Commercial Cinema Research Articles

Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Genre, Gender and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema

Meheli Sen, <i>Haunting Bollywood: Genre, Gender and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema</i>

Remembrance and the fate of a commercial Canadian cinema

Abstract Remembrance highlights the possibilities of a modest commercial cinema that prioritizes craftsmanship and focus. This has special importance in Canadian and Quebec cinema, and Remembrance's afterlife as the three-season Canadian TV show X-Company raises important questions about the flourishing of small national cinemas in a globalized age.

Filmowa franczyza. Od tematu do widowiska telewizyjnego (na podstawie cyklu „Prawdziwe Historie”)

The TV series True Stories (Prawdziwe Historie) is an example of contemporary commercial cinema. It is located on the border of documentary film and an attractive version of fictional cinema. In specific circumstances, it can be treated as a commercial product, but not only in the sense of film production and distribution, but more broadly, as a recognisable brand on the domestic cinema market, containing all the elements of industry know-how, as well as significant and commonly seen features of a film style that guarantees both turnout and financial success. In a sense, therefore, this phenomenon can be considered in terms of a film franchise which offers creators, most often beginners, a proven business patent in the form of a coherent television series, but also giving the possibility of a safe feature debut and the space for creative exploration.

The story of one crime: in life, in literature and in cinema

Today, the name of the New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson is known throughout the world. His films The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit received many awards, were a major commercial success and conquered millions of viewers' hearts, including the admirers of J. R. R. Tolkien, who followed the screen adventures of their favorite literary characters with bated breath. However, connoisseurs of cinema had closely followed the work of Jackson for many years before the films' release, for his early films above all, Heavenly Creatures, based on a monstrous real crime impressed by the complexity of chosen topics and the outstanding directorial skills.&#x0D; This essay analyzes Heavenly Creatures, exploring the reality of a terrible murder in a sleepy, little New Zealand town the murder which was largely disclosed through explicit entries in the diary of one of the criminals; and which became the basis for the film's plot. In no way justifying the criminals, Jackson, however, makes it clear that the incident was also the fault of the adults who did not see and did not want to see the difficult situation of their daughters. To ban, to punish such educational measures largely anticipated the tragic ending: harmless fantasies turned into a tragedy. The action of the film could take place in any town, and not only in New Zealand. The film's warning - don't be indifferent to your children was understood by all viewers, regardless of their country.&#x0D; The essay looks at how the film was made by an artist who knew how to combine and make this combination credible art house and commercial cinema, surrealism (and other aesthetics of shock) and hard realism.

Love Actually y la esfera musical como cómplice de la perpetuación de los roles de género tradicionales.

The romantic comedy remains today as one of the most demanded film genres by the consumer society. In spite of the numerous and recent examples in which we can find a new gender approach, where the empowerment of women prevails or their absence is visible, most of the romantic comedies that have reached the big screen and have been considered classics of commercial cinema, are based on the perpetuation of traditional roles. This is precisely the case of the parallel plots that occur in the movie Love Actually (United Kingdom, 2003), directed by Richard Curtis, considered one of the most popular English romantic comedies developed in Christmas and whose soundtrack would be, also, projected as a powerful sales product. Last December, fourteen years after its Premiere, social networks opened a chain of discussion where they proposed the visualization of the film from a feminist perspective. Throughout our article we won’t only study the roles played by the female and male characters, whose characterization perpetuates the image of the woman, among others, as caregiver, sexual object, mother, femme fatale, meanwhile men are projected as powerful, cultured and unfaithful, but we will focus on those elements which constitute the attractive package that manages to convert a plot based on clearly unequal principles in a candid cinematographic piece that pursue being a poem of love in all its forms. In this process, as we will see throughout the text, along with the ambitious distribution of the group of actors and the use of the sense of humor, music will act as an accomplice and main object in the development of the different plots, supporting with the characterization of roles and as a key ingredient of main scenes of the movie.

