Film Media Research Articles

MC-Media Pad SA (Sanita-kun SA) for the Enumeration of Staphylococcus aureus in a Variety of Foods.

MC-Media Pad SA (formerly known as Sanita-kun SA) is a dry rehydratable film medium for the enumeration of Staphylococcus aureus. The performance of the method in a variety of foods was compared with that of ISO 6888-1:1999, Microbiology of Food and Animal Feeding Stuffs - Horizontal Method for the Enumeration of Coagulase-Positive Staphylococci (Staphylococcus aureus and Other Species) - Part 1: Technique Using Baird-Parker Agar Medium. The validated matrixes included pastrami, a sliced cooked chicken roll, cooked prawns, cold-smoked salmon, pasta salad, sandwich spread, fresh uncooked pasta, infant cereal, custard, and raw-milk Brie cheese. In the matrix study, five replicates at each of three contamination levels were tested as paired test portions. Across all matrixes, the difference in mean log10 values ranged from -0.32 to 0.10, which was within the acceptable range of -0.50 to 0.50. Thus, all 10 matrixes met the acceptance criterion at all concentration levels. Further, only two matrixes, cooked prawns and raw-milk Brie cheese, had 95% confidence limits outside the -0.50 to 0.50 criterion, and these were at the lowest concentration level for each matrix. The candidate method sr varied from 0.03 to 0.22 log10 CFU/g. This compares favorably with the reference method SD, which ranged from 0.06 to 0.30 log10 CFU/g. The candidate and reference methods detected 51 of 53 inclusivity strains, with both methods not detecting the same two strains. The candidate method did not detect any of the 32 exclusivity strains, whereas the reference method did not detect 30 of the 32 exclusivity strains; the 2 strains detected by the reference method were S. delphini and S. hyicus, both developing atypical colonies on Baird-Parker plates. The product consistency study demonstrated no significant difference between lots of product and supported the 1 year shelf life. Robustness testing yielded no significant differences when small variations were made in sample volume, incubation temperature, and incubation time. Thus, the data show equivalent or better performance of the Sanita-kun SA/MC-Media Pad SA method compared with the International Organization for Standardization reference method, in support of AOAC Performance Tested MethodSM certification.

Deep Truth and the Mythic Veil: Werner Herzog's New Mythology inLand of Silence and Darkness

This article begins with Werner Herzog's programmatic statements on new images and deep truth and connects it to ideas of Nietzschean aesthetics, mainly the Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror. My main argument is that Herzog contributes to the literary and aesthetic tradition of new mythology within the medium of film by developing a distinct visual language that tries to express non-rational truth claims. In a first step I explore how Nietzschean aesthetics influenced the debates about the mythic image and total cinema in classic film theory and visual studies. More importantly I show how the desire to create new mythic images not only influenced Herzog's discourse on film, but his actual aesthetic practice. In my analysis of his 1971 documentary Land of Silence and Darkness (Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit) I show how the dynamic between Apollonian veil and Dionysian Urbild (original image) is effective in the construction of what Herzog calls “deep truth”. This article attempts to shift the focus away from the fact-fiction debate surrounding most of Herzog's documentaries and to concentrate instead on framing Herzog's claims of non-rational truth theoretically and locating his work in the aesthetic tradition of new mythology.

Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain. By Christine Grandy

The First World War cast a long shadow over Europe (and indeed many other parts of the world), and in Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain Christine Grandy explores how the war impacted on the ways in which popular culture was consumed in Britain in the years following the conflict. To do this Grandy chooses to evaluate two of the most popular leisure activities of the interwar period: cinema-going and reading. This period witnessed a significant boom for these leisure pursuits. The cinema-going habit flourished as the film medium matured and a large number of purpose-built “picture palaces” sprung up across the country to supplement the many thousands of cinema halls that already operated, while the market for popular fiction grew significantly as the publishing industry transformed its working practices, public libraries became more accessible, and low-cost circulating libraries—particularly twopenny libraries—opened up in convenient locations in both towns and rural areas. It is within this thriving cultural milieu that Grandy sets out to evaluate the most popular films and novels that the British chose to consume in the interwar period and assess their reasons for choosing them. Attempting to chart these is of course extremely difficult due to the rarity of extant archival material. However, by casting the net widely and drawing on a vast range of source material, from exhibitors’ catalogues, reviews in popular newspapers, periodicals, and trade magazines, to the records drawn up by leading scholars in the field, such as Clive Bloom, Joseph McAleer, Billie Melman, and Maria Bracco (for novels), and Christine Gledhill, Sue Harper, Annette Kuhn, and John Sedgwick (for films), Grandy convincingly identifies a body of works from which she can begin to conduct her analysis.

