ABSTRACT This paper explores how Chloé Zhao employs adaptation strategies to construct her transnational identity in her film Nomadland (2020). Through two significant adaptations, Zhao replaces the real protagonist, Linda May, in the original with the fictional middle-aged white woman, Fern. This intervention allows Zhao to project her authorship shaped by mobility, outsiderhood, and personal cinematic aesthetics into an easily understood role from an American left-wing liberal perspective. Through Fern’s persistent loneliness and repeated farewells, Zhao maintains low political visibility, transforming the instability of American society into a personalized, “safe” narrative space. Meanwhile, the film’s poetic reconstruction of the vans and the American West transforms spacesshaped by colonial history, labor exploitation and the instability of late capitalism, into heterotopias, facilitating personal healing and identity. Through these strategies, Zhao reconstructs these spaces as an aesthetic sanctuarywhere she can reconcile her outsider identity. This aestheticization constitutes a creative mode of low political visibility, allowing Zhao to participate in American mainstream film industry without directly confronting ideological tensions. Together, these adaptive strategies collectively reveal how Zhao uses fiction and landscape to negotiate transnational identity through a personalized and politically cautious cinematic languages.

This article aims to investigate accounts of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1898–1994) through a Marxist retrospective, approaching the phenomenon of statelessness as represented in its posthumous digitised life through films, video games and other forms of immersive or interactive media, tracing a lineage of postcoloniality through a critique of hauntology and affect. Tracing the question of Walled City’s history within debates of statelessness, the article intends to prescribe a dialectical and spatial reading of capitalist neglect, juridic-political abandonment within the aesthetics of gaming, genre film and contemporary exhibitions on site and in greater Hong Kong. It provides a critical retrospective on Derrida’s anti-Marxist approach to hauntology and the condition of postmodern capitalist malaise as per Spectres of Marx. Furthermore, it asserts that digitised reconstructions of the historic Walled City remain in the popular ‘dystopian’ oeuvre through its repeated intimate re-exploration, re-screenings of popular periodic genre films, and the persisting nature of interrogating, macabre curiosity on the part of the consumer class. Derrida’s hauntology, while an evocative means for literary, textual or visual analysis, ultimately risks crucial detachment from material and historical contradictions, spiritualising class antagonisms as something of a stand-in for more concrete, structurally-informed Marxist critique, which asserts that the driving force of history is not the ghostly or spectral but, rather, a fetish.

In Marguerite Duras’s oeuvre, the late 1970s represent a critical moment, marked by Le Camion (1977) and Le Navire Night (1979), two films that resonate strongly with her contemporaneous political reflections on the impossibility of societal revolution. In particular, Duras regarded the aesthetics of these films, which she considered to be the culmination point of her intellectual trajectory, as the most viable artistic response to the coeval political climate. While this remarkable moment in her career takes place against the background of 1970s French political history, the notion of a culmination concurrently suggests that it draws on a pre-existing intellectual history. This article examines Duras’s thoroughgoing alignment of politics and aesthetics against the background of French political history, while tracing the roots of its premises back to the redefinition of human existence as ‘insufficiency’ in 1930s French philosophy, which was instigated by the work of Alexandre Kojève. Mediated by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Dionys Mascolo, this legacy found new footing in Duras’s political film aesthetics in the late 1970s.

This study analyzes the visual communication strategies combining cinematic aesthetics and 3D graphic technology in Burberry's fashion advertising campaigns directed by the French creative group Megaforce.The research explores how advertising extends beyond a medium of product promotion to become an artistic form that creates emotional experiences.The analysis reveals that Megaforce's direction visually embodies Burberry's brand philosophy of freedom, exploration, innovation, and solidarity through cinematic composition and advanced visual effects, thereby enhancing brand value through emotional immersion.In particular, technologies such as 3D graphics, physics-based simulation, and live-action compositing serve as key tools that blur the boundary between reality and the surreal, reinforcing the brand's emotional identity.

