Film Theory Research Articles

Stop-Motion Animation’s Object Substitutions and Non-Depictive Representation

This article explores a distinctive representational strategy used in stop-motion animation: the object substitution. Using as its central example a children’s TV episode in which brushes stand in for dogs, it explains how this strategy produces a complex relationship between depiction and representation. The analysis highlights the pragmatic underpinnings of various theories of pictorial and cinematic representation, arguing that, in a substitution, depicted elements constitute explicatures and represented ones implicatures. Connecting this strategy to humans’ capacity for pareidolia (seeing things in other things), it contends that an object substitution achieves its effects—and reconciles its marked incongruities—by prompting viewers to pleasurably reverse-engineer the far-fetched projective imagining that motivated its use. This process, which is a form of conceptual blending, is based on relations that are neither straightforwardly iconic nor purely arbitrary.

Inhuman Music and the Monstrous-Feminine

In video games, female characters have traditionally been meant to be seen and not heard, mirroring the history of women under patriarchy. Those female characters who reject their secondary and primarily visual role often become monstrous, and like Barbara Creed argues, this monstrosity is itself profoundly gendered. This paper focuses on two such female characters whose monstrosity, and also revolt, are indisputably feminine, as well as musical. Both the 2007 classic Portal and the 2017 cult hit Doki Doki Literature Club! feature central antagonists who are sentient artificial female monsters who both start off as the players’ guides through their respective games, their roles similar to those of gendered digital assistants in everyday life. While GLaDOS is voiced throughout Portal, Monika remains silent until the final credits of DDLC!, but the comparison between the two is never as evident as when they sing. Both games end with songs performed by these antagonists, after they have technically been defeated. This paper draws on feminist literary and film theory, as well as musicology and ludomusicology, to deliver both a comparative analysis of the two songs, and a broader formulation of the sonic representation of the monstrous-feminine in video games.

Narratives of Mediterranean migrants in Italian cinema: The camera angle and close-up in Terraferma and Fuocoammare

Over the last two decades, Italian cinema has turned its gaze towards the Mediterranean Sea to dismantle the narratives constructed by populist political parties and mainstream European media, which have emphasized the rhetoric of border protection, security and legality through the systematic depersonalization of migrants. Film counter-narratives to this have been effectively developed, and cinema has responded to the materiality and fixity of migrants’ bodies by composing stories in which these migrants recover their sociopolitical agency. This article provides a close analysis of the characterization in Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma (2011) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) (2016) in relation to technical and stylistic forms of filmic representation. Particular attention is paid to the correlation between the aesthetic level of the films and the social dimension of the characters, which is primarily expressed through framing in which the migrant occupies the central position, establishing a dialectical relationship with the other characters and their social space.

Navigating Patriarchy and Class Divide: Bollywood's Cinematic Representation of Business Families in Post-Liberalisation India

Navigating Patriarchy and Class Divide: Bollywood's Cinematic Representation of Business Families in Post-Liberalisation India

Turning Older Women’s Life Stories into Hypermedia: Reflections on the Production of Feminist Creative Analytic Practices

This article discusses our development of a new form of feminist Creative Analytic Practices (CAP) by creating knowledge through interactive video installation and web-based interactive re-storytelling ( https://kimchoi.net/a-story-of-ones-own/ ). Since the 1990s, qualitative social researchers have been developing alternative methods and forms to capture and represent the complexity of lived experiences. Through referencing feminist postconstructionist CAP, Deleuzian rhizomatic narrative inquiry, and feminist film theories and films, our project – consisting of reflexive writing experiments and re-enactment of 43 older Hong Kong women’s life stories in hypermedia – contributes to this expansive knowledge. Specifically, we describe our writing and production processes, including the strategies and tools considered, medium specificity and cinematic apparatuses used, and challenges encountered when attempting to create a nonlinear, multi-layered, polyphonic, and interactive narrative. Our main concerns are: How can researchers produce a self-conscious, research-based creative work that highlights women’s agency under socio-cultural constraints, whilst acknowledging selfhood as rhizomatic, knowledge as situated, and “truths” as partial and multiple under conditions of its own making? How can we produce alternative social science research practices that carry both logic and affect? How can we engage the audience to open up and interpret older women’s life stories in embodied and experiential ways?

