Film Makers Research Articles

“The inanimate becomes animate”: Loie Fuller, speculative feminist aesthetics, and posthuman embodiment

How can we know the dancer from the dance? —William Butler YeatsAt the close of the nineteenth century, Gabreille Bloch (1878–19?), experimental choreographer and film maker, described the dancing ...

I.1. Introduction psychologique et historiographique

European countries who participated in WWII remember the conflict as a trauma born out of defeat, collaboration, and genocide. In Switzerland, however, the war is seen as an extraordinary success in the fact of extreme circumstances. The country’s neutrality and army play a central role in this interpretation. These two factors inspired the Swiss to present a united front against the Nazi aggressors, a threat that the country decided to confront using a long-term approach. Writers, journalists, and film makers were the first to question this version of events after 1968, especially with respect to Switzerland’s economic cooperation with Nazi Germany. It was only much later, in the 1990s, and under international pressure that the Swiss were forced to consider that their country might have been complicit in the genocide. Recent research, including that of the Bergier Commission, led to the conclusion that sovereignty and neutrality, even in the face of a genocidal regime, carried darker consequences for the Swiss than their humanitarian mission would imply.

New Technologies of Representation, Collaborative Autoethnographies, and “Taking it Public”: An Example From “Facilitating Communication on Sexual Topics in Education”

New technologies for representing and communicating autoethnographies make it possible to be publicly visible in new and interesting ways that weren’t possible prior to the digital revolution. An important ingredient in this process is the Internet platforms that can make the digitization of performances accessible across the world, even for short, modest creations from less experienced digital storytellers and film makers. As an illustration of the potential applications of digital technologies for “taking” autoethnographic research to the “public,” and making our research accessible to a wider audience, we share “Reverberations,” a collaborative autoethnography exploring bullying, homophobia, and other types of sexual harassment and associated feelings of shame, embarrassment, and fear which often surround these topics.

Scales and Perspectives of Resilience: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Tange’s Peace Memorial

Resilience can mean a range of things, including the ability of a city or a community to recover quickly both physically and socially, through tangible and intangible elements, physical structures, and people. Built environment scholars have picked up on the concept of resilience in recent years, interpreting it in multiple ways and creating a broad range of narratives. These narratives need to be explored critically, considering who wrote them at what time for what audience and with what narrative goals. This article explores how various actors—from architects to film makers, from historians to politicians and planners —have consciously proposed a range narratives of resilience through their depictions of post World War II Hiroshima. It first briefly reflects on the meaning of resilience. It then builds upon earlier examinations of the destruction of Hiroshima and the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Peace Memorial Museum by the Japanese architect Tange Kenzō to explore how different actors conceived of resilience, for whom and from which perspective they have built narratives. In the second section, the article explores how Tange and his team managed to bring their project to realization. It suggests that administrators, architects and urbanists, have used rebuilding visions and detailed reports to create resilience narratives aimed respectively at global and local audiences. Overall, the text demonstrates that together, disaster and rebuilding, their representation in the urban environment are all part of larger societal constructions of historical identity.

The Intersemiosis of Negative Emotions in the Cinematic Discourse: a Psycholinguistic Perspective

This study of the psycholinguistic properties of negative emotions in the English cinematic feature discourse focuses on the establishment of their intersemiosis – the simultaneous multimodal construction of emotional meanings by means of heterogeneous sign systems. The means of meaning construction in the cinematic discourse include linguistic, non-linguistic (prosody, kinesics, etc.) and extra-linguistic (music and kineikonic means), and different modes – acoustic and visual channels for transmitting meanings. The main psycholinguistic properties of cinematic emotions are their inextricable connection with the physiological processes, rootedness in the common human embodied experience, motivational basis; emotions are read as the result of an assessment of the satisfaction degree of individuals’ needs. The construction of emotional meanings in the cinematic discourse is the result of the interaction between the real world of the film makers and the imaginary world of the action. In constructing negative emotional meanings in general and emotions of fear and anger, in particular, the collective author of the cinematic discourse uses different semiotic codes in a parity or non-parity way. In the first case, heterogeneous semiotic codes both serve to denote fear or anger, while in the second, advantage is given to one of heterogeneous codes – linguistic, non- linguistic, and extra-linguistic. Consequently, this leads to the domination of one of the modes of transmitting meanings to the collective viewer – acoustic or visual. According to the coherence parameter of the emotional meaning embodied by various means of the semiosis of fear or anger, individual episodes of the English cinematic feature discourse are either congruent or non-congruent. Being congruent, different codes simultaneously transmit the same emotional meaning; being incongruent, heterogeneous semiotic codes actualize different emotional meanings, which leads to higher expressiveness of such emotions and their more effective influence on the viewer.

