Cinema Release 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

‘The kaleidoscopic conditions’ of John Akomfrah’s Stuart Hall

ABSTRACT The Unfinished Conversation – and the extended cinema release, The Stuart Hall Project – is, on the one hand, a continuation of Akomfrah’s engagement with iconic black public figures (Days of Hope and The March on Martin Luther King; The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong; Mariah Carey: The Billion Dollar Babe; Urban Soul: The Making of Modern R&B). Unlike Akomfrah’s conceptual approach in those films though, the Stuart Hall films are the dialectical sum of two major thinkers’ ideas. Focusing on Hall’s life and work, the films incorporate what Hall termed ‘the kaleidoscopic conditions of blackness’ into their aesthetic design. This article engages closely with the extended cinema release to explore Akomfrah’s approach to Hall’s mode of analysis, analysing the films’ decentring of wider social narratives, which, I argue, are seamlessly interwoven into both the design of Akomfrah’s montage and the analytic methods of Hall’s work in the field of Cultural Studies. Through close analysis of sequences in The Stuart Hall Project, I demonstrate how Akomfrah’s refined approach to archival montage hails Hall’s writings on identity, realising new analytic possibilities in the coming together of two major postcolonial intellectuals.

Who BannedThe War Game? A Fifty-Year Controversy Reassessed

The War Game (BBC TV, 1965), directed by Peter Watkins, is one of the most famous films from the 1960s. Banned from TV for twenty years, it gained a limited cinema release which saw it go on to win an Oscar in 1967. Suspicions have long circulated that the BBC's decision to ban the film from TV arose as a result of pressure from government amid fears of the effect that Watkins' documentary dramatisation of a nuclear attack on the UK might have on mass TV audiences. On the fiftieth anniversary of the censorship of the film, this article takes a fresh look at the controversy, examining previously classified Cabinet Office papers and tracing in greater detail than ever before how ministers and civil servants working for Harold Wilson's 1964–70 Labour government reacted to and dealt with the issue. From this evidence, the article argues that the TV censorship of The War Game involved a complex interaction between civil servants in Whitehall, government ministers, including Prime Minister Harold Wilson himself, the Director-General of the BBC and the Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors. The article traces the close relationship between Whitehall and the upper echelons of the BBC during this Cold War period, and argues that The War Game offers a very interesting historical case study which raises disturbing questions both about the limits of the BBC's professed liberalism of the 1960s and about the true extent of its much-vaunted independence from government. The latter is particularly important in the light of more recent and current threats to that independence.

From the Banned Telefilm to the Feature Film: the Two Versions of Alan Clarke’s Scum (1977-1979)

Alan Clarke’s Scum, originally made for the BBC’s Play for Today series in 1977, has become a cause celebre in the history of film censorship. Although the film had already been scheduled, it was eventually banned and only broadcast in 1991, a year after the director’s death. How the decision was reached remains unclear but there is no denying that the film was deemed too controversial both by the Home Office and the newly-appointed BBC One controller Bill Cotton. Scum is set in a borstal, the name given to institutions for young offenders (a system that was to be abolished in 1982), and depicts life under a daily regimen of violence, bullying and racism. In response to the censoring of the original TV version, director Alan Clarke and screenwriter Roy Minton decided to re-shoot the film two years later for cinema release. Starting with a comparison between the two versions we will examine the different modalities of production and reception related to the two different media (television and cinema). Then we will analyse what makes the representation of a sensitive question such as living conditions in a borstal acceptable or not, considering the degrees of fictionalisation of the representation.

The production and distribution of audiovisual works via new media in the light of European media policy: constraints and opportunities

PurposeAudiovisual works – especially cinematographic works – are at the heart of the changes resulting from the development of the information society. Media convergence radically changed the way traditional audiovisual content is produced, distributed, consumed and eventually archived. Film producers slowly started to experiment with new ways of digital production such as the shortening of release windows to favor new on demand services. How does this translate to European film policy? Due to the unique double nature of cinematographic works which are both economic and cultural goods at the same time, the European film policy is at the crossing point of media, culture, competition and heritage. This paper seeks to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachIn this research paper the authors assessed to what extent the adoption of digital technologies is stimulated throughout the value chain of film making and more precisely to what degree the distribution of a European culturally diverse catalogue of films is encouraged.FindingsFor the first time in history, European producers have the tools at their disposal to collaborate, promote and distribute internationally, at lower transaction costs and at a higher speed, and to look beyond their national market. The fast‐evolving technological developments provided the European legislator with the opportunity to strengthen and support the promotion of the European cultural identity in all its diversity. But is this also reflected in the current legislative framework? It is clear that different hurdles still need to be tackled.Originality/valueIn this research paper an overview is given of the regulatory steps that have been taken so far in the field of European film policy to stimulate the digital production and distribution of European film productions. In the context of new unfolding alliances between stakeholders and experiments with premium video‐on‐demand or shorter cinema release windows, the relevance of digital production and distribution schemes can no longer be neglected. The emergence of web‐based services including cloud computing is likely to accelerate this trend.

