Montage Sequence Research Articles

Attractive Visuality Generation Within the 360˚-VR Video Format as a Technological Trend in Modern Film Production

The aim of the article is to study the features of the process of attractive visuality generation within the 360˚-VR video format. Results. A comprehensive consideration of the issue with the use of general scientific and special methods (problem-logical, theoretical-informational, art studies, comparative analysis, the method of analogy, abstraction, induction, and deduction) demonstrates that one of the key trends in modern film production is the creation of a “multinarrative space” (A. G. Iñárritu) VR-immersion of the viewer as a recipient and co-creator of this space, accompanied by the transformation of the film into a visually attractive activity and transformation principles of film aesthetics in the 20th century. Scientific novelty. It is proved that the 360˚-VR video format is a unique audiovisual form that requires a special grammatical, technical and technological base (professional or amateur 360˚ camera, effective tools for creating and editing 360˚video content for the different platforms, Kolor Autopano Video Pro, SIFT algorithm, etc.) thus, brings the use of the immersion principle to a qualitatively new level. Conclusions. Due to this, attractive visuality is becoming possible in the quality of a new aesthetic and perceptual-virtual experience that is being formed under the influence of VR-attractions and modern special effects in the digital cinematograph. It leads to the synthesis between cinematograph and theatre when the transition is occurring from montage sequence to virtual-theatrical play where in consequence of 360˚-VR the action has been developing constantly, and the viewer is in the very centre of the events. Thereby, there are grounds to confirm that, including technological development and measureless creative possibilities in the process of projecting different VR-attractions, it is possible for a viewer’s infinite immersion in the space of a digital film; that, from one side, transforms film language on the modern stage, creating the perspectives of the further branch development, and from another side, it conditions a number of psychological problems and risks connected with the viewers’ reaction on a different level of density of the attractive field of modified film language.

The Shameful Story (La Storia Vergognosa)

The Shameful Story (La Storia Vergognosa)

Queer African Cinemas

Discussion| June 01 2022 Queer African Cinemas: A Conversation with Lindsey B. Green-Simms Bruno Guaraná Bruno Guaraná Bruno Guaraná is Master Lecturer of Film Studies in the Department of Film & Television at Boston University. Originally from Recife, Brazil, he received his PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and his MA in Film from Columbia University. His current research explores negotiations of cultural citizenship in contemporary Brazilian media. He currently serves as the Page Views Editor for Film Quarterly. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA: Lindsey B. Green-Simms, Queer African Cinemas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. $99.95 cloth; $26.95 paper. 264 pages. Film Quarterly (2022) 75 (4): 83–88. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.75.4.83 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Bruno Guaraná; Queer African Cinemas: A Conversation with Lindsey B. Green-Simms. Film Quarterly 1 June 2022; 75 (4): 83–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2022.75.4.83 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA: Lindsey B. Green-Simms, Queer African Cinemas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. $99.95 cloth; $26.95 paper. 264 pages. The first romantic sequence in Rafiki, by the Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu, opens with a close-up of a pair of sneaker-clad feet on a skateboard, its wheels thumping along the asphalt. The feet belong to the teenage Makena, who arrives at her friend Ziki’s apartment building to take her out around town for the day. After Ziki’s mother answers the door, an elliptical cut thrusts the viewer into a montage sequence in which the two teenage girls sit close together on a tuk-tuk ride around the streets of Nairobi. The cut introduces a nondiegetic love song that slowly drowns away the bustling sounds of the city as the girls go on a carnival ride, pedal a boat, and dance at a club. Diegetic sound only returns during a... You do not currently have access to this content.