국내 영화 독립 제작사 리더 필름 영상디자인 표현에 관한 연구 - 국내 개봉한 역대 천만관객 한국영화 중심으로 -

국내 영화 독립 제작사 리더 필름 영상디자인 표현에 관한 연구 - 국내 개봉한 역대 천만관객 한국영화 중심으로 -

Documenting a People yet to Be Named: History of a Bar Hostess

The paper focuses on Imamura Shōhei’s History of Post-War Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon Sengoshi—Madamu Onboro no Seikatsu), a documentary released for general viewing in 1970. The subject of the documentary was Azaka Emiko, the uninhibited middle-aged owner of the bar Onboro in the port city of Yokosuka, home to a U.S. naval base. Emiko embodied the phantasmagoric (chimimōryō) lowlifes who inhabited the nooks and crannies of Japanese cities and went about their lives without resentment or guilt, unburdened by familial responsibility and social norms that fascinated Imamura. While other intellectuals and film makers were obsessing about the status of Japanese democracy, Imamura chose to focus on people such as Emiko to identify the psychological and moral changes undergone by the Japanese people during three decades of post-war recovery and growth.

War, Snipers, and Rage from <em>Enemy at the Gates</em> to <em>American Sniper</em>

Shooting people, murder and war are inherently violent activities to which the concept of rage might seem inextricably linked, but deeper examination reveals levels of complexity. Despite what we often perceive, soldiers are actually trained to operate in a calm and dispassionate manner. This is especially the case for military snipers, who perform the role of hiding in the battlefield, waiting for the chance to take single aimed shots to kill an unsuspecting enemy. My study examines the concept of rage and compares the level of rage in the film American Sniper (2014), set in the Iraq war with that of Enemy at the Gates (2001), set during the siege of Stalingrad in the Second World War. I argue that a form of controlled rage can be seen in the world of the sniper, and I set this against the acceptance of violence in an America where mass shootings appear to be an ever-growing expression of individual rage.

How to Fight Fair Use Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt: The Experience of One Open Educational Resource

At the launch of one of the early online open educational resources (OER) in 2002, the approach to addressing copyright was uncertain. Did the university or the faculty own their material? How would the third-party material be handled? Was all of its use considered fair use under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act (Title 17, United States Code) because of its educational purpose? Or was permission-seeking necessary for this project to succeed and protect the integrity of faculty and university? For many years, this OER was conservative in its approach to third-party material, avoiding making fair use claims on the theory that it was too risky and difficult to prove in the face of an infringement claim. Additionally, being one of the early projects of its kind, there was fear of becoming a target for ambitious copyright holders wanting to make headlines (and perhaps win lawsuits). It was not until 2009 that the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare was written by a community of practitioners who believed that if fair use worked for documentary film makers, video creators, and others (including big media), it worked in open education as well. Once this Code was adopted, universities and institutions were able to offer more rich and complete course content to their users than before. This paper explains how it happened at this early open educational resource offering.

The unusual properties of liquid helium

Each year since 1925, one UCLA faculty member has been selected to present the Faculty Research Lecture. In 1976, Isadore Rudnick was so honored. As an experimentalist, Izzy chose to make his presentation a lecture demonstration, like those of Michael Faraday’s famous Christmas presentations at the Royal Society in London. This required that an entire low-temperature laboratory be recreated on the stage of Schoenberg Hall, including a transparent Dewar vessel. The success of those live demonstrations, and the fact that two of Izzy’s sons were film makers, prompted him to make a 17-min film version of those demonstrations. That film won the award for best Technical and Scientific Film at the 21st Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, in 1977. Also, at this same time, the Cultural Revolution in China had ended, and Izzy was one of the first U.S. physicists invited to lecture there. As a gift to his Chinese hosts, he had this film translated into Mandarin. Due to the scarcity of the material available for those early Chinese television broadcasts, the film was played frequently, and Izzy became a TV celebrity throughout China. The film, shown in this talk, is included in ASA’s Collected Works of Isadore Rudnick.