Racialized Disgust and the Depiction of Native Americans in the Ranown Cycle Westerns

This article explores mainstream audience reactions concerning race and how they intersect with late 1950s Westerns known as the Ranown cycle. Synthesizing ideas from critical philosophy of race, philosophy of film, cognitive film theory, and philosophy of emotion, I analyze how these films elicit racialized reactions of sociomoral disgust toward Native American characters. Because such responses are not ordinarily processed through higher-level forms of cognition, I argue that these embodied, affective, implicit reactions are key to understanding how films like those in the Ranown cycle convey feelings, perspectives, and ideas concerning race, with important implications for ideology as well as philosophizing about film.

São Paulo’s Minhocão on Film

This paper concerns the cinematic representation of São Paulo’s Elevado João Goulart, a 3.5km elevated expressway close to the historic centre of the city, popularly known as the Minhocão. Built during the boom period of Brazil’s dictatorship, the Minhocão opened to traffic in January 1971. Controversial at the beginning of its existence, it has been partially rehabilitated, a process in which film has been important. The paper describes three general modes of the Minhocão’s depiction on film: in the first it represents a generalised fear of the modern city, in the second it is a normal part of the landscape, and in the third it is a form of aesthetic occupation. Key films discussed include Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), directed by Hector Babenco (1985) and the documentary Elevado 3.5 (Maíra Bühler, Paulo Pastorelo and João Sodré 2006). The paper responds to Sophia’s Landscapes of Care theme by showing how over time film can, over time, help rehabilitate seemingly irredeemable infrastructure.

Representation of Women in Film Literature: Application of Feminism Film Theory on ‘The Princess and the Frog’

Representation of Women in Film Literature: Application of Feminism Film Theory on ‘The Princess and the Frog’

Blindness Challenging Melodrama in Your Eyes Tell (2020) and Blind Massage (2014)

While blindness has been a recurring motif in melodramatic fiction films, this article argues that some contemporary East Asian films about blindness provide a template for challenging ableism and melodramatic conventions via textual analysis. Based on the work of Peter Brooks, Linda Williams, and other significant studies on melodrama and blindness, I first introduce three main characteristics of and gaps in melodrama (virtue, dichotomy, and the moral occult) while examining the connections between blindness and melodrama in East Asian film history. Then I explore how filmic representation in East Asian can question melodramatic conventions and disrupt the dichotomy between disability and non-disability by using the Japanese film Your Eyes Tell (2020) and the Chinese film Blind Massage (2014) as case studies. Your Eyes Tell begins to problematize the melodramatic dichotomy and ableism by attaching great importance to multiple senses, whereas Blind Massage emphasizes the diversity of blindness and challenges melodramatic patterns by representing the body, emotions, affect and sound in very specific ways.

Senarist Ayşe Şasa’nın Sinema Düşüncesi ve Örnek Filmlerin Söylem Analizi

Screenwriter Ayse Sasa, with her active role in the intellectual history of Turkish cinema, her ideas and determinations, and the theories of cinema she put forward, is the subject of this study. The general question addressed in the study is whether Ayse Sasa establishes her idea of cinema in her screenplays. Discourse analysis using the concepts of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Karl Marx was used to answer this question. The two films that Sasa highlighted the most in the books she wrote and in the interviews with her were classified and analyzed according to the evolution of her cinematic thought. In her own words, Sasa's cinematic thought consists of two periods. In this study, Ayse Sasa's cinematic thought is traced through the films Ah Guzel Istanbul (1966), which she wrote in her first period, and Gramofon Avrat (1987), which she wrote in her second period. As a result of the research, it was determined that Sasa's thoughts existed in her screenplays within the limits of possibility.

