Film Enthusiasts Research Articles

Film festival coverage: an interview with journalists, critics, and event programmers of Latin American film festivals

Film festivals are meeting spaces where various players from the audiovisual industry, students, film enthusiasts, journalists, and the organizers themselves converge. This research aims to describe the experiences in journalistic coverage of film festivals for media outlets: generalist, specialized, and digital native in Ibero-America. To achieve this, a qualitative approach was applied through semi-structured interviews with film journalists and festival managers. The results reveal that each journalist applies their framebuilding to cover the event, which is subject to the informational agenda of the media commissioning them. New agents have also emerged who communicate about festivals, such as influencers; furthermore, festivals have created their own platforms to cover informational gaps that specialized press does not report on the festival. Therefore, it is concluded that festivals are media epicenters where different types of content generators currently converge, diversifying the informational offer thanks to the technological facilities offered by digitization, the internet, and social media.

An Empirical Study of Youth Perceptions of Social Factors Influencing Audience Interest in the Bangladeshi Film Industry

Bangladesh has a rich and influential film history, which serves as an effective means of mass social communication. This research will give an in-depth look at the present situation of the Bangladeshi film sector emphasis on social perspectives. Bangladesh's film industry has flourished since the first screening of "Mukh O Mukhosh" in 1955 and the enactment of the "East Pakistan Film Development Organization" bill by Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1958. Despite its historical significance, the film industry is still not economically viable. The study demonstrates the significance of reviving audience interest and combining mathematical and visual evaluations for a better understanding of public opinions. Analyzing the coefficients and multiple variables gives vital insights into the societal and artistic progress, serving as a guideline for scholars, learners, and film enthusiasts.

Genre Drama sebagai Favorite di Netflix Periode Januari – Juni 2021

Netflix is a film exhibition platform in digital format. Netflix is one of the favourite platforms for film enthusiasts, especially among the respondents in this study. Netflix is included in the Non-Theatrical Exhibition Film category with its popular term Over-The-Top. Netflix is categorized explicitly as SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand). In this study, we do not only look at the categorization of films based on the primary genre but also look at the secondary film genres. According to respondents, the secondary genre of films is one aspect of selecting films on the Netflix platform.This study used a quantitative approach with a cluster random sampling method. The sample used in this research was students of the Film Study Program, Faculty of Art and Design, Multimedia Nusantara University. The results of this study show that in the period January - July 2021, the film Ali & Ratu Ratu Queens is an Indonesian film that many Netflix users watch. In addition, the film Sweet & Sour is the most-watched international film by respondents. Respondents in this study stated that there is a need for film categorization. Still, film categorization is not only based on the primary genre but there needs to be a secondary genre as well. Films in the drama genre are the favourite of the respondents in this study, both primary and secondary drama genres.

Ad hoc Screen Translation in Soviet Estonian Film Clubs

In Soviet Estonian official cinemas, foreign films were always dubbed into Russian with Estonian subtitles. Founded at the end of the Thaw, film clubs and other semi-official screening locations became popular as part of the alternative scene and unauthorised discourse. They screened uncensored original Western European and Hollywood films and thus the works of forbidden film directors and cinema movements from the West were introduced to a limited audience of film enthusiasts. Compared to other Soviet Socialist Republics, Estonia was in a privileged geographical and linguistic position to be able to access the films of the West via Finland. Film clubs looked beyond the Iron Curtain and opened up a cultural dialogue between the West and Soviet Estonia. This article analyses the repertoire of foreign films and different translation modes, social relations and the agency of the interpreters, and it looks at their interpretative act from theoretical perspectives discussed by Juri Lotman and Naoki Sakai. Lay Summary: In the era of Soviet Estonia, where foreign films were typically re-edited and dubbed into Russian, film clubs emerged as underground screening locations that offered uncensored original Western European and Hollywood films. These clubs played a crucial role in introducing the works of forbidden film directors and cinematic movements from the West to a limited audience of film enthusiasts. Soviet Estonia stood out in three significant aspects: 1) it was the only SSR to subtitle all films in the official cinema into Estonian; 2) it had a vibrant film club culture in universities with diverse repertoires from Finland, and all films had a live translation into Estonian, 3) and it had access to Finnish television broadcasting Western movies that were otherwise not shown in the Soviet Union (Estonian and Finnish are closely related languages that share many semantic and grammatical structures). Compared to other Soviet Socialist Republics, Estonia had the advantage of its geographical and linguistic position, facilitating a socio-cultural dialogue with the West. The various translation methods employed, often conducted on an ad hoc basis, social dynamics, and the role of interpreters in the film clubs, played a transformative role in dismantling the barriers of the Iron Curtain. Interpreters, by navigating the boundaries between the original films and their translations, significantly influenced the understanding of Western cinema and culture in Soviet Estonia.

