Traditional Cinema Research Articles

Taking it to the street: screening the advertising film in the Weimar Republic

This essay examines the emergence of a new screen culture for advertising film in post-World War Germany, where a plethora of newly invented mobile screening technologies sought to take film out of the film theatre and into the commercial spaces of the new democracy. Asking how this drive to portability could exist alongside the continued praise for the traditional film theatres by advertising theorists, I argue that both types of screening – mobile projectors and traditional cinema screens – were understood in analogy to other types of advertising distribution, especially the phenomenon of ‘traffic advertising’ that emerged after the war. It is only by examining this new discourse on advertising–in particular the science of advertising psychology and its particular model of the interactions between images and spectators – that we can understand the screen culture of advertising film in its oscillation between portability and traditional cinema.

Moving innovation: a history of computer animation

Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It began in 1963 when an MIT graduate student named Ivan Sutherland created the first true computer animation program. Instead of presenting a series of numbers, Sutherland's Sketchpad program drew lines that created recognizable images. Sutherland noted: Since motion can be put into Sketchpad drawings, it might be exciting to try making cartoons. This book, the first full-length history of CG, shows us how Sutherland's seemingly offhand idea grew into a multibillion dollar industry. In Moving Innovation, Tom Sito -- himself an animator and industry insider for more than thirty years -- describes the evolution of CG. The history of traditional cinema technology is a fairly straight path from Lumire to MGM. Writing the history of CG, Sito maps simultaneous accomplishments in multiple locales -- academia, the military-industrial complex, movie special effects, video games, experimental film, corporate research, and commercial animation. His story features a memorable cast of characters -- math nerds, avant-garde artists, cold warriors, hippies, video game enthusiasts, and studio executives: disparate types united by a common vision. Computer animation did not begin just with Pixar; Sito shows us how fifty years of work by this motley crew made movies like Toy Story and Avatar possible.

From a Tactile Epistemology to the Ontology of Affect: Two Readings of Deleuze’s Time-Image in Film and New Media Theory

Abstract The paper compares how two theorists of media arts, Mark B. N. Hansen and Laura U. Marks, interpret the relation of Deleuze’s time-image to corporeality. Both argue that some novel types of images - in film and media art - engage the body in new and also more intensive ways than traditional cinema did. While they remain committed to Bergson’s theory of perception, their works offer different readings of how the Bergsonian concepts of Deleuze’s film philosophy can be applied to new media: on the one hand, to the non-signifying, affective properties of Hansen’s digital image in contemporary media arts, and on the other, to Marks’s - in the last instance, memory-signifying - haptic image, which she discussed initially in connection with video art and experimental film. In New Philosophy for New Media (2004), Hansen asserts that “Deleuze’s neo-Bergsonist account of the cinema carries out the progressive disembodying of the [body]”, which “reaches its culmination in […] what he calls the ‘time-image,’” and calls for “a rehabilitation of Bergson’s embodied concept of affection.” While Marks also offers some criticism on Deleuze, she suggests that his “theory of timeimage cinema permits a discussion of the multisensory quality of cinema,” and undertakes to examine “how the body may be involved in the inauguration of time-image cinema.” Besides arguing that both tendencies are present in Deleuze to varying degrees, I attempt to contextualize the divergences in their lines of thought by looking at the types of media and selection of works they examine, as well as the possible theoretical commitments that might guide these selective strategies

Narration and the production of meaning in neomodernism

This essay analyzes the narration strategies and methods of making meanings in neo-modernism movement. Filmmakers, who are its representatives, prefer the opposite model of cinematic communication which is commonly used in mainstream movies. The article begins with the definition of neo-modernism and description of key components that provide specific forms of narration and reception. Moreover, there were presented main terms related to the modernism and so-called slow cinema. In main fragments of the essay the author focused on some neo-modernist crime stories, which have been created through different, than in traditional cinema, methods of making meaning. Then, there were analyzed such elements of cinematic style as: use of off-screen space and non-conventional concepts of narrative ellipsis.

The Trickster in Bulgarian identity discourses and his manifestations in postcommunist Bulgarian cinema

