Function Of Cinema Research Articles

Wild Animation: From the Looney Tunes to Bojack Horseman in Cartoon Los Angeles

In this paper, I trace themes of the animetaphor. I interpret Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term as a moving image of the re-membered animal that projects a collective anxiety of oblivion for all animals, including humans. I begin with an exploration of this theme with respect to early cinema and the philosophical and psychological movements that accompany it. I then investigate more contemporary examples of these models in three case studies—Chuck Jones’ characters in the Looney Tunes, the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the Netflix series BoJack Horseman—to explore the imagined city of Los Angeles as a cartography of animal ghosts, invented and reinvented as semiotic machines, which force us to look at animals as ourselves and at ourselves as animals. Mechanisms of mass cultural memory are at work in the cinematic history of Los Angeles, and animation is often a projection of those memories. The link between psychoanalysis, the emergence of cinema, and modernism during the early part of the twentieth century serves as the philosophical-aesthetic background for my approach to social and artistic themes that haunt cinematic and real space in Los Angeles through the movement of animated animals. I argue that the fascination with animal movement of early cinema and cartoon animation suggest a particular function of cinema, and even more so cartoon animation, to remind us of repressed sensations and images from our collective unconscious.

Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe

Reviewed by: Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe Nancy P. Nenno (bio) Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema. By Steve Choe. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. vii+274. Cloth £80.00. ISBN 978-1441175380. Steve Choe’s Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema is a philosophical meditation on the function of cinema in a time of crisis. Drawing on a selection of art films from the early years of the Weimar Republic, Choe juxtaposes their representations of life and death in the aftermath of World War I [End Page 398] and the devastating Treaty of Versailles with philosophical and popular discourses to illuminate the ways in which the cinematic medium not only embodies the idea of mortality itself, but can catalyze a spectatorial positionality that encourages reflection and model an ethics of spectatorship. This dialogue between literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historically grounded analysis and close readings of the films is the book’s strong point, as it reflects on the ways in which cinema itself constitutes a self-reflexive medium that is intimately tied to specific historical contexts. As such, his readings also interact with the Kinodebatte, the debate about film’s potential to become an artistic medium. The two pillars of Choe’s analyses are Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the analytic and intuitive attitudes toward time and change and Walter Benjamin’s understanding of allegory. Along the way, he brings an impressive array of other voices into dialogue through his discussions of cinematic depictions of death, loss, mourning, and revenge. Film critics from the period such as Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balász, philosophers Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Georg Simmel, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke all contribute to his understanding of his primary themes: the experience of the animation of the inanimate as represented by film, and the struggle to understand life and death following World War I, ultimately culminating in what Choe terms the “ethics of survival” (10). Afterlives opens with a beautifully nuanced close reading of a scene from Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which he argues that the somnambulist Cesare functions as an allegory of the cinema itself insofar as he is “reawakened” or reanimated from the dead. These moments of self-reflexivity appear in most of the films Choe analyzes, from the origins of cinema in the traveling fair depicted in Caligari to the play of shadows in Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923). There is a distinct narrative in the study which progresses from initial reactions to the war experience to those of mourning and loss to the projection of the future through the remembrance of the past. Chapter 1 focuses on two possible reactions to having survived the war. Here, Choe contrasts the two male figures in Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919) to demonstrate how they enact diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with postwar trauma. Chapter 2 undertakes a complementary reading of Murnau’s films The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922) in order to understand the ways in which the topos of haunting functioned in the immediate postwar period. Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) is the focus of the third chapter, which underscores the relationship between the duration of the film experience and the experience of lived human life. The fourth chapter focuses on Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) and its explicit allegory of cinema as the animation of the inanimate as a means to posit the possibility of an ethical relationship to the other. In the final chapter, which deals with Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), Choe demonstrates how the theme [End Page 399] of revenge can lead either to a sense of life as predetermined or as open ended and potentially utopian. While the stated focus of Afterlives is early Weimar cinema, it is not entirely clear what the historical parameters of “early” Weimar cinema are, nor how he has chosen these films rather than others. Although there are references to Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), it seems odd...

