Film Reception Research Articles

Intersections between Italian and Slavic cinemas

The purpose of this issue is to explore the encounter between Italy and Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe and Russia during and after the Soviet period, as well as the fervid cooperation and fruitful co-productions between the film industries in this vast geographic region. More specifically, this Special Issue covers the following topics: the reception of neorealist films in Slavic countries and the influence of neorealism in Slavic cinema, the links between Italian political cinema and Slavic media, the presence of popular Italian genres of television shows and series in these geographical areas, transnational stardom in cinema and television, co-productions and their adaptation to the needs of national film and television markets, Soviet–Italian film institutional exchanges and co-productions and Italian film festivals in Russia and Italy.

Изключително фантастичният Е. Т. А. Хофман – една традиция в полето на модерността

The article provides a brief overview of E. T. A. Hoffmann's reception in Bulgaria – translation, literary, theatrical, film reception. Special attention is paid to its presence/absence in different periods of Bulgarian culture. The aim is to briefly present the Bulgarian contribution to the “Hoffmann” theme, in the context of the 2022 commemorations of the 200th anniversary of his death. A special focus is placed on the Bulgarian participation in the E.T.A. Hoffmann's Year in Germany.

Антисоветская этика и эстетика фильма М. Захарова «Убить дракона» в дискуссиях на цифровых площадках

The study of the temporal transformation of attitudes to the ethical and aesthetic values of the Perestroika era in post-Soviet Russia is proposed through the analysis of the modern audience reception of its film products. Feature films are defined as a source of information about the dominant meanings of the era when they were created. The main attention in this article will be paid to the ethical and aesthetic components of the film "To Kill the Dragon" (directed by M. Zakharov), which was released on Soviet screens in 1988, as well as its reading by Russians in the 21st century. The present research contributes to understanding the nature of the modern perception of ethical and aesthetic ideas, important during the period of Perestroika and encoded in M. Zakharov's film script. The study of the factors of critical (and insufficient) attention to the film now contributes to understanding the relevance of the period of Perestroika for understanding the processes of the 21st century. As a result of the analysis of the modern reception of Mark Zakharov's film in the media space (in particular, in the form of reviews on the Kinopoisk, reviews of Yandex and others), three strategies of audience comment were identified: philosophical, film critical and political science. The analysis of the modern reception of Mark Zakharov's film allows us to conclude not only about its relevance in the 21st century, but also to identify factors that make it difficult to perceive it positively. The film disgusts young viewers with its aesthetics, and experienced ones with its opportunism. The free interpretation of the play by Evgeny Schwartz, the director's departure from the spirit and letter of the original source in our time has become much more sharply criticized. Viewers are upset by Mark Zakharov's lack of a direct forecast of the development of history after the victory over the Dictatorship of the Dragon.

Polish Spy Movies of the 1960s in Light of Transcripts from Meetings of Script Assessment and Film Approval Commissions

This article addresses the problem of the unique reception of spy films made in the 1960s in the People’s Republic of Poland. In line with the tenets of New Historicism (cultural poetics), the New Film History and the historical poetics of film, the author focuses on the political, ideological and rhetorical nature of these movies, focusing especially on the analysis of various contexts in their historical setting. Analysis of the transcripts and minutes from script assessment and film approval meetings, important in terms of the process of producing a film and clearing it for distribution, helps to reconstruct both the disputes about the predominant features of the spy film at the time and the fears of its subversive reading. Analysis of these documents makes it possible to show the tensions, limitations and contradictions of the spy film formula of the time, related to cultural politics and the perception and use of genre conventions, to reconstruct the processes of negotiation of meanings, the interpretative strategies of the time, and the social and cultural tensions of the historical moment.

