Film History Research Articles

Global cinema in an era of deglobalization: trans-territorial compulsions and the plenipotentiary potential of human activities in Cloud Atlas and Okja

ABSTRACT Deglobalization has arrived as a symptom of globalization's overextendedness. Organized through policies and thought practices that take ideological, economic, and cultural forms as significant to the homeland — these deglobalist agendas which accord a worldwide phenomenon since the 2010s – are implemented via a decoupling from cosmopolitan outlooks, multilateral trade deals and even cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in media. This article wishes to theorize deglobalization to shed light on how it helps us to identify the localization of capital, tariff increases, and a new phase in cinema history: ‘the deglobal cinema phase’. I will also argue that Cloud Atlas (2012) and Okja (2017) are permutations of global cinema and films that are counterhegemonic to deglobal cinema's focus on national seclusion and deglobalization's cordoning off national from global space. Thus, global cinema’s currency and the systems it builds and critiques has presupposed a pathology of the outside, to turn film into the collective life of the planet in the face of forces that now purport the inside.

Forerunning film stardom: Julienne Mathieu, the great illusionist of Pathé’s golden years (1905-1909)

ABSTRACT This article brings to light the career of Julienne Mathieu, a key figure in early cinema whose work was overshadowed by that of her partner, the Spanish trick film pioneer Segundo de Chomón. Mathieu was one of the most prolific actresses of her time, making more than sixty films between 1905 and 1909. She worked for Pathé Frères, the leading film company of those years in France and worldwide. Her case illustrates how in this period Pathé was already beginning to test out strategies that would lay the foundations for the rise of the world’s first film star, fellow Pathé actor Max Linder. At the same time, her role as a show-woman in trick films made her an “authorial personae” and encouraged her, in collaboration with Chomón, to subvert established gender conventions and to reveal with her magic the flexibility of an artform in its nascent stages. This work thus contributes to the fields of film history and celebrity studies in early cinema.

Unsupervised hyperspectral image segmentation of films: a hierarchical clustering-based approach

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has been drastically applied in recent years to cultural heritage (CH) analysis, conservation, and also digital restoration. However, the efficient processing of the large datasets registered remains challenging and still in development. In this paper, we propose to use the hierarchical clustering algorithm (HCA) as an alternative machine learning approach to the most common practices, such as principal component analysis(PCA). HCA has shown its potential in the past decades for spectral data classification and segmentation in many other fields, maximizing the information to be extracted from the high-dimensional spectral dataset via the formation of the agglomerative hierarchical tree. However, to date, there has been very limited implementation of HCA in the field of cultural heritage. Data used in this experiment were acquired on real historic film samples with various degradation degrees, using a custom-made push-broom VNIR hyperspectral camera (380–780nm). With the proposed HCA workflow, multiple samples in the entire dataset were processed simultaneously and the degradation areas with distinctive characteristics were successfully segmented into clusters with various hierarchies. A range of algorithmic parameters was tested, including the grid sizes, metrics, and agglomeration methods, and the best combinations were proposed at the end. This novel application of the semi-automating and unsupervised HCA could provide a basis for future digital unfading, and show the potential to solve other CH problems such as pigment mapping.

It’s not funny! – On Wes Anderson’s comedy and genre hybridizations

Wes Anderson is, arguably, the greatest heir to the traditional American comic genre in its different manifestations. Starting with the profound influence of the masters of comedy of the silent era, Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin, Andersonian comedy also lines up with the works of masters of classical American Comedy such as Frank Capra, George Cuckor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges, up to the existentialist tone of some of Woody Allen’s comedies. The present contribution analyses, from the perspective of the History of Cinema, the way in which Andersonian comedy draws on this long tradition, crystalizing in the coalescence of up to five comic subtypes: deadpan humour, slapstick, screwball comedy, verbal humour and parody. The latter is of particular significance, since it is the key to the hybridization of cinematic genres that is one of the traits of Anderson’s playful and postmodern approach as a postmodern auteur. Thus, the second part of the article will explore the genre hybridizations through which the Texan filmmaker resignifies the usual meaning of traditional genre conventions, often for the purpose of achieving a very particular comic effect.

