International Film Research Articles

Socio-political features and prospects for the development of the Russian movie industry through the prism of the history of soviet cinema and international film industry experience

The article is devoted to the Russian movie industry and the problems that national cinema is currently facing. This applies to surface level, urgent difficulties, such as the rapid decline in cinema attendance in the absence of Hollywood tentpoles at the box office, as well as to deeper shortcomings, among them the lack of Russian cinema's own identity. The author describes how the modern system of state support of the movie industry unwittingly leads to a deluge of similar run-of-the-mill movies, which not only negatively affects the total revenue of Russian cinemas, but also does not allow the domestic film market to grow, as well as effectively perform its socio-political functions. Patriotic high-budget blockbusters have become the most demanded type of Russian film production in recent years, the plot of which is based on events from Russian history, told in the language of Western commercial cinema. The rare but nevertheless sound successes of such films have led to the system under which these types of movies receive the lion's share of budget funding. Disregarding the fact that box office data shows that viewers are more often attracted to films of a smaller scale, but about lives of our contemporaries of today and tomorrow. The current situation in the Russian movie industry is compared with the experience of the formation of the Soviet cinema and withe the development of national film industries of China, South Korea and France.

Novas perspectivas para uma abordagem interdisciplinar do cinema na escola.

In 2010, at the Avanca International Film Conference in a panel dedicated to Film Literacy, there was presented the communication “The possible contribution of the subject cinema to a classroom without walls”, where a pilot project of film teaching was revealed in a school in Quarteira. After just over a decade, this experience has evolved into a new subject that associates film teaching with science. For this new project started in 2017, a specific program and exclusive educational resources were conceived, enabling students attending the 3rd cycle in the Agrupamento de Escolas Dra. Laura Ayres, a pedagogical approach distinct from the other subjects.

LaSER: Language-specific event recommendation

While societal events often impact people worldwide, a significant fraction of events has a local focus that primarily affects specific language communities. Examples include national elections, the development of the Coronavirus pandemic in different countries, and local film festivals such as the César Awards in France and the Moscow International Film Festival in Russia. However, existing entity recommendation approaches do not sufficiently address the language context of recommendation. This article introduces the novel task of language-specific event recommendation, which aims to recommend events relevant to the user query in the language-specific context. This task can support essential information retrieval activities, including web navigation and exploratory search, considering the language context of user information needs. We propose LaSER, a novel approach toward language-specific event recommendation. LaSER blends the language-specific latent representations (embeddings) of entities and events and spatio-temporal event features in a learning to rank model. This model is trained on publicly available Wikipedia Clickstream data. The results of our user study demonstrate that LaSER outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation baselines by up to 33 percentage points in MAP@5 concerning the language-specific relevance of recommended events.

The International Reception of Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004)

Nearly twenty years after its premiere, Downfall still constitutes, among German theatrical features, the most significant media event since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The highest-profile sort of German (co-)production with a relatively big budget of approximately €14 million, well-known source material, a tie-in to sordid national history, a saturation exhibition strategy in Germany and (within five months of its September 2004 premiere) theatrical release in over 40 countries worldwide, Downfall sought – and received – wide press and public attention like almost no other German film before it. This article uses discourse analysis to survey and anatomise the international journalistic reception of Downfall, focusing on four of the five major territories for international film (USA, UK, Germany, France). Although there are some national peculiarities to the reception, in general the article argues that the critical reception can be distilled into three main, and overlapping, themes/debates: the perceived (in)authenticity of the representation of history; the aesthetic and moral implications of representing Adolf Hitler, in particular questions of sympathy; and the reception as a subject in itself, often coupled with perceptions of novelty vis-à-vis German film history. Even if the variety of topics and diversity of opinions regarding the film remain modest, Downfall’s international reception supplies powerful and peculiar reminders about how commercially aspirational films representing contentious or sensitive historical events were received in the early twenty-first century. In particular, and first of all, press reactions to Downfall reveal how lived experience and identity – whether a status as a professional filmmaker, specialist historian, established critic or simply a member of a certain generation or national community – became proxies for taste and cultural authority in the early twenty-first century.