“I am no longer afraid”

“I am no longer afraid”

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray (streaming on Amazon) Sunset Blvd, directed by Billy Wilder (streaming on Amazon) White Hunter, Black Heart, directed by Clint Eastwood (streaming on Amazon and YouTube) Barton Fink, directed by Joel Coen (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Trumbo, directed by Peter Askin (streaming on Kanopy) Dreams on Spec, directed by Daniel Snyder (streaming on Amazon) Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Mank, directed by David Fincher (streaming on Netflix). In the Hollywood of old a well-defined hierarchy of power and prestige extended from studio moguls at the top down through unit managers and producers to directors and established stars, then to ordinary actors, and below them, finally, to screenwriters, the necessary but otherwise unimportant wordsmiths who crafted lines for stars to speak and studio moguls to sneer at. From the 1930s through the 1940s a lot of wordsmiths, among them highly regarded reporters, playwrights, and novelists like Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Herman Mankiewicz, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and Scott Fitzgerald, headed west to make easy money by writing scripts, only to find that film-industry money came with a price, namely the incomprehension, disdain, or outright hostility of picture people. In the last sad year of his life Fitzgerald distilled his unhappy scenario-writing experiences into a dozen or so stories about an old alcoholic hack, Pat Hobby, still trying to scratch out a living in Hollywood. One of the stories, “Mightier Than the Sword,” sees Pat and another scrivener yelled at by a big-shot producer: Goddam writers! . . . What do we pay you for? Millions—and you write a lot of tripe I can’t photograph and get sore if we don’t read your lousy stuff! How can a man make pictures when they give me two bastards like you and Hudson. How? How do you think—you old whiskey bum? The producer promptly throws them out of his office and off the lot. So much for the might of the pen as compared with that of the sword. Interestingly, old Hollywood liked to depict fictional screenwriters in movies, low-positioned as they might be in the studio pecking order. After all, comedy or melodrama might be wrung out of their eccentricities [End Page 459] or disillusionments. Unquestionably, melodrama is wrung out of the experiences of the fictional screenwriter Duke Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, from 1950. Humphrey Bogart plays Steele in what is generally regarded as one of the finest performances of his career; Gloria Grahame is no less impressive as Laurel Gray, the young actress-wannabe who falls hard for him. There are really three storylines here. First and least interesting, a murder mystery: did Steele seduce and then strangle a naïve hat-check girl? Certain clues point in his direction, but it is scarcely giving anything away to reveal that he is innocent, and finally proven innocent by a deus-ex-machina confession from someone else. Second comes the story of Steele’s uncontrollable anger. His outbursts may have to do with his drinking or being suspected by the police, but fundamentally they derive from built-up resentment at the whole Hollywood scene. Even when not enraged, Steele can be controlling, at times boorish, so that one sometimes wonders how Laurel can be drawn to him. Eventually she becomes terrified by him, his sudden fury at an innocent beach party, his lashings-out at another driver on the highway (could this be the first instance of road rage ever screened?). The third and by far most compelling story focuses on Steele as screenwriter. We watch him lost in concentrated thought, scribbling away, piling up pages of dialogue for Laurel to type. Many movies involving screenwriters feature getting-it-down-on-paper processes like this, often via montage sequences. In a Lonely Place, unusually, shows the mental work which precedes getting it down on paper. A genuinely startling moment from early in the film presents Duke imagining how the murder of the hat-check girl might have taken place, detail by lurid detail (note the melodramatic light Ray casts on...

Sound and Fury on the Move: A Critical Exploration of the Self and Metamorphosis in Road Movies

A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering their perspective from their everyday lives. A road movie is technically defined as a movie that starts at geographic point A and travels through various pit-stops along the way before reaching geographic point B, the final destination. Road movies are noted for their vivid, dynamic and picturesque narration. Normally the protagonist or traveler is a male and the purpose of journey is self-discovery. Characters’ internal conflicts and transformations are highlighted. The characters in road movies often experience new realities on their trip and often explore the intensity of their alienation and solitude on a possibly long road trip to a remote destination. In road movies, the protagonist is usually considered as on the move. The present paper explores the theme of oppression, rebellion, escape, self-discovery and the metamorphosis of the protagonist as depicted in Frank Capra’s movie It Happened One Night and the Easy Rider by Dennis Hopper. The paper, on a further note, examines the emotional transformations of the protagonists as they sail through varied personal, emotional and social experiences on the way to their destinations. Montage sequences, travelling shots, aerial shots and diegetic music are some of the technical peculiarities employed in road movies. The road movie entered a political phase in the late 1960’s influenced by the low budget biker movies and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. The narrative is somewhat picaresque in almost all road movies that sequentially present certain pertinent events that culminate in a good or bad ending.

