Filmic Experience Research Articles

Cine “nacional”/Circulación transnacional: la experiencia fílmica colombiana en el extranjero en años recientes

<p>Esta ponencia aborda el trabajo de cineastas colombianos que producen cine desde diferentes países europeos para entender sus condiciones de producción y circulación. A la luz de teorías sobre cine diaspórico, cine “acentuado” (término acuñado por Hamid Nacify) y cine del exilio, se dilucida si estos paradigmas se ajustan a la experiencia fílmica colombiana en el extranjero o si, por el contrario, tanto para Colombia, como para otros cines latinoamericanos, es necesario pensar nuevas articulaciones teóricas.</p>

Testing audio narration: the emotional impact of language in audio description

ABSTRACT Around the world, guidelines have been created to establish a clear procedure on how to create audio description. These put emphasis on the objectivity principle. However, in recent years this principle has been widely criticized, and a more narrative approach has been encouraged, although the reception of these opposing styles has not been compared experimentally. At the same time, while emotions play a central role in the filmic experience, the emotional reception of audio description in films has been tested on very few occasions. This paper analyses the differences in the emotional response to two audio description versions: a more objective version vs. a subjective version including metaphors, inferences, and subjective evaluation. We worked with 15 film scenes eliciting disgust, fear, and sadness to analyse how sighted and unsighted participants react at an emotional level. Emotions were measured by means of a Likert questionnaire and measurements of the heart rate. The results point to statistically significant differences between the versions in the case of fear and especially sadness, but not disgust.

Exploring pop-up cinema and the city: Deleuzian encounters with secret cinema’s pop-up screening of The Third Man

Abstract In this article I mobilize Deleuze to explore transformative relationships between filmic and urban space in Secret Cinema’s pop-up screening of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). Secret Cinema is a company that turns urban sites into dramatized versions of the films they screen, and this unusual practice of exhibition raises fascinating questions about how film texts and urban sites come into contact. In particular, I respond to two crucial questions that are provoked by Secret Cinema’s ‘immersive’ screening of The Third Man. First, I consider the impact this kind of filmic experience has on ways of seeing the urban, drawing on the Deleuzian concept of the any-space-whatever. Second, I take up Deleuze’s ideas about the out-of-field and its differing functions within the movement-image and the time-image to address how Secret Cinema’s dramatized site of spectatorship reciprocally transforms the meaning of film text and urban space. By addressing these two questions, and with comparative reference to early cinema’s practices of exhibition, I develop a nuanced reading of Secret Cinema’s screening as a co-production of filmic and urban space.

Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies: Eduardo Coutinho's documentary Jogo de Cena (2007)

This article examines Eduardo Coutinho's Jogo de Cena (2007) in relation to documentary spectatorship across cultures. Coutinho's documentary contains numerous culturally specific and localised references amongst the stories told by a cast of women actors. These stories and the figures that relate them make available a number of layers of knowledge production constituting a filmic experience that is multivalent and complex. In considering these complexities and their spectatorship, this article utilises Paul Willemen's notion of comparative film studies as a springboard to begin a closer consideration of what is possible with a combination of Brazilian cultural knowledge and documentary film theory.

The effects of projected films on singers’ expressivity in choral performance.