Containing Voices of Memory: Lesbianism, Second-Wave Feminism, and the Queer Mnemonic Voice-Outtake in MAKERS: The Women Who Make America

Abstract Applying theories of voice, feminist film and extratextual media studies, and queer rhetorical memory, this article considers how lesbian feminism in the American second-wave feminist movement is remembered in the 2013 documentary film MAKERS: The Women Who Make America. The film minimizes and omits the voices of lesbian women, thereby overlooking the queer memories they express of the feminist movement. Many of these voices are only made accessible through the MAKERS official website, and thus, they become examples of “queer mnemonic voice-outtakes” whose containment on the MAKERS website aids in the negation of queer memories of the feminist past. However, this article also finds that queer feminist memory is presented only through white lesbian women, as the voices of black lesbian feminists featured in MAKERS never provide their own insights into how their sexuality influenced their feminist politics.

“That’s My Life Jacket!” Speculative Documentary as a Counter Strategy to Documentary Taxidermy

ABSTRACTDespite the socially committed attitude many documentary artists take, documentaries often end up underpinning a large-scale epistemological enterprise linked to global capitalism and Western colonialism (H. Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” Re-visiones (2011) www.re-visiones.net). Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017), an award-winning documentary about the “refugee crisis”, provides an insightful case study. The film’s well-intended activism becomes a mere trope that does not prompt any change. The formal strategies deployed do not address the power differentials between the filmmakers and their subjects, so that neither subjects nor viewers are left with any form of agency. In contrast, this article argues for embracing a speculative form of documentary which puts the messiness at its heart that is typical of the relations between representation and reality, between the West and its constructed “others”. Acknowledging the impossibility to access the real in an unmediated manner, the authors believe in the intertwining of ethics and form; and in the transformative potential of art. Inspired by the pioneers of documentary art and drawing from their own practice-based research as film and theatre makers, the authors hope to offer an insight into some of the speculative documentary’s possible counter-strategies to go against the grain of taxidermic, image-positivist mainstreams.

Editor's Introduction

The field of Asian feminist media studies is inchoate and under-defined. Despite increasing archival endeavors to excavate women's work in early to mid-twentieth-century film and media cultures in Asia and continuous scholarly attention to the accomplishments of contemporary Asian women film and media makers, a concerted, in-depth reexamination of women's media work in different parts of Asia has been lacking. This has to do with fundamental difficulties in cognitively mapping the field—difficulties stemming from multifarious modes of practice that resist generalization, limited availability of primary and archival materials, and continuous anxiety with universalized Western critical discourses. These are further compounded by the complex and shifting parameters of what counts as “Asia,” given its mind-boggling linguistic, religious, historical, and regional diversity, and its constantly shifting gender and ethnic politics—all unfolding in relation to divergent yet more or less shared colonial experiences and postcolonial participation in (or resistance to) globalization. That is to say, every word in the field designation “Asian feminist media,” comes loaded with both overdetermined and under-determined significations, such that any attempt to develop one-size-fits-all narratives would be not only impossible but also misdirected. With this special issue (five articles and one interview), our collective goal is to tentatively map a critical understanding of Asian feminist media authorship, including its formation, articulation, self-reflection, reconstruction, and ramifications. We stress this authorship as stemming from multiple intersections—in situated geopolitics (both intra-Asian and between Asia and what is conventionally seen as non-Asia), in theoretical assemblage (resulting from the clash with Western theoretical hegemony), in historical and sociopolitical constructions of gender identity (in relation to national, regional, racial and ethnic, and other dimensions of identities), in intermedial exploration (encompassing film, television, and video), and finally in institutional infrastructure (including the practitioners' education, multichannel fund-raising, polylocal production, and transnational exhibition). I unpack these intersections …

Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called weak event. Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's gathering torrents. We were only just beginning to stockpile our algorithmic future. There is of course a strong human element to all of this as well, as domesticity was about to be transformed in ways not seen since the automation of white goods in the 1950s. Installing a telephone line in a new rental was a priority as this was not just a communication device but a gateway to a new digital epoch (chat rooms, conspiracy theories, gaming mods and a seemingly limitless archive of music). Australians, who would become the new suitors of the boom in computer peripherals and digital gadgetry, turned the latent ability to send short text messages from their mobile phones into a new form of digital dialectics. Meanwhile, the cinema was signalling a grave warning of what all of this might mean if we could indeed become virtual, if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself. From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These mid-nineties films tapped a rich vein of paranoia around the new vanguard of networked information and computer-generated image making while also expressing - in often garish terms - a deep anxiety about a not-to-distant future crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

Transformation of Shangai at the beginning of the New China. Observations from two sino-soviet coproductions

Since the Second Opium War, Shanghai was designated as a trading port, and because of its coastal location, the city became an isolated island. Its different from the backwardnessof China’s semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. Shanghai’s «capitalization» is more serious, and social culture is very special. It is a difficult point for a new regime to besupported in the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This article examines the publicity screenings of the two documentaries in 1950, «The Victory of the Chinese People» (中国人民的胜利) and «The Liberated China» (解放了的中 国), and analyzes how the two Sino-Soviet documentaries have attracted widespread attention. How did the new regime deploy the film industry’s work, talks about the direction of the «film maker» and the «imager» identification mechanism, from the expression of the phenomenon-level viewing to explore Shanghai people’s political identity facing the new China.