A History of Forgetting

A History of Forgetting Elizabeth Wijaya (bio) REMAPPING THE SINOPHONE: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHINESE-LANGUAGE CINEMA IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA BEFORE AND DURING THE COLD WAR BY WAI SIAM HEE Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019 REMAPPING THE SINOPHONE: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHINESE-LANGUAGE CINEMA IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA BEFORE AND DURING THE COLD WAR BY WAI SIAM HEE Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019 What does it mean to remember an absence? Many of the films analyzed and listed in the filmographies of Hee Wai Siam's Remapping the Sinophone are doubly lost: both materially absent and barely present in film canons and popular memory. Even some of the films that have survived or have recently resurfaced and have been restored, such as Blood and Tears of the Overseas Chinese (Cai Wenjin, 1946) and Spirit of the Overseas Chinese (Wan Hoi-Ling, 1946), having already been once-forgotten, currently still have limited visibility as they can only be accessed at film archives or during special screenings. In Hee's Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War, the status of whether a film is extant or nonextant is not always marked because Hee's concern is less with listing the material disappearances of the films than with tracing the causes and effects of the disappearances from the cultural histories of Chinese-language cinema. Through foregrounding lost but important films or rediscovered films and the debates surrounding their production, the ambition of Remapping the Sinophone extends to reclaiming the history of early Chinese-language cinema in Singapore and Malaya and positing the importance of this history for Sinophone and Cold War cinema studies. Remapping the Sinophone presents an indictment of forgetting and a call to remember that which has been obscured by historical and [End Page 197] geopolitical forces. The author argues that Mandarin and Chinesetopolect cinemas from Singapore and Malaya (1927 to 1965) have been neglected within academic discourse, cultural memory, as well as contemporary debates on inclusion and exclusion in cultural productions framed as Sinophone/Chinese-language. Hee is concerned that early Chinese-language cinema has been overlooked not only in Singapore and Malaysian cinema history but also in histories of Chinese-language cinema. This forgetting encompasses the films themselves as well as the debates on the term "Chinese-language cinema" in Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s. Hee's project of "remapping" the terrain of the Sinophone occurs alongside a recovery of the Singapore and Malayan roots of the "Sinophone" and "Chinese-language" debate as well as the Cold War context of the making and forgetting of this oeuvre that is further marginalized within the already marginalized cinemas of Singapore and Malaysia. In terms of the timeline covered in the book, 1927 was the release year for New Friend, the first locally produced film in Singapore, while 1965 was the year of Singapore's independence after separation from Malaysia and the last year in which the director Yi Shui made a film. In Hee's telling, 1965 was a crucial year of beginnings and endings, when Singapore's independence coincided with the end of Yi Shui's dream of the acceptance of the hybridized "Malayanised Chinese-language" cinema. The first chapter of the book begins with a debate over two non-extant films: New Friend (1927) directed by Guo Chuwen, and Leila Majnun (1934) directed by Balden Singh Rajhans. Hee argues that unlike what Latent Images by Uhde and Uhde claimed, New Friend (1927), rather than Leila Majnun (1934), was the first locally produced film in Singapore. Both films, though materially lost, remain significant in the entangled memory and legacy of Singapore and Malaysian cinema. The chapter continues with characteristically detailed research on the historical evidence pertaining to the production and release of New Friend. Hee ties the fate of New Friend to that of Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia, arguing that the neglect of New Friend reveals the "double rejections" of "Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia" by "national ideologies in their homeland and by postcolonial concerns in a new country" (45). For Hee, this double rejection is not...

Engagement, Psychological Fit, and Evolution in Movies on Our Minds

Abstract Cutting's quantitative approach to analyzing films enables him to discover many fascinating and important design features of mainstream movies as well as how they have changed over cinema's history. Cutting also proposes plausible psychological explanations for some of these features and changes. However, Cutting places his empirical findings and his psychological explanations of them within a broader account of what he calls the evolution of cinematic engagement. For Cutting, movies have “evolved” to better “fit” our psychological capacities and have therefore become more “absorbing.” While some aspects of this account are plausible, others are less so. In this article, I therefore focus critically on Cutting's use of the concepts of “evolution,” “psychological fit,” and “engagement.”

Review: Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang, by Nicholas de Villiers

Review: <i>Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang</i>, by Nicholas de Villiers

