Cinematic Journey Research Articles

REALISM AND COMPOSITIONAL REPRESENTATION OF REALITY : AN ANALYSIS OF THE MANIPURI DOCUMENTARY FILM “FRIED FISH CHICKEN SOUP AND A PREMIERE SHOW”

The debate around realism in documentary cinema has evolved significantly over the years reflecting broader shift in filmmaking techniques, compositional forms, audience expectation, cultural and political contexts. The realms of realism and compositional documentary have been in a constant state of flux, each genre pushing the boundaries of what is considered truth, authenticity, and artistic expression thereby blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and challenging the traditional notions of documentary filmmaking. Several Manipuri documentary films have made endeavors of recreating the reality through their representation on cinematic canvas. Depicting Manipur’s cinematic journey and its socio-political context in a compositional form, the documentary film “Fried Fish, Chicken Soup, and a Premier Show” (2012) relies heavily on editing with found footage and presents an even greater challenge with the inclusion of historical narratives. It intricately combines observational account of a film crew at work during the filming of the Manaobi MM’s Manipuri feature film “21st Century Gee Kunti” (2010) with intertitles, archival footage etc. to depict the history of Manipur. This paper explores the realism and compositional representation of reality in the film which skillfully blends diverse elements to document the trend of change and transformation within the cinematic landscape and the lived reality of Manipuri society in transition.

Optimizing Sound Quality and Immersion of a Proposed Cinema in Victoria Island, Nigeria

Enhancing sound quality and immersion is vital for an enriched cinematic journey. This study is centered on the proposed cinema in Victoria Island, Nigeria, aiming to tackle challenges and opportunities in this realm. It explores the current landscape of cinema sound technology, focusing on innovations like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, renowned for transforming global audio experiences. Through thorough analysis, the research aims to offer comprehensive recommendations for augmenting sound quality and immersion in the proposed cinema. It scrutinizes acoustic aspects, employing acoustic treatments and advanced audio processing technologies, alongside immersive audio solutions. Cultural nuances specific to Nigeria are factored in to ensure resonance with local audiences. Ultimately, the research seeks to establish new benchmarks for cinematic audio experiences in Nigeria.

Part VII–Critiquing Africas/Diasporas: Intersecting Dialogues—In Conversation with Claire Diao, Leyla Bouzid, Mati Diop, and Cornélia Glele

Abstract: Journalist/film critic Falila Gbadamassi, in conversation with several film practitioners and activists, discovers the myriad interests, concerns, and burning issues that propel their desire to plunge into this vast cinematic landscape. Franco-Burkinabe film journalist, programmer, and activist Claire Diao explores the role that cinema plays as a link between her two cultures. Franco-Tunisian Leyla Bouzid, talks about her film A Tale of Love and Desire (2021, Tunisia) in the context of her own lived experiences, to have a double culture and at the same time have a kind of distance, to be able to question these identities and interrogate representations of it. Franco-Senegalese Mati Diop's relationship to cinema is intertwined with her Africanity. At the same time that her films pay homage to the generation of her uncle Djibril Diop Mambety and her father Wasis Diop, she continues her cinematic journey in her own way, using the tools of her generation. Beninese film organizer and consultant Cornélia Glele navigates behind the scenes with The Woman King (dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2022, United States and Benin) team as she teaches the actresses the fundamentals of the Fon language of the "Agodjiés" of Benin.

Climate Advocacy in “Ice Age”: A Cinematic Journey towards Environmental Consciousness

The comedy plot and lovable characters of the animated film series “Ice Age” have captured the attention of viewers all over the world. Beneath its pleasant exterior, though, is a potent story that quietly promotes environmental care and climate action. This essay investigates the thematic components of climate advocacy found in the “Ice Age” films, looking at how they encourage action and increase public awareness of urgent environmental challenges. This study examines the film’s impact on promoting a better awareness of climate change and the significance of collective action in protecting the future of our world. It does this through analyzing important plot points, character dynamics, and visual symbolism.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: A Cinematic Journey Exploring Mental Health Themes: From Existentialism to Nihilism and Everything in Between

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: A Cinematic Journey Exploring Mental Health Themes: From Existentialism to Nihilism and Everything in Between