ABSTRACTThe collapse of communism in 1989 left Bulgarians reeling between one failed great project (the building of communism), and the hardships of a new one (the long and winding road to the European Union). The place of the traditional communist cinema heroes has been either suspended or arrogated by a compelling bunch of clowns, reluctant heroes, drifters and losers, and other ambivalent figures. These multifaceted, controversial, marginal and generally complex character types, which were pushed into the unconscious, or into the objective (or collective) psyche as a result of relentless social engineering on collective and individual level, have been emerging with a vengeance, and predominantly as aspects of what Carl Gustav Jung describes as the archetype of the Trickster. In mythology and the arts, the Trickster is mostly likely to appear in time of crisis and in the no-man's land between two epochs, cutting an uncannily familiar figure, both ‘subhuman and superhuman, bestial and divine, whose chief and most alarming characteristics is his unconsciousness’ (Jung ([1954] 1990: 263). This study focuses on the aetiology of the infamous Bulgarian literary hero Bai Ganio cum Trickster figure, and in light of discourses on Bulgarian national identity and masculinity. It first looks at Bai Ganio's representation in two films from the early 1990s — Ivan Nichev's Bai Ganio (1990) and Bai Ganio on His Way To Europe (1991), and then at two of his most recent manifestations in the fiction film Mission London (Mitovski and Popov, 2010), as well as in the documentary Encounters with Ireček (Stoyanov, 2011), where this resilient Bulgarian national archetype is featured along with other major archetypes of the collective unconscious like that of the Hero and the Wise Old Man.

A Philosophy of Cinematic Art--The Big Picture

A Philosophy of Cinematic Art is a systematic investigation of cinema as an art, examining cinematic expression, realism, authorship, interpretation, narration, emotional engagement and related topics. It argues that appeal to the medium plays an important role in any adequate theory of cinema as an art. Cinema is understood as the medium of the moving image. Like many other media (such as that of prints, which contains the media of etchings, engravings, woodcuts, etc.), the cinematic medium contains other media—not just photochemical (or ‘traditional’) film, which has been the almost exclusive focus of analytic philosophers, but also handmade cinema (such as that of Émile Reynaud in the 1890s) and digital cinema (discussion of which comprises a quarter of the book); and digital cinema in turn has both non-interactive and interactive forms, including videogames. Since the cinematic medium contains other media, which nest within it, explanations and evaluations of cinematic works sometimes appeal to features of the cinematic medium itself and sometimes to those of its nesting media; so the book investigates what makes cinema in general an art as distinct from, for instance, literature; what makes traditional cinema artistically distinct from digital cinema; and what makes cinema’s interactive forms artistically distinct from its non-interactive ones.

Real Time Live

In March 2009, DreamWorks Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Katzenberg announced that in conjunction with the release of the animated feature film Monsters Vs. Aliens (2009, directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon), all of his company's subsequent film projects would be produced and exhibited in 3D. The gambit allows the studio to delineate clearly between the cinematic experience as it is enjoyed in the theater and the DVD screening in the home--or airplane, desktop, mobile device, and so on. The immersive film event could, in addition, prompt higher ticket prices and hinder piracy. Despite the wonders of 3D, this attempt to revitalize Hollywood's increasingly marginal role in moving-image entertainment remains merely one of the many examples of a broad-based dismantling and reconfiguration of cinema at the turn of the century as a once relatively stable form splinters into dozens of image/sound practices, ones that not only reference the generally elided history of avant-garde experiments of the last century, but also respond to new forms of networked, digital life that invite artful reconfigurations of time, space, and social interaction. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One of the happier outcomes of this dismantling and reconfiguration is the convergence of visual music, forms of video art, and the fundamental properties of cinema in what is known as by which I mean the live, real-time mixing of images and sound for an audience, where the sounds and images no longer exist in a fixed and finished form but evolve as they occur, and the artist's role becomes performative and the audience's role becomes participatory. As described, this notion of live cinema remains cheerfully broad, welcoming at once the Nervous System Projection performances of the New York-based avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and the audiovisual spectacles produced by the Light Surgeons, a group of British artists who work intensively with the relationship between sound, image and, on occasion, story. It embraces VJ performances, in which video is mixed live to accompany the performance of music, as well as immersive, ambient media environments crafted on the fly. In an interview about live cinema in 2008, Thomas Beard, who edited the collection of essays for San Francisco Cinematheque titled Cinematograph 7--Live Cinema: A Contemporary Reader (2008,), adds several other examples to emphasize the diversity of the form. He says: It means the manipulations of multiple small-gauge projectors by artists like Guy Sherwin or silt or Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, the image processing of LoVid on their custom-made hardware video equipment, or even intrepid uses of moving images in musical performances, like Text of Light, who situate silent experimental films as a sort of additional member in a broader improvisation. (1) In each of these instances, artists perform with moving images, sometimes playing overtly with the structural conditions of traditional cinema, and at other times moving more toward illustrated musical performance. While these examples diverge dramatically in terms of histories, tools, objectives, practices, and audiences, they are nevertheless emblematic of the form's expressive potential, and both underscore a widespread international interest in exploring diverse cinematic forms and suggest that the unity of the definition is grounded in the desire for liveness. Recent developments in media processing software have certainly helped enable these new genres of computer-facilitated live cinema expression across the world, and for the last five years, the form has at once emerged and returned, with performances illuminating galleries, museums, and festivals around the world. While there may not be as yet any kind of coalescence or sense of stability, live cinema, in its myriad manifestations, points to new needs and agendas in a networked, mediated culture. Despite the range of performance styles or genres, three aspects characterize this recent spate of live cinema work: first, the works insist on the live interaction of artwork, performer, and audience and suggest the desire for the event and its specificity; second, they propose an interrogation of forms, asking us to contextualize the event within histories of cinema, video, performance, art, and music; and third, the works often play on the liquidity of information and the sense that we exist in a world characterized not by concrete spatial boundaries and fixed temporal coordinates, but instead by a mobile, accelerating experience of fluidity and flows. …

