Commercial Filmmaking Research Articles

Crossing thresholds: women directors making a home in Japanese cinema

ABSTRACT Within many of the works of contemporary Japanese women commercial filmmakers, we see a new vision of home, home spaces, and the act of home making. These depictions diverge from cinematic spaces of and metaphors about the home found in the works of previous directors. While ‘home’ on screen has been shaped throughout Japanese cinema history by dominant gendered narratives that imagine family and the physical house itself as an ideological extension of the state, contemporary Japanese women directors reimagine home as not a physical structure or ‘traditional’ family, but as a matter of repetitive habit expressed through visual and narrative motifs. This creates a sense of ‘at-homeness’ in their films that resonates with how a contemporaneous generation of young people in Japan have also found new definitions of and feelings about home. This article traces both the depiction of home in Japanese cinema and the dominant definitions of ‘home’ in Japanese public discourse from the early 1920s to the early 2000s, before offering a close analysis of two case studies – directors Tanada Yuki and Ogigami Naoko – to show how members of this new generation find an expression of home through the formal craft of cinema itself.

In conversation with Stallone Vaiaoga-Ioasa

Becoming a feature film director is a privilege available to only a handful of people, no matter where in the world they live. In Oceania, access to filmmaking is arguably more constrained because the market conditions under which commercial films are produced do not favour small, geographically dispersed and linguistically distinct communities. Opportunities to make publicly funded, critically acclaimed Pacific films in metropolitan centres like Aotearoa New Zealand are vanishingly small. Often when they are made, these ‘art house’ Pacific films primarily appeal to audiences outside of the communities in which they are set. Stallone Vaiaoga-Ioasa has challenged this status quo by pioneering a mode of populist commercial filmmaking for Samoan (and other Pacific Island) audiences in the islands and across the diaspora. His commitment to making entertainment that is relevant to and reflects contemporary Samoan culture has been remarkable. On the eve of Vaiaoga-Ioasa’s fourth feature film release, filmmaker/academic Sarina Pearson sat down with him to talk about how he developed the ‘Stallone model’, the films he has made, and his plans for the future.

Social Advocacy Cinema: The Mode of Production by Alternative Multimedia Collectives

Alternative multimedia collectives in the Philippines advocate for social change on behalf of the marginalized sectors of society by producing, distributing, and exhibiting social advocacy cinema and other audiovisual productions. They creatively utilize film in various forms as a tool for social advocacy by adhering to the theory and praxis of alternative cinema that counters the dominant ideology, hegemony, and culture of mainstream media and commercial filmmaking. Anchored in the framework of small-scale, collective, and political filmmaking, this paper examines the mode of production of alternative multimedia collectives such as Kodao Productions, Tudla Productions, Mayday Multimedia, Film Weekly, Southern Tagalog Exposure, and The Breakaway Media, to name a few, that emerged and active between 2000 to 2019, or from Estrada to Duterte regime.

Minor Cinema and Conviviality: Túndé Kèlání’s Film Worlds in Comparison

ABSTRACT Túndé Kèlání's films have mostly been analysed in relation to their social and cultural context of origin; they have hardly been made the object of larger comparisons with the work of non-African filmmakers. However, Kèlání's conscious and articulate intermixing of both local and international cultural and stylistic influences, the wide international circulation of his work, and its explicit autonomy in relation to commercial filmmaking (Nollywood in particular) suggest the possibility of comparing his work with that of filmmakers from other regions of the world who position themselves in relation to comparable socio-political contexts and confront similar artistic and political challenges. This is why, following Jean-François Bayart's call to ‘de-dramatize’ African case studies in order to bring to light their global relevance, this essay will compare Kèlání's work with that of the Southern Italian filmmaker Vittorio de Seta, whose life and work present some unexpected and thought-provoking parallels with those of Kèlání. This analysis ultimately shows that both filmmakers are intimately concerned with the creation of a convivial society, in which past and present can cohabit thanks to the affirmation of a philosophy of radical humanism.

