Cinematic Conventions Research Articles

Film bleu: the development of cinematic aesthetics and disavowal of cultural traditions in Hong Kong crime cinema

ABSTRACT This essay revisits a period (from the early 1980s to early 2000s) in the history of Hong Kong film through the perspective of ‘film bleu’ and traces a brief and roughly chronological history of Hong Kong film bleu. In the early stages of the development of the film bleu aesthetic in local cinema, red was nearly as prominent as blue, whereas the blue–red scheme has largely been replaced by a monochromatic blue tone in more recent ‘bluish’ films. This essay reveals how a blue–red color and lighting scheme gradually gave way to a blue-dominated one and how blue was developed as a generic and cinematic convention in Hong Kong crime films. It propounds that, in addition to efforts to develop idiosyncratic generic conventions, the film bleu aesthetic in post-Handover Hong Kong cinema reflects a detached attitude toward and even a disavowal of both contemporary and traditional Chinese cultures.

Insomniac Nights and an Aesthetics of Passivity: On Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker Series

Through Tsai Ming-liang's postretirement Walker series (2012–18), I consider Tsai’s ever-further alienation of cinematic conventions and expectations and a continued pursuit of an “aesthetics of passivity” within the illusory form of the moving image. Guided by Levinasian themes of passivity, fatigue, and insomnia, I read the ethicopolitical possibility of on-screen passivity and passive spectatorship through scenes in the series and the 2016 No No Sleep exhibition at the MoNTUE in Taipei. In a pandemic time when self-isolating is a passive action and form of responsibility for the other, waiting together becomes a temporal practice of the will that has collective, political potential.

Smooth, Bumpy and Ghostly Rides: (Re)Viewing the American Landscape and Travel Imagery in Bill Morrison’s Night Highway (1990), The Death Train (1993), City Walk (1999) and Ghost Trip (2000)

In this paper I analyze various ways in which Bill Morrison’s travel films, Night Highway (1990), The Death Train (1993), City Walk (1999) and Ghost Trip (2000), tend to challenge the concept of the American landscape through the use of cinematic conventions traditionally associated with early cinema’s phantom rides as well as contemporary travel ride films and road movies. Particularly, I argue that Morrison’s experimental pictures, while simultaneously drawing on and playing with selected phantom ride, travel ride film and road movie tropes, exploit the dynamics between the spectator’s unique frontal perspective, visual mobilities and distant panoramic views as well as evoke a distorted experience of sensational and contemplative voyages, hence challenging panoramic perception and an idealized image of American (film) landscape intrinsically bound with the natural and technological sublime. To achieve this particular effect, the analyzed material incorporates such elements as deteriorated footage, manipulated travel imagery and image looping enhanced by atmospheric scores, slow and fast motion cinematography or more conventional traditions of abstract formalism.

Subversive Horror, Patriarchal Poison, and Progressive Apocalypse in Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls and Blood Quantum

In the ongoing First Nations and otherwise Indigenous apocalypse in Canada and abroad, the colonial footprint continues to remain firmly stamped on cultures and peoples relegated to the socio-political margins. One recent response occurs in Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) and in his follow-up Blood Quantum (2019). Following a combination of Indigenous theoretical analyses combined with traditional cultural studies, this article demonstrates how these films simultaneously expose the horrific crimes of colonialism in a relatively recent contemporary setting while ironically using the cinematic conventions of horror and apocalypse to critique a stultifying patriarchal ideology both from within and surrounding the Indigenous community.