The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault

Reviewed by: The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault Cecily N. Zander (bio) The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict. Edited By John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault. ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021. Pp. 246. Cloth, $40.00.) In The Long Civil War, an arsenal of Civil War historians take on the challenge of defining (and redefining) the boundaries of the long Civil War era. Editors John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault dedicate the work to Randall M. Miller, whose contributions to the field have ranged from histories of slavery and Reconstruction to those of religion and the home front. Matching Miller's dedication to examining the depth and breadth of the field, volume contributors explore such diverse topics as abolition and colonization, soldier motivation and political rhetoric, the war's historical legacy, and the memory of the conflict; they stretch as far forward in time as Dwight David Eisenhower and Walt Disney in their efforts to show just how expansive the long Civil War era can be. Alongside the editors' desire to broaden the chronological scope of the Civil War era, Smith and Arsenault seek to "chart the variety of uses of the Civil War in contemporary culture" (3). Their project, they argue, reflects how expanding the war's temporal range helps historians to see "the maturation of its historiography" (5). The resulting ten essays, therefore, add historiographical significance to topics that were previously considered outside the traditional Civil War–era framework. Summaries of three of the ten essays will serve as representative of the volume and its relevance to multiple ongoing debates in the larger field of Civil War history. [End Page 129] Raymond Arsenault's essay on Walt Disney's historical films from 1946 to 1966 expands the history of the Civil War era into the realm of American studies. In this twenty-year period, Arsenault writes, Disney hoped to gain some financial solvency for his ailing studio by producing films that presented an "imaginative form of popular history" (198). Eschewing historical complexity for stories that imagined history as a boyhood adventure, and in pursuit of narratives that sounded notes of triumph, Disney avoided assigning winners and losers, leaving films such as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) to depict both Union and Confederate soldiers as heroic, fighting for equally noble causes. Arsenault's work thus adds a new layer of understanding to the relationship between Civil War memory and popular culture, especially as they relate to the ideology of reconciliation. Paul A. Cimbala's essay on the officers who served in the U.S. Army Veteran Reserve Corps (VRC) should be essential reading for military historians. Cimbala's treatment of the corps, which was composed of men who could not fight because of combat injuries but were healthy enough to provide auxiliary support to Union armies, highlights the complicated politics that surrounded Civil War military service. Cimbala reveals an intriguing facet of the corps' duties that deserves further study: many of the VRC's officers remained in the army after the war and transitioned to work in the Freedman's Bureau during Reconstruction. These soldiers, Cimbala writes, "understood that the war would not be over until they had secured the fruits of victory" (66). This commitment to Reconstruction and emancipation set such officers apart from most of their comrades in arms, who did not embrace abolition readily (beyond its usefulness as a war measure), and identifies the VRC as a cohort to be taken seriously in studies of soldier politics and motivation. In her timely essay on the political rhetoric of suicide in the antebellum South, Diane Miller Sommerville adds a new dimension to scholarship on the politics of disunion and the degree to which Americans experienced secession as a visceral and wrenching trauma. The essay is a reminder of how nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation as an exceptional symbol of democracy and liberty—a topic receiving just consideration in a variety of new works. Sommerville, however, reminds readers that one of the roles of the historian is to examine how words functioned and became freighted with extreme emotion...

Review: Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja &amp; Hess,” by Christopher Sieving

Review: <i>Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja &amp; Hess,”</i> by Christopher Sieving

Did television kill cinema? Contemporary writings on film and early television in Finland

The aim of this article is to survey and re-examine writings on the emergence of television in Finnish film journals and newspapers in the 1950s and early 1960s. While film history has typically pictured film and television mainly as rivals, here the relation is discussed in terms not only of competition but also of interaction and cooperation. I classify the early writings into three groups according to the mode with which the relations between television and cinema are discussed: separationist, protectionist and cooperative. Based on this classification, I argue that it was only after 1963 that the narrative about television taking over – or, indeed, killing – cinema was retroactively established.

“An Extraordinary Piece of Engineering”: The Artificial Woman as Digital Effect

In the history of science fiction feature cinema, the manufactured female body has long been treated as a blank canvas for spectacular visual effects, arguably beginning with Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). Nearly a century later, fembot bodies tend to be computer generated rather than constructed on-set, but they have retained the role of a diegetic tech demo highlighting the latest advancements in visual effects research and design. Drawing on the persistent cultural notion of the female body as a site for simultaneously negotiating gender roles and technological progress, my article offers a close reading of cyborg, nonorganic, and biologically enhanced women and/as digital effects. I examine a range of feature films, including Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), and Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez, 2019). I argue that such media texts cast sexualized digital Galateas to affirm (digital animation) technology’s capacity to fulfill white male heteronormative fantasies. At the same time, depictions of the computer-generated female body as a sexual object aim to compensate for the digital effect’s artificiality. Both within the narrative and in paratextual discourse, tying technological progress to male sexual wish fulfillment becomes the digital female’s benchmark for authenticity.

The Histories We Tell

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt discusses the emphasis on history and memory in recent Latin American cinema. Taking Pablo Larraín’s No (2012), about the plebiscite that marked the end of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, as an ur-text, he examines the more recent films Bardo, falsa crünica de unas cuantas verdades (Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2022), Nuestra película (Our Movie, dir. Diana Bustamante, 2022), and Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre, 2022). These films suggest that Latin American filmmakers are again claiming cinema as an active participant in fashioning how the region’s history is understood, both from within and abroad. Building on the metafictional conceit that to (re)write history is to (re)shape it, they highlight the “story” aspect of “history” by asking viewers to (re)examine how and what one chooses to see, to watch, to remember.

Between Sound and Image

In 1929, the “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith made her only known film appearance in a short, two-reel film by Dudley Murphy, St. Louis Blues, titled after the W.C. Handy song that Smith had made famous. One prefiguration of the music video medium, it was the first film to be made to a preexisting song. Sixty years later, the song moves into a third instantiation when Isaac Julien returns to a fragment of Smith’s film performance in his dreamy Looking for Langston. It situates Smith in the context of Black queer literary voicings and media history more generally, thus assuring a primary place for Smith in the history and theory of film. Taken together, these films acousmatic voices provide the material for an aesthetic theory of Black queer film as an ongoing, questioning encounter between sound and image, one where the otherworldly takes precedence over realism.