Communication Strategy to Make MAFI Fest Become a Sustainable Local Film Festival

In the last two decades, the Indonesian film ecosystem has been enlivened by the presence of local film festivals in various cities. The presence of film festivals is often seen as a space to channel interests, express creativity, build networks, and exchange knowledge and experiences. Local film festivals are generally initiated by student associations, film enthusiasts' communities, or government programs. Festival organizers also face various environmental challenges that are unstable in order to maintain their existence. It is not uncommon to find film festivals that have only been successfully held once or a few times, then postponed or discontinued for various reasons. Malang Film Festival (MAFI Fest) is the oldest local film festival initiated by a campus institution and has been able to survive from 2004 until now. This research aims to analyze the communication strategies used by the organizers to establish MAFI Fest as a sustainable local film festival, providing a space of appreciation for filmmakers to showcase their work. The research adopts a qualitative-descriptive approach, and data collection is conducted through interviews, observations, and documentation. The results of the research indicate that MAFI Fest implements repetitive, informative, and educative communication strategies through the media they use. The sustainability of the film festival is inseparable from the shrewdness of the organizers in innovating, support from stakeholders, their ability to obtain funding, and the commitment and activeness of its members. This research contributes to adding insight to academics and practitioners regarding the efforts that can be undertaken to maintain the sustainability of a local film festival in the long run.

The Caste of Cinema and the Cinema of Caste: Shooting the Dalit 24 Frames Per Second

Even though Bombay has been hailed as the capital of Indian Cinema, film enthusiasts and connoisseurs would agree that it is South Indian Cinema that deserves the honour. It was 1936 when the ‘social’ films tainted with politics infiltrated the sphere of Tamil Cinema and since then, it has become extremely pervasive in all spheres of life, particularly political life. During the first phase of Tamil Cinema, that is in the pre-1950s, films such as Sevasadanam (1938), and Sabapathy (1941) were an instrument to represent the upper caste communities with upper caste protagonists revelling in their privileges. The recent phase not only addresses the caste issues explicitly but lets the Dalit occupy the centre stage. This was initiated by director Pa Ranjith in his films Madras (2014), Kabali (2016), Kaala (2018), Sarpatta Parambarai (2021) and as a producer for Pariyerum Perumal (2018). The film industry of Tamil Nadu is as heterogenous as the Indian society and has metamorphosed into an instrument incumbent for understanding the battleground of the caste system of India. My paper attempts to analyse the ways in which caste-based films are affecting the politics of Tamil Nadu and vice versa. My paper intends to reflect on how the caste-based cinematic themes have created class consciousness on one hand, but have given rise to caste-based narcissism among the people of the same caste on the other. Among this chaos and dichotomy, the enormous popularity, as well as the commercial success of films like Pariyerum Perumal and Asuran (2019), and Karnan (2021), deserves a detailed study that would enable us critically assess the cinematic representation of Dalits and their perils in the quest for social identity and acknowledgment.

Becoming Community. Filmmakers Crafting Futures in an Andean Town

In the aftermaths of the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000), a group of film enthusiasts from the Andean highland town of Ayacucho began using cameras to tell their stories of violence in the region. According to scholarly analyses, these films reflect a collective trauma resulting from prolonged experiences of political violence and abandonment from the state. However, little attention has been given to the filmmakers’ creative practice and its impact on their community. To address this gap, this article takes a multimodal approach to ethnographically explore the circumstances and conditions in which these films are made. It argues that cinema-making in the Andes is a social intervention that resists contemporary memory regimes by forming a community of storytellers who reimagine the past to create alternative futures.

