Film Culture Research Articles

Where Adab Meets Film: Mapping Discourses on Akhlaq and Islah in the Urdu Film Journals from India (1930–1950)

Film journals had become part and parcel of the complex of cinema consumption and a vital source of information in the 1930s. These film journals successfully expanded the reach of cinema and created a space for thinking and engaging with cinema and cinema-related content. The film magazine not only fulfilled the needs of average cinema-goers but was also aimed at distributors, exhibitors, advertisers and potential film financiers. This article throws light on the issue of cinema’s relationship to language through the Urdu film journal. It explores how literary public spheres impinged on the cinematic and reflected the tensions and anxieties that had arisen over the question of the Hindi-Urdu language divide during the 1930s. The intersection between – and transformations of – literary and cinematic cultures effected by commercial printing produced a series of complex negotiations. Through the specific cases of the Urdu film journals Film, Shama, Star, Film Stage and Nigarkhana, I show how these journals were responding to – or how they expressed continued engagement with – notions of akhlaq (moral conduct) and islah (correction) which were central to contemporary articulations on reform and morality.

Review: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya Swapna Gopinath Swapna Gopinath SWAPNA GOPINATH is an associate professor of film and cultural studies at Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Pune. She is a Fulbright fellow and is a coeditor of Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India (Routledge), a book on popular Hindi cinema. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Samhita Sunya, Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. $34.95 paper. 270 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 106–107. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.106 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Swapna Gopinath; Review: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 106–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.106 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Samhita Sunya, Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. $34.95 paper. 270 pages. In her new book Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, Samhita Sunya examines “public debates over gender, excess, cinephilia and the world via Bombay … over a ‘long’ 1960s period” (4). A fitting addition to the Cinema Cultures in Contact series, Sunya’s book considers the role of popular Hindi cinema in the nation’s embrace of modernity, but moves away from national allegorical approaches to explore the transnational visibility and circulation of popular Hindi films of the 1960s. More provocatively, Sunya’s case studies are not purely Bombay productions; rather, they are transnational coproductions or remakes of Madras productions, thereby enabling the reader to see beyond the hegemonic patterns of production and reception of Bombay cinema. This well-researched work lies at the intersections of film studies and... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research the Development of International Joint Film Production in the Context of the New Era

Under the current globalization, the international market is integrating swiftly, and the film industry is no exception. In today’s global film culture and art market, international co-production is an excellent method for enhancing the branding of national films, expanding their influence, and fostering the growth of national film industries. The investigation of international co-production is therefore of considerable importance. This paper examines the necessity and prospective growth of international co-productions, using the Sino-Korean film industry and Chinese-produced international co-productions as examples. The objective is to better analyze this rapidly expanding method of filmmaking.

Queer Cinema’s Practicing Muslims and Practicing Homosexuals

Bilal Qureshi returns to the pages of Film Quarterly to examine the unexpected success on the festival circuit and beyond of Joyland (Saim Sadiq, 2022), from Pakistan, and Le bleu du caftan (The Blue Caftan, Maryam Touzani, 2022), from Morocco. Both films are singular, unusual stories of success from underrepresented film cultures, prompting Qureshi to inquire whether they represent a queer breakthrough for Pakistani or Moroccan filmmaking. Elegant, lush, and romantic, each an impeccably made window into middle-class Pakistani and Moroccan family life and unspoken queer desire, Joyland and The Blue Caftan open up exciting conversations about the future of queer cinema and, perhaps even more importantly, about Muslim cinema.

