Film Magazines Research Articles

Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cold War (review)

Reviewed by: Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cold War Joshua First (bio) Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cold War. By Kristin Roth-Ey. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xi+315. $39.95. Kristin Roth-Ey's Moscow Prime Time interweaves an analysis of Soviet cinema "as an industry" with the much-less-studied phenomena of Soviet radio and television. Her story of the USSR's mass-media explosion after Stalin provides technology and culture scholars with a complex understanding of how a socialist regime used media in some remarkably similar ways to Western capitalist countries, though there also were distinct differences. As Roth-Ey argues, post-Stalinist elites created a "media empire" that "was, on its own terms, a very successful failure" (p. 1).What she means by this is that the Soviet Union attempted to compete on the international stage using the same tools as Western mass culture, while remaining committed to a uniquely "socialist" project that foregrounded the pedagogical and high-cultural mobilization of cinema, radio, and television. By the 1980s, Soviet mass media found itself straddling the boundary between this ambitious project and that of entertaining Soviet citizens. [End Page 731] When its elites invented a distinctly Soviet culture in the early 1930s, raw propaganda was only a minor motivation; rather, a conception of "cultural uplift" stood at the foundations of socialist realism. "Backward" Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, etc. needed the cinema (along with theater and literature) to transform them into modern socialist citizens. As Roth-Ey argues, this principle remained a core function of Soviet media culture until the collapse in 1991. The modern multiplex with comfortable seats and a cafe, widescreen viewing technology, glossy film magazines that highlighted global celebrities, televised quiz shows, and shortwave broadcasts of the Beatles, however, all emphasized personal pleasure and consumerism over collective education and overcoming cultural backwardness. These new forms of mass media eroded traditional mechanisms of exerting cultural power in the Soviet Union. Roth-Ey successfully connects the history of post-Stalinist mass media to the broader struggle for power and influence during the cold war. The Soviet Union had to develop methods to woo both domestic and foreign audiences because American cultural power began to penetrate the socialist world after World War II: Hollywood movies were screening throughout the Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America were aiming their signals eastward, and television strove to remain interesting to Soviet viewers by adapting American-style programming. Soviet culture, something usually imagined as exceptional, now found itself in competition with Western mass culture, not only because of the larger political tensions between global superpowers, but also due to the reality of postwar globalization and the new technological possibilities of broadcasting. As Roth-Ey demonstrates, the post-Stalin Soviet Union was no longer the isolated cultural and economic system that he had created during the 1930s. The post-Stalinist leadership, ever enthusiastic about modernity and socialism's preeminent role in "overcoming backwardness," could not justify circulating antiquated wired radio sets to the citizenry, releasing only twenty to thirty films annually while cutting off foreign imports, or restricting television technology to the political elite. Soviet leaders had to make good on their assertion that its citizens were the most advanced, cosmopolitan, and cultured peoples in the world. But with the exponential growth of Soviet mass media from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s came diversification of cultural production and professional interests, increasing expectations, and thus demands, from citizen-consumers, and the economic necessity to turn a profit. Thus the Soviet "media empire," as Roth-Ey calls it, found itself playing a game it could not win. Soviet mass media were able to compete with the West, but only if they played according to rules that were unacceptable: hence Roth-Ey's description of this military and cultural empire as a "successful failure" (p. 23).When they played by Soviet rules, they were plagued by the same problems as the Soviet economy as a whole: inefficiencies, [End Page 732] resistance to innovation, the conservatism of party leaders, and an economic model...

Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Ramsay Brothers forged a career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry, creating a niche market for their cheaply produced horror films. Despite drawing committed audiences in B- and C-centers, these films were dismissed by the urban English press as clumsy counterfeit versions of American and British products, and by the late 1990s a new school of practitioners led by Ram Gopal Varma had begun producing slick and songless horror films that could translate internationally. Little is known of the Ramsays’ production and distribution practices, their frugal discipline, their internal star system, and their markets in India’s rural territories. Using first-hand interviews and trade journals, this paper excavates the history of a cottage industry of terror that rode the same wave as Bombay’s blockbusters. It is perhaps perversely appropriate that the Ramsay Brothers rose to prominence in the 1970s, a time when the question of cinema—its politics, aesthetics, and status as “bad object”—returned to the fore in Bombay. Using essays and reviews from popular film magazines (especially Filmfare), as well as censorship documents from the CBFC archives, this paper navigates the discursive life of the Ramsay Brothers as a way to illuminate the fault-lines of taste over which cinema was popularly judged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (review)