Relaciones públicas y Neurocomunicación como herramientas de mejora de la imagen de marca de los personajes públicos

El presente artículo sobre las Relaciones Públicas (RR.PP.) en el ámbito personal tiene la finalidad de esclarecer y profundizar sobre la labor que ejercen en los personajes famosos o públicos. Se detallarán las posibles y distintas estrategias que se pueden llevar a cabo para gestionar la imagen pública de un individuo desde el marco de la neurocomunicación. A través de diferentes ejemplos se contempla demostrar cómo la labor de las RR.PP. ha ido evolucionando a través de las nuevas herramientas que han ido conquistando el mercado, como Internet. Así pues, se detalla la importancia que las redes sociales han ido cobrando en esta profesión, puesto que son estos medios los que hoy por hoy se deben controlar, manejar o manipular para gestionar de forma global la imagen pública de un personaje famoso. Se aluden a casos llevados a cabo tanto fuera como dentro de España para comparar las distintas formas de gestión de imagen que predominan en este mercado globalizado. Por otro lado, se desarrollan ciertos aspectos como la impresión y gestión de impresión más allá de una celebridad, como recurso que una marca personal debe planificar desde el uso de técnicas derivadas de la neurocomunicación. Así mismo, se desarrolla la evaluación de una campaña de RR.PP. con el objetivo de esclarecer un aspecto poco conocido de dicha profesión, no sólo por su dificultad sino también por su metodología algo abrupta.

Science, Medicine and the Creation of a 'Healthy' Soviet Cinema.

Cinema had long been hailed by Bolshevik party leaders as a crucial ally of the Soviet mass enlightenment project. By the mid-1920s, however, Soviet psychologists, educators and practitioners of ‘child science’ (pedology) were pointing to the grave effects that the consumption of commercial cinema was exerting on the physical, mental and moral health of Soviet young people. Diagnosing an epidemic of ‘film mania’, specialists battled to curtail the NEP-era practices of film production and demonstration that had rendered cinema ‘toxic’ to children. Campaigns to ‘healthify’ Soviet cinema, first manifesting in the organization of child-friendly screenings and forms of ‘cultural enlightenment work’, soon extended to attempts to develop a new children's film repertoire based on the results of psycho-physiological viewer studies. A vast variety of pedological research institutions established during the late 1920s and early 1930s began to experimentally test cinema's effects on children with the view of assisting the production of films that could cultivate a sound mind and body. Tracing a link between the findings of pedological viewer studies and the ‘healthy’ cinema championed in the 1930s, this article sheds light on the vital role played by medical and scientific expertise in shaping Stalinist culture.

Cell Phone Cinema: Latin American Horror Flicks in the Post-Digital Age

Cell phone cinema is an emergent phenomenon well-suited for Latin American independent filmmakers. With technology that is simple to operate and low production costs, as well as open and free distribution via online streaming, cell phone cinema has arguably democratized access to filmmaking. But even as alternative production and distribution avenues liberate filmmakers, they also limit artistic potential and marginalize their films as the work of amateurs. Since cell phone cinema’s arrival in the early 2000s, filmmakers have wrestled with a paradox: they have embraced the making of films that are low-budget, transgressive, and independent, even as they strive for a higher production quality to compete with commercial cinema. Efforts to reconcile these seemingly opposing tendencies have profound repercussions on the content and aesthetics of cell phone films—works that are made close-to-the-body and are increasingly hybrid (combining digital and analog elements), characteristic of a post-digital aesthetic of glitch. This essay defines the features of global cell phone cinema and presents an overview of the format. Then, turning to Latin America, it studies three paradigmatic cell phone horror flicks, a genre with a significant presence in mobile filmmaking. Several critical questions are raised: are we experiencing a cinematic format that will change the game, from a cinema made and distrib-uted by the commercial industry to self-produced films created by autodidacts and distributed freely online? Or will these films be co-opted by market forces? I argue that whatever the future of this new format, the Latin American independent film landscape has already been significantly altered by cell phone technologies

The Adulterer: Censorship, Morality, and Foreign Films in Thailand

The Thai state dramatically increased the censorship of cinema during the period of authoritarian military rule and American military and economic intervention from 1958 to 1973. Enforced through the Board of Film Censorship, censorship evidenced official concerns about the impact of commercial cinema on Thai audiences. Given the political context, one might expect intense censorship of political expression. The censors, however, focused on sexual morality and depictions of adultery in foreign films, thereby asserting urban bureaucratic norms of specifically "Thai" social appropriateness. This regulation occurred in tandem with scandals involving extramarital affairs of government officials. As adultery came to be seen as an issue simultaneously regulated and committed by the bureaucracy, it became a critical issue on which middle-class and elite concerns regarding social status and women's rights centered. The censors' actions underscore the significance of cinema as a site of transnational social and political expression.

