Contemporary Cinema Research Articles

Telling the Untellable: Experiments on Wisdom in Contemporary Cinema

Telling the Untellable: Experiments on Wisdom in Contemporary Cinema

An epic of terror in contemporary cinema

Este ensaio apresenta uma leitura crítica do filme The Northman (2022) considerando as características próprias de seu gênero (épico) no cinema e maneiras de redefinir seus códigos, bem como os diálogos estabelecidos com ele, conforme propomos que o filme de Robert Eggers realiza através da construção de uma atmosfera de terror. Consideramos também o diálogo com a história da dramaturgia como maneira de contribuir para essa atmosfera pela exploração de algumas figuras e momentos característicos do pathos aterrorizante no drama (do período grego clássico a Shakespeare), ao mesmo tempo em que os velhos arquétipos são desafiados a novos desenvolvimentos de lugares de significação diferenciados para os personagens.

On Drill Team and the musicality of videographic criticism

An article comprising the videographic study Drill Team alongside a written framing of its film studies origins and comparative methodology. The video attempts a performative audiovisual adaptation of a chapter section from Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s 2020 book Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack. Drill Team explores both Kulezic-Wilson’s specific (if uncertain) argument about the relationship between two films, Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) and The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015), and her general argument in the chapter about the “composed” nature of the sound (and music) design in these and other modern or contemporary films, as well as about the capacity of these films, and film generally, to use modes of embodied experience as the substance of their language.

The perennial commitment of Francesco Rosi in his most contemporary cinema, through his work Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo Connection)

A lo largo de su obra, el director de cine Francesco Rosi adoptó un compromiso político sobre los temas de actualidad que aquejaban a toda Italia, especialmente al sur del país. En una de sus últimas obras, Dimenticare Palermo (1990), se adentra en la relación entre política y mafia. Condicionado por los temas que trata, sus películas acaban por adoptar una narrativa cercana al cine negro. Contemporáneo al debate de aquel entonces, se posiciona a favor de una legalización controlada de las drogas, aunque el enfrentamiento con el PSI que propugnaba una postura diferente, haya hecho peligrar su proyecto.

Caribbean Bodies of Global Desire: Tourism and Eroticism in Contemporary Cinema

Caribbean Bodies of Global Desire: Tourism and Eroticism in Contemporary Cinema

Non-Violent Revenge — Analyzing the Elements of Revenge in Visual Works in the Context of the Era

Revenge often signifies the retaliation of the powerless against the powerful in various relationships such as gender, society, peers, or family, enabling the audience to derive satisfaction from the triumph of the underdog. This enduring appeal is why revenge narratives have remained prevalent throughout literary and cinematic history. Recent discussions have questioned whether characters in many contemporary film and television productions are excessively “weak.” The emergence of numerous dark hero narratives such as Empresses in the Palace, The Glory, Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace, and The Knockout has sparked extensive debate on violent revenge-themed visual media. In this context, drawing from a synthesis of literature and analysis of works like The Great Jang-Geum, Like a Flowing River 3, and Roving Inspection Team, this paper proposes the concept of non-violent revenge. Moreover, building upon the idea of non-violent revenge, it discusses revenge elements in visual media within the context of their respective eras, exploring new revenge ideologies and the societal significance reflected in visual media, thus envisioning new avenues for revenge aesthetics.

Cultural Hybridity in Indonesian Contemporary Cinema: A Postcolonial Study on the Film Bumi Manusia

Cultural Hybridity in Indonesian Contemporary Cinema: A Postcolonial Study on the Film Bumi Manusia

Portrayals of the Shero: a critical discourse analysis on the representation of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel

ABSTRACT Superhero films are currently the most commercially successful action films. They long relied on classical gender role divisions, representing physically strong male heroes. However, especially films published in the second decade of the 21st century have also shown women in more active roles. Wonder Woman (2017) and Captain Marvel (2019) were the first superhero films in which superheroines saved the world as protagonists. In this paper, I apply critical discourse analysis to investigate the contemporary film representations of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. My results suggest that both films depict female empowerment and address their superheroines’ struggles in rejecting women’s social roles and focusing on the pursuit of activities traditionally perceived as masculine. Both films also emphasize their superheroines’ womanhood; however, they represent these characters differently. Wonder Woman strongly emphasizes its superheroine’s feminine traits and shows her engaging in a heterosexual romantic relationship. Conversely, Captain Marvel depicts an obstinate woman whose psychological strength derives from her perseverance and support from a close female friend. I discuss my results with reference to the contemporary feminist movements postfeminism, neoliberal feminism and popular feminism.

