Full-length Feature Film Research Articles

Features of Atheistic Discourse in the Cinema of ‘‘Militant Atheism’’ of the 1920s

The article examines the specific features of Soviet anti-religious films of the 1920s from the first propaganda campaigns to full-length feature films. The real persecution of the Church and believers was beyond the attention of filmmakers. The core purpose of such films was a full-scale defamation of the Russian Orthodox Church, its ministers and parishioners. This kind of cinema was the mainstream of militant atheism, aimed at exterminating Christianity. The author focuses primarily on little-studied films from the collection of the National Film Archive.

Bruegel według Majewskiego. Literackie i malarskie problemy adaptacji

Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (2011) is a full-length feature film, a screen adaptation of Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Way of the Cross (1564). Majewski proves to be an excellent interpreter of Bruegel’s art, whom he considers a philosopher, an epic, and a poet. He relies on the research of Michael F. Gibson, and in his plotting he draws on a long-standing tradition of literary experience and digital technology (without this, it would have been impossible to faithfully reproduce the overall plan and realities of the painting). Majewski exposes the palimpsest nature of the narrative and shapes the film like a contemporary novel of space. In order to make the ideas of the screened painting comprehensible and to emphasize the fictionality of the depicted world, he introduces various versions of “literature about literature”. In the film, he perfectly integrates painterly features (word reduction, stop motion, long static camera shots) and literary features (the structure of an episodic novel of manners).

Abstract 13871: Portrayal of Acute Myocardial Infarction in Popular Film

Introduction: The representation of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in popular media plays a pivotal role in shaping public conceptions about CV health. CVD is the leading cause of death among women and disproportionately affects racial/ethnic minority populations in the United States, yet recent national surveys indicate a significant decline in public awareness. Our study sought to investigate the portrayal of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in popular film. Hypothesis: Portrayal of AMI in film will predominantly show white men exhibiting symptoms of chest pain. Women, racial/ethnic minority populations, and subtle symptoms of AMI will be underrepresented. Aims: To examine 100 full length feature film scenes depicting AMI and evaluate the representation of gender, race/ethnicity, and symptoms. Methods: The 100 most popular films with scenes depicting AMI were identified using the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Scenes and AMI symptoms were analyzed by cardiologists/cardiology fellows. Gender and race/ethnicity were acquired via movie plots/scripts or via actor self-identification if the former was unavailable. Results: Of the 100 scenes analyzed, 10% depicted women. The representation of people of color was only 6% in contrast to the 94% of scenes featuring non-Hispanic whites. Of the 10 women portrayed, 1 was non-white. The distribution of gender and race/ethnicity for all scenes is shown in Figure 1. The most prevalent presenting symptom observed in 65% of scenes was chest pain accompanied by loss of consciousness. Conclusions: Popular film depictions of AMI appear to be under representative of women and racial/ethnic minority populations. This may be a contributing factor to the inaccurate public perception that CVD does not affect these populations. Film depictions of AMI, which predominantly portray dramatic symptoms of chest pain and loss of consciousness may also perpetuate false beliefs on typical (or even atypical) symptoms of AMI.

Children as a Reflection of Transcendence in the Filmography of Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrej Tarkovsky is a Russian film author who has indebted the entire world’s cinematography with his cinematic style. His (auto)biography and filmography give us a hint that he was a deeply religious man who believed that art should serve to deepen man’s spirituality. By watching and analyzing the author’s films, we came to the hypothesis that Tarkovsky uses the characters of children to express something supernatural, and therefore, we wanted to explore which narratives and stylistic devices the director uses to give his interpretation of the spiritual and transcendent. Thus, we analyzed nine characters of children that appear in the director’s six full-length feature films: Ivan Bondarev (Ivan’s Childhood), Boriska (Andrei Rublev), Aleksej, Ignat and Asafjev (Mirror), Marta (Stalker), Domenico’s son and Angela (Nostalghia), and Gossen (The Sacrifice). The methods we have used are qualitative content analysis, description, comparison, and synthesis. The characteristics we have noticed in the characters of the children, which could point to the transcendent, are a deep and penetrating gaze, the supernatural powers children use, the mysterious environments they inhabit, the deep influence they have on other characters, asking religious questions, hermit-like loneliness, modest clothes, and allusions to a Christ-like figure.