Reviewed by: Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin Kay Armatage (bio) David Church, editor. Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin. University of Manitoba Press. 2009. xiii, 280. $29.95 Guy Maddin is one of the most loquacious of Canadian film-makers. His conversation is garrulous, effusively personal and autobiographical, and deliriously confessional. He responds enthusiastically and ingenuously to questions about anything anyone dares to ask, spontaneously and richly connecting the characters and narratives of his films to his own experience and family history. As an illustration of this continuing engagement with self-revelation, take the self-generated title of his series of lectures and performances at Innis College, University of Toronto, in 2010: ‘I’m Going to Pull Down My Pants: Confession & the Cinema of Uninhibition.’ Already two books of interviews are in print, as well as countless one-off interviews in cinema journals and film magazines. [End Page 758] Maddin is also wonderfully generous with the dissemination of his own work, including scripts and documentation of his films, as well as publication of his private journals. As a result, the critical discourse surrounding his work is deeply larded with quotations from Maddin, as well as from his former mentor and close collaborator, screenwriter George Toles. It is no wonder that Maddin’s witty reflections on film history, the future of the forgotten and the unknown, the allegorical complexion of autobiography, the welcome anaesthetic of amnesia, and the truth of melodrama (among many other poetic and often haunting statements) productively activate a critical context for his work. In addition, perhaps not so productively, his statements of his own intentions are routinely ladled into analyses of the films. From my training in film theory, I approach with cynicism a book that takes as its subtitle ‘Essays on Guy Maddin,’ for I see this as indication of a determining biographical paradigm centering on the person of the film-maker rather than his work. The introduction to Playing with Memories, by editor David Church, sets out the biographical details accordingly. Yet the welcome surprise of these essays is that, while almost all of them include citations of Maddin in their footnotes, they come at the films from divergent angles. There are a few commonalities of course, consistent with the current trends of contemporary film scholarship. A common thread is the reinvigoration of thinkers from the past. Walter Benjamin is a perennial, a master of many moves; Freud in the context of Maddin is a must (while Lacan is outré these days); E.H. Gombrich is a breath of fresh air, not seen in a long time; Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ seems a bit tired, too familiar to be productive; and then along comes Nietzsche dancing with Freud’s ‘uncanny’ and we are back on Broadway. In addition to the differences among their theoretical references, the essays take effectively opposing positions on key critical issues. Are the films postmodern or nostalgic? Are they camp or kitsch, melodramas or fairy tales? Do they evoke the bergfilme (German mountain film) or the baroque Trauerspiel (‘sorrow play’)? Should they be read as deixis (the orientational features of language)? Are they avant-garde or mainstream? Do their tattered surfaces revivify the lost past of cinema, or do they suggest the impossibility of retrieving the past? Do they trace the 1970s model of Canadian cinema as featuring ineffectual and repressed characters, or do they carve out a post-national space that queers the connections between nation, family, sexuality, and gender? While contrarian views abound in this collection, most of the essays include close analysis of the films and argue their points pretty convincingly. About half the essays have been published elsewhere in the past – for example, those by Geoff Pevere, Steven Shapiro, William Beard, and Will [End Page 759] Straw – but their inclusion in the anthology is worthwhile as they are often cited in later articles. In sum, this book will be an effective teaching aide, and it is a pretty enjoyable read for those of us who love Guy Maddin. And really, who doesn’t? Kay Armatage Cinema Studies, University of Toronto Copyright © 2012 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920-60. By Jeffrey Richards.