Sound synchronized with film has been influential in the delivery of filmic content since its development in 1927 with the production of The Jazz Singer (Wierzbicki, 2009; Zanuck & Crosland, 1927). Within the soundtrack, music has functionally and culturally contributed intrinsic value upon the spectator during the interpretation of a film (Tagg, 2006). As music cues can elicit particular emotions based on mode, tempo, or timbre, the cues' cultural significance in cinematic and real-world history could also contribute toward an interpretation when embedded within a film. The role of music in film and its various theories have been discussed at length and documented by both filmmakers (Hoover, 2009) and film music scholars (Brown, 1994; Burt, 1994; Gorbman, 1987). However, it has not been until recently that researchers have begun to explore this film music phenomenon more objectively through empirical research. These studies have focused primarily on the emotional (Bullerjahn & Guldenring, 1994; Tan, Spackman, & Wakefield, 2008), physiological (Thayer & Levenson, 1983), interpretive (Bolivar, Cohen, & Fentress, 1994), and cognitive (Boltz, 2004; Boltz, Schulkind, & Kantra, 1991) responses of the spectator.A central finding regarding the effect of music within film is that music can affect one's interpretation, perception, and response toward a film's narrative (Lipscomb & Kendall, 1994; Marshall & Cohen, 1988; Vitouch, 2001). Often, these responses can be influenced by internal and external relationships between film and music (Cohen, 2014). A deeper understanding of how the brain processes information from multiple sensory in order to formulate an interpretation from a film can be explored through Cohen's congruence-associationist model (CAM). Based on one kinesthetic (human motion), two visual (visual surface and text), and three aural (dialogue, sound effects, and music) channels, this multimodal system incorporates a bottom-up and top-down process to form a conscious filmic experience within a working narrative. Structural characteristics, independent of the other sensory channels, can correspond with one another in a similarly structured modality, causing an interactive relationship between two or more modalities in a temporal environment. This structural congruence process (internal) can provide focus to one modality (domain), often from the primacy of the visual modality, while matching structures from a second modality such as music. Temporal structures in music could come in the form of accents, strong and weak beats, or phrasing segments, whereas structures in film could include analysis of temporal patterns, motion, and segmentation (Cohen, 2010). When information from both channels perceptually correspond through accent alignment (Lipscomb, 2005) or crossmappings of auditory and spatiotemporal dimensions (Eitan & Granot, 2006), the relationship is known to be cross-modally congruent. For example, cross-modality congruency can be considered a match when the temporal structures of an ascending music scale with crescendo correspond with the structures of an enlarging visual projected on a screen (Iwamiya & Ozaki, 2004). When these channels perceptually differ, an incongruent relationship between the channels has occurred. Regardless, through the bottom-up processing, congruency is ultimately perceived in the working narrative.Subsequently, each modality can have meaning when experienced alone. This meaning can be derived from associations (external) and stored and retrieved in the long-term memory. Meaning in music can be derived from personal or cultural experiences. A piece of music could infer sadness, a particular time of year, a traditional ceremony, or a main motive heard earlier in a film representing a specific character. Through top-down processing, the combination of isolated meaning from each combined modality, such as visual and music, could alter an interpretation that would otherwise be different from meaning derived from a modality in isolation. …

Retrato invulgar do cotidiano e subversão de gêneros no cinema de Anna Muylaert

Ao analisar os longas-metragens Durval discos (2002) e É proibido fumar (2009), de Anna Muylaert, este artigo busca compreender de que modo os dois filmes dinamizam o urbano e sua representação em uma linguagem de forte alcance subversivo, na medida em que a experiência fílmica desconstrói as noções preestabelecidas de composição cênica. Neles, a narrativa se vislumbra na intervenção de um “retrato” do comum, contudo, inserida em denúncia, característica quase intrínseca na produção do cinema brasileiro nas últimas décadas. Ao fazê-lo, os filmes instituem-se como exemplos de narratividade contemporânea do cotidiano, cujo apelo estético de espontaneidade referenda certo experimentalismo por meio da tensão rítmica de uma montagem calcada na fugacidade, além da ligação com o ritmo próximo à comédia – como gênero demarcado – e aos percalços dos erros e acertos da vida diária.

