Cinematographic Form Research Articles

The Unconscious as Cinematographic Form: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Inception

Freud’s “unconscious,” a lauded seminal psychological contribution, has transitioned into an efficacious narrative device in cinema, evolving into a paradigmatic relationship. This article scrutinizes Inception (2010), a quintessential psychoanalytical film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It explicates the director’s linkage to psychoanalysis and reveals how he demystifies the unconscious through its utilization both as a cinematic form and thematic device, manifested in discernible dream layers. It is ascertained that these layers perform a bifunctional role as cinematic and narrative elements. Intriguingly, this multifaceted structure extends to character development as well, exploiting the complexities of the characters’ pathologies. Since the filmic structure leverages the pathologies exhibited by the characters, they constitute secondary data for the analysis. The pathologies are aligned with the mental disorder classifications the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TRTM) (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Pertinent character data are analysed in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings, subsequently subjected to psychoanalytic film analysis, enrich a deeper understanding and fuller appreciation of the representation of the unconscious in the cinematic domain.

Turn Your Head and Listen: 360° Audio Between Old Utopias and Market Strategies

Many scientific publications directly concern VR, often conceived as a battlefield for rethinking our relationship with the moving image, and our frameworks on topics such as the cinematographic language or the spectator perception. And yet, although for some time film studies have re-evaluated the role of sound in cinematic production and spectatorship, in the field of VR the theoretical reflection on concepts such as stereoscopic audio and binaural recording has remained confined to the technological-engineering aspect. This essay aims to explore the most common audio techniques and their real impact in terms of consumption and affordances, on the basis of some software studies and sound studies reflections and within a media-archaeological perspective. The results of these innovations go beyond the technological features, suggesting a further rethinking of the cinematographic form and calling into question, even from an audio-only perspective, the issue of audience perception and interaction. The case studies taken into account might be an impulse, heuristically, for new studies on these topics.

El espacio novelesco y la descripción en Beltenebros, de Antonio Muñoz Molina

La presente investigación consiste en el análisis del espacio novelesco y la descripción en Beltenebros (1985). Por un lado, se hará hincapié sobre el tipo de espacio, su función y su correlación con los personajes de la novela, destacando los que adquieren especial relevancia en los hechos narrados. Por otro lado, se analiza la descripción, como uno de los procedimientos narrativos, y su función en el discurso narrativo. En este punto, es interesante subrayar la forma cinematográfica y los elementos sensoriales que emplea el escritora la hora de describir, minuciosamente, objetos y ambientes con el fin de crear una atmósfera de suspense e intriga hasta poner el punto final de su obra. The present study consists in the analysis of the fictional spacy and the description in Beltenebros(1985). On the one hand, emphasis will be placed on the type of space, its function and its correlation with the characters of the novel, highlighting those that acquire special relevance in the narrated events. On the other hand, the description is analyzed, as one of the narrative procedures, and its function in the narrative discourse. At this point, it is interesting to underline the cinematographic form and the sensorial elements that the writer uses when describing, meticulously, objects and environments with the purpose of creating an atmosphere of suspense and intrigue until putting the end point of his work

Virtually Real: Cinematographic Verisimilitude within the Construct of Artistic Referentiality

The creation of so-called realistic images is seemingly incongruously a key aspiration for many feature film cinematographers creating dramatic films today. This may be, as theorised by Charles Pierce, that the lens-based imagery of photography, and by extension cinema, is connected to reality in a way unlike any other artform. Prince refers to the cinematographic form as a tension between perceptual realism and referential artifice. He uses the term perceptual realism in reference to Peirce’s claim of the photograph as icon. With the term referential artifice though, Prince is suggesting the artificial proposition of film making is in reference to the subjects and object within the frame. This concept can be extended when connected to Bordwell, Thompson and Smith’s claim that stylistic choices are made in reference to the film’s content, its script. For example, a period film may be captured on celluloid film negative whilst a science fiction narrative may be captured with the newest digital cinema camera. Realism, however, does not necessitate the same or even a similar cinematographic form response for feature filmmaking. This essay will explore how feature film cinematographers interpret realism or verisimilitude within the construct of artistic referentiality as a response to narrative content.

