Film History Research Articles

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022

FQ contributing editor Carla Marcantonio returns to Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival dedicated to the rediscovery of old films organized every summer by the Cineteca di Bologna. This year’s edition marked the first time its audience of international cinephiles reassembled for a wholly in-person experience since the onset of the COVID pandemic. With a total of close to four hundred films and thirty-five to forty screenings a day, the festival offers a unique encounter with film history.

FBI film control activities and the «COMPIC» Program (1941–1943)

The period of 19411943 became a time when the American art was rapidly rebuilt into war rails. Artists in every possible way reinforced the morale of American soldiers and were engaged in justifying various actions of the government with the help of a more accessible and understandable language of artistic storytelling to the wider masses. The paper will address specific films and their propaganda subtexts. A special role in this process was played by the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation, which quickly realized the propaganda potential of cinema and therefore quickly began building systemic work to control film production. As part of the paper, it will be examined on a specific example how the FBI was displayed in the cinema and how the Bureau began to build mechanisms for controlling the film industry through a special program COMPIC. This program was aimed at countering the communist influence in the cinema. The close connection between the development of the COMPIC program and the COMRAP program, which provided for the opposition of federal agents to the Comintern, was also considered and the CINRAD program developed at the same time was mentioned, designed to protect USA developments in the field of nuclear weapons. The paper is based on archival materials and literature on the history of American cinema and the FBI.

Trains and Constrains: Re-Examining the Griersonian Documentary Influence upon David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)

Early British documentary cinema, pioneered by John Grierson, undeniably had a heavy influence on later wartime-era cinema. One such film is David Lean’s beloved Brief Encounter. Lean’s utilization of a first-person, omnipresent narrative structure mirrors the philosophy behind these earlier documentary films. By first providing an overview of the history of documentary film, Lean’s depiction of the banality of middle England is then re-examined through the lens of Laura and Alec’s affair. Particular focus is placed upon his depiction of class, empire, and female voices, which are compared and contrasted to these aforementioned British documentaries.

Reconstituting Archives: Moroccan Cinema and History in Ahmed Bouanani and Ali Essafi's Projects of Re-collection

This article addresses two recent contributions to the archive of Moroccan cinema and culture: Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011)'s recently published history of cinema in Morocco, La Septième porte: Une histoire du cinéma au Maroc de 1907-1986 (2020), and Ali Essafi's montage film Avant le déclin du jour (2020). In addressing these two works, the essay also evokes Bouanani's archival film Mémoire 14 (1971) which, like the other two texts, theorizes a relationship between Morocco's colonial past and its contested postcolonial present. By thinking across these interventions, the essay reveals a collaborative project to construct an archive of cinema, politics, and culture in Morocco beyond the absences and denials of the past.

«Чемпион мира» и «Одиннадцать молчаливых мужчин»: нормативный порядок современного российского кинематографа и ностальгия по советским спортивным победам

The article focuses on the feature films "The World Champion" and "Eleven Silent Men" released by the domestic cinema in the winter of 2021/2022, which relate to the genre of historical films about a specific event. In the absence of a universal theory and methods of analyzing historical cinema, an attempt is being made to consider films based on the assumption that they broadcast the mythologeme "USSR – The West". The current political situation is taken into account, characterized by the interest of the Russian state in the production of historical and patriotic motion pictures popular with the viewer, as well as the acute phase of confrontation between the Russian Federation and Western countries. The essence of historical films claiming to be connected with the modern context and going beyond the usual perception in the conditions of digital media communication is also taken into account. Using the example of the development of the "USSR – The West" mythologeme in feature films, the evolution of the "Us – Them" myth is shown and the approval of such a normative order in which Soviet sports victories acquire an epic scale and legendary dimension, and the actions of Soviet citizens are predictable, inscribed in the logic of rational, correct behavior. The actions of representatives of the Western world are associated with ambiguous, often caricatured images referring to heterogeneous socio-cultural phenomena. It is noted that an important factor in the success of films is what generation the audience belongs to, what forms of nostalgia they experience: this is both a restorative nostalgia, which allows us to recall the grandiose sports victories that the entire Soviet people were involved in, and a reflective nostalgia that focuses on details and contexts. After watching movies, the viewer begins to live as if in two realities. In one – cinematographic – the victories of Soviet athletes and almost fair play; in the other – objective – violations of international law and campaigns to discredit Russian athletes as heirs of Soviet winning traditions.

