Filmmaking Practices Research Articles

Review: Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, edited by Deniz Bayrakdar and Robert Burgoyne

Review: <i>Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media</i>, edited by Deniz Bayrakdar and Robert Burgoyne

Cinema Divina and Autotheory: An Interview with Marilyn Freeman

This is an interview with moving image artist, writer, and contemplative practitioner, Marilyn (M) Freeman by artist, Cat Auburn. They explore Freeman’s contemplative filmmaking practice, ‘Cinema Divina’ and the relationship of Freeman’s life, artistic practice and research interests to autotheory. Autotheory is widely held to be the coalescence of autobiography with theory (or philosophy) within a work of art or literature, often with an aim towards offering social or cultural narration and service. The impulse to collaborate on this interview came from Auburn’s encounter with Cinema Divina during an online group contemplative session facilitated by Freeman in February 2022. This interview covers Freeman’s development of Cinema Divina, such topics as Freeman’s theory of Vertical Dissonance, the risks of working autotheoretically, mysticism, interior life, the hierarchies of knowledge production and the potential for what Freeman calls ‘the illuminated space’ to create radical opportunities for personal transformation. Ultimately, this interview establishes that Cinema Divina can be seen as an autotheoretical practice that uses contemplative practices rooted in lectio divina, a meditative prayer ritual of early Benedictine monastics, to theorize through Freeman’s embodied, lived experiences and artistic outcomes.

ANSIS EPNERS’ FILM “ALIVE”: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO FICTION

The first short documentary “Alive” (Dzīvs, 1970) is an important signifier of Latvian director Ansis Epners’ (1937–2003) oeuvre both in terms of his approach to documentary film practice, and growing interest in fiction filmmaking. The film “Alive” and later idea to develop a full-length fiction film based on its main character demonstrate Epners’ unconventional expression of both kinds of filmmaking, which was received with a mixed response at the time. Epners used performative elements in the documentary, and included real-life character playing himself in the planned fiction film, challenging the assumptions and conventions of filmmaking practices in Latvia at that time. In this article I will analyse Epners’ formal and stylistic choices in the film “Alive” and its reception in the early 1970s, and the script for the fiction film based on the main character of the film “Alive” Arnolds Cīrulis. The reception of “Alive” shows the contradictions between the dominant views on the documentary film form and Epners’ work. The fiction film script, which was not turned into film, remains as an example of versatility of Epners’ ideas on the potentials of fiction filmmaking.

Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Collaborative International Student Filmmaking – Establishing Joint Filmmaking Practices within FilmEU

FilmEU is an alliance including Lusófona University, Portugal, Baltic Film and Media School, Estonia, LUCA, Belgium and IADT, Ireland. Together they are working to create a collaborative University of Film and Media Arts. This paper aims to elucidate their pilot project which consisted of a year-long Challenge Module designed for 2nd year film and media BA students in the consortium and represents the first test implementation of the Samsara pedagogical framework. Students came together to create mini-series from concept development to postproduction. This project asked students to incorporate and consider a societal challenge in their work. The first challenge topic launched by FilmEU concerned “Sexuality, Gender and Censorship”. By developing and producing a pilot for a short-form series or other media art projects in collaborative teams drawn from four of the Alliance institutions, the students posited their stories within a larger social sphere. This paper will document the process, challenges, aims and objectives of the first pilot project from the FilmEU alliance.

From informal to formal: understanding gendered energy transitions through filmmaking in Cape Town and Mumbai

Provision of affordable housing and energy access is an urgent challenge in India and South Africa. This study adopts a participatory filmmaking approach to understand women’s agency in low-income domestic housing in Mumbai and Cape Town. Through their films, the women shared insights of how the transitional housing environment has impacted their everyday routines and how they are utilising the access to energy. By employing creative, participatory filmmaking practice within the female community, the research explored an alternative approach to understand energy demand. The cycles of participatory filmmaking were followed by workshops, interviews, and acknowledgement of participation. The films revealed that access to formal housing and electricity grid have led to improvements in the women’s welfare and wellbeing, showing the importance of privacy and the development of personal leisure activities. Yet echoing Murray Li, there is nothing ‘inevitable’ about women’s energy transitions and energy access does not necessarily reduce the women’s time spent on household chores: in Mumbai, women still cook 3–4 times per day, every cooking moment taking 1–2 hours, amounting to women putting in 56 hours of (unpaid) work per week. The study advocates the use of film as a method in energy studies: the films were able to capture the lived experience in these low-income groups, heterogeneity of the material arrangements, the pride and skills in cooking. The films enabled the participants to see their ‘invisible’, unpaid work and to express their aspirations giving us a glimpse of what ‘empowerment’ from the women’s perspective would look like.

