Film Theory Research Articles

Music as an Element of Director’s Screen Language. Part 1. Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone: Creating a Musical Image as Basis for Creative Tandem

The purpose of the article is to determine the peculiarities of using music in the screen plane through the study of artistic tandems of director-composer. Research methodology. The methods of scientific analysis, comparison, and generalisation were comprehensively applied in the development of the topic. Analytical and systematic methods in their unity were used to consider the art historical aspect of the problem. The scientific novelty of the research is that the director's creativity is studied in the context of composers’ practices of creating music for audio-visual art; the appropriateness of using a systematic method in studying the peculiarities of composers' creativity in the context of audio-visual art and production has been proven. Conclusions. The materials presented in the article expand the arsenal of knowledge regarding the specifics of co-creation of a director and a composer in the screen arts and enable their application in educational courses, creation of educational and methodological literature on the theory and history of music, film and television, directing, and composition.
 Key words: musical art, composer, screen art, directing creativity, musical image, creative tandem, musical instruments.

Introduction: ‘Different (Everyone is So)’: conceptualisations of Russian and Russophone queer cinema in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT In the introduction I conceptualise cinematic narratives of difference and queerness, and the ways in which the queer lens has been used in contemporary Russian and Russophone cinema to interrogate cultural politics, identity and belonging. I also demonstrate how a queer optic facilitates discussions about the complexity of the terms ‘Russian’ and ‘Russophone’ vis-à-vis other cultural identities and queer subjectivities, emphasising the transnational, poly-cultural nature of Russian culture, with queer individuals playing an important role in de-colonising ‘Russia’. In particular, I discuss spaces and geographies of queer experience in relation to new centres and practices of filmmaking in the RF. I showcase the diversity of queer cinematic expressions, pointing at the ways in which the canon of Russian cinema could be revised. The interdisciplinary, multi-scalar analysis interrogates a range of discourses – academic, film criticism, media and politics – and phenomena such as cultural industry and institutions, cultural politics, sociology of queerness, and technology. Making use of a number of examples, I put forward a vision for a theory of contemporary Russian and Russophone queer cinema which expands the knowledge of (world) queer cinemas and (queer) world cinemas.

Frame Design in Visual Culture of Contemporary Filmmaking.

The purpose of the article is to define the artistic and aesthetic toolkit of frame design in the visual culture of auteur film directing. Research methodology. In developing the topic, an integrated approach was applied, in particular, the methods of systematisation, comparison, verification, comparative and textual analysis were used. The analytical method and the method of figurative and stylistic analysis in their unity were aimed to consider the art historical aspect of the problem. The scientific novelty of the research is that the director's creativity is studied in the context of the visual culture of frame design and for the first time became the subject of a special study. The appropriateness of using the systematic method in studying the features of the author's plastic film language has been proven. A comprehensive analysis has been conducted and the features of frame design in the author's film work have been revealed. Conclusions. The materials presented in the study expand the arsenal of knowledge about the specifics of the visual culture of the author's film language in various worldview models and enable their application in educational courses, the creation of educational and methodological literature on the theory and history of cinema and television, directing. Key words: visual culture, author's cinematography, director, frame, design, screen art, composition, colour.

Wallmapu in Contemporary Chilean Cinema

Chilean cinema has developed alongside the political changes of the past decade. Its aesthetic is one of discordance or disjuncture (desajuste), in which political and social issues seep into the country’s films through a variety of formal practices. Films made between 2010 and 2020 oscillate between an adherence to realism and the principle of “processualism” (procesualidad) as a way of revealing the mechanisms of representation and thus highlighting their own mediation. This article examines such an aesthetic of disjuncture by studying the cinematic representation of the conflict between the state and the Indigenous Mapuche people through the films El verano de los peces voladores (The Summer of Flying Fish, Marcela Said, 2013), Mala junta (Bad Influence, Claudia Huaiquimilla, 2016), Rey (King, Niles Atallah, 2017), and Notas para una película (Notes for a Film, Ignacio Agüero, 2022).