Mythical Association of Male Body in Baahubali Series

This study entitled as “Mythical Association of Male Body in Baahubali Series” explores how S.S. Rajamauli destabilizes the cinematic convention of the constructed female body in consideration of the male gaze in the Bollywood film industry. It investigates the entertainment industry’s presentation of the male body for both the male and female gaze in Baahubali Series. Moreover, the manuscript highlights the glorification of the male body through rigorous training and constant maneuver in resonance with the Eastern mythologies and Hindu scriptures. The study discovers the reworking of myth and archetype in film and an ideal male body prepared in gym centers and training institutions. Cinematic representations of Bhima, Krishna, Lord Vishnu and Arjuna mythologize male bodies. The research paper examines the texts from the perspectives of Body Studies and the body myth from the Eastern epic traditions, including Mahabharata, Ramayana and Hindu hymns. Similarly, the body of Baahubali rehearses Bhima and Krishna, the body of Bhalla Deva with Duryodhana and the body of Bajjala Deva with Dhritarastra. The Hollywood film industry’s projection of the body with resonance of myth and archetype subverts the traditional notion of body as impure trivial thing. Since the representation of the body in Bollywood movies has barely been explored, this study can be significant source for the researchers of myth, movie and masculinity in the future.

Sex scene and unseen: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019)

ABSTRACT Across her body of work, Céline Sciamma demonstrates a persistent and progressive interest in reconfiguring cinematic discourses of desire. The few sex scenes in her oeuvre do not function narratively as straightforward evidence of a character’s desire or the truth of the self. Rather, the director tests out how the reorientation of both conventional and novel sex scenes via visual style and mise en scène might offer opportunities to reorganise their sexuality effects. In Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Sciamma eschews the cinematic conventions of a sex-positive lesbian romance or arthouse film and offers instead an idiosyncratic image of sex that playfully acknowledges, and complexly references, the historical invisibility of lesbian sexuality and its more recent subjection to spectacular regimes of cinematic visibility. Detaching pleasure from the desire that looking everywhere else in the film sustains, Sciamma adopts a queer aesthetic of diffusion and strategic invisibility.

Film and the Right to Privacy

FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott examines the role of cinematographer Hélène Louvert’s in crafting narratives that protect the cinematic subject’s right to privacy in two recent films by female directors: Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, 2020) and The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021). Noting that the history of cinema has privileged the camera’s voyeuristic violation of privacy, particular of women and other minorities, Benson-Allott explores how Louvert employs different cinematic codes and conventions to instead protect and respect her characters’ interiority. These gestures call into question the presupposed right of both mainstream and art cinema to look, and encourage scholars’ long overdue attention to the role of the cinematographer in creating cinematic meaning.

Witnessing Women: Quo Vadis, Cinema?

Abstract The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide. The Diary of Diana B. (Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, 2019, Croatia) directed by Dana Budisavljević, and Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020, Bosnia-Herzegovina), directed by Jasmila Žbanić, both compel us to bear witness to mass atrocities while avoiding the pitfalls of turning suffering into a spectacle, and by sidestepping the predictable cinematic conventions of redemption and closure, both formally and narratively. In my analysis of the films as anti-spectacles through the framework of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ‘speaking nearby’, I argue for the concept of ‘women’s world cinema’, a kind of cinema that is made by women, speaks to women’s experiences, and/or addresses the spectator as female while also speaking nearby instead of about its subjects in ways that eschew conventional spectatorial alignments and co-optations of traumatic experience.

On Black Affective Forms: A Conversation with Garrett Bradley

Abstract In this conversation—recorded in 2019 for the artist's first solo museum exhibition—New Orleans–based Garrett Bradley discusses her filmic work as well as its relationship to institutional archives and personal communities with art historian Huey Copeland. What emerges is a critical account of Bradley's evolving Black feminist practice—its inspirations, antecedents, and analogues—which puts pressure on filmic conventions to move toward an “affective resymbolization” of America's racial imaginaries and the means through which they might be contested, shared, and visualized for audiences on all sides of the color line.