Herculean Unproductivity in Pasolini's La ricotta and Teorema

Abstract This article examines the relationship between work, capitalist productivity, and the filmmaking practice of Pier Paolo Pasolini. This article examines how Pasolini's La ricotta and Teorema represent an interruption of labor and a contestation of the disciplining mechanisms that compel workers to work. Recuperating Jean-François Lyotard's concept of acinema, this inquiry suggests that Pasolini creates scenes that oppose the capitalist work ethic through formal techniques associated with immobility and contingency. It deploys Hannah Arendt's concept of action and Jacques Rancière's dissensus to describe workers’ political actions in these films as gestures where they shed their identity as workers to enjoy life as humans. The purpose of this intervention is to reframe academic debates of anticapitalism around workers’ desire not to work. Pasolini's films give viewers images that highlight workers’ unproductive potentials, thereby giving them examples of immobile, nonwork dissensual actions, or Herculean unproductivity.

Design Anthropological Filmmaking for Automated Futures

In this article I introduce the theory and practice of Design Anthropological Filmmaking as a mode of actively proposing alternative possibilities to the technological solutionist narratives and imaginaries that dominate industry, government and policy narratives about automated futures. I argue for documentary practice that is theoretically and critically aligned with a vision of the world as ongoingly emergent, and unfinished, and contests conventional innovation paradigms. To demonstrate this theory-practice dialogue I draw on my collaborative documentaries Laundry Lives and Smart Homes for Seniors which explore everyday life in the home with digital, emerging and automated technologies.

The abortive revolution: The South China Film Company in early Cold War Hong Kong (1949–1952)

Although existing scholarship is paying increasing attention to leftist cinema in Cold War Hong Kong, few works fully examine the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) revolutionary filmmaking practices during the early Cold War. Centering on the short-lived leftist studio South China Film Company (1949–1952), this paper argues that the studio’s development epitomized the CCP’s efforts to transform cinematic representation for multiple revolutionary purposes and strengthen the Party’s mobilization of filmmaking communities, which were eventually crushed by escalating conflicts between colonial authorities and the CCP. The films produced by South China Film Company exemplified the CCP’s ambitions to appeal to a Cantonese-speaking local audience and later, to carry out more radical ideological campaigns, influence overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and conduct thought reform of intellectuals. Film production was accompanied by mobilization of leftist filmmakers. The ideological message and mobilization led to a crackdown by colonial authorities and further drove the CCP to adopt a more implicit approach to launching ideological campaigns. This paper revises the history of South China Film Company and unsettles the existing historiography of Hong Kong leftist cinema that centers mainly on moderation and balance.

Visualising memory: filmmaking as research method to engage with China’s wartime past

ABSTRACT This article explores filmmaking as a historical research method by drawing on the output and experiences from my fieldwork at the Nanyue Martyr’s Shrine, Hunan province of China, where I produced a forty-five-minute documentary Till the Living Memory Fades (2020). Situated on the frontline of fighting in Hunan during the Resistance War against Japanese invasion (1937–1945), this war memorial, dedicated to fallen Chinese soldiers, has survived Japanese occupation and years of Communist erasure, re-emerging today to be visited by groups of people and thus being reincorporated into contemporary China’s war narrative. By analysing selected scenes from the film, I map out the temporal and spatial presence different from the text and discuss how this practice-based research contributes to the current memory study of war. The film uses observational methods from visual anthropology to visualise a complicated correlation between memorial landscapes, material culture, and individuals’ behaviour. It examines how remembering processes have been encoded in senses, embodied knowledge, and lived experiences, generated through affective communication between filmed subjects and the remembrance work organised in commemorative spaces. The capacity of camera to capture multi-layered acts of remembering points to the possibilities of bringing together historical research with practices of filmmaking.

A report on FIRST International Film Festival and an interview with young filmmakers

The FIRST International Film Festival is an annual grand event for young Chinese film professionals who have just started their careers as film directors. Its current development situation highlights the festival’s importance in the pandemic context. This article is comprised of interviews with attendees at the festival, especially the competitors, and provides a lens through which to interrogate how Chinese young film professionals as neophytes adapt to the post-pandemic environment of the Chinese film industry. By seeking their views on film production, distribution and the festival, this article aims to reveal the state of the film industry during the pandemic and in the post-pandemic period, the current living situation of young Chinese film professionals, how these film professionals connect with the industry and market and how these connections impact on their filmmaking practices.