Management Structure in the Film Industry

Introduction. The scientific and technological revolution and digitalisation introduced into various spheres of life also bring with them opportunities for creating completely new film content. The demand for cinema is constantly growing, as it is one of the most popular and profitable industries in the world. Purpose and methods. The purpose of the article is to identify the stages of contemporary film production organisation, determine the sequence of processes for creating a film product, analyse employees’ functions in the field of cinema, and substantiate a typical scheme of a film project organisational structure. The methodological basis of the study is the systemic and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as terminological, historical, calculation and constructive, structural and functional, and expert methods. Results. The stages of modern film production organisation are identified. The sequence of creating a film product processes on the way from creation to consumption is determined. The employees' functions in the field of cinema are analysed. A typical scheme of a film project's organisational structure for the perspective is substantiated. Conclusions. Summarising the scientific theoretical provisions on the organisation of management and a team of specialists in the field of cinematography, the article substantiates a flexible adaptive standard system for organising the filming process, which ensures effective interaction between various participants in the film making process, helps to avoid mistakes and delays in production, ensure compliance with the budget and deadlines, and deliver a high-quality film product that will be commercially viable for producers. In terms of scientific novelty, this study has significant potential for the development of management theory and practice, as well as for improving film production efficiency.

Gaging "JoJo Rabbit " Skies - Film Deconstruction and Reshaping of Literature

In contemporary film and television, many creative works use excellent literary works as the basis of adapted scripts. Many not-so-excellent literary works have been adapted into film and television works that the audience knows and loves. Adapting literary works into film and television has always occupied a significant position in film history. This article will compare JoJo Rabbit and the original novel Gaging Skies to explore the adaptation of movies based on literary works that align with human ethics in today's social environment and the successful deconstruction of literature by film. And reinvention. This article elaborates on the expression of the theme in JoJo Rabbit from multiple dimensions, such as the comparison between the script and the original work, the current situation of film adaptations, and the excellent use of audio-visual language in the film. Finally, a multi-angle comparison of the original novel and the film summarizes how the film deconstructs and reshapes the literary adaptation of the original work and the profound impact of scholarly works on adapters.

A Brief Analysis of the Perfect Integration of Narrative Elements and Space-time Construction

As a comprehensive art, film often has the dual attributes of time and space. "Time and space" is one of the most special and free features of film, and it is also the basic element and main content of film narrative, and it is also the necessary condition for the audience to establish the imagination space. From the perspective of narratology, this paper will analyse the text of several domestic films in terms of their thematic narrative space-time construction and the design features of narrative elements, study the specific integration and practical application of lens narrative and space-time construction, and through the examination and analysis of the film's thematic content, reveal the imaging expression and thinking mode of different films, so as to help people better understand and explore the narrative art of different contemporary films. Structure. The construction of film narrative space-time should become a basic instinct of creative practice, conveying the performance of narrative space-time in specific works and clarifying the diverse forms and nature of the film and television means presented, as well as putting forward further effective suggestions on the time-space dimension and elemental shaping of film narrative in line with the requirements of the times, and endeavouring to incorporate this kind of experience into the creation of more specific film narrative practice in the future. The film will also endeavour to incorporate such experiences into the creation of more specific film narrative practices in the future.

Seaports as criminal gateways in contemporary South Korean cinema: illicit globalization and marginalized subjects in The Yellow Sea (2010) and New World (2013)

ABSTRACT This article examines the seaport as a trope in contemporary cinema in relation to notions of spatiality, illicit globalization, and border studies. We analyze how seaports as social and cultural networks of built environment and infrastructure have become gateways to illicit globalization. We then provide a critical analysis that unbundles these spaces in the film genre of neo-noir out of South Korea. Our focus then zooms in on real organized crime, smuggling, human trafficking and black-market transactions as refracted and bounded in the Korean films The Yellow Sea (2010) and New World (2013). Within these cinematic glamorizations of crime, we find transgressive characters contributing to what we dub “dark neoliberal accumulation” of profit through kinds of unremorseful economic predation at two seaports. Criminals and migrants in these films portend audiences to underworld activities of drug and human trafficking to serve their needs or rescue them from peril. In other ways, we scrutinize the material commodities and shipping containers themselves as having symbolic value and thus providing a commentary on the circuits of low-end global trade through transoceanic routes through Korea and worldwide.

