Film History Research Articles

Frankenstein (Re)Membered

A kaleidoscopic vision of Frankenstein comprised of collaged fragments from the entirety of cinematic history and its various adaptations and influences.

Representation of Marxism in Historical Film

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengidentifikasi bagaimana kostum dan aspek dialog dalam film Merah Putih berkontribusi pada penggambaran ideologi Marxisme, khususnya yang berkaitan dengan konflik kelas sosial. Penelitian ini menggunakan desain penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Teknik kualitatif berusaha untuk memahami fenomena yang dihadapi peserta studi. Berdasarkan temuan analisis yang dilakukan peneliti terhadap film Merah Putih, Marxisme digambarkan sebagai ideologi yang mendominasi film tersebut. Kata Kunci: Film; Marxisme; Perwakilan; Semiotika

Was Sultan Abdülhamid II suspicious of the cinema? A study of cinema in the Hamidian era (1876–1908)

ABSTRACT Due to Sultan Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian regime and his alleged suspicion of modern technologies, Turkish film historians have often viewed the Hamidian era as an obstacle to the development of cinema in Turkey. However, this article aims to move beyond the simplistic characterizations of Abdülhamid’s reign as mere despotism and paranoia, especially concerning cinema. It explores government regulations, censorship, and prohibitions to gain a deeper understanding of how the Hamidian regime perceived, regulated, and influenced the development of cinema in the Ottoman Empire. By analyzing the motivations and measures taken by the Hamidian regime, this article demonstrates that the regime not only attempted to control cinema’s perceived negative impacts on public safety, morality, and state policies but also used cinema for political, economic, and cultural purposes. It argues that while the Hamidian regime was aware of cinema’s potential risks, it also recognized that, under strict control, cinema could offer significant benefits.

Circulation patterns of East-Central European films on European SVoD catalogues

Combining statistical, quantitative analysis with qualitative examination of film titles, the article explores the presence and circulation patterns of films from five East-Central European (ECE) countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) in European SVoD catalogues. The scene’s continuous change and adaptation pose challenges for analysis due to its fluidity. While examining streaming libraries, it becomes apparent that distinguishing between commissioned and licensed content, a fundamental consideration in such analyses, may hold greater relevance for larger markets compared to smaller, peripheral ones like those in the ECE region. Moreover, while exclusive content is valued among leading streaming providers, there is limited competition for exclusive streaming rights to ECE films. Additionally, classic films from the region’s cinematic history are readily accessible online, often free of charge, offering opportunities for viewers to explore Romanian or Polish cinema without subscription requirements. However, access to classics from other ECE countries may be more limited. Market shares based solely on film quantity require contextual analysis, as they are influenced by niche platforms specializing in specific regions or genres. Notably, recent years have seen shifts in local film cultures and trends in theatrical and VoD distribution, with distinct characteristics observed in different ECE countries. While certain trends, such as the rise of successful genre films like comedies and crime thrillers, are evident, the visibility and distribution of ECE films on European VoD platforms remain influenced by various factors, including festival success, auteur directors and genre preferences. Furthermore, the inclusion of globally popular genres and actors recognized beyond the region can enhance a film’s market reach. The study suggests that peripheralization is not unique to the ECE region, with similar dynamics potentially affecting other European small and peripheral film markets. Ultimately, analysing SVoD presence represents only one aspect of a multifaceted ecosystem, highlighting the complexity of the streaming landscape.

Non-Violent Revenge — Analyzing the Elements of Revenge in Visual Works in the Context of the Era

Revenge often signifies the retaliation of the powerless against the powerful in various relationships such as gender, society, peers, or family, enabling the audience to derive satisfaction from the triumph of the underdog. This enduring appeal is why revenge narratives have remained prevalent throughout literary and cinematic history. Recent discussions have questioned whether characters in many contemporary film and television productions are excessively “weak.” The emergence of numerous dark hero narratives such as Empresses in the Palace, The Glory, Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace, and The Knockout has sparked extensive debate on violent revenge-themed visual media. In this context, drawing from a synthesis of literature and analysis of works like The Great Jang-Geum, Like a Flowing River 3, and Roving Inspection Team, this paper proposes the concept of non-violent revenge. Moreover, building upon the idea of non-violent revenge, it discusses revenge elements in visual media within the context of their respective eras, exploring new revenge ideologies and the societal significance reflected in visual media, thus envisioning new avenues for revenge aesthetics.

"And Your Days Are Just About Over": Escaping the Outlived Era in Pulp Fiction and the Later Films of Quentin Tarantino

Abstract: This essay argues that Pulp Fiction (1994) is a foundational text for Tarantino's recurrent explorations of awakening to—and trying to control the outcomes of—outliving one's era, especially when "one's era" is defined by a shared aesthetic, identity, code, and sense of purpose. Tarantino's characters cannot grasp the totality of their defining eras until signs indicate its eminent demise, at which point they face the existential crisis of wondering if their vocations allow any opportunities for escape. As a means of analyzing the "outlived era" in Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill (2003-2004), and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019), this essay also explores how Tarantino's metafictional engagement with film history and counterfactual rewriting of history allows his characters a means of transcending their eras.

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.

Soviet Historical Films as a Tool for Enlightening and Educating Modern Youth

The article analyzes Soviet historical films which represented significant historical events and biographies of outstanding personalities. The author reveals the dramatic and artistic aspects of the films created by famous directors in different years. The relevance of the moral and artistic principles inherent in these films is substantiated, allowing them to be used as an instrument for educating and upbringing modern young generations.

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.