Framing as a method of creating a film's metaphorical context

This essay continues the study of the semiotics and synergetics of Framing in the Art of Cinematography which substantiates the hypothesis that framing (perspective) constitutes one of the most important codes of screen communication in its cinematographic and metaphorical contexts. Thus, framing is represented by two hierarchical levels of representation of contextual semiotic connections: the connection between mise-en-cadre and mise-en-scne (the level of the cinematographic form of film sign); and the relationship between cinematographic imagery, action and meaning (the level of the cinema sign).
 Framing consolidates the process of cinematography divided by the artistic and production dichotomy, which is especially important in the context of mass culture determined by the total industrialization of all areas of life, including cinema.
 The essay is based on the statement of Sergei Eisenstein that each high film work has the unity of two dialectical categories: the content (abstract language, part of logical thinking) and the form (emotional language, part of emotional-sensory thinking). It identifies and analyzes the spatial-temporal and linear-tonal features of cinematic framing as a method of expressing the metaphorical existential context of the crisis of Russian self-identification, using as examples a number of expressive episodes of the documentary film Anna: 618 (1980-1993; dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, DOPs: Pavel Lebeshev, Vadim Yusov, Vadim Alisov, and Elizbar Karavaev). This film work is explored as a study of the socio-cultural situation in modern Russia undertaken from a multi-faceted and multi-level authorial perspective associated with expressive cinematographic framing.

Caminhos cruzados entre intermidialidade, star system e música no Ébrio de Gilda de Abreu

Em 1935, o tenor Vicente Celestino lançou a música O Ébrio. Aproveitando o grande sucesso alcançado, a canção foi transposta para o universo do teatro, do cinema, da literatura e da telenovela ao longo de 30 anos. O artigo toma a intermidialidade, o conceito de transposição e o star system como ferramenta de análise do filme O Ébrio de Gilda de Abreu. A partir da construção da persona de Celestino, na materialidade do filme, no eu lírico da canção e na representação da vida midiática do ator, o objetivo é demonstrar como a presença em cena do astro nas sequências musicais junto à transposição intermidiática se fazem presentes na forma cinematográfica. O estudo demonstra como a presença em cena do astro nas sequências musicais fornece um fator de compensação à ausência do hic et nunc.

The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism by Delphine Bénézet

Reviews 249 Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). On this level, the book breaks significant new ground: we see, for example, how short stories drafted in one decade resurface in screenplays composed twenty or thirty years later, or how Rohmer conceived his role as a pedagogue in his Sorbonne University courses on mise-en-scène. Material is grouped thematically when appropriate: chapter 5, for example, broaches work done for French educational television in the 1960s, while chapter 7 looks at the German intermezzo of the 1970s when Rohmer wrote a doctoral thesis on Murnau, shot La marquise d’O..., and staged Catherine von Heilbronn. Elsewhere the coherence is provided by the cycles that afforded Rohmer international stardom, with excellent pages on the Contes moraux’s reception.Writing with acumen and stylistic consistency, Baecque and Herpe achieve in this scrupulously researched volume the paradoxical feat of writing the definitive biography of a pseudonymous subject, a director whose low-budget modus operandi remains one of the miracles of modern film production. Johns Hopkins University Derek Schilling Bénézet, Delphine. The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism. New York: Wallflower, 2014. ISBN 978-0-231-16975-2. Pp. 160. $25. From the beginning pages, the book establishes itself against existing research on Varda’s shorts, features, and artistic projects, and sets out to“redress gaps and absences in the scholarship, to revisit neglected portions of Varda’s production [...] to re-situate these within their cultural and political context,” and “to analyze Varda’s eclectic yet consistent conception of cinema”(4–5).It is composed of an introduction,five chapters, well-chosen screen shots, conclusion, filmography, bibliography and index. The introduction situates the book’s content and scope within Vardian studies and in relationship to the recent widespread availability of the director’s artistic works. While doing so, it encourages us to consider the director beyond her regular étiquette of auteur and to broaden our understanding of Varda’s artistic production and place in the international realm. The recent accessibility of shorts from France, beyond big-city festivals, has encouraged a growing scholarly interest in this cinematographic form and its history in the Hexagon. As part of pedagogical workshops subsidized by the French Government, DVD compilations (UniFrance), and ready-made short-film festivals for colleges and universities like Le festival international du court métrage de ClermontFerrand , shorts from France have found solid ground as a new terrain for scholarly inquiry and as part of a strategized promotion of France as cultural powerhouse. The Cinema of Agnès Varda entices the reader to explore the short within each director’s own filmmaking career, beyond exercices de style, to take on a more holistic approach when understanding Varda’s some sixty years of art. The book is a solid contribution to this field, though it could have benefited from an additional fifty pages to fully explore the themes evoked. More connections could have been made; for example, a paragraph on Varda’s 1984 Les dites cariatides would have been appreciated; that said, Bénézet is quite aware of the restrictions this type of publication demands and acknowledges such at several times throughout. Of particular interest was chapter three, which studies the recurring theme of marginalized groups by drawing out the extent to which Varda’s socially inclusive perspective, attention to others, and love of new encounters are communicated through her choices of characters, locations, and focus of study. Chapter four continues through the importance of dynamics between people and locations in Varda’s works. Bénézet’s inquiry into Baqué’s cinéma passeur (5), the stroller-historian, and cinema of sensations (100) are thought-provoking and insightful. Throughout, her arguments are informed and compelling, bringing new perspective to both familiar and often-slighted works. Bénézet’s work complements recent publications, such as Agnès Varda: le cinéma et au-delà (PU de Rennes, 2009) and T. Jefferson Kline’s Conversations with Filmmakers: Agnès Varda (UP of Mississippi , 2013). It is, nonetheless, unique in its precision and focus on the evolution of Varda’s continual embrace of upcoming artistic media, technological advances, and...