Technical filmmaking and scientific narratives: Has science overtaken fiction in recent science fiction? An analysis of Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian

One can view the recent science fiction films Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian as a three-part dialogue concerning the existential relationship between humanity, technology, and the science employed to create said technologies. Pitched into the deep of space, each film’s protagonist must seek to find technological answers to save their own existence. Each film’s exploration of these themes essentially questions the importance of technology as a product of scientific-calculative thinking and the validity of this thinking as the primary mode of understanding the world. In this article, I explore the existential dialogue crafted between these films through Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Through Benjamin, we will see how the medium of film is completely dependent upon technology to present its art and how this transforms the stories it tells, while also transforming the audience and the audience’s reality. Consequently, understanding the popular reception of these films becomes just as important as the films themselves for our present study. Through Heidegger, we will see how technology provides a space where we can find a truth about ourselves and our reality. However, modern technology’s increasing scientific complexity, created by scientists who in turn employ modern technology to further science, also conceals just as much as it reveals. These films provide us with an opportunity to explore a truth about our dependence upon technology even though, as technologically dependent works of art, they may also conceal how dependent upon science we have become when constructing our reality.

Cinema and painting in Parajanov’s aesthetic metamorphoses

In this article I examine the painterly qualities of Sergei Parajanov’s films and argue that these qualities are profoundly related to the alteration of the spectatorial experience and reinvention of the aesthetic possibilities of the cinematic medium. In particular, I analyse how in his films the implementation of inverted perspective alters the spectator’s perception of the cinematic world. Furthermore, I explore how the painterly qualities in Parajanov’s films open new aesthetic possibilities through the hybridization of cinema and painting. This leads me to reconsider the genealogy of Parajanov’s cinematic experimentations within an alternative history of the moving image.

Teaching Business Ethics Through Narrative Film

We address the question: what can experience of narrative film bring to a business student? The medium of narrative film allows discussions of ethical issues, as well as discussions of film as a product in terms of its artistic creativity versus its business goal and its marketing of an underlying ideological position. Hence, we look at films from philosophical (ethical), aesthetic (artistic), and business perspectives. We describe the effort and the outcome of delivering a new course in the business undergraduate program at the College of Business at Stony Brook University in New York, USA. The course was entitled Ethics: Critical Thinking through Film and it was designed to address various business and societal problems through narrative films. A diverse set of films allowed us to discuss questions about problems facing contemporary society, as well as ethical issues arising in business, including workforce ethics, greediness, bribery, whistle-blowing, and fraud.