FILM TRANSLATION ISSUES AND SPECIALIZED FIELD TECHNIQUES

A new area of art and translation is film translation, which is a type of mass multimedia translation. Film culture, and particularly film, has been recognized as one of the key cultural expressions in contemporary society within the international communication. Beyond the realm of art, it has permeated society and had a significant impact on the development of people's values, language, and way of life. This paper attempts to classify some practicable principles and requirements that account for successful film translation and can be used to direct the practice of film translation which is not an easy task as most people think of. Some guidelines are proposed bearing in mind the characteristics of film translation (dubbing and subtitling) in comparison to general translation. Bearing in mind that it also refers to the process of translation where the process of harmonising the meaning and expression in a source language with the meaning of target language is of huge significance, Theory of Translation is also briefly discussed. The advantages and disadvantages of both film translation techniques, i.e. dubbing and subtitling, are described as the preference of prevailing one of them over the other in a typical genre is also mentioned. Some advice and guidelines are provided before delving headfirst into the challenging task of producing a correct translation of a film for a voiceover, it is important to become familiar with the translation techniques, translation as a procedure and processes required for the project.

Once upon a time in Turkey: the sex influx, gender inequality, and revisiting past pornographies

ABSTRACT In Turkish cinema culture, something akin to a ‘golden era’ dates to the years 1974–1980. During this time, some of the most prominent figures in mainstream Turkish cinema, directors included, shot various sorts of sex films: almost half of the 1091 features shot during these years were designated as sex films. This article asks: how did this era end? What happened to its performers? What kinds of gendered realities appeared on-screen and off-screen? In what ways have these films reappeared in popular memory? In order to address these questions, the article introduces debates and testimonies concerning the sex influx and discusses how its materials are revisited today. In conclusion, the article points out some future research directions.

Queer creative Indian city: queer film festivals, precarious cultural work and community making in Kolkata

ABSTRACT In this article, we offer a new concept of the “queer creative city”, through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising and cultural activism. We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata. Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and community building that created a solid base for queer counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India.

Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies

Matthew Strohl’s Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies is a deeply personal, philosophically sophisticated, and thoroughly enjoyable book. Written devoid of unnecessary philosophical jargon, the book is accessible to non-specialists, a trademark of Routledge’s Why It’s OK… series. However, with novel and nuanced arguments, the book is more than merely accessible and will be interesting to cinephiles and philosophers alike. I want to start by summarizing why Strohl believes it is OK to love bad movies. I will put these reasons in two camps: personal reasons and film culture reasons. Personal reasons for watching good-bad movies include deepening your cinephilia, building social relationships with others (e.g. bonding with strangers through audience participation rituals), and the pure joy of the hunt for the overlooked gem. Watching good-bad movies also promotes creative engagement. We know the outline for appreciating serious art-house movies. Good-bad movies break us out of these scripts, forcing us to engage in less familiar ways. Loving good-bad movies also provides benefits to the film culture at large by working against stagnation in the culture, re-earthing overlooked gems, and promoting a diversity of taste.

Counting Kisses at the Movies: The Screen Kiss and the Cinematic Experience in Egypt

AbstractIn this article, I use the 1969 Egyptian film Abi fawq al-Shagara and the motif of the kiss as a launch pad to explore broader cinematic experiences and cultures in 1960s Egypt and beyond. I argue that the deployment and debates around screen kisses not only represented wider conflicting and shifting impulses around questions of audience tastes, sexuality, and the role of the cinema, but became central motifs through which audiences experienced the movies. Inspired by a historical approach to the study of cinema, one in which media texts and audiences are central, this article shifts the gaze away from the screen to consider the public lens through which films were appreciated, the broader global media landscape in which they existed, and the tensions between audiences and critics. I bring popular magazines, audience reactions and memories, and wider international cultural trends into the frames of analysis not only to nuance our understanding of Egyptian cinematic cultures, but to shed light on an often-neglected component of Egyptian history of the 1960s; the fun, the pleasures, and the anxieties of a quickly changing cultural and leisure landscape, and the wider cultural mood that helped shape a generation's experiences of the cinema.

