Films Of 1960s Research Articles

Miklós Jancsó’s historical cinematic spectacles and moving pictorial figurations in a Hungarian landscape a study and a phenomenological perspective on Jancsó’s films of 1960s and 1970s

In the following article, I examine the originality of Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó’s (1921–2014) filmmaking practice. Jancsó appears as a unique representative of European filmmaking tradition who was motivated by a specific commitment to develop and increase the function of cinematic form, the effectiveness of images and sounds and performances of the actors which aesthetically formulate, translate and change the effects of Hungarian cinema to higher qualities and dimensions of art and spectacle. The significance of the filmic form comes forward, and the camera-based organisation of it increases the intensity of narration. Jancsó’s use of folk rituals adds a strong sense of pictoriality to the overall narrative structure, because his emphasis lies in the physicality of different appearances inside the frame. In his own stylistic way, Jancsó processes these various formations executed by the performers in a style in which all the elementary forces—whether physical, pictorial, psychological, or aesthetic—work in conjoint with one another. In this regard, Miklós Jancsó’s cinematic spectacles are symbolical fantasies enriched by phenomenological realism.

Southeast Asian Independent Cinema TILMAN BAUMGÄRTEL, ed. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 304p.

Southeast Asian Independent Cinema TILMAN BAUMGARTEL, ed. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012, 304p.The prolific production of independent films in one of fastest growing economic regions of world impels filmmakers, critics, and scholars to seriously study Southeast Asian (hereon referred as SEA) cinema as a distinct area of filmmaking within global cinema. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, edited by German scholar of Southeast Asian cinemas Tilman Baumgartel, is a contribution to growing discussion of SEA cinematic developments.Essays that constitute book's first part identify conceptual framework and themes in recent Southeast Asian indie films. John Lent's definitions of in terms of governmental regulation, financing, and fresh styles and methods of filmmaking may serve as an index through which cinemas in region are to be examined. The editor's own essay extends Benedict Anderson's imagined communities to film and television in region but hesitates to argue that indie movies are not as popular as other media (such as television melodramas and mainstream films), thereby making contentious idea that through independent cinema, peoples of Southeast Asia imagine and construct their communal identities. If so, this is only at a very limited level. Indeed, there may be a strategic essentialism here in sense that national or cultural essences posited by non-Southeast Asians in region's indie productions are largely ignored by Southeast Asians themselves. What are objectives of SEA filmmakers in portraying different realities-poverty, local traditions, etc.-in different lights, when these themes are largely not patronized by their fellow citizens presumably hooked on technologically superior Hollywood and escapist local films?1) To these problems of relevance to a national audience, Baumgartel offers possibility of seeing such films in a post-national context. His application of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's dimensions of global cultural economy raises important issues: multi-national productions of SEA indie films, immigrant nature of SEA indie filmmakers, international financing, government support, utility of internet social networking programs, relations with local audience, ingenious distribution techniques, exposure to world/other cinemas that inspired SEA directors to make their own films, video piracy, and socio-political subject matters in contemporary SEA indie cinema. In conceptualizing region's independent cinema, Baumgartel pertinently points out difference between imagined worlds of SEA film-makers and those of their fellow citizens and governments. It is this difference that plays out multifarious contradictions that continually debate notions of independence in SEA cinema.Alfia Bin Sa'at and Ben Slater analyze fraught film histories and geographies of Singapore in light of its separation from Malaysia and its exceptional development in last half century. Sa'at's Hinterland, Heartland, Home: Affective Topography in Singapore explains shared film histories of Malaysia and Singapore and looks at contemporary Singaporean films in light of studio era (1950s and 1960s) specific history of which small country surrenders to Malaysia. The urban-rural dialectic in revival period (1990s) of Singaporean cinema traces its origins to post-war (note: Malaysian) studio era when kahwin lari narrative (marriage of lovers from different class backgrounds) dominated. Films of 1960s and 1990s have a striking similarity in that they create hinterland or rural area-now heartland in highly urbanized Singapore-as ideal and morally upright while opposing this to developed but corrupting topography of city. Now, kampong or village life is only inscribed in autobiographical accounts of those who have lived in it, and hence, according to Sa'at, the social trauma of hinterland-to-city dislocation becomes a kind of inherited post-memory (p. …

