Film Awards Research Articles

Emotional Images, Immersive Realities: The Fortieth Cinéma du Réel

Research Article| September 01 2018 Emotional Images, Immersive Realities: The Fortieth Cinéma du Réel Clarence Tsui Clarence Tsui Clarence Tsui is a Hong Kong-based journalist and film critic, who contributes reviews to The Hollywood Reporter and writes a regular column on Chinese cinema for the South China Morning Post, as well as other news and specialist media outlets. Meanwhile, he teaches journalism and film studies courses at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and serves as an international consultant for the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. He has also served on juries at Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Nantes (Festival des 3 Continents), and Hong Kong (Asian Film Awards). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2018) 72 (1): 73–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.1.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Clarence Tsui; Emotional Images, Immersive Realities: The Fortieth Cinéma du Réel. Film Quarterly 1 September 2018; 72 (1): 73–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.1.73 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Iranian Women in Focus at Tehran’s Fajr Film Festival

Iranian Women in Focus at Tehran’s Fajr Film Festival

Teaching European cinema

The “Teaching European Cinema” dossier has grown out of the European University Film Award (EUFA) project that was initiated in 2016 by Filmfest Hamburg in collaboration with the European Film Academy (EFA) and the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). In its second edition in 2017, the EUFA connected twenty European universities in a common teaching project in which five nominated films were analysed and discussed in courses of the respective universities. Subsequently, one student representative per country joined the three-day student jury deliberation in Hamburg and voted for the final EUFA winner. In 2016, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016) won the inaugural EUFA; in 2017, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Heartstone (Hjartasteinn, 2016) was awarded the prize. The dossier works on different levels: first, it aims to present the EUFA project to a wider public; second, it promotes an exchange among the participating colleagues; and third, it operates as a teaching dossier for scholars within the wider field of European film and media studies to discuss questions of how best to teach contemporary European cinema.

Lunch with Family

Lunch with Family is a short film (30’) on postmemory that was shortlisted in the Inspiration category at the AHRC Research in Film Awards held at BAFTA in London in 2016. Judges thought the film to be visually and thematically engaging and called it strong. The film reveals the tension between Slav-silenced history in Trieste and its impact on personal life and identity in a city-symbol on the former Iron Curtain, in Italy. The film intertwines the author's own story with the history of forced Italianisation of half a million Slavs, their persecution, their organisation in anti-Fascist groups, and the final attempt to delete this ethnic group, which, in Trieste in 1918, was more substantial than in Ljubljana – the capital of Slovenia. As part of the wider discourse of postmemory, the films aligns with the work of other scholars: Anne Karpf's The War After: Living with the Holocaust (1997) and Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (2004), but also Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge. However, Lunch with Family goes further. It uncovers the long history of resistance and the fight for the existence of a community that does not see its history acknowledged in Italy. Based on interdisciplinary research, archival material and interviews, the film establishes the use of research-by-practice on film as an adequate epistemological methodology to uncover long-buried events and to explore the loop of existential questions the situation provoked and continues to stir in Trieste's Slav inhabitants. A paper published in Screenworks (Vol.8, No.1) in January 2018 explored the context, methods and outcomes of the research enquiry, and Turina presented conference papers and screenings at events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.

Onofre R. “Pagsi” Pagsanghan

“Pagsi” is a well-loved, multi-awarded teacher in his alma mater, the Ateneo High School, where he has been teaching English and Filipino since he graduated college in 1951. Pagsi founded the Ateneo High School Dramatics Society in 1956, which was renamed Dulaang Sibol in 1966. As both a teacherformator and a cultural icon, Pagsi has won numerous awards since the 1960s, among them the prestigious Metrobank Foundation Outstanding Filipinos Award for Teachers in 1985, the first year the awards were ever given. More recently he has received awards like the Gawad Paz Marquez Benitez For Outstanding Educator in Literature from Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (2002), Bayaning Gurong Pilipino Award from the ABS-CBN Foundation (2003), and the Natatanging Gawad Buhay (Life Achievement Award) from Philstage (2015). One of the mainstay productions of Dulaang Sibol is Sinta, an adaptation of the long-running 1960 musical The Fantasticks. The adaptation made its debut in 1975 and won the FAMAS Best Musical Film Award in 1976. In this interview, conducted in 2002, Pagsi recounts his writing of Sinta, his reflections on growing up in Postwar Manila, and his insights on enduring love.