Films, Subtitles and Subversions

Focusing on subtitling for film festivals, more specifically on an Italian festival on human rights, this paper centres upon the notion of subversion as it can be applied to the practice of subtitling in this very special field. Subversive practices can, in fact, be found at various levels in the overall activity which the international distribution of films through festivals entails. From the very production of films and videos which tend to upturn mainstream cinematic conventions to the translation and dissemination of texts denouncing the violation of rights, the subversive action carried out by film festivals is always visible, strong and steady.Laying emphasis on the often unacknowledged role of the subtitlers involved in these subversive actions, the paper attempts to highlight the unique and often very complex role they are required to play, as well as the linguistic, sociocultural and emotional constraints they have to face.

Synthetic Vision in Virtual Reality Documentaries

Based on a nuanced understanding of immersion and sense of presence (SoP) as two key aesthetic effects that the application of virtual reality (VR) to cinema is believed to innovate, this paper develops the concept of synthetic vision as fundamental to understanding the visual experience of VR media, particularly VR documentaries. The concept contends that viewers’ experience in VR is based on two visions that seemingly contradict each other: first, a disembodied vision that transports them to a simulated world, and second, an embodied vision guaranteed by the freedom to control kinesthetic movement and direction of gaze. This serves to advance the idea that immersion and SoP are not unified but rather multifaceted concepts premised on a nuanced understanding of the varying relationships between the technological system of VR, its media content, and its user. For the concept of synthetic vision points to the paradoxical coexistence of viewers’ presence in the virtual world and their structural absence from the world that lays the groundwork for their immersive experience. By classifying three generic categories of contemporary VR documentaries (humanitarian and journalism documentaries, documentaries about nature, travel, and museum visits, and documentaries based on the reenactment of conscious or mnemonic realities), and by examining the aesthetic and ethical underpinnings VR brings to each of them, I argue that it hinges upon what kind of cinematic conventions and genres are remediated to determine the effective synthesis of the two visions. The varying effects of synthetic vision in the three subgenres of VR documentary stress that immersion and SoP have different political and ethical consequences of media witnessing. In the conclusion, I recapitulate multiple implications that the concept of synthetic vision has in regards to both the studies on VR and the recently flourishing investigation into cinematic VR artifacts.

Private screenings: Ingmar Bergman's ‘Cries and Whispers’ and cinematic fiction

ABSTRACT Though literary studies has developed a rich understanding of the way that certain Modernist, early-, and mid-twentieth-century writers responded to cinematic conventions in their work, and to a lesser extent postmodern novelists as well, we do not have a full account of how contemporary fiction is responding to the visual norms embedded within cinema, nor how readers intimately familiar with filmic form might be experiencing these novels. By reconsidering film and literature in light of the groundbreaking work on the literary imagination done by Elaine Scarry in Dreaming by the Book, this article isolates a strand of criticism from recent decades that asks very different questions of literature to those usually asked by film theorists, cultural studies critics, and philosophers interested in the subject. Via a detailed examination of Ingmar Bergman's overtly cinematic short story, ‘Cries and Whispers’, which serves as an unusually direct instance of the multiple connections between literary and cinematic visuality, the article opens up broader questions about the ethics of seeing, and the ways in which contemporary fiction – and indeed twentieth-century fiction more broadly – might be understood in relation to cinema.

DECONSTRUCTING HOLLYWOOD WAR CINEMA: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ENEMY IN INGLORIOUS BASTERDS AS POSTMODERN ENEMY

<p><em>This research examines the construction of the enemy in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) as postmodern enemy through the portrayal of the Nazi. Applying Derrida's deconstruction theory to see how Hollywood cinematic convention is being deconstructed, the analysis shows that the Nazi are being deconstructed through the following construction: 1) wearing distinctive outfit, 2) being dehumanized as evil, 3) having different purpose from the hero, 4)being on the losing side, and 5) being racially different. The Nazi shows some qualities of not being stereotypical enemy: they are depicted to show patriotism, loyalty, and compassion. The blurry characteristics between hero and enemy shows postmodernity.</em><em></em></p>

‘Something was wrong with the movie’: formal analysis of historical films and the development of historical literacy (‘Había algo fuera de lugar en la película’: análisis formal de las películas históricas y desarrollo de la alfabetización histórica)