Cine-AI: Generating Video Game Cutscenes in the Style of Human Directors

Cutscenes form an integral part of many video games, but their creation is costly, time-consuming, and requires skills that many game developers lack. While AI has been leveraged to semi-automate cutscene production, the results typically lack the internal consistency and uniformity in style that is characteristic of professional human directors. We overcome this shortcoming with Cine-AI, an open-source procedural cinematography toolset capable of generating in-game cutscenes in the style of eminent human directors. Implemented in the popular game engine Unity, Cine-AI features a novel timeline and storyboard interface for design-time manipulation, combined with runtime cinematography automation. Via two user studies, each employing quantitative and qualitative measures, we demonstrate that Cine-AI generates cutscenes that people correctly associate with a target director, while providing above-average usability. Our director imitation dataset is publicly available, and can be extended by users and film enthusiasts.

Implementation Naïve Bayes Classification for Sentiment Analysis on Internet Movie Database

A film review is a subjective opinion of someone who has different feelings about each film. As a result, film enthusiasts will struggle to assess whether the film meets their requirements. Based on these issues, sentiment analysis is the best way to fix them. Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is the study of assigning views or emotional labels to texts in order to determine if the text contains positive or negative thoughts. The Nave Bayes method was chosen because it can classify data based on the computation of each class's probability against objects in a given data sample. The best model was created utilizing data without lemmatization, 500 vector sizes, and Nave Bayes classification, with an accuracy of 78.96 percent and a f1-score of 78.81 percent. Changes in vector size affect the system's capacity to foresee positive and negative sentiments. The difference in accuracy and recall values shows that when vector size 300 is utilized, the precision and recall outcomes are lower than when vector size 500 is used.

Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso.

Reviewed by: Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso by Armelle Faure Marcia Tiede Armelle Faure. Révolution et sorcellerie : une ethnologue au Burkina Faso. Afterword by Lazare Ki-Zerbo. Bordeaux: Elytis, 2020. 224 pp. $31.45 (paper). ISBN: 978-2356393005. In this sometimes pungent memoir, Armelle Faure traces her experiences as a young ethnologist in the Bissa region of southern Burkina Faso during the turbulent years of the Sankara administration (1983–1987), from which emerged her doctoral dissertation (1990). Her publications have concerned rural land tenure and displacement, oral histories of place, and sustainable/participatory development. They include a contribution to this journal on Mossi-Bissa relations in the nineteenth century (2002). She published a monograph (1996) on the Bissa region before construction of the Bagré dam on the Nakambe (White Volta) river in the early 1990s—a development which hovers in the background of her fieldwork there. Révolution et sorcellerie is the author’s recollections of her seemingly fearless younger self in the presence of an idealistic revolution, which she was eager to witness and support. (She dedicates the book to “all the humanist and romantic utopians who have died with their ideas and their dreams.”1) As a young person of that era, Faure recalls, “I like the idea of revolution. The youth, all the young people of my age, aspire to a collective energy that could permit transcending, acting collectively to transform society” (2020, 42). Despite her ardent sympathies, she was obliged to reckon with the notion of “vous les Blancs” being viewed as “a foreign enemy” (2020, 50). An article written just days after Faure’s return to France and before completion of her dissertation (Faure 1988) provides an enlightening counterpoint to this book. It preserves more of the precariousness of those years, both in navigating the academic channels in Paris, and in finding her way in Burkina Faso on slim resources, when “the mere sight of a piece of bread would cheer me up,” and she was still limited in language and means of transport: “I had not yet found my research topic, persuaded that it would come to me in the field one fine day, perhaps after some calabashes-ful of dolo [millet beer]. Moreover, I had had enough of preserving the state of mind of a Parisian student who was half on holiday and always a stranger. The word went out: I wanted to be part of the village conflicts.” (1988, 10) [End Page 217] Faure had an earlier degree (DEA) in film. In preparation for the Festival panafricain de cinéma (FESPACO) in February 1985, she describes the transformation of Ouagadougou’s most notorious slum into new residential quarters, the Cité de l’an III, in this third year of the revolution. Representatives from Jerry Rawlings’ Ghana would join the festivities, and pop-culture reference was made to “Tom and Jerry, two great revolutionaries changing Africa in the face of history.” She and her fellow film enthusiasts reveled in the ambience of authors and filmmakers such as Wole Soyinka, Souleymane Cissé, and Ousmane Sembène. She noted the number of films portraying confrontations between “the young rural generations, who hope for change and greater freedom, and the village elders, jealous guardians of their privileges” (2020, 93). Faure saw FESPACO as an example of how the charisma of Thomas Sankara was making Burkina Faso a magnet for creative forces and for young people like herself, ready to help bring about change (2020, 92–93). She came to appreciate a central tenet of Sankarisme being to build Burkina Faso up from its own resources—rather than exporting its labor to help build Côte d’Ivoire, as had been the case for generations—and without depending on the Soviet Union or former colonial powers. This was to be a largely voluntary effort, sustained by “effervescence and hope”—strengthened by public festival and spectacle—in order to develop a national culture, with the aim of attracting foreign support and providing more economic possibilities for the Burkinabé people (2020, 104). While visiting with various NGOs at FESPACO, Faure connected with an OXFAM representative, a Bissa woman, and found “a new team with...