Cinema as family romance

This essay analyses the narratives and iconographies of India embedded in a trilogy of blockbuster Hindi films from the long 1970s: Deewar (1975), Trishul (1978), and Shakti (1982). These films represent some of the decade's aspirations as well as its repressions that together constitute its public fantasies. Their narratives provide access to the political unconscious of modern India revealing the profound anxieties that pervaded the public culture of the decade. The essay explores the extent to which the traumas of the decade were displaced on the family, and the crisis in political culture was recast in social terms as a Family Romance in popular Hindi film. It analyzes Deewar's tensions at narrating and containing an incendiary critique of the decade, and it exposes the ‘revisions‘ to this film's masterplot as they were rescripted in Trishul and Shakti. The essay concludes with proposing the social function of cinema as a Family Romance.

Just look at yourselves: The face and the ethical event in Israeli cinema

ABSTRACTIn his writings (Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being), Emmanuel Levinas points out the affinity between the ‘other's’ face-proximity and responsibility. In this article I focus on the way in which the ‘I’ challenges the physical border demarcated by a checkpoint, in order to reach ‘the other's’ face, and our own. Following Levinas, I trace the cinematic writing of the face of the ‘I’ and the ‘other’, which are subject to a dual disciplining—that of the checkpoint, and that of the cinematic camera. The transition sites in Israeli cinema function as a recurring meeting point between the military and optic regime. These sites serve as an intersection that discloses the changing positions of Israeli film, and through it that of the Israeli collective unconscious, in its attitudes towards ‘I’ vis-à-vis the ‘other’. My reading will be guided by four films: Ben-Gurion (1997), a short film directed by T. Grad and G. Levenberg, with a screenplay by A. Dayan; and three documentary films all made during the 2000s, Borders (Riklis and Keidar, 2001), Checkpoint (Shamir, 2003) and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (Mograbi, 2005). I contend that the shifting—from a gaze attempting to bring closer the other's suffering towards a gaze focusing on our own Israeli faces, and from fiction films to first-person documentaries—is intended to expose the face concealed by the mask, and, through this disclosing, to intensify the doubts concerning our responsibility as observers and witnesses.

Envisioning Asia: on location, travel, and the cinematic geography of U.S. orientalism

Film provides a window into American culture and its attitudes toward Asia of the first half of the 20th century. The birth of cinema coincides with the beginnings of U.S. expansion overseas, and the classic Hollywood era coincides with the rise of the U.S. as a global superpower. In Envisioning Asia, Jeanette Roan argues that throughout this period, the cinema's function as a form of virtual travel, coupled with its purported 'authenticity', served to advance America's shifting interests in Asia. Its ability to fulfill this imperial role depended, however, not only on the cinematic representations themselves but on the marketing of the films' production histories - and, in particular, their use of Asian locations. Roan demonstrates this point in relation to a wide range of productions, offering an engaging and useful survey of a largely neglected body of film. In addition, by focusing on the material practices involved in shooting films on location - that is, the actual travels, negotiations, and labor of making a film - she moves beyond formal analysis to produce a richly detailed history of American interests, attitudes, and cultural practices during the first half of the 20th century.

‘So essentially human’: The appeal of Charles Chaplin's Shoulder Arms in Britain, 1918

Charles Chaplin's war comedy Shoulder Arms (1918) was shown as a trade screening in Britain within five days of the Armistice in November 1918. Close friends had warned Chaplin that this might be an inappropriate topic for a comedy, given the enormous loss of life suffered by European. In Britain, Chaplin had come under scrutiny for not enlisting. However, Chaplin and his comedy stood, at the end of the war, for the recreational function of cinema and also as a counter to arguments for cinema as a marker of the social and moral disintegration associated with the negative effects of modernity. This article outlines the British context for the reception of Shoulder Arms and argues that the function of Chaplin's persona and comedy technique, both in his previous films and in Shoulder Arms, contributed to the increasing acceptance of cinema as an integral element of everyday life, with a laudable social function.

Salas de cinema: cenários de uma história porto-alegrense

The present work is a summary of the first two chapters of a book about the cinema halls of Porto Alegre, still untitled, to be released by the Municipal Department of Culture in March 1999. The research was carried out jointly with the SMC Research Advisor. The editorial proposal is not intended to be an exhaustive historical research, but to reconstruct the function of Cinema in the Porto Alegre scene.