Working It

Famously touted as “the most beautiful woman in movie history” by Darryl F. Zanuck, the chief executive of Twentieth Century Fox, actress Gene Tierney achieved major stardom with Fox’s classic Laura (dir. Otto Preminger, US, 1944) following years of being typecast as an Orientalist “exotic.” The production insisted on her embodiment of the Hollywood beauty ideal during World War II and defined feminine beauty in terms that would not offend soldiers overseas. Fox went as far as to excise a montage sequence in which the influential columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) helps make over Laura Hunt (Tierney) from the stenographer of an advertising agency to a Madison Avenue executive and glamorous socialite, selecting a more sophisticated hairstyle and wardrobe and introducing her to the café society of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This article analyzes the historical promotion and publicity that surrounded Tierney’s transformation. It argues that her shifting star image accommodated the different conceptions of the Laura character both at diegetic and extradiegetic levels, but made haute couture beauty accessible to the home front by concealing an ornamental process of female beautification. With a wardrobe that anticipated the ready-to-wear women’s fashions she went on to create, Fox costume designer Bonnie Cashin refashioned Tierney into an “all-American” war-time working woman.

To Critique Affect by Means of Affect

To Critique Affect by Means of Affect Jaap Kooijman (bio) “It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp”1—these words by Susan Sontag immediately came to mind when colleague Wanda Strauven used “meta-cheesy-ness” to describe my audiovisual essay “Success,” which, as she quickly added, was meant as a compliment.2 Although meta-cheesy-ness is not something I specifically was aiming for, the term does capture how the original source material ended up inspiring—or perhaps even dictating—the form of my audiovisual essay. The essay’s main aim was to connect the star images of black female superstars Diana Ross and Beyoncé Knowles as well as the fictional characters they had portrayed on-screen, Ross as Mahogany in Mahogany (Berry Gordy, 1975) and Beyoncé as the Ross-inspired Deena Jones in Dreamgirls (Bill Condon, 2006). Whether Mahogany and Dream-girls can be considered camp by Sontag’s definition is open to question, [End Page 146] but both films rely heavily on the camp aesthetic of theatricality and diva worship, particularly the famous montage sequences, which constituted the essay’s main source material. I began working on this video essay at Middlebury College’s videographic criticism summer workshop in 2015. From the start I knew what the essay should be about, but not what form it should take. The essay almost organically grew into shape as I worked with the material as part of the first week’s exercises, including the videographic epigraph assignment. We were asked to select ten sentences from a critical text that did not explicitly discuss the film we were using. Moreover, both the images and the soundtrack of the source film were to be altered, with the quotation added “as text on screen in some dynamic interaction with the images in the scene.”3 As text, I selected a relatively obscure two-page essay on Diana Ross by Richard Dyer from 1982, in which he argues, without referring to Mahogany: “The sheer ecstasy of the whole Diana Ross thing is an outrageous reveling in what success could feel like, but not how to achieve it.”4 I altered the source material by reediting the montage sequence, enhancing the use of dissolves, and looping a fifteen-second segment of the instrumental “Theme from Mahogany,” leading into a bombastic finale taken from the original score playing over Mahogany’s end credits. These elements of the videographic epigraph assignment ended up forming the basic structure of the final audiovisual essay. As Catherine Grant has argued, audiovisual essays differ from conventional written ones because “they don’t have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us,” enabling us to “feel, as well as know about, the comparisons these videos enact.”5 In my written essay on Dreamgirls, I suggest that Dyer’s argument about Diana Ross “also seems to apply to Beyoncé three decades later.”6 The audiovisual essay made it possible to examine whether such a comparison works by literally applying the Dyer text to both the Mahogany and Dream-girls montage sequence as well as to the footage of the “real” Beyoncé doing a 2011 photo shoot for the French fashion magazine L’Officiel Paris. In this way, I could not only show how Diana Ross and Beyoncé are connected through their on-screen characters but also make the “outrageous reveling in what success could feel like” visible by enhancing the camp aesthetic of the original source material. “Success” was my first audiovisual essay to be published and to go through the peer-review process. Determining whether an essay is fit for publication, and as such giving it an academic stamp of approval, might be the most important function of peer review. Far more valuable, however, was the way the peer reviewers interpreted the essay, thereby articulating some of the choices that I had made rather intuitively. In his review, Richard Dyer emphasized “how editing . . . can do what words cannot, [End Page 147] not just to enable one to (re)see and (re)hear the affective qualities of...

