Filmic Form Research Articles

FilmCrit: using cinematic critical race counterstorytelling as critical race feminista methodology

This paper provides an overview of a Critical Race Feminista praxis-oriented methodological framework in development called FilmCrit, and a critical race method expanded into filmic form called Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling. Critical Race Feminisita Praxis informs this work by drawing on a Critical Race Theory in Education framework and Chicana Feminist theories and epistemologies. In discussing two FilmCrit studies, a qualitative documentary study, No Somos Famosos (We Are Not Famous), and my dissertation study, From the Classroom to the Screen: Experiences of Women of Color MFA Film Students, I detail the theoretical, methodological, and analytical development, as well as the scholarly significance, of FilmCrit and (auto)biographical and composite Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling.

Cinema and Revolution: Fifty years after the Carnation Revolution

This special section of Aniki is designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution of 1974-1975. The five articles included in it reflect the need to bring together international research, particularly on a theme with such a wide geographical scope as this one, highlighting the importance of adopting cross perspectives. The analyses proposed in these essays take a variety of approaches – critical film studies, the history of cinema’s modes of production, the ontology of the documentary, comparative analysis – and move through different filmic forms and revolutionary territories, namely: France, the Philippines, Spain, Romania and Brazil. Together, these essays allow us to update the links between cinema and revolution and extend them to other historical contexts and case studies, thus contributing to the global history of a cinema that has for a long time been confronting revolution and society in creative and inspiring ways.

Sans soleil by Chris Marker. The essay film and its cinematic thinking process: reflecting on postmodernity

ABSTRACT The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière’s concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens – film image, television image, electronic image and video game image – in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the image, Marc Augé’s of non-places and Fredric Jameson’s of the postmodern historicism.

Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness

Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual.

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds

From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds

The Multiply Produced Film: Collaboration, Ethnography, and Feminist Epistemology

This article introduces the “multiply produced film” as a methodology and analytic that highlights the asymmetrical dynamics inherent to collaboration. I draw on (auto)ethnographic material from the making of Get By (2014), a film on worker-community solidarity, to explore collaboration across race, class, and gender in subject matter and method. I situate the multiply produced film within a genealogy that grafts ontological insights from the anthropology of exchange onto the epistemological contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropologists committed to collaboration. I argue that as a method, collaborative filmmaking has the potential to challenge narrow Western conceptions of autonomy and authorship through shared authority and fluid roles that engender a cascading multivocality that shapes the resulting filmic form. As an analytic, the multiply produced film reveals how collaboration entails a fundamental tension between the gift-like exchanges of solidarity and the outwardly commoditized form (e.g., films, books) produced by such exchanges, raising questions about asymmetries of power, prestige, and accountability.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Diptychs. Rethinking Cinema through the Essay Film

The beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s essayistic practice is intrinsically linked to the use of the diptych device. Thus, a previous work is the cause of an essay film that aims to reflect on the cinematic practice carried out. This article aims to analyse the use, function, and evolution of this device in the beginning and consolidation of the Godardian essay film. While Camera-Eye (1967) offers a prefiguration of this new filmic form in relation to La Chinoise (1967), Letter to Jane (1972) results in its first realisation concerning a previous fiction, Tout va bien (1972), in order to continue the reflection on the intellectuals’ role in revolution. Thanks to the decisive arrival of video technology, essential for the essay film practice, Ici et ailleurs (1976) takes up the material of the never released film Jusqu'à la victoire to generate self-criticism in militant practice. Finally, with Scénario du film Passion (1982), Godard offers a new subsequent essay film that generates both temporalities, before and after the creation, in order to materialize an essential self-portrait of the audiovisual essayist. This series of diptych works reveals a hypertextual audiovisual thinking process that rethinks cinematic practice.