This study investigates the impact of avant-garde cinema in redefining Indonesian film aesthetics, focusing on its role in challenging dominant cultural and technological narratives in the digital era. Presented at the Cine Future: Radical Cinema on Future Perspective exhibition, the research identifies a critical gap in mainstream cinema’s limited engagement with narratives evolving alongside rapid advancements in projection technology and digital reproduction. The study is anchored in the experimental works of film students from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia’s Film and Television Study Program, showcased in the Cine Future exhibition, which exemplifies avant-garde cinema’s potential to reinterpret traditional narratives. With the Practice-led Research methodology, this research integrates artistic practice with critical analysis, allowing student filmmakers to explore the complexities of the digital age through creative expression. Findings indicate that avant-garde cinema enables the construction of new, culturally rooted narratives by merging historical aesthetics with modern technology, providing students with a framework for critiquing and interpreting social realities. This research contributes to broader discussions on avant-garde cinema’s relevance in academic and creative fields. It demonstrates its significance in fostering critical dialogue and evolving cinema as a dynamic medium for cultural reflection. The study underscores the value of incorporating avant-garde methods within film education to prepare students for a rapidly changing cinematic landscape.

The article Anthroposcenicity. Landscape as a New Climate Narrative examines the challenges of representing climate disasters and the Anthropocene in visual culture. Using the case of the 2024 floods in Poland as a starting point, it highlights the limitations of traditional media in capturing the scale and processual nature of environmental crises. The author explores how cinema moves away from the narratives of Hollywood disaster films – which often reinforce anthropocentric perspectives – and presents alternative approaches that allow for the dehierarchization of the human viewpoint. Drawing on the concepts of Andrzej Marzec, Timothy Morton, and David Matless, the article introduces the term anthroposcenicity as a framework for rethinking film aesthetics in the Anthropocene. By analyzing films that expand spatial and temporal scales, the text emphasizes the potential of cinema to shift narratives from an anthropocentric perspective to ecological and posthumanist storytelling.

This article aims to expand on German philosopher Christoph Menke’s (b. 1958) notions of ‘meta-tragedy’ as he presents it in his book Tragic Play: Irony and Theatre from Sophocles to Beckett (2009) by exploring how the ‘theatrical’ or ‘weird’ acting style in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2017 film The Killing of a Sacred Deer reflects the irony of the tragic plot. The article examines how this ‘weird’ acting style, characterized by staginess and stiffness, invokes the ‘presentness’ of the theatre actor, making it obvious that an actor is playing a role. I call this type of acting ‘meta-acting’. The conditions of a meta-tragedy in theatre, as outlined by Menke, are primarily defined by an ironic relation to the role of the spectator, and by a meta-theatrical plot, which centers on the workings and shortcomings of theatre to represent the insights in the tragic from Ancient Greece. In contrast, in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, this irony is transposed to the meta-acting style of the actors, resulting in a meta-tragic aesthetics in cinema.

Abstract Comparatively analyzing the representation of bodies in atomic bomb films, Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) and Women in the Mirror ( Kagami no onnatachi , Yoshida Yoshishige, 2002), this article examines how the aesthetics of cinema can intensify the spectator's ethical experience. Yoshida argues that the ultimate ethics in cinematic aesthetics lies in how filmmakers formulate cinema as an open text. However, are open texts possible? Can images be autonomous? It is possible to leave an image's meaning undecided and ambiguous, but does that mean this image is open as a text? Can a viewer freely interpret the image? If a film is read beyond or irrelevant to its context, should such freedom be allowed? Even if open texts are possible, is such an action to make open texts ethical, especially when those texts are regarding atomic bombs? This article explores how to answer these questions.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon that has become quite widespread in the world cinema — films reflecting on the nature of cinema, or ‘cinema about cinema’. The motif of ‘cinema about cinema’ emerged in the early years of cinematography and was often applied in order to add comedy to films. However, even a simple joke, a cinematic gag can become a starting point for reflections on what cinematography is. Through the doubling of artistic reality, filmmakers give rise to discussions about various aspects of cinema: artistic, production, and sociological. Cinema itself reflects on its own nature and is involved in heated discussions between its theorists and practitioners. The article analyses several Soviet feature films of the 1920s which feature the motif of ‘cinema about cinema’. The postrevolutionary 1920s became a special transition period for the Russian film industry and cinematography, when cinema, after the Civil War and the emigration of leading film industrialists, was trying to revive in the new conditions of state control. Young filmmakers who stood at the forefront of cinematography through their unusual theories and experimental practice defined the new look of cinema. However, not only manifestos proclaimed the new cinematic aesthetics. Films such as The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom (1924), A Kiss from Mary Pickford (1927), and Blown-up Days (1930), where the theme of making and showing films is central, reflect different trends and views on cinema as art, entertainment, and a way of political propaganda.

