Film Camera Research Articles

Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez

Reviewed by: Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance by Curtis Marez Theodora Dryer (bio) Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance. By Curtis Marez. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016. Pp. 232. Paperback $25.00. Farm Worker Futurism sits at the scholarly intersection of race, gender, technology, envirotech, and labor history. Historians of technology have identified interwar agriculture as a critical moment of technological transformation under industrialization, automation, and mass production—a moment fueled by promises of social-technological progress. Farm Worker Futurism (FWF), by ethnic studies scholar Curtis Marez, disrupts linear histories of agricultural industrialism and takes apart the agribusiness machine that has diminished and ended the lives of Mexican farm workers. This book features farm workers, activists, and labor unions whose political work, speculative technologies, and farm worker futurisms give visibility to contradictions, exclusions, and violence in U.S. agriculture. The story roots in the interwar period, when agribusiness in the San Joaquin Valley created "a system for controlling production and reproduction that significantly relied on media technologies" (p. 52). Agribusiness controlled movie theaters, advertisements, and film distribution, and denounced critical, "communist" works such as John Steinbeck's 1939 The Grapes of Wrath. Marez reads corporate agribusiness through textual analysis of popular white science fiction authors: Robert Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick, and George Lucas. Their stories project an agribusiness futurism that displaces migrant farm workers in the media image of a white farm society. Heinlein's 1950 Farmer in the Sky, for example, poses the speculative question, "What if an exemplary white U.S. American boy was forced to become a lowly farm worker?" (p. 47). Against this media monopoly, Marez chronicles union world-building in three episodes. The first episode, "To the disinherited belongs the future," centers on [End Page 924] the 1948–50 National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) strike against the Di-Giorgio Fruit Company, which is emblematic of the clashes between the agribusiness mediascape and farm worker resistance. Media projections of company head Joseph DiGiorgio depict a towering industrial giant, gridded agricultural fields, and bowed, subjugated workers as "an extension of his technological dominance" (p. 58). Agribusiness media erased farm workers as people, but also as unions, as corporate heads suppressed union materials, one representative example being the 1948 AFL film, Poverty in the Valley of Plenty. This erasure of history is countered in the archives of union tech researcher Ernesto Galarza, where Marez unearths a farm worker mediascape in "music, radio, magazines, newspapers, and especially documentary photo essays" (p. 65). Farm worker cameras and film subvert mass industrialism by giving exposure to the conditions of agribusiness, in their eyes. The second episode, From Third Cinema to National Video, situates the rising United Farm Workers (UFW) on the world stage as part of third world cinema, linking California farm workers to revolutions in Latin America, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The union used new media technologies of the late 1970s and 1980s—video cameras, videotapes, and VCRs—as a "medium of radical transformation" (p. 84). Cameras were key technologies in "reversing the gaze" (p. 100) of agribusiness, which had since the 1960s been policing strikers and using corporate technologies, such as chemical spraying, to violently suppress them. The 1974 film Fighting for our Lives, covering the UFW grape strikes, turned camera film "on the plantation masters of agribusiness" (p. 99), which would become a powerful collective bargaining tool in the mid-1970s. While women are not centrally featured in the first two episodes, the final episode, Farm Worker Futurisms in Speculative Culture, unfolds the technological visions of Chicana activist and visual artist Ester Hernández, read against California native George Lucas's Star Wars. Hernández's artwork, part of the Chicano/a movement in graphic, print, and electronic media, pierced through the white anti-immigrant nativism of 1980s and 90s neoliberal agricultural policy. Her bright red silk-screen print Sun Mad, depicts a calavera or skeleton over the prolific digital-corporate raisin-box print, "Sun Maid." Foregrounding the calavera as a symbol of corporate greed, Sun Mad displays "the consequences for women of color of the alliance between white nativism and agribusiness" (p. 149) and recalls the decades of violence against workers during the...