Film and History

Abstract The long, rich history of Francophone cinematic culture has been largely absent from the pages of French Historical Studies. The current issue offers a corrective by initiating dialogue between historians and film studies specialists, and this introduction lays a groundwork by briefly sketching intellectual and cultural contexts for the articles that follow. Brett Bowles, Christian Delage, and Thibault Guichard examine films that recover voices silenced by abuses of state power or antistate terror, adding to existing work on how visual media preserves evidence of violence and so broadening our understanding of how history is constituted. Vanessa Brutsche engages a rich literature on how cinematic fictions represent the past with an article that explains how two popular films of the 1970s married historical “truths” with contemporary cultural referents to reappraise the French past and challenge illusions of progress. Kamel Ben Ouanès and Patricia Caillé’s overview of Tunisian cinema explores its complex relationship to state, civil society, and an international “Third Cinema” while reminding us how much Francophone cinema has become transnational in contexts of production and subject matter alike.

The Caravan Of Hate: The Cautionary Tale of Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers and Alternative Spaces for Masculinity On-Screen

Ben Wheatley's Sightseers is a brutally violent and darkly comic addition to British cult cinema, satirising British values, habits, and relationships with the humble caravan at the centre of its world. However, Wheatley's third feature warns against the harmful effects of not conforming to masculinity. Performance, recognition, and hegemonic masculinity enter this conversation. This paper critically analyses how Sightseers uses frame, sound, character, and narrative to condemn white, working-class toxic masculinity in a regional context. The true cautionary tale is in the numerous and savage manifestations of violence and hyper-masculinity. Sightseers is a cult film that shows the harmful effects of masculinity and societal demands, but it neglects alternative masculinities, which may help us comprehend gender construction and portrayal. This research relies on scholars like Jack Halberstam who discuss alternative and subordinate masculinities. How do these affect viewers? This dissertation concludes by considering how current cult cinema may offer alternatives to "heroic" masculinity or "real thing" as Halberstam calls it. Whether it's Everything Everywhere All at Once's "gentle masculinity" or other constructions, different spaces will hopefully continue to reshape our understanding of masculinity and the positive role these on-screen representations can play in this ideology evolution.

Director’s Techniques of Recreating Circus Culture on the Screen and in the Arena

The purpose of the research is to expand scientific ideas about the significance of the culture of circus and film directing in the system of humanitarian knowledge. Research methodology. The researcher applied an interdisciplinary approach based on the use of the following general scientific methods: induction, deduction, identification, complex art analysis, and synthesis to define the culture of directing as a universal variety of artistic-aesthetic and creative-production activity. These methods made it possible to work out the factual basis of the reproduction of circus productions on the screen and in the arena. The methods of systematization and generalization were used to argue for the originality of circus directing in the context of audiovisual art. The typological approach was applied to examine common artistic principles in the creative search for circus and cinema art directors. The scientific novelty of the research lies in defining the culture of the directing profession as a universal type of artistic activity; identifying and an in-depth analysis of the factors influencing the artistic and aesthetic potential of adapting a circus performance on the screen; revealing specific canons for building film and television films based on circus creativity; clarifying the mutual influence of circus and screen arts in the development of directing culture; expanding scientific knowledge about the place and role of screen and circus directing in the system of humanitarian expertise at the present stage of social development; defining directing as a universal multi-vector type of artistic and aesthetic, creative and production, moral and ethical, educational activity. Conclusions. The researcher substantiates that the creativity of film and television directors develops and expands knowledge about circus art, and gives impetus to the development of creativity of directors and circus performers in the screen space. The materials of the scientific article enrich the arsenal of knowledge regarding the specifics of the production and distribution of circus performances by means of screen arts in society and can be applied in educational courses, the creation of educational and methodological literature on the history and practice of the circus, the theory and history of cinema and television, directing, producing.

Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by LukeParker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. 228 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐6652‐7

The Russian ReviewEarly View BOOK REVIEW Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. 228 pp. $47.95. ISBN 978-1-5017-6652-7 Stephen Blackwell, Corresponding Author Stephen Blackwell [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-9349-9266 University of Tennessee Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Stephen Blackwell, Corresponding Author Stephen Blackwell [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-9349-9266 University of Tennessee Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12493Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

‘There is no gallery’: race and the politics of space at the Capitol Theatre, New York