Traversing boundaries: Contemporary Hindi cinema at international film festivals

ABSTRACT The paper investigates the symbiotic relationship between international film festivals and contemporary Hindi cinema. The years post 2010 have witnessed an increase in showcasing of Hindi cinema at international film festivals. Unlike earlier Indian cinema that has been celebrated at global platforms, the Hindi cinema under discussion situates itself at a juncture between the commercial and the art. In fact, a number of mainstream filmmakers who attempt unconventional themes, are exploring international film festivals as suitable avenues to reach a larger audience and to forge newer alliances. The primary theoretical framework of this research will draw upon Marijke‘s proposition that film festivals are ‘sites of cultural legitimisation’ (77); along with, as an entry point, Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the festival space as an active site for the generation of economic and cultural capital. In addition, the study also investigates how Hindi filmmakers use this platform to market cinema and reach an international audience. This paper attempts to evaluate the above dynamics through the prism of three representative cinematic texts: Masaan (Dir. Ghaywan), Newton (Dir. Masurkar) and Gully Boy (Dir. Akhtar).

UAE: Cultural Representation and Re-Creating Emirates Environment in International Films and its Implications for Tourism

This article aims to highlight the role and importance of the cinema in raising tourism, introducing the UAE's tourism potential, promoting and attracting tourism, and increasing local development. Because 'there is [.] a lack of data-driven academic research that measures the effects of film industry on local tourism' (Tkalec et al. 2017, p.705). Further, 'the impacts of film tourism still appear to be under-appreciated. Though the effects of film tourism can have significant long-term benefits' (Hudson, 2011, p. 165). Likewise, Connell and Meyer argue that 'understanding of the experiences of screen tourists in film and TV locations remains an emerging area of inquiry' (2009, p. 194). This article 'evaluates the effects of film industry on tourism outcomes' (Tkalec et al. 2017, p.705) in the UAE. The article interpreted the films' portrayal to reveal how UAE's culture and the environment were represented in the international movies filmed in the UAE. Cities of UAEs are not merely replicated in international films but constructed anew; reimagined, or repurposed according to filmmakers' and cinematographers' points of view and the role of those cities within that vision. Huge attention, however, is paid to representing the UAE's cities in international films. How do the filmmakers contribute to portraying the UAE and represent the knowledge on-screen in the filming process? Reviewing international filming in the UAE will explore possible answers to these informed questions.

ANALISIS SEMIOTIKA KOMUNIKASI ROLLAND BARTES DALAM FILM KUCUMBU TUBUH INDAHKU

The film, which was produced in 2018 and written by Garin Nugroho, won an award at the 75th Venice International Film Festival. In Indonesia, this film won 9 awards at film festivals. The existence of this film gets a lot of controversy in Indonesia, because of the LGBT issue. This study uses a communication semiotics approach with the Rolland Barthes method. Qualitative research methods with an interpretive paradigm are the basis for this research. The dominant eastern Javanese cultural value in this film is the cultural tradition of the lengger dancer. Juno as the main character in this film is interested in becoming a lengger dancer which is then opposed by the surrounding community, this is because the main character is a man. The inspiration for this film came from a choreographer who blended the lengger culture in East Java.