Private screenings: Ingmar Bergman's ‘Cries and Whispers’ and cinematic fiction

ABSTRACT Though literary studies has developed a rich understanding of the way that certain Modernist, early-, and mid-twentieth-century writers responded to cinematic conventions in their work, and to a lesser extent postmodern novelists as well, we do not have a full account of how contemporary fiction is responding to the visual norms embedded within cinema, nor how readers intimately familiar with filmic form might be experiencing these novels. By reconsidering film and literature in light of the groundbreaking work on the literary imagination done by Elaine Scarry in Dreaming by the Book, this article isolates a strand of criticism from recent decades that asks very different questions of literature to those usually asked by film theorists, cultural studies critics, and philosophers interested in the subject. Via a detailed examination of Ingmar Bergman's overtly cinematic short story, ‘Cries and Whispers’, which serves as an unusually direct instance of the multiple connections between literary and cinematic visuality, the article opens up broader questions about the ethics of seeing, and the ways in which contemporary fiction – and indeed twentieth-century fiction more broadly – might be understood in relation to cinema.

Beyond the webs of ideology: Orson Welles’s Othello in post-war Italy

This article focuses on Orson Welles’s filmic adaptation of Othello (1951) with attention to how the filmic form interacts with the historical background of post-war Italy. The country where the director first took refuge after being virtually blacklisted from Hollywood did not seem to welcome his controversial style either. Taking the hint from the biased responses of most Italian critics to Othello, the article explores Welles’s revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy in relation to the early-1950s Italian landscape. I shall analyse how the visual techniques of the film create a challenging style that ensnares and engages the audience. The dominant imagery of entrapment can have a meta-cinematographic effect that disturbs the mimetic function of the screen. The resulting formal inconsistency and disunity of the film defies a totalizing notion of the work of art and invites the viewers to question and go beyond ideologically biased interpretations of the sociopolitical scenario it springs from. My aim is to show that Othello offers an intellectual engagement that goes beyond the webs of ideology which trapped the Italian post-war situation and leads to a more complex confrontation with the most urgent issues in the country.

La estética modal como herramienta de análisis cinematográfico.

Modal aesthetics emerges from Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology, whose modal distribution has three fundamental categories: the Repertorial, the Dispossitional and the Landscape which diverse dynamic equilibriums articulate both the artwork and the aesthetic experience. In this way, movies and our responses to them would appear as manifestations of diverse “modes of relation”, which organize the cinematographic work along with the sensitivities coupling with it, while integrating them both within the technological-historical development.As a result of the different modal equilibriums available, film poetics can eventually be better understood in their dependence to repertorial aesthetics. Such is the case with classic American which following the logics of the mode of the necessary, has been able to produce and consolidate a series of aesthetic patterns based on invisibility and that have come to us as a collection of filmic forms. On the other hand, the dispositional aesthetics deploy the mode of the possible. This is the case of the film vanguards, where new ways of doing things are built against what was previously considered necessary. Other film aesthetics can put the focus on the mode of effectiveness: this could be the proper focus to understand the character of werewolf, whose iconography comes to a full crystallization in the cinema, while being the object of dispute between a number of differente efectivities that are happening and that change both the man and the werewolf that emerges from the metamorphoses.Of course nothing here happens in isolation, since modal aesthetics categories are dynamic devices which describe different modal tensions and processes.

<i>Sagrado y obsceno:</i> entre el personaje rebelde, os tipos sociales y el color local

A partir del análisis del filme Sagrado y obsceno (Román Chalbaud, Venezuela, 1975) se busca caracterizar al personaje rebelde, reconocer la presencia de tipos sociales a lo largo de la historia y establecer si el uso del color local a través de la presencia de rasgos estilísticos propios del costumbrismo entran o no en contradicción con la motivación realista que parece justificar buena parte de la forma fílmica dominante en el texto. Para alcanzar estos objetivos se establecerán relaciones entre las características del protagonista de la historia y las del personaje rebelde, se reconocerá el modo como el resto de los personajes se pueden presentar bien como tipos sociales propiamente dichos, bien como recreaciones de meros estereotipos del imaginario colectivo, para finalmente establecer la manera en que los usos del costumbrismo y del color local subrayan o debilitan las propuestas narrativas y conceptuales presentes en el filme.