Caetlin Benson-Allott, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television

In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Caetlin Benson-Allott turns an expert eye on the material culture that embeds, situates and shapes popular media, its production and consumption. Material culture, with its broad and interdisciplinary understanding, allows the author to cast a wide net to examine the ways in which ‘the stuff around media’ inflects what is on-screen, how it got there, the framing of it, and viewer engagement towards a nuanced and holistic understanding of film and television, their history and culture. What drives the book is an interest in the messy and tangled ecosystem of contemporary American film and television. Focusing deliberately on the web of interconnections that shape and perpetuate the media system, and that affect creators, consumers and content, the book seeks to move beyond narrow medium- and genre-specific analysis to expand understandings of context for popular media and offer critique of existing scholarship. There exists a body of scholarship that addresses the infrastructure and hardware of cinema as well as exhibition spaces and settings, starting with early cinema and travelling exhibitors. Studies of film reception have also examined the physical and social spaces of cinema, actual audiences and the material cultures of cinemagoing. Yet Benson-Allott’s book does not locate itself within this scholarship; rather it distinguishes itself from studies of technology, apparatus and infrastructure, as well as scholarship on embodied engagement with media, or ‘specific sites of media consumption’ (p. 2).

The audience and reception of the films from the Profil Film Unit in 1982-1989


 
 
 The subject of this article is an analysis of the distribution, attendance results and reception of feature films made by the Profil Film Unit in 1982–1989. The Profil Film Unit was the second film group (alongside Iluzjon, headed by Czesław Petelski) to be reactivated by the cinematography management after martial law was declared in Poland. The artistic director of Profil, Bohdan Poręba, enjoyed the trust and support of the Party authorities, linking his allegiance to communist dogma to his activity in the nationalist ‘Grunwald’ Patriotic Association. Profil’s productions were boycotted by a large part of the acting community (also due to an appeal by the Solidarity Stage and Film Artists published in the newspaper “Tygodnik Mazowsze”), and some of the films made by this unit in the 1980s clearly followed the guidelines of the cultural policy of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The following questions will be answered: How did the political circumstances outlined above affect the distribution and reception of the films made by Profil? What attendance results did the films produced by Profil achieve and to what extent did they differ from the cinema ticket revenues of the films produced by other groups? How was the activity of the Profil Film Unit and the financial results achieved evaluated by the Supreme Board of Film Affairs? How were the productions of Profil received by film critics in the daily press and magazines?
 
 

The spectator thinks: cinema, education and film reception in the classroom

What are the external repercussions of a representation that is diegetically constructed? How a film can be understood by the audience? What a cinema experience is able to mobilize? By means of a research-action method and from the perspective of Hermeneutics, Cultural Studies and theories of perception, which places the spectator as an active agent in the understanding and communication process, this article seeks to reflect on cinema spectatorship in its educational dimension, taken as object the reception of Through the Olive Trees (1994), by the iranian film-maker, Abbas Kirostami, from the classroom experience, in a postgraduate course at a public university. After an introductory and conceptual discussion on the relation between reality and fiction, and between cinema and education, the students’ interpretations were analyzed, revealing the active, imaginative, educational and formative character of the cinema experience.

Symbolic Time(s) of Violence in Late Socialist Bulgaria

By introducing Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, the author explores the state uses of the cinematic industry—notably through the making of grandiose national epics—in the endeavor to model and, ultimately, to assimilate Muslim minorities during the so-called “Revival Process” (1984–1989) in socialist Bulgaria. Drawing attention to often-neglected aspects of film production, such as the selection of symbolically charged “national landscapes,” shooting locations, and the use of Muslim film extras, she examines the production of a state-sponsored historical master narrative, its widespread dissemination at home and abroad, and the attempt at channeling film reception by national minorities and the majority population. The visual recreation of the alleged Ottoman “forced islamization” of Christians and the blurring of the distinction between fiction and fact, as well as past and present were intended to boost the national pride of the majority, achieve support for anti-minority measures, and win the obedience of minorities.

The Issue of Teenage Girl Marriage in Indonesian Films: Analysis of the "Yuni" Film Reception

The film titled “Yuni” talks about a young girl named Yuni who experiences pressure from her society to get married. Despite gaining international recognition through awards at prestigious events, this film has attracted various discourses on social media. This research aims to examine the audience’s meaning of the film “Yuni”, especially for women who have married in their teens. This is phenomenological research that focuses on the experience of the audience as individuals. The research method uses Stuart Hall’s reception analysis with the concept of encoding and decoding and uses the stereotype concept of Richard Dyer as an analytical tool. This research uses in-depth interviews, observations, and literature studies. The results show that the audience’s meaning is in a position of dominance and negotiation. A dominant position occurs through scenes that show that married teenage girls are victims of a still-strong cycle of patriarchal systems and we will limit the options to develop themselves for experience after marriage. The negotiating position occurs in scenes that show stereotypes related to women must be smart in matters of kitchens, wells, and beds.