Editors’ Introduction

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

Imamura Shōhei: Betwixt fiction and documentary − an introduction

Abstract ‘Betwixt fiction and documentary’ reveals Imamura’s development as a filmmaker through reference to historical events that shaped the style and form of his work. Imamura traces his quest for an authentic cinematic to his involvement in the black market in the years immediately after Japan’s surrender and occupation. ‘Betwixt fiction and documentary’ also gives the background to why Imamura turned his back on commercial filmmaking for most of the 1970s.

Bollywoodization or ghettoization? The Bangladeshi dream factory is in disarray

Abstract In this article, I claim that instead of making Bangladeshi films appealing to the Bangladeshi middle-class audience, the hegemony of Bollywood films has ghettoized them. I explain that with the change in the target audience and the production and exhibition of Bollywood films in the 1990s, the Bangladeshi middle-class audience responded to this change – as did the Indian middle-class audience – and was alienated from Bangladeshi commercial films. The absence of middle-class audiences in Bangladeshi cinema halls, however, was quickly filled out by working-class audiences who migrated from rural areas following economic liberalization and the expansion of the ready-made garment, housing and transport industries from the 1990s onwards. Bangladeshi commercial filmmakers then targeted the so-called captive lower-class audience with action-packed vulgar or obscene films. Through analysing the titles of Bangladeshi commercial films produced in the 1990s and the 2000s, I expound on how these films were ghettoized, completely alienating the middle-class audience.

Hybrid Texts, Assembled Bodies: Michel Gondry's Merging of Camera and Dancer in "Let Forever Be"

Michel Gondry, a filmmaker who created and directed music videos for Propaganda Films, which produced close to a third of all music videos by 1990, began his career in music video and film during this time, where he experimented with collaging postmodern and commercial filmmaking. In 1936, cultural critic and German philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that art fundamentally changes in the age of mechanical reproduction, creating questions of authenticity and aura. This article argues that Gondry’s video “Let Forever Be,” for The Chemical Brothers, illustrates Benjamin’s argument not only in that the digital video itself artificially reproduces the bodies embedded within it, but also in Gondry’s employment of collage, special effects, and camera-enabled illusions in order to create a simulated and dream-like world.

Concerns and constraints of Film-Making in North-East India

The focus of the study is to assess the issues and challenges of filmmaking in North-East India particularly in states of Assam and Manipur. Film-making in the region began amidst variety of odds, be it financial constraints or technological shortcomings. However, against such uninspiring background, artistic ambience and commercial prospect filmmakers in the region ventured to explore the novelty of this medium. This study examines the i) status of filmmaking in Assam and Manipur as they are the largest filmmaking producing states in the region and ii) the reasons why filmmaking has not prospered much as compared to other film producing states in the country. The region has the potentiality of emerging as an important entertainment powerhouse given the adequate resources, infrastructural support and proper outlets for distribution. While there are many deserving filmmakers, talented artists and a great reservoir that could be tapped, the pace of growth and development of film industry in the region is rather slow.

NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films

New York City has always been a center of the motion picture industry. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, independent and experimental artists, as well as commercial filmmakers, have paid tribute to the dynamically changing landscape of New York City. The filmmakers have employed diverse stylistic approaches to express both the formal beauty inherent in the city's architecture and the rhythmic energy of its people. Photographed during both day and night, through distorting mirrors and prisms, as well as by more direct photographic methods, the films include scenes filmed from atop skyscrapers, under bridges, through parks, down Broadway, and in Coney Island. Such motion pictures have come to be identified as films.In cinematic terms, such works represent the articulation of both a defined time frame (most often from morning until evening) as well as a carefully articulated geographic space (e.g., a loft apartment, a city block, the length of the island of Manhattan). Rather than offering a comprehensive listing of all city symphony films made in New York, this article endeavors to define the framework for thinking about such motion pictures from an enlarged perspective, encompassing a variety of genres (early cinema, documentary, experimental, animation, independent, political films, etc.).The first films exhibited in New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century (1895-1905) revealed a sense of wonder at capturing motion by showing busy street life and powerful machines at work. The films also showcased spectacular man-made constructions such as bridges, skyscrapers, and tunnels. There was an expression of optimism by the filmmakers about the limitless potential of man to control production and increase his leisure time in the machine age.Panorama films were a popular genre view. Electric lights were first used on the exterior of public buildings in the late 1800s. Soon thereafter, filmmakers captured floodlit urban views at night. One such film, Coney Island at Night (US, 1905, Edwin S. Porter), captures nocturnal views of the fabled amusement park (see figure 1). This film is composed of three shots. The texture is high-contrast black-and-white imagery. The night is so dark that the electric lightbulbs function to illuminate geometric forms-the circular, rectangular, and triangular outline shapes of the buildings, interior arches, and windows-in abstract fashion. The carefully controlled and slowly moving pans and tilts serve to contrast the different forms of the buildings-the merry-go-round whirls, the steeplechase sign seesaws, and the Ferris wheel circles.With the rise of the Nickelodeon (around 1905, when storefront theaters began showing movies), filmmakers turned their attention to making story films, which were of longer duration and composed of more shots edited together. In films of this period, the chases take place in the countryside and in streets, with the protagonists running diagonally from the background of the image to the foreground. In each successive shot, the characters traverse obstacles in their path, including natural barriers such as steep inclines, bodies of water, and fences (over, under, and through which they run, climb, and fall). All of the characters pass through the image before the cut to the next scene occurs. How a French Nobleman Got a Wife through the New York Herald Personal Columns (US, 1904, Edwin S. Porter) is representative of the chase film of the period and contains exterior shots in which a groom is pursued by prospective brides, beginning at Grant's Tomb in Riverside Park and ending on the waterfront.Interiors N.Y. Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (US, 1905, G. W. Bitzer) is representative of the early documentary, or actuality form of filmmaking (see figure 2). From a camera mounted on the front of the subway car, the camera travels through the tunnel toward Grand Central Station while pillars whiz by and dwarfed human figures move silently about on the platforms. …

Affectless Economies: The Berlin School and Neoliberalism

The Berlin School is a loosely affiliated group of contemporary German filmmakers whose work can be said to constitute a new countercinema. Emerging in the 1990s, when first-generation Berlin School filmmakers Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, and Christian Petzold released their first features, the group has gained increasing recognition over the past decade for a growing body of films that pay renewed attention to film form and aesthetics, turning their lens on life in Germany and Europe during the era of late capitalism and globalization.1 Much interest in German during recent years has focused on big-budget high-profile movies, which are Oscar-friendly (in fact, they are sometimes produced by Hollywood companies) and capitalize on audience familiarity with German history, especially the Nazi or East German past. By contrast, Berlin School films are typically set in the present day. Conveying a strong sense of contemporaneity, they represent not Germany's turbulent twentieth-century history but rather its less sensational aftermath. In particular, these films experiment with narrative time and the representation of space, shifting focus away from dramatic historical events and onto the everyday lives of their characters. These average Germans have lived through the dissolution of their national borders, radical alterations to the spaces of their cities and towns, and an acceleration of time and a decrease in spatial distances due to technological developments as well as a host of other changes brought about by German unification, the expansion of the European Union, the impact of globalization, and the hegemony of the free-market economy. Berlin School films examine the effects of these transformations in an understated way, exploring their impact on social structures, on family and love relationships, and on the struggle to overcome alienation and find happiness.Berlin School films have been the subject of public debate about the role of in contemporary Germany and Europe, not least because, like the New German Cinema films of the 1970s, they have received a warmer critical reception on the festival circuit and abroad than at home. Critics and scholars have tended to focus on the rigorous aesthetics of the films, viewing them as attempts to redeem a European tradition of realism in the face of the predominant transnational style of commercial filmmaking. At the same time, a number of vocal detractors of the Berlin School have decried the fact that films with so litde commercial appeal have generated so much discussion.2Accounts of the place of in the contemporary world, especially those that emphasize production and finance, have been relatively united in their assessment of present-day art as a nostalgic throwback to the twentieth century. According to such accounts, the rise of digital technologies means that has become a residual form of visual culture, an analog relic that art attempts to resuscitate. More significandy, in the era of neoliberal media regimes, the strategies of art cinema-defamiliarization techniques, distantiation, aesthetics, self-referentiality, and subversion, among others-have been thoroughly recuperated for mainstream cinema, draining art of its oppositional value.In his discussion of emblematic postcinematic works from the early twenty-first century, for example, Steven Shaviro dismisses the current vogue for contemplative cinema as nostalgic recycling with no political basis.3 Shaviro privileges video and film productions that map the present moment by pushing contemporary multimedia aesthetics to an extreme, thereby up [ping] the ante on our very complicity with the technologies and social arrangements that oppress us. In an era when it is impossible to imagine alternatives to capitalism, Shaviro argues, postcinematic media perform a valuable function of cognitive and affective mapping of the present moment: They help and train us to endure-and perhaps also to negotiate-the complexity of cyberspace and multinational capital. …