From Shame to Drive

This article juxtaposes two 2011 Hollywood films—Shame, directed by Steve McQueen, and Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn—that in their mutations of narrative time and cinematic montage demonstrate the ongoing salience of Fredric Jameson’s Marxist analysis of postmodern culture for the aesthetic and social form of contemporary Hollywood cinema. What Jameson in Postmodernism called the atemporal “waning of affect” is hyperbolically exposed in both films, which are linked by their formal emphasis on accumulation, repetition, and looping. This late capitalist regime of accumulation and excess takes the form of a cinematic drive that no longer hews to a narrative temporality but, rather, appears as exactly the hallucinatory intensity of an overwhelming present that Jameson described. For this reason, the films dispense with beginnings and endings; through modulations of filmic time, they return to the stasis of an eternal “posthistorical” present. Drive and Shame both end with montage sequences in which flashbacks and flash-forwards are rendered indistinguishable. Exploring this emphasis on sameness and repetition, the article takes up the psychoanalytic notion of the drive in relation to Jameson’s argument about the waning of affect.

An Historical Examination of the Film Theories and Avant-Garde Mediation of Slavko Vorkapich in Hollywood

Early film theorist Slavko Vorkapich, a talented European emigre who became one of the first avant-garde filmmakers in the United States, articulated his conception of cinema as a unique, distinctive artistic endeavor. I will historically examine extensive original primary archival materials from the Slavko Vorkapich Collection to historically contextualize his film theories, montage techniques, and investigate how he envisioned his cinematic philosophy and visual aesthetic in his theoretical writings on motion pictures regarding “Film As A Visual Language,” “The Motion Picture as an Art” and “Motion and the Art of Cinematography” in 1926 which he went on to stylistically employ in his independent avant-garde films, such as The Life and Death of 9413 ? A Hollywood Extra (Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey [with Gregg Toland]; US, 1928), and in montage sequences for an extensive number of Hollywood studio films, including What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, RKO Pathe; US, 1932). Vorkapich’s diverse array of work embodies the dynamic representation of his aesthetic philosophy encompassed in both his studio and independent productions. Notable is that he manages to successfully bridge the conceptual economic and artistic abyss between the dominant commercial industry and the avant-garde. Moreover, an analysis of montage sequences in the commercial film What Price Hollywood? reveals how his avant-garde stylistic mediation functions to transform the overall narrative film text by appropriating his innovative experimental aesthetic techniques expounded on in his film theories within the mainstream commercial production environment of the classical Hollywood studio system.