Unveiling the Familiar: Exploring Makoto Shinkai’s Anime Art

In the past few years, film theory has experienced incredible growth and transformation. In modern film theory, the analysis of the relationship that films have with their recipients is a key area of research. This study examines the aesthetics of Makoto Shinkai's anime and how it realistically depicts the outside world. Additionally, it will compare and contrast their investigations of this realism in his art style with selections from Shinkai's corpus of films. Harnessing the principles embedded in the concept of mimesis developed by Walter Benjamin, this paper uses a recipient-centered approach to cinema narrative. This study is significantly central to the art style rather than its structure by observing the characteristics of animation drawings and audio-visual in the anime. The paper provides an insight into the connection between man and man-made, which unveils the familiarity we have with nature—justifying the hypothesis by employing the literary theory of Mimesis. It investigates the art style of Shinkai’s animation that works as a special force to realize this connection. It will enable one to recognize the significance of his works in serving as a model that consciously or unconsciously influences the recipients to take note of and appreciate the mundane sights and moments of life around them.

Non-Interiors

This text-based research essay, through the theory and practices of mapping, suggests a non-dichotomous conceptualisation of interiority. It offers to probe the potentials of ambiguities and multiple meanings of an interior rather than the traditional oppositions such as inside-outside, private-public, female-male invoked by the term interior. We argue that interiority is not a fixed entity but a continuously changing state through the relationships formed among the imagined, remembered, and lived spaces of a subject. Our research is centred around a study of filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, which traces filmmaker Anna's encounters with hotel rooms, stations, and trains as she travels through different cities to promote her film. Akerman’s film introduces interiors provoked by uncertain and unfamiliar modes of interiority by interrogating its habitation through the peculiar tactics of filmmaking and viewing. By mapping this filmic interiority, we argue for ‘non-interior’ as a critical and creative way of approaching an interior. Non-interior is not the opposite of interior, nor an in-between position of interior and exterior, yet is concerned with what is unknown, what is excluded, and what is unheeded. It aims to theorise and practise an uncertainty of the interior without assigning a single static definition. The research of a non-interior offers ambiguity, multiplicity, and uncertainty to an interior, allowing us to explore interiority within gradual shades of its materiality as a room, a threshold element, or a piece of furniture. Mapping came to the fore as a method of this research, which performs the filmic topography. It suggests an embodied practice of film viewing, including the authors’ analytical and emotional responses to the encountered representation of the interior. Mapping enables us to explore the potential of filmic representation to blur the presumed definitions and conventional boundaries of the concept of the interior. By mapping filmic interiors, we reveal ambiguous states of the interiors we encountered in the film and multiply their layers of uncertainty. These mapped uncertainties allow the interior to be questioned and the non-interior to be produced. In particular, non-interior draws on the non-dichotomous approaches in art and architecture such as Robert Smithson's ‘non-site’, Pascal Bonitzer’s ‘de-framing’ or ‘off-screen’, and Rosalind Krauss's ‘expanded field’ to explore ambiguity as a critical tool in order to understand the uncertainty of an interior. Mapping of non-interiors proposes architectural theory and representation that consists of fragmented, subjective, situated, and embodied knowledge of interiors.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACH TO COMPLEX NARRATIVE IN MOVING IMAGE: NOLAN’S MEMENTO

