Generation Of Filmmakers Research Articles

Impact production in higher education: shaping future change makers through film education

This article considers impact production (using film and other forms of storytelling as the core of a social change strategy) as an important component of well-rounded film education programmes that seek to shape a new generation of socially and environmentally conscious film-makers. Through desk research, interviews and a survey, we found that opportunities to learn about impact production at higher education institutions are limited and expensive, while open-access resources are numerous, but can be overwhelming for those new to the field. We interview practitioners who specialise in: (1) raising awareness about what impact production entails; (2) practically implementing impact production strategies; and (3) educating film-makers in how to design impact campaigns. We analyse two case studies from Majority World countries to demonstrate strengths and weaknesses of existing impact teaching and training. The data gathered inform a theorisation of how impact production can be incorporated into formal educational practices worldwide. The article conceptualises what ‘impact production film education’ entails in a higher education context. This includes unpacking the interdisciplinary and practice-based nature of impact production. The intention is to shine light on the pedagogical value of impact production for shaping a new generation of film-makers who are technically equipped to tell compelling stories, and intellectually committed to using film as a tool for change.

Ethical instances of doubt: The case of Yoyes on the screen – An interview with Helena Taberna and Lur Olaizola Lizarralde

‘Ethical instances of doubt: The case of Yoyes on the screen’ is an in-depth interview with filmmakers Helena Taberna and Lur Olaizabal who both focused on the figure of ETA leader Dolores González Katarain, Yoyes, as they each began their film careers despite belonging to different generations of filmmakers. The interview explores gender and necropolitical power as well as feminism and its incompatibility with violence, among other topics. Both filmmakers are interested in Yoyes’s role as a female terrorist and ETA leader, her fight against social injustice, and the path that led her to depart from violence at a time when her generation considered that political activism meant fighting the abuses of the Spanish state with fire.

Reframing violence in Corsica : cinema as mask and mirror

Corsican historical and endemical violence takes many forms (armed fight for Independence, ‘terrorist’ attacks, bombings, delinquency…) and this violence has often been overexploited by media and political discourses. What viewpoints might filmmakers in Corsica have of this violence? Is their filmic output reflective of the situation, offering original mise-en-scene to mirror and engage with the socio-historical context? Should Corsican cinema, on the contrary, take some distance to reconstitute the framework of a stereotyped, decontextualised violence, at the risk of dismissing historical reality? A new generation of filmmakers is at odds with the touristic, exotic, and truncated exploitation of the image of a sunny yet explosive island, a strange and foreign Corsica. This paper seeks to question the ethical dilemma these filmmakers are facing and analyse the dialectical position of the screen as mask and mirror. Filmmakers need to delocalise, internalise, decontextualise and reframe this violence in the specific context of Corsica to reveal the unspoken, to highlight silences, to echo clandestine testimonies, to exorcise individual memories and collective trauma.

Mobile Moving Image Culture & Smartphone Filmmaking Past, Present & Future

Over the last decade, smartphone filmmaking evolved from an underground and art house into an egalitarian filmmaking practice and moving-image culture. In an international context mobile, smartphone and pocket films can provide access to filmmaking tools and technologies for a new generation of filmmakers. Max Schleser will review the developments and directions in mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking through the International Mobile Innovation Screenings (www.mina.pro). During the last ten years, he curated the screening and smartphone film festival, which captures and celebrates smartphone films about communities and cities from around the world. Mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking expands the tradition of experimental filmmaking, expanded cinema and documentary making. Smartphone filmmaking facilitates experimentation. This presentation will outline how early mobile filmmaking aesthetics still resonate in contemporary smartphones films and documentaries that screen at major festivals such as Berlinale or Festival de Cannes. Furthermore, mobile moving image aesthetics now influence filmmaking more generally.
 As Creative Arts research in screen and digital media, Max Schleser’s research projects are also disseminated via non-traditional research outputs. He applies practice-led research to examine novel film forms and formats. His creative practice focuses on filmmaking and curation. Max Schleser has demonstrated how mobile media can drive social innovation in interdisciplinary research projects. To establish a conversation on mobile media's potential for transdisciplinary research, he co-edited Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones and Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones. His monograph, Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory & Practice will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2021.

