Film History Research Articles

The Strawpeople of Russian, Eastern European, and Soviet History in English-Language TV and Film

Abstract This special issue features historical scholars of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union analyzing representations of Russian and East European characters and history in contemporary Anglophone television and films, such as The Americans, Black Widow, The Great, For All Mankind, and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. They identify several tropes that shore up Anglosphere conceptions of progressiveness, liberalism, feminism, and even whiteness in ways that put pressure on geopolitics today, which some have characterized as a second Cold War. Gender and sexuality are dominant themes through which difference between the West and Eastern Europe is commonly staged onscreen. Debate emerges on whether this is a return to twentieth-century thinking or a new vision of Russian and East European otherness.

The Canvas of Love Under the Light of Technology: An Analysis of Photography, Music and Narrative Techniques of Love Themes in Edward Yang’s Films

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the expression of love themes in Edward Yang’s films, especially through the use of photography, music and narrative techniques, and explores how these elements work together to construct a unique love narrative. Through case analysis of works such as The Murder of the Boys on Kuling Street, Yi Yi and Love in the Wind, this article reveals how Edward Yang used film technology to deepen emotional expression and theme exploration, thus leaving a mark in the history of Taiwanese films. An indelible mark.

Willy Haas in Bombay

This archival piece presents an excerpted translation from the memoirs of Willy Haas, Die Literarische Welt (1958). Haas was a Czech-German writer and scenarist who migrated to Bombay during the Nazi purge of European Jews. The translation, by Xan Holt, offers rich atmospheric and technical details about an underdocumented period in Indian film history. The framing commentary by Debashree Mukherjee goes deeper into the histories coded in the excerpt: of Bhavnani Productions, a studio founded by film director Mohan Bhavnani, and the first film that Haas wrote for him, a controversial adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts, released in India as Jhoothi Sharm (1940).

Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema By SethPeabody, Camden House. 2023. pp. 199. $120 (hardback), $29.95 (ebook)

Film History for the Anthropocene: The Ecological Archive of German Cinema By SethPeabody, Camden House. 2023. pp. 199. $120 (hardback), $29.95 (ebook)

Nostalgic Dimensions of Autobiographical Canonization Generational Canon in Slovak Collective (Self)Portraits: +−90 and Wave vs. Shore

The history of cinema, built on periodization and the canonization of works, tends to favour the interpretation of artistic development as a causal chain in which one stage builds upon the other. Locating a specific author and work within this chain legitimizes their significance in the creation of the canon, just as the canon justifies the importance of a singular author and work. My study focuses on how generational (self)identification through autobiographical documentary filmmaking can contribute to the construction of an authorial canon and how these self-portrayal and memory practices use two different strategies of nostalgia. Through the analysis of two Slovak collective (self)portraits in documentary form, +−90 (Marek Kuboš, 2022) and wave vs. shore (vlna vs. breh, Martin Štrba, 2012), I explore how authors can tell their own stories within a broader framework where personal history intersects with cultural history and how, in the process of writing the history of cinema and photography through the medium of film, it defines the generational affinity of creators.

The Code Analysis of ‘Post-Apocalyptic Era’ Movies: Take Mad Max: Fury Road as an Example

In the 88th Academy Awards, directed by George Miller, a "wasteland" theme film "Mad Max 4: Fury Road" is the world's most recognized female theme film. 50% of film history is one of the films in the explosive stage. After it won the Oscar six awards, it has become a "wasteland" theme film's new benchmark. Through semiotics and the Bible, this paper deconstructs the image codes in movies. Based on the symbolic interactionism theory, this paper analyses the character behaviour, identity construction and prop application in the Christian symbol system and combs and deconstructs it, trying to explore the symbolic metaphors in movies and reflect on the artistic value and ideological connotation contained in movies.

A TEXTBOOK ON CINEMATOGRAPHY WAS PUBLISHED AT CHELYABINSK STATE UNIVERSITY

The reviewed textbook has recently come out at Chelyabinsk State University publishing house. Impressum: Kiuru KV, Linkov SV. Kinematograf: yazyk, istoriya, zhanry, proizvodstvo i prodvizheniye = Cinema: language, history, genres, production and promotion. Chelyabinsk: Chelyabinsk State University Publishing House; 2024. 168 p. ISBN 978-5-7271-1939-6. The textbook examines issues of theory, history and genres of cinema, film production technology and film promotion.

Antoni Ribas’s La ciutat cremada against National-Popular Memory: Consent and Common Sense in Spain’s Transition to Democracy

This article examines the political implications of Antoni Ribas’s La ciutat cremada (1976), a historical film that chronicles the turbulent period in Barcelona from 1899 to 1909. As the first major film shot in Catalan after Franco’s death, La ciutat cremada is a culturally significant product that reanimated a contentious past marked by the rise of political Catalanism, the evolution of working-class protests, and the Spanish state’s repression of both Catalanist aspirations and revolutionary ideals. By drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the national-popular and exploring its reception among the Catalan revolutionary left in the late 1960s, I first argue that the film’s effort to represent the needs and interests of the working classes is perfunctory. Secondly, I show that exposure of the working classes in the film manufactured a specific type of public consent based on common sense in which the hope for an autonomous Catalonia ended up silencing other voices who demanded a cleaner break with the dictatorship’s economic structure. The article challenges the established argument that La ciutat cremada furthers a progressive model of nationhood and shows instead that it anticipates the conservative turn that Catalan politics would take in the 1980s.