Ambivalent Masculinities in Contemporary Film and TV

In 1999, Jamie Babbit’s lesbian cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader parodied the absurd correlations between cisgender roles, styles, and heteronorms. In doing so, it gave audiences the opportunity to laugh at the assumptions of “gaydar”: the notion that you can make a connection between gender nonconformity and sexuality. This article explores how the landscape of queer and trans representation in film and TV has shifted in the intervening decades, arguing that the reading and misreading of gendered codes remains a structuring condition of the queer comedy. If mainstream media of the past decade have strategically pursued femininity as the visible symbol of lesbian progress, other media have instead ambivalently negotiated a double bind: a resistance to accepting masculinity as the straightforward condition of lesbian legibility and a simultaneous anxiety over the precarity of lesbianism itself.

The Weather in Tsai: Slow Cinema and Slow Violence

Abstract: Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema’s ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.

The transformation of images of Nezha and the changing cultural discourses in Chinese national style animated films from 1979 to 2019

Nezha is a mythological and dynamic character in the Chinese cultural discourse. In traditional China, the mythological character of Nezha represents a cultural integration between Daoism and Buddhism. By applying the Chinese animated films as an approach, this article focuses on exploring the changing cultural discourses of the Chinese national style in post-Maoist cinema through critical analysis of the character of Nezha and the deployment of Daoist philosophy in the construction of Chinese national style from the post-Cultural Revolution context to the post-Socialist context. This article examines two Chinese national-style animated films. The first film is Nezha Naohai (1979) which was produced in 1979, and another animated film is Nezha Zhi Motong Jiangshi (2019) which was produced in contemporary China. Through the film and cultural analysis of Nezha Naohai (1979), this article argues that the Daoist philosophy engages in the cultural discourse of Chinese national style and shapes the narrative, rhetoric, aesthetics and characterisation of Nezha in the post-Cultural Revolution context. The contemporary film Nezha Zhi Montong Jiangshi (2019) reflects an ideological change in the discourse of Chinese soft power states the power of Chinese culture including Daoist philosophy within a modern and scientific paradigm, which promotes a more international Chinese national identity and national style.

The Current Discourse of the New Biographism in the Contemporary Cinema

The article is devoted to the actual problems of the biographical genre in cinematography. This genre arose at the very beginning cinematography and developed in the 1920s. However, the first classic examples of it were created in England in the mid-1930s by Alexander Corda (in particular — «Rembrandt»).Soon, the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany began to actively use it with varying degrees of success. We can see the paradoxical flowerishing genre in the 1950s when it underwent final academisization and codification, but lost touch with real life (despite some successes, par example, the film «Taras Shevchenko» by Ihor Savchenko). The follow years demonstrate a variety of undividual options, both in the works of artists of «poetic cinema» («Dream» by Volodymyr Denysenko) and artists of late modernism («Dante`s Inferno» by Ken Russel, «Portrait of Rembrandt» by Jos Stelling). For the first time, artists of naïve direction (Pirosmani, Chontvari) become heroes of feature films. But the genre really changes already at the turn of the century. It draws attention to artists with disabilities, marginals, representatives of national and sexual minorities. A typical example is Frida Cahlo, a heroine at least three films. Finally, the image of female artist — a dissident (Alla Gorska in «Forbidden» by Roman Brovko) or a simple village woman (Katerina Bilokur in «Mad Woman» by Victor Vasylenko) appears in Ukrainian cinema. And even in the realm classics, the most popular characters remain artists with victim fate: Van Goht, Modigliani, Goya, and again Rembrandt. We have, of course, Taras Shevcenko.

Cultural Pluralisms: Neo-Nollywood and Biyi Bandele’s Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022)

ABSTRACT In Biyi Bandele’s last feature, Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022), adapted from Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Bandele registers an awareness for the multiple film cultures that have shaped filmmaking in Nigeria. Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba is structured as a homage to the legacies of Yorùbá traveling theatricalities, while retaining the visual codes of contemporary cinema, including in the ways it co-opts traits of Western and neo-Nollywood filmmaking. In this analysis of Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba, I map the visual awareness it establishes of the legacies of filmmaking in Nigeria, while also centering the film’s thematic registers of colonial politics, cultural abjection, and gendered representations as constitutive of the colonial world in which the story is situated. I frame Bandele’s pluralistic approach as a spirited engagement with the unstable category that colonization produces for the erstwhile colonized person. That is, it is not only the characters in Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba who are forced to interplay between Yorùbá and British intellectual and cultural practices; Bandele, too, is placed in this complex interrogation, as embedded in his stylistic approach.