Roger Leenhardt’s world, viewed: rethinking colonial film and realist film theory in 1930s France

ABSTRACT Of his mentor Roger Leenhardt, André Bazin once stated, ‘There is in all phenomena a primary level, that of basic understanding. There is a second level, where the subtleties lay. And the third level, that belongs to Roger Leenhardt’ (cited in Roger Leenhardt ou le dernier des humanistes, André Labarthe, 1965). Though the influence of Leenhardt’s realist film theory on the Cahiers du cinéma generation of filmmakers and theorists is widely acknowledged, the contexts that served to germinate his ideas about cinematic realism remain understudied. This article links Leenhardt’s theories pertaining to film’s indirect or understated interpretation of reality, first articulated in his pioneering ‘Petite école du spectateur’ (1935–1936) series, to his search for a subtle approach to ethics, politics and colonial documentary within the same era. If scholars have tended to account for sparse cinema in France by turning to aesthetic traditions, Leenhardt’s 1930s career reveals that the conceptualisation and reinvention of cinema as a medium of subtle suggestion also arose within a political setting, namely nonconformist, Popular Front-era thought, which encouraged Leenhardt to embrace a Personalist-humanist stance towards the ‘other’. His film L’Orient qui vient (Roger Leenhardt and René Zuber, 1937) puts these ideas into practice, endeavouring to restrain the excesses of pro-colonial ideology and media.

Electricity within: Islam, pre-Islamic traditions and secular forms of belief in contemporary Kyrgyz cinema

ABSTRACT Although post-Soviet Central Asian societies self-identify as Muslim, spiritual identity is a highly contested subject in the region and one influenced by Russian imperialism and Soviet atheist ideology. In Kyrgyzstan, a transnational Islamic movement, the Tablighi Jama’at Network (TJN) calling for a purification of Islamic practices, competes not only with the practitioners of ‘Soviet traditional Islam’ deeply rooted in Kyrgyz ethnic customs and traditional culture, but also with the proponents of the pre-Islamic beliefs of Tengriism, all against the background of deeply-ingrained Soviet notions of modernity. On the basis of a close analysis of two Kyrygz films, Ernest Abdyzhaparov’s Saratan. Village Authorities (2004) and Aktan Arym Kubat’s Centaur (2017), this article examines negotiations of spiritual identity in contemporary Kyrgyz cinema at the intersection of global and local Islam, pre-Islamic traditions, and Soviet-imparted spiritual secularism as a complex process navigated by the Soviet generation of filmmakers who are apprehensive of Islamic global movements and emerging dominant religious narratives as an ‘alien’ ideology aiming to suppress Central Asians’ cultural diversity and authenticity. Responding to Russo-Soviet ideological imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, these artists negotiate their culture’s multiplicity and ambivalence while drawing on regional diversity and nomadic roots.

Generating History: Rethinking Generations in Chinese Filmmaking

Abstract This paper argues that the idea of a Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers was created almost as much by critics and others outside of China as by China-based writers on film. I will suggest that this cohort of filmmakers, which emerged in the mid-1980s, was more distinctive and shared more in common than generations of filmmakers before or since that decade. But using the Fifth Generation label can sometimes obscure real differences among the artists to whom the term is applied. Moreover, this cohort, within a matter of a few years, lost its relative coherence as its members went their separate ways. The paper will end by suggesting that in some senses the Fifth Generation, usually hailed as a “New Wave” in Chinese filmmaking, marked an end of certain attitudes to film in China rather than a new beginning.

Visualizing thought at work. Review of Alyssa DeBlasio: The Filmmaker's philosopher - Merab Mamardashvili and Russian cinema

Alyssa DeBlasio’s book The Filmmaker's philosopher - Merab Mamardashvili and Russian cinema presents Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy seen through the eyes of film directors who were directly or indirectly influenced by his lectures. With a detailed analysis of eight films, the book brings together a generation of filmmakers who translated Mamardashvili’s message into cinematic language, performing an experiment through which we might see an alternative mode of thought at work. By showing how Mamardashvili’s considerations of metaphysical, epistemological and moral nature shine through in the films described, DeBlasio touches upon one of the pillars of Mamardashvili’s thought: art is, together with philosophy, a privileged language for recording each own’s experience of the field of consciousness.

The rupture in Hong Kong cinema: Post-2000 Hong Kong cinema(s) as both a transnational cinema and a national cinema

This paper traces artistic and ideological discrepancies between the young generation of Hong Kong filmmakers and their predecessors – the established generation who contributed to the glory days of Hong Kong cinema during its economic boom. By tracing studies of national cinema and transnational cinema in the last three decades, the author argues that current Hong Kong cinema has split into two: a transnational cinema represented by the established generation of filmmakers; and a national cinema that is driven by the emerging generation who struggles for better preservation of Hong Kong local culture and their own cultural identities. To conduct the research, 47 people were interviewed including13 established filmmakers, 16 young filmmakers and18 film students from 3 universities in Hong Kong. The three groups of respondents generally represent three perspectives: that of the established film practitioners, who have a vested interest in the current co-production era; that of the emerging young film practitioners, who above all crave a flourishing local film market and whose productions exhibit stronger Hong Kong cultural identities; lastly, that of the, who were predominantly born in the 1990s and have the most extreme views against mainland China and whose filmmaking ideologies and practices foreshadow the future of the industry.