History's Irruption in the Look-to-Camera

History’s Irruption in the Look-to-Camera Sara Saljoughi (bio) Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema by Antoine de Baecque. Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 424 pages. $105.00 hardcover, $35.00 paperback. In his sprawling work of film historiography, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema, Antoine de Baecque conceptualizes three modes of interpretation as “ways of entering history” (xv). One can figure history, narrate history, or “circle” history. Beginning with a close reading of Manuel de Oliveira’s No, or the Vain Glory of Command (1990), de Baecque pursues the circling of history, or what he calls the cinematographic form of history, that is, the mise-en-scène that gives form to a director’s vision of history. Cinema and history create this form together, which de Baecque also says has the status of a methodology entailing the study of history with films rather than historicizing films. The aim of de Baecque’s project is thus to connect aesthetics and historiography by examining the development of cinematic form. For de Baecque, history “irrupts” into cinema; in other words, cinema does not simply reconstitute the events of the past. History’s impression on the cinematic image results in metamorphoses of form. Following Gilles Deleuze’s argument that the systematic [End Page 165] use of the jump cut is a key feature of the time-image and the break with prewar, classical cinema, de Baecque locates another “formal figure of the irruption of that same history: the look-to-camera” (27). The look-to-camera occurs when a character stares into the camera lens, seemingly gazing at the spectator with a “head-on intensity” that emerges “straight from history” (35). De Baecque calls the look-to-camera the “supreme form” of modern post-1945 cinema because its formal transgression illustrates a type of fundamental encounter between history and film, a literal “looking back” of the historical through the capacities offered by cinema. He finds the look-to-camera, for example, in the faces of the Japanese women standing in the doorways of their hospital rooms at the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour (1959, directed by Alain Resnais), in Europa ‘51 (1952, directed by Roberto Rossellini) through Irene’s (Ingrid Bergman) encounter with eleven “mad” women, and in Summer with Monika (1953, directed by Ingmar Bergman), where the title character directly addresses the spectator. These encounters exemplify a mode of historical address because they originate from a visual affirmation temporarily occluded by repressed trauma that, when released, generates revolutionary changes in cinematic form. According to de Baecque, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), made on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, crystallized this version of the look-to-camera. The film’s “countless stares,” he says, “wrenched from the death camps by photographers and cinematographers,” are “stares that bear witness to the Nazi horror” (37). In his discussion of the camp footage in the first chapter, de Baecque characterizes images of mass graves and naked corpses as “staring down the history of cinema …, offering themselves up as a generic form for modern cinema” (44). While de Baecque’s argument could be used to elaborate the visual “evidence” of history (which would, in turn, make Camera Historica about film and representation), it instead articulates the process by which history suddenly breaks into cinema. The images of death that emanated from the camps were “silent” at first but returned a decade later, vis-à-vis the look-to-camera. Whereas the visions and figures of the death camps were once considered an unrepresentable history of trauma, their return through modern cinematic form produces the very way they enter into history. The chapters that follow look at a range of European and American films that illuminate what de Baecque calls “the age of history in film”: Sacha Guitry’s Si Versailles m’était conté (1954), the French New Wave, the work of English filmmaker Peter Watkins, Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), the end of communism as seen in the work of several East European directors, and [End Page 166] American films of the late twentieth...