Decoding brain basis of laughter and crying in natural scenes

Laughter and crying are universal signals of prosociality and distress, respectively. Here we investigated the functional brain basis of perceiving laughter and crying using naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) approach. We measured haemodynamic brain activity evoked by laughter and crying in three experiments with 100 subjects in each. The subjects i) viewed a 20-minute medley of short video clips, and ii) 30 min of a full-length feature film, and iii) listened to 13.5 min of a radio play that all contained bursts of laughter and crying. Intensity of laughing and crying in the videos and radio play was annotated by independent observes, and the resulting time series were used to predict hemodynamic activity to laughter and crying episodes. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) was used to test for regional selectivity in laughter and crying evoked activations. Laughter induced widespread activity in ventral visual cortex and superior and middle temporal and motor cortices. Crying activated thalamus, cingulate cortex along the anterior-posterior axis, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. Both laughter and crying could be decoded accurately (66–77% depending on the experiment) from the BOLD signal, and the voxels contributing most significantly to classification were in superior temporal cortex. These results suggest that perceiving laughter and crying engage distinct neural networks, whose activity suppresses each other to manage appropriate behavioral responses to others’ bonding and distress signals.

Sensing Shipibo Aesthetics Beyond the Peruvian Amazon: Kené Design in Icaros: A Vision (2016)

This essay considers how Indigenous Amazonian aesthetics can sense and be sensed when incorporated into film. Drawing on Amazonian ontology, Shipibo aesthetics, and haptic film theory and focusing on the function of the multimodal Shipibo designs known as kené in Icaros: A Vision (2016, directed by Matteo Norzi and Leonor Caraballo), we propose that the full-length feature film format allows for a sensory experience of kené as life forms emanating from the forest. Two Italian artists created Icaros: A Vision in collaboration with Shipibo artists and shamans affiliated with Anaconda Cósmica, the Iquitos, Peru-area ayahuasca retreat centre where the movie takes place, and the film candidly reflects on the commodification of Indigenous healing and aesthetics in which it participates. Our analysis centres kené and its Shipibo makers – especially women – and compares the film’s Shipibo aesthetics with the words, sounds, and images from César Calvo’s The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon (1981) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, both of which the film explicitly references. We argue that, in contrast to those works, Icaros: A Vision’s multisensorial engagement with Shipibo aesthetics intercepts – however imperfectly – the objectifying gaze inherent in the unrestrained partitioning of the forest into natural resources.

The Many Lives of Yang Luchan: Mythopoesis, Media, and the Martial Imagination

The life of Yang Luchan, patriarch of the Yang lineage and founder of taijiquan’s most popular style, is a biographical blank slate upon which conservative, progressive, orientalist, and just plain rice bowl interests have inscribed wildly divergent narratives. Conservative scholar-disciples sought to link him with the invented Wudang-Daoist lineage, while progressives emphasized his humble origins and health benefits of the practice. His life (c.1799-1872) straddled the height of the Manchu empire and decline into semi-colonial spheres of foreign influence, while successive generations of Yang descendants propagated his ‘intangible cultural heritage’ through Republican, Communist, ‘open’ and global eras. Practiced world-wide by hundreds of millions, taijiquan’s name recognition made it ripe for media appropriation, and Yang Luchan has been remythologized in countless novels, cartoons, television series, and full-length feature films. The case of Yang Luchan offers an unusual opportunity to witness an ongoing process of mythopoesis against a background of historical antecedents and to compare these narratives with traditional Chinese warrior heroes and Western models of mythology and heroology. If the lack of facts has not constrained the fabrication of invented biographies, neither should it discourage the quest for historical context as we sift and winnow truth from trope in examining the patterns of motivated reasoning that characterize the many reconstructions of Yang’s biography.