<i>Wholly Communion</i>: Scenario, Film, Novelization

The phrase wholly is a recurring motif in Peter Whitehead's fi lm and fi ction, punning Holy Communion of Christianity and at least two forms of communion that Whitehead aimed to achieve in his cinema of 1960s- that which breaks down borders between artist and theme, fi gure and ground, subjective and objective, and document and reality; and that which blurs boundaries among people sharing an aesthetic experience that is authentic and powerful enough to propel consciousness beyond temporal and material limits that habitually hem it in. While efforts to bring such communions into being characterize virtually all of Whitehead's fi lms, Wholly Communion (UK, 1965) is- as its title suggests- one of his most concentrated, focused, and vibrant endeavors along this line. Wholly Communion is most obviously a spontaneously fi lmed account of International Poetry Incarnation, an event involving members and fellow travelers of Beat Generation that took place at London's venerable Royal Albert Hall in 1965. At same time, Wholly Communion is motion picture equivalent of Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, a novel that Whitehead published in 1999, which swings with Beat- style abandon among visions of what actually happened, what might have happened, and what couldn't possibly have happened to a variety of actual and fi ctitious people before, during, and after legendary event. The richly synthetic quality of both Wholly Communion and Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, conjoined with heterogeneous content of Incarnation itself, place these twin embodiments of Whitehead's swirling vision under cultural rubrics that Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called and carnivalesque. Dialogism fi nds one of its polyvalent meanings in concept of many equally privileged and fully valid consciousnesses dynamically posed on boundary between one's own and someone else's consciousness, threshold where everything internal . . . is to outside, revealing that very being of man (both external and internal) is deepest communion.1 This is an excellent precis of spirit that was heard, seen, and felt at Incarnation. It is passionately conveyed by Whitehead's novel and fi lm, which portray every consciousness involved in event as a singularity that is turned outward, intensely addressing itself, another, a third person, seeking ecstatic state of eternal co- rejoicing, co- admiration, con- cord that constitutes world symposium in its ideal form, which is to say, dialogic fabric of human life itself.2 Generated by communing minds that experienced Incarnation June 11, 1965, event's polyphonic dialogues continue to thrive in Whitehead's fi lm and book, with Whitehead as psychic intermediary linking singular event with mythic meanings it has been acquiring ever since. The latter point- that Wholly Communion is less a record of Incarnation than an extension, amplifi - cation, and intensifi cation of it- is illuminated if we think of fi lm not as an object for beholding but as a component of a dispersed, multitudinous system. This system constitutes what phi los o phers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a machinic assemblage- a set of intertwined networks that perform, regulate, effectuate, and guide converging and diverging fl ows of desire, expression, content, and becoming. Considered within this framework, Whitehead's movie resembles a music recording as theorized in Deleuzian terms by Drew Hemment, who observes that when a recording is played and listened to, the fi nal statement is deterritorialized and set adrift in multiple, uncertain circumstances that can never be fully prescribed in advance, presenting only a snap shot of . . . materials and codes circulating in technological networks. In this context, matter at hand in Wholly Communion is understood not as that which was seen, spoken, and heard while Whitehead's camera and sound recorder rolled but rather as a set of multiple, mobile strata that territorialize and deterritorialize afresh every time fi lm is viewed. …

José Mojica Marins and the cultural politics of marginality in third world film criticism1

This article seeks to revise and question the cultural politics through which Third World film criticism has historically constructed Latin American continental and national film canons. To this end it reassesses the highly politicized notion of an imperfect, marginal or alternative cinema promoted in the 1960s by filmmakers like the Brazilian Glauber Rocha and the Cuban Julio Garca Espinosa by looking at the contemporaneous exploitation cinema of Brazils Jos Mojica Marins. The article suggests that what makes Mojicas work significant is the fact that it challenges the elitist, high cultural standards on which Brazils Cinema Novo is judged the representative of Brazilian cinema of 1960s by subverting the idea of what a an imperfect/marginal/alternative cinema is.

Symbols of Empire: The Buildings of the Liverpool Waterfront

The three monumental Edwardian buildings that dominate Liverpool’s waterfront stand as a testament to the city’s pre-eminence in global trade in the early years of the twentieth century (Fig. 1). These great buildings, occupying the former George’s Dock, were erected in turn for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the Royal Liver Friendly Society, and the Cunard Steamship Company. They were the result of a long cherished vision to enhance the city’s maritime gateway. Stridently individual in character, commercially driven, and self-advertising in intent, they have given Liverpool an identity that is universally recognizable. Familiar as a backdrop in 1930s travel posters, from films of 1960s ‘Merseybeat’ bands like the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers, or in the 1970s television sit-com ‘The Liver Birds’, they have become icons of popular culture in a way that buildings rarely achieve. This paper, which has been prompted by the recent proposal to erect a further iconic building, a ‘Fourth Grace’, examines the redevelopment of the George’s Dock and reveals how the competing demands of municipal enterprise and mercantile profit were brought together to achieve a potent symbol of imperial ambition.