ABSTRACT This essay brings developments in Black film historiography and architecture studies to bear on the study of Northern picture palaces as the period of their prominence coincided with the Jim Crow era. Taking as my focus New York City’s Capitol Theatre – which opened in the immediate wake of the US race riots of 1919 and was the largest movie theater to date – I show how Northern middle-class film culture enforced racial segregation in the absence of legal protection. Southern movie theaters were able either to outlaw Black attendance or relegate their Black patronage to the gallery, a seating section closest to the roof of the auditorium and farthest removed from the screen. Northern movie theaters, on the other hand, had to find extralegal ways to ensure a predominantly white clientele – while also maintaining the image of the Northern picture palace as a shrine to New World inclusivity. They accomplished this, I demonstrate, through a combination of film-programming, strategically equivocal promotional language, and, most strikingly, architectural design.

Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker (review)

Nabokov Noir: Cinematic Culture and the Art of Exile by Luke Parker (review)

‘An indie voice for a generation of women’?: Greta Gerwig, and female authorship post #Metoo

ABSTRACT Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut Lady Bird (2017) hit screens during an extraordinary cultural moment in which stories of the abuse women suffer at the hands of powerful men were receiving unparalleled visibility. The #MeToo movement prompted the entertainment industry to reflect upon issues of diversity, equality, and women’s roles on and off screen. As a woman filmmaker on the press circuit at the time, Gerwig was symbolically recruited and operationalised as part of the #MeToo/Times Up project. This article examines the dominant discourses circulating around women filmmakers in a post #metoo landscape, using Gerwig as a case study. In so doing, it seeks to revaluate feminist theories of authorship during a supposed watershed moment for the industry. It argues that the spectre of the (masculine) auteur not only endures in post #MeToo film culture but has actually been emboldened by the movement to further ghettoise women in the film industry.

Scenes of Destruction and Beauty

This essay addresses a surprising convergence of women, cinema, and forest conservation in the 1910s and ’20s. I tell the story of a short nonfiction “woman’s redwood film” produced in 1919 to anchor a larger analysis of women’s shifting roles in the public sphere. Women’s clubs played a prominent role in the early American conservation movement; women were also influential in the silent-era film culture of Humboldt County, California. I show how these two roles came together briefly in the sponsorship of an educational film by the Women’s Save-the-Redwoods League. While the league continued to use nontheatrical film in the 1920s, its women’s auxiliary receded into the background. The marginalization of women in conservation thus bears similarities to the marginalization of women in the film industry as both enterprises became more powerful. Additionally, both cinema and conservation were shaped by the era’s virulent white supremacism, though in different ways.

Нормативность в философии киноискусства (обзор конференции)

The article is devoted to the All-Russian scientific conference "Normativity in the Philosophy of Cinema", organized jointly by Volgograd State University, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and the Russian Philosophical Society. Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Volgograd branch of the Russian Philosophical Society. The participants of the conference focused their attention on the fact that cinema inevitably reflects the nature of normativity because, in accordance with the traditions of European dramaturgy, the storyline is based on the event of disorder, and the conflict structure requires that the figure of the violator is opposed by the antagonist, that is, the follower and defender of the social norm. At the same time, cinetext can reflect both the author's ideas and purely typical notions of law prevailing in culture. At the same time, the cinema, among other things, can be used as an experimental ground for working out a new way of social action. In addition to the philosophical approach proper, interdisciplinary approaches to the problems in question were presented: legal, historical, sociological, and theological. In the framework of the thematic sessions and plenary lectures of the conference, various aspects of philosophical comprehension of cinema in general and the idea of normativity as its substantial leitmotif were discussed, including genre specificity (crime films, horror, serials); the works of certain masters (A. Tarkovsky, F. Fellini, M. Scorsese, W. Anderson, M. Zakharov, E. Ryazanov, G. Daneliya, etc.); national codes of film cultures; reflection of historical events, including traumatic ones, and their processing by means of film language; representation of religious symbols and meanings in cinema; normative modes of perception of a film production. Thus, we have seen that cinema, as a fractal way of seeing modern culture, is an exceptionally rich and grateful material for philosophical thinking.