In Interview: On the Development of Video in the Theatre

German film artist Jan Speckenbach ingeniously contributed to the development of live video on the stage, and this discussion focuses on his education, as well his as experimental collaborations with director Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne Berlin, starting in 2000. Speckenbach’s background in film and media studies facilitated his explorations of uncharted territory in the theatre, going from a set of fixed cameras on the stage to the use of a camera crew with live-editing for augmented images as part of the whole directing concept and process. His first-hand insights into how actors have interacted with this new technology and how filmmaking can be an integral part of the theatre indicate clearly that filmmaking has played an invaluable role in recent theatre history. Speckenbach here also speaks of his collaborations with other directors, notably Sebastian Hartmann and René Pollesch, and about the future perspectives of this technology, which has changed the theatre altogether.Jan Speckenbach studied art history, philosophy, and media in Karlsruhe, Munich, and Paris during the 1990s. At the beginning of the new millennium he participated in the development of video theatre with Frank Castorf and, now a successful filmmaker, he also continues to work in the theatre. His short film Gestern in Eden [Yesterday in Eden] premiered at Cannes in 2008, while the full-length feature film Die Vermissten [The Missing] was shown at the 2012 Berlinale and Freiheit [Freedom] at the 2017 film competition at Locarno. In 2020 he directed the live-stream of Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain, after Thomas Mann’s novel] at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (premiered online in November 2019), which was subsequently invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Thomas Irmer is the editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based monthly Theater der Zeit. He has co-edited two books on the work of Frank Castorf – Zehn Jahre Volksbühne Intendanz Frank Castorf (2003) and Castorf (2016). During the last forty years he has authored, among other significant writings, numerous analytical articles and interviews on Castorf’s creative output.

Loving Vincent: Online Exhibition as an Innovative Form of Presenting Visual Art in Ukraine

The article considers the online exhibition and art events Loving Vincent as the relevant forms of exhibition of art works, the main idea of which is to promote the work of Vincent van Gogh and the art of the animated films in Ukraine. The aim of the paper isto highlight the importance of the latest forms of visual art representation in Ukraine on the example of the online exhibition Loving Vincent and a number ofrelated events dedicated to the world’s first full-length eponymous animated feature film about the life of Vincent van Gogh. The role of Ukrainian artists in the process of working on the film is also highlighted. The methodology of work includes a set of culturological and art research methods and approaches. In particular, empirical observations, analysis of the source base and video materials contribute to the comprehensive coverage of the process of organization and realization of the Loving Vincent exhibition. The interviews with the organizers, screenwriters, and artists helped to get a deep insight into the specifics of working on the film. Descriptive and analytical methods contributed to the formation of a comprehensive view regarding the innovative forms of representation of visual artworks in Ukraine. On the basis of factual material, a synthetic comprehension of problems and prospects of development ofsuch newest exposition forms as virtual excursions and online exhibitions were formed. Emphasis is also made on the participation of Ukrainian artists in the largescale international art projects that leads to the creation and development of new opportunities of the representation of contemporary art

Лингводидактический потенциал современных художественных фильмов на занятиях по русскому языку как иностранному

The work is devoted to the formation of sociocultural and linguocultural competences of foreigners studying Russian as a foreign language (RFL) through work with modern feature films. We describe the linguodidactic potential of authentic video materials designed to work in the classroom in Russian as a foreign language; selection criteria are presented. We point out that mo-tion pictures are a valuable source of both linguistic and extralinguistic information. We conclude that it is advisable to use authentic full-length feature films in RFL lessons; the recommended lev-el of language proficiency is B1. We offer a methodological development for the Russian film “Moscow Romance” (2019). We substantiate the criteria for choosing this film, we have devel-oped a system of tasks, some of which can be completed during extracurricular hours. We pre-scribe such stages of work with the film as: “Pre-demonstration. Preparation for viewing”, “Dem-onstration. Understanding Test” and “Post-Demonstration. Discussion”, as well as offer the fourth stage “Continuing work outside the classroom”. This system of work has been tested by the au-thors of the work in three groups of different nationalities studying at Russian universities.

Film fabularny jako narzędzie kuratora i badacza sztuki

In the essay, the author, Łukasz Ronduda, relates his own work as an artist, a film director, an art historian and curator, discussed in the light of the cinematic turn and the formation of common ground between cinema and contemporary art in both artistic and institutional sense. Ronduda looks closely at his two full-length feature films: Performer (2015) and Serce miłości (Heart of Love) (2017) and highlights their wider context. The first frame of reference spans from experimental films to contemporary full-length productions dedicated to wide audience. The second reference is his own work involving academic research, curating, writing a novel and the creation of a found footage film. In this self-presentation, Ronduda discloses his different attempts to find the right medium to speak about and analyze contemporary art. The full-length film turned out to be particularly effective medium in its ability to express the truth by means of fiction, placing him between creation and institutional structure. Film as a medium of interpreting art seems to productively question fixed boundaries between research, criticism and art.