Freedom smothered: Gang rape as patriarchal punishment of emancipated women in Yugoslav new film

This paper investigates how women, and their roles in changing Yugoslav society, were represented in Yugoslav New Film (1961-1972). Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia legalized gender equality in the wake of the Second World War, but the tentacles of patriarchy, which were difficult to eradicate, still lingered from pre-socialist times. In many movies there is a recurring pattern of sexual violence towards women. One possible interpretation of depicted sexual violation, for example gang rape in contemporary-themed Yugoslav New Films, is as a patriarchal punishment for emancipation of women in terms of education, work, or their sexuality. In order to examine this, the feature-length fictional films: Povratak/The Return (Živojin Pavlović, 1966) and Horoskop/Horoscope (Boro Drašković, 1969), in which the freedom of women’s emancipation was smothered by gang rape, are selected for the case study and analysed. The films are explored through the lens of feminist film theory, via close reading. Besides, the concept of the gaze is applied. Furthermore, I scrutinise whether these representations of rape and their aftermaths condone, or condemn brutality toward female characters, or have rather ambivalent stance toward it.

Illuminationist cinema: How Islamic mysticism inspired Morteza Avini’s Sacred Defence documentaries of the Iran–Iraq War and his attempt at constructing a film theory

"‘Sacred Defence cinema’ is the official title given to Iranian pro-establishment war films concerning mainly the Iran-Iraq War [1980-1988]. The most prominent figure of this filmmaking movement who both made films and wrote about them was the documentary filmmaker, Morteza Avini [1947-1993]. In his search for a new Islamic inspired cinematic language, Avini argued that Islamic mysticism could inspire a mode of filmmaking which he called ‘illuminationist cinema’. He used this term mainly in order to reflect on the filmmaking techniques he developed and used during the making of his own documentaries, but also proposed it as a filmmaking method to be adopted by other Islamic filmmakers. Avini’s early death in 1993 put a stop to his theorisation of ‘illuminationist cinema’; however, his films and his writings continue to inspire new generations of Iranian propaganda filmmakers. In this paper, by analysing Avini’s films and writings, I lay out a definition of his ‘illuminationist cinema’ and explain what aspects of Islamic mysticism inspired which filmmaking techniques developed and theorised by him. "

Let’s not talk about men: When meaningful female-to-female interaction and dialogue drive higher box office sales

ABSTRACT This study explores two unique aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the perspective of gender diversity in the field of motion pictures and the dimension of inclusion utilizing the Bechdel-Wallace Test (BWT). A production may pass the BWT if a conversation between two women is not about men, hence the conversation is deemed meaningful. Using a consumer-driven data set, we find a positive effect of the BWT on international and total box office sales. The results also show a unique result in the years following the modern #MeToo movement, leading to enhanced box office returns for domestic, international, and total box office sales. Therefore, in addition to contributing to efforts to better understanding the impact of the addition of gender diversity and inclusion on motion picture performance, female characters’ meaningful conversation with other females will likely lead to higher return on producers’ investment in motion pictures. Practical implications and contributions to feminist film theory and theory of planned behavior are discussed.

The Changing Role of Marginalised Women in Hindi Cinema: A Shift from Cinematic Negotiations to Empowerment

Men are shown the most dominant humans in societies and film industries, while women are confined to being the best homemakers, kind mothers and sisters. On the one hand, women have always been marginalised; on the other hand, there is no end to the plights of marginalised women. Dalit women, one section of the marginalised, have been suffering in the patriarchal society of India. Their representation in cinema is not free from flaws. The representation of Dalit women has been grossly victimised in the history of Indian cinema. As Dalit filmmakers have entered the film industry, the role of Dalit women on the screen has changed. However, it is slow-paced. Based on Gayatri Spivak’s theory of ‘Can the subaltern speak’, the present study attempts to understand and analyse the representation of the marginalised. By qualitatively analysing the films— Achhut Kanya, Sujata, Ankur, Sadgati, Bandit Queen, Bawandar, Chauranga, 200 Halla Ho, Madam Chief Minister, Geeli Pucchi and Jhund, the research work tries to navigate the timeline study of the changing roles of marginalised women, Dalit women.