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken

Reviewed by: Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao by Michael Lucken Meghen Jones (bio) Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao. By Michael Lucken; translated by Francesca Simkin. Columbia University Press, New York, 2016. vi, 248 pages. $60.00, cloth; $59.99, E-book. The subject of imitation in Japanese arts is well-trodden scholarly ground. Various significant publications in recent years have explored the premodern histories of copying (utsushi), physical reproductions (mosha), and imitation (mohō) within Japanese culture more generally.1 Not confined to issues of pedagogy or artistic transfer, Michael Lucken’s Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao challenges fundamental assumptions, over time, about the nature of Japanese imitation and creativity in order to define key characteristics of modern Japanese art and visual culture. In confronting head-on the notion of the Japanese as imitative, Lucken unravels the complex discourse of imitation and creativity to reveal much more than a mere refutation of the stereotype. The premise of the book is that the dialectic of imitation and creativity is a by-product of enlightenment and colonialist paradigms. That established, Lucken describes the field of modern Japanese visual art as having a plasticity with which [End Page 117] imitation and creativity are pursued, a quality distinct from the Western polarity of imitation and creativity. He argues that modern Japanese visual arts occupy an ontological space eschewing pure subjectivity in favor of leaving “residual components,” and the book explores this aspect within the modern mediums of oil painting, film, photography, and animation. Michael Lucken’s contributions to scholarship on twentieth-century Japanese art, visual culture, and critical theory are well established. Professor and director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), one of the eight higher education institutions comprising Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, his publications have addressed a variety of issues relevant to the interpretation and analysis of modern Japanese art and visual culture.2 Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki Hayao is Lucken’s long-awaited first single-authored book in English.3 It is a translation and modification of Les fleurs artificielles: création, imitation et logique de domination (Presses de l’Inalco, 2012Presses de l’Inalco, 2016). Like his previous studies, it concerns a topic of relevance to virtually all scholars of modern Japan and presents a compelling method of interpretation, thus its readership will be wide. Considering the substantial attention that has been given to the subject of imitation in Japan, and the rebuking of it, some may wonder if the perception of Japanese arts as imitative still looms. Lucken acknowledges that, today, many outsiders see Japan as not a center of imitation but rather a source of intense creativity in the form of manga and anime, and that Japanologists routinely critique the stereotype of Japan as a nation of imitators. But, he asserts, “among the petty bourgeoisie and general public” the stereotype persists (p. 15). Lucken also cites Western influences on Japanese art as the cause of the relative lack of modern Japanese art in major European and U.S. public museum collections, where he describes it as “rarely to be seen and seldom highly valued” (p. 33). This statement deserves discussion; for example, permanent exhibition rooms of Japanese art at the British Museum have recently featured art and material culture from prehistory to the present, including twentieth-century manga. Furthermore, institutional stances decrying the value of modern Japanese arts as mere imitations of [End Page 118] Western art no longer serve to narrow, as they once did, the foci of scholarly inquiry. On the contrary, according to the most recent College Art Association listings available, at U.S. and Canadian institutions in 2015 there were in progress or completed 29 dissertations on Japanese art history topics—12 on ancient to premodern Japanese art history subjects, and 17 on Meiji-era to contemporary subjects.4 Thus, a significant gap exists between popular perception and current scholarship on modern Japanese art and imitation. This book serves not simply to sustain or...

Prima facie Deception: The Immediacy of the Face in Two Nazi Propaganda Films

Prima facie Deception:The Immediacy of the Face in Two Nazi Propaganda Films Daniel Gilfillan (bio) The picture in all its forms up to the film has greater possibilities. Here a man needs to use his brains even less; it suffices to look, or at most to read extremely brief texts, and thus many will more readily accept a pictorial presentation than read an article of any length. The picture brings them in a much briefer time, I might almost say at one stroke, the enlightenment which they obtain from written matter only after arduous reading.1 During the Third Reich, National Socialist propaganda invaded the medium of film and its production at all levels. It cut across the different genres and/or subgenres comprising entertainment, documentary, and newsreel film; and it did so, according to Adolf Hitler, precisely for its fundamental nature as image and its ability to be read "at one stroke" in its immediacy as prima facie evidence. In Hitler's description of propaganda, truth established through visual immediacy minimizes the "arduousness" of reading by removing the need for deep critical thought on the part of the viewer. It is a type of truth that can easily be taken at face value, and consequently one that can easily be distorted to suit the needs of its producers. In terms of its efficacy, post-1939 Nazi propaganda film was reliant on each respective filmic form working in concert to produce a seamless narrative that supported the regime's sociocultural, racial, and economic policies and its wartime agenda. The politics of deception wrapped up in these films shifts between insidious opacity and aggressive transparency, according to their varying degrees of propagandistic subtlety. Feature film offered either distraction in the form of pure entertainment or fictional frameworks for engaging ethical/moral questions (e.g. the 1941 film Ich klage an (I Accuse) and its exploration of euthanasia as a solution for the physically or mentally disabled).2 And following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, footage captured by propaganda companies embedded within the Wehrmacht provided "almost live" visual coverage of German war victories for the weekly newsreel series Die deutsche Wochenschau (The German Weekly Review) and for film documentaries focused on campaigns in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Although these propaganda companies were formed as specific units [End Page 217] connected to the various branches of the German military and the Waffen-SS, their professional directives were initiated from the Reich Ministry for Propaganda.3 As a direct result of the seizure of Poland, these propaganda companies were instructed to acquire film and still image footage of Jews for use in a range of print and film-based propaganda. This Nazi archive of photographs and film images captures an idea of Jewish life that was already being deceptively staged for the camera. It includes footage taken prior to the Nazi-enforced practice of Jewish ghettoization, as well as footage from inside a handful of Nazi-controlled Jewish ghettos and camps in Eastern Europe. The pre-ghettoization footage was used in antisemitic documentary films such as the notorious 1940 film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) to substantiate Nazi claims about the sub-human life of the Jews.4 While such footage is rare, there are two other Nazi-era propaganda films depicting Jewish victimization that this article will explore in the context of the filmic close-up, and the role of the face as a screen of embodied cognition, a site where one's perceptual and affective experience becomes embodied and displayed visà-vis the physical features of the face.5 The Ghetto (1942) and Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area (1944) are similar in their propagandistic audiovisual capture of Jewish life in Nazi-controlled ghettos and camps—Warsaw and Theresienstadt—and for their respective use of close-ups.6 Drawing on cultural-theoretical discourses about the role of the face in the work of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, this article seeks to understand the immediate filmic encounter with these victims' faces within a politics of deception, where deception reflects both the National Socialist intent in producing these films and the traces of...