ABSTRACT Historical film literacy has been defined as a set of skills that will ‘empower students to look at movies set in the past critically as historical documents’. In the present paper we aim to explore the possibilities of advancing these skills through the development of a model for history education that adds an element of formal analysis to the analysis of historical films in the classroom. Next, we attempt to provide an overview of these skills based on preliminary research findings from the field. Based on students’ film reviews written as historical film analyses which made use of the model presented, we conclude that three types of skills related to history education are developed: skills related to historical thinking concepts, skills related to the interpretation of the cinematic language and conventions as ways to construct historical meanings and skills related to analysing the processes of constructing history and memory.

Attention, Blending, and Suspense in Classic and Experimental Film

Alfred Hitchcock claimed that suspense arises when viewers have - or believe that they have - privileged information about a forthcoming undesirable event and are powerless to intervene. In Hitchcock’s canonical formulation, then, suspense is a function of information management and audience anticipation. Cognitive approaches follow this line of reasoning, and thus the cognitive literature on suspense has thus been especially concerned what is sometimes called the “paradox of suspense” or the “anomalous experience of suspense”: if suspense involves uncertainty, why should people feel suspense when they know what’s about to happen? In the present study, we think the explanation lies in another aspect of suspense that Hitchcock alludes to but never develops in his own account: namely, the extent to which its suspense seems to be the product specifically of social cognition. That is, it is not merely a matter of tracking information about a sequence of events, but of processing and applying social information, managing multiple perspectives, and ascribing mental states to real and imagined participants in the narrative scene. To explain how suspense emerges from the interaction of narrative conventions and our natural cognitive responses, we will need to look at the contributions of two important cognitive systems that underlie the construction of meaning: (1) joint attention, in which two or more people are both focused on an external object and mutually aware of this shared focus; and (2) conceptual integration, in which elements and vital relations are selectively projected from multiple inputs, and processes of composition, completion, and elaboration give rise to new emergent structure in the blend. Each without the other fails to provide an adequate cognitive model of the phenomenon of suspense as it plays out in real time. Suspense is a product of manipulations of blended joint attentional scenarios. Filmic conventions generate suspense by constructing triangles of joint attention in which the intentions of the filmmaker, or the camera-eye, overtly overpower the agency of the viewer. They engage our natural systems for social cognition while frustrating our desire to complete the joint attentional triangle. We use this model for the analysis of two classic Hollywood films, Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and Wells's Touch of Evil (1958), and one experimental film, Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967).

Speaking Without Words: Luhrmann's Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet

Abstract In an assessment of Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, this article takes up the question of what makes a film adaptation of Shakespeare successful. The film has been criticized for its divergence from the letter of Shakespeare's text and its apparent lack of adherence to the structure of the play. However, I argue that these alterations enable Luhrmann to transfer the key themes of Romeo and Juliet into a uniquely cinematic form. Drawing on Richard Fry's interpretation of the Shakespearean text, I focus on the play's theme of the inevitable inadequacy of language to convey emotion and meaning. By deconstructing the play's text and employing cinematic conventions, Luhrmann offers the viewer a visual experience of emotions that were initially meant to be represented verbally on the stage. Transferring the language of Shakespeare's play into the visual and thereby offering the viewer a genuinely human approach to the emotions conveyed within the play seems to imply the inadequacy of language. This technique creates a stark contrast with the spoken language that remains in the film. By that, Luhrmann seems to underscore Shakespeare's point about the inadequacy of language and enables viewers to experience the Shakespearean verse anew.