Dubbing filmów animowanych jako przekaz kulturowy. O współczesnym podejściu do translacji dubbingowej w Polsce

The process of dubbing a production does not end at the direct translation of the text into the target language, but involves adapting and localising the verbal and choral contents of the film. Moreover, the finished product has to stay intact with the represented visual layer. This analysis researches upon dubbing as a form of translation regarding its function as a channel of conveying culture. In this study some of the animated films released in the past 20 years have been analysed. The discourse is focused on the importance of translation in the reception of the mainstream films from the perspective of a Polish viewer. The main aim of the article is to bring attention to the way in which dubbing presents culture by detaching the viewer from the cultural source and conveying the message of the film by focusing on the familiar, target culture.

„Айріс” (2001) Річарда Ейра: специфіка кінорецепції біографії письменниці

The article analyses the film reception issues of I. Murdoch’s biography in epistemological and historiographical perspectives. Due to the productive interaction of different types of biographical works, the mechanism of presentation / perception / cognition is mainly realized through references and reflection as an individual ability to supplement the “truth” of factual biographical material with other relations such as “interpretability”, “realizability” that form the so-called cognitive complex related to the perception peculiarities of biopic both as a separate genre and in the context of other biographical genres: memoirs, literary biography, etc. In the global context of biopics about writers, the film “Iris” (2001), directed by Richard Eyre, is perceived quite ambiguously. This receptive „ambiguity” is explained by the fact that R. Eyre deviates to some extent from the established canons of the biopic genre, building his plot on the contrast of two planes of relations between famous intellectuals – Bayley and Murdoch – as young, talented, charismatic, open-minded in her relationships Iris and as an elderly woman suffering from an incurable disease. Since it is almost impossible to cover her life in all its manifestations and activities in one perspective, the director resorts to intermedial dimensions and techniques of presenting biographical material. Relying on the documentary basis and memoirs of Murdoch’s husband John Bayley (“Elegy of Iris” and “Iris and Her Friends”), due to chronotopic shifts, television biography in the biopic, excerpts from Murdoch’s lectures, emphasizing her quotes scattered in the film, R. Eyre frames his model of Murdoch’s biography. This strategy allowed him, albeit fragmentarily, to show one of the world's smartest women in various guises: as a writer, as a philosopher and as an ordinary person, recreating the happiest and the most tragic fragments of her life, especially during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

The Spread of New Chinese Socialist Martial Arts Films in Africa

ABSTRACT In the 1970s, Hong Kong kung fu films were distributed across Africa and reached large audiences. Although the spread of Hong Kong films in Africa has received some scholarly attention worldwide, the African reception of Chinese films in the post-Mao era has rarely been analysed. Based on archival research and the collation of historical data and materials, this article discusses the background and advancement of the new Chinese socialist martial arts films across Africa and uses the acclaimed film Wudang as a case study to explore the spread of Chinese socialist martial arts films. This article argues that Mainland Chinese films’ imitation of Hong Kong films was a strategic choice made in the context of the Economic Reform and Opening Up policies, in response to Africans’ changing attitudes toward socialist ideology. The research contributes to the understanding of the historical exchanges between China and Africa in the post-Mao era, as well as to the topic of cooperation in the Global South today.