Buñuel's Phantoms

Through studying select works by auteur Luis Bunuel, focusing in particular on his 1962 masterpiece El angel exterminador, this article explores cinematic time and the latent, spectral temporalities underlying the medium of film itself—delay, repetition, prolonged or extended time, time constrained or condensed, tempo-ral aporias or gaps, and the sensation of time as asynchronous with actuality. Bunuel’s works wield poetic constructions of time indebted to the surrealist ap-proach, and thus to rupturing order, sense, chronology, and linearity. Across these filmic constructions—what I will call here, meditations on time—there is an acute rendering of time as doubled, lost, and/or unsettled. Bunuel cinematically crafts temporal modes that fold, embed, and/or crystallize other times within them. At the heart of this essay is a deep desire to understand how Bunuel’s cin-ema operates both in and with time, and how it cultivates slowness and modes of deferral tethered to attention and captivation that hold us and make us aware of time’s inner-workings. I locate Bunuel’s oeuvre at the center of a modern cinema invested in philosophical ruminations on time—time’s proliferation, perforation, and entanglements of multiple temporalities, its spectral nature; films that ac-tively contemplate the time created and “sculpted,” to draw on Andrei Tarkovsky’s evocative phrase, by the act of filming and through the experience of film viewing that they invite.

The Dialogue Between Literature and Film in Early Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro

The Dialogue Between Literature and Film in Early Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro Robert Patrick Newcomb Maite, Conde. Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 227 pp. ISBN 978-0-8139-3214-9. In Consuming Visions: Cinema, Writing, and Modernity in Rio de Janeiro, Maite Conde charts the dialectical relationship between literary composition and incipient Brazilian film production in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the twentieth century. Conde observes a two-part movement: Brazilian writers including Olavo Bilac and João do Rio commented on the emerging medium of film, and in certain cases, as in Monteiro Lobato’s “Marabá” (1923), incorporated cinematic techniques or motifs into their work. Meanwhile, early Brazilian filmmakers sought inspiration in nineteenth-century novels such as José de Alencar’s O guarani and Iracema (dir. Vittório Capellaro, 1916 and 1920) and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s A moreninha (dir. Antonio Leal, 1917), as well as in French and U.S. models. Conde backdates Brazilian literature’s engagement with cinema to the first two decades of the twentieth century, demonstrating that “Brazilian writers had been observing film well before the advent of modernism in 1922” (2). She thereby contributes to a valuable, ongoing reappraisal of the vitality of Brazilian literary culture during the period commonly referred to as pré-modernismo, which has traditionally been overlooked. Conde highlights several interesting features of early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro’s literary culture. In her second chapter, “Comic Visions of the New City,” she describes practices of the period that bridged the journalistic, literary, theatrical and cinematic. These include the jornal falado (spoken newspaper), in which “new bohemian” writers recited their newspaper pieces in venues such as cafés and theatres, “ma[king] fun of contemporary life, parodying fashionable writing, as well as Rio’s Europeanized social and political landscape” (73), and Bastos Tigre’s fitas impressas (printed movies), which were “tantamount to a crônica written in the form of a movie” (74). And early films such as Alberto Botelho’s Paz e amor (Love and Peace, 1910) drew on the vaudevillian tradition of teatro de revista, and in doing so “domesticated, or localized” film, rendering it more authentic to—and critical of—Brazil (77). In what to my mind is the book’s best chapter, “Envisioning a New Political Landscape,” Conde describes the film production of recent, [End Page 142] often Italian immigrants to Brazil. She convincingly argues that their films, frequently produced by mutualist associations, constituted a cinema of identification distinct from the exotic foreign vistas marketed to fashionable carioca moviegoers. And finally, in the chapter “Women, Rio’s Modernity, and Film’s Visual Pleasures,” Conde makes a strong case for Benjamin Costallat’s novel Mademoiselle Cinema (1923) as an important reflection on consumerism and changing women’s roles that has perhaps been obscured by the prominence of the São Paulo-based Brazilian modernistas. Conde’s broad literary-historical claims are bold, and invite debate. In arguing for the specific importance of the first years of Brazil’s Old Republic, Conde risks downplaying certain overarching historical continuities. First, in her introduction and opening chapter, “Documenting New Urban Experiences,” she describes early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro’s “French-style makeover [which was] aimed at expressing and projecting the country’s new and modern identity, which was profoundly identified with Europe” (4). She also references Brazil’s contemporaneous insertion into “neocolonial” economic relations in which European nations “export[ed] consumer items and new technologies in exchange for raw materials, such as coffee” (26). While Rio’s “Haussmanization” under Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos (1902–06) was dramatic, it followed earlier urban renewal efforts, which can be backdated at least to the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808. Indeed, as early as Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s comic novel Memórias de um sargento de milícias (Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant; 1852–53), which chronicles the period of Dom João VI’s residency in Rio (1808–21), carioca writers had been documenting a city that had since been altered by urban reforms. Similarly, the Brazilian economy had been built since...

Sensing Through Slowness: Korean Americans and the Un/making of the Home Film Archive

Sensing Through Slowness:Korean Americans and the Un/making of the Home Film Archive Crystal Mun-hye Baik (bio) Introduction In the opening scene, two women appear before the camera. Adorned in a bright red dress, the younger of the two grabs the hand of the older woman as they shyly walk toward the filmmaker. Joined by two lanky young men and a young girl dressed in a simple black frock, everyone laughs as they enjoy popsicles. Within twenty seconds, the frame jumps to a different sequence of scenes. In the unfolding imagery, an older woman and adolescent girl pluck pink roses from a front lawn as they greet a young man in front of the house. Gesturing to the camera, the older woman teases the young man as she playfully pushes him off the porch. Captured on 8-mm color film shot during the early 1950s, this silent footage was taken by Shungnak "Luke" Kim, an evangelical missionary and the reverend of the Korean Presbyterian Church, one of the most important institutions in Los Angeles's Korean community during the first half of the twentieth century.1 Portraying Reverend Kim's family and friends enjoying a warm evening together, this scene is a snippet from the reverend's collection of home films deposited into the University of Southern California (USC) Korean Heritage Library.2 An assemblage that includes color and black-and-white films shot over two decades (1948–67), the reverend's films register a tumultuous arc of time encompassing the afterlife of Japanese colonial rule, the Cold War division [End Page 5] of Korea, and the beginning of dictatorial rule in South Korea. As one of the only known home film collections to depict Koreans in the United States before 1965, a pivotal year marking key shifts in U.S. immigration policies and significant changes in home film technology, Reverend Kim's footage offers a compelling opportunity to contemplate the materialization of an early Korean presence in the United States. Located at the fault lines of Japanese occupation, U.S. racial violence, and competing Cold War ideologies, Koreans were subjected to Japanese colonial violence and racial exclusion in the United States, even as they became enmeshed in the consolidation of American imperial power in Asia. In this article, I draw upon the reverend's home film archive to track these historical conditions and the conflicting memories associated with the multiple positions occupied by Korean Americans during this volatile moment. Specifically, through a methodological approach conceptualized as a differentiated analysis, Reverend Kim's films generate meaningful opportunities to sense and make sense of messy subjectivities that exceed oppositional binaries, such as the national versus transnational, colonized versus colonizer, and oppressor versus oppressed. This textured reading of Reverend Kim's film archive, I argue, pushes against the existing parameters of Asian American film and media studies by contending with the ways in which the home film is predominantly depicted as a cultural apparatus that reproduces dominant ideals and norms or as a cultural artifact that taps into the truthful or raw realities of subaltern subjects. In fleshing out a differentiated approach to the home film, Edward Said's contrapuntal reading practice is an illuminating starting point. For Said, a contrapuntal framework recognizes the complexity of imperialism by attending to the entwined histories of metropolitan and subaltern life that constitute the cultural field. In essence, a contrapuntal practice feels for difference, incongruities, and absence, because imperialism produces historical conditions and subjectivities that are conflicting, contrarian, and at times, ugly. Such ugliness unhinges the dichotomies of colonizer versus colonized, evil versus good, and dominance versus resistance, particularly as everyday life transcends these hard-and-fast delineations. Hence, by identifying the political, historical, and racial conditions that anchor a cultural work, a differentiated reading labors through a condensation of irreconcilable gaps, submerged experiences, and silenced desires informing the "hybrid, heterogeneous … and unmonolithic" experiences of colonized subjects.3 Yet if a contrapuntal reading underscores the hybridity of cultural content produced at a particular moment, a differentiated reading accentuates this sense of multiplicity by attending to the specificity of the home film medium—and the technological practices, expectations, and yearnings that govern its aesthetic...