The Long Run: A Story About Filmmaking as Qualitative Research

Against the logic that if you aren’t a film maker, you shouldn’t make films, we hope to shed light on why qualitative researchers might consider a filmmaking journey. Research-based films are an accessible genre through which to raise issues in an empowering way, about the lives of stigmatized and marginalized people. For us, a vital step in the production of films has been through writing stories and songs. As a reflexive resource, a song anchors a researcher in a multidimensional way to events and relationships. We use a storytelling format here to illuminate these interrelated processes while giving support to the philosophy of “slow” scholarship.

Current Trends in Tamil Cinema and its Impact

The “CINEMA” is a mesmerizing word for the Tamil Audience and it is ruling the hearts and houses for more than 100 years. The larger than life images have played a major role in the socio, political and cultural lives of the people of Tamil Nadu. The images have participated in all emotion of the audience, when the nation was fighting for freedom, the images have spelled “Vanthe Matharam”, during the festival the images have sung “Unnaikandu Naan Aada… Ullasam Pongum inba Deepavali”, during the world war the images have narrated “Andhanal”. When television was entered, the cinema has embarrassed and made television as supplement screen. When people had communal riot, the cinema presented “BOMBAY”, at the time of water scarcity the screen offered “Thanneer Thanner”, when we were at romantic mood it screened “16 Vayathinile”, to empower the women and to criticize the male domination it showed “Pudhumai Pen”, it punished the pannyar in Uthiri Pookkal, exposed the life of the innocent tribals in “Mullum Malarum” it brought the historical characters to proximity like “Veera Pandiya Kattabomman”, “Raja Raja Cholan”, It was created docu-fiction on the lives of ethnic groups as “Devar Magan”, “Madhurai Veeran”, “Chinna Gowndar” and “Kala”. Above all the cinema has provided five Chief Ministers to Tamil Nadu assembly. After the implementation of New Economic policy the cinema has faced many obstacles. The satellite television has offered more than 100 channels, the conventional cinema has changed from celluloid to digital, sports become as the core entertainment for the young ones, family audiences have moved away from theatre, ticket prices went up, Mobile brought the digital content to the palm of young audience in spite of all these challenges, the cinema multiplexes have increased, the film productions also have increased in numbers, new film makers are coming in and the Tamil film business have widened its wings to the international spear. The Tamil films are continued to be in the goodwill of Tamil People with the changing screen formats provided by the AMAZON PRIME and the NETFLIKS.