I will begin this review with a confession: I am a bit of a fan of Jeffrey Richards. Like many film historians, I began by reading his Visions of Yesterday (1973). When one wanted to read solid and insightful histories of British cinema and culture, one read Jeffrey Richards. Nearly 40 years on, despite the massive development of film studies and the dozens of books on British cinema and cultural history published each year, there is still Jeffrey Richards. His latest book, Cinema and Radio in Britain and America, 1920–60, represents what I expect and look forward to in his writings: a wide-ranging, informative, engagingly written, comparative media history. While many film historians and theorists continue to analyse film in relative isolation from other media, Richards argues, ‘the power of films in the imaginative lives of audiences can only be properly understood when films are located within the wider cinema culture, which comprised film magazines, cigarette cards, postcards, cheap biographies, the book of the film, the sheet music of the film and above all radio’. Richards has done sound research on the different industrial and creative relationships between film and radio in the USA and Britain. As he explains early on, while Hollywood, after some initial nervousness, forged a strong and even ‘symbiotic’ relationship with the radio networks, Britain and its media monolith the BBC were less influenced by British film culture and the demands to showcase its film stars. Richards’ history of America's interconnected radio and cinema audiences ranges widely over the vision of David Sarnoff, head of RCA and later RKO Radio Pictures, Orson Welles, John Michael Hayes, Lucille Ball, and Howard Koch. He reveals how certain popular radio dramas such as Sorry, Wrong Number with Agnes Moorehead (1943, repeated a record seven times), became popular films (with Barbara Stanwyck in the lead, 1948), and how, despite the critical consensus that women's radio programmes constructed a limited, house-bound narrative for America's women, a number of programmes featured working women who stayed in the workforce (The Story of Mary Marlin, 1937–43). But as Richards points out, there were far more male Hollywood stars than female stars with their own radio programmes during this period, and the industry was almost entirely run by men.

AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF A FILM INDUSTRY IN TRANSITION: DARCY PAQUET’S MEDITATIONS ON THE CONTEMPORARY KOREAN CINEMA

This article introduces a variety of free-ranging meditations on the recent state of the Korean cinema as I have witnessed in my privileged position as a key insider to the Korean film industry. As someone with experience as a film journalist and a columnist for the weekly film magazine Cine21, I identify a common thread that unites a selection of Korean Cinema Today articles in an attempt to complement the academic essays in this special issue. By assessing the particular character and identity of Korean cinema in the “post-boom” years of 2007 to the present, I demonstrate how the industry has recovered some ground since 2007, when the industry faced widespread losses at the box office, the bursting of a film financing bubble and a steep drop in export revenues led many in the film industry to declare a crisis. Since then, although, there is still a sense that Korean cinema has entered a less bountiful era than the one that preceded it, a constantly evolving film landscape continues to offer hallenges of many kinds.

The Benshi Track: Mizoguchi Kenji's The Downfall of Osen and the Sound Transition

Drawing on production memos, film magazines, and censorship records, this essay locates the formative moment of Mizoguchi's style within the sound transition. The Downfall of Osen , with the benshi (film lecturer) narration recorded on its soundtrack, weaved the transformation of exhibition practice and the emergent "talkie" aesthetics into its textuality.

<i>Theorem</i> (review)