Reception analysis of Indonesian audience towards physical and verbal violence on series Squid Game (2021) by Hwang Dong-Hyuk

Korean film has been rampantly surging all over the world, particularly in Indonesia. Moreover, Squid Game (2021) by Hwang Dong-Hyuk is popular in the country due to its plot and settings which present the real condition of the gap between upper-class and lower-middle class urban people in South Korea. It becomes intriguing for Indonesian audience because it shows the happening fact not only in South Korea but also similarly in Indonesia. The research was aimed at investigating Indonesian audience’s responses on physical and verbal violence depicted on Squid Game series (2021) by Hwang Dong-Hyuk. The research used the qualitative approach with reception analysis method by Stuart Hall. There are four audiences who become the informants of this research coming from urban workers and Korean film enthusiasts. The data collection technique was done through interviews as well as document analysis. The result showed that the informants’ reception towards the scenes are varying due to the situation and context that set the scenes which present different uses of physical and verbal violence.

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Comedy and Jewishness in the Work of Stephen Dwoskin

ABSTRACT: This essay reframes the infamously grave and grueling experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin as a comic artist. Experimental film in the UK is usually discussed in terms of the marginal history of artists' film and video, or the form's relationship to elite contemporary art. Stephen Dwoskin was engaged with these concerns. He was, however, also a devotee of Hollywood film, like his fellow filmmakers in the New York underground, and like the group of "film enthusiasts" that founded the London Film-Makers' Co-op on its model and screened popular and generic American cinema alongside avant-garde and arthouse works. This essay will argue that comedy in particular, a genre enriched by Jewish artists between his birth in 1939 and his leaving for Europe in 1964, was a major shaping intertext on Dwoskin's work. It will further argue that an engagement with comedy and its practitioners allowed Dwoskin to explore Jewish-related themes in a subterranean manner when Jewish identity was not a usual subject in experimental film—unlike the directly queer, black, or post-colonial films made by his contemporaries. After a survey of two major Jewish thinkers on comedy—Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud—the major intertext discussed in the essay will be the early work of the Marx Brothers. In the first films where he played a version of himself, Dwoskin appropriated themes, images, and even narrative approaches introduced by American Jewish comics like the Marx Brothers, such as the foregrounding of the precarious, unstable, or disruptive body; the comedy of sexual dysfunction and bodily failure; and identity crisis resulting from social marginality. With Dwoskin, as with these comics, such themes and structures resulted in the subversion of mainstream narrative modes and character stereotypes.