Povestvovatel'naya strategiya i vdohnovenie rossijskih polnometrazhnyh mul'tiplikacionnyh fil'mov o trekh bogatyryah

The localization of the narrative is an important factor in the success of The Three Bogatyrs, which is a phenomenal film in the history of Russian animation films in the new era. The folk narrative, historical narrative and carnival narrative are interwoven and blended to balance the storytelling, ideology and entertainment of the series. The use of traditional cultural symbols greatly broadens the potential audience resources of the animated film series.

Introduction: Intertwining histories of film and television in the Nordic countries

The last few years have increasingly shown that the boundaries between film and television are porous. This In Focus section re-examines historical intermedial connections, calling into question the dominant narrative of rivalry and contest. Case studies on specific genres, film and television viewing practices and discourses on the emergence of television demonstrate that there were numerous points of contact and cooperation between the two media in the 1950s and 1960s, a reassessment that opens up new perspectives and paves the way for further intermedial research on film–television relations.

Heroism, Silence, and Erasure: Jewish Children in Holocaust Cinema

ABSTRACT: The stories of the many Jewish youngsters who actively resisted Germany and its collaborators are virtually absent in Holocaust cinematic representations of children. Such erasures stem from two main sources. First, political efforts to discount Jewish heroism in the Holocaust, and second, such representations are increasingly considered incompatible with culturally acceptable notions of youth that privilege narratives of childhood innocence and vulnerability. Numerous feature films, shorts, and documentaries employ the theme of silence to describe suffering and/or murder of victims, persistence of post-Holocaust trauma, intergenerational transmission of trauma, and coverup and suppression of atrocities and crimes. But the silences addressed in this article are not those surrounding the murdered victims, they are rather the silences surrounding Jewish resistance, especially by child resisters. The omissions and distortions of the Jewish contribution to Holocaust resistance seem to violate the most minimal standards of representation. Because of the popularity of historical films, the erasure of a Jewish child's identity can have an outsized effect on audiences' understanding of the Holocaust. Because of their mass appeal, films become almost a consensual version of history itself. Further, the false inventions discussed in this paper exacerbate this phenomenon specifically by erasing the contributions and perils of Jewish children during World War II. In a world where the very existence of the Holocaust is sometimes called into question, the importance of these erasures cannot be understated.

Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema

Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema

Franco-Iranian cinema

The history of Franco-Iranian cinematic exchanges is long and complex, with its roots stretching back to the earliest days of film. This chapter will explore the evolution of Franco-Iranian cinema, highlighting the significance of the pairing at key moments in a traditional narrative of French film history, as well as examining the ways in which the relationship plays out through funding and festivals, giving voice to a wider set of cultural and political narratives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article seeks to explore the extent to which we can see a sustained pattern of creative intersections emerging and the ways in which ‘Franco-Iranian film’ can meaningfully be understood in the context of twenty-first-century cinéma-monde.

영화 &lt;미몽&gt;과 1936년의 경성

Mimong(Sweet Dream, 1936), the oldest talkie film made in the Korean language in existence, became an instant target of many researchers in its cinematographical plot and methods when it first came to light. This article, based on former studies in film history, crossexamined several significant places in the colonial capital of Joseon depicted in the film with historical materials. As Sweet Dream dealt with a run-away modern girl, it showed some modern landmarks of Keijo. This paper found eight places that were fairly accurately identified with other photos of the time. Therefore, this paper examined the film as a text of reading city rather than film history and pursued the possibility of using it as a historical and cultural resource of today’s Seoul.

How to Use Methods of Visual Sociology to Study Global Threats

This paper argues for the significance of employing visual sociology methods to study global threats. The central theme revolves around the human tendency to struggle with recognizing shared humanity, often resorting to negative stereotyping that contributes to dehumanization and social injustices. The author draws on decades of experience in using visual semiotics to confront the stigmatization of diverse communities, emphasizing the role of the visual in reshaping perceptions. Addressing the dehumanization inherent in conflicts, the author emphasizes the importance of recognizing the "Other" as part of the human family, advocating for a right to be seen and represented in diverse ways. The essay critiques historical and contemporary visual practices that exclude and denigrate minorities, citing examples from film history and modern media. It underscores the persistence of negative stereotypes and advocates for counter-narratives that portray the diversity and humanity of marginalized groups. The conclusion reaffirms the author's commitment to using visual technologies and emphasizes the integration of visual technology with traditional approaches as a means to foster a deeper understanding of our multicultural world.