This article explores Christopher Nolan’s Memento as an exemplar of complex narrative in moving images with a psychoanalytical approach. Psychoanalysis has provided a foundation for commentators, film critics and theorists to analyse cinema. By using Freud’s Iceberg Analogy of the unconscious mind, this article examines the parallelism between the emergence of unconscious complex mental states, how they are expressed through emotions and behaviour in moving images and how spectators reflect their unconscious emotions and mental states. The article focuses on Memento and analyses the movie's character and narrative structure. Memento was chosen as Christopher Nolan captured the scary extent of the human mind's complexity and its unconsciousness. Through complex narrative structures, he created associations between audiences’ unconsciousness and negative emotions of repression and stress associated with it, such as helplessness, fear of having no purpose, misjudgement or unfair treatment. This article examines the scene structures in relation to the complexity of narratives and narratives’ relation to Leonard Shelby’s unconscious mind, through the framework of psychoanalysis and interpretivist approaches by utilising psychoanalytic film theory and text analysis. It concludes that the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, has a detached preconscious and conscious and unconscious resulting from not his head injury but unconsciously using it as a psychological shield. The detachment between levels of consciousness is depicted as a moving image in black and white. This provides stability and consistency to Leonard’s version of narratives, which plays the reverse. The analysis of Memento with a psychoanalytical approach evidences the parallelism between Freud’s Iceberg Analogy of the unconscious mind and humans' complex unconscious mental states and how this is depicted in moving image.

Metaphysics of the sequence shot: the gathering and nihilating of being in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse

ABSTRACT This article examines the philosophical implications of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) by attending to the thematic and aesthetic configuration of its sequence shots. The film’s durational images, I suggest, perform a gathering and nihilating of presence whereby the existence of the subject is repeatedly affirmed and questioned. I read this dynamic, over and above figurative and diegetic parameters, as metaphysical. In line with its Nietzschean framing and de-creational structure, and in distinction from the hermetic living that characterises Damnation (1988), Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), I posit the film’s catastrophic vision of the end of the world as revelatory. Placing stylistic analysis in dialogue with film theory and the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, I argue that Tarr’s strategies of attention (on the subject) and reversal (of the action and cinematography) puncture narrative chronology, exposing the spatiality and temporality that structure our existence. For this, I align with Heidegger’s thinking on metaphysics and the relation between art and truth. I establish the grounds for a compatibility between Heidegger’s philosophy and the worthiness of cinema by appealing to the ontological purpose it attributes to certain works of art and technology. The presencing and absencing of The Turin Horse’s in turn phenomenal and abyssal sequence shots, I conclude, produces a renewal of ground that illuminates questions of human fragility, freedom and emancipation, attuning us to the responsibilities of our being in a shared world.

Reanimating experimental psychology: Media archaeology, Hugo Münsterberg, and the ‘Testing the Mind’ film series

For historians of psychology, Hugo Münsterberg is best remembered as William James’ successor as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and a pioneer of applied psychology. By contrast, for film and media studies scholars, Münsterberg is recognized less for his contributions to experimental psychology than for those to film theory, a field in which his penultimate book, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), is frequently claimed as an inaugural text. However, lost in the blind spots of both disciplinary perspectives has been a thorough examination of Münsterberg's collaboration with Paramount Pictures, translating psychological tests into experimental short films. Despite reaching millions of moviegoers in 1916, Münsterberg’s ‘Testing the Mind’ series has received little attention from historians of science and early cinema alike. One reason for this neglect is that, to date, not a single extant copy of a ‘Testing the Mind’ release has been located. This article is about the author's efforts, in collaboration with students, to reanimate these lost psychological tests for the screen through meticulous historical reconstruction based on the original scripts, journalistic accounts, and correspondence between Münsterberg and Paramount. This reconstructive process, I show, yields new insights into the relationship between psychology and early cinema and an opportunity for reflection on this promising new space for research at the intersection of media archaeology, the history of psychology, and experimental history of science. Film URL: https://archive.org/details/munsterberg_paramount.pictographs

Development of a generalized mathematical model for two-stage reverse osmosis desalination systems

This study presented a generalized mathematical model for a two-stage reverse osmosis (RO) system based on mass balance, the solution-diffusion model, and film theory. The model is user-friendly and can be customized for any membrane regardless of the manufacturer. A set of non-linear equations was solved in MATLAB to calculate the system arrangement, performance parameters, and the required feed pressure for the desired recovery ratio by incorporating membrane characteristics and design parameters. Actual data from a two-stage RO system were employed for model validation against ROSA software results. To optimize energy conservation, equal recovery rates are applied to both stages, resulting in lower calculated feed pressures than those obtained using ROSA software. The study reveals a strong agreement between the simulation results and those obtained from the ROSA software and alignment with the membrane manufacturer's recommendations, making the model a reliable tool for evaluating the system before implementation.