Mass film criticism and its digital afterlives

This article looks at a unique kind of Chinese film culture known as the ‘mass film criticism’ (qunzhong yingping), namely, film discussion and criticism initiated by the non-professionals – workers, peasants, soldiers, students, etc. The practice of mass film criticism (MFC), led spontaneously by grassroot film enthusiasts and supported by state institutions, gained momentum in the 1980s: it is estimated that by 1988 there were more than 20,000 local groups of mass film criticism across the country, and the total number of amateur film critics reached ten million. The analogue history of MFC comprises a different genealogy for the emergence of amateur cinephiliac writing, which is almost exclusively associated with digital cinephiles in the west. This article examines the style and structural formation of MFC, as well as the role it played in fostering knowledge and appreciation of cinema for a large population with uneven film literacy. More importantly, often preforming a kind of sanctioned social criticism, MFC helped to carve out a public space for intense negotiations of what cinema and what China should become.

Romancing the Reds: early encounters with Soviet cinema in India

ABSTRACT Censorship records show an apparent absence of Soviet films in Indian cinemas during the late years of British colonialism (1920s–40s). Apart from a few ‘apolitical’ feature films, Indian audiences hardly got any chance to watch important works of Soviet cinema until the late 1940s. Contrastingly, a number of writings that appeared in film journals from the 1930s–40s provide evidence for a growing interest in Soviet cinema among Indian film enthusiasts. This cluster of writings virtually hides the fact that Soviet masterpieces were yet to reach the Indian viewers. Many Indian films from the same period also offer instances of Soviet influence revealed through political symbolism, visual styles and techniques. Exploring various layers of archival and filmic materials, the article traces the routes through which the Soviet influence provided motivations to filmmakers and enthusiasts about the new explorations in Soviet cinema in the absence of the actual films on Indian screens.

Introduction: Božena Němcová Adapts into Czech Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron”

IntroductionBožena Němcová Adapts into Czech Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron” Anne E. Duggan (bio) and Rebecca Cravens (bio) While Charlotte Trinquet du Lys has traced the diffusion of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette-Cendron” from France to French Missouri in her fascinating 2007 article that appeared in Marvels & Tales, I followed another path the tale took, this time moving eastward. I was intrigued to uncover another history of the tale, which continues to resonate today, unbeknownst to many folklore and fairy-tale scholars and fairy-tale film enthusiasts. Specifically mentioning “Finette-Cendron,” Dil Prvni claimed in 1902 that French fairy tales traveled from France to Germany to Czechoslovakia (328). Providing further evidence for this theory in 1930, Václav Tille published an overview of Czech versions of d’Aulnoy’s “L’oranger et l’abeille” (“The Bee and the Orange Tree”) and “Finette-Cendron.” He emphasized the important role played by Václav Matěj Kramerius (1753–1808), a Czech publisher and writer who founded the publishing house Czech Dispatch in order to translate and adapt into Czech works “capable of instructing or amusing the lower classes” (Tille 285), and to foster a literary culture at a time when there was not yet an established Czech literary tradition; Kramerius had translated and published a version of d’Aulnoy’s “The Bee and the Orange Tree” in 1794. Citing Josef Jungmann, Tille suggests there may have been in Jindřichův Hradec (southern Bohemia) a translation of “Finette-Cendron” from German into Czech as early as 1761, which was reprinted several times in the nineteenth century. Later, Kramerius’s son, Václav Rodomil Kramerius (1792–1861), produced a Czech version of “Finette-Cendron” in which, according to Tille, the youngest of three daughters, Finette, assisted by the female magician Tamarinde, [End Page 353] manages to kill the ogres and take over their castle, and rides a white horse, gifted by Tamarinde, to the palace, where she meets the prince, Otmar, whom she eventually marries. Tille documents several other oral variants of “Finette-Cendron,” including a Moravian variant published by Matouš Václavek (1842–1908), which includes only the first part of the tale; a version by Václav Popelka in Pohádky z Poličska (Fairy Tales from Policka, 1888), in which the ogress, instead of being fifteen feet wide, has fifteen toes; and another Moravian variant told by the informant Kateřina Vidláková and collected and published by Beneš Method Kulda (1820–1903), in which the wife of the ogre is happy that her husband is killed in the oven, and Finette rides on her white horse to mass instead of a ball. Kram Zuzana Raková maintains that, along with dramatic works by French playwrights like Molière and Marivaux, “French fairy tales, for example Finette Cendron (Pohádka o Popelce [A Fairy Tale about Cinderella]) in the version by Madame d’Aulnoy … represented another source of inspiration for different Czech adaptations and for indigenous literary production, especially in the 1840s” (15). As d’Aulnoy’s tales were circulating throughout Bohemia via German and Czech translations and oral storytelling, Božena Němcová (ca. 1820–62) was coming into her own as a writer. The daughter of a servant and a coachman, and unhappily married to Josef Němec in 1837, Němcová frequented Czech nationalist salons and in this spirit changed her first name from “Barbora,” which comes from the Greek for “foreigner,” to “Božena,” which derives from Slavic roots and importantly can translate as “woman of God” or “blessed by God”; her chosen name thus reinforces her identification with her Slavic heritage.1 Alfred Thomas characterizes Němcová and her works in the following terms: “Influenced by the French novelist George Sand, Božena Němcová was the first feminist writer in Czech literature. But she was also a nationalist writer who believed deeply in the Czech and Slovak right to equal political representation within the Habsburg Empire” (281). Her work collecting tales is thus grounded in the type of nationalist and democratic impulses evident in the oeuvre of the Brothers Grimm, with Němcová specifically identifying as socialist. At...