Films and Filming Reviews, 1966-1969 Peter Whitehead Between 1966 and 1969, Peter Whitehead wrote a series of reviews for the British film magazine Films and Filming. The magazine had begun in 1954 and would be published monthly up until 1990. At the time of Whitehead's involvement, it was edited by the respected cinema journalist Robin Bean and was noted for publishing the work of critics such as Raymond Durgnat. In his own critical writing, Whitehead places emphasis less on the technical aspects of the films under his consideration than on the extent of their engagement with "truth," "being," and other key philosophical issues. When reading this material, the impression is created that they are compacted essays that use the films as lenses through which to discuss a number of personal concerns. Whitehead's contributions to Films and Filming also consisted of reviews of films by Godard. Apart from the review herein of the collaborative Paris vu par . . . , these have been included under "Dossier: Godard." Reviewed by: Thomas the Imposter Peter Whitehead Thomas the Imposter. Directed by Georges Franju. Produced by Eugene Lepicier. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau, Georges Franju, Michel Worms and Raphael Cluzel from the novel by Jean Cocteau. Director of photography, Marcel Fradetal. Editor, Gilbert Natot. Music, Georges Auric. Art director, Claude Pignot. A Filmel production, distributed by Amanda French. English subtitles. Original title, Thomas l'Imposteur. Cert A. 93 mins. The Princess de Bormes, Emmanuelle Riva; Pesquel-Duport, Jean Servais; Thomas, Fabrice Ronleau; Henriette, Sophie Dares; Doctor Vernes, Michel Vitold; Mme. Valiche, Rosy Varte; Dr. Gentil, Bernard Lavalette; Aunt Thomas, H Dieudonne; The Bishop, J. R. Caussimon; Elderly man at the ball, Andre Melies; The nurse, Edith Scob; Captain Roy, Edouard Dermithe; Narrator, Jean Marais. In 1918 Tristan Tzara wrote, in his introduction to Dada that "we have repudiated all the distinctions between life and poetry; our poetry was a matter of living"—and at about the same time, Alfred Jarry, with this is as his philosophy, identified himself with Pere Ubu until he was indistinguishable from his creation.1 Four years later, Jean Cocteau wrote his novel Thomas l'Imposteur about the First World War in which he describes his young hero's death with these words—"Thomas thought, I will be lost if I do not act as if I'm dead. But in Thomas, fiction and reality had become one." Thomas is a young poet who, instead of writing poetry, lives it. To escape the reality of war and his untenable duty to be a soldier in it, he imagines himself to be someone else, just as in a similar way perhaps, Cocteau himself while serving at the same front with the Marine riflemen, may have dreamed away the time creating his character Thomas. Cocteau gave the rights to Franju to make the film of his novel, saying that he'd sooner be betrayed by him than anyone else. The master has been served very well. One image in Franju's film, however, accidentally creates an experience in which fiction and reality become simultaneous. A terrified horse gallops through the surrealistic ruins of a town, vainly trying to escape the flames of its own burning mane. In the context of the film, the image has tremendous power and works with almost archetypal immediacy. But coincident with this "reading" is a second one, for we suddenly realise that the horse is a real horse and not just a "horse in a film"—it's not a horse acting!—it really is a frightened horse whose terror has been inflicted upon it by a film unit making a film. Whether or not this is justified is another question but, for a second or so, the reality of the film, the illusion, is breached; its reality is transcended by the image. We suffer for the horse both as an imaginary one and a real one. Such a moment is a Cocteau illumination, and for Franju too it would be an experience in which "surrealism" becomes real, when its use is justified. It is not surprising after the unbelievable horrors of the First World War that soon after, poets should speculate on the nature of the tenuous...

<i>The Sergeant</i> (review)