On Casty’s <em>Robert Rossen</em>

On Casty’s Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist Vincent Brook Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist. By Alan Casty. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012. 276 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-6981-9 (pbk). US $45. Alan Casty is on a mission—an important (if not particularly Jewish) one, in more ways than he may have been aware. Casty’s declared purpose in Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist is twofold: first, to raise writer-director Rossen from comparative cinematic obscurity to the pinnacle of the auteurist Pantheon; and second, more controversially, to reassign the brunt of moral turpitude from those who, like Rossen, named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to those who denounced cooperation with the HUAC yet remained silent about the far graver depredations of the Soviet Union. Along the way, Casty also manages to enhance our understanding of the creative process during the classical Hollywood period. The revising upward of Rossen’s filmmaking reputation is a bit of a stretch—not because his work is not worthy of major accolades but because it has not been denied them to the extent that Casty claims. Casty himself quotes glowing reviews of several Rossen films and cites Cahiers du cinema’s posthumous dedication in 1966 (he died earlier that year) of a “special issue to Rossen’s work” (213). Nor is Casty’s complaint that such praise was limited to Europe borne out by even a cursory gloss of the literature. In regard to the post–World War II “change in style and content that would be as radical as the economic and social dislocations of [End Page 217] the changeover to sound,” Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman assert in Flashback: A Brief History of Film (1986), “No single film demonstrated this change in attitude quite as succinctly as Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul [1947].”1 Thomas Schatz, in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (1999), calls Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949) “a stylistic tour de force” that “injected a new energy and social awareness into the American cinema.”2 Thomas W. Bohn and Richard L. Stromgren’s Light and Shadows: A History of Motion Pictures (1983) includes Rossen in a select group that “influenced and set the tone for American film of the sixties.”3 And Paul Monaco’s History of American Cinema: The Sixties (2001) singles out Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) for challenging “the best of the French New Wave films.”4 Casty’s alleging “more than a half century of the denial of [Rossen’s] legacy” (11) is thus clearly overstated, and his claiming that Rossen created “the most complete realization in cinematographic form of the indefinable” is hagiographic to the extreme. It is true, however, that no one other than Casty has written a full-length study of Rossen’s oeuvre, first with a short monograph for New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1969 and now with this extremely comprehensive and perceptive analysis. His treatment here, of Rossen’s body of work in relation to his life experiences, is especially impressive, fully justifying his contention that “the creative inter-action between [Rossen’s] life—and particularly his political beliefs and conflicts—and his films was (and remains) unique among American directors” (8). Casty compellingly demonstrates that leftist ideals course through Rossen’s work from his earliest New York stage writing and directing in the 1930s, and that disillusionment with the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which began in the late 1940s after more than a decade’s active membership and climaxed with his 1953 HUAC testimony, colored his remaining corpus to an uncommon degree. Though not Rossen’s first or only film to confront the HUAC controversy, The Hustler crystallized it in the archetypal titular figure, who embodied the idealistic betrayal that Rossen attributed to the CPUSA and for which he himself was (and continues to be) blamed by the political left. Casty’s most explosive sections deal with the HUAC period (1947–1955). Though he has no truck with the committee and the blacklist that followed on its heels, he...

CONSTRUCTION OF THE SACRED IN THE MOVING IMAGE

Contemporary moving image (film and video) is looking for a new form of expressing the sacred, after decades of refusing all kinds of explicit “religious” content. The notion of Sacred changed with the social evolution and today its representation is directly related to the image of reality, that allows a sincere and immediate contact with the viewer. The body’s image can be a strong mediator between the expression of the sacred and reality, because it questions the position of man in the world and its relation to others. Bill Viola and The Dardenne Brothers ‐ among others, are directors who work with a totally different cinematographic form but they have the same challenge: to reveal the potential sacred of life through light and image movement.

TRTRACING THE TRUTH WITHIN THE BLURRING BORDERS OF FICTION AND DOCUMENTARY

Reality seems to be lost its reliability and authenticity within the simulation era where the distinction between the real and unreal is blurred and we have difficulty to find the truth while being surrounded by the mess of hyper-reality. The ‘thing” that we consider as cinema today, is a tangible allegory of life ranging from politics to wars and religions to economy which are all captured by a cinematographic form. It’s increasingly being difficult to perceive for the spectator to make distinction between virtual world and the real one. This paper aims to draw the attentions to this dilemma of modern subject and analyze the films 9/11 (documentary) and Swordfish(fiction) from this point of view.

