Abstract This article explores three volumes published in Latin America in the 1990s under the banner ‘Gabriel García Márquez’s Scriptwriting Workshop’. These volumes compile transcripts of the workshops for Latin American screenwriters that the Nobel Laureate taught at the International Cinema and Television School in Santo Domingo de los Baños, Cuba, in the 1980s and 1990s. García Márquez’s scriptwriting workshops were practice-based and production-oriented, generating film and television scripts that were subsequently brought to the screen. Therefore, while these workshop texts were disseminated throughout Latin America as manuals for aspiring screenwriters, these collected transcripts also disclose processes of creative collaboration taking shape within localized industrial contexts. Drawing on contemporary research on screenwriting manuals, critical industrial practices and forms of corporate and situational authorship, this article explores García Márquez’s workshop as a window into the craft training of screenwriters and the development of forms of collective screenwriting emerging at the intersection of literary and cinema movements in Latin America.

“To Be Actually Honest”: An Interview with Reginald Hudlin, Writer, Producer, Director, and Executive

“To Be Actually Honest”:An Interview with Reginald Hudlin, Writer, Producer, Director, and Executive Joi Carr (bio) Academy Award nominee Reginald Hudlin is an innovator and has spent most of his career in cinema and television, although his work cuts across several media (television, film, comic books, animation, documentary, music videos, and live entertainment production), evidencing success after success, both market and critical. He somehow always seems to find himself in the right place at the right time with the necessary creativity and resources to fill a gap. Along with his brother, Warrington Hudlin, “The Hudlin Brothers” were a central force in the independent black cinema movement in the 1980s and 1990s. They made it their business to tell stories that featured African Americans that were wildly successful, beginning with the hip-hop classic House Party (1990), that launched a three-feature franchise starring Kid ‘N’ Play (Christopher “Kid” Reid and Christopher “Play” Martin), Martin Lawrence, and Robin Harris, receiving the Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers Trophy (Reginald Hudlin), Best Cinematography (Peter Deming), and nomination for the Grand Jury Prize (Reginald Hudlin), and then next with the romantic comedy Boomerang (1992) featuring Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry, Martin Lawrence, David Alan Grier, Chris Rock, Robin Givens, Eartha Kit, and Grace Jones. Boomerang earned $130 million globally and spawned a double platinum soundtrack produced by Antonio “L.A.” Reid and “Babyface” (Kenneth Edmunds), which made Billboard music chart history with Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road,” spending thirteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Learning more about Hudlin’s personal background and the trajectory of his career will help explain how Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) came to fruition, and also why this humble East St. Louis, Illinois, creative and graduate of Harvard University (magna cum laude) in Visual and Environmental Studies, finds himself at the head of the pack currently producing the 88th Academy Awards. His creative authenticity, intellectual [End Page 45] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Reginald Hudlin and Quentin Tarantino. Courtesy of Photography by Jeff Minton for Newsweek. curiosity, and rich understanding of black cinematic representation create the context for the impetus for Tarantino’s Django Unchained: the carefully crafted tone and affect. Here you will truly find a renaissance man who has a keen business acumen coupled with technical skill, insight, innovation, and risk-taking. Hudlin planted the seed that Tarantino watered and they [End Page 46] together riff and signify on old representations, creating this masterfully crafted new black cinematic hero called Django and this groundbreaking genre hybrid film called Django Unchained—that we now critically engage from multiple perspectives. October 12, 2015, 6 p.m. PST Joi Carr: Thank you so much for taking time out of your hectic schedule to have this interview with me. Reginald Hudlin: No problem. JC: So what I want to do is first talk about the trajectory of your career, your childhood, and then Django Unchained. RH: Okay. On His Creative Voice JC: I’ve heard you say in many interviews that you are simply—at the core of who you are—a storyteller and you explore that through multiple media: film, television, digitally, etc. Tell me more about that, and what in your family or childhood cultivated that creative voice. RH: [laughter] Right, to be actually honest, what I am is a propagandist. JC: Please elaborate. RH: Yeah, I mean the fact that I’ve got a political agenda. Right? And I tell these stories because I want to shape public debate or at least get people to think. And, yeah, I love the arts and I love the storytelling aspect of it, but I also love the idea of influencing people. . . how they think and how they feel. So it truly pulls those two things together [stories and provoking thought]. Yeah, it is a part of a family tradition. Although some of it I wasn’t fully aware of it until I was already into show business. JC: Tell me about your grandfather. Was your grandfather or great-grandfather with the Underground Railroad? RH: Yeah. A great-uncle, Richard Hudlin—no, Peter Hudlin—was a conductor on the Underground...

Dynamic drawings and dilated time: framing in comics and film

Several Hollywood adaptations of comic books have attempted to emulate source comics very closely, with substantial portions of their dialogue and mise-en-scène transposed directly from the panels of the original comics. Directors such as Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) and Robert Rodriguez with Frank Miller (Sin City) have, to a significant extent, utilised the panels of the source graphic novels as story boards for the film productions. These films raise a number of potential issues regarding intermedial adaptation, one of the most intriguing of which is the fundamental relationship between time, space and movement in cinema as opposed to within the sequential art characteristic of comic books. Using the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and the structural-semiotic analysis of comics by Thierry Groensteen, among other critical sources, this paper argues that one cannot conceptualise the cinematic frame in terms of the comics panel, or vice versa. Instead, one must attend to the divergent acts of framing constitutive of each medium, and the highly different manifestations of rhythm that are thereby produced.

Corporeal violence in art-house cinema: Cannes 2009

Taking 2009 Cannes Film Festival as a case study this article explores the narrative limits and possibilities of a global movement in art-house cinema: the portrayal of extreme corporeal violence – a movement that ranges from new French extreme to Asian extreme cinema. Cannes 2009 housed a collection of films that display extreme bodily violence, showing acts ranging from brutal rape and dismembering of the body to graphic scenes of torture, genital mutilation and murders. The analysis of a selection of festival films provides an opportunity to track a transnational movement in which graphic scenes of violence become not only a convenient tool to further audience affect, but also a means to reinforce the reality effect. This study, on the one hand, explores how films that display extreme bodily violence as an eruptive force seek memorability in the competitive art-house film market. On the other hand, it suggests that on the eve of the 2009 global financial crisis, showing corporeal affect alludes to the disposability of bodies under a neoliberal economy obsessed with efficiency and adaptability. Hence, the ethical impulse that seeks the production of sympathetic bodies in the audience often goes hand in hand with the marketing of sensationalism.

Lineages of Dissent: Popular and Artistic Resistance to Imperialism and Extraction on 'The Beautiful Island'

Lineages of Dissent: Popular and Artistic Resistance to Imperialism and Extraction on 'The Beautiful Island'

The Other Side of the Tracks: Nontheatrical Film History, Pre-Rebellion Watts, and Felicia

Felicia (Alan Gorg, Bob Dickson, and Trevor Greenwood, 1965), a short educational film about a teenage girl living in Watts, California, chronicles a day in the life of a high school junior as she reflects on her geographical situation and life aspirations. This article considers how Felicia is particularly suited to a discussion of the ways that urban spaces, and Watts in particular, were imagined in the 1960s. It demonstrates how nontheatrical film can inform our understanding of film history and enrich discussions of documentary filmmaking, the role of student filmmakers, and other cinematic movements such as that of the LA Rebellion.