Films and Filming Reviews, 1966-1969 Peter Whitehead Between 1966 and 1969, Peter Whitehead wrote a series of reviews for the British film magazine Films and Filming. The magazine had begun in 1954 and would be published monthly up until 1990. At the time of Whitehead's involvement, it was edited by the respected cinema journalist Robin Bean and was noted for publishing the work of critics such as Raymond Durgnat. In his own critical writing, Whitehead places emphasis less on the technical aspects of the films under his consideration than on the extent of their engagement with "truth," "being," and other key philosophical issues. When reading this material, the impression is created that they are compacted essays that use the films as lenses through which to discuss a number of personal concerns. Whitehead's contributions to Films and Filming also consisted of reviews of films by Godard. Apart from the review herein of the collaborative Paris vu par . . . , these have been included under "Dossier: Godard." Reviewed by: Thomas the Imposter Peter Whitehead Thomas the Imposter. Directed by Georges Franju. Produced by Eugene Lepicier. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau, Georges Franju, Michel Worms and Raphael Cluzel from the novel by Jean Cocteau. Director of photography, Marcel Fradetal. Editor, Gilbert Natot. Music, Georges Auric. Art director, Claude Pignot. A Filmel production, distributed by Amanda French. English subtitles. Original title, Thomas l'Imposteur. Cert A. 93 mins. The Princess de Bormes, Emmanuelle Riva; Pesquel-Duport, Jean Servais; Thomas, Fabrice Ronleau; Henriette, Sophie Dares; Doctor Vernes, Michel Vitold; Mme. Valiche, Rosy Varte; Dr. Gentil, Bernard Lavalette; Aunt Thomas, H Dieudonne; The Bishop, J. R. Caussimon; Elderly man at the ball, Andre Melies; The nurse, Edith Scob; Captain Roy, Edouard Dermithe; Narrator, Jean Marais. In 1918 Tristan Tzara wrote, in his introduction to Dada that "we have repudiated all the distinctions between life and poetry; our poetry was a matter of living"—and at about the same time, Alfred Jarry, with this is as his philosophy, identified himself with Pere Ubu until he was indistinguishable from his creation.1 Four years later, Jean Cocteau wrote his novel Thomas l'Imposteur about the First World War in which he describes his young hero's death with these words—"Thomas thought, I will be lost if I do not act as if I'm dead. But in Thomas, fiction and reality had become one." Thomas is a young poet who, instead of writing poetry, lives it. To escape the reality of war and his untenable duty to be a soldier in it, he imagines himself to be someone else, just as in a similar way perhaps, Cocteau himself while serving at the same front with the Marine riflemen, may have dreamed away the time creating his character Thomas. Cocteau gave the rights to Franju to make the film of his novel, saying that he'd sooner be betrayed by him than anyone else. The master has been served very well. One image in Franju's film, however, accidentally creates an experience in which fiction and reality become simultaneous. A terrified horse gallops through the surrealistic ruins of a town, vainly trying to escape the flames of its own burning mane. In the context of the film, the image has tremendous power and works with almost archetypal immediacy. But coincident with this "reading" is a second one, for we suddenly realise that the horse is a real horse and not just a "horse in a film"—it's not a horse acting!—it really is a frightened horse whose terror has been inflicted upon it by a film unit making a film. Whether or not this is justified is another question but, for a second or so, the reality of the film, the illusion, is breached; its reality is transcended by the image. We suffer for the horse both as an imaginary one and a real one. Such a moment is a Cocteau illumination, and for Franju too it would be an experience in which "surrealism" becomes real, when its use is justified. It is not surprising after the unbelievable horrors of the First World War that soon after, poets should speculate on the nature of the tenuous...

Het Nederlandse filmtijdschrift en de markt

<strong>The Dutch film magazine and the market</strong> In the United States, fan magazines formed an integral part of the film industry from the early 1910s onwards. The reciprocal relationship between film press and the cinema trade in a small country such as the Netherlands has hardly been studied. This contribution explores the history of the film magazine in the context of the Dutch film industry (circa 1920-1960). The most flourishing era of the film magazine was during the interwar years. Entrepreneur Pier Westerbaan combined the roles of journalist, publisher and printer in producing the fan magazine <em>Cinema en theater</em>, a trade journal, as well as many other printed materials such as programmes, posters and periodicals. His good network in the cinema business community, and the broad, general interest formula of his fan magazine both contributed to Westerbaan's success. The period after World War II proved to be less prosperous: popular film periodicals had relatively short lifespans, and after 1952 no Dutch fan magazine of substance appeared for decades. Further to the fan magazines aimed at the general movie-going audiences, more marginal, specialized journals have appeared since the 1920s, targeted at specific niche markets of cinephiles and Catholics. These journals did not have strong ties to the Dutch cinema industry as a commercial undertaking.

A prequel to Nollywood: South African photo novels and their pan-African consumption in the late 1960s

This article interrogates the history of the photo novel in Africa with particular reference to African Film, a magazine of almost pan-African circulation, published between 1968 and 1972 in South Africa. Featuring the adventures of Lance Spearman, an African crime fighter, the magazine was read widely across Anglophone Africa, from Nigeria and Ghana to South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. After a brief introduction to the history of the photo novel, the author discusses the production, content, reception, and legacy of the Lance Spearman photo novels. It is argued that Lance Spearman may be understood as a crossover of James Bond and Philip Marlowe, and several influences from contemporary Western popular culture are traced. Contemporary readers cherished the visual modernity of the photo novels and readily identified with their stylish and street-wise main character. It is argued that African Film magazine played an important (today almost forgotten) role within the history of visual media in Africa. It was instrumental in spreading the new format of the photo novel to many Anglophone post-colonies, where it subsequently was ‘vernacularized’. Photo novels served as surrogates for films, as a means to tell almost film-like stories, at a time when commercial African cinema was not yet invented. In terms of its commercial orientation, its readiness to borrow from Western popular culture, its transportability, and its almost pan-African circulation, African Film magazine may be called a distant forerunner of the current commercial video film industry of Nigeria.