The final reel [cinema distribution

In the last century, movies used to be printed on film stock composed of celluloid that could combust in a flash and be gone forever. Today, it is rare for movies to be printed on film and transported manually to the local Roxy, Electric or Odeon. No catalyst was needed to destroy this method of film delivery. It simply took the introduction of the digital distribution employed for music, and increasingly books and movies. With cinereel distribution, if you lived outside London you would have to wait several weeks for the latest cinema release to reach your town. It's also the reason Hollywood movies could take months to reach the UK. Today, a movie can be distributed via hard-drives, optical disks or satellite and projected using digital projection systems instead of a conventional film projector.

Digital Cinema Watermarking for Estimating the Position of the Pirate

Many illegal copies of digital video productions for cinema release can be found on the Internet before their official release. During the illegal copying of cinema footage, composite geometric distortions commonly occur due to the angle of the camcorder relative to the screen. We propose a novel video watermarking based on spread spectrum way that satisfies the requirements for protecting digital cinema. It enables the detector to not only extract the embedded message but also estimate the position where the camcorder recording is made. It is sure that the proposed position estimating model (PEM) can judge the seat in a theater with a mean absolute error (MAE) of (33.84, 9.53, 50.38) cm. Experimental results using various types of films show that the presented method provides the mathematical model for detecting and investigating the position of the pirate.

Humanitarianism

This article argues that humanitarianism is a theme in the popular culture and politics of contemporary Britain which repays close analysis. Humanitarianism is identified as a strand of the ‘social imaginary’ through which conceptions of Britishness seek to understand the world and the place of Britain within it. Commitment to the social imaginary is secured through ‘group charisma’ which ties social subjects to it by means of assertions about the unique importance of the nation in the moral improvement of the world. This article identifies humanitarianism as a theme through which Britain deals with postcolonial melancholia and the problems of being an ‘old country’ marginalized in the present. The focus of the discussion is on two films: the cinema release Amazing Grace (2007) which focused on the 19th-century abolition of the slave trade and the broadcast film The Girl in the Café (2005) which was, in its turn, a romance about the eradication of world poverty. It is proposed that if these two films are subjected to cultural and social as opposed to textual analysis it is possible to explore why humanitarianism is so important to contemporary imaginations about — and commitments to — Britain.

Australian cinema's dark sun: the boom in Australian horror film production

ABSTRACTThere has been a boom in Australian horror movie production in recent years. Daybreakers (2010), Wolf Creek (2005), Rogue (2007), Undead (2003), Black Water (2008), and Storm Warning (2006), among others, have all experienced varying degrees of popularity, mainstream visibility and cult success in worldwide horror markets. While Aussie horror's renaissance is widely acknowledged in industry literature, there is limited research into the extent of the boom and the dynamics of production. Consequently, there are few explanations for why and how this surge has occurred. This article argues that the recent growth in Australian horror films has been driven by intersecting international market forces, domestic financing factors and technological change. In so doing, it identifies two distinct tiers of Australian horror film production: ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ production, though overlap between these two tiers results in ‘high-end indie’ films capable of cinema release. Each tier represents the high and low ends of Australian horror film production, each with different financing, production and distribution models.

Review article: Gaming the system: Peter Watkins' The Gladiators and Punishment Park