‘I’m just doing my job’: The First Lady and the Work of Political Mythmaking in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016)

Jackie (2016), Pablo Larraín’s biopic of Jacqueline Kennedy, is the first full-length feature film devoting serious attention to an American First Lady and the work she carries out. I argue that Larraín’s interpretation should be read as an endeavour to render visible a First Lady’s largely invisible work of image-making. Larraín’s subversion of biopic conventions combined with the use of estrangement devices enables him to posit a nuanced and complex interpretation of Jacqueline Kennedy and to lift the cinematic veil of invisibility obscuring her work. I close by considering the uniqueness and significance of Jackie, suggesting it has the potential to serve as an alternative, postmodern, and perhaps feminist, option for portraying women’s lives and labour.

“Bie zai tiqi” and You Mean the World to Me: Two Subversive Sinophone Malaysian Metatexts

AbstractThis article aims at exploring the subversive nature of two Sinophone Malaysian cultural products, namely “Bie zai tiqi” (2002) a short story by Ho Sok Fong and You Mean the World to Me (2017), a full-length feature film by director Saw Teong Hin. I argue that, despite their differences, both fictional products use powerful metafictional and metanarrative devices to challenge factuality. In doing so, they not only blur the fine line between fiction and reality, but they also question cultural power dynamics and ethnic politics in Malaysia. Moreover, they defy the truthfulness of Mandarin as the preferred Sinitic cultural language as well as the idea that, in Malaysia, literature and film can be considered Malaysian only if produced in Malay, the official language of the country. By performing an analysis of the linguistic choices made by Ho Sok Fong and Saw Teong Hin, I will suggest that both the short story and the feature film analysed in this article use metafiction and metanarration to subvert widely-accepted, yet problematic, notions of national culture and common ethnic language.

THE JOURNALIST IMAGE IN THE WORKS OF MASS CULTURE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

The article reveals the terms of modern journalism, analyses the journalist images created in the mass culture of the Russian Federation. It is not easy to find out the journalist image on pages of mass editions and in full-length feature films. In various stages of the Russian society formation, the journalist appeared in this type of works with the goal of personifying a certain ideology. Today, the comic characters are pushed into the background by a solid superhero nature, the audience often discusses the relationship between heroes than who they are in the series, the films emphasize the epic nature of the action, and the journalist is usually a way of creating a work in the "action" genre in fiction. The Russian journalist image is often negative: it is either a "hatchet" man from the tabloid press, or gossip "collector", or a careerist. Such characters much less often become the main participants in criminal events, seeking the triumph of justice and the establishment of truth in the society. The main task of the authors when creating such works with the characters-journalists is to provide material interesting to the consumer. Transformation of any product, including spiritual, into a good, dictates the special conditions for creating the journalist image. Based on the universal journalist image, identified by D. Randall (2000) [1], we typologized the characters, having revealed certain regularities. The results of our study consist in confirming the expected results: the creators of mass culture products do not set themselves the task of objectively demonstrating the journalist profession; journalism appears in a grotesque image in their works

The Islamic Subject of Home Cinema of Kerala

Migration to the Arabian Gulf as the experience of the state of Kerala has mostly been elided in mainstream Malayalam cinema. The digital revolution towards the end of the last century has spurred a local film practice in northern Kerala, usually called ‘Home Cinema’/‘home video’/‘home film’ and so on. Home Cinema of Kerala is locally produced low-quality CD/DVD video productions which are full-length feature films distributed through video shops, stationeries, bookstores and so on. Home Cinema, synonymous in its beginning with the films of Salam Kodiyathur, began as an attempt to oppose what was perceived as the immoral qualities of mainstream cinema, both global and regional. As a counter to the mainstream, Kodiyathur attempted to formulate Islamic cinema but in the idiom of a strand of mainstream Malayalam cinema. This article looks at the constitution of the Islamic subjects of these cinemas as negotiating the figure of the migrant Muslim in the dominant idiom of Malayalam cinema.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Camera Buff”: a revised version of “First Love”