The Surrogacy Literacy of the Indian Surrogate: The Filmy Way

According to narrative theories, fiction and non-fiction literature are text types that can manifest themselves in different mediums. Cinema is a medium that imitates both text types for a screenplay. However, when a non-fiction work is fictionalised for its cinematic representation, it invites urgent and special attention on the social front. This study investigates the sexual, social and economic typecasting of Indian surrogates through the lens of Indian cinema. The landscape of the media texts used for this study ranges from two prevalent practicing modes of surrogacy in India—the traditional form of surrogacy and the gestational form of surrogacy. The traditional form of surrogacy in this article is represented in the movies Doosri Dulhan (1983) and Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001), whereas the movie Mimi (2021) represents the gestational mode of surrogacy. These media texts often represent overtly fictionalised accounts of Indian surrogacy and considerably tamper the authenticated contents of Indian white paper documents on surrogacy. Anindita Majumdar talks about the ‘prostitute surrogate’, a type-casted representation of Indian surrogates, where the character of surrogates is that of sexually provocative women or prostitutes. For scrutinising this prototypical representation of surrogates, the methodological framework of this paper borrows arguments from Aristotle’s theory of mimesis and Seymour Chatman’s narrative theory. The article also advocates a nascent coinage—surrogacy literacy, a literary drive to keep a check on how surrogates are represented in films dealing with sensitive technology like assisted reproduction. The possible changes in such representation due to the new surrogacy law in India are also vital considerations of the article.

“The Hum of the Conversing Audience”: Ordinary Criticism and Film Culture in American Early Film Theory

AbstractThis article seeks to explore the early stages of American film theory, wherecinephiliabecame a site of aesthetic interest and criticism thanks to the theorization of cinema as a conversational medium. Following Stanley Cavell’s analysis of a distinct form of moviegoing in America, based on the casual conversation about movies, I argue that a reinterpretation of Emerson’s ordinary aesthetics has been at the core of early film theory, especially in Vachel Lindsay’s writings. In order to illustrate the relation between the defence of a new medium and the attempt to define a quintessentially American art form, this article focuses on the concept of “conversation” that Lindsay uses to describe film spectatorship and to provide a new critical apparatus to grasp the specificity of film aesthetics.

The cultural politics of race in Chinese cinema: Nationalism and the changing representation of whiteness in Big Shot’s Funeral and Crazy Alien

Research on whiteness in Western cinema has effectively revealed how cinematic representation contributes to formulating, perpetuating, normalizing, and contesting white superiority in Western cultural discourses. However, little research considers how Chinese cinema imagines and negotiates whiteness. Using the visual-textual analysis method, this article examines the representations of white identities in Big Shot’s Funeral (2001, dir. Feng Xiaogang) and Crazy Alien (2019, dir. Ning Hao). These are two well-received post-socialist Chinese dark comedy films depicting encounters between Chinese people and Westerners in contemporary China. Approaching racial identity as a form of social positioning, I analyze how various meanings are ascribed to white identities in the films, and how these meanings articulate Chineseness and Chinese nationalist sentiments. I show that white superiority is simultaneously reinforced and contested in the two films. While doing so, I will also highlight Western cultural theories’ lack of analytical power in explaining how white superiority in cultural discourse transforms across different geographical locations.

