Explicit Scenes Research Articles

Subtitling Taboo Expressions from a Conservative to a More Liberal Culture

Abstract Subtitling involves constraints about differences between cultures. This requires a set of translation strategies, especially when subtitling from relatively conservative to more liberal cultures. This study explores subtitlers’ strategies when translating the Jordanian Arabic vernacular series Jinn into English. Jinn has been selected because it’s Netflix’s first Arabic-Jordanian series containing explicit scenes and inappropriate language. Further culture-bound expressions were classified according to their connotative functions. The findings demonstrated that subtitlers used various strategies to render culture-bound expressions from Arabic into English. These include translating the source culture taboo to a target culture taboo of the same, higher or lower intensity levels. The findings also revealed that ‘unfriendly suggestions’ and ‘noun supports’ were the most frequently targeted connotative functions of the swear words. The research recommends additional studies on subtitling movies and series cross-culture.

Cinema in the World of OTT and the Ethics of Visual Representation in a Fictional World

Research has revealed that during the Corona Pandemic almost a thousand single screen theatres shut down for good in India. Meanwhile, a huge surge was seen in the viewership of OTT platforms. Producers who could not release their films in theatres sold their films to OTTs instead; and this trend has continued even in the post-pandemic environ. It is believed that this growth in the popularity of streaming platforms is facilitated by the bolder content that OTTs offer, raising several ethical dilemmas for both viewers and the government over censorship issues. A survey conducted by this researcher amongst more than 350 young students across Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh revealed that 47.5% of the respondents (311) go only once a year to watch a film in a cinema hall, while 14.3% do not go to a film theatre at all. On the other hand, among the same set of respondents, 13.2% watch a film every day, 38.5% watch every week and 40.8% every month on an OTT platform. 51.3% of the youth who responded to the survey also revealed that the explicit scenes of nudity and violence in OTT content, does not bother them. There is however also the view shared with this researcher by Jyotsana Garg, an advisory panel member of the Central Board of Film Certification, who says that the present guidelines enacted to regulate OTTs in India are not adequate; as the foul language, nudity and violence in OTT content will negatively impact the youth, and there is a need for greater censorship. The moral compass is obviously divergent between the youth and policy makers. In conclusion, there are contrary ethical standards and many dilemmas surrounding visual representations in the fictional world of cinema and OTT, especially with OTTs showcasing bolder content and threatening the very survival of cinema halls.

The media and violence - cyberbullying

Violence in the media mostly refers to the use of explicit scenes of violence seen on film and television screens as well as in the cyberspace of interactive digital games. Everlasting questioning about the negative effects of the media of mass communication was especially evident in the time of expansion of television and the ?narcotic role? of the television image, when violence became one of the most commercial areas from which the media got the topics of their cultural content. The arrival of the new ways of communication by means of digital media has opened another page in the consideration of the notion of violence in the media - cyberbullying. Therefore, the subject of the paper is violence in the media and the possible effects of traditional and social media on the global audience. By presenting some of the theoretical considerations and empirical research on the effects of the media, the aim of this paper is to answer the question of how much the connection there is between the media and violence with special reference to digital abuse as a long-term exposure to violence on social networks. By using the descriptive-explanatory method and the method of theoretical analysis, by connecting theoretical knowledge and empirical data, the paper, within the scope of the research, presents the overview of theoretical premises related to the action of violence in the media. Likewise, the examples from the field of the effects of violence in traditional and digital media were reviewed in order to realize the phenomenon of violence and its connection with the media. The research results indicated the connection between the effects of traditional and digital violence and the particular danger of different methods of cyberbullying considering the characteristics of this phenomenon. Beginning with the assertion that the media greately influences the recipients with their aggressive content, by applying a literature review, the models of aggression in the traditional media were pointed out, as well as the methods by which cyberbullyingis done by means of text or video messages that insult, harass, threaten. The answer to the question of the connection between the media and violence required theoretical reflections and the presentation of empirical research in order to realize the effects of violent communication, and especially to shed light on digital abuse on social networks. Recent analyses of cyberbullyingrarely rely on the previous research and do not tend to connect mutually in order to provide a general picture, so it is difficult to get a whole picture of the state of violent content in digital media. Nevertheless, even though there are opinions about the media as being the sole culprits of violence in society, even though completely opposite opinions are pointed out, the latest researches unequivocally prove that the theory about the ineffectiveness of media violence is not sustainable.