The Return of Genre in 1990s Spanish Cinema: Industry, Legislative Changes and Economics

This article focuses on the key impact of genre in Spanish cinema in the early to mid-1990s. First, it addresses a series of legislative changes from the 1980s and 1990s and their influence on the national cinematic output. Second, it analyses box-office data in the early-to-mid 1990s while drawing attention to the emergence of new players—such as private multimedia enterprises—in the field of film production. Third, it examines the work of two different filmmakers—the duo Manuel Gómez Pereira/Joaquín Oristrell, and Álex de la Iglesia—studying both their cinematic works and their status in different historiographies of Spanish cinema. Finally, it discusses the above-mentioned filmmakers’ engagement with genre as a key development in the history of Spanish cinema, paving the way to a later generation of filmmakers who drew from the generic to significantly change the development of the national film industry.

The Opening of South Africa and the Future of African Film

The Opening of South Africa and the Future of African Film Mahir Şaul (bio) The newest development in African cinema is the eruption of South Africa, previously isolated from the rest of the continent, as a film industry giant. In 2005, South Africa made a strong showing at FESPACO, with a large number of visitors and four feature films in the competition, one of which (Drum, dir. Zola Maseko, 2004) took the grand prize. In 2006, South Africa's Department of Arts and Culture hosted an African Film Summit in Pretoria-Tshwane, including a congress held by FEPACI. At this meeting, the members voted for the creation of a full-time secretariat in South Africa, though the headquarters remains in Ouagadougou, and elected Seipati Bulane Hopa, a South African woman producer, as Secretary General. The decision was hailed as a watershed in the history of FEPACI, and no doubt it serves as an emblem of the shifting center of gravity for the African film world. On the commercial front, the South African media company M-Net, already broadcasting to the rest of the continent via satellite and a subscription-based online TV service, began compiling its African Film Library by purchasing exclusive electronic rights to the films of the major francophone and anglophone directors. M-Net's pay-per-view entertainment channel, Africa Magic, airs daily Nollywood dramas and is starting to have an impact on both the finances and technical services of Nigerian video production.1 Another South African company, Nu Metro, operates theaters in several African countries, produces and distributes films and TV programs, and sells videos, DVDs, and video games for home entertainment. This new configuration is strengthened by two different imperatives stemming from South Africa: the local film industry's desire to reach a new market and the struggle of the formerly disadvantaged groups within the country to find proportional representation in post-apartheid society. The South African film industry, one of the oldest in the world, intermittently produces features that triumph at the international box office—for example, Academy Award winner Tsotsi (dir. Gavin Hood, 2005) and District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2009)—but suffers from a narrow domestic market, which [End Page 315] observers attribute in part to the lack of exhibition theaters and filmgoing habits in the Black townships. Adjustment to the realities of majority rule after the 1994 elections created a temporary lull in production, which was softened but not totally offset by the small flurry of anti-apartheid films. At the same time, the Cape Town World Cinema Festival and the simultaneous Sithengi Film and Television Market, promoted by the South African film industry, have now become major showcases for African cinema, on a par with FESPACO and Carthage.2 The rise of a new generation of young Black South African producers and directors is the second crucial element in the opening of South Africa. The latest crop of filmmakers is different from the small numbers who matured in the underground film scene during apartheid. Young filmmaker Carmen Sangion distinguishes "two generations of filmmakers, the younger generation that is focused on fantasy, entertainment, and commercial work, and the group from the old school with political and social baggage about the country."3 The younger cineastes may wish for work in a normalized commercial film sector, but they find it hard to break into the existing professional circuits. The studios around Johannesburg, and the major broadcast companies and distributors as well, are dominated by white capital and employ an old coterie of producers, directors, and technical personnel. Government aid administered through the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) prods this establishment to integrate the new Black professionals, but progress has been slow. Policy debates turn around a contrast, the independent filmmakers on one side, who establish start-up companies or operate informally, and industry organization on the other. During the 2008 Gauteng Film Commission conference, which was an "industry" event, Bulane Hopa said that "ten percent of the population continue to determine the nature of cultural content production … only by creating and sustaining more opportunities for Black filmmakers will the industry be able to meet the changing demands of South Africa."4...