Recognition in Art World as Social Process: The Case of Oscar and Daejong Film Awards

Recognition in Art World as Social Process: The Case of Oscar and Daejong Film Awards

Behind film performance in China\u2019s changing institutional context: The impact of signals

Grounded in signaling theory, this paper investigates the signals reflecting product quality, innovativeness, reputation and cultural background which influence film performance, that is, film survival (duration on cinema screen) and box office success, in China’s changing institutional context. This market has grown substantially and still possesses potential for further development. However, China’s unique institutional context presents challenges. By examining an expanded range of potential signals, two of which have not previously been examined in the literature, namely imported films and enhanced format film formats such as 3D and IMAX, we develop a conceptual framework and argue that signaling theory needs to be combined with institutional context. Similar to findings for film industries in other countries, we find quality and reputational signals including budget, star power, sequels, and online consumer reviews to be important in China. However, unique results are also revealed. Chinese consumers react to an innovativeness signal in that they are specifically attracted to enhanced format films. Film award nominations and prizes are insignificant reputational signals. Once other signals are taken into account, imported films on average do not perform as well as domestic films. We link these findings to China’s unique institutional setting and offer important implications for management, recognizing the challenges to film companies of competing in an increasingly globalized market. This paper is also of relevance to policymakers given their continued efforts in shaping the development of China’s film industry.

Social networks and inference about unknown events: A case of the match between Google's AlphaGo and Sedol Lee.

This study examines whether the way that a person makes inferences about unknown events is associated with his or her social relations, more precisely, those characterized by ego network density that reflects the structure of a person’s immediate social relation. From the analysis of individual predictions over the Go match between AlphaGo and Sedol Lee in March 2016 in Seoul, Korea, this study shows that the low-density group scored higher than the high-density group in the accuracy of the prediction over a future state of a social event, i.e., the outcome of the first game. We corroborated this finding with three replication tests that asked the participants to predict the following: film awards, President Park’s impeachment in Korea, and the counterfactual assessment of the US presidential election. Taken together, this study suggests that network density is negatively associated with vision advantage, i.e., the ability to discover and forecast an unknown aspect of a social event.

City Profile: Recollections of Hong Kong's Future

WORLDLIT.ORG 5 When Hong Kong was returned to communist China in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” principle, no one really knew for sure what would happen to this former British colony. The first decade after the handover was marked by doom and gloom, as the city plunged into a serious economic slump in the midst of a string of crises—the 1997–98 Asian financial turmoil, the 2000 dotcom meltdown, and the 2003 SARS outbreak. It started to regain its economic footing in the following decade, but the increasingly overt influence of Beijing— not just economically but politically and ideologically—heightened Hongkongers’ fear of and alienation from the mainland. The pent-up tension ultimately boiled over in the so-called Umbrella Movement in 2014, where mass pro-democracy protests shut down parts of the city for months and clashed violently with local law enforcement. Without doubt, the path taken by post-handover Hong Kong has been anything but predictable; what, one may wonder, will Hong Kong be like a decade from now? Ten Years (2015), a low-budget indie production that became a surprise box-office hit and was named the best film at the Hong Kong Film Awards, attempts to answer this very question. Comprising five episodes set in 2025, the film imagines a dystopian future of Hong Kong in which the semiautonomous territory sees its local culture and values being increasingly eroded under the tightening grasp of the Chinese government. In one story, Mandarin—spoken by the majority in the mainland—has displaced the local Cantonese as the official language, marginalizing those who cannot speak it. In other segments, neighborhood stores are spied on and even vandalized by “youth guards” for using banned terms such as “local,” a young couple strives to preserve objects from bulldozed homes by embalming them, and an old woman sets herself on fire outside the British Consulate after the death of a hunger striker protesting for independence. These scenarios, seemingly far-fetched to some, are by no means made-up fantasies but are deeply grounded in the present and the recent past, touching on feelings of a fading Hong Kong identity that have been building up as the city moves ever closer to the mainland. Not surprisingly, the success of Ten Years, coming in the wake of the Umbrella Movement and the burgeoning discourses of Hong Kong’s self-determination and even independence, touched a nerve with the Communist government in Beijing, which denounced the film as a “thought virus” in the state-run newspaper Global Times. For many locals, however, the film offered an uncompromising expression that rendered tangible their deep-rooted worries and fears, urging them to rethink their past and present experiences and to rediscover them as part of a future trajectory. Man-Fung Yip is assistant professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation. Notebook city profile Recollections of Hong Kong’s Future by Man-Fung Yip ...