Explicit kissing scene detection in cartoon using convolutional long short-term memory

The main concern of this study is due to certain cartoon content consisting of explicit scenes such as kissing, sex, violence. That are somehow not suitable for kids and may contradict to some religions and cultures. There are some reasons the film industry does not expel the kissing scene in a cartoon movie. It is categorized as a romance sequence and love scene. These could be a double-edged weapon that will ruin an individual’s childhood through excessive exposure to explicit content. This paper proposes a deep learning-based classifier to detect the kissing scene in the cartoon by using Darknet-19 for frame-level feature extraction, while the feature aggregation in the temporal domain is using convolutional long short-term memory (conv-LSTM). This paper also has discussed a few steps related to evaluation and analysis regarding the performance of the models. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed system provides excellent results of 96.43% accuracy to detect the kissing scene in the cartoon. Due to high accuracy performance, the model is suitable to be a kissing scene filter feature in a digital video player that may able to decrease the excessive exposure to explicit content for kids.

Heteroerotic Failure and “Afro-queer Futurity” in Mohamed Camara’s Dakan

ABSTRACT The year 1997 marked the release of Mohamed Camara’s film Dakan, which centers on two young men entangled in a homoerotic affair. Africa’s first LGBT film produced by an African filmmaker, Dakan featured explicit scenes of homoerotic love on the cinematic screen. While the film, upon its release, invited negative criticisms from Guinea where the plot of the film was set, it was paradoxically heralded in Europe and the United States as marking Africa’s triumphant entry into the liberal LGBT world. I pose the following questions: How does the film’s renunciation of heterosexual permanence valorize homoerotic possibility? How do the attempts by the young men’s parents’ to constrain them, through ritual practices, forced marriage, and the promise of wealth, create an archive of homosexual panic and enforce a postcolonial heteronationalist disorder? I argue that the film, unlike consequent documentaries on the situation of LGBT human rights in Africa, foregrounds a uniquely resilient queer African agency that nevertheless envisions a future of uncertainty.

Animating the Real: Illusions, Musicality and the Live Dancing Body

Animation film frequently uses dance and choreography as part of explicit scenes to help assist with and compliment the narrative. Although animators frequently acknowledge relationships between dance and animation, scarcely any scholarly work considers how animated film principles are used and applied within live dance performances. Additionally, although many scholars discuss the relationship between live dance and music and similarly animation and music, rarely has the collision of all three been scrutinized. In this article, I draw upon principles from animation film and choreomusical scholarship to show a complex relationship between the real and the pretend in a solo street dance performance. Based on detailed movement analysis of a short solo dance performance by Isaac "Turbo" Baptiste, I discuss the ways that moving image can influence live dancing bodies and create endless possibilities for choreomusical play.

BAD ATTACHMENTS: EMAIL AND QUEER ANTI-CENSORSHIP PROTESTS

This paper examines a 1996 U.S. internet censorship protest that encouraged users to email a series of technically “indecent” files as attachments to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich using an online email generator. These attachments were: a list of abortion clinics, a graphic illustration of condom-use instructions, and excerpted sexually explicit scenes from Gingrich’s own novel, 1945. Selecting from a drop-down menu, senders chose their attachments, completed a personalized message, and clicked send, all within a web-based form. By using the platform to inundate the Speaker’s email with attachments, senders cleverly broke the censorship provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), putting themselves at risk to the criminalization of sexual expression online. The “bad attachments” protest grew out of the fact that online information about sexuality was vital to marginalized communities with limited access to other kinds of information channels—including queer and rural youth, and people living with HIV. This paper argues that the protest attachments constitute a queer, material digital practice, attuned to the political demand for ready information access as a means of survival.