Construction and Destruction—Making Delhi World-Class: A Critical Study of Trickster City and A Free Man

In post-independence India, the city has served as a critical site for the negotiation of postcolonial citizenship. As Gyan Prakash has noted, literary and cinematic representations of urban spaces have captured both the promise and the failures of this process (199). In this study, I seek to examine the extent to which the postcolonial neoliberal city in India has delivered on its promise of citizenship for the urban poor, and how literature from the region responds to this issue. To explore these questions, I turn to Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi and Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis which features the works of multiple authors. Both texts offer first-hand accounts of individuals in Delhi who have experienced the effects of neoliberal transformation. These works depict a paradoxical situation: as the city strives to become a world-class metropolis, it simultaneously dispossesses its most vulnerable citizens, who are often the ones contributing their labour to its construction and maintenance. To make sense of this dialectic of construction and destruction, I argue that we must examine the complex interplay between the market, the state, and spatial restructuring. Drawing on the concept of ‘precarity’, as developed by Irene Pang, David Harvey, Kalyan Sanyal, Giorgio Agamben, Amita Baviskar, D. Asher Ghertner, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja, I analyse the mechanisms that contribute to the precariousness experienced by the urban poor in India.
 Keywords: Postcolonial city, precarity, neoliberalism, metropolis, dispossession

HAUNTING THE PSYCHE OF MALAYALI: THE TRADITION OF HORROR IN MALAYALAM CINEMA

Malayalam Cinema is well known for its making of exceptional horror films along with great films in other genres. It is quite interesting that Malayalam Cinema has had a tradition of horror from the beginning. The tradition of horror in Malayalam Cinema starts with A. Vincent’s Bhargavinilayam, released in the year 1964. It is notable that Malayalam Cinema attempted the genre of horror even in its early period.This paper tries to examine how Malayalam cinema deals with horror and thereby creates a say in the culture of Kerala. Interestingly, the culture of Kerala has contributed a lot to the making of Malayalam horror films and it in turn helped in shaping the culture too. So, horror in Malayalam cinema is an area that needs discussion and analysis.The exciting part of the study is that Malayalam Cinema has varied versions of horror. As Kerala is enriched with folklore and stories that engagingly instill horror, it is not surprising that Malayalam films have a say in the horror tradition. Not only that but also, Malayalam Cinema owns different kinds of horror films, each one linked with various cultures that exist/existed in Kerala. The study explores various types of horror films made in Malayalam. The paper also aims to examine the cultural connection that each type holds. Feminist Film theories and psychoanalytic theories provide the foundation for the study.

“Great Historians Are Biological Freaks”: Siegfried Kracauer's Philosophy of History

Abstract This text examines Siegfried Kracauer's unfinished final book, the posthumously published History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969). While Kracauer's Weimar writings have long been celebrated, History, apart from a few key early texts, has only recently been given critical attention. Written in English in New York in the 1960s, the book lies at the intersection of film theory and historical philosophy. One of the key contributions of History, I argue, is that it offers a filmic technology of historical thought that might intervene in the emergent systems of temporal management and control that haunted the 1960s and continue to condition our experience of time to this day. Kracauer's name for his counter-technology is “the anteroom,” and its function is to aid utopian thought and practice, what he calls “the emergence of something new, something beyond the jurisdiction of nature.”

The New Virtuality: A Video Essay on the Disappearing Differences Between Real and Unreal

This video essay explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real-time. Through readings of film and media theory, archival research, textual readings (across paintings, digital art, cinema, performance, VR, apps and architecture) and media archaeology, the essay argues for virtuality as a multi-paradoxical and discombobulating vacillation: believed yet disbelieved; manipulated yet recognisable; realistic yet fake. This renewed understanding of the virtual also signals the pliability of post-truth and its concomitant challenges to frameworks of disbelief, reliability and certainty. It constitutes the new battleground for understanding the politics of current and future realities and histories.

A physics investigation on impedance matching theory in microwave absorption film—Part I. Theory

The mechanism for microwave absorption in a film has previously been numerically verified from the theoretical formula for RL and attributed to angular and amplitude effects with a simple geometrical representation from energy conservation unique to the film. Starting from the case where |RL| = 0, using basic transmission-line theory and mathematics, it is confirmed theoretically here that the mechanism for absorption mechanism in a film, responsible for the minima of the reflection loss RL/dB, is best explained by wave cancelation theory rather than by impedance matching theory. This theoretical proof also reveals that the mechanisms for a film and material are different. The flaws of neglecting the phase effects of interfaces in a film in quarter-wavelength theory are also quantitatively discussed from transmission-line theory. Contrary to the theory held currently, the reported minima of RL/dB originate from phase effects in the film rather than from the resonance peaks for the intrinsic frequencies of a material.