First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland

In 1930s Finland the new medium of the sound film was regarded as an essential part of modern culture. After the advent of sound, the domestic film industry flourished and the development of the national cinema became the subject of a lively debate in popular film magazines. A large part of this discussion was centred on the screenplay. The choice of suitable subject matter and important themes were investigated, as were the special requirements of the craft for the writer. In this article I explore how screenwriting and the screenwriter were constantly defined and redefined in public discussion in film magazines during the decade and how this discussion influenced the formation of the identity of the screenwriting profession.

Out of the Shadows: The Impact of the First World War on the Status of Studio Cameramen in France

Toward the end of the First World War, film magazines began to identify cameramen as artist-creators, and as the new right-hand men of film directors. Their gradual emergence from anonymity testifies to this new and improved status, which contrasts with the scant recognition accorded to cameramen prior to the conflict. In the course of four years of war, the way in which film-studio cameramen were perceived underwent a profound change. This article examines the details of this progressive transformation, culminating in 1918 when the name of a cameraman, Leonce-Henry Burel, first appeared in the credits of a French film (Abel Gance's La Dixieme Symphonie ).

Cinema in the City: Tangible Forms, Transformations and the Punctuation of Everyday Life

In India, cinema does not exist merely on the screen; it permeates everyday life. Just as formula films are punctuated with song and dance, fantastic interludes which at times break from the narrative to express the dreams, wishes and desires—in short the “inner-world” [Kakar 1980] of characters—everyday life in India may be seen to be punctuated with the fantasy world of cinema. If popular Indian cinema is indeed a “collective fantasy” or “group daydream…containing the unconscious material and hidden wishes of a vast number of people” [Kakar 1980: 12], what is to be made of the images from this fantasy world which populate the urban landscape? What does cinema's spectacular presence in the Indian city mean for cinema? For urban life? Scholars of film in India have commented on cinema's ubiquity and presence outside the theater, noting the pervasiveness of film music, film fashions and film magazines and of the posters and other visible icons of films, such as “decals, painted signboards, giant movie hoardings [billboards] and towering cut-outs” that clutter urban space [Dickey 2005: 69; see also Dickey 1993]. The colorful posters, “cut-outs” and hoardings which announce a film and which make cinema's presence in the city tangible have been studied as art [Dwyer and Patel 2002] and as advertisements, “circulations and reproductions” of cinema which form a mediascape and which provide urban spectacle [Jacob 1998]. Taking a phenomenological perspective, this essay provides a descriptive analysis of the incorporation of cinema into everyday settings, addressing the significance of this presence in the context of the flow of urban life and for the “extra-cinematic experience” [Spitulnik 2002]. While study of posters and billboards as advertisement acknowledges their intentional role, this essay comments on the unintentional aspects of cinema's visual and tangible presence outside the theater, and the kinds of reaction and interaction it attracts.

Film Melayu: Nationalism, modernity and film in a pre-World War Two Malay magazine

Prior to World War Two many of the Malay-language films released in Singapore and Malaya were made in Java and the Philippines. Beginning in 1940 the Shaw Brothers began producing Malay films in Singapore for distribution to their theatre network throughout Malaya. The first Malay film magazine,Film Melayu, which began publishing in May 1941, documented the production and release of a number of these pre-war films in Singapore, providing one of the few avenues for a better understanding of the origins of Malay cinema. More importantly, this periodical was firmly ensconced within the Malay publishing community and thus reflects debates over issues ranging from the proper script to use in publishing to technology and its relationship to the nation (or community, bangsa).

Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8

Anywhere But the Home: The Promiscuous Afterlife of Super 8

On the Relationship between Japanese Language Instruction and Didactic Films in the Showa Pre-World War II Period : Some Considerations on the Debates in the Film Magazines in 1930&apos;s Japan

On the Relationship between Japanese Language Instruction and Didactic Films in the Showa Pre-World War II Period : Some Considerations on the Debates in the Film Magazines in 1930&apos;s Japan

Philistines and Cinephiles: The New Deal

1. There is first a problem with French word which, as Genevieve Sellier1 and Noel Burch have shown,2 is a modernist, formalist, and masculine attachment to cinema-and not at all, thus, equivalent of love of cinema. of De Baecque (whose book is an essay, and not rigorous ethnological study of a behavior), is a Parisian version of this cinephilia. And it has not varied since time of Cahiers du cinema (the 1950/1960s): there is still a cult of Great Men (the Auteurs), esotericism, aestheticism, sexism, and especially a disgust for of others, in words of Pierre Bourdieu. One sees it clearly when one talks to a Parisian critic:3 he/she conforms still to Baudelairian model of the one who knows (how to appreciate Modernity), above vulgar taste of public. It is amusing, in this sense, to read petition that Jean Douchet wrote at time of bad financial press about Cahiers, titled future of Cahiers du which was published in various journals in April 2008: The cinema concerns us all in a pressing way: artists, philosophers, writers, filmmakers, critics, actors, directors of festivals. . It lacks only one category of people: those who are not part of this little world, that is to say, common mortals! 2. Then, there is love of cinema, which is, alas, called in France popular (while it is cinephilia a la De Baecque that would have to be called elitist cinephilia, in order to leave term to refer alone to love of cinema). This love has existed for a very long time, and was always organized as a personal or collective cult, whether by reader responses of film magazines from 1930s or cine-clubs of 1940s.4 Today, in France, it is found still in magazines (Premiere, Studio, and all specialist revues, like Mad Movies, for gore, which prints every month as many copies as Cahiers du cinema). But there are practices added now: discussion sites and forums on Internet, which make more or less public debate of fans around their favorite films, and screening (also more or less collective) of DVDs, their loan, and their exchange. passage from theater screen to TV screen also bears a sociological importance, since one no longer has to live in center of a large city to see rare films. However, these technologies do not change fundamentally esprit de culte, which remains same as in other spheres of art.5 3. central paradigm of cinephilies is always same. In elitist cinephilia, it is always Kantian aesthetic, based on intuition, ineffable, immediate sense of dealing with an Artist or an Artwork.6 In popular cinephilia, it is always expertise. An expert is someone who has experience: he has seen many films and discusses especially qualities of one in relation to qualities of other. For example, to make a sociological observation in manner of Becker,7 one can learn to love films of kung fu only after having seen some hundreds of kung fu films, so that one can detect small differences that confer value on one film and mediocrity on another. Otherwise, one remains a philistine, not a cinephile. But technological changes of these last twenty-five years favor largely this paradigm of expertise: it has effectively become easy (either legally, or illegally) to see entire filmographies. One can order or pirate on Internet some thousands of films once impossible to find, and acquire an enormous culture in several months. As for miscegenous character of new cinephilia, whose members like equally films, TV series, and video clips, that is not either: young Turks of Nouvelle Vague were obsessed by literature, almost more than by cinema. 4. This changes something for history of styles. Thanks to multiplication of cable stations, television spectator can acquire more encyclopedic competence than authors of official histories of cinema, who wrote at a time when it was difficult to see everything. …

The motion picture story magazine and the origins of popular British film culture

This article explores the reasons for the establishment of the first popular film magazines in 1911. It looks at the priorities underpinning the invention of their main contents – the ‘motion picture story’ – in the United States and the reasons for creating a UK version, and relates the emergence of this most vital aspect of a new, nationally uniform, popular film culture to the transformations in the British and American film industries that occurred between 1908 and 1911.

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Spanish National Cinema

This study examines the discourses of nationalism as they intersected or clashed with Spanish film production from its inception to the present. While the book addresses the discourses around filmmakers such as Almodovar and Medem, whose work has achieved international recognition, Spanish National Cinema is particularly novel in its treatment of a whole range of popular cinema rarely touched on in studies of Spanish cinema. Using accounts of films, popular film magazines and documents not readily available to an English-speaking audience, as well as case studies focusing on the key issues of each epoch, this volume illuminates the complex and changing relationship between cinema and Spanish national identity.