Sex Positivity of Satyajit Ray’s Women: Their Cinematic Journey Towards the Ancient Indian Heritage

The article shows how Satyajit Ray’s women resist the sexism that comes from colonialism and reach back into a more sex-positive Indian heritage, particularly Chakras and Tantric philosophy of life. This is particularly important in correcting the way imperialist ideology misrepresented gender relations in India to justify British rule and how the misrepresentation has continued in the name of nationalist movements in post-independent India. The article focuses on a selection of Ray’s films. It stresses the themes (and their deviation from their original sources) used by Ray to make his point obvious and, at the same time, not very shocking to the traditional Bengali audience of his time. This article also focuses on how the sex positivity of ancient India is manipulated by the colonial hangover and the confusing nationalist ideas that have developed of late into limiting the sexual and social rights of women and how Ray’s cinema resists it in a delicate yet bold manner by visualising the markedly conflicts in both of his female and male characters by awakening their sexuality to the ancient Hindu vision of life.

Deferral and the Dream

Deferral and the Dream

Contesting Culture: The Grammar of ‘Kaala’

Cinema as an art form vividly captures the aspirations and everyday life-worlds of the people in India. In more contemporary times, suffused with the global language of desire, popular Indian cinema has sought to project the nation as a global power, while invisibilizing the faultiness of caste, gender, race and ethnicity. The films are increasingly shot in exotic locales with the lead characters leading enchanted lives. Innovative technology is utilized to narrate stories in which the farmer/worker/maid/other laboring people are conspicuous by their absence. Very few films possess the courage to buck this trend to recount tales of struggle entwined with the language of rights and justice. My article focuses on one such film—Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (Black). The film interrogates the muscular religiosity, caste and patriarchy on which the nation state is tethered. The cinematic journey also infuses the locale of Dharavi in Mumbai, home to thousands of migrant workers, with an agency of its own.

“You Were Born with a Giant Silver Spoon in Your Mouth”: Geography, the Young, and Social Class in Finnish Films in the 2000s

In several Finnish films of the 2000s, Finland is portrayed as divided geographically into two parts: the small urban area around Finland’s capital, Helsinki, in the south and the rural areas in the country’s north. This polarization frames conceptualizations of social class, particularly in films that depict young people leaving their homes. Forbidden Fruit (Kielletty hedelmä) and August (Elokuu) are examples of Finnish cinema in the 2000s that negotiate ideas about class and circulate this polarized imagination through geography. Both films depict the young leaving their homes and then clashing with a geographically marked border. The films are analyzed in the context of the neo-liberal success story which defines the ideal subject of contemporary society. The article argues that the cinematic journeys of the young show the power of geography in reproducing class structures.

"You Were Born with a Giant Silver Spoon in Your Mouth": Geography, the Young, and Social Class in Finnish Films in the 2000s

In several Finnish films of the 2000s, Finland is portrayed as divided geographically into two parts: the small urban area around Finland's capital, Helsinki, in the south and the rural areas in the country's north. This polarization frames conceptualizations of social class, particularly in films that depict young people leaving their homes. Forbidden Fruit (Kielletty hedelmä) and August (Elokuu) are examples of Finnish cinema in the 2000s that negotiate ideas about class and circulate this polarized imagination through geography. Both films depict the young leaving their homes and then clashing with a geographically marked border. The films are analyzed in the context of the neo-liberal success story which defines the ideal subject of contemporary society. The article argues that the cinematic journeys of the young show the power of geography in reproducing class structures.

View of a city: an immersive history of Kolkata via camera-eye

ABSTRACTThis photo-essay sutures and structures a massive pool of images emerging out of an art-project conducted by the author, CAMP Studio, Mumbai, and Kenneth Cyrus (cinematographer), in the context of Response, CIMA 25th Anniversary show, held during January-February 2018 in Kolkata. The project negotiated the multi-planar history of the city, and thus, by emphasizing on its heterogeneity, recreated a visual record of its chronotopia (Also see Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, 22–27). The process was possible by setting up a camera on top of a defunct theatre – Gem (Entally, AJC Bose Road); and, by shooting ceaselessly for over 10 days an immersive and 360-degree time-space movement was generated. The project was first streamed live and thereafter, the edited material was staged inside the theatre, with which the (local) people/participants interacted. A play between recorded events and liveliness, the video (1 hour) brought forth multiple memories of the place (Gem), the locality and adjacent spaces, as well as a range of narratives of regarding noted and trifling events. The project involved a cinematic journey through the cityscape, and an engaging and challenging artistic quest by exploring the ‘kino-eye’. The omniscient camera-eye provoked us to become intimate with our immediate and distant contexts, and produced a dense tapestry of the city.