Changing Times

Changing Times

Колоніальна спадщина Росії в українському кінематографі: проблеми подолання

Colonial expansion of the imperial Russia on the territory of Ukraine is of a three hundred years’ history, which has got its logical continuation in the 20th – 21st centuries. Social and cultural dynamics of the colonial war of the imperial centre against Ukraine and its people during the last century is analyzed in the article. It is the period starting from the destruction of cultural institutions at the turn of the 1920s – 1930s, arrests and executions of a whole generation of the workers of literature and art, destruction of grain-growers’ culture and its bearers during the years of Holodomor. Then there has been a decade of the late Stalin years (1944–1954), when the only existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians is declared illegitimate, decades (1954–1964, 1964–1974) of the legitimization of Ukrainian political elites, with the condition of their work for a real liquidation of Ukrainian culture and language, and resistance of a young generation (the Sixtiers) to a new imperial policy. The following decennial periods have their peculiarities, however, even at the times of the dawning of the age of Ukrainian independence the expansion of Russia hasn’t abated. It is armed with the cultural and informative technologies of influence, reformatting of the consciousness of the masses, developed over the centuries. Cinematograph is one of the most powerful means of the formation of senses, narratives and images, aimed at the territories, interpreted as the zones of traditionally ostensibly Russian civilization. In fact, these zones are the borderlands. Really a clash of civilizations takes place here. According to popular and authoritative nowadays concept of the clash of civilization by American sociologist and political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the most important borders, dividing mankind in modern world, are not determined by ideology, economics, but culture. These are not nation-states that are in conflict now (although their significance in the world is still very notable), but nations and groups, belonging to different civilizations. The clash of civilizations becomes a dominant factor of a world politics. The conflict between civilizations, which turns into a real war, is the final phase of the evolution of global conflicts in the modern world. Russian-Ukrainian war is a real war for the strengthening of the civilizational senses and lines in this context. From the side of Ukraine this is a struggle for the return to the West civilization. The struggle, which is conducting including with the means of purely cultural and artistic direction, which is evidenced with the submitted material from the up to date history of Ukrainian cinema.

<와호장룡>의 색채와 음악의 융합 연구

The film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) directed by Ang Lee, known as one of the new era of Chinese martial arts films, is the first film in Chinese film history to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Tan Dun, a composer and conductor, won the 73rd Academy Awards for Best Original Music in 2001 by the music of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2002, he won the 44th Grammy Award for Best Original Film Music Album, and began to receive extensive attention. This paper explored Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with strong oriental color and traditional music and investigated the Chinese traditional color view and aesthetic thought of director Ang Lee by his pursuit of the costume color and modeling of the main characters in the film. At the same time, through the music of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that throughout the film, to show the music creation characteristics of the integration of eastern and western music of Tan Dun.

Chinese Film in the 1930s: Potential Energy and “Left-Wing” Influence

Abstract The history of Chinese films in the 1920s and the 1930s refers to two periods that are at once continuous yet distinctive. Created and formed in the “Concept—Aesthetic” system of “Benevolence—Legend-Influenced Image Narration” of 1920s native film, Chinese film underwent an evolution from the literary film of the Domestic Film Movement to genre film in the tide of commercial films. Then upon entering the 1930s it faced double upheavals: within from the film industry and without, from the socio-historical context. This made Chinese films in the 1930s more complex than before. From the perspective of historical dynamics, potential energy and strong left-wing influence hidden within Chinese film itself were the main causes of this complex historical phenomenon.

DISCURSIVE DIVERGENCES BETWEEN FILM MEDIUM AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE

Representation of history is the most powerful formative factor of historical insights in society in the 20th and 21st century. Currently, there have been a number of films in production which interpret Latvian history, thus raising the profile of issues relating to the portrayal of the history of the cinema. This article conceptualises the discursive differences between historical research and historical films in order to create a basis for further studies of historical films and their adequacy for the research perspective. This article also outlines the historical features of the cinema, as well as the possibility of an alternative historical narrative: a hybridised form of a historical account created by film.

Locating Chinese screens: Introduction to a special issue on film exhibition

This introduction situates the topic of film exhibition in Chinese and Sinophone cinema studies in relation to the approaches of new cinema history and the crisis of traditional cinematic institutions brought about by digitization and the COVID-19 pandemic. It gives an overview of the contributions by drawing several broad conclusions, highlighting problems of infrastructure, educational cinema, the relationship between what is on and off screen, and the contextualization of film exhibition in cultural history.