Het (on)gewapend oog: Modernisme en realisme in <small>DER WELTKRIEG</small> en <small>WESTFRONT</small> 1918

During the Weimar Republiek, some thirty films were made in Germany about the First World War. That the film makers largely represented the state vision of the war is hardly surprising. Less predictable is that some films attempted to find a cinematographic form to represent the sufferings of war in general - which made the films considerably less unequivocal. The documentary DER WELTKRIEG (1927) and the feature film WESTFRONT 1918 are two exponents of the latter approach. Bernadette Kester analyses the ambiguity of the two films that are generally accepted as simplistic propaganda films.

Thomas Hardy and Cinematographic Form

Alan Spiegel's article to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic Form (NOVEL, vi, 1973, pp. 229-43) is interesting and instructive, but I should like to suggest that Thomas Hardy deserves a more prominent place in this context than Mr. Spiegel accords him. Indeed I would argue that Hardy is a more cinematic novelist than any of the writers discussed in detail by Spiegel, though this judgment entails taking a slightly different view of from his. Spiegel tends to identify the evolution of that form with the evolution of the modernist or symbolist novel. Thus Flaubert only shows the way: essentially he is a scenographic novelist, handling visual space in terms comparable with those of the proscenium-arch theater. James and Conrad mark a later stage in the evolution of cinematographic form, but it is Joyce who emerges from Spiegel's discussion as its fully-fledged exponent. There seems to be a problem, or at least a paradox, here, for in most respects film, as a narrative medium, has more in common with the traditional realistic novel than with the modernist or symbolist novel. In his distinction between metaphor and metonymy, as the two poles towards one of which all forms of communication and representation tend, Roman Jakobson classes prose, realism, and film as metonymic, as against poetry, romanticism/symbolism, and drama, which are metaphoric.1 It is true that in this scheme the film technique of montage is metaphoric (as against the metonymic, or rather synecdochic technique of close-up), but a film that was all montage, like a novel that was all metaphor (Finnegans Wake?) would be highly unrepresentative and probably incomprehensible as narrative. Film, like prose fiction, is essentially a metonymic form, connecting items that are contiguous rather than similar, and making much more use of match cuts and close-ups than of jump cuts and montage. Hence the traditional realistic novel is more easily adapted to film than works of modernist, symbolist fiction in which prose is always threatening to turn into poetry, and sequentiality dissolving under the pressure of consciousness. Which could be more easily translated into film-the passage from Ulysses quoted by Spiegal, or this passage

Flaubert to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic Form

I believe that the reification of narrative form represents one of the defining characteristics of much of the fiction we designate as modern. This trend seems to begin in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most notably with the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, continues into the twentieth century, and on to the present day. By reification I mean precisely what Ezra Pound meant when he described Flaubert's efforts as an attempt to set down things as they are, to find the word that corresponds to the thing, the statement that portrays, and presents, instead of making a comment, however brilliant, or an epigram.' Reified form, then, is a way of transcribing the narrative not as a story that is told, but as an action that is portrayed and presented, and some or all of the following characteristics are usually present in each reified narrative:

The Limitations of Kymography

Mainly owing to the researches of Stumpf1 and his associates, kymography has developed along three lines; first, the simple recording of the movement, or absence of movement, of borders of organs, more particularly those of the heart and other mediastinal structures; secondly, the minute analysis of these movements by means of the photo-electric cell, a process termed densography; and thirdly, the reconstruction of the movements in cinematographic form, a process known as kymosopy. Based as it is on a classical physiological method, kymography would seem on the face of it to be an ideal method of recording visceral movement. In certain cases, for instance, in the differentiation of hilar shadows, in the determination of local infarction of the heart, and in pericarditis, its value has been proved. Possibly its chief value lies in the fact that it gives the best means so far known of estimating the size of the heart in systole and diastole. Kymography, however, contains certain inherent fallacies which seem to have been overlooked by its enthusiastic advocates, but which must be emphasised if the limitations of the method are to be properly understood. These fallacies it is the purpose of this paper to describe. First, the complexity of the cardiac movements, and more especially the fact that the auricles are to a great extent passengers in movements determined by the ventricles, make it active and passive movements.