Film ininflamable o le roman vague

Este artículo pretende ensayar un acercamiento transversal a la presencia en pantalla de El Quijote (libro y tema). Abordándolo no desde el punto de vista de la adaptación convencional, si no desde la redefinición que de su legado textual y poético —tanto en lo personal, como en lo visual y cultural— han realizado cineastas como Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut o Éric Rohmer, asociados a la Nouvelle Vague: una generación brulê por la pasión lectora y espectadora. Constituye la tela de fondo de esta reflexión una cadenaformada por la pauta iconográfica del objeto-libro abrasado, instaurada por F. W. Murnau en Faust (1926), la paradójica reescritura que el fuego hace de la obra de Cervantes en el Don Chisciotte (1933) de G. W. Pabst, y la voluntad quijotesca del propio medio fílmico, representada por el Quijote inacabado de Orson Welles (1957-1985). Todo ello, conectado con la propia naturaleza inflamable de la textura del viejo cine y de los viejos libros (fábula de Fahrenheit 451 novela y film).

The Birth of Cinema in the Russian Empire and Film Censorship

The article analyses two closely interrelated research topics: the nature of pre-revolutionary film censorship and the question of the beginnings of cinema in Russia. Early film censorship cannot be studied without considering the arrival of cinema, and, vice versa, since the birth of cinema in the Russian Empire is related to the first cases of censorship. The author argues that the widely accepted date of 1907/8 as the starting point needs to be revised. Even before large-scale commercial production and distribution of feature films such as Stenka Razin, in different parts of the Russian Empire ample evidence of growing enthusiasm for the recording of movement can be found. Engineers, inventors, photographers, and showmen became fledgling filmmakers. The author bases her argumentation on the birth of cinema in Russia mainly on examples dating back to the 19th century. During the festivities of Nicholas II coronation in May 1896 the French cinema apparatus clashed with the Imperial Police in Moscow. After Russian screenings of Lumires films containing a selection of moving images of the Emperor, the Russian court took matters in their hands and started producing their own Royal films - both private home movies and those chosen for public screenings. This is the moment when a relatively stable, yet not public form of film production was established inside Russia continuing for two decades: the Tsar and his family being filmed by the court photographers Matuszewski, and later Jagielski. Some of these court film chronicles were also shown in cinema-theatres. The article also treats the reasons for the later suppression of these early Royal film production in Soviet historiography. While establishing a tight bond between Lenin and the film medium, Soviet film historians had to bury the pivotal role the Imperial court played in cinemas beginning in Russia. After having been the first object of foreign actualities in Russia, Nicholas II became not only a patron of Imperial film productions; moreover, the interference of Court censorship, overseen by the Ministry of the Interior, made clear that films shown and produced in Russia would have to deal with several censorship institutions protecting the representation of the sacred and regulating the free flow of information. The earliest example is the police confiscating a camera with film material shot by Lumires film reporters in Khodynka in May 1896. At this very early stage a procedure is set for the rise to a development of practices of film censorship.