Прокатно-возвратный механизм советской кинематографии в период «застоя»

The article discusses the process of film distribution in Soviet cinema in the 1970s. This complex, multi-path way of the film to the viewer that begins with scenarios of application, and finishes with the replication of film prints. This article describes the mechanism of film award, the system of payment of fees (“production fees”) of the Soviet filmmakers, depending on the category and the payment process “potirazhnye” («printing fees»). The author analyzes the work of «GUKK»- General Directorate of cinema spreading and the distribution, the specifics of its work in the “stagnation”, considering the work of the distribution companies and cinemas, the mechanism of distribution of gross income of cinemas, in the period of “stagnation”, they were rather nominal
 in nature. Every filmmaker knew only his job and his salary, the overall picture of the industry was not inter-esting for him. Distributing and returning links of Soviet cinema, in essence, were not for its return and were separated from production. According to the notorious principle of thematic planning it was obligatory to make certain proportions of films about the leading role of the party and its leaders, revolution, the working class, the collective farm of the village and etc. The Soviet Studio were to run the movies of similar subjects every year regardless of whether they had appropriate, high-quality scripts, good Directors and, most importantly, potential
 audience. Based on the studied material the author concludes that in the 1970-ies the Central headquarters of the Soviet cinematography – ​Institute of State cinema of USSR –determined: who, what, where and when to watch at the cinemas. The professional consciousness of each member of the creative team, therefore, did not fix the desire to achieve success with the audience, and the willingness to achieve recognition by the College of the Institute of State cinema and the film award of the highest category (which assumed significant additional benefits and bonuses). However, Institute of State cinema («Goskino»), the state cinema management was not the ultimate authority in the control of cinema industry process. At the head of the system was the Communist party.

20 Years of (Re)Unification: The Representation of Post 1989 Berlin in the Achtung Berlin! Film Series

Twenty years have passed since the political unification of East and West Germany. In 1989, the fall of the Wall had symbolically presaged this ostensive reuniting of two halves of not only a divided city, but a divided nation. Since this new “year zero”, filmmakers have documented the reshaping of Berlin, a metonymy for the Federal Republic. While scholarship on literary works situate this "New Berlin Republic," an equivalent does not exist for film. We aim to explore the new capital by focusing on Achtung Berlin! because of the importance of this festival to the German film landscape as a whole and the metropole in particular. Achtung Berlin!, the self titled “New Berlin Film Awards,” is a unique contributor to the creation of the New Republic. Begun in 2005 in response to a lack of German content in Berlin’s festivals, Achtung Berlin! presents contemporary films whose production have a strong connection to Berlin and the surrounding state of Brandenburg. Analyzing Achtung Berlin! and its films, we address (re)unification by utilizing the notion of “space” in its shifting forms. The interrelated themes of identity, urbanness, and mobility in (trans)national perspectives reveal the contested nature of the aftermath of the Berlin Wall‐ whose fall stands as a concrete "success" story in the amalgamation of "a" people. Our project endeavors to account both for Berlin's unification and the dis/contents that are still issues today.