Hot venus, cool modern: voice, body, and the hungry gaze as sites of black feminist re-inscription in Ann Petry’s The Narrows

ABSTRACTAnn Petry’s The Street, a bestseller when it appeared in 1946, has come to define her legacy as a novelist and public intellectual. Perceived as a disciple of Richard Wright, Petry has often been configured within the black protest tradition, which obscures her narrative experimentation and attention to rich, aesthetic detail. This essay places Petry in a more expansive and dynamic cultural context by examining The Narrows, her 1953 novel, as an exemplar of “hybrid modernism,” which combines social realism with aesthetic experimentation. In focusing on the subversively blowsy, bluesy Mamie Powther, the black woman simultaneously at the novel’s periphery and integral to its unfolding, this essay analyzes Petry’s investments not only in the blues and the African-American musical tradition, but in her incorporation of the cinematic conventions of film noir; particularly in the re-inscription of the figure of the femme fatale as (Hottentot) Venus. Rather than simply a passive recipient of the male gaze, Mamie can be interpreted as an active agent in her own right, a modern woman capable of sexual agency and erotic self-assertion as embodied in the active desire of her own hungry gaze and corporeal appetites.

Interactive Narrative Design beyond the Secret Art Status: A Method to Verify Design Conventions for Interactive Narrative

In recent years, game narrative has emerged as an area for novel game concepts and as a strategy to distinguish a particular title. However, innovation in this area comes primarily from indie companies and individual efforts by noted designers. There is a lack of trained specialists ready to produce interactive narrative experiences. Many existing practitioners are self-trained and often rely on intuition in their design practice. A key element missing from the effort towards a more sustained development and improved professional training is a set of design conventions that fulfill a role comparable to cinematic conventions like continuity editing or montage. Therefore, our research focuses on identifying, verifying and collecting such design strategies. We describe an empirical method to verify candidate design conventions through the evaluation of user reaction to A/B prototypes, which improves upon the trial-and-error process of old.

Horror vérité: politics and history in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017)

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes that certain cinematic conventions of the horror film are uniquely suited to bring into visibility everyday, endemic horror – a horror that many in US society refuse to see. I call this use of horror, ‘horror vérité’ or truthful horror. As a form of politically inflected horror, it has potential to perform the kind of materialist history that Walter Benjamin theorizes, in which the historical materialist ‘appropriate[es] a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ in order to recast the present. Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, is an example of ‘horror vérité’, because it uses the mechanics of the horror genre to expose actually existing racism, to render newly visible the very real, but often masked, racial landscape of a professedly liberal post-racial America. The film analysis considers: first, the use of the conventions of horror to expose everyday racial violence; second, its reliance on a dialectic of sleeping (hypnosis) and waking up (provoked by photography); and third, its performing of the historical materialism Benjamin describes, in which the jarring confrontation of the past and the present radically alters the landscape of the present.

Beyond 4K: Can We Actually Tell Stories in Motion Pictures and Television in 8K?

Although the full-scale implementation of 4K (ultrahigh-definition) is not yet achieved, demos showcasing 8K (Super Hi-Vision) have already been introduced at major industry conferences and trade shows. While it is a part of the strategic plan of some public and private parties, and already standardized (ITU-R BT.2020, SMPTE ST 2036–1, ARIB STD-B56), the question of the value of 8K (or, more precisely, 7680 pixels) as a storytelling tool deserves further consideration. In this paper, we analyze the relative worth of achieving such a resolution through the lens (pardon the pun) of the cinematic language, as it has been defined over the past 120 years. From a technical perspective, the resolving capacity of the human eye, proxemics (the science of interpersonal distances) and dynamic resolution (motion) are applied to cinematic conventions to determine whether this increase in spatial resolution yields an improvement in viewer experience. The paper demonstrates that there are very few cinematic shots that actually benefit from 8K. In most cases, framing conventions would need to be drastically widened, and motion reduced to almost nothing, defeating the purpose of motion pictures. In the opinion of the writer, progress in sensor technology, bandwidth, and compression would be more effectively leveraged in the delivery of better pixels, instead of more pixels. The author describes several avenues that could be explored using this philosophy, i.e., the use of ultrahigh frame rates (240 Hz), lesser compression, higher dynamic range, and more immersive media.