Review: Build Something Modern: Ireland’s Modernist Mission in Africa, by Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley, directors

Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley, directors Build Something Modern: Ireland’s Modernist Mission in Africa Still Films, 2011, 70 min., http://www.volta.ie/films/build-something-modern A melding of images and colors, voices and rhythms: that’s the impression one is left with after viewing Build Something Modern: Ireland’s Modernist Mission in Africa , a film documenting the Irish architects who, from the 1940s to the 1960s, designed churches, schools, and hospitals for missionary religious orders in Africa. Eschewing a narrator, the collage-like film moves back and forth through interviews with architects and priests, reworked archival footage, animation, experimental presentations of drawings and photographs, accompanied by a distinctive sound track. The different parts come together to leave the viewer with an overall impression, rather than a fully coherent position. The film begins and ends in 2010 in the company of the Kiltegan Fathers, a group of elderly missionary priests now returned to Ireland. We spend time with them at their home: St. Patrick’s Missionary Society in Kiltegan, County Wicklow, a 1950s building designed by Pearse McKenna, one of the Irish architects discussed in the film. Here we learn about the wave of missionary priests and nuns who left the young, recently independent Ireland for an Africa itself experiencing the end of colonialism, emerging independence, and the tensions such transitions bring. If this was a time in which Ireland and the Catholic Church were closely intertwined, it was also a period of tremendous change in the church, consolidated by the modernizing reforms of Vatican II in the early to mid-1960s. The architecture examined in Build Something Modern embodies this moment in modernity. One of the architects interviewed, Dr. Richard Hurley, wittily characterizes McKenna’s pre-1963 modernist church designs in Africa as “old wine in new bottles.” Hurley discusses his own Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Eldoret, Kenya, designed following the “huge change in ritual and worship” codified by Vatican II, whereby priest and people were brought closer …

Sound and space in La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces

Abstract This article offers a detailed reading of the connections between sound and space in the 1968 film La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces. Extant explorations of sound in this film tend to highlight the strategies of juxtaposition and commentary on the image track. Building on this scholarship, I propose that three uses of sound in particular – the narrative voice-over, dissonance with the image, and semi-diegetic music – correspond to the spatial imperatives of the film: its desire to forge alliances among disparate groups scattered throughout national and international space. This strategy is coherent with the express desire for the filmic experience to become a militant act, an intervention in the class war of 1960s Argentina. I conclude by positing that sonic elements together present an alternative to the vision-centric bias of critiques of late capitalism’s dawn, something The Hour of the Furnaces shares with other representative films of same period in Latin America. Finally, I suggest that the analysis of sound in this film they highlights the sensorially embedded character of all filmic experience.

From the Astonished Spectator to the Spectator in Movement: Exhibition Advertisements in 1920s Germany and Austria

Lorsque les foires commerciales, phénomène nouveau et en voie de professionnalisation, se sont répandues après la première guerre mondiale dans des villes telles que Vienne, Francfort, Berlin et Düsseldorf, elles se sont souvent tournées vers le film comme moyen publicitaire, employant fréquemment des experts en animation ou des cinéastes d’avant-garde. En examinant les films publicitaires faits pour ces évènements, cet essai explore quelques unes des relations changeantes, dans les années 1920, entre le cinéma et la culture des foires commerciales. Les films adoptent souvent une stratégie de l’étonnement qui est commune à la publicité imprimée, aux expositions technologiques du 19ième siècle et au cinéma d’attraction des premiers temps. Mais, ils tendent aussi à illustrer un nouveau paradigme du film comme médium qui peut à la fois interpeler le spectateur et le contrôler. Cette idée du film comme moyen de direction du spectateur est en phase avec les nouvelles théories de la publicité qui sont apparues après la guerre et qui ont trouvé leur terrain d’essai précisément dans le milieu des foires commerciales.

The Four Turns

Beyond differences in cinematic vocabulary, four Spanish filmmakers belonging to successive generations (Pere Portabella, Víctor Erice, José Luis Guerin, and Isaki Lacuesta) exhibit in their work a common creative trend: not only do they practise an ‘expanded cinema’, but also, in one way or another, they engage with myth as a place of mediation between history and dream. The aim of these filmmakers as artists could be defined as a deep commitment to seeking out and opening up new pathways that push the filmic experience beyond its conventional boundaries. In this context, cultural continuity and narrative experimentation are linked, offering the spectator a new way of engaging with the medium.