1917-1927: Films russes entre l’ancien et le nouveau : genres, récits et corps

There are different forms of continuity and shifts in the Russian film after the October Revolution. On the one hand, films by Alexander Panteleev, Vladimir Gardin, and Czeslaw Sabinski adapted the new post-revolutionary reality to the established genres and narratives of the Russian prerevolutionary cinema, and the stylistic tradition of the Russian film school was continued not only between 1917 and 1924 but also afterward. The new generation of filmmakers, the Soviet Avant-Garde (Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin), was looking for different canon of representation. The article shows the interplay between the tradition and the shifts which could be discovered in common gestural behavior and the mode of its representation produced on the screen between 1924 and 1927.

Contribution of Artists Teaching at the Russian Federation S.A. Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography into Formation and Development of the Fine Arts in Mongolia in 20th century

The relevance of studying the contribution of artists and educators of Russian art for formation and development of the creative method of masters in Central Asian countries is due to the importance of this topic for solving the theoretical and practical problems of contemporary art history. Since the second half of the 20th century, the influence of Russian art school on art of the countries of the socialist community has increased. Russian universities have become base centers of higher art education. As a result, the main number of masters of art in Mongolia are graduates to Soviet and Russian art institutions. With appearance in 1935 of the studio "Mongolkino" in Ulan Bator, there was appear need for connoisseurs. Mongolian creators got the opportunity to obtain good education in the Soviet Union in VGIK. When learning students mastered programs aimed at comprehensive creative education. Priceless contribution to formation of the creative method of young masters was made by the artist-educators B.V. Dubrovsky-Eshke, F.S. Bogorodsky, Yu.I. Pimenov and others. Particular attention in pedagogical activity they drawn to the development and improvement of the creativity of the student. We were taught to think and feel images, constantly develop creative individuality, professionalism and at the same time preserve national roots. In the 50s, Mongolian painters Ochryn Myagmar and Purev Tsogzol were educated at VGIK. They passed the school of Soviet art and based on it stood at the origins of the Mongolian cinema. Artists work in various genres and techniques, in the mainstream of European artistic methods. Perfectly knowing how to draw, they write with oil and watercolor. For both artists, work on the nature is fundamental. With a perfect mastery of this creative approach, they remain deeply national masters. VGIK pedagogical school gave the basic footing for the development of cinema in Mongolia and further stimulated the creative potential of new generations of filmmakers. So the Mongolian visual and film art enriched with innovative artistic principles.

Adapting Balzac: Realism and Memory on Screen

The visual imaginary world of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was exemplarily suited to his preferred genre, that is, a newly emerging realist prose. Within his own lifetime Balzac’s popular novels were frequently adapted for the stage, and it follows that his highly visual style has also inspired film adaptations since the earliest advent of cinema. Generations of filmmakers have faced the dilemma of how to reflect the descriptive realism of Balzac’s dense writing within the unique language of cinema. One of the more challenging and abstract features of Balzac’s writing is the central importance of memory in many of his texts, among them Le Colonel Chabert (1834) and La Duchesse de Langeais (1836). In the wake of the antirealist movement in film (following its perceived association with mid-twentieth-century fascism), several recent film adaptations of Balzac have avoided the tendency to produce traditional, highly visual and illustrative interpretations of nineteenth-century realist prose by making original use of the presence or absence of diegetic sound in their films. In so doing, they grant a new realist importance to film audio and engage the viewer in the realist experience of a created and shared memory.

LA ARQUITECTURA DESAPARECE CONJETURAS SOBRE EL REGISTRO ESPACIAL EN EL CINE CHILENO CONTEMPORÁNEO

Este artículo plantea una reflexión acerca de la presencia de los espacios arquitectónicos en el cine chileno y sus estrenos comerciales en los últimos 50 años. Un grupo paradigmático de films del período analizado da testimonio de un proceso donde las referencias de la arquitectura reducen su presencia, dejando de considerarse elementos protagónicos de las ficciones locales. La metodología consistió en estudiar películas estrenadas bajo del gobierno democrático, que incluyen a dos generaciones de realizadores, con el fin de identificar variables y categorías referidas a los elementos arquitectónicos proyectados. Acto seguido, con dichos parámetros ya detectados, se revisó la narrativa cinematográfica de las producciones locales y su relación con la arquitectura, con el objetivo de ofrecer una aproximación interpretativa del papel que tuvieron los elementos que conforman la visión de los espacios arquitectónicos en sus tramas. De esta forma, la investigación revela un proceso de paulatino reduccionismo de esos rastros arquitectónicos, que disminuyen su presencia en favor de una representación atmosférica de ámbitos habitables más difíciles de identificar, según aumentan ciertos estrenos de las producciones locales a partir del año 2000. A su vez, es posible leer este factor como un síntoma de la condición urbana actual, confirmando que el arte cinematográfico mantiene su vigencia como denunciante de las problemáticas urbanas de Chile originadas por sus dinámicas sociales.