Transformative Genealogies: Childbirth and Crises of Succession in Athelston

In medieval historical narratives, including chronicles and many romances, violent and explicit scenes of childbirth often accompany political upheaval or dramatic genealogical changes. In such scenes, childbirth—including pregnancy, labor, and delivery—is frequently in tension with ideal agnatic succession, erupting into the narrative at moments of patrilineal disruption or ambiguity, such as illegitimacy, the loss of patrimonial lands, and the lack of a direct male heir. This essay examines how representations of women's child-bearing provide a means of genealogical transformation, particularly during disruptions in succession. It focuses on the late fourteenth-century romance Athelston, with reference to royal genealogical rolls, the Beaufort/Beauchamp Book of Hours, and the Wilton Diptych, situating these sources in late medieval political and genealogical challenges, including Richard II's tumultuous reign and non-agnatic ascension and succession, and Anne of Bohemia's childlessness. In particular, it examines the tension in representations. In Athelston, whose narrative crisis and climax involve horrific violence toward and political action by royal pregnant women, this tension between the mother's role in producing an heir and the urgent embodiedness of child-bearing allows both genealogical continuity and sudden change. The essay argues that prominent childbearing characters and detailed acts of childbirth in medieval texts, particularly those concerned with genealogy, often show how women not only contribute to an existing genealogy but imbue it with types of authority that are new and possibly radically different from male primogeniture.

Victorian Popular Fictions Today: ‘feel these words as mama does!’

This article is in two parts. The first seeks to set an agenda for the study of Victorian popular fiction by examining what the field comprises today in terms of texts studied, methodologies and affective engagement, and then thinking through the implications of studying such fiction today in a global and remediated context. I argue that Victorian sentimental popular fiction self-consciously models processes of relationship formation and exploration in its characters, its explicit scenes of reading, and above all in its plots, in order to mould and maintain readers’ relationships to it. “Sympathy” and its interrogation defines both the representation of characters’ relations to one another and readers’ relationship to that representation. It is a textual technique used by the fiction industry to create and maintain customer loyalty. Our affective responses to this technique constitute one reason we, as students of a still marginal field, continue to read it with energy and enthusiasm. What we need to do is self-consciously think through the implications of this energy’s rootedness in the commercial imperatives of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Part 2 offers two case studies to examine that call, one very famous and the other virtually unknown, by American women writers whose work circulated globally: Susan Warner and E.D.E.N. Southworth. I ask what the ethical and methodological implications might be for the checking of our pleasure through what neuroaesthetics calls “cognitive elaboration.”

Photometric and Colorimetric Assessment of LED Chip Scale Packages by Using a Step-Stress Accelerated Degradation Test (SSADT) Method.

By solving the problem of very long test time on reliability qualification for Light-emitting Diode (LED) products, the accelerated degradation test with a thermal overstress at a proper range is regarded as a promising and effective approach. For a comprehensive survey of the application of step-stress accelerated degradation test (SSADT) in LEDs, the thermal, photometric, and colorimetric properties of two types of LED chip scale packages (CSPs), i.e., 4000 °K and 5000 °K samples each of which was driven by two different levels of currents (i.e., 120 mA and 350 mA, respectively), were investigated under an increasing temperature from 55 °C to 150 °C and a systemic study of driving current effect on the SSADT results were also reported in this paper. During SSADT, junction temperatures of the test samples have a positive relationship with their driving currents. However, the temperature-voltage curve, which represents the thermal resistance property of the test samples, does not show significant variance as long as the driving current is no more than the sample’s rated current. But when the test sample is tested under an overdrive current, its temperature-voltage curve is observed as obviously shifted to the left when compared to that before SSADT. Similar overdrive current affected the degradation scenario is also found in the attenuation of Spectral Power Distributions (SPDs) of the test samples. As used in the reliability qualification, SSADT provides explicit scenes on color shift and correlated color temperature (CCT) depreciation of the test samples, but not on lumen maintenance depreciation. It is also proved that the varying rates of the color shift and CCT depreciation failures can be effectively accelerated with an increase of the driving current, for instance, from 120 mA to 350 mA. For these reasons, SSADT is considered as a suitable accelerated test method for qualifying these two failure modes of LED CSPs.

Horror in mainstream en cult cinema: is het genre extremer geworden?

Ever since the creation of silent movies, directors aim to shock the audience with explicit scenes of violence. Yet, little attention has been given to the evolution of horror movies. In order to create ‘monsters’, ‘dark locations’ and ‘explicit scenes of violence’ directors have to experiment with storylines and new techniques, if they want to shock the audience. The aim of this paper is to examine whether or not horror has become more violent (more extreme) throughout film history. Hence, we will discuss the historic evolution of horror movies in mainstream cinema (films that reached a large audience) and cult cinema (films which have a select, mostly fan based, audience).