The Horror of the Real: Filmic Form, The Century, and Fritz Lang's M

It is not surprising that film became the dominant art form of the twentieth century. The promise of a medium that could capture life in motion proved exciting, though soon after its conception, debates cropped up pitting the merits of realism against those of expressionism. Should a medium predicated on recording life adopt expressionistic sensibilities? Writing on the burgeoning cinema, Walter Benjamin seemed to imply that film carried with it a distinctly political responsibility to show life as it really is. In attempting to rethink this argument, I argue for the political potential of an expressionistic cinema, as understood by considering the theoretical underpinnings of Alain Badiou’s The Century (2008) when read in relation to Fritz Lang’s M (1931)—a film that embodies Badiou’s musings on the twentieth century’s aesthetic ideals and violent tendencies. Badiou writes that “the torment of contemporary art” is that it is situated at a crossroads between “romantic pathos, on the one hand, and a nihilistic iconoclasm” on the other: a knowing admission that the Real can never be truly represented, and an oppositional desire to convey it anyways. M knowingly exposes these aesthetic contradictions at the heart of the filmic medium by leaning into its own artificiality, and, in doing so, it prophetically exposes the thinking behind a growingly fascist German state in the 1930s. By the end of my paper, I arrive at the conclusion that the violence found in both twentieth century aesthetics and politics came about as the result of a similarly idealistic principle.

Quiebras de la cronología y sentido: una aproximación narratológica a De la vida de las marionetas

El presente artículo propone una aproximación a una de las películas menos estudiadas del director sueco Ingmar Bergman: De la vida de las marionetas (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten, 1980). Nos interesa sobre todo el estudio de la forma fílmica y las huellas enunciativas como generadoras de significados. Por ello, recurriremos a una metodología híbrida en la que se combina el análisis de corte estructural del relato con la aplicación de procesos de microanálisis narratológico. Pretendemos demostrar cómo las decisiones estrictamente formales responden de manera íntima a la pregunta sobre el sentido que desencadena el drama y la complejidad de los personajes. Este propósito nos conduce a dividir los campos de análisis en tres categorías concretas: la cronología de la diégesis (fricciones entre el tiempo del relato y de la historia), el sistema de narradores y la gestión temporal del punto de vista (las implicaciones significantes del flashback y el flashforward en particular).

La forma fílmica y la alteridad: hacia una lectura ética de la obra de Stanley Kubrick

Our work tries to analyze the ethical implications of the filmic form in the movies directed by Stanley Kubrick. In order to achive our goal, we use a methodology of textual and narratological analyse over different movies –specially, Lolita, Spartacus and The Clockwork Orange-, trying to understand how the director uses the flows of empathy and the management of the “point of view” to rise complex debates about the nature of the world. The structure of our discussion is focused on his uses of the framing, the shot/reverse-shot filming, the edition and the structural disposition of his stories, looking for an ethical bet in his filmic writing. Finally, we conclude that against the common acussations of “pesismism” or even “nihilism”, Kubrick´s cinema is totally awar of the otherness and takes a decided care and rigour when it shows the complexity of the relations between human beings.

Tempo, Trânsito, Subjetividade em En Construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2000) e El Cielo Gira (Mercedes Álvarez, 2004)

Pensados sobre os processos de transformação dos significados do pertencimento e da descoberta de uma estrangeiridade absoluta, o cinema-documentário dos anos 2000 na Espanha vertebra-se a partir de uma dupla emergência: a paisagem cênica é imediatamente conduzida a ser real, enquanto que a realidade é inscrita em uma personificação (desafiante) das formas fílmicas. O artigo discute as metáforas da desterritorialização na escavação do tempo, do silêncio, do vazio e seus restos em dois filmes fundamentais do cinema documentário espanhol dos 2000: En Construcción (José Luis Guerín, 2000) e El Cielo Gira (Mercedes Álvarez, 2004).

Miklós Jancsó’s historical cinematic spectacles and moving pictorial figurations in a Hungarian landscape a study and a phenomenological perspective on Jancsó’s films of 1960s and 1970s

In the following article, I examine the originality of Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó’s (1921–2014) filmmaking practice. Jancsó appears as a unique representative of European filmmaking tradition who was motivated by a specific commitment to develop and increase the function of cinematic form, the effectiveness of images and sounds and performances of the actors which aesthetically formulate, translate and change the effects of Hungarian cinema to higher qualities and dimensions of art and spectacle. The significance of the filmic form comes forward, and the camera-based organisation of it increases the intensity of narration. Jancsó’s use of folk rituals adds a strong sense of pictoriality to the overall narrative structure, because his emphasis lies in the physicality of different appearances inside the frame. In his own stylistic way, Jancsó processes these various formations executed by the performers in a style in which all the elementary forces—whether physical, pictorial, psychological, or aesthetic—work in conjoint with one another. In this regard, Miklós Jancsó’s cinematic spectacles are symbolical fantasies enriched by phenomenological realism.