Introduction: Back and Beyond—The Context

WHILE CARIBBEAN FILMMAKING HAS BEGUN TO FLOURISH, there is little published research. Ex-Isles: Essays in Caribbean Cinema, published in 1992,1 remains the seminal text. Nonetheless, Caribbean filmmakers have been insistent about the need to theorise their filmmaking and to depict the lived spaces and specific experiences of the Caribbean. Films such as Pim de la Parra's Wan Pipel (1976), and Hugh A. Robinson's Bim (1974) which fictionalises political developments of independence politics in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Euzhan Palcy's Rue Cases-Negres (1983), suggest that initially filmmakers focused on issues of race and identity in their attempts to create counterdiscourses and to localise filmmaking.The development of an indigenous industry in the Francophone Caribbean is usually attributed to Christian Lara because his film Lorque l'herbe (1968) provided the impetus for a wave of filmmaking by native-born filmmakers. These include Jean-Paul Cesaire, Gabriel Glissant and Willy Rambeau. This movement is marked in the first instance by Cesaire's negritude movement. At the Caribbean Tales Festival in Toronto in 2009, Euzhan Palcy spoke movingly about the influence of Cesaire and called him her father.Francophone filmmakers reflect on historic ills in different ways. Raoul Peck's Lumumba: La mort du prophete (1992) is about memory and the ghosting of the past and uses a ghost (Lumumba, voiced by the director himself ) to reconstruct a history of the assassination of the politician whose ascension to power lasted two months. Peck's revolutionary use of archival and home movie footage and the shooting of the film in Brussels give a peculiar quality to the work that Laura Marks has analysed in depth in her book, The Skin of the Film.2 Peck's analyses of power and terrorism in Moloch Tropical (2009) suggest the importance of the haunting of the past in the Caribbean. Hauntology, for example, is evident in Rue Cases-Negres in the shadowy shapes that hover at the back of Medouze's hut and the retained sounds and movements from an African ancestral presence. In her essay in this issue, focusing especially on Peck's 1994 L'homme sur les quais, Meredith Robinson dissects the ways in which Peck revolutionises traditional film techniques to interrogate memory's function in addressing historic trauma.The work of Guy Deslauriers from Martinique is also about the effect of a past in need of exorcism and uses a ghost to narrate the journey through the Middle Passage. Deslauriers, in the making of the film Passage du milieu (1999) and the filming of the political documentary based on the murder of the journalist Andre Aliker (Andre Aliker, 2008), uses filmic devices to probe the residues of history in specific ways. His use of montage techniques, for example, creates a profound sense of the presence of the past in Martiniquan and Caribbean history as a whole. Some of the most evocative scenes image the bodies of slaves as subhuman in their positioning within the cramped space of the ship's hull and juxtapose such atrocities with idyllic scenes of Africa. The narrator insists on the need for remembrance, thereby invoking the persistence of the effects of these traumas. Montage sequences also create conflictual lines that serve to refute imposed authority as in the frenzy of feet dancing to an inner spiritual music from Orisha rituals.Rachel Moseley-Wood also suggests that music and dance are integral to the representation of place and the experiences of the region. Her essay examines and problematises the ways in which Jamaican cinema has shaped reception to cultural products. For her, the exploitation of ghetto-based culture both constructs an often-stereotyped idea and image of Jamaican reality and, paradoxically perhaps, provides for a critique of class-based systems within the city space. Her enquiry plunges her into cultural debates about the ways in which films such as Dancehall Queen (Rick Elgood and Don Letts, 1997) engage with the female body and ideas of 'slackness'. …

Opening shots and loose slots: adapting Las Vegas

Anyone who has ever seen a film set in Las Vegas will be familiar with opening shots of sensational neon signage clustered against the night sky. This montage sequence, now an established convention, leads the viewer on a thrilling joy-ride, generally beginning on Fremont Street in the old city centre, then heading down the world-famous Strip. Such an opening occurs in textual fictional narratives about Las Vegas in various ways, and in film it visually supplies backstory, indicating to viewers that the movie will feature some or all of the classic ‘Las Vegas total’: hotel rooms, food, gambling, lounge acts, quickie marriages and divorces, commercial sex. Mobilizing these signifiers of ‘Vegas’ to inform viewers that certain fictional codes will be in place, this opening both establishes an implicit pact concerning what to understand and anticipate, and serves as a gateway to various life-changing experiences involving love, fortune, violence or death. So whether it opens a novel or film, or is developed in a flashback, the visual cruise past Vegas landmarks signals associations that ‘stay in Vegas’, from loose slot machines and unsanctioned sex to big losses and drunken disorderliness.

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

The makeover and the malleable body in 1980s American teen film

This article suggests that 1980s American culture was preoccupied with ideas of bodily transformation. It takes a look at the representation of the teenage girl in makeover montage sequences in 1980s teen films, in order to make three main arguments: (1) these sequences shifted their focus from before-and-after shots to make increasingly visible the transformation process itself, (2) they connected the makeover process to the purchase of consumer goods and services, and (3) by presenting the teen girl’s body as able to actively take on and adapt its performance of femininity, they opened up pockets of agency within a seemingly conservative discourse. The shifts created a filmic environment in which conventional representations of women and girls could slowly begin to evolve.