„Pan sądzi, że koniec bliski?”. Późny modernizm, duchy kina i Wesele Andrzeja Wajdy

The aim of the article is to place Andrzej Wajda’s work from the early 1970s in the late-moderist trend developing in Polish film at that time. The best example of this is The Wedding (1972), which implements modernist strategies of subjectification, self-reflection and stylisation at the artistic and narrative level. The presence of ghosts in this film especially leads to a theoretical discussion on the spectral nature of the medium of film.

Transposition of the Scientific Elements in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Adaptation of Kobo Abe’s the Face of Another

This article focuses on Hiroshi Teshigahara‟s film adaptation of the famous Kobo Abe‟s The Face of Another with special attention on the transposition of the scientific elements of the novel in the film. This article observes how Teshigahara, through cinematic techniques, transposes Abe‟s scientific language into visual forms. Abe himself involved in the film adaptation by writing the screenplay, in which he prioritized the literary aspects over the filmic aspect. This makes the adaptation become more interesting because Teshigahara is known as a stylish filmmaker. Another noteworthy aspect is the internal dialogues domination within the novel narration. It is written in an epistolary-like narration, placing the protagonist as a single narrator which consequently raises subjectivity. The way Teshigahara externalizes the stream-of-consciousness narration-like into the medium of film is another significant topic of this essay.

Moon: A sensuous scholarship of the art of costume breakdown in film

Abstract Cloth has a particular relationship with the human body. It is always in contact with, or imagined to be in contact with, the skin, our largest sense organ. Cloth is our interface with the outside world, and the way in which we cover that interface has meaning. The important relationship that we have with cloth to protect and augment our bodies performs as a prosthesis of touch that, in its everydayness, offers a constant opportunity for expression and fetishization within the various discourses of identity in art, fashion and lifestyle. This article aims to explore the way in which cloth as costume in the medium of film, having been ‘broken down’ to naturalize the piece to its setting, stimulates an embodied relationship between the audience, the actor and the film itself. Following Laura Marks and her theories on visual haptics, the piece is a sensuous scholarship of an-often overlooked and under-researched textile art whose effect, the article argues, is that of reinstating the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin stated is lost by the mechanical intervention of the movie camera.

Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America by Alison Griffiths (review)