FESPACO Film Festival

FESPACO Film Festival Colin Dupré (bio) The Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival Panafricain de Cinema et de Television de Ouagadougou–FESPACO) was set up in Burkina Faso (Upper Volta at the time) in 1969. Born out of a modest private initiative, it received official backing from the Burkinabe authorities in 1972. That year, awards were introduced, the first editions not having had any competition sections. By the sixth edition (1979), the FESPACO adopted a biennial rhythm, the festival starting on the final Saturday in February every odd year. This choice was partly motivated by Tahar Cheriaa, founder of the Carthage Film Festival (JCC), who wanted to avoid competition between the two events. Set up in Tunisia in 1966, the JCC was originally intended to be a festival for films from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Arab world. In practice, however, even though Ousmane Sembène won its first prize in 1966 with La Noire de… / Black Girl (Senegal), the JCC soon became a festival focused on the Maghreb, Mashriq, and Arab world in general. Placed under the authority of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Communications, the FESPACO continues today to reflect the determination of the Burkinabe government. Michel Ouedraogo has been its Delegate General since taking over from Baba Hama in 2008. As it became institutionalized, the event adopted clear objectives, aiming principally to encourage the distribution of all African films, to facilitate contacts and exchanges between film and audiovisual professionals, and to contribute to the emergence, development, and safeguarding of African film as a means of expression, education, and consciousness raising (Statuts du FESPACO, 1999). The best of African film production is thus screened at the festival. At the end of the feature film competition, three major awards are attributed: the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Étalons de Yennenga (Yennenga Stallions). Short films are awarded the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Poulains (Foals). The horse plays a highly important role in the epic founding myth of the Mossi people, Burkina's majority ethnic group. Princess Yennenga met her future husband, Riale, thanks to his mount. Their child was the first in the line of the founders of the Mossi Empire. They named him Ouedraogo, [End Page 282] which means 'the stallion,' in reference to the horse that brought about their meeting. A Festival of its Kind The FESPACO brings together a considerable number of film enthusiasts. Today it easily attracts over half a million spectators. It is characterized by its popular dimension, lacking in a lot of other international film festivals. The Ouagadougou festival is one of the rare festivals to offer the general public the possibility of seeing the films selected during the competition, and on no other condition than buying one's ticket. Right since the outset, one of the FESPACO's major stakes has been to show African films to African audiences, and that at a time when the continent's screens were flooded with American, French, and Indian films. Largely inspired by Pan-Africanism, this militancy has remained unfailing since 1969 and has translated into Africans' desire to reappropriate their culture and develop their cinema. A real showcase for African film, the FESPACO helps 'keep a finger on the pulse' of filmmaking on the continent and makes it accessible to the world. FESPACO: Birth and Evolutions Born thanks to the initiative of a few enthusiasts, the FESPACO was created by the Franco-Voltaïque Cultural Centre (CCFV) film club in 1969 under the name of the Ouagadougou First African Film Festival. It emerged in a favorable context, several cultural initiatives having been launched across the continent, and notably in the domain of film. From the rudimentary nature of its first editions, it has evolved into a major event on the international cultural agenda. It was renamed FESPACO in 1972. That year, the Burkinabe government decided to institutionalize it, in an effort to thereby benefit from this showcase. Indeed, whatever the period, the FESPACO has always represented a key asset in Burkinabe diplomacy. Each regime has benefited from the platform that the event represents to convey certain positions to the international community. That was the case in 1983, for example, when...