Of Ghosts and Gangsters: Capitalist Cultural Production and the Hong Kong Film Industry

This article contends that ghosts and gangsters are not merely popular genres in the Hong Kong film industry; they are also legitimate participants in the film production process itself, influencing financial, creative, and logistical resources and decisions. Film personnel's accounts of the possession and protection of their bodies by members of the cosmological and criminal underworlds, particularly in location filming in graveyards and gangster turf as well as ritual payments and appeasements made to the underworlds, reveal the diverse risks and cultural practices in film production. This article argues that despite the rationalization of commercial filmmaking, “enchantments” in the form of religion and feudalistic crime linger within capitalist production.

Machinima as a Viable Commercial Medium

The author investigates the feasibility of machinima as a commercial filmmaking format, suggesting that quality-wise, it cannot compete, in its current state, with computer generated imagery. Moreover, although computers and game engines will improve dramatically in the next decades, machinima’s re-sampling nature will not allow this form of expression to achieve the variety and originality of live action or animation. The author concludes that machinima could become more successful — critically and commercially — in other areas, such as television and the internet.

Undoing Violence: Politics, Genre, and Duration in Kathryn Bigelow's Cinema

Kathryn Bigelow's eight feature films all seek a balance between progressive representations of gender and race and the demands of commercial filmmaking. Close attention to the filmmaker's experiments with duration and camera technology reveals her interest in reworking Hollywood conventions to critique conventionally masculinist genres.

Towards an understanding of Australian genre cinema and entertainment: Beyond the limitations of ‘Ozploitation’ discourse

While Australian cinema has produced popular movie genres since the 1970s, including action/adventure, road movies, crime, and horror movies, genre cinema has occupied a precarious position within a subsidized national cinema and has been largely written out of film history. In recent years the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) has brought Australia's genre movie heritage from the 1970s and 1980s back to the attention of cinephiles, critics and cult audiences worldwide. Since its release, the term ‘Ozploitation’ has become synonymous with Australian genre movies. In the absence of discussion about genre cinema within film studies, Ozploitation (and ‘paracinema’ as a theoretical lens) has emerged as a critical framework to fill this void as a de facto approach to genre and a conceptual framework for understanding Australian genres movies. However, although the Ozploitation brand has been extremely successful in raising the awareness of local genre flicks, Ozploitation discourse poses problems for film studies, and its utility is limited for the study of Australian genre movies. This paper argues that Ozploitation limits analysis of genre movies to the narrow confines of exploitation or trash cinema and obscures more important discussion of how Australian cinema engages with popular movie genres, the idea of Australian filmmaking as entertainment, and the dynamics of commercial filmmaking practises more generally.

Images of culture in visual ethnography

Visual ethnography is a kind of ethnographic filming which aim is to gather visual information and to help analyzing the data in the process of a research. It can help also to enhance communication between researcher and his subjects in the field or between researcher and the audience. Because of the prevailing use of a camera visual ethnography is called also camera-ethnography. This field of anthropological activity is raising different questions. The basis of visual literacy in this case is a general cinematographic language. First question is: how much knowledge does a researcher need to have if he or she is using a camera in the field? What is the difference between TV production of documentary and the production of visual ethnography? How to construct a visual narrative to keep a relevant information about the culture in question and how to avoid the stress on emotional experience and dramatic suspense, characteristic for artistic or commercial filmmaking? New visual technology is opening many new possibilities in approaching people. How close can we go in approaching people not to step over the thin line of unethical behavior?.