Рецензия на книгу «Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture», автор Сяомей Чен (издательство Columbia University Press, февраль 2023)

The review reviewed the basic structure and ideas of Xiaomei Chen's book, Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture. This title can be translated as "The Performances of the Socialist State: Contemporary Chinese Theater and Film Culture". This monograph deals with the aesthetics of pre-communist, communist and post-socialist China. The two-part book explores the creative work of Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian, prominent figures in contemporary Chinese culture, and explores their legacy, which helped shape the theater culture of the 21st century. The main idea of the book is that despite the ideological restrictions, especially characteristic of Maoist China, the analyzed figures created works of genius in their aesthetics, constituting masterpieces of not only national but also world culture.
 The book is recommended for culturologists, art critics, historians, and anyone who loves and appreciates modern Chinese culture.

More than law and order: film regulations and the control of Chinese theatres in colonial Hong Kong

Motion pictures were first brought to Hong Kong in 1897.1 Initial screenings were held in the City Hall, the colony’s only venue for public assembly at the time, and shows of the ‘new invention of the 20th century’ (a typical tagline used to advertise Edison’s pictures) were received with enthusiasm by local expatriates.2 Soon motion pictures spread to Chinese neighbourhoods and were shown in traditional opera houses in the interval between the acts of live performances.3 In the ensuing ten years (1897–1907), such screenings would become a thriving business and a popular form of entertainment, their success marked by an increasing number of dedicated cinemas, some of which held several hundred seats. With little local production to be found in the colony,4 the early film scene in Hong Kong remained largely in the realm of exhibition.5 The exhibition of motion pictures thus served as a pivot between the socio-economic aspects of the industry and the introduction of film regulations in Hong Kong in 1908. Studies on early cinema in Hong Kong have focused on key personalities and productions in an attempt to construct a genealogy of Hong Kong cinema, including naming the ‘founding fathers’ and their struggle to create a cinema that would later establish Hong Kong as the ‘Hollywood of the East’.6 While this focus is imperative, given that the dominance of Shanghai film personalities in the standard historiography routinely underestimates the impact of film culture in places such as Canton or Hong Kong, it is important to expand its scope by attending to cinema’s civic role in the social fabric of early 20th-century Hong Kong. Some recent works have ventured in this direction: a recent article by Ting-yan Cheung and Pablo Sze-pang Tsoi, for example, discusses the germination of a local film culture and its transition into a small-scale sector of production and distribution, paving the way for development of the film industry in the 1930s.7 The ways in which motion pictures, ‘the marvel’ of the new century and an emergent commercial sector, were incorporated into the larger social and economic fabric nonetheless remains an under-explored terrain. To address this, I concentrate upon the scarcely examined field of film regulation from the first two decades after motion pictures were brought to the colony. Previous studies on Hong Kong film regulation and censorship have focused on two areas: one being the politics of film policy, responding to the 1987 outcry over the illegitimacy of the censorship imposed in Hong Kong over several decades;8 the second being the cultural Cold War and the complex negotiations by different stakeholders after World War II.9 Other studies on national film law or policy examine the ideological, cultural, sexual and business control of film production, distribution, exhibition and consumption.10 More recently, racial, ethnic and religious politics have also played a role in policy studies.11 In early colonial Hong Kong, ideological or cultural control was less prominent, while business and racial control reigned in the regulatory frameworks. My essay traces the legal and ideological genealogy of film regulations in the early 20th century, and how financial motivation and discrimination against Chinese business sat at the very heart of their enforcement. I argue that the colonial credo of ‘law and order’, when confronting local Chinese businesses such as movie theatres, was far from an impartial tool for administering justice in Hong Kong. As the legal foundation of the colonial governance, ‘law and order’ instead veiled the mercantile motivation and tended to target the non-European businesses – in correspondence with Teemu Ruskola’s term, ‘legal Orientalism’.12 Law and order, at this period in colonial history, ruled cinema exhibition in tandem with the racial prejudice of the British rulers, attesting to what Victor Fan calls the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the cinema in Hong Kong.13