Queer neorealism: Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione and the Cinema conspiracy against fascism

‘Cinema is the most powerful weapon’ – Benito Mussolini’s motto loomed in capital letters over the 1937 inauguration of the massive production hub being built in the outskirts of Rome, reminding the film industry what was expected of it. Notwithstanding the effort to deploy cinema as a key technology for governing the nation and the empire, in the early 1940s film became a battlefield for the Regime. This essay excavates from the closet of memory the story of the Cinema cell, the group of young film enthusiasts who, in fascist Italy, engaged in what today we would call ‘media activism’: they put their lives on the line, infiltrated the film industry, and shouldered the movie camera as their initial weapon of combat against a defiant regime. I focus on how the underground formation elaborated an iteration of filmic realism that countered the implantation in the body politic of racialized fantasies of national identity. In tracing the cell’s efforts to develop a gaze on the nation that would oppose the race-driven realism advocated by Mussolini’s son Vittorio, among others, I establish a genealogy for Visconti’s 1943 Ossessione and its display of queerness as the authentic alternative to fascist life. By way of conclusion, I disentangle the system of intimacy and affectivity harnessed by this film from the one that postwar neorealism contributed to securing.

From Stalinism to Cinephilia: The Emergence of East German Film Culture in the 1950s

This article analyses the institutional developments in East German film culture during the 1950s and focuses on the so far under-researched filmaktiv movement (groups of individuals engaged in the promotion and discussion of films along political guidelines), and on a first wave of film clubs that arose around 1956. The study will illuminate the role played by both initiatives in the context of the state cultural policies as well as within a broader, international history of film culture. Even though they were rapidly integrated into state structures, in 1951 the aktivs opened up a new field of cultural exchange and cinematic activism. Openly opposed by the Ministry for Culture, the clubs challenged the state policies in a different way by successfully implementing an alternative approach to film consumption. In film cultural terms, the film clubs represented both an adaptation to national realities and a reaction to contemporary international trends. Compared to the work of the aktivs, they embodied a shift in the cultural status of cinema, the position of the national film culture within the international context and local film enthusiasts’ relation to the history of the medium.

Кіно в житті української еміграції в міжвоєнній ЧСР (1921–1939)

Кіно в житті української еміграції в міжвоєнній ЧСР (1921–1939)

A Film Criticism Website Based on “ThinkPHP”

With the continuous development of science and technology and progress of society, the rise of Internet plus era, the cinema began to build their own website in order to expand the film to improve the efficiency, to provide a common discussion for film enthusiasts. This paper uses ThinkPHP framework to complete the needs of the site, it is to simplify the enterprise application development and agile WEB application development and the existence of a fast, compatible and simple lightweight domestic PHP development framework. The analysis in detail on the film critic website in addition, the ThinkPHP framework were analysis explain, on the basis of that tool use is Webstorm development tools with Wamp integrated development tools and environment related structures, database using mysql, ThinkPHP film critic website based on is not only convenient for the users to understand the new release of the news and information, more convenient is that one can allow managers to facilitate the management of a good movie dynamic information and view the user to give the evaluation and so on.