The Musical Idea Work Group: Production and Reception of Pre-existing Music in Film

AbstractHow do filmmakers work with pre-existing music? To answer this question, I conducted interviews with the musicians, composers, editors, sound designers, and music researchers for Lars von Trier's films. This article combines previously unpublished insider information with an original analytical methodology to clarify the working processes of contemporary filmmakers who utilize pre-existing music. I build on Ian Macdonald's production-situated conception of the ‘Screen Idea Work Group’ to posit the ‘Musical Idea Work Group’, a notional framework emerging from the teams who develop film-musical ideas. While previous film music research tends to analyse artists (persons) or music (products), here I focus on contrasting descriptions of highly collaborative working processes with the prescriptive mechanisms of film reception. In this way, I demonstrate a more holistic understanding of filmic authorship while accounting for previous constructions of Trier as an ‘auteur mélomane’ based on critical perceptions of how he utilizes music.

Discovering Exodus: Content, Interpretation, Reception by Ralph K. Hawkins

Reviewed by: Discovering Exodus: Content, Interpretation, Reception by Ralph K. Hawkins Brian Joseph Meldrum ralph k. hawkins, Discovering Exodus: Content, Interpretation, Reception (Discovering Biblical Texts; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Pp xiii + 308. Paper $22. The Discovering Biblical Texts series seeks to provide "student-friendly introductions to the books of the Bible" (p. ii). Hawkins's contribution to the series comes as the product of his teaching introductory courses on Exodus. His book serves as an excellent introduction to Exodus and contains an extensive bibliography. It would be a useful resource in any course on the Pentateuch generally or Exodus specifically. I would group H.'s thirteen chapters into three sections: chaps. 1–3, which provide an overview of past Exodus scholarship and introduce current questions about the exodus account's historicity and dating; chaps. 4–10, which present descriptions of Moses as Israel's leader, Yhwh as Israel's God, the law and the covenant as Israel's foundation, and the [End Page 483] tabernacle as Yhwh's dwelling; and chaps. 11–13, which treat Exodus's impact throughout the OT, its echoes in the NT, and its reception in Western culture, art, film, music, and politics. For H., Exodus unfolds as a series of crises that Israel endures and Yhwh overcomes: Israel's enslavement, Moses's hesitancy, Pharaoh's stubbornness, and so on. Exodus's distinctive narrative features—Israel's foundation and Yhwh's self-revelation—make the text a compelling story even for modern readers. Exodus ultimately shares the OT vision that Yhwh dwelled first among the Israelites in hopes "that all people would eventually come to acknowledge the Lord as God" (p. 11). Hawkins reviews the Documentary Hypothesis and presents the scholarly movement from source to literary criticism. Employing the latter as his method, he deals with "the final form of the text, in the context of the whole canon of Scripture, in order to determine what its final author or authors wanted to tell its readers" (p. 20). Regarding historicity, H. suggests that, while a lack of extrabiblical attestation is usually the reason why scholars dismiss the Bible's exodus account, the persistence of the exodus tradition throughout the OT and the fact that Israel's foundational myth often presents the people in a way that is "anything but noble" (p. 38) are also significant. H. presents the thirteenth century b.c.e. as "the consensus date for those who hold that a historical exodus occurred" and considers that the enduring quality of the exodus traditions, "the basis on which the nation of Israel's existence was predicated," are the strongest evidence for the exodus's reality (p. 39). Hawkins devotes chap. 5 to Moses's multifaceted depiction. He is a prophet, shepherd, judge, priestly figure, military leader, sanctuary builder, and divine mediator. Chapter 6 has a similar function, but here H. concentrates on a single aspect of Yhwh's portrayal in Exodus: God's power. Sections that detail the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea demonstrate "the Lord's mastery over nature and, indeed, all of creation. They were nature weapons in the hand of nature's God" (p. 108). In his treatment of Exodus's legal material, H. argues that suzerain–vassal treaties from the ancient Near East provide the closest parallels to the covenant ratification ceremony and the legal corpus contained in Exodus. H. reviews the constituent parts of suzerain–vassal treaties from their preambles through closing historical reports (pp. 111–14), and he provides a helpful chart detailing where the various sections of the treaties appear from Exodus 20 through Leviticus 27 (p. 116). H. then details the ancient Near Eastern context of the Ten Commandments. When considering the scope of Israel's law, H. notes, "While some of its laws were similar to those of other cultures, others were entirely unique and distinguished Israel from all other people in the region" (p. 129). Chapters 9 and 10 are particularly interesting. In chap. 9, H. interprets the themes of sin, rebellion, restoration, and renewal throughout Exodus as an occasion of good news, or the "gospel" of Israel in Exodus. Through Yhwh's self-revelation of the divine attributes in...