Eesti etnograafid lõunavepsa külades 1965–1969

Estonian ethnographers in southern Vepsian villages, 1965–1969 Estonian ethnographers have taken an interest in Finno-Ugric peoples since the dawn of ethnography, and to the extent possible, they have made trips to the regions in question to study their culture. Starting in the 1960s, the State Ethnography Museum of the Estonian SSR in Tartu (the past and present Estonian National Museum) became the hub of Finno-Ugric ethnography under its director, Aleksei Peterson. Expeditions to the linguistic relatives in the east began at the initiative and with the support of linguists (chiefly, Paul Ariste) and continued in later years independently. The article looks at five expeditions made by Estonian ethnographers to southern Vepsian villages in the years 1965–1969. The central source is the fieldwork diaries maintained on the expeditions. In addition, the article examines the photographs, film footage and drawings from these expeditions, along with collected items and ethnographic descriptions. The scholarly and popular science-oriented texts based on the material acquired on the expeditions and coverage of the expeditions in the Estonian media of that era are analysed. Interviews were conducted with a few of the people who took part in the trips. The southern Veps region was poorly connected with the rest of the world in the 1960s, and the people there led quite an isolated existence. For this reason, the villages in the region had an abundance of extant or only recently defunct aspects (such as slash and burn agriculture, dugout canoe construction or use of twigs to heat the stove), which captivated the ethnologists. The southern Veps region was a unique window to the past for Estonian researchers, who in that period dealt with questions of ethnogenesis. The material culture had received little study and Peterson saw this as his calling and an opportunity. Modernisation was already under way and everything old was at risk of fading. Ethnographers interested in these matters had to hurry to save for science what could be salvaged. The traditional peasant culture of the Vepsians was documented using still cameras and film cameras, ethnographic interviews were conducted, ethnographic drawings prepared, and artefacts were collected with great verve. Quantity was important, and the field work was generally a collective pursuit – many people could after all accomplish more than just one. The material recorded in the course of fieldwork reached academic circulation quite rapidly – presentations were delivered at international conferences, and journal articles were published. The coverage of the expeditions in the Estonian media was quite lively as well. Newspapers published accounts of various lengths and on at least once occasion the ethnographers’ activities in the Vepsian region was discussed on television. Estonian scholars perceived and conveyed the southern Veps villages as some kind of Baltic-Finnic fairy tale land. In general, researchers relished the opportunity to go on an expedition. It was felt that this was a noble thing, which in some sense also tied in with the Estonian national cause. Research into the linguistic relatives was positively received by Estonian society for this reason – i.e. it was linked to the national identity. Local authorities in the destination regions generally took a positive attitude toward the ethnographers. The zeitgeist favoured science and expeditions. The Veps people – especially those in more remote and isolated villages – frequently greeted the Estonian ethnographers with initial scepticism. The Estonians had to explain their objectives and use documents to prove their bona fides. Later the alienation dissipated and once the close kinship of the Vepsian and Estonian languages was revealed, the newcomers received a rapturous reception as if they were long-lost relatives. At Sodjärv Lake, which served on multiple occasions as the ethnographers’ base camp, Estonian researchers became accepted by the Vepsians as their own people. It is difficult to gauge precisely the influence that those and later expeditions had on the Vepsian peoples. The Estonians’ visits probably helped to bolster the generally weak self-identity of the Veps people. While the Russians in the region all too often took a supercilious view of the Veps and their language, the ethnographers from Estonia had come to study them precisely because of their identity and held in high regard everything from old peasant culture to the language. Some local people still speak positively about Estonians. The five expeditions to the villages of the southern Vepsian region discussed in this article, their outcome and resonance make up a key part of a cultural current that sprang from Finno-Ugric studies in Soviet Estonia, the best-known examples of which are Lennart Meri’s ethnographic documentary films, the choral music of Veljo Tormis and the graphic art of Kaljo Põllu. Emphasising their Finno-Ugric roots was for Estonians an additional way to express their Estonian identity independent of Soviet rule and ethnographers made a significant contribution to this trend.