‘Something is Trying to Get Inside My Body’: A Gay Reception and Narrative Analysis of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

The critical understanding of horror film has traditionally been locked into a particular psychoanalytic framework concerning audience composition of the genre, as well as the identity politics operating within (Twitchell 1985; Carroll 1990; Clover 1992; Creed 1993; Grant 1996). Within this work, little attention has been paid to alternative audience demographics, especially gay and sexually non-normative viewers. This is rather surprising considering the horror film, and the monster in particular, has been understood as a material manifestation of queerness, as that which bourgeois ideology cannot accept and must therefore construct as ‘Other’ (Benshoff 1997; Wood 1986; Saunders 1998). As a result, this article looks at a gay online reception of gay audiences of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985). Such a text is important, as it fractures the established formula of the slasher film by introducing a ‘male scream queen’ – a ‘final boy’ named Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton). This article employs Janet Staiger’s (2000) work on reception studies to argue that the strategies and tactics brought by the spectator to the filmic experience are constructed by particular historical circumstances, which in turn, assist in the formation of ‘interpretive communities’. While the introduction of the final boy certainly disrupts fixed points of gendered identification, such features are only part of a holistic approach to understanding the subjective responses of gay audiences to Jesse’s characterisation. Textual subversions therefore mobilise gay audiences’ affective responses to the film – as Jesse’s narrative struggles mirror the lived experiences of gay audiences as they relate to the social context of homosexuality in the 1980s.

Hearing things in music for films: music, fiction and engagement

Film music is often thought of as something that adds to the visuals. Yet, this truism somehow obscures the complexity of how film music works. First, music has no single and fixed meaning that can be added to the visuals in the first place. Second, experiencing audiovisual meaning can be accounted for on several levels. For that reason this article proposes eight different but complementary ways of listening to music along the lines of ecological theories of musical perception in which it is argued that we hear things, that is, referential matters in music. The validity of this is demonstrated through the discussion of a series of scholarly interpretations of John Williams’ music for the opening scene of Jaws (1975). Second, it is argued that music may add meaning on different levels and a three level model of film music analysis is suggested in which the music as an expressive device, the fiction world as a dramatic space and kinds of audience engagement are conceived as three separate, yet interacting, levels of the filmic experience.

In support of creative subtitling: contemporary context and theoretical framework

Although the issue of creativity in subtitling is gaining increasing awareness in academic papers and conferences, it is a topic that is often met with concern amongst subtitling academics and practitioners: the stylised nature of creative subtitling means that it is often too easily dismissed as amateurish and unprofessional. This paper, therefore, aims to speak out in support of the creative subtitling practice by drawing attention to its wide-ranging theoretical framework, its appropriateness in the context of contemporary digital media and its practical benefits. It begins by outlining the characteristics that might define creative subtitling and providing examples of films where this practice has been used to great creative effect, before drawing upon translation and film theory, amongst other disciplines, to discuss issues of creative thought, invisibility, corruption and abuse, and the importance of contingency in translation. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the practical benefits of creative subtitling for subtitlers, filmmakers and film audiences alike. Ultimately, this paper argues that creative subtitling should be accepted as a viable alternative to conventional subtitling practice; one that transforms the film text into an enhanced filmic experience for the target audience.

Framing dialogue through the mirror

Along with the visual turn experienced by society and daily life, cinema and films remain somehow apart and above the other image forms surrounding us everywhere. The fascination and imaginary, here assumed as active power of (self)representation, brought by filmic experience have not been replaced by the multimedia digital representations, rather they have been transformed and amplified. In this transforming process, within the relation between (dis)places and subjects, filming still constitutes a mediation stage where makers, matters, viewers and social scientists play. In this article I show the dialogue in act between video production and ethnography, both in terms of methodology and practices, on the basis of ongoing fieldwork on Chinese independent images and their private shift.