The article develops its title thesis, which proposes interpreting Kieślowski’s Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), his second full-length feature film, as a revised version of his documentary First Love, made five years earlier. Both films have similar starting points ‒ the story of a couple expecting the birth of their first child. But the conclusion in each case also has something in common and results in the abandoning of a film project. The latter similarity meant that Kieślowski changed the character of the main protagonist in his full-length movie. It is no longer a documentary hero but the film auteur himself. This was probably the essence of the director’s artistic discovery made while shooting Camera Buff. It meant the abandonment of the documentary character when the prolonged relationship with him (and her) proved to be ethically dubious and his (and her) development predictable. At the same time, Kieślowski expressed his own creative experience as the film’s author creating a fictitious character in Camera Buff, inspired by various figures of real ‘prototypes’.

The trouble of gender sin in post-Yugoslav film – in the name of the father

Post-Yugoslav film art is, similarly to Yugoslav cinema, exemplary of masculine cultural domination, approaching socio-national themes in a highly gendered mode and reflecting a return to patriarchy, more brutal than that during the existence of Yugoslavia. A new generation of cinéasts explores, with a backlash mixture of contempt and compassion, the themes of violence, displaying a new assault on female emancipation, which seemed to be in line with the socio-political context of rising nationalist movements that led to the bloody events of the Yugoslav war in 1991. The female character is re-located to a place traditionally assigned to women not as the subject of narrative or discourse, but as the object of love and/or hatred by a masculine subject. The films chosen to be analysed here are full-length auteur feature films – Virgina, Grbavica, Djeca, Bure baruta, with a specific focus on the work by Danis Tanović – are not representative of post-Yugoslav cinema, but as rare exceptions demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant post-Yugoslav public opinion, both the Yugoslav wars and post-war traumatic realities remain cinematically unexplored.

The Zones of Twilight. Son of Saul and the Tradition of Holocaust Representation in Hungarian Full-Length Feature Films

Der Erfolg des vielfach ausgezeichneten Son of Saul hat die Aufmerksamkeit der Welt erneut auf das Paradoxon der Darstellung des Holocaust gelenkt. Die Studie untersucht zunachst die Tradition der Darstellung des Holocaust in ungarischen Spielfilmen und widmet sich auserdem jenen stilistischen Losungen, die das Paradoxon im Laszlo Nemes Film auf asthetisch innovative und gultige Weise auflosen. Von den 1950er Jahren bis zum Regimewechsel wurden die Regisseure, die sich mit dem Thema auseinander setzten, sowohl mit asthetischen als auch mit politischen Schwierigkeiten konfrontiert, da das kommunistische Regime den Holocaust nicht als nicht darstellbar, sondern in erster Linie als der Vergessenheit geweiht betrachtete. Obwohl mit dem Regimewechsel dieser politische Druck aufgehort hat zu existieren, reagiert die ungarische Gesellschaft immer noch sensibel auf das Thema des Holocaust. Der historische Uberblick vor der Analyse des Son of Saul stellt daher seine Thematik in das doppelte Licht der politischen und poetischen Sichtweisen, was allgemein auf die Filmkunst in Ungarn sowie im weiteren Sinne in der mittelosteuropaischen Region nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg zutrifft.

КОММУНИКАТИВНЫЕ НЕУДАЧИ КАК СЛЕДСТВИЕ НАРУШЕНИЯ ТАБУ

The article considers one of the reasons for communication failures - taboos violation. Dialogues in English from the full-length feature films of the British cinema of the XXI century, on the basis of which the author analyzes the influence of taboos on the success of communication, serve as material for the study. The researcher comes to the conclusion that effective communication is provided by many factors: external conditions of communication, personality, age, status of communicants, degree of acquaintance, and, by all means, knowledge and compliance with the norms of communicative etiquette, as violation of these norms, where taboo is one of the forms of their expression, brings an undesirable emotional effect in the process of communication and leads to the emergence of communication failures.

Rasgos del cine histórico. Reflexión desde el cine colombiano

Caracterización del cine histórico a partir de una muestra de obras cinematográficas de largometraje hechas en Colombia y mediante acercamientos teóricos a Ricoeur, Rosenstone, la escuela de los annales y otros. Frente a la historia escrita, se aporta que el cine no es reconstrucción de hechos sino discurso emotivo que comunica no solo lo narrado sino la forma de concebir al mundo por parte del realizador y la sociedad en que surge la obra.