The Rise of the Sound Designer: Northern California Film Sound in the 1960s and 1970s

Northern California based filmmakers in the late 1960s and 1970s pushed the traditional boundaries of filmmaking practices in ways that have been adopted and reworked into contemporary Hollywood filmmaking practices. The article examines labour issues and conditions and politics of film sound work during this era, some of which continue to be applicable today. The development of new production practices pushed filmmakers including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch to produce films outside the traditional Hollywood studio production paradigm. This new generation of filmmakers held sound with a higher status and popularized non-traditional ways of working with sound. They created the new job title of sound designer to signify a person who supervises and collaborates with the director, department heads, and screenwriter on the use and function of sound through all of the filmmaking phases from the writing stage through the final mix. Through this historical view of the issues, conditions and politics of Hollywood film sound labour as experienced by practitioners at the early period of the contemporary film sound era, this article illuminates the reasons and ways in which filmmakers sought to work outside of studio controls and union regulations that inhibited their emerging production processes, and led to formation of a media capital for film sound in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A brave new world?—Understanding U.S.-China coproductions: collaboration, conflicts, and obstacles

ABSTRACTThe unprecedented growth in U.S.-China film coproductions and Chinese companies’ high-profile investment in Hollywood studios and U.S. cinemas signal a shift in global power relationships and a reshaping of the global media structure. Combining textual and document analysis with interviews of policy makers and film professionals in China and Hollywood, this article explores the implications of U.S.-China coproduction for global communication. The article proposes three ways of understanding coproductions: as a market-driven and profit-seeking partnership, as a policy and power negotiation, and as a brave experimental adventure. This article contends that the current state of U.S.-China coproduction manifests the contradiction between desire and reality. Although coproductions have the potential to create a space for a new global culture, to develop innovative communication models, and to achieve a China-U.S. consensus, the fulfillment of these potentials will require a steadfast effort and the commitment of more than one generation of filmmakers from both China and the U.S.A. Nevertheless, a global culture and a reshaping of the global media structure are in the making.

Emerging film cultures: Spotlight on post-disaster Haiti

In the past decade, a new generation of filmmakers has committed to establishing a local film market via the film school, Ciné Institute, in Jacmèl, Haiti. Film production in Haiti today, grounded in a virtually non-existent cinema historiography, is particularly challenged by the neocolonial politics following the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Via lowest-budget productions, Haiti’s filmmakers are not only contributing to new modes of translocal media production but are also attempting to create economically viable exhibition networks and subsequent distribution infrastructures on a transglobal scale. This analysis draws on the local prolificacy and global orientation of Haiti’s emerging film cultures, and demonstrates that both aspects are influenced by and intervene in the broader contexts of geo-political debates in global cinema. Finally, this study considers the extent to which Haiti contributes to new configurations of film and media cultures in the Caribbean.

‘Joined together there is power, sister’: Re-viewing feminist work from the London Film-makers’ Co-operative

The 'From Reel to Real' season of programmes, the first retrospective of women filmmakers' work from the London Film-makers' Co-operative, curated by Maud Jacquin with Tate Modern and LUX, bring together three generations of filmmakers, and highlight the transmission of a political aesthetics that is both theoretically-informed and embodied.

Not Even in a Dream. Emigration and immigration in new Italian cinema

Abstract After a historical and theoretical review, this article analyses several generations of film-makers whose works address the phenomena of emigration and immigration as represented in Italian cinema. The classic, post-war Italian cinema often describes emigration from the country, but in the last two decades, new Italian cinema has dealt with the topic of immigration in its diverse and complex forms. More specifically, the discussion will focus on the generation of the post-fascist Italy (Germi, De Seta), the ‘modern’ Italian film-makers (such as Bertolucci), the auteurs of the 1980s and 1990s (Tornatore, Giordana, Amelio) and lastly the generation of the New Italian Cinema of the 2000s (Crialese, Segre, Mazzacurati, Salani, Noce, Di Matteo, Munzi, Cupellini, Giovannesi among others).