Abstract In this paper we use our combined expertise in textual film analysis and social and cultural gerontology to interrogate visualisations of age and gender in Hampstead (2017) and The Lady in the Van (2015). Building on existing work which analyses film as a narrative (Oró-Piqueras and Casado-Gual, 2020) we engage with cinematography, mise-en-scène and aesthetics, viewing film as a vivid and moving imaginary of old age. In particular, we use Barber’s (2015) expertise in British cinema to link the performances of Smith (The Lady in the Van) and Keaton (Hampstead) to incarnations of ageing women which are deeply rooted in British cinema. Both films allow us to locate the main female characters in the precise analytical frame of British cinema. Both provide a visceral and visual representation of older women’s precarious property ownership in two contrasting visions of London. For British cinema-goers Maggie Smith’s struggle with homelessness, mental health difficulties and status as a single, childless older woman evoke the harsh realities of London’s property market whilst drawing on British social realist cinema. By contrast, Keaton’s ‘American in London’ story of widowhood, ageing and ultimate salvation through the love of Irish man Brendan Gleeson draws heavily on heritage cinema aesthetics and familiar rom-com tropes. After attending the session participants will be able to see that a filmic gaze offers a powerful means of de-constructing homogenization of old age well documented by scholars of the ‘silvering screen’ (Chivers, 2011).

The article examines the work of the largest cultural scientist of the South Urals, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Sergei Sergeevich Zagrebin in the field of cinematography. His contribution to the study of Russian cinematography, the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, cinema aesthetics and semiotics of cinematography. Also offered for publication is an article by S.S. Zagrebin, dedicated to the figurative structure of urban landscapes in Russian cinema of the 1960s. S.S. Zagrebin makes a representative selection of domestic films created in the 1960s, which most fully reflected the main artistic-aesthetic and ideological-moral foundations of Soviet cinema of this period. In the structure of urban landscapes, six artistic dominants are distinguished: morning, friendship, love, rain, loneliness, night, through which artistic intentions and reflections are expressed, and a dialogue between the artist and the viewer is built. These artistic dominants are represented in a figurative-symbolic form, create internal tension in the film narrative, determine its polysemy and multidimensionality. The researcher focuses on the semantics of the city, which he considers in the unity of the named images-symbols that dominate in the representation of the urban space of the film narrative. S.S. Zagrebin summarizes that the use of semiotics as a method of cognition of cinema is a productive way of understanding emotional impressions in the mainstream of rational analysis of cinema and its reverse structure in the context of time.

In Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, the “face” serves not only as a visual subject but also as a methodology. Continuing the previous realistic shooting style, this film utilizes the faces of ordinary individuals as a poignant commentary on the era. Simultaneously, by leveraging the proper noun “Zhao Tao’s face,” it achieves nonverbal emotional expression while sketching the evolution of Chinese independent film aesthetics. Compared to faces captured in moving images, the faces of lifelike “quasi-human” sculpture resist being fixed as mere images through their vivid presence, autonomously generating narrative momentum by being viewed across different times and spaces. Moreover, in this media age of breakneck technological advancement, the “crisis of the face” has also transformed into a broader “existential crisis.” How to preserve the warmth and vitality of the human face may be the most profound and provocative question the film leaves its audience.