Reviewed by: Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America by Alison Griffiths Carolyn Jacobs Griffiths, Alison. Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 472pages. ISBN: 9780231541565. Even if you have never stepped foot inside a prison, you probably have some image of what life is like within its walls. Iconic films including Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 1979), The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994), and Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995), and recent television shows such as HBO’s Oz and The Night Of, Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, and Fox’s Prison Break have shaped the way we think about prisons and those who are incarcerated within them. Alison Griffiths’ Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America delves into the complex and inextricable relationship between prisons and popular media. In this thoroughly researched, methodologically interdisciplinary book, Griffiths traces the relationship between screens and prisons to the early twentieth century, a moment when the emerging medium of film took on an important role in representing and shaping the American penal system. Carceral Fantasies explores how early twentieth-century American cinema both represented prison to the outside world, constructing cultural notions of life behind bars, and brought the outside world into prisons, profoundly altering prisoners’ senses and perceptions of carceral space. Griffiths does not attempt to construct a neat, linear narrative, but rather focuses on distinct points where prisons and cinema intersected between the emergence of the media and the mid-1930s. Organized into three broad sections, titled “The Carceral Imaginary,” “The Carceral Spectator” and “The Carceral Reformer,” Griffiths examines the relationship between prison and screen-based media from three unique angles. In the first, she outlines the role popular media have played in constructing cultural understandings of carceral spaces. Next, she turns to the prison as an exhibition space, examining how cinema found a home within prison walls. Finally, Griffiths details the role cinema played in prison reform movements in the early twentieth century. Organizing Carceral Fantasies in this way allows Griffiths to cover a broad range of topics and make use of diverse archival sources, including prison records, reports, and newsletters, newspapers and trade publications, and the correspondence of prisoners, wardens, and reformers. In an approach she labels “methodologically ambidextrous,” Griffiths relies upon not only archival research, but also close textual analysis, theories of film spectatorship and reception, gender, space and the built environment, and foundational texts in prison studies. In this way, Carceral Fantasies, like much of Griffiths’ previous work, is a truly interdisciplinary piece of scholarship. Griffiths’ willingness to step out of disciplinary bounds pays off throughout the book. For instance, the opening chapter looks at the history of the execution film not only in relationship to visual representations of capital punishment from woodcuts and sketches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through smartphone recordings of Saddam Hussein’s execution, but also in terms of the cultural significance of electricity and the Phantasmagoria in the early twentieth-century. Looking at early execution films in this context allows us to understand cinematic representations of capital punishment, found on screen from the earliest years of filmmaking through today, as indicative of cultural anxieties and obsessions related to death, punishment, and modern technology. [End Page 57] In its focus on separate, yet interrelated, moments of intersection between cinema and prison, Carceral Fantasies resists a sense of closure. Instead, the book’s structure invites further investigation into this complex, ongoing relationship. Griffiths leaves the door open, for instance, for a more thorough investigation of the role race plays in the production of carceral space and in media representations of prison, providing productive archival leads and theoretical frameworks through which to pursue such a study. Additionally, while Carceral Fantasies is centered in the early twentieth century, frequent references to contemporary images of prisons in popular culture, as well current uses of cinema, television, radio, and other media in penitentiaries today remind the reader that the relationship between audiovisual media and prison is not merely a relic of the past. On the contrary, Griffiths stresses the continuity of this intersection over time, suggesting that this historical...

Whiteout: Animal Traces in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World

Literary animal studies are confronted with a systematic question: How can writing, as a human-made sign system, represent the nonhuman animal as an autonomous agent without falling back into the pitfalls of anthropomorphism? Against the backdrop of this problem, this paper asks how the medium of film allows for a different representation of the animal and analyzes two of Werner Herzog’s later documentary films. Although the depiction of animals and landscapes has always played a significant part in Herzog’s films, critical assessments of his work—including those of Herzog himself—tended to view the role of nature imagery as purely allegorical: it expresses the inner nature, the inner landscapes of the film’s human protagonists. This paper tries to open up a different view. It argues that both Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World develop an aesthetic that depicts nonhuman nature as an autonomous and lively presence. In the close proximity amongst camera, human, and nonhuman agents, a clear distinction between nature and culture is increasingly blurred.

Developing a film-based service experience blueprinting technique

The arts are labelled an important driver of value co-creation. Research suggests that businesses can translate the arts into action using the potency of art forms. Film is one of these art forms available to businesses that are willing to draw value from employing arts-based initiatives and approaches. Film as an art form, as well as its technological evolution, is opening up new perspectives for the service industry, also for designing and managing services. The technique of service blueprinting, developed in the 1980s, has since been applied and improved. Nevertheless, the conventional service blueprinting technique does not properly capture and visualise the customer's service experience. To date, the art form and medium of film has not been suitably conceptualised and integrated into the method of blueprinting of service experiences. This conceptual paper addresses this gap and showcases how digital film can be used for the development of a film-based service experience blueprinting technique to make service issues more comprehensible and service redesign more customer focused.

Depth-resolved chemical speciation of a W-B4C multilayer structure

We report results of simultaneous x-ray reflectivity and grazing incidence x-ray fluorescence measurements in combination with x-ray standing-wave-assisted depth-resolved near-edge x-ray absorption measurements to reveal new insights on chemical speciation of W in a ${\text{W-B}}_{4}\mathrm{C}$ multilayer structure. Interestingly, our results show the existence of various unusual electronic states for the W atoms especially those near to the surface and interface boundary of a thin film medium as compared to those of the bulk. These observations are found to be consistent with the results obtained using first-principles calculations. Unlike the conventional x-ray absorption measurements the present approach has an advantage that it permits the determination of the depth-resolved chemical nature of an element in the thin-layered materials at atomic length scale resolution.