Analyzing The Protagonist Character of Elliot Anderson As Seen In The Film “Black Or White” By Mike Binder

‘Black or White’ described of complains, blames, jealously, selfishness, and understanding about the family love from Elliot Anderson’s character. This research is aimed to know the character of Elliot Anderson as main character by analyzing the evidence from the dialogues and his actions in the film. To know about the character of Elliot Anderson, the writer used the descriptive qualitative method in this paper. The writer employs himself to collect the data by reading script, watching the film and marking them. The writer used the film of Black or White by Mike Binder released in 2014 by Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The writer focused on the dialogues of the film, and then followed by analyzing the character through conscientiousness and neuroticism of personality. In this analysis, the writer finds out that final result about the protagonist character of Elliot Anderson. Elliot Anderson is a recently widower and visible wealthy grandfather. The writer found Conscientiousness of Elliot Anderson characteristic is ambitious and neuroticism Elliot is irritable or anger, complaining person, blaming person, selfish, and jealous. It’s all happened when on one particularly bad day, in which he loses his wife, he wishes people would recognize how hard he is trying and how good his heart is and just leaving him alone in his big house with its big swimming pool and his Mexican maid to raise his young granddaughter Eloise. Keyword: Black or White Film, Elliot Anderson, Protagonist Character

Trading devil Fish and Monkey kings: French and Chinese film industry policies and exchanges 1978-1993

ABSTRACT In the first years of China’s Opening and Reform period, the China Film Corporation and a combination of French film institutions and individuals established a robust import/export exchange that sent dozens of film titles in both directions. These Sino-French connections have been largely overlooked in scholarly histories of both film industries at this time. This is, in part, because France and China each had more economically valuable and/or culturally proximate foreign partners. However, marginal global cinema flows offer their own valuable insights into the operation of media industries. This paper examines the conditions that allowed this connection to emerge, the ability for personnel on each side to strike mutually-beneficial deals, and the dissolution of the exchanges. It draws critical parallels between the mid-20th century establishment of French and Chinese film policy frameworks and argues policy similarities and a new confluence of domestic and international film industry conditions enabled this rich connection between 1978-1993.

Project governance interface and owner organizational identity: The Venice Biennale case

There is a considerable body of work on managing the governance interface in project organizing, yet there has been little consideration of how the organizational identity of the project owner might shape the design of that interface. This is important because organizational identity is known to shape various aspects of project organizing, such as how an organization is perceived by team members, so we might expect it also influence the performance of projects. We explore this question through a case study of how the Venice Biennale owner organization governs one of its temporary project events – the 2019 Venice International Film Festival. Through our empirical fieldwork, based on multiple data sources including a participant ethnography of the 76th Venice International Film Festival and semi-structured interviews, we found that the organizational identity of the project owner organization influences choices made for the governance of a delivery project. The study contributes to theory on project organizing by highlighting the importance of owner organizational identity for the design of the governance interface in project organizing and identifying the importance of an interpersonal approach to governance interface design for an owner organization with an identify of innovation and experimentation on its delivery projects.

The Songs of Old Europe—Ancient Belarusian Folk Songs

The Songs of Old Europe—Ancient Belarusian Folk Songs

Istanbul as a "City of Design"

Istanbul as a "City of Design"

De-marginalising and de-centring film studies in bodies, places and on screens

This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intended that readers listen to parts of the audio if they please, but that they are not compelled to do so to find meaning.

Lund Film Society and Interwar Cultural Propaganda

During the interwar period, there was a surge in cultural diplomacy efforts in Europe. This article investigates the role of cultural diplomacy within the Swedish film society movement, focusing particularly on Lund Film Society’s travels abroad during the 1930s: to Nazi-Germany in 1935 and in 1938 respectively, as well as to the Soviet Union in 1936. Through international exchange, Lund Film Society did not only get access to artistic and politically radical films but also an increased insight into in the international film industry. The article shows that the trips fulfilled several important functions for Lund Film Society. The film society was theoretically oriented and the possibilities of exploring the film medium practically were limited. During these journeys abroad, the film society managed to gain insight into how modern film studios worked in several different countries. At the same time, interest in cultural exchange was mutual, and the international film connections were purposefully exploited by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as a form of cultural-political propaganda.