Watching Men Kissing Men: The Australian Reception of the Gay Male Kiss On-Screen

I n t h e 1942 f I l m C a s a b l a n C a , piano-playing Sam famously sings that we “must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss.” Although now a classic cinematic moment, coming from a Hollywood film, this is arguably something of a hypocritical message; when placed on-screen, a kiss has often represented much more than just a kiss. The kiss has been required to carry multiple meanings in the history of cinematic sex, from innocent affection to sexual passion. From cinema’s very beginnings until the mid1960s, Linda Williams argues, “a kiss of variable length had to do the job of suggesting all the excitement and pleasure of intimate sexual contacts.” This was certainly true in Australia, where a limited local film industry and a dependence upon British and American studios was coupled with multiple layers of censorship, first in the place of production and then through local censorship regimes. Kisses were targets for the censors, who feared that audiences might be enticed toward inappropriate passions. But if the kiss could arrive at a range of moments in the narrative and could convey a range of possible meanings—from affection to desire and from illicit passion to marital bliss—there was at least one kind of kiss that remained entirely unacceptable to the censors. Until the 1970s the kisses filmed by British or Hollywood studios and ultimately screened to Australian audiences were always between a man and a woman. Although heterosexual sex enjoyed a slow cinematic reveal, starting with the kiss and leading up to the eventual display of sexual intercourse, gay men were first seen kissing on-screen in the same films in which they were first seen having sex. There was no slow reveal; a gay male kiss only ever appeared in films that also featured sexually explicit scenes. While heterosexual kisses were cinematic symbols for the whole range of heterosexual sexual acts, when two men kissed on-screen, it was always foreplay.

Intertextuality in Tunisian Cinema: State, Allegory, and ‘Sexual Breathing Room’

The repressive political climate in pre-revolutionary Tunisia often necessitated that artists issue their critiques in clandestine modes. In cinema productions, artists used allegory in order to touch on or evoke larger political issues. Owing to the politics surrounding the pursuit of funding, Tunisian artists were forced to censor themselves in order to secure patronage, and even then financial assistance was not assured. However, despite the sophisticated mechanisms crafted to mitigate the threat of cultural production, Tunisian filmmakers were able to address sex and sexuality in explicit plots and scenes. As cinematic allegories frequently took the body as a grotesque mode of representing the epistemological and the political, filmmakers were able, in some cases, to secure funding and pass censors while still covertly subverting the state, its policies, and/or the social structures upon which it depended. Interpreting the cinematic allegories in short and feature-length films through the lens of intertextuality, allegorical critique of the state emerges alongside the mantle of historical genealogies they built their films upon and in conversation with.

Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities

This essay examines two gay zombie films by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. I look to the ways LaBruce brings together the already intimate genres of horror and porn to paint an ambivalent picture of contemporary gay life and what he calls ‘the death of gay culture’. Zombies and zombie sex are deployed to level an anarcho-punk critique at contemporary queer collusions with necropolitical power. At the same time, explicit scenes of zombie sex gesture toward an always immanent political potentiality lodged within necropolitics. Rather than herald only a dead or failed future, LaBruce's gay zombies express disaffected, impersonal socialities, and especially forms of sex and politics that are deemed retrograde but that paradoxically suggest undead presents and futures. These necropolitical socialities are stubbornly animate, undying efforts that improvise intimate publics appropriate to contemporary precarities.

‘When you have your back to the wall, everything becomes easy’: performance and direction in the films of Catherine Breillat

French director Catherine Breillat has gained notoriety for her distinctly personal portrayal of gender relations and intimacy. With the inclusion of sexually explicit scenes, such as those featuring loss of virginity and/or rape, her films explore subjects of emotional, as well as visual, taboo. In this article the author examines Breillat’s preproduction and on-set practices, particularly focusing on her control of actors’ bodies. Breillat’s risk-taking seems to involve a lack of contact with actors in the preproduction stage of each film, meaning that the camera is rolling when scenes play out for the first time. The director counters this risk with long periods of casting and her technique of control on-set: the precise choreography of each shot. Rather than allow actors to move and act on the emotional responses they draw from the script, Breillat physically puts them into position, choreographs their movement in advance and models the performance she wishes to capture. The author suggests that, by taking risks as director, notably by pushing cast and crew into fearful and uncomfortable situations, Breillat is able to capture moments of onscreen intimacy in a subversive manner. The author draws upon her own interview with Breillat (undertaken during a period of screen testing for her latest film, Abus de faiblesse [2013]), as well as a range of other primary and secondary sources, to provide a new reading of key scenes in films such as Romance (1999) and À ma sœur (2001).