Investigation of Fast-Flowing Processes of Heat and Mass Transfer during Arc Welding with a Melting Electrode under Conditions of Laser Coherent Radiation

The results of the development and manufacturing of a unique research complex for investigating fast-flowing processes of heat and mass transfer during arc welding with a melting electrode are presented. The advantages of the developed complex over traditionally used ones are shown using cinema and video cameras by shadowing the image of heat and mass transfer of a metal. Studies of fast processes using high-speed video recording require powerful backlighting, such as a scattered laser beam, which enhances the visualization of the observed object, namely, the process of melting and transferring each electrode metal droplet under conditions of intense light emission from the electric arc. The article contains explanatory diagrams, control algorithms, video frames of a separate welding microcycle, and examples of recorded oscillograms and the graphical representations of the changes in their quantitative values.

Color-Infrared Kite Aerial Photography with a Mirrorless Digital SLR Camera

Color-infrared (CIR) photography has been utilized often for many scientific and environmental applications since the mid-twentieth century. For the past two decades, the authors have developed techniques for CIR kite aerial photography, first with an analog (film) camera, then with an early digital camera, and now with a much improved digital camera. The Sony α6000 model is a compact, digital, mirrorless, single-lensreflex (SLR) camera that is specially modified for CIR; it records blue, green, and nearinfrared wavelengths that are depicted respectively as blue, green, and red in false-color format. Active, emergent vegetation appears orange in this format, in contrast to the red-pink color of vegetation in traditional CIR images. The Sony α6000 camera provides 24-megapixel images that are visually sharp and clear. Kites, blimps, and UAS (drones) have different technical characteristics and legal status and, thus, play distinct roles for small-format aerial photography.

Heat Transfer Coefficient Identification in Mini-Channel Flow Boiling with the Hybrid Picard–Trefftz Method

This paper summarizes the results of the flow boiling heat transfer study with ethanol in a 1.8 mm deep and 2.0 mm wide horizontal, asymmetrically heated, rectangular mini-channel. The test section with the mini-channel was the main part of the experimental stand. One side of the mini-channel was closed with a transparent sight window allowing for the observation of two-phase flow structures with the use of a fast film camera. The other side of the channel was the foil insulated heater. The infrared camera recorded the 2D temperature distribution of the foil. The 2D temperature distributions in the elements of the test section with two-phase flow boiling were determined using (1) the Trefftz method and (2) the hybrid Picard–Trefftz method. These methods solved the triple inverse heat conduction problem in three consecutive elements of the test section, each with different physical properties. The values of the local heat transfer coefficients calculated on the basis of the Robin boundary condition were compared with the coefficients determined with the simplified approach, where the arrangement of elements in the test section was treated as a system of planar layers.

Spectres of hierarchy in a Chilean domestic archive

The work of Chilean documentary film-maker Ignacio Agüero demonstrates a constant preoccupation with the home and its environs. In his film El otro día (2012), his home is presented as the repository of personal memory and, more problematically, of national history. Agüero’s camera travels between domestic interior and urban exterior, attempting a reconstruction of community across the physical and social boundaries of Chile’s capital. This article contends that Agüero’s development of an analogy between the (middle-class) house and the film camera restricts that endeavour. Where much scholarship on domestic documentaries privileges notions of encounter and intersubjective exchange, this article engages with theorizations of the archive and ‘counter-archive’ to insist on the persistence of spectral images of hierarchy. These spectres mark the limitations of a project of memory undertaken through the logic of private property.

How Animation Won Over the Lightning Sketch: Re-Evaluating Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

The short film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, released in 1906 and directed by J Stuart Blackton (1875–1941), is considered to be one of the earliest examples of cinematic animation. This article aims at examining the film’s influence from another perspective, beyond its pioneering use of film camera: the author argues that Blackton’s film has also laid the foundation for common design principles in subsequent animated productions, particularly in the design of animated characters. The analysis of Blackton’s film aimed at supporting this argument is based on Scott McCloud’s seminal book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) and this article offers a modified method of McCloud’s ‘Vocabulary of Comics’ to demonstrate how Blackton has introduced the basic building-blocks of animated characters’ design that are common to this day: designs that rely on an emotional, universal core upon which culture-specific items are overlaid. Moreover, through appearance and performance of his animated characters, Blackton broke the design process of animated characters into such building blocks, emphasizing their importance.