The Gladiators (Peter Watkins, Sweden, 1969). Original title Gladiatorerna. New Yorker Video/Project X. NTSC region 1. 1 . 66 : 1 pillarboxed anamorphic. us $29.95Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, USA, 1971). Eureka Video. PAL region 2. 1 . 33 : 1 anamorphic. £ 19.98'The sound you are listening to is that of the international ICARUS system. This sound represents the pressure applied by the system to ensure that we all play the game as hard as we can.' The opening lines of Peter Watkins' remarkable The Gladiators make clear that it is no ordinary narrative feature, but rather a complex political allegory designed to have applicability to all in the modern world who find themselves caught within 'the system' and forced to play its game as hard as they can, yet with no conceivable chance of actually winning in the end. ICARUS stands for Ideological Correction and Rapid Unification System - a giant computer system controlling the International Peace Games (a gathering of the world's military powers in which the need for war and destruction has been sublimated into limited combat scenarios). These are the misnamed Peace Games, in which troops from different sides compete to the death, all the time watched not only by their military superiors but by a global audience which has the coverage beamed live onto television sets as entertainment and perhaps, also, as a warning of the need always to play within 'the system' and to conform. We follow the 256th Peace Game, held in supposedly neutral Stockholm, in which an Allied team (made up of members from Britain, the US, West Germany and South Vietnam) compete against a corresponding one from Red China, the objective being to be the first to reach the Control Room where ICARUS, and hence the source of power in this global society, resides.In 1968, when the film was shot, Watkins was most famous as the director of The War Game, a powerful Oscar-winning documentary construction of the horrors that would happen should a nuclear bomb fall on Kent, England. Made for BBC TV in 1965, the film was controversially banned by the BBC from television screens around the world for twenty years, receiving only a limited cinema release during this period via the British Film Institute. His first feature film, Privilege (UK 1967), received a hostile reception in Britain, a reaction which Watkins believed was a political consequence of his having challenged the British Establishment and the Cold War system with The War Game, and so in 1968 he seized the opportunity to quit Britain for a self-imposed international exile (which continues to this day). This followed an offer from the Stockholm-based Sandrews production company, in the wake of all the publicity The War Game had generated, to finance any film he cared to make.Watkins' already-existing Gladiators draft script (which had been co-written with Nicholas Gosling in the UK) was adapted for a Swedish context and shot in the late summer and early winter of 1968 in two main locations - a deserted brick factory and an abandoned manor house, just outside Stockholm. This, however, was no local Scandinavian production. In keeping with the subject matter, Watkins employed an international cast, including professional and non-professional actors from the range of countries represented in the film, alongside the Polish-born cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and the Canadian- born art director William Brodie, who had worked with him on Privilege. Looking back, Watkins has bemoaned the obstacles he faced in shooting The Gladiators, not least the cumbersome 35mm feature film cameras of the period, which restricted his preferred and characteristic hand-held faux-newsreel style (for which he typically deployed lighter-weight, more portable 16mm equipment to give audiences the impression that they were watching a documentary film rather than a conventional dramatic narrative).In The Gladiators, despite some sequences being shot hand-held, notably those depicting combat, Watkins adapted the restrictions of 35mm shooting to his advantage by using, for most of the film, highly static set-ups with little or no camera movement. …

Reviews

Book reviewed in this issue: Imagined Nation: England after Britain Edited by Mark Perryman (2008) Juno (DVD) Dir. Jason Reitman Released April (2008) 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (DVD) Dir. Cristian Mungiu Released June (2008) ¡Hugo! The Hugo Chavez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution Bart Jones (2007) Sex and the City (DVD) Dir. Michael Patrick King (2008) On general cinema release

Neurosurgery in a cold climate

At first glance, The English Surgeon might seem to have a similar theme to Michael Moore's documentary Sicko—a comparison of the UK's National Health Service with health care elsewhere. But Geoffrey Smith's film is primarily a moving and surprisingly entertaining account of how two neurosurgeons from different backgrounds relate to each other and their patients. Henry Marsh is a London-based neurosurgeon who met Smith through their shared passion for Ukraine. Marsh's first visit to the country in 1992 made a lasting impression on him, and he now returns regularly to Kiev to work with his counterpart Igor Petrovic Kurilets. In addition to the two surgeons, we meet patients and their families, although many are seen by us and the neurosurgeons only once: poor access to appointments and scans means that diagnosis often comes too late. However, there is sometimes hope, and we are able to follow a young man called Marian as he prepares for and has surgery to remove a tumour that is causing his epilepsy. The decision of when and whether to operate is often very hard for the surgeons and the patients—for example, Marian's surgery could leave him severely disabled. Marsh likens the situation to Russian roulette. This is an honest film. We see Marsh's frustration with a new computer system in the UK, whereas in Ukraine Kurilets struggles to pay his staff, relies on second-hand and do-it-yourself equipment, and treats as many desperate patients as he can without getting on the wrong side of the authorities. Having left the main Ukrainian health system, Kurilets runs what is effectively a one-man hospital in rented rooms. No-one could accuse the English surgeon or his Ukranian counterpart of choosing an easy life, and both have an inspirational desire to help people. Despite the life-and-death subject matter, The English Surgeon is genuinely funny, with a dry humour that saves the film from being a depressing, although excellent, medical documentary. The only fault I can find is that the film is not scheduled for a wider general cinema release.

The 'Loneliness' of the Angry Young Sportsman

Introduction The war between the classes has never been joined in British films as openly as it was this week. In the forties the working class were idiom-talking idiots, loyal or baleful. In the fifties they grew rightly articulate and angry. Now we get what may be the prototype for the sixties: Colin Smith, borstal boy hero of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a youth beyond anger, almost beyond speech, joining battle. (cited in Hill, 1986: 213) So wrote the Sunday Telegraph film critic P. Williams in a review of the Tony Richardson film of aforementioned title upon its British cinema release in September 1962. The film—based on the 1959 novella of same name by Alan Sillitoe (the screenplay for the film version was also written by Sillitoe)—was produced by the independent film company Woodfall, started by Richardson and playwright John Osborne as an avenue for the making of films affording 'artistic control' to directors. According to Richardson, 'It is absolutely vital to get into British films the same sort of impact and sense of life that what you can loosely call the Angry Young Man cult has had in the theatre and literary worlds' (Hill, 1986: 40). Click for larger view Figure 1 The Lonliness of the Long Distance Runner in paperback Courtesy of www.theprisonfilmproject.com