How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media

A recent trend in documentary and true story films revisiting early years of AIDS crisis and its activism has gained a foothold in popular media. These include We Were Here (2011), Vito (2011), United in Anger (2012), How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and film adaptation of activist Larry Kramer's 1985 autobiographical play The Normal Heart (2014), to name a few. These films adapt video footage and stories about activism generated during early years of crisis. With exception of United in Anger, each film depicts AIDS activism through lens of white male heroes. This is not new. W hat differs is that, unlike popular AIDS films of 1990s-including And Band Played On (1993) and Philadelphia (1993)-today's films narrate white men's struggle for survival as initially tragic, yet ultimately successful in prolonging their lives against odds.1 Women and queers of color are marginal in these films, and appear only in order to missing by narrative's end.Given extensive documentation that recalls central role women and queers of color have played in AIDS activism since onset of crisis, these misrepresentations of past are egregious. Nonetheless, they continue to receive popular endorsement. How to Survive gained an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature. Dallas Buyers Club garnered a bevy of industry nominations and awards for its script and cast. Though film's lead protagonists pass, they are survived by accolades that, presumably, could only be heaped upon white, male, and cisgender actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. The Normal Heart was nominated for and won a number of Golden Globe, television, and online film awards for movie and its cast. What does this popular revision of AIDS past say about our present?Focusing on How to Survive, this article argues that renewed interest in AIDS crisis activism has much to do with a historical impasse we have reached in valuation of living over dead. The AIDS crisis emerged concurrently with late twentieth-century Reaganomics, including arms buildup, dismantling of welfare state, and criminalization of precarity.2 During this time, AIDS activism became first U.S. social movement to integrate handheld camcorder technology into direct action to record lives laid bare to state violence and vehement social neglect ( Juhasz 1995). Since then, further removal of social safety nets, recent economic downturn, exacerbation of class disparities, increased policing, retrenchment of freedoms, and continued global U.S. military occupations have made experience of crisis ordinary (Berlant 2011, 11). AIDS crisis videos portray modes of survival and livelihood that activists fought for which were alternative to what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism-the unrequited fantasy for the good that is sustained by a thin thread of hope, in spite of evidence that opportunities to thrive have severely diminished (1). Archival AIDS activist documentary footage, then, is a living testament to collective will against perpetuation of state oppression and colonial terror.The advance and proliferation of handheld audiovisual technologies, such as smartphone, begs question of what it means to record death as a mundane activity-and for video to survive, go viral, and galvanize social movements. Yet, according to How to Survive, value or quality of one's life is measured and represented principally by an individual's biological endurance. The film trains attention on certain white men within Treatment and Data Committee of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Mixing archival and present-day video footage, it focuses exclusively on their efforts to seek a medical panacea. The advance of this endeavor is attributed largely, if not entirely, to white men. That Treatment and Data helped to forge life-extending medications, and that some of these white men survived crisis, become film's evidence that biomedical interventions can and should work for everyone. …

Narcissism, Masochism and the Reconstituted Male—Masculine Performances in Fight Club and The Wrestler

The article reads David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Darren Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler (2008) as films that deploy masochistic spectacles of heroically suffering white men. Both Fincher and Aronofsky are well known for their dark and sometimes surreal films that frequently take up violence as a theme (Mayshark, 2007). They are also prominent auteurial voices, nominated for and winning multiple prominent film awards. Both Fincher and Aronofsky are, the article argues, representatives of a class of American directors who, starting in the early 1990s, made independent art house films and won accolades at various film festivals, making anti-mainstream, if not subversive cinema. These filmmakers of the 1990s sustained the spirit of enquiry that was the hallmark of the auteurs of the New Hollywood age. Our contention is that Fincher’s Fight Club and Aronofsky’s The Wrestler can be accommodated on this list as films made by subversive filmmakers and that they share common features owing to their commitment to explore constructions of masculinity and performances of the same. The question that the article seeks to address is—does David Savran’s framework offered in Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (1998) predict the distinct male posturing of masochistically suffering white men visible in Fight Club and The Wrestler? The article will primarily use the theoretical framework offered by David Savran to examine where Fight Club and The Wrestler are situated with respect to the mainstream Hollywood fare featuring hyper-masculine heroes.

Capture, hold, release: an ontology of motion capture

ABSTRACTIn proposing an ontology of motion capture, this paper identifies three modalities – capture, hold, release – to conceptualise the peculiar affordances of motion capture technology in its relationship to a performer's movement. Motion capture is unique among contemporary moving image media in its capacity to re-perform a performer's recorded movement a potentially limitless number of times, for example, as applied to innumerable different CG characters. Unlike live-action film or even rotoscoping (motion capture's closest equivalent), the movement extracted from the captured performance lives on, but only by way of the inimagable (non-visible) domain of motion data. Motion data ‘holds' movement itself in inimagable form, and ‘releases' it in the domain of the digital moving image. This tri-fold conception relates an important dimension of (Heideggerian) Being to the idea of movement as fundamental to an ontology or ‘being' of motion capture. At the same time, the proposed ontology challenges the ‘illusion of life' metaphor as the accepted definition of (motion capture) animation. The Oscar's Special Rules for the Animated Feature Film Award asserts that ‘by itself' motion capture does not qualify as an animation method. The notion that a technology could do or be anything ‘by itself' affords a conceptual leap towards Heideggerian thinking on the nature of Being as embodied in temporality, in which past, present and future are unified. In its capacity to operate outside the domain of the digital moving image, the concept of ‘movement itself' not only articulates an ontology of motion capture: motion capture itself can be understood to be brought into being by movement, thus also challenging the notion that capture technology has a parasitic relationship to a performer's originary performance.