The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure as a Formal Experiment

This text presents an analysis of the relationship between Kino-Eye, the Russian montage technique that was most clearly demonstrated by Dziga Vertov in his 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera, and Russian Formalist theory, which underwent an intensive period of development during the 1920s. Russian Formalism, established primarily as a theory of literature, was likewise applied in film and the visual arts. A dominant characteristic of Soviet film authors and theorists from the avant-garde period was a preoccupation with linguistic aspects and an understanding of film itself in terms of language. Transposing Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization [остранение, ostranenie] to the visual experience of Vertov’s film contributes to an additional understanding of the usage of unconventional camera angles, diagonal camera positions, as well as to the interpreting of the Kino-Eye montage procedure. The experimental montage procedure of Kino-Eye is posited as an attempt to decode the world through the lens of a film camera, while understanding this procedure is linked to the impact of Shklovsky and Russian Formalism on Russian 1920s cinema.
 
 Article received: December 15, 2017; Article accepted: December 30, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper
 
 How to cite this article: Latifić, Amra. "The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure as a Formal Experiment." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 23–33. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.227

From Edwardian Selfie to Telepresent Comic

Drawing on the media archaeology accounts of ‘Illusions in Motion’ by Erkki Huhtamo (2013) this paper will compare and discuss audience participation in three specific self-view artworks involving interacting public audiences captured and presented in live telepresent film and video performances since 1900. This comparative study will draw out an underlying cultural fixation and amusement with the self-image, analogous to Henri Bergson’s understanding of laughter in meaning of the comic (1900). These case studies will include my own artistic practice that focuses on telematic encounters and shared visual dialogues between public audiences linked via Internet videoconferencing in “Peoples Screen”, in collaboration with Charlotte Gould for the Guangzhou Light Festival in 2015. The seminal live satellite public performance “Hole-in-Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherie Rabinowitz in 1980, providing the passing public in New York and Los Angeles with opportunity to converse, co-create and play in the first live public connection of its kind. And Mitchell and Kenyon’s historic films of Edwardian public crowds in the 1900’s, allowing audiences the opportunity to play and perform in front of the film camera in the knowledge they could watch their spectacle in its screening at the local traveling fairground. In all these cultural events the audiences become both performers and viewers by creating an improvised response to the camera and screen. The striking similarity with the way audiences react and perform comical narratives from these early self-view film screenings to telematic performances possess all the unique traits of telepresent interaction and the selfie phenomenon.

Haznos reír, Cómo conocí a tu madre

Creo que inicialmente queríamos escribir un programa con una sola cámara, pero la sabiduría de entonces decía que la comedia con una sola cámara no estaba funcionando (recuerde: eso ocurrió hace nueve años), por lo que tomamos un montón de elementos de ese estilo —como mayor número de escenas, más edición, más trabajo cinemático de cámara— y lo filmamos con cuatro cámaras y agregamos una pista de risas. El estilo se desarrolló de manera natural a partir de eso.

Development and Application of the New Explosive Loading Experimental System of Digital Laser Dynamic Caustics

Abstract The new explosive loading experimental system of digital laser dynamic caustics was developed by replacing the conventional multi-spark point source light and the previous multi-frame film camera with the solid-state laser and the digital high-speed camera, respectively; namely, a new caustics experimental system of high-speed photography system using a combination of solid-state laser and digital high-speed camera was created. This new experimental system was used to conduct the crack propagation test of single-borehole explosion with defective medium and the double-boreholes explosive loading experiment to obtain the clear digital caustics photos. If compared with the conventional optical photos, these digital photos were found to be clearer with more reliable results and longer recording time, which demonstrates that the new system can meet the requirements of ultra-dynamic fracture problems such as blasting. The new optical system is simple, user-friendly, which ensures a low experimental cost, short cycle, and the continuous observation throughout the fracture process.