Southern Slavery, Italian Style: Italian-American Exchange, International Networks, and Global Exploitation Film in the Slaverysploitation Cycle

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a cycle of slavery exploitation films emerged around the racial developments of the civil rights era and the industrial destabilizations accompanying the drawn-out collapse of the Hollywood studio system, responding to both by rewriting entrenched idealizations of slavery, race, and the "Old South." Yet despite the seemingly "American" nature of such racial and regional histories and imaginaries, the cycle was thoroughly global. Centrally shaped by the transnational influences and circulations marking its production, distribution, and evolution—and indeed, the global trends and flows of popular commercial cinema at this time, particularly expanding exploitation markets—this becomes most evident in the Italian-American/Hollywood exchanges and the Italian films, producers, and production contexts which were crucial to the cycle's emergence and development. Considering these films within the logics of filoni production—the cycles of cheap, imitative, and often exploitative genre fare fueling Italy's Golden Age—this article reveals the cross-industrial relationships, cross-country networks, and global flows underwriting the slaverysploitation cycle, and by extension, its contributions to changing cinematic and cultural understandings of race (blackness and whiteness), slavery, and (African) American history. In so doing, it breaks down nationalized conceptions of genre and film, broadly speaking, while pointing to the links between the US South and the Global South, not only in terms of mid-twentieth century popular film production and distribution, but also the transnational circulation of racial and regional imaginaries, common regional and national histories of slavery and imperialism, and the exploitative relations of global capitalism which continue to mark and connect the two.

Prejuicios y estereotipos en el cine sobre trastornos alimentarios

El conocimiento de la población general sobre los trastornos alimentarios es deficiente, pues al igual que con otras patologías mentales se mezclan la desinformación, los prejuicios y los estereotipos sin profundizar en las raíces de la enfermedad. Los medios audiovisuales suelen ser un reflejo de esta actitud, y a la vez son parte del problema, porque al reproducir los mismos conceptos terminan por reforzar idénticas ideas a las esperadas por los espectadores. En este artículo se estudian cuáles son las corrientes de pensamiento dominantes en el cine comercial de los últimos 20 años, analizando aquellos filmes cuyo argumento se centra en trastornos alimentarios, para confirmar si esta hipótesis es correcta.

Artsibo at Sineng Bayan: Pagpapanatili ng Kolektibong Alaala at Patuloy na Kolektibong Pagsalungat sa Kasinungalingan at Panunupil

Sineng Bayan (People’s Cinema) is a salient part of Philippine alternative cinema, which is in stark contrast to the dominant commercial cinema. It is an important aspect in the pursuit of a more serious Philippine cinema. Political film collectives that arose in the early 1980s and flourished during the Marcos dictatorship gave way to Sineng Bayan. This article focuses on the archival audiovisual works of AsiaVisions Media Foundation (AVMF), a non-government organization which primarily utilized film documentaries in its propaganda-education work, and Alternative Horizons (AlterHorizons), the first media cooperative in the country. This study on Sineng Bayan and the Archives forwards the discourse on film as an effective cultural weapon of the Filipino people in their struggle for national freedom and genuine democracy. Capturing the people’s experiences and struggles through audio-visual presentations, videos, and films, the works of these political film collectives are part of the collective memory and documentary heritage of the country.

Commercial Cinema as a learning tool in medical education, from potential medical students to seniors

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. The use of Commercial Cinema in education has a long tradition, but using movies to teach medical students is a relatively recent application. This topic is emerging as a learning tool to retrieve many of the essential values of the medical profession. There are various experiences of the use movies during pre-graduate and post-graduate medical periods. Medical issues, but also social, historical and humanistic elements are valuable, useful aspects available in a number of movies. In particular, General Medicine as well as Psychiatry are two of the medical specialties that have more experience in this field. Medical topics considered include doctor-patient relationship, medical professionalism, pre-clinical and clinical research, bioethics, and others. The learning methodology is simple, and the final results obtained by many working science-health groups are very good. We conclude that critically viewing selected commercial movies academic and humanistic training of future physicians and health professionals improve.The use of Commercial Cinema in education has a long tradition, but using movies to teach medical students is a relatively recent application. This topic is emerging as a learning tool to retrieve many of the essential values of the medical profession. There are various experiences of the use movies during pre-graduate and post-graduate medical periods. Medical issues, but also social, historical and humanistic elements are valuable, useful aspects available in a number of movies. In particular, General Medicine as well as Psychiatry are two of the medical specialties that have more experience in this field. Medical topics considered include doctor-patient relationship, medical professionalism, pre-clinical and clinical research, bioethics, and others. The learning methodology is simple, and the final results obtained by many working science-health groups are very good. We conclude that critically viewing selected commercial movies academic and humanistic training of future physicians and health professionals improve.