Dance film from Maya Deren to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

This study sets out to review the most influential creators in the history of dance film, both historical and recent figures. In approaching dance film I was inspired by my own experience in this field, a short dance film, and by my passion about contemporary dance. I see the communication between cinema and dance as capitalising both on corporeal expressive capacity and the technical means of editing, lighting and oratorical accumulation in the sense of a discourse, whose substance need not be epic or narrative. The studied creators demonstrate the primacy of poetry, as it is transposed into movement, in the making of a dance film.

The Work of Art as a Fictionalized Duplicate of Life: Boris Lehman's Babel film project in the Light of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman has created what is surely the most ambitious film diary in the history of cinema, Babel, a twenty-four-hour film divided into nine parts and several appendices, which traces a sort of sublimated filmic duplicate of the author's life between 1983 and 2020. In Babel, Lehman painstakingly records the daily activities of his life: eating breakfast, walking, talking with friends, traveling, playing the piano, being evicted, looking for a job or paying his taxes. Despite the appearance of a realistic duplicate, the filmmaker claims for his film the denomination of "autobiographical fiction". How can we understand this mismatch between the everyday reality suggested by the film and the fictional will that the author proposes as a key to reading it? This article proposes to consider this fictional quality of Lehman's autobiographical project in the light of the aesthetic proposal crystallized in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, which Gérard Genette proposed to call "autofiction".

해부학적 카메라와 의학 이미지에 관한 이론적 고찰

This is an attempt to consider how, when physical optical apparatus penetrate the body, the visibility of internal body images, considered invisible, leads to the formation of a subject with a certain kind of ‘Optical Unconscious’ in humans. The internal body images refer to the “anatomical camera” based on medical devices such as X-rays, endoscopes, ultrasounds, CT/MRI/PET, and the “medical images” they represent. Unlike medical images that inevitably require interpretation, the emergence of internal body images, not easily accessible in everyday life, crossing the boundaries between film cameras and medical cameras, can be considered a symptomatic phenomenon. Even though the appearance of these images has become frequent on screens around the turn of the 2020s, they cannot simply be seen as new images. The reason is that the history of optical apparatus resonates with humans' desire to capture the body and movement. In terms of media archaeology, reviewing individual theories about scattered internal body images in the field of film history, and reconciling the discontinuity of anatomical cameras and medical images, reveal the affinity and complementarity of optical apparatus that were divided into science and art, while also gathering the origins of various apparatus that were concealed or unified in film history.

Gaging "JoJo Rabbit " Skies - Film Deconstruction and Reshaping of Literature

In contemporary film and television, many creative works use excellent literary works as the basis of adapted scripts. Many not-so-excellent literary works have been adapted into film and television works that the audience knows and loves. Adapting literary works into film and television has always occupied a significant position in film history. This article will compare JoJo Rabbit and the original novel Gaging Skies to explore the adaptation of movies based on literary works that align with human ethics in today's social environment and the successful deconstruction of literature by film. And reinvention. This article elaborates on the expression of the theme in JoJo Rabbit from multiple dimensions, such as the comparison between the script and the original work, the current situation of film adaptations, and the excellent use of audio-visual language in the film. Finally, a multi-angle comparison of the original novel and the film summarizes how the film deconstructs and reshapes the literary adaptation of the original work and the profound impact of scholarly works on adapters.

A framework for the analysis of historical newsreels

Audiovisual news is a critical cultural phenomenon that has been influencing audience worldviews for more than a hundred years. To understand historical trends in multimodal audiovisual news, we need to explore them longitudinally using large sets of data. Despite promising developments in film history, computational video analysis, and other relevant fields, current research streams have limitations related to the scope of data used, the systematism of analysis, and the modalities and elements to be studied in audiovisual material and its metadata. Simultaneously, each disciplinary approach contributes significant input to research reducing these limitations. We therefore advocate for combining the strengths of several disciplines. Here we propose a multidisciplinary framework for systematically studying large collections of historical audiovisual news to gain a coherent picture of their temporal dynamics, cultural diversity, and potential societal effects across several quantitative and qualitative dimensions of analysis. By using newsreels as an example of such complex historically formed data, we combine the context crucial to qualitative approaches with the systematicity and ability to cover large amounts of data from quantitative methods. The framework template for historical newsreels is exemplified by a case study of the “News of the Day” newsreel series produced in the Soviet Union during 1944–1992. The proposed framework enables a more nuanced analysis of longitudinal collections of audiovisual news, expanding our understanding of the dynamics of global knowledge cultures.