Primal Events: The Early Films of Gonzalo Suárez

his article seeks to address the specificity of filmic form in the work of Gonzalo Suarez, a filmmaker very much associated with literature and the written word. It argues for the use of the word translation rather than adaptation in the movement from page to screen. It seeks to identify certain motifs and images in Suarez’s early work and suggests that it is distinguished by mutation and transference that, in turn, determine questions of filmic structure and subjectivity. In this discussion of form, the article focuses upon the idea of the “void” as a primal space of creation and does so with refer-ence to Suarez’s 1997 short piece on Chillida. This is done in order to draw out a coherent relation between the first films and the later work.

Prima facie Deception: The Immediacy of the Face in Two Nazi Propaganda Films

Prima facie Deception:The Immediacy of the Face in Two Nazi Propaganda Films Daniel Gilfillan (bio) The picture in all its forms up to the film has greater possibilities. Here a man needs to use his brains even less; it suffices to look, or at most to read extremely brief texts, and thus many will more readily accept a pictorial presentation than read an article of any length. The picture brings them in a much briefer time, I might almost say at one stroke, the enlightenment which they obtain from written matter only after arduous reading.1 During the Third Reich, National Socialist propaganda invaded the medium of film and its production at all levels. It cut across the different genres and/or subgenres comprising entertainment, documentary, and newsreel film; and it did so, according to Adolf Hitler, precisely for its fundamental nature as image and its ability to be read "at one stroke" in its immediacy as prima facie evidence. In Hitler's description of propaganda, truth established through visual immediacy minimizes the "arduousness" of reading by removing the need for deep critical thought on the part of the viewer. It is a type of truth that can easily be taken at face value, and consequently one that can easily be distorted to suit the needs of its producers. In terms of its efficacy, post-1939 Nazi propaganda film was reliant on each respective filmic form working in concert to produce a seamless narrative that supported the regime's sociocultural, racial, and economic policies and its wartime agenda. The politics of deception wrapped up in these films shifts between insidious opacity and aggressive transparency, according to their varying degrees of propagandistic subtlety. Feature film offered either distraction in the form of pure entertainment or fictional frameworks for engaging ethical/moral questions (e.g. the 1941 film Ich klage an (I Accuse) and its exploration of euthanasia as a solution for the physically or mentally disabled).2 And following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, footage captured by propaganda companies embedded within the Wehrmacht provided "almost live" visual coverage of German war victories for the weekly newsreel series Die deutsche Wochenschau (The German Weekly Review) and for film documentaries focused on campaigns in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Although these propaganda companies were formed as specific units [End Page 217] connected to the various branches of the German military and the Waffen-SS, their professional directives were initiated from the Reich Ministry for Propaganda.3 As a direct result of the seizure of Poland, these propaganda companies were instructed to acquire film and still image footage of Jews for use in a range of print and film-based propaganda. This Nazi archive of photographs and film images captures an idea of Jewish life that was already being deceptively staged for the camera. It includes footage taken prior to the Nazi-enforced practice of Jewish ghettoization, as well as footage from inside a handful of Nazi-controlled Jewish ghettos and camps in Eastern Europe. The pre-ghettoization footage was used in antisemitic documentary films such as the notorious 1940 film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) to substantiate Nazi claims about the sub-human life of the Jews.4 While such footage is rare, there are two other Nazi-era propaganda films depicting Jewish victimization that this article will explore in the context of the filmic close-up, and the role of the face as a screen of embodied cognition, a site where one's perceptual and affective experience becomes embodied and displayed visà-vis the physical features of the face.5 The Ghetto (1942) and Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area (1944) are similar in their propagandistic audiovisual capture of Jewish life in Nazi-controlled ghettos and camps—Warsaw and Theresienstadt—and for their respective use of close-ups.6 Drawing on cultural-theoretical discourses about the role of the face in the work of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, this article seeks to understand the immediate filmic encounter with these victims' faces within a politics of deception, where deception reflects both the National Socialist intent in producing these films and the traces of...