The Radio of Cinema

Film Quarterly columnist Bilal Qureshi explores the radio origins of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, the first film to ever be nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, best animated feature, and best international feature film. Trained as a radio journalist who aspired to use sound to immerse the listener in images, Qureshi finds inspiration in Flee’s unique and extraordinary merging of radio and film. Relating the true story of an Afghan refugee’s arrival in Denmark after his escape from the Taliban’s first siege of Kabul in 1989, Flee began as a radio documentary compiled from conversations between Rasmussen and “Amin,” the alias chosen by his childhood friend to protect his privacy. Animators only began visualizing the story once the radio cut was locked. While there is a topical urgency that undoubtedly makes this film of migration, loss, and war “important,” there’s more: Flee is a master class in intimacy and immersion in the form of a radio film.

Introduction

This introduction offers a summary discussion of research articles drawn from the International Cinema Conference and Festival, Cine-Lit 9, ‘Mujer y Género’, held in Portland, Oregon in March 2019.

World Film Locations: Florence

World Film Locations: Florence offers a unique, insightful examination of Florence as both backdrop and protagonist in a selection of international films. Joining the already forty-two volumes in the World Film Locations series, this edited collection is the third Italian city to be highlighted after Venice (2013) and Rome (2014), and conforms to the series’ organization: forty to fifty brief scene reviews, including six to eight individual frames, along with a time sequence, director's name, a one-line description, and a contemporary image of the area portrayed. User-friendly in presentation, each film is presented in two-page segments, the left and right side of the book, for the reader to experience the representation of the film in a complete unit.Edited by Alberto Zambenedetti, this volume is divided into six thematic sections. The first section begins with Eleanor Andrews “Views from the Grand Tour(ist): Florence and Foreign Consumption,” which examines films that represent the conceptualization, and at times adaptation, of the Grand Tour through Florence, starting as early as 1924 with Romola (Henry King) and ending with Carlo Lizzani's Cronache di poveri amanti (1954). In the second contribution, “Florentine Artists on Film: Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,” Nathaniel J. Donahue explores films in which Florence influences the artist on screen. Although the essay is rich, the title is misleading, as Donahue considers films which represent both fictional artists and historical ones, including but not limited to Ottone Rosai. Dom Holdaway's “Florence after Dark: Cops, Crime and Serial Killers” successfully studies “giallo-like” classics revolving around the city. His brief introduction is well written and mentions Hannibal among others, but surprisingly chooses to omit it from his analysis despite its notoriety (Hannibal appears instead in Hennessey's section on food later). The fourth piece by Pasquale Iannone explores “Rolling Hills, Scorching Sun: Filming the Tuscan Countryside,” highlighting the mysticism that the Tuscan countryside offers. Although Iannone considers these films Tuscan, most of the scenes analyzed are actually shot in Florence proper. Next, Brenden Hennessey's “Bread, Wine and Celluloid: Tuscan Cuisine at the Movies” delves into the way Tuscan foodways function in seven memorable films. In this section, the movie choices are compelling, but it is unfortunate that there is no mention of Carole Counihan's anthropological research of Tuscan foodways, either in the introduction or the analysis. In the final piece, “From Dante to Machiavelli: Canonical Florentine Literature on Film,” Barbara Garbin investigates what the author deems to be canonical literature on screen through a variety of works, but the author's definition of “canonical” is debatable.The editor of the volume, Zambenedetti, collaborated with many contemporary film scholars on this publication. Most of the photo credits belong to the editor himself, and the collection works well together as a unified piece. The introductions are all insightful, well written, and provide a complete overview of each theme.Zambenedetti's “Introduction” makes it clear that the volume is not exhaustive due to its size and approach, and as such it is always a difficult task to select which movies to feature. The collection presents a balanced range of films that represent Florence's cinematic ingenuity, yet placement of a few films may have fit stronger in alternative categories. In revised editions, it may be interesting to include an essay dedicated to Florence in other media, particularly television with the new productions about the Medici and Borgia families.To conclude, one of the most appealing components of the volume is its very rich visual aspect, from contemporary images and maps to the individual cinematic frames, which will be useful to a wide array of readers, from undergraduates in a monograph course or study abroad experience, to film students and cultured travelers alike. Additionally, the individual authors often reference and cross-cite films throughout the work, intertwining nicely the six themes.