Ethnic Identity and Traces of Culture: Pema Tseden in a Centenary History of Films

Abstract As a Tibetan indie filmmaker, Pema Tseden is endowed with an ethnic advantage. In his films, he focuses on the real-life conditions of Tibetans. Observing ethnic groups through the personal perspective of the individual, he profoundly contemplates the condition of Tibetan culture in the modernized world while reflecting on China through the geographical perspective of borderland. In terms of form, Pema Tseden’s films represent the unique features of Chinese film aesthetics and poetics by adopting special Tibetan images and the implicit narrative structure of blank space.

Rhythm in Genre Cinema and Cinematic Avant-Garde

The article attempts to outline certain principles and prerequisites for the study of the role of rhythm as the fundamental moment of any film and various approaches (avant-garde and mass cinema) to overcoming, or vice versa, fixation in the film of a given rhythm of the social whole, often associated with and expressed through aspects of industrial production rhythm. General connections between Fordism and classic Hollywood cinema are outlined, as well as between post-Fordism as an economic expression of postmodernism (the cultural logic of late capitalism) and the “cinema of nostalgia” of the 1970s. A comparative study of the approach to the issue of rhythm in the field of the cinematic avant-garde (using the example of the German avant-garde movement of the 1920s (“absolute film”)) and classic genre American cinema is offered. An attempt was made to connect the approach to the rhythm of the cinematic narrative in the film La Palisiada (1923, directed by Philip Sotnychenko) with the above-mentioned moments of the history of cinema, understanding La Palisiada as, at the same time, a study of rhythm and a study of modes of perception of the 1990s years in the current Ukrainian society. It is argued that the research in the realm of rhythm and the nostalgic orientation of films (including La Palisiada) can be closely related manifestations of the same deeply-rooted process — nostalgia for a different rhythm of the social whole, given in this particular case as the 1990s of Ukrainian history

Screening films on the peripheries: ‘cine-service’ in ‘red chums’ for Indigenous audiences in the rural Soviet North

ABSTRACT This article looks at film exhibition targeting Indigenous audiences in the rural Soviet North. It draws on the case of ‘red chums’ (or red ‘iaranga’, or ‘yurt’, etc. depending on the target population), which were a type of political enlightenment facility set up specifically for the Soviet Indigenous peoples. From their implementation at the end of the 1920s to the early 1970s, when they became a staple of Northern Indigenous life, red chums served remote Indigenous communities and reindeer-herding brigades, and are today regarded with nostalgia. Rooted in political enlightenment rhetoric, cinema in red chums was one of several activities to mediate Sovietness to Indigenous people. They exemplify the Soviet notion of ‘cine-service’ in the particular context of an ethnically defined peripheral space, the ‘North’, which can be located diversely in terms of geography and should be apprehended more as a concept than as a region. Ultimately, looking at cinema exhibition practices in the Soviet rural Northern peripheries helps us to re-envision our global understanding of centre-peripheries dynamics in cinema history.

Research on the Application of Oral History in Anthropological Films

Research on the Application of Oral History in Anthropological Films

‘Film, Fashion, Costume in Italy and Beyond’

This editorial positions the study of fashion and costume against the field of film studies and the history of Italian cinema and media. Although scholarly approaches to this field of study first appeared in Anglo American literature at the beginning of the 1990s, the pioneering work of Italian historian and film critic Mario Verdone has yet to be acknowledged. The anthology Verdone edited in 1950, a pivotal year of Italy’s post-war reconstruction, was the first of its kind: prior to its publication, the relationship between costume, fashion and film had never been the subject of scholarly enquiry. The title of Verdone’s book, La moda e il costume nel film (‘Fashion and costume in film’) calls attention to how these arts, techniques and industries work in the actual process of making films. Verdone’s book offers a context for the articles contained in this volume.

Transforming Cultural Memory: <i>Inglorius Basterds</i> (2009)

Inglourious Basterds (2009) stands out as an example to the unusual storytelling techniques which have been used by Quentin Tarantino in recent years. It can be classified as Historiographic Metafiction with a postmodern perspective. The film's narrative bends the historical narratives and social traumas ingrained in cultural memories. This study has shown that Tarantino's films are not just a pastiche where the director collaged the concepts, events, and motifs selected from the cinematic history. Instead, Tarantino's films challenge audience's cultural memory, knowledge of history, and ways of seeing them. I think they are metafictions that first reveal the conventional methods of remembering before developing an alternative to these kinds of narratives. In this metafiction, memory is more than just a burden of the past, but rather a tool used to reshape the present.

Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women

Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, composers Renée C. Baker and Gonca Feride Varol, Indigenous film historian and booklet contributor Liza Black, and film scholar Kaveh Askari. The other included cocurator and film historian Maggie Hennefeld, silent film festival organizer Enrique Moreno Ceballos, film scholars and commentary contributors Yiman Wang, Aurore Spiers, and Kate Saccone, and film scholar Neta Alexander. Rachel Loewen transcribed the roundtables and Hennefeld and Horak condensed and cut together the conversations to highlight the key themes that emerged.