‘Akerman’ on-screen: Chantal Akerman behind and before the camera, and after cinema

To challenge the increasing tendency to read Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre autobiographically, this article analyses two documentaries on the filmmaker. It theorizes the effects of the increasingly frequent appearance of the filmmaker on screen in such documentaries and in her own films by reviewing both tendencies through the classic debates about authorship. Noting and critiquing the way in which the documentary filmmakers attempt to mimic ‘Akerman’ filmmaking, the article argues that their attempts betray the codes that constitute ‘Akerman’ cinema by reproducing the modes against which her cinema worked. ‘Akerman’ names a cinematic journey towards the formulation of an aesthetic language of space, shot, frame and temporality through which to make visible the unseen and make audible the unspoken that constituted both the conditions and the imperative for a cinematic intervention from a historically situated post-war, post-Shoah ‘Polish Jewish family in Brussels’. This article proposes the term filmworking (drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s post-traumatic concept of artworking) to reveal how Akerman queered cinema. This effect emerges only from close analysis of each instance of filmworking and not from the closed tropes of a retrospective narrative of the life of the filmmaker, who, being repeatedly interviewed, herself contributed to such extra-cinematic explanations and closures of her own work.

The Black Tent (1956) and Bengazi (1955): The Image of Arabs in Two post-Empire Journeys into the Deserts of Libya

These two little known films are both part of the cycle of post-imperial films dealing with the decline of the British Empire. They are perhaps the only films set in or near the historical period of the British Military Administration of Libya after 1945. The Black Tent frequently gets lumped in with the genre of World War II British war films. Bengazi marks the cinematic journey of the actor Victor McLaglen from The Lost Patrol (1934) to Bengazi (1955), his career encapsulating the beginning and end of the Hollywood British Empire film genre. Both films contain redemptive dramatic journeys into the deserts of Libya involving the loss of British imperial male power. The case studies of The Black Tent and Bengazi show the beginnings of new post-empire film genres and new mentalities toward the Arab “Other” that partially promotes a decolonization of western cinema.

Into the Wild

This essay explores the main reasons behind the emergence of a new film form over the past decade – variously referred to as “New Bollywood,” or alternative Hindi cinema. Using philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches, the essay argues that the rise of these new aesthetic forms is one of the results of the neoliberal transformations that have been taking place in India over recent decades and, more importantly, that this new film form is an integral part of the construction of the new urban upper class Self vis-à-vis the Other. By examining some examples of recent films set in small-town India, or Other India in terms of target audience background, the essay argues that the new film form is a far more complex phenomenon than most scholars working in Indian cinema would imagine. The desire for the Other, expressed as cinematic journeys outside urban spaces, helps in the construction of a new Self in a rapidly transforming and highly mediated environment. The essay constructs an approach to understanding alternative Hindi cinema, its appeal to urban consumers, and its relationship to the spaces represented in the films.

Los suelos de la danza. Autoetnografías escenificadas de Frederick Wiseman

Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has been mapped, throughout his long cinematic journey, the form and the life of institutions. In this particular film territory, dance connects the institutional space with the prosaic and anonymous ground of everyday life of the city and its many tours. These samall choreographies, embedded into the heart of institutions, have the corrosive force of an estrangement, through which the dance produces and imagines overflows of the sensitive of a situation. They also update the exercise of a gaze that works as a detailed autoethnography of contemporary tensions.