Why Is Touch Sometimes So Touching?: The Phenomenology of Touch in Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions

The film Female Perversions (1996) has received mixed reviews in newspapers and popular magazines. Critics have made appreciative comments on the powerful feminist message of the film, while many reviews registered frustration at the overuse of vulgarised Freudian psychoanalytic discourses in the film. Apart from those film reviews, however, many viewers have been somehow touched by the film and especially by the last scene, in which Eve physically ‘touches’ a girl’s face—though they do not know exactly why they felta€€the film was so good. The difficulty of discussing the film Female Perversions lies in its contradictory appeal to the audience. While the film calls on the audience—most likely to be either ‘art-film’ fans or ‘professional’ viewers—to participate in the discussion about contemporary sexual politics, it eventually encourages them to suspend such a cerebral way of appreciating the film and to engage emotionally and physically in it as ‘lay’ cinema fans enjoy a nice entertainment movie. This apparently ‘highbrow’ film illuminates the very gap between the sophisticated analytic mode of film-watching and a more sensual and corporeal cinematic experience, and in a very subtle manner it invites us to move from the former mode of filmic experience to the latter. This paper aims to describe in words the film, the audience, and the intertwining of the two as a sensual, material, and corporeal being. For this purpose, this paper focuses on the moments of ‘touch’ in the film, the effect of which plays a crucial role in the subtle shift of the filmic mode mentioned above. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflection on touch, this paper textualises what happens when touch happens in the film, how touch serves to produce the power of the film, and how it works on us when we are watching it.

Monkeys at the Movies: What Evolutionary Cinematics Tells Us about Film

Because the visual neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of monkeys are largely similar to ours, we explore the hypothesis that the same cinematographic techniques that create a visual scene for us likely create one for these close kin. Understanding how monkeys watch movies can illuminate how film exploits the capacities we share with our simian relatives, what capacities are specific to humans, and to what extent human culture exerts an influence on our filmic experience. The article finds that humans and monkeys share a basic capacity to process sensory events on the screen. Both can recognize moving objects and acting individuals, and both prefer looking at motion pictures of social behaviors over static images. It seems clear that some of the same things that make movies “work“ for human brains also work for the brains of our nonhuman relatives—excepting two critical features. First, humans appear to integrate sequential events over a much larger time frame than monkeys, giving us a greater attunement to the unfolding narrative. Moreover, humans appear to have special interest in the attention and intentional states of others seen on the screen. These states are shared through deictic cues such as observed gazing, reaching, and pointing. The article concludes that a major difference in how humans and monkeys see movies may be declarative in nature; it recognizes the possibility that movies exist as a means of sharing experience, a skill-set in which the human species has specialized and through which humans have reaped unprecedented rewards, including the art of film.

Towards a radically different understanding of experience: Looking for an heautonomous auditory field in film

What can be the status of sound in film? Is sound always dependent on image in film? Or is it possible to give sound a more autonomous status? If yes, what are the consequences for the workflow? In the 1980s and early 1990s two opposing propositions about the relation of the audible and the visible in film were presented. For Michel Chion the auditory field is completely a function of what appears on screen and for Gilles Deleuze the externality of the visual image as uniquely framed has been replaced by the interstice between two framings, the visual and the sound. Introducing the auditory field as multi-layered, dynamic, experienced and embodied, the author proposes a phenomenological approach of the audio-visual that moves towards a different understanding of the filmic experience, which has its roots in a phenomenology of auditory experience. In the practice-based research project, Surrounded, the author explored together with sound designer and sound mixer Griet Van Reeth, how the creative process of film-making can start from the auditory field, including inner sound and a heautonomy of the auditory field.