The Impact of Hosting Film Festivals on the Development of Cultural Tourism: A Case Study of Cairo International Film Festival

The Impact of Hosting Film Festivals on the Development of Cultural Tourism: A Case Study of Cairo International Film Festival

Conscience and Controversy

Conscience and Controversy

Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World ed. by Vania Barraza and Carl Fisher

Reviewed by: Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World ed. by Vania Barraza and Carl Fisher Fernanda Righi Barraza, Vania, and Carl Fisher, editors. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World. Wayne State UP, 2020. Pp. 375. ISBN: 978-0-8143-4682-2. Over the last twenty years, Chilean films have received praise and prizes at international film festivals and awards ceremonies, drawing the attention of critics and the public all around the [End Page 304] world. During this time, the incipient local productions of the post dictatorship period have improved in quality and presented a wide variety of topics and aesthetics. This diversity makes putting them into a single category (other than country of origin) difficult. Indeed, even the “Chilean” label has proven problematic, as some films are set abroad and/or feature foreign actors, making their “Chileanness” a somewhat flexible notion. While acknowledging the role the state played in the development of a Chilean cinema, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First Century World (2020), edited by Vania Barraza and Carl Fisher, focuses on the tension between local and international, political and personal in Chilean films of the twenty-first century. In the introduction of the volume, the authors address this opposition between the political and the personal. On the one hand, some films focus on local, political issues affecting the wider Chilean society, from issues of memory connected to the dictatorship, to LGBTQ+ struggles. On the other hand, films that sidestep a clear political statement and focus on personal dramas and everyday life, as well as genre pieces like horror and action films, can offer innovative aesthetics—such as the so-called Novisimo generation. Considering this tension and the limited local distribution and audience, the editors ask a central question: “what choices do filmmakers have to make in order to make domestic issues intelligible to global audiences?” (2). Working at the intersection of aesthetics and content, local and global audiences, the book is divided into five sections dealing with fiction and documentary films. The first section, entitled “Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World,” examines the markets, distribution, and exhibition of Chilean films around the world. Then, “On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks” considers the political aspects of both horror and martial arts cinema. The third section, “Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation beyond Chile(in Cinema),” focuses on film adaptations in transnational contexts. “Migrations of Gender and Genre” looks at how Chilean films enter into the transnational debate on sexual dissidence, and “Politicized Intimacies: Debating (Post)Memory and History” debates how different filmmakers address the issue of memory. With the exception of the last section, which contains four chapters, each section comprises two or three chapters, allowing the reader to explore a variety of creative analysis and connect different films around a common topic. One argument that connects the sections of the book, and strives to provide a resolution to the discussion of personal versus political, is an expanded definition of politics. Indeed, many authors consider that historical topics can be addressed from a personal perspective, as Camilo Trumper analyzes in the chapter “Displacement, Emplacement, and the Politics of Exilic Childhood in Sergio Castilla’s Gringuito.” Here, the author discusses exile from the perspective of the child. The authors also agree on the political potential of films that explore intimate worlds and do not explicitly narrate any urgent social issue. Chapters such as “Films of Loss and Mourning: Bridging the Personal and Collective” by María Helena Rueda show how fictional films like Una mujer fantástica (2017) connect the mourning of Marina, the protagonist, to the relatives of desaparecidos who were unable to have funerals for their loved ones during (and after) the dictatorship, posing the question of who has the right to say goodbye. The chapter “Intimacies and Global Aesthetics in Vida de familia by Alicia Scherson and Cristián Jiménez,” written by Vania Barraza, explores how Vida de familia (2017), in which the aesthetic seems to be the priority, indirectly touches on issues of narratives of memory. While arguing that this film can connect to both local and global audiences, the author analyzes how the intimate...