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

Review: Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes, by Iain Borden; Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.; and Car Country: An Environmental History, by Christopher W. Wells

Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes London: Reaktion Books, 2013, 280 pp., 40 color and 40 b/w illus. $28, ISBN 9781780230269, by Iain Borden. Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013, 320 pp., 112 color and 102 b/w illus. $59.95, ISBN 9781606061282, by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds.. Car Country: An Environmental History Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012, 464 pp., 7 maps and 44 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780295992150, by Christopher W. Wells. In July 2013, a New York Times headline proclaimed “the end of car culture.” Though the summer driving season offered plenty of evidence to the contrary, recent data indicate that fewer Americans are driving fewer miles in fewer cars, and even forgoing the adolescent ritual of getting a driver’s license upon turning sixteen. Thus, the Times felt confident in declaring that the country’s century-old love affair with the automobile was finally, inevitably, running out of gas. But if the romance with the car is cooling down, studying its fraught legacy is still plenty hot, as a spate of recent publications makes clear. In fact, in the hundred years since the first Model Ts rolled off the assembly line at Highland Park, Michigan, the car and its social, spatial, and economic impact have been under almost continual scrutiny, producing triumphant Fordist narratives and muckraking antisprawl screeds in almost equal measure. More nuanced, scholarly studies emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century with The Automobile and American Culture (1980; David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds.), a notable early example that attempted a comprehensive analysis of what its editors called the “auto-consciousness” of the United States. The continued evolution of that consciousness is fully evident in the three books under review here, each of which tackles a distinct aspect of the culture of automobility. In Car Country , Christopher W. Wells tracks its environmental evolution; in Drive , Iain Borden scrutinizes its experiential representation; in Overdrive , seventeen contributors examine its urban and architectural influence in Los Angeles, the world’s original autopia. Unsurprisingly, all three books deal principally with twentieth-century developments in the United States, though each pushes these parameters in important ways. Car Country begins with the infrastructural consequences of streetcars and railways in the 1880s. Overdrive , which …

Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement

Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement

Framing a New World Order

17th Biennale of Sydney Sydney, Australia May 12-August 1, 2010 Riding the ferry home from Cockatoo Island invites reflection. Cockatoo is the biggest island in Sydney Harbour and among seven venues showing work in the 17th Biennale of Sydney. A former convict prison and defunct shipyard, the site provokes consideration of a key concern in Artistic Director David Elliot's take on the 17th Biennale of Sydney, namely how the colonizing impulse has been, by turn, internalized and resisted in cultures around the world. After sitting in its many darkened chambers lit by the flicker of film, one gains a sense of the powerful mediating role of video in negotiating personal and national identities in a postcolonial world. This year's biennale draws inspiration from the multidisciplinary achievements of American musicologist and filmmaker Harry Smith and champions a non-hierarchical arrangement of works where no culture can claim precedence over another. event brings together a broad 440 works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, installation, sound art, performance, and more under the theme The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. A comprehensive program of video works is among the biennale's most striking features and warrants closer consideration. As the biennale makes use of multiple non-gallery venues, some spectacular artworks, including large-scale videos, appear strategically employed to capture the attention of visitors while simultaneously challenging audiences with conceptual complexity. This is true of one of its star attractions, Isaac Julien's epic nine-channel video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which debuted at the biennale. An unashamedly beautiful work, it represents a significant step forward in the artist's vision, boldly connecting video with the fragmentary nature of modern subjectivity by challenging the viewer to hold multiple images and stories in their mind simultaneously. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Beginning with shots of a turbulent, churning sea at night, the scene is overlaid with the soundtrack of desperate rescuers searching for a group of Chinese migrants whose boat has overturned off the coast of Lancashire, England. From here, the focus shifts to China, enacting a lush, cinematic journey through rural countryside and cosmopolitan interiors spliced with enigmatic sequences played out on a nostalgic Shanghai film set. In abstract ways, the video tracks the magnetic pull of the promise of a better life that drives migration as well as the complex desires shaping the modernization of today's China. Yet, other artists diverge markedly form the cinematic. German artist Christian Jankowski collaborates with television personalities and artworld celebrities to produce a mock documentary on his own practice in Live from the Inside (2010), playfully interrogating where power in media representations is actually vested. …

Sol y viento: En breve. A Cinematic Journey for Beginning Spanish by VANPATTEN, BILL, MICHAEL J. LEESER, & GREGORY D. KEATING

The article reviews the book Sol y viento: En breve: A Cinematic Journey for Beginning Spanish, by Bill VanPatten, Michael J. Leeser, and Gregory D. Keating.