Comparing different ACES Input Device Transforms (IDTs) for the RED Scarlet-X Camera

The RED film cameras are important for professional film productions. Therefore, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (AMPAS) inserted to their new Input Device Transforms (IDTs) in ACES 1.0.3 among others a couple of conversions from RED color spaces. These transforms are intended to establish a linear relationship of the recorded pixel color to the original light of the scene. To achieve this goal the IDTs are applied to the different RED color spaces, which are provided by the camera manufacturer. This results in a linearization of the recorded image colors. Following this concept the conversion should render comparable results for each color space with an acceptable deviation from the original light of the scene. In color science color space conversions need a documentation of the three main components of the individual color spaces: primaries, whitepoint and transfer function. For the RED colorspaces in question these parameters are only available for the REDWideGamutRGB color space, whereas the other color spaces are not documented. For this reason the behavior of the color conversion can only be tested, but not calculated. The goal of this paper is to compare the results of the color conversions of the main RED color spaces: REDWideGamutRGB, REDcolor4 and REDdragoncolor2. Additionally a conversion to the for television usage important color space REC2020 (ITU-R BT.2020) is added. The test setup contains a GretagMacbeth ColorChecker, which is recorded by a RED Scarlet-X camera and a mobile spectrometer (rgbphotonics Qmini). The latter captures the spectral distribution of the individual ColorChecker patches under the same lighting conditions. To compare the results, the recordings of both devices were converted to the CIE xy-chromaticity diagram using The Foundry Nuke11X. Additionally a comparison to reference data provided by the ACES document TB- 2014-004 is included. Finally it is reviewed if the ACES IDT concept is working for the RED Scarlet-X camera.

Comparing ACES Input Device Transforms for the Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR camera

Color is an important aspect of the camera quality. Above all in a Visual Effects Pipeline (VFX) it is necessary to maintain a linear relationship of the pixel color in the recorded image to the original light of the scene throughout every step in the production pipeline. This means that the plate recorded by the camera is not permitted to be subject of changes in any way (,,do no harm to the plate"). Unfortunately most of the camera vendors are applying certain functions during the input step to the recorded RAW material, mostly to meet the needs of the display devices at the end of the pipeline. But they also are adding functions to establish a certain look the camera company is associated with. Maintaining a linear relationship to the light of the scene enables compositing artists and editors to combine imagery of varying sources (mostly cameras of different vendors). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (AMPAS) established an Academy Color Encoding System (ACES). To achieve a linear relationship to the light of the scene, Input Device Transforms (IDTs) for most of the digital film cameras have been provided recently. Unfortunately, such IDTs are not available for nearly all consumer and DSLR cameras. To add their imagery to the film production pipeline it is desirable to create convenient IDTs for such devices as well. The goal of this paper is to record the spectral distribution of a GreagMacbeth ColorChecker using a spectrometer and also photography it with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera under the same lighting conditions. The RAW image is then converted to ACES color spacers (ACES2065-1 or ACEScg) using industrial approved RAW converters. The positions of the patches of the ColorChecker in CIEYxy color space are then compared to the positions of the patches captured by the spectral device. As a result a tendency could be obtained if the camera can be used inside the AMPAS ACES workflow.

Development of Cinema Camera F65 - Honored with Scientific and Engineering Academy Award

Development of Cinema Camera F65 - Honored with Scientific and Engineering Academy Award