Subtle Varieties of Love within Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949)

EXPLORING THE SUBTLE VARIETIES OF LOVE WITHIN CECIL B. DeMILLE'S SAMSON AND DELILAH (1949) Introduction: Cecil's Samson SagaProducer-director(1) Cecil B. DeMille(2) (1881-1959), affectionately known as CB, was a co-founder of Hollywood, a progenitor of Paramount studio and an unsung auteur who helped turn an obscure Californian orange grove into a major movie centre that became the synonym for commercial filmmaking worldwide.(3) Not only did DeMille help institute "the Age of Hollywood" (Paglia 1994, 12), but this pioneering "auteur of auteurs" (Vidal 1995, 303) became the master of the American biblical epic with such indelible classics as The Ten Commandments (silent), The King of Kings, Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments (sound). Not surprisingly, he was subsequently tagged "King of the epic Biblical spectacular" (Finler 1985, 32), the "high priest of the religious genre" (Holloway 1977, 26) and the "arch apostle of spectacle" (Clapham 1974,...

Jean-Pierre Jeunet (review)

Elizabeth Ezra. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Jean-Pierre Jeunet by Elizabeth Ezra is the first full book published on the contemporary French film director. Part of the reputable Contemporary Film Directors series, the book proposes engaging commentaries of Jeunet's short and full-length films. Thematic chapters follow a brief introduction, and the book closes with a translation and transcription of a 2005 French television interview with Jeunet. A complete bibliography of secondary sources in both French and English finishes the book; Isabelle Vandershelden's French Film Guide: Amelie (U. of Illinois Press, 2007) just missed inclusion. Images from the director's features and the 1981 short, Le Bunker de la derniere rafale, parcel the book; the rare film images, from L'Evasion and Le Manege, the ones aficionados hanker to see, are disappointingly absent. To compensate, the author puts forth full descriptions and partial analyses of these early shorts. The author studies numerous threads woven through Jeunet's cinema over the years while supplying enough film detail for those who have yet to see the films. Her brief synopses are clear and well situated in developed analyses. The strong point of this project is the in-depth cultural content and context which the author provides. For example, situating into French History Jeunet's earlier films, Delicatessen and La Cite des enfants perdus, allows Ezra to present some convincing correlations between film narratives and their contemporaneous contexts, evoking the Klaus Barbie trial, the French colonial project, and the conflict in Algeria. She takes risks which lead to original thought-provoking readings; at times, however, her analyses stop short which is the case when discussing Jeunet's earlier works alongside cinema du look directors, without delving into the director's career in commercial filmmaking. Uncovering Jeunet's approach to cinema as a director of music clips and television advertisements would have brought about an interesting discussion of his passion for mise-en-scene, pre-production methods and post-production techniques. Rather than providing full monographs, chapters focus around one feature film while reactivating inquiry into themes such as prosthe sis and corporeal mutation, codes, reproduction and cloning, collect ing, the transnational as well as French idiosyncrasies. Commentaries are rich in film and national literary history: Montaigne, Hugo, Perec, Gance, Came, Kassovitz have all found a proper place. …

The Persistence of Fidelity

The Persistence of Fidelity

Partition and Punjabiyat in Bombay cinema: the cinematic perspectives of Yash Chopra and others

Focusing on the post-1947 cinematic depiction of Punjabis by the director Yash Chopra and other commercial Mumbai filmmakers, this article examines the self-censorship applied by them in the presentation of what is termed ‘Punjabiyat’, or sense of being Punjabi. The silence surrounding the Partition of Punjab has led to the construction of a curious Punjabi world almost exclusively occupied by Hindu Khatris, and the near-non-representation or demonising of Sikh and Muslim ‘Others’. The discussion considers the emergence of this Punjabiyat and situates its implications for understanding the history of Partition, Punjabi identity and contemporary South Asian politics.