HISTORY IN THE FILMS OF JĀNIS STREIČS

The creative biography of the film director Jānis Streičs includes 22 feature films, 13 of which are devoted to the present day and nine are about the past. From among historical films, one depicts Latvia at the turn of the 19th century, another focuses on the Russian Civil War, two deal with the inter-war period, three depict World War II, and two are about the 1940s. These films offer Streičs’ views about the past, his own interpretation of the texts of history. At the same time, events, people, environments and life situations of the past are viewed from the present-day perspective, which includes issues and values from the present day within the space of the past. This paper examines two films made by Jānis Streičs during the Soviet era, both of them focusing on Latvian history – “The Boys of Līvsala” (1969) and “Strange Passions” (1983), and both of them are set in 1946. The films are different because of the 14 years that passed between the production of the first one and the second one, but they differ even more by the way in which the director sends messages about the past, also displaying his relationship to history and regimes. “Strange Passions” is a challenging film in terms of the history of cinema and the Soviet occupation of Latvia, bringing up the question of whether such a film could have been produced and shown in cinemas and on television. The era that is reflected in the two films is part of Jānis Streičs’ own biography. He was a child in 1946, and there was a great deal of tragedy caused by the Soviet regime, its cultivated violence, and the lack of value for human lives. The paper reviews the history interpretation in these films, and the research is based on documents from the Riga Film Studios materials that are stored at the Latvian State Archives. The conclusion is that “The Boys of Līvsala” and “Strange Passions” provide brilliant evidence of the director’s “magical realist” style. They demonstrate his great skill in transforming the childhood and youth period of his generation into a part of Latvia’s cultural memory.

VISUAL AESTHETICS OF JĀNIS STREIČS’ FILMS

Jānis Streičs is one of the key figures in the Latvian film history. His Soviet period films (13 feature films) are distinguished by a certain visual style, as well as by technique and aesthetics of creating characters, sets and the on-screen world. The 1970s and 80s was a prolific time for the director both in terms of genres and subjects covered in his films. Films of this period serve as evidence to Jānis Streičs’ strong authorship, as well as give grounds for further research into aesthetic canons, technical possibilities and visual aesthetics of the Soviet period films.

TAKING THE ACTORS SERIOUSL : MICHIEL VANDEVELDE S “PARADISE NOW (1968 – 2018)”

The article departs from a phrase in Paul Ricoeur’s “Memory, History, Forget- ting” (2003), and attempts to take Ricoeur at his word, by taking seriously the troupe of Flemish teenage actors performing Michiel Vandevelde’s “Paradise Now (1968–2018)”, a re-working of the iconic performance by The Living Theatre, which when it was presented fifty years ago at the Avignon Festival offered itself as a preparation for its audience to take action, individually and collectively, personally and politically, beyond the space of the theatrical representation. Vandevelde and the teenagers’ re-do functions rather differently. Drawing as much on film history and news and popular media as on theatre history, it offers a compilation of iconic images winding back to 1968, an occasion for these young 21st century performer- citizens – at once theatrical actors and “actors” of their own history – to voice their ambivalence about the potentials for common action in the present moment and the times ahead. The article considers the role of the “actors” (including the absent and the dead) in historical representation. It argues that the temporal form of the serial or chronicle (one image after another in chronological order) rather than the supposedly more complex – and human – dramatic plot (which structures relations between beginning, middle and end), attends to “taking the actors seriously” – in their actions and their passions – as a pressing task for our times.

CENTENARY OF LATVIA THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

Article “Centenary of Latvia Through the Eyes of a Child” focuses on the re- cent history of Latvian cinema – programme “Latvian Films for Centenary of Lat- via” (LV100) –, within framework of which 16 full-length films were made. For the first time in the history of the independent Latvia the films made in 2018 have been watched by more than half a million spectators. The main characters in several films from this programme are children and they offer a chance to view various events from the perceptual vantage point of a child. Author analyses numerous films of the programme (“Bille”, “Paradise 89”, “The Mover”, “To Be Continued”) in the context of representation of children’s experience in cinema and focuses on the different cine- matic approaches used by the authors of the films to communicate stories about the history of Latvia. Does the principle of choosing a child as the central image of the film signal the desire of the Latvian film directors to observe historical processes with a child’s eyes?