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Violence against Women and Girls: Female Filmmakers Critique the Menace

Her resistance is many: the accented filmmaking practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan

ABSTRACT This paper aims to understand the “accented” documentary practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan, a contemporary Kurdish female filmmaker who was born in Turkey but lives in diaspora. I will discuss her filmmaking through the features of accented cinema, developed by Hamid Naficy and furthered by Asuman Suner. These features are multi-perspectivity, liminality, being the subject and the storyteller simultaneously, deconstructing the borders, replacing the history with a new memory, and cyclicity. As Naficy’s model lacks the gender dimension in its imagery of nation, identity and belonging, I will discuss his model from a broader perspective by adapting Suner’s approach, adding the gender dimension into my discussions. For this purpose, I will use the principles of “accented feminism”, a term I develop within the paper and draw the concept of “accented feminist cinema” from.

Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema

Beyond the Metanarratives of Indian Cinema Parichay Patra (bio) Priya Jaikumar. Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 398 pages. $109.95 cloth. $29.95 paperback. Why should we be so scared of a cosmic or cosmological ambition in cinema? It has always been part of the potential—and destiny—of film to mix the smallest with the largest, the immediate everyday with the longue durée of grand history, the microscopic with the macroscopic. —Adrian Martin, “ ‘The Tree of Life’: Great Events and Ordinary People” (2011) Priya Jaikumar’s Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space is a spatial film historiography and much more than what it usually means. It asks a number of complex questions in the context of Indian film historiography, Indian cinema studies, and the various modes of film history writing in general. Jaikumar presents several arguments that are located in apparently disjointed temporalities and makes a strong case for the reconsideration of spatiality in cinema [End Page 101] studies. It should be noted that the historicist research dominates Indian cinema studies, as opposed to some other views that intended to locate Indian cinema in mythological time and narratives. However, spatial history remained largely ignored. Jaikumar’s work addresses this lack in its own idiosyncratic ways. The book has a complex structure and varied, deceptively disjointed areas of interest. This highly ambitious project defies categorization; it acknowledges its debt to 1970s screen theory yet dissociates itself from the continuation of such legacy through its novel sites of inquiry. Its interdisciplinarity has far-reaching connotations and consequences for Indian cinema studies. The book successfully challenges disciplinary conventions and epistemic borders within several established practices and points out the dearth of prevalent cinema studies narrative(s) in India. For Jaikumar, this dearth might mean the absence of spatiality: her book presents the dominant narrative’s inability to explore the potential of space in the discussion on Indian cinema and India as a location for cinema. In this context, Jaikumar engages with such significant works as Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Edward Soja’s political geography to develop her theoretical framework. Jaikumar presents a densely informed case that engages with filmed space, profilmic space, the politics and poetics of location shooting and abstraction, the role of the cinematographic apparatus, and above all the idea of a multiplicity of spatial histories spanning over centuries. The afterlives that she presents are mostly unpredictable, as proclaimed in the book; this only adds to the text’s own unpredictability within the larger fabric of Indian film studies. In several interviews related to her most recent (and, I would say, pathbreaking) book, Jaikumar refers to the infamous U.S. wars in the Middle East as an event that triggered her interest in the politics of specific geographies, the sudden media-induced global visibility of apparently obscure locations and spaces.1 As a researcher who worked extensively on empire cinema and the colonial lives of filmmaking practices in South Asia, Jaikumar has always maintained her distance from the more dominant trends and methodologies in Indian cinema studies. Her previous book, on empire cinema, began with a call to abandon “the rubric of national cinemas.”2 In Where Histories Reside, Jaikumar introduces a spatial film historiography that is sui generis in Indian cinema studies. Here her concentration on fragmented spaces and multiple temporalities moves beyond the dominating framework of the national. The idea of space has not been completely overlooked and ignored in Indian cinematic histories. There is historical research [End Page 102] on the formation of Bombay and its cinema, work treating the city as a cinematic archive, and a 2012 volume of verbal and visual essays that explores “the multiple subjectivities related to cinema and the watermarks it has left on the body of a city.”3 However, Jai-kumar’s work is not restricted to the urban space and the cinematic urbanity: hers is an eclectic collection of spatialities, a sustained theorization of this historiographic model. The novelty of Jaikumar’s approach becomes evident as we look at the dominant historiographies in Indian cinema studies in retrospect. According to Ranjani Mazumdar, the latter has...