Commercial Counterhistory: Remapping the Movement in Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) might seem an unlikely candidate for intervening in Hollywood's civil rights genre, given both its nationalistic ending and its recuperation of iconic styles and images. This paper argues, however, that the film's pastiche interrogates past cinematic tropes for race and space; in this sense, it proves counterhistorical, a term indicating not a lack of accuracy but a commitment to illuminating the role of visual media in shaping contemporary understandings of history and to encouraging fresh perspectives on the past. Examining the many forms of constraint produced by iconic images of black and gendered personhood, the film also takes on the spatial icon with which many of these figures are associated – the southern plantation. Both exposing and challenging the ways in which spectacular accounts of southern racism occlude the geographic and political reach of African American movements against oppression, the film inconsistently insists on the importance of thinking across conventional demarcations of space and time. At these moments, it suggests possibilities for how even commercial cinema might contribute to new conceptions of black political history and possibility.

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage

La Ciudad En El Cine: Una Perspectiva Mundial

Commercial cinema is a worldwide form of entertainment enjoyed by most of the planet’s population and variety of cultures. Films are produced on six continents and marketed successfully internationally. However, cinema is more than a medium for telling stories of adventure, intrigue, comedy and romance. As most of the world’s population now lives in cities, many films take place in urban settings, where a large number of those cities’ physical and social problems are exposed. Commercial film, then, plays a useful role in determining how such issues can be confronted through the lenses of their many countries and cultures. That is, solutions to urban problems must be culturally sensitive. Moreover, as cities dominate life on planet Earth in the 21st century far beyond what their population alone would warrant, they are at the core of some of the most influential films of the last century. This paper, then, is significant in that it looks at some of these urban focused films and identifies the universal themes they consider.

El silencio de la representación: la imagen de las víctimas en el cine afgano post-Talibán

Afghan cinema has been inextricably linked to the different conflicts that have marked the social context of the country and the region. e fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 allowed the country’s lm industry to rise again and, as a result, it has also allowed the opportunity to tell what Afghan society experienced during the years of most radical repression. Some of the works of Afghan cinema have explored ways of understanding the voice and the testimony that move away from the traditional formulas repeated by the mass media and by the most commercial cinema, and introduce a reflection about the expressive possibilities of silence and paralysis that we often overlook in our desire to privilege word and action. is paper proposes an analysis of some Afghan films as a way of learning and analyzing the way others have faced the problem, always open to the reconstruction of memory through the voice of those who suffered the direct consequences of an armed conflict of several decades. This is not to suggest that the Afghan context should be used as a model in Colombia when considering the role of cinema in the so-called “post-conflict,” but to open up the possibility of considering the problem of “giving voice” through the analysis of what has happened in other contexts, and the role assigned to image in those contexts.

Filmmaking and the India-Pakistan partition: the representation of women in contemporary commercial Hindi cinema

The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan has been the subject of great scrutiny and debate. In particular, significant research has been done on the roles of women during the era and the injustices committed upon them in the name of religion. The partition in itself has been the subject of commercial Hindi cinema for the last several decades. Filmmakers have portrayed the epic migration through their own peripheries. Through this paper, we have analysed how contemporary Hindi cinema (2000 onwards) has constructed the archetypical female during the partition era while drawing upon the Ramayana. The paper analyses injustice through three forms of perpetration: communal, familial, and national. Gender identities and sexual violence have become of increasing importance in India over the last few years. At the same time, religious identity continues to play a huge role in day to day living. With the pervasive mass appeal and the rising globalisation of Indian cinema, it is critical to understand how the country's most successful films portray gender in conjunction to religion.

Commercial Cinema as a learning tool in medical education, from potential medical students to seniors [Correction

MedEdPublish (ISSN 2312–7996) is a highly visible, open access, specialist practitioner e-journal that enables academics, teachers, clinicians, researchers and students to publish their experiences, views and research findings relating to teaching, learning and assessment in medical and health professions education. An innovative and key feature of MedEdPublish is that the peer review process begins following publication.

Filmmaking and the India-Pakistan partition: the representation of women in contemporary commercial Hindi cinema

Filmmaking and the India-Pakistan partition: the representation of women in contemporary commercial Hindi cinema