The Great War: Cinema, Propaganda, and The Emancipation of Film Language

AbstractThe relation between war and cinema, propaganda and cinema is a most intriguing area, located at the intersection of media studies, history and film aesthetics. A truly tragic moment in human history, the First World War was also the first to be fought before film cameras. And while in the field, airborne reconnaissance became cinematic (Virilio), domestic propaganda occupied the screen of the newly emergent national cinemas, only to see its lucid message challenged and even subverted by the fast-evolving language of cinema. Part one of this paper looks at three non-fiction films, released in 1916:Battle of Somme, With Our Heroes at the Somme(Bei unseren Helden an der Somme) andBattle of Somme(La Bataille de la Somme), as paradigmatic propaganda takes on the eponymous historical battle from British, German and French points of view. Part two analyses two war-time Hollywood melodramas, David Wark Griffith’sHearts of the World(1918) and Allen Holubar’sThe Heart of Humanity(1919), and explains the longevity of the former with the powerful “text effect” of the authentic wartime footage included. Thus, while these WWI propaganda works do validate Virilio’s ideas of the integral connections between technology, war and cinema, and between cinema and propaganda, they also herald the emancipation of post-WWI film language.

マス・メディア生産現場の文化 : テレビカメラと送り手に関するメディア論的研究をめぐって( メディア文化研究の課題と展望)

マス・メディア生産現場の文化 : テレビカメラと送り手に関するメディア論的研究をめぐって( メディア文化研究の課題と展望)

Image Restoration: From Sparse and Low-Rank Priors to Deep Priors [Lecture Notes

The use of digital imaging devices, ranging from professional digital cinema cameras to consumer grade smartphone cameras, has become ubiquitous. The acquired image is a degraded observation of the unknown latent image, while the degradation comes from various factors such as noise corruption, camera shake, object motion, resolution limit, hazing, rain streaks, or a combination of them. Image restoration (IR), as a fundamental problem in image processing and low-level vision, aims to reconstruct the latent high-quality image from its degraded observation. Image degradation is, in general, irreversible, and IR is a typical ill-posed inverse problem. Due to the large space of natural image contents, prior information on image structures is crucial to regularize the solution space and produce a good estimation of the latent image. Image prior modeling and learning then are key issues in IR research. This lecture note describes the development of image prior modeling and learning techniques, including sparse representation models, low-rank models, and deep learning models.

Vibration factors impact analysis on aerial film camera imaging quality

Aerial film camera can acquire ground target image information advantageous, but meanwhile the change of aircraft attitude, the film features and the work of camera inside system could result in a vibration which could depress the image quality greatly. This paper presented a design basis of vibration mitigation stabilized platform based on the vibration characteristic of the aerial film camera and indicated the application analysis that stabilized platform could support aerial camera to realize the shoot demand of multi-angle and large scale. According to the technique characteristics of stabilized platform, the development direction are high precision, more agility, miniaturization and low power.

Attitude control strategy for a camera stabilization platform

In this paper, an attitude control strategy for a 3-axis gimbaled platform used for the stabilization of film and broadcast cameras is presented. The attitude control strategy for the camera provides an alignment of the camera’s line of sight with a desired attitude, independent of the movements of the platform base. This control objective is achieved by a combination of a feedforward compensation of the disturbances induced by the moving base (the operator) and a feedback control of the orientation of the camera. The required attitude information is obtained by an attitude estimation strategy presented in [1] that fuses the measurements of two inertial measurement units. The derivation of the proposed control law utilizes a number of approximations tailored to the considered application. This allows to obtain an efficient but yet accurate attitude control concept. The very good accuracy and the practical feasibility of the overall control strategy are demonstrated by simulation and measurement results of a prototype platform.

Image Acquisition and Techniques to Perform Image Acquisition

In the present scenario images have become the most suitable way to keep our past alive. Nowadays people are very busy in earning their livelihood and day to day life, even though they want to keep their golden moment alive for the rest of life. Images have touched almost all the fields like medical, sports, social networking and many more. It is the need of time to know how the images are being captured and stored into memory. To deal with images and before analyzing them the most important thing is to capture the image. This is called as Image Acquisition. Image Acquisition is achieved by suitable camera. We use different cameras for different application. If we need an X-Ray image, we use a camera (film) which is sensitive to XRays. If we want Infra Red image, we use cameras which are sensitive to Infra Red radiations. For normal images (family pictures etc.) we use cameras which are sensitive to visual spectrum.