‘I never imagined that the time would come’: Martin Cole, the Growing Up Controversy and the Limits of School Sex Education in 1970s England1

This piece concerns the controversy engendered by Martin Cole’s 1971 film Growing Up, an attempt to start a revolution in school sex education practices by showing explicit scenes of unsimulated sexual acts. Although Cole’s film was never widely shown it marked a turning point in English school sex education by defining the limits of the ‘tasteful’ and the acceptable. 1 I am grateful to Professor Ian Grosvenor of the University of Birmingham and the participants in the DOMUS seminar where a version of this piece was first aired and to the staff of Birmingham Central Library and Archive.

‘On the Back of a Blue Elk’: Recent Ethnohistorical Sources and ‘Ambiguous’ Stone Age Rock Art at Pyhänpää, Central Finland

Three groups of motifs – cervids, boats and human figures – dominate North European hunter‐gatherer rock art. The scarcity of explicit narrative scenes makes the interpretation of this art a very difficult task, but important clues can be found in a group of ‘ambiguous’ images, where the said three categories are combined in ‘unrealistic’ ways. In this paper, the prospect of an ethnographically informed approach to their interpretation is explored, using as a case study the rock painting of Pyhänpää (Central Finland) and ethnographic material drawn chiefly from Saami religion and traditional Finnish epic poetry. It is argued that the ambiguous imagery of rock art has a clear counterpart in the pre‐Christian religious tradition, where cervids and boats have a similarly ambiguous nature. The painting, which shows an elk, a boat and a human figure merged together, is interpreted as representing the shamanic flight and the sense of co‐essence between the shaman and his spirit helper beings. The making of the painting is associated with the belief that such beings lived inside specific rock cliffs and that their power could be obtained through visits to rock art sites.

Sex and the Maiden: Authenticity and the Erotic Adaptation of The Wings of the Dove

Abstract: Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove has been the most popular of the recent crop of cinematic adaptations of Henry James and has elicited approving readings from Jamesian critics, who laud its fidelity to aspects of the text. Accompanying the praise, though, is the familiar criticism that the film strays from the true path of Jamesian ambiguity when it substitutes sexually explicit scenes for the subtlety and indirection of the original novel. In an adaptive move that flattens the novel’s ironic treatment of sex, money, and power, the filmic Kate Croy becomes an unambiguous femme fatale, whose sexual desire kills her best friend and alienates her lover. It is in the closing scene of the film, in its depiction of uninhibited but loveless sex, and its delicate allusion to Gustav Klimt’s 1908 painting Danae, that the film adaptation of Kate Croy is paradoxically least, and yet most, satisfying—and so, most authentically Jamesian— in its rendering of both her sexual energy and her sexual entrapment.

Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City

Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City

Sex and the Maiden: Authenticity and the Erotic Adaptation of The Wings of the Dove

Abstract: Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove has been the most popular of the recent crop of cinematic adaptations of Henry James and has elicited approving readings from Jamesian critics, who laud its fidelity to aspects of the text. Accompanying the praise, though, is the familiar criticism that the film strays from the true path of Jamesian ambiguity when it substitutes sexually explicit scenes for the subtlety and indirection of the original novel. In an adaptive move that flattens the novel’s ironic treatment of sex, money, and power, the filmic Kate Croy becomes an unambiguous femme fatale, whose sexual desire kills her best friend and alienates her lover. It is in the closing scene of the film, in its depiction of uninhibited but loveless sex, and its delicate allusion to Gustav Klimt’s 1908 painting Danae, that the film adaptation of Kate Croy is paradoxically least, and yet most, satisfying—and so, most authentically Jamesian— in its rendering of both her sexual energy and her sexual entrapment.