Toward Holistic Animacy: Digital Animated Phenomena echoing East Asian Thoughts

In a previous article published in 2009, the author showed how animation, when combined with computer technology, makes movements of different degrees of liveliness that are meaningful to humans. Following this thesis, this article draws on insights from perceptual and cognitive psychology to propose a new typology of liveliness for classifying digital animated phenomena. This classification emphasizes balance and spread of liveliness in today’s digitally mediated environments, echoing traditional East Asian holistic thoughts, including the core ideas of Dao and Shinto. Using analyses of exemplary animated artifacts from contemporary East Asia, including a montage sequence from the Japanese animated film Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), an animated version of the Chinese painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival exhibited in Shanghai Expo 2010, and Electroplankton, a video game released on a Japanese portable game console, the author argues that today’s digital animated phenomena incorporate co-creation between animators, computers and even spectators/users, thus provoking thought on the human–machine relationship in pursuing the illusion of life.

‘Same old song’: on audio-visual style in the films of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson's films display a carefully crafted symbiotic relationship between songs, visuals and dialogue. Songs are essential to the storytelling style we see and hear across his cinematic oeuvre – a style we cannot simply describe as visual. From Bottle Rocket (1996) through The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), soundtracks often drive the narrative and enrich the development of the characters. We discuss five stylistic threads, illustrating their trajectory through examples from four of Anderson's films. Music plays a paramount role in producing nostalgia and structuring his trademark montage sequences. Silence and/or music often replace ambient sound in synergy with changes in the visuals to intensify significant narrative moments, and music-related technology links characters and their objects of desire or loss. Finally, songs carry paratextual information, which can add a further layer of meaning. In this paper, we argue that these audio-visual stylistic threads are a defining feature of Anderson's films.

The Changing Poetics of the Dissolve in Hollywood Film

Most films contain many shots knit together by several types of transitions, and by far the most prevalent is the cut. Over the last 70 years, fades and wipes have become increasingly rare. Dissolves have also diminished in frequency but, unlike the others, they remain an important part of the general visual narrative and have shown a small increase in contemporary film. We tracked the usage of dissolves in 150 films released from 1935 to 2005. We found: (a) that after a lull between 1970 and 1990, dissolves have become more numerous, although not nearly so common as during the studio era; (b) that shots surrounding single dissolves are fairly long compared to the median shot lengths of a given film, suggesting visual preparation for scene change before a dissolve, and a re-acceleration after; and (c) that after their nadir, dissolves have increasingly reappeared in clusters reflecting a rebirth of the Hollywood montage. We also discuss the functions and meanings of these montage sequences in the stream of a film's narrative, with more contemporary films focusing on setups, altered mental states, and celebrations rather than older films' focus on travel and time gaps of various sizes.

Televisual memory

This essay weaves together a series of televisual moments which summon, manage, even simulate reflection and remembering. A sequence from the 9/11 documentary Out of the Blue (2006), a BAFTA necrology and the opening of the documentary Previously on ER (2009) are examples of what I refer to as 'televisual memory' – a term which refers to the representation and forms of memory on television. Taken from a range of television programmes, different in genre and address, these montage sequences act as both expressive of television's textuality and as examples of memory texts, or more specifically commemoration texts, as each is designed as a site of televisual commemoration and reflection. As 'memory montages' they work to reflect upon, construct, even manipulate televisual memory, playing with 'afterimages' and notions of haunting, and illuminating the forms and function of repetition on television. But as examples of 'televisual memory' they are also moments which capture a sense of the complexity of our experience of television and might be seen to offer a commentary on the similarities between the mechanisms of both television and memory

Three Ring Circus: the ur-text of modernist television drama

Three Ring Circus (BBC, 2 February 1961) was a BBC Scotland production, written by Jack Gerson and directed by James MacTaggart. A sixty-minute studio drama in which a man with amnesia seeks to recover his identity, Three Ring Circus has been described by John McGrath as the ‘ur-drama’ in a tradition of experimental television drama produced at the BBC in the early 1960s. What is remarkable about the production, especially for a 1961 studio drama, is its innovative, non-naturalistic style. Virtuoso long-take studio sequences alternate with modernist montage sequences to create a kaleidoscopic fantasy world, embellished by sound effects from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The precocious stylistic innovations of Three Ring Circus led to an invitation for MacTaggart to join the BBC Drama Department in London, where he produced a number of ground-breaking drama series prior to becoming the first producer on The Wednesday Play. This essay examines the origins of the experimental tradition in British television drama at the BBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s, analyzing sequences from Three Ring Circus in order to establish the veracity of McGrath's claim that the play is the founding text of modernist television drama.