Three Filmmaking Practices That Guide Our Attention to Popular Cinema

Abstract Popular movies are constructed to control our attention and guide our eye movements across the screen. Estimates of fixation locations were made by manually moving a cursor and clicking over frames at the beginnings and ends of more than 30,000 shots in 24 English-language movies. Results provide evidence for three general filmmaking practices in screen composition. The first and overriding practice is that filmmakers generally put the most import content ‒ usually the center of a character’s face ‒ slightly above the center of the screen. The second concerns two-person conversations, which account for about half of popular movie content. Dialogue shots alternate views of the speakers involved, and filmmakers generally place the conversants slightly to opposite sides of the midline. The third concerns all other shots. For those, filmmakers generally follow important content in one shot by similar content in the next shot on the same side of the vertical midline. The horizontal aspect of the first practice seems to follow from the nature of our field of view and vertical aspect from the relationship of heads to bodies depicted. The second practice derives from social norms and an image composition norm called nose room, and the third from the consideration of continuity and the speed of re-engaging attention.

Toei’s Truck Guys series (1975–79): masculine identity and fantasies of utopia

The Toei Studio-produced Truck Guys/Torakku yarō (1975–79) is a popular domestic genre film series. Consisting of ten films, it is an action-comedy, loosely structured around a buddy-road film genre framework. While rarely canonised within critical or academic discourses, the series’ lasting popularity is still evidenced by its commercial ‘long-tail’. The aim of this article is primarily to shed light on this critically overlooked series, locating it within specific national and cultural contexts, in particular toward the end of the Japanese studio system. Specifically, this article examines how Toei attempted to revitalise the popular cycles of their genre films facing a decline in both mainstream commercial film production and cinema audiences, highlighting a fiercely pragmatic mode of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s where serialisation played an important role. By exploring the films from both textual and contextual perspectives, the article will also attempt to highlight and confirm the significance of intra-serial intertextuality, with particular reference to the first and the final instalments of the series: No One Can Stop Me (1975) and Hometown Express Service (1979). Addressing a practice of popular genre filmmaking in Japan also begins to fill a critical gap in Japanese film studies

Transforming education with Black diaspora film and filmmaking practice

At the first Third World Filmmakers Meeting held in Algiers in 1973, participants resolved that the cinema they envisioned could conscientize audiences and continue Indigenous and African storytelling traditions. Today, there is a robust canon of Black diaspora cinema, which should be preserved, archived and analysed. Yet when coupled with filmmaking practice, it can become living history as a tool in the application of critical pedagogy. This article considers Black diaspora film and filmmaking practice as mechanisms for the radical transformation of education. It examines how oppositional cinematic representations can spark critical consciousness and how filmmaking practice can put emotional intelligence at the centre of learning.

‘It is, that’s all.’: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and the cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet

ABSTRACT The notebooks that accompany J. M. Coetzee’s early drafts of The Life & Times of Michael K (1983) reveal the importance of cinematic modes of representation for Coetzee’s conception of the eponymous Michael K. With reference to early drafts of the novel, this paper argues that Michael K’s characterisation is particularly influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s filmmaking practices. Specifically, this article illustrates the importance of Robbe-Grillet’s treatment of subjectivity and objectivity for Coetzee’s experimentation with modernist modes of writing. Coetzee’s experiments with cinematic form during the drafting process illustrate the ways in which he navigates his fidelity to modernism’s formalist values in relation to the political and literary concerns that encircle him as an author in apartheid-era South Africa. By analysing the implicit and explicit influence of Robbe-Grillet’s aesthetic values as a filmmaker on Coetzee’s writing, this article illustrates the importance of acknowledging cinematic modes of representation in Coetzee’s fidelity to the nouveau roman, and his continuing investigation of modernism during this era.

Quilting Voices

Quilting Voices

Candra Aditya’s Dewi pulang

Abstract Short films have proven an important medium for social commentary in contemporary Indonesia. As an example of the genre, this special issue of BKI presents Candra Aditya’s (2016) short film, Dewi pulang (Dewi goes home), which follows a young Javanese woman as she travels from Jakarta to her natal home in Central Java to attend her father’s funeral. A critically annotated transcript and translation of the film’s dialogue is followed by four essays on various aspects of the film and a conversation with the filmmaker. Issues addressed include the changing nature of short films and ‘indie’ cinema in post-authoritarian Indonesia; the filmmaking practices specific to Dewi pulang; the interplay of absence and presence in Dewi’s movement between Jakarta and her natal home in Central Java; and the juxtaposition of Indonesian-, English- and Javanese-language dialogue, and the forms of sociality they respectively embody. Taken as a whole, the special issue offers at once a window onto short filmmaking in Indonesia and new primary materials for further analysis.