A physics investigation on impedance matching theory in microwave absorption film. II. Problem analyses

In Part I of this work published previously, it was proved from the transmission-line theory that impedance matching (IM) theory should be replaced by wave cancellation theory, film is different from the material, and the phase effects from interfaces should be considered in quarter wavelength theory. In this Part, it is shown that energy penetration for a film cannot be defined and IM is flawed because it cannot be proved theoretically or shown to be consistent with experimental data. The multi-absorption peaks in a film originate from wave cancellation under the constraint of energy conservation rather than from the resonances from the material.

The accented Japanese screenplay: Transnational currents in contemporary Japanese cinema

Japanese cinema in the early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Japanese-language films written by non-Japanese screenwriters. The arrival of these screenwriters and screenplays complicates existing discourses on ‘nation’ and the transnational in Japanese cinema. In particular, it adds to the tensions around East–West binaries that often permeate considerations of non-Japanese contact with cinematic representations of Japan and requires industry practitioners and researchers to re-consider notions of ‘Japan’ and cultural contact in cinema from Japan. Drawing on the concept of ‘accented cinema’, this article positions Japanese screenplays by non-Japanese screenwriters as accented Japanese screenplays. Two such screen texts are critiqued to suggest the dialogic inevitability of polyvocal interpretations of accented Japanese screenplays with regard to issues of privilege and marginalization, as well as the national and the transnational.

“Ja Sagen”: Katakan “Ya” pada Kehidupan (Kajian Narasi Pergulatan Eksistensial dalam Film Theory of Everything)

In the midst of the phenomenon that brings the trap and temptation to say “no” to life, Theory of Everything movie comes against it. The study tracks the narrative of existential twists in the film Theory of Everything (2014) which tells the life journey of famous science writer Stephen Hawking. This study uses the existentialism approach with the Clark and Braunn thematic analysis techniques. The existential themes that are exposed include: 1) faith and destiny; 2) freedom of will, choosing to live or die; 3) the empowering love; 4) suffering as an integral part of living; 5) humor, self-acceptance and achievement. All these themes can be summarized in the statement that life, however sweet and bitter, must still be lived. “Ja Sagen”: Say “yes” to life.

After the "Great Studio Pullback of ’08": Late Indiewood and American Independent Film Theatrical Distribution in the Age of Streaming (2008-2019)

This article surveys the field of American independent film theatrical distribution in the years following the so-called “great studio pullback of ’08” and until the end of the second decade of the 21st Century. Within the space of less than three years (2008–2010), three of the “Big Six” conglomerated Hollywood majors shuttered five of their specialty film divisions, which had been members of a small cadre of companies that dominated the independent film sector from the mid-1990s to that time. The dominance of these companies had relied heavily on their adoption of a filmmaking model that was identified as “indiewood” and entailed the finance, production and distribution of a fairly distinct category of films with particular characteristics. The closure of these companies made it clear that the independent film sector was changing, and the article surveys specifically the field of theatrical distribution from 2008 to 2019 with a view to understanding how this change occurred. In seeking to identify the nature of the impact of the closure of these companies on the domestic theatrical distribution landscape, the article addresses such questions as whether the closure of these studio subsidiaries signalled the end of indiewood; whether a new type of specialty film replaced indiewood as the dominant paradigm in American independent film theatrical distribution; if other companies have taken the place of the shuttered studio specialty film divisions; and how important the theatrical market still is in the age of streaming. In addressing these questions, the article provides a comprehensive account of a sector in transition. It also highlights broader changes in the structure of the American film industry, paying particular attention to a set of companies it identifies as “late indies” and the role they played in transforming an American film industry at the same time as streaming companies have been exerting enormous pressures on the theatrical film market.