Some everybodies design and non-dualist filmic experience

During a showing of the video Some Everybodies, which observes tourist behaviour at a non-tourist site in Bath, the work will be discussed as evolving through non-dualist processes of film-making (enabled through new technology), whilst also attempting to create a non-dualist filmic experience for the spectator. Shot with a fixed-frame camera at a corner scene (which is the site of a minor accident), the film does not possess a traditional narrative structure or design, and has been described as a moving painting. There is no central character (people are viewed more as moving bodies), and the momentum (rather than linear progression of scenes) has been made entirely in the editing suite, rather than on-site through a directorial eye. Dialogue from the site has been included as a multivalent communal poem that scrolls as subtitles beneath the images. Here the traditional understanding of subtitles is, once again, questioned, and they no longer exist as semiotic colonizers of othered national experiences, but evolve as asides from the passers-by themselves. Time-as-intervention will be discussed through the bleached colouration of the pictorial image, reminiscent of old postcards. This visual sense of well-worn familiarity is juxtaposed against a soundtrack that has been slowed down, creating primal groans and utterances. The significance of still-images within film-making will be explored, as the narrative freezes whilst the tourists themselves freeze, or snap, their own narratives. These mementos are also included on postcards and posters as part of a larger installation. The walk-through, yet high-walled cross design of the installation creates corners (said to be the places where people meet), and optimal viewing points a tourist leit-motif. The site is designed to illustrate the dislocation of time and place, where images of the video site (as posters and postcards) are seen before the video itself. Reference will be made to film-maker Joseph Robakowski, artist Barbara Kruger, the scientist Dirk Helbing (with particular reference to dynamical flow and pilgrim crowd behaviour at Mecca) and film theorist and film-maker Professor Laura Mulvey.

Lighting Boris Godunov with Andrei Tarkovsky

It is early spring in 1983, and I am lighting a revival of another of the myriad productions that the Royal Opera at Covent Garden has at its disposal. A very excited production manager comes to the production desk and whispers in my ear (rather loudly), “We have Andrei Tarkovsky to direct Boris Godunov next season.” I was familiar with the name Tarkovsky, but my filmic experience had been shaped almost exclusively by Hollywood and British cinema, particularly as a young boy in the Second World War. Russian film had passed me by—something to be remedied. However, sometime after this, Andrei Tarkovsky and the set designer Nicholas Dvigubsky duly arrived in London to begin the tortuous process of designing Boris Godunov. As a film director, Andrei was clearly a very visual being, and Nicholas, as a painter, was equally visual. Unfortunately, their visions did not always coincide, resulting in a lot of heated Russian expletives. I was not party to all of this, but the word came down from our model room that “all was not going swimmingly”! They did eventually arrive at a solution which, by and large, still stands today as a monument to their perspicacity and originality (fig. 1).

Filmic experience

Let us try to consider cinema not for the technology it has developed, nor for the productive systems that have characterized it, nor for the films that have appeared within it, nor even in terms of the effects they have created. Let us try instead to rethink the type of experience that spectators have lived in front of a cinematic screen. It is an experience that began to define itself on the night of 28 December 1895, with the Lumière projections in the Salon Indien, and that was subsequently developed and perfected through film theatres, sound, colour, the panoramic screen, and so on – an experience that today faces a radical transformation in coincidence with the end of two of the most characteristic traits of cinema: its status as a photographic medium and its identity as a collective show. The term experience has a specific (and binding) meaning here. On the one hand, it refers to the act of exposing ourselves to something that surprises and captures us (‘to experience’). On the other hand, it relates to the act of reelaborating this exposition into a knowledge and a competence, so that we are then richer in the face of things, since we are able to master them (‘to have experience’). Indeed, filmic experience is arguably both that moment when images (and sounds) on a screen arrogantly engage our senses and also that moment when they trigger a comprehension that concerns, reflexively, what we are viewing and the very fact of viewing it. We have, then, a stretching of attention while facing something that strikes us, whilst we also have a ‘knowing-how’ to look and a ‘knowing-that’ we are looking, which make us protagonists of what is happening to us. From this point of view, filmic experience is something more than film reception – more than an interpretation or a consumption. It is a situation which combines sensory or cognitive ‘excess’ (there is something that touches or addresses us, outside the taken-for-granted) to the ‘recognition’ of what we are exposed to and the fact that we are exposed to it (a recognition which makes us redefine ourselves and our surroundings). An excess and a recognition: it is thanks to these two elements that we ‘live’ a situation, recuperating contact with what we are viewing; and that at the same time we frame it, giving it a meaning. It is thanks to these two elements that we face things; and that at the same time we enrich our lives to the extent that we may confront new events.1