“For Your Consideration”

Massive campaigns are annually launched by Hollywood studios to persuade film awards bodies to vote for their films, with success resulting in publicity, prestige, and potentially millions more in product revenues. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the media were supposedly progressing in their portrayal of LGBT storylines. As the Academy Awards body is composed of mostly older, white men who are, or were, the major players in the film industry, critically and historically analyzing the print advertisement campaigns that targeted these persons gives us telling indications of these culture creators' views toward LGBT content. This study found that, over sixteen years, film award campaign ads continually avoided queer imagery while promoting heteronormative themes, even in queer films. This counters a notion of progress during this era within this elite group while complementing psychological, political, and mass communication research analyzing how normative voters respond to queer content in advertisements.

Film Award Choices

Three sources—domain experts, consumers, and professional film critics—engage in the recognition and validation of cinematic excellence. Each signals its approbation with awards, ratings, reviews, and lists of the best. Notwithstanding a generous body of research, congruence among these sources remains unclear. For example, research findings show the influence of critics’ reviews on box office receipts—consumers—vary from strong to nil. Some studies report similarities in critics’ and consumers’ cinematic taste; others report differences. This article seeks a clarification of one facet of the role of critics in the recognition of cinematic excellence by comparing critics’ film award choices—not their ratings—with Oscar awards, in four categories: best actor, actress, director, and film. For each pair of award categories, chi-squares were performed on cross-classifications of the frequency of critics’ choices matching Oscar’s. Cramer’s V sheds light on auteur theory, actress–actor differences, and coat-tail effects of best film awards.

IMAGE SOLUTIONS OF DOMESTIC CINEMA. MOODS. (ZOLOTOY OREL AWARD – 2015).

The article highlights visual images of films produced in 2013-2014 and nominated for the Zolotoy Orel (Golden Ea-gle) Film Award in 2015. The article analyzes expressive methods used by contemporary masters of Russian cine-ma for achieving the most subtle and bright transmission on the screen of both real and subconscious inner life of people. The author presents detailed studies of the materi-als reflecting the work on image solutions in the films “Sunstroke” (Solnechny Udar) directed by N. Mikhalkov, “Correction Class” (Klass Korrektsii) by Ivan Tverdovsky, “Yes and Yes” (Da i Da) by Germanika, “Star” (Zvezda) by A. Melikyan, “The White Nights of Postman Alexey Triapitsyn” (Belie nochi pochtalyona Alexeya Triapitsina). Special attention is given to the analysis of creative meth-ods used by Russian contemporary cinematographers for creating visual images of cinema works.

Violence as resolution in Cinema NarrativeA study of Malayalam Cinema Since The Inception of Film Awards by The Government of Kerala

Violence as resolution in Cinema Narrative<i>A study of Malayalam Cinema Since The Inception of Film Awards by The Government of Kerala</i>

“The Aim of All Genuine Art is Always Engaged”

In 2013, Texas-born film maker Joshua Oppenheimer launched his documentary film The Act of Killing, which explores the aftermath of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia. The work received worldwide critical acclaim, won numerous awards and prizes at festivals (European Film Award, BAFTA Award, DocsBarcelona, Berlinale), and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2014. Oppenheimer’s new film, The Look of Silence, was released in August 2014.

The Othering of Palestinians in Film: Munich (2006) and Waltz with Bashir (2009)

This paper is a critical textual analysis of two of the most popular and critically acclaimed non-documentary films on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The wide array of popular films on Israel and Palestine released in the past two decades, and the myriad perspectives they present, call for a more current critical textual analysis, as some of these films have been very well-received by audiences worldwide and have garnered numerous international film awards. These films include Divine Intervention (2002), Munich (2006), Miral (2010), Ajami (2010), and Waltz with Bashir (2009), to name a few. Film provides a popular medium through which we find an active Othering of Palestinians, sometimes even in films that have set out to upend dominant narratives. By undertaking a textual analysis of two of these films, Munich and Waltz with Bashir, and utilising works on collective memory along with elements of critical race theory, this paper discusses some problematic aspects of modern film representations of Arabs in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This study carries implications for both historical and political studies of this conflict, and for communications theory by delving more deeply into media depictions of race, ethnicity, and nationality amidst the Arab-Israeli conflict. It also raises questions as to the dominance of Orientalism and neo-Orientalism in media depictions of Palestine and Palestinians and how that may be changing due to an emerging ‘Palestinian narrative’ in recent films. Furthermore, by lending a critical eye towards these films, we can take a more accurate look at the larger historiography and media landscape surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict and observe how recent political developments ‘on the ground’ have, or have not, influenced depictions of the conflict and the region.