Social Changes in America: The Silent Cinema Frontier and Women Pioneers

Silent cinema acted as a bridge between early motion pictures and today’s film industry, playing a transformative role in shaping feminist film history and American society. This article explores pioneering American women in the silent film industry who ventured into technology, film culture, marginalized communities, and social movements. Despite the prevalence of racist and sexist propaganda, American silent films were a frontier for innovation, filmmaking, and exploring the New Women concept. This study examines 23 American silent films that have often been overlooked and rarely studied, whereby film analysis generally aligns with established feminist silent film theories. By shedding light on a previously overlooked film directed by May Tully, this study challenges the widespread belief that there existed “no women directors in 1925”. The examination of databases reaffirms American women directors’ contributions to silent films, especially during the early years of the silent film era. The results modify the previous scholarly notion that “influential women directors’ involvement was over by 1925”. Following an initial surge in their active leadership during the early years, influential women directors’ participation was over after 1922, rather than 1925.

Beyond The “Joker” Movie: Cinema As A Politainment Agent

In the scope of this study; Joker (2019) film will be analyzed and examined as a political entertainment medium through cinematic narration. The film is assessed both in terms of scene analysis and in terms of the film's current discourse. Within the framework of this study, Joker film evaluated thematically as a political entertainment thus this article aims to enlighten the relationship between cinematic representation and political circumstances through the perspective of Douglas Kellner's Cinema Wars narrative. The goal of this study was to break down Joker film to examine its ideological and aesthetic representations within the social, political and cultural context in the timeframe when the film was released to build up a bridge between political reality through the employment of cinematographic machinery.

Pioneering "Experimental Heroes" of Turkish Cinema

While the narrative tradition, which has been developing for thousands of years, can be examined by dividing it into three parts as Drama, Lyricos and Epos, since the discovery of cinematography 127 years ago, narrative in cinema has developed narratives parallel to the two most basic theories of cinema, Realistic Film Theory and Formalist Film Theory, as well as contributing to experimental, feminist, etc. narratives in addition to these theories. The main purpose of this article is to examine three different pioneering films and heroes of Turkish Cinema (Umut-Yılmaz Güney-hero: Cabbar, Anayurt Oteli-Ömer Kavur-hero: Zebercet, Uzak-Nuri Bilge Ceylan-hero: Mahmut), which were shot in a realistic theme, and to reveal how they developed their heroes and what kind of experience they offered to the audience with the heroes they presented, starting from the literary narrative genre Epos. Based on the concept of objectivity, the presentations of the heroes were examined by using the cinema's own language and forms with the cooperation of the screenwriter-director.

Frame Design in the Visual Culture of Modern Author’s Directing. Part 2. Projecting the Objective World in Films by Author-Directors

The purpose of the article is to determine the artistic and aesthetic toolkit for designing the objective world of the frame in the visual culture of the author's film by the director, artist, cameraman. Research methodology. An integrated approach was used in the development of the topic, in particular, methods of systematisation, comparison, verification, comparative, and textual analysis. The analytical method and the method of figurative and stylistic analysis in their unity were used to consider the art historical aspect of the problem. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the director's creativity is investigated in the context of the visual culture of frame design and for the first time it became the subject of a special study. The appropriateness of using the systematic method in studying the features of the author's plastic film language has been proven. A comprehensive analysis was carried out and the features of frame design in the author's film creativity were revealed. Conclusions. The materials presented in the study expand the arsenal of knowledge about the specifics of the visual culture of the author's directorial film language in various worldview models and enable their application in educational courses, the creation of educational and methodological literature on the theory and history of cinema and television, directing. Keywords: fine art, artist, audiovisual art, director, shot, design, image projection.