Film-Theatre as an Intermedial Occurrence of Theatre: Recycling Ionesco’s Bald Soprano

Can the term and the category of adaptation adequately emphasize the relationship in which theatre and film engage during the audiovisual recording of live performances? Can renaming and positioning such films within a conceptual framework fitting their unique aesthetic qualities legitimate their status as interdependent art forms? For his 1991 adaptation of The Bald Soprano, Jean-Luc Lagarce supplants the British bourgeois interior suggested in Ionesco’s stage directions for a ‘décor kitsch’. To further the senseless world evoked in the play, Lagarce also adds a soundtrack with fake laughter inspired by sitcoms. Then, when Vincent Bataillon films Lagarce’s production in 2007, he relays the textual and scenic readings of the absurd on the screen with cinematic devices. Thus, while presenting his own conception of the ‘absurd’, Bataillon underlines a dialogic relation operating between the textual, scenic and filmic forms, thereby confirming the interdependent nature of ‘film-theatre’.

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental Documentary, and Subjective Sounds

Ethnographic film is documentary's avant-garde. Who is more self-conscious than an anthropologist with a movie camera?-J. HobermanFilm language is language of moving, seeing, and hearing. More than any other medium or art form, film uses experience to express experience.-Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (1)The term documentary, at first glance, can be considered an oxymoron at worst or a hybrid category at best that in either case illuminates assumed dialectical tensions between formal experimentation and cultural representation.1 Experimental documentary filmmaking conflates this dichotomy at level of aesthetics, or as Stella Bruzzi puts it, aestheticization of a given reality (9). The use of expressive, cinematic techniques, often celebrated in fictional filmmaking as an imaginative means for filmmaker to engage and enhance emotional involvement of viewer with filmmaker's stories and characters, often meets critical resistance when applied to documentary forms, including those whose origins are not necessarily related to their cinematic incarnations. Erik Barnouw, for example, in his seminal book Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film (1993), categorizes documentaries into nonfiction conventions or trends that existed before advent of documentary filmmaking with terms such as explorer, reporter, advocate, poet, and observer, among others. Barnouw's classification relates closer to the essay, diary, autobiography, notebook, editorial, evocation, eulogy, exhortation, description or report (Nichols, Introduction 72). These conceptual, and largely literary, nonfiction templates provide a reference point for how experimentation in popular imagination can be preconceived as counterintuitive to nonfiction's enterprise for verifiable knowledge. Elsewhere, John Corner points out that application of documentary aesthetics not been surprisingly framed by an interest in cognition, in how documentaries construct and project knowledge and use of this by viewers (20-21). Rather, in documentary's quest to capture visible evidence of its social subject, use of expressive cinematic techniques in nonfictional modes-such as dynamic dolly camera movement in Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955); stylized, noir-like cinematography and reenactments in Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988); and kinetic music video editing with staged musical numbers in Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach (2011)-short-circuits this supposed link to unmediated knowledge. In more extreme visual measures, experimental documentary bypasses it altogether.The use of formal experimentation with cultural representation does more than just dismantle universal impulse toward discourse of objectivity in mainstream documentary filmmaking-it is also a discourse that itself has lost creditability with wider acceptance, or at least acknowledgment, that any form of documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective. Theorists such as Trinh T. Minh-ha notably refute definitions of documentary as a filmic form or approach altogether, despite its cinematic tradition, due to its untenable conflation of fixed notions of truth with meaning. She argues that [t]ruth, even when 'caught on run,' does not yield itself either in names or in (filmic) frames; and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at what is said and what is shown (92). documentaries can offer, at best in her estimation, is a visual representation of a meaning that is already once removed from what it purports to signify. She provocatively asks: What is one to do with films which set out to determine truth from falsity while visibility of this truth lies precisely in fact that it is false? (92). Although this debate continues, experimental documentary offers recourse in its acknowledgment of fluctuation of both truth and meaning in a nonfiction filmic form. …