Abstract Referring to existing theories on Hollywood’s runaway productions, this article examines the motivations, characteristics, and influences of Hong Kong’s runaway practices in the 1950s and 1960s, analyzing the trend’s relationships with politics, economics, and film aesthetics and revealing its contribution to cross-border flows of people and ideas. It demonstrates that by strategically navigating the Cold War media landscape, Hong Kong’s runaway productions unlocked the economic potential of authentic locations, demonstrated a capacity to gain an advantage by leveraging political campaigns between competing powers, and built bridges across Asia, sparking a subtle exchange of talent, techniques, and aesthetics – even among rivals. This article focuses on two such productions and their on-location activities – Phoenix’s Golden Eagle (Jinying 1964) in Inner Mongolia and the Shaw Brothers’ The Songfest ( Shange yinyuan 1965) in Taiwan – revealing that runaway filming enabled crews to engage with different production cultures, thereby triggering the transcultural exchange of filmmaking customs and craft practices. The two crews’ on-location shoots imbued their films with visual intrigue, refreshed Hong Kong film aesthetics and repertoire, and revealed the underlying cross-Asia communications within the Cold War context.

This essay takes the 2025 miniseries Larte della gioia (The Art of Joy) as its object of study, examining how it reconstructs the representation of female desire and bodily autonomy through narrative strategies, visual aesthetics, and symbolic imagery. The series, adapted from Goliarda Sapienzas oncebanned radical novel, follows the comingofage and resistance of its protagonist Modesta, while challenging the gendered power structures rooted in the male gaze of traditional cinema and television. Drawing on Laura Mulveys theory of the male gaze, Teresa de Lauretiss concept of gender as technology, and Anneke Smeliks discussions of feminist film aesthetics, this paper analyzes how the series employs cinematic language, spatial narration, and bodily imagery to liberate female desire from the frameworks of guilt and punishment, and to reconfigure it as an active, selfdetermined form of innocent desire. Through its reciprocal depictions of intimate relationships, its ethical handling of scenes of sexual violence, and its recurring use of symbolic elements such as the corset, the sea, and the image of Saint Agatha, the series constructs a trajectory of female development that moves from repression to liberation. This study argues that The Art of Joy is not only a historical drama but also a feminist visual practice, which, by rejecting the objectification and eroticization of the female body, endows desire with political significance and subjectivity, thereby opening new possibilities for female narratives on the contemporary screen.

The traditional subjectivity in cinematic photography aesthetic analysis is impeded by a lack of objective and systematic approaches for analysis. The current study mathematically translates and interprets the essence of cinema’s three pillars: composition, narrative structure, and rhythm within the domain of communication sciences. The study uses a combination of theoretical approaches in cinematic aesthetics and quantitative approaches like digital image processing, graph theory, and statistical analysis of shot lengths, and the theoretical foundations of cinematic aesthetics. The results illustrate that mathematical patterns like geometric distributions based on golden ratios in composition, different rhythmic cuts in dramatic scenes, and mathematical network patterns in traditional and contemporary narrative structures directly affect cinematic perception and meaning transfer. The significance and uniqueness of this proposed study are centered on building a connection between the qualitative approaches in film studies and the quantitative approaches in data science to provide a fresh paradigm for visual communications.

The comparative study of cinematic aesthetics between Western and Chinese traditions reveals profound influences from their underlying civilizational foundations. While Western film aesthetics, shaped by maritime civilization, emphasize dynamic movement and Visual hegemony, which are theorized by Virilio's "dromology" and Panofsky single point perspective. Chinese cinema is deeply rooted in agrarian civilization, drawing from the "Three Distances" principle of classical landscape painting to construct its unique visual language with multi-dimensional cavalier perspective. Despite extensive research on cross-cultural film analysis, the role of civilizationallongue dure in shaping cinematic form remains underexplored. This paper examines how marine and agrarian civilizational genes manifest in film aesthetics, focusing on spatial composition, perspective selection, and ideological encoding with the aim of reaching dynamic and static organic coordination and unity. By integrating Braudel's historical framework with film theory, this study aims to provide a systematic comparison of Western and Chinese cinematic paradigms.The review uses Eisenstein's montage as theoretical tools for Western cinema andsan yuanperspective for Chinese filmwhile addressing challenges in cross-cultural visual analysis. Ultimately, for the sake of a more nuanced understanding of how civilizational heritage continues to influence contemporary filmmaking, this work offers insights for global film theory and comparative media studies.