Finance Film on Must-See Lists: A Tale of Positivization

Abstract The article shows the way must-see film lists hosted by financial publications positivize, after the 2008 crisis, the message of feature and documentary films representing finance. Here positivization refers to the detouring or softening of the critical edge of the message of a film in the interests of the hosting website and the profession of finance in general. Emphasis falls on financial literacy and on a film’s artistic prestige and entertainment potential. The author argues that positivization is a semantic strategy indicative of a neoliberal business ontology that informs the interpretation of cultural artifacts. It instrumentalizes signification processes in order to foreground exchange value and present film reception as an investment in human capital.

Anna Hofman-Uddgren, Pioneer of Stockholm Cinema Culture. Digitized Tools and Resources for Research on Early Cinema History and Film Reception in Sweden

Iluminace is the only Czech double-blind peer-reviewed journal for scholarly reflection upon cinema which is approached from theoretical, historical and aesthetic perspectives. It emphasizes original research and interdisciplinary approaches and in recent years has focused on international authors and readers.

A Hard Sell: The Nazi Film Ohm Krüger in Wartime France

Historians of the Third Reich generally view Ohm Krüger (Hans Steinhoff, 1940), an anti-British historical drama set during the Boer War, as a triumph of Nazi propaganda, yet the film's distribution and reception in German-occupied territories have never been studied in depth. By offering a detailed comparison between the German original and a substantively reedited, French-dubbed version produced in 1941 under the title Le Président Kruger, as well as a politically and economically contextualized analysis of the film's distribution and reception in occupied and Vichy France, this article questions the persuasive power traditionally ascribed to Ohm Krüger to draw broader conclusions about the complexities of exporting Nazi propaganda to foreign markets in the volatile context of the Second World War.

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The reception of American and French film noir in post-war Greece, 1945–58

The aim of this article is to examine the distribution, promotion and critical reception of American and French film noir in Greece from 1944 to 1958 and to shed light to the reasons of the belated appearance of Greek noir examples. It is based on archival research that was made in the framework of the project ‘Film noir in Greece: Reception, assimilation, and imitation of a US film genre, from the post-war period until today’ (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens), financed by the Operational Programme Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning, P.A. 2014–20. Crime thrillers that were retrospectively labelled as film noirs, were not only known and enjoyed by the Greek public from 1945 onwards, but also their conventions and imagery were used in the journalistic discourse, showing a wider diffusion to society that was not only limited to communities of cinephiles. From this perspective, we examine the vocabulary and terminology invented and established by Greek reviewers and distributors, in order to describe the key features of the films that today we classify as film noir. We discuss how emblematic films that today form the canon of film noir were received at that time, as well as the negative discourses that appear at the same time in the public sphere, especially around issues of ‘moral panic’, violence and delinquency. Furthermore, the distinction in the reception of French vs. American films enables us to apprehend the different ideological stances towards these films and to understand why French crime films were more influential in Greece than their American counterparts.

The Neuroscience of Film

In the last decades, the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to film studies has been invested in at least three different lines of research. The first one has to do with film theory and history: the new attention, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, to the viewer’s brain-body, the sensorimotor basis of film cognition, and the forms of embodied simulation elicited by the cinematic experience has stimulated a profound rethinking of a relevant part of the theoretical discourse on cinema, from the very beginning of the twentieth century to the most recent reflections within cognitive film studies and the phenomenology of film. The second line has to do with the intersubjective relationship between the movie—its style, rhythm, characters, and narrative—and the viewer, and it is characterized by an empirical approach that yields very interesting results, useful for rethinking and problematizing our ideas about editing, camera movements, and film reception. The third line concerns a possible experimental approach to the new life of film, focusing on the digital image, the innovative forms of technological mediation, and the inscription of a new film spectatorship within a completely different medial frame. The goal of this special issue is to offer insights across these lines of research.