Esmond Bradley Martin, 1941–2018

Esmond Bradley Martin (17 April 1941 to 4 February 2018) was an American geographer who, through extensive fieldwork in Asia, was an authority on the traditional uses of rhino products. He carried out pioneering work from the 1970s investigating the illegal rhino horn and ivory markets to help close them down and save rhinos and elephants. He had been the United Nations Special Envoy for Rhinos in the early 1990s and, in the 2000s, he worked in dangerous markets surveying endangered wildlife commodities for sale. His work helped China ban their domestic rhino horn trade in 1993 and their ivory trade in 2017. Esmond was essentially an optimist, believing that with committed leadership, proper law enforcement and effective management, wild populations of rhinos, elephants and other species could flourish in their natural habitat in Africa and Asia. Born in New York City, Esmond had the most enquiring and persistent mind, always questioning well informed people. His interests ranged from opera, 18th century French furniture and paintings, to travelling and learning about different cultures and demand for endangered animals. From Brooks School in Massachusetts, he went to the University of Arizona receiving a BSc in Agricultural Economics in 1964 followed by an MA for his thesis “The rural land use of Kenya.” In 1971 he completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Liverpool on “The development of Malindi from the Portuguese period to the present.” While in England he collected Africana, enjoying visits to Maggs and other antiquarian bookshops, absorbed by the writings of early explorers in Africa, particularly admiring Burton. He had first been to Africa when he was 18 with his brother on a hunting safari to the Congo, which gave him his initial taste of adventure in Africa. In 1972 he and his wife Chryssee made Kenya their home, living near Nairobi National Park in Langata where he was to be tragically murdered 46 years later. The dhow trade was his first passion, exploring many of the Indian Ocean ports. He wrote Cargoes of the East: The ports, trade and culture of the Arabian Seas and West Indian Ocean in 1978 (reprinted in 2008) and Zanzibar: Tradition and revolution in 1978 (reprinted in 1992 and 2007). From this, he learned about huge quantities of rhino horn smuggled from Africa into North Yemen to make into handles for traditional daggers (jambiyas). The Saudi Arabian oil boom brought wealth to many in North Yemen in the 1970s. This was at a time of civil wars, corruption and mismanagement in much of Africa where rhinos were slaughtered and wiped out from much of their range to meet this demand. He worked tirelessly to close down this market. From 1971 to 1991 Esmond investigated the international trade in rhino products in Africa and Asia. His position as Special Envoy for rhinos for the United Nations Environment Programme in 1992 and 1993 helped to curb the poaching crisis and illegal trade in rhino horn at that time. From the late 1990s he investigated the world's ivory markets, supported mainly by Save the Elephants, and continued to monitor the rhino horn trade for the Aspinall Foundation. His final fieldwork was in Myanmar in December 2017. Esmond's main publications included Run rhino run (Chatto & Windus 1982) written with his wife. Later he co-authored a series of monographs on the ivory trade with Daniel Stiles or myself. Esmond kept copious notebooks and wrote prolifically, always with a fountain pen, producing over 30 books and monographs and more than 350 articles. For many years Esmond was on the Boards of the Kenya Museum Society and the East African Wild Life Society, and selflessly helped with their respective publications, Kenya Past and Present and Swara. He was also a dedicated editorial board member for Pachyderm, the journal of the IUCN SSC African Elephant, African Rhino and Asian Rhino Specialist Groups (and was a member of all three Groups). He believed in “widely disseminating information.” He was often interviewed by the media and advised several wildlife documentary film makers. Such films included “The Rhino War” documentary by Westinghouse TV USA in 1982, National Geographic's “The Rhino War” in 1988, and the BBC TV's “Ivory Wars” in 1989, 2000 and 2012. Esmond was a member of the Association of American Geographers, American Geographical Society, Explorers Club New York, Royal African Society, UK African Studies Association and UK's Fauna and Flora International. He received the Order of the Golden Ark from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1986, and he was a Chartered Geographer awarded in 2003 by the RGS-IBG. He was a life Fellow of the RGS-IBG and an ardent supporter.

Anatomy, Animation, and Visual Effects: The Reciprocal Tools of Biology and Film-Making.

Locomotion studies, biomechanics, and particularly vertebrate paleontology have had a deep influence on the development of motion pictures, animation, and computer generated visual effects. Biologically straightforward concepts such as morphological correlates of diet, sexual dimorphism, and ontogenetic change are powerful tools for animators and visual effects artists. Despite this deep debt to the ever-increasing role of science and technology in film making, scientists often forget to mine the communication strategies of their science-savvy entertainment industry kin. Further, many of the tools of the film industry are making a direct impact on basic research or have the potential to do so. It is becoming increasingly clear as part of the overall outreach for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ("STEM"), scientists must inform and engage with the public. Significantly, many of the concepts and stories we offer as useful to film makers are compelling stories to offer to our own students. And these can be as compelling to the public as the entertainment they often facilitate. Whereas STEM is critically important, adding "A"-art-as in the artistic strategies from the fields of animation and visual effects to produce "STEAM" helps to build a potentially unstoppable tool for science communication and the public good.

Hacer, explicar, enseñar cine. Didáctica y epistemología de la creación fílmica

La relación entre teoría y práctica en los estudios académicos cinematográficos sufre un estado de segregación y distanciamiento que es causa y efecto de una profunda crisis de entendimiento entre académicos y cineastas. Sin embargo, esta crisis no puede afrontarse, en primer lugar, desde la asunción de esa dicotomía intelectual entre el ellos y el nosotros ―desde dondequiera que se sitúe la otredad en el enfoque―, ni tampoco desde la observación de ningún conflicto radical entre ambos mundos profesionales del cine, ya que ese conflicto, al menos de forma manifiesta, no existe. ¿Qué perspectivas didáctica y epistémica genera esta situación de cara a los estudios fílmicos y cinematográficos? ¿Cómo se puede enseñar cine en estas circunstancias? En el presente artículo se analiza esta controvertida situación y se acentúa la necesidad de romper esta dicotomía para resituar el foco de atención en las condiciones necesarias y existentes para explicar y poder trascender, desde una perspectiva epistémica y sustancialmente didáctica, esa aparente distancia entre dos caras de una misma moneda que llamamos cine.