A RYÛSUKE HAMAGUCHI MOVIE: ‘WALDEN'

<p>Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (1978) is one of the most important directors of contemporary cinema. He has won many awards with his films at the world's major film festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice and he received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022 with his movie <em>‘Drive My Car’</em>. Hamaguchi’s <em>‘Walden’</em> (2022) is one of Hamaguchi's recent movies. <em>‘Walden’</em> is a co-production of Austria, and Japan, premiered at The Festival Viennale (2022). Within Hamaguchi’s relatively mainstream cinema poetics, the movie <em>‘Walden’</em> is an experimental work that invites the spectator to a deep contemplation. The film is a 2-minute, almost monochrome record of a water surface with reflections of trees, raindrops, vibration waves, water rings, bird songs, swarming insects, several sounds of nature, a floating leaf, etc. In addition to the sounds of nature, the film includes a female voice excerpt with music from Douglas Sirk's <em>‘All That Heaven Allows’</em> (1955). Jean Wyman who is the protagonist “Cary Scott” of <em>‘All That Heaven Allows’</em>, reads some lines from Henry David Thoreau's book Walden (1854). This movie at the same time is a documentary record of a water surface; a free cinematographic adaptation of Henri David Thoreau's autobiographical book <em>‘Walden’</em>, a deep romantic landscape through continuous and random visual variations occurring on the surface and a crystallization of Hamaguchi’s style. Hamaguchi’s <em>‘Walden’</em> surface also becomes an interface where Hamaguchi the artist, and the spectator meet temporally to explore the noema of existence, nature, and cinema within a Heideggerian-verse. Besides the 2- minute durée of the film and its surface subject indicates a continuous oscillation between Kronos and Aion in the Deleuzian sense.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0758/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Wives of Henry VIII: Historiography in the concepts of modern cinema

The research relevance is determined by the variety of myths and legends formed around the historical personality of Henry VIII, which are not true, yet are repeated in the context of contemporary cinema. The study aims to analyse each of Henry VIII’s wives, using literature as a primary source, analyse modern cinema and attempt to introduce an innovative view of the historical situation in the history of the British monarchy. The artistic and stylistic method and the method of comparative analysis were used. Aside from the rapid change in the paradigm of personal life, the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty is also known for several significant reforms that were demonstrated only in a few films and TV series, and then in passing, leaving a bad impression of the English crown. Under the Tudors, England became the “mistress of the seas” and established the Anglican Church independent of the Pope, from a period of turmoil to stability. The work combines the embodied images with portraits of Henry VIII’s wives’ contemporaries, namely those of Hans Holbein the Younger. General information on the establishment of the English monarch, their origin, as well as the circumstances at court after the marriage, namely the death of the heirs to the throne, which, as recent studies have proved, was related to the health of the monarch, not his wives, was analysed. The study examines the external features, behavioural patterns, and influence on the internal politics of medieval England. The following films were analysed: “The Other Boleyn Girl” (2008, directed by Justin Chadwick), the TV series “The Tudors” (2007-2010, directed by Michael Hirst), “Henry VIII and His Six Wives” (2016, directed by Chris Holt), establishing that cinema does not accurately convey the era, the character and appearance of the girls. This study may be useful for researchers, history buffs, specialists in the Tudor dynasty, students of history and amateurs

“Warfare is a specialised variety of hunting”

The Ukrainian war pervades – as a token for deciphering the ruins of our present – the lines of this interview. That deciphering implies both refusing to be subjected to the devastation of the cities as an inevitable fate and trying to unfold the possibilities of rediscovering a «poetry of the city» (Fabrizio Desideri). We risk falling into incontrollable mistakes and mystifications if we hide from ourselves life’s violence. Philosophically speaking, the most beautiful victory is the one in which we defeat ourselves (Plato). But the role of art, the only human activity able to tear off the masque to violence (Giorgio Colli) is irreplaceable: from Greek tragedy to contemporary cinema.