This paper takes Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice and its 2005 film adaptation as research objects to explore the reciprocity between literature and film in the portrayal of female characters. Using Genette's narrative theory to analyze how narrative clues in the novel utilize the shift of narrative perspective to highlight the fate and growth of different female characters, the study finds that the novel profoundly reveals Elizabeth's self-awareness awakening and subjectivity establishment process through Elizabeth's internal focalization narrative. Employing film semiotics theory to interpret the female charm constructed through visual symbols (such as costumes, body language, and camera language) in the film, the study points out that the film relies on Keira Knightley's performance and a series of shots to strengthen the intuition and body narrative of Elizabeth's emotional changes. Furthermore, comparing and contrasting the two, it is found that the novel uses psychological descriptions to show the inner growth of the characters, while the film relies on visual symbols and body language to convey emotions and identity transformation. This study reveals the similarities and differences between the two media in expressing the growth path and gender awareness of female characters, and provides a new perspective for understanding the reproduction mechanism of classic literary works in different media.

This study decodes cultural chromatic evolution in wuxia cinema using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of 30 rigorously curated films across three epochs: Celluloid (1960-1979), New Wave (1980-1999), and Digital (2000-2024). Key findings reveal the following: Editing speed (PC1) dominates digital-era films, with cutting rates accelerating by 63% annually (β = 0.63, p < 0.01), fragmenting traditional narrative rhythms; Color stability (PC2) preserves core aesthetics through robust hue-value coordination (r = 0.62, p < 0.001), stabilizing cultural symbolism in wuxia visual motifs; and Saturation adaptation (PC3) activates under high editing intensity to counteract perceptual fragmentation. Crucially, 61% of digital-era films maintained cultural distinctiveness via strategic HSV manipulation, thus demonstrating that cinematic aesthetics actively resists technological homogenization. This reveals a paradigm shift from technological subjugation to chromatic sovereignty in cinematic heritage.

This study decodes cultural chromatic evolution in wuxia cinema using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of 30 rigorously curated films across three epochs: Celluloid (1960–1979), New Wave (1980–1999), and Digital (2000–2024). Key findings reveal the following: Editing speed (PC1) dominates digital-era films, with cutting rates accelerating by 63% annually (β = 0.63, p < 0.01), fragmenting traditional narrative rhythms; Color stability (PC2) preserves core aesthetics through robust hue-value coordination (r = 0.62, p < 0.001), stabilizing cultural symbolism in wuxia visual motifs; and Saturation adaptation (PC3) activates under high editing intensity to counteract perceptual fragmentation. Crucially, 61% of digital-era films maintained cultural distinctiveness via strategic HSV manipulation, thus demonstrating that cinematic aesthetics actively resists technological homogenization. This reveals a paradigm shift from technological subjugation to chromatic sovereignty in cinematic heritage.

This article attempts to extend the discourse on cinematic aesthetics by focusing on the under-studied dimension of purbawara films (also known as period costume dramas), by highlighting the aspect of shared cinematic identity. This can be perceived through the nuances and aesthetics of Asian melodrama, which emphasise the diverse emotions of characters and can be read as conveyed through cinematic space, fostering an interactive viewing experience between the spectator and the characters’ emotions via spatial aspects and cross-cutting techniques. Therefore, through the examination and discussion of the film Gurindam Jiwa (M. Amin 1965), this article argues that the shared cinematic identity of Asia is one of the elements that shape the unique nuances and aesthetics of purba films, observable through the complex assimilation of spatial, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the characters. Gurindam Jiwa tells the story of a romantic relationship between a husband and wife slowly evolving into a tragic tale due to suppressed emotions. This can be identified through the concept of “firasat” conveyed by the characters and translated through cinematic space (both interior and exterior) or in “babak bisu,” where viewers are only left with the emotions or facial expressions of the characters without dialogue, or scenes where characters do not speak but rather ponder their fate, accompanied by diegetic or non-diegetic sound. This intimate emotional space can be expressed by both men and women through their life experiences and perceptions. Therefore, by employing textual analysis methods and considering the aspects of cinematic space as well as local cultural phenomena such as “firasat,” “nestapa,” and the interplay among them, this article attempts to elaborate and weave together all these elements as a unique Asian value. This also contributes to a deeper understanding of the fluid and interconnected nature of Asian cinema through its shared cinematic cultural identity.