Museum without Objects: A Phenomenological Study of the Cinema Museum

ABSTRACT Traditional museums consistently attend to the collection, research, and exhibition of material objects. When it meets cinema, the museum begins to transform its perspective from object-oriented to experience-oriented, shifting its aim from the musealisation of objects to the musealisation of Being and ushering in the birth of the “cinema museum”. Expanding from the phenomenological perspective, we contend that the cinema museum's primary purpose is not the cognition of material objects such as artifacts and technologies; rather, it is concerned with bringing into audiences’ perceptual world the living experience or the meanings expressed through film, thereby embodying phenomenological cinematic worlds as opposed to presenting a knowledge-based history of films. Unlike traditional museums, a proper cinema museum will demonstrate a new existential mode—a “museum without objects”—in which musealia is not to be cognised through the museality of objects but to be experienced through the museality of Being.

Rolf Hammerschmidt’s Boytropolis and the Ethno-Ecological Imaginary

Abstract Rolf Hammerschmidt, one of Europe’s most prolific gay porn directors and producers, first came to notoriety with an eco-utopian fantasy that descends into the dystopian. His two-part Boytropolis (1993, 1996) imagines a secluded woodland society of horny loincloth-clad young men whose insatiable sexual appetite appears to derive from a juice diet consisting of a mysterious emerald-colored potion that they extract from the local foliage, at least until they are denied indulgence in either this nectar or the sexual activity it inspires and vanish in a puff of smog. Attending to the unexpectedly rich cinematic history on which the film draws, which centrally includes not only Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but also Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), this article puts forth that Boytropolis exposes and explores a troublingly normative homotopian vision, one that relies on environmental and racial homogeneity, and on an eco-imperialist politics of conquest, for its erotic charge.

Reanimating the Master Narrative: How They Shall Not Grow Old Curates the Perception of Common Truth through CGI Animation

In 2014, the British Imperial War Museum (IWM) contracted New Zealand-based filmmaker, Peter Jackson, to use their audio and video archives to create a media-based memorial to the men who served in World War 1. The documentary film, They Shall Not Grow Old ( TSNGO), released in 2018, was the product of this collaboration. Jackson took on the project to better understand his own grandfather’s experience as a soldier at the Battle of the Somme. Weta Digital Studios, founded by Jackson, converted the standard WWI newsreel footage into a product that aligned to a modern audience’s perceptual sense of truth. Weta Digital redrew and colored each frame, a process that is strikingly similar to CGI animation. Curiously, Jackson, a filmmaker whose career has hinged on his ability to collaborate with CGI animators, does not describe his new historical film treatment as animation. This article first argues that TSNGO is following in the footsteps of previous CGI animated films, in particular those that have re-edited historical footage, but more importantly asks: why would Jackson prefer to keep the word ‘animation’ out of the discussion about his new historical documentary? The answer to this question leads us to a critical discussion about how animation has become both the preserver and ‘re-imaginer’ of existing historical archives.

THE LOST TRADITION OF MAKING QUALITY SERIES . LATVIAN CASE

The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept of quality TV series in the context of Latvian film history and contemporary practice. Lately, the so-called quality TV series have been extremely successful, especially when it comes to the series offered by global streaming companies. Contemporary TV series made in Latvia have not been noticed internationally yet, although there are examples in the history of Latvian cinema that confirm that Latvian filmmakers have created quality series as early as the 1980s. What is a high-quality series in the context of modern Latvian cinema and why have the traditions of making quality series been lost? Keywords:

Research on Ethnic Culture Presentation of Inner Mongolian Film from Multiple Perspectives

In Inner Mongolian films, heterogeneous culture is not a symbol of consumption to the West/others, but an important medium to explore the true meaning of the national culture. The analysis of Inner Mongolian films from the perspective of landscape aesthetics can give insight into the most distinctive features of The Times. This paper holds that, in terms of story text, Inner Mongolian films is breathing with The Times and sharing the fate with the motherland, constantly reflecting the living conditions of Inner Mongolia people in the great era. In terms of music application, Inner Mongolian films adhere to the "imported", integrate the characteristic music of other nationalities, and apply it in an innovative way, presenting a brand new musical cultural landscape. In terms of belief, Inner Mongolian films express the deepest cultural concept of the nation by presenting a series of folk culture with a cold gaze attitude. In the course of more than 70 years of creation, Inner Mongolia has built a unique cultural landscape in the history of Chinese films.