The tears of Naples' daughters: Re-interpreting the sceneggiata in Mario Martone's L'amore molesto

This article sets out to explore the relationship between L’amore molesto (Mario Martone, 1995) and the kind of traditional Neapolitan narratives exemplified by the sceneggiata and the filone napoletano through an analysis of its intertextual relationship with Lacrime napulitane (Ciro Ippolito, 1981).It will be argued that L’amore molesto constitutes less a complete break with tradition than a complex reconfiguration of the ideological basis and functional aims of traditional Neapolitan cinema, making them more congenial to contemporary audiences. In this respect it is exemplary of the approach employed by the New Neapolitan Cinema that emerged in the 1990s and of which it is part.

Unfixing the photographic image: Photography, indexicality, fidelity and normativity

Normative conceptions of embodiment can operate only by fixing or essentialising the body's necessarily processural (or existential) ontology. Given that traditional film-based photography and cinema are reliant on the arrestation of a process, a process of fixing analogous to that seen in the constitution of normative bodies, this paper suggests that it is not surprising that photography has long been considered a privileged realm for the presentation of idealised bodies. Some critics have of course problematised this primarily indexical role of the photographic image by showing how this is disrupted in avant-grade practices in both photography and the cinema. In this paper, what is suggested instead is that the rupture of indexicality in traditional cinema and photography was always already inscribed in the technological apparatus or medium itself, and that what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) was therefore only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium. To this end, this paper presents case studies of the work of (amongst others) Edward Weston and Bill Henson, paying particular attention to their conceptualisation of the material ontology of the medium in which they work to show how they, respectively, reinforce or disrupt normative modes of embodiment.

Becoming-Samurai

Becoming-Samurai

Jean Cocteau by James S. Williams

MLR, I02.I, 2007 245 then considers the suggestive contrast between the heritage-piece marketing of the filmand itscollation of amultiplicity of styles, including the intertextual dimension of surrealism, while inChantal Akerman's 2000 filmLa Captive, a study of pathological jealousy, the freestand yet closest Proustian adaptation todate (p. 172), the intertext is the cinema of obsession, including the thriller and the filmnoir. This last film is convincingly characterized as an example of a cinema of 'differance' in itsquestioning of traditional sets of binary oppositions (p. 204). A furtherchapter looksmore briefly at two filmsby Italian director Fabio Carpi, Quartetto Basileus and Le intermittenze del cuore,which present a kind ofmise en abyme ofProustian themes andmotifs, while a finalchapter traces Proustian echoes in film-making on both sides of theAtlantic. Itwill be apparent that the central focus of the book is the legacy ofmodernism. This means that more could be said both about Proust's 'nineteenth-century' qualities and about more traditional cinema, including the 'cinema du patrimoine'. However, the authors make it clear from the beginning that theywill be concentrating their attention on modernism, so it isperhaps unfair to reproach themwith a somewhat one-sided approach. This privileging of the free, more experimental rendering does, however, give rise to another potential problem in that the authors define themost Proustian filmnot necessarily as an adaptation of hiswork, but as one thatadopts and develops upon his innovative aesthetic.While this definitionwidens the scope of the topic considerably and permits a number of illuminating insights, it also makes the dividing line between a 'Proustian' filmand various other types of art cinema very difficult to draw. These are onlyminor quibbles, however. In general thebook's breadth of allusion and depth of analysis make itboth rewarding and enjoyable to read. It should be of interestnot only to specialists inProust and Film Studies but also toundergraduates, especially if it is read selectively (as the authors explicitly encourage us to do). UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM JANE WALLING Jean Cocteau. By JAMESS. WILLIAMS. (French Film Directors) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2oo6. xv+223 pp. ?4o. ISBN 978 0-7I90-5883-7. Cocteau's contribution to thecinema is thearea ofhis artistic activitywhere his genius has been most unambiguously recognized, and yet the available critical literature still remains relatively thin,which makes thisnew volume in the Manchester French Film Directors series all themore welcome. James S.Williams deals with Cocteau' scontri bution to the cinema as awhole, and so discusses films towhich Cocteau contributed without being director, particularly L'Eternel Retour, although, as is tobe expected, it is thosewhich he did direct thatprovide themain focus, and all of hismajor works in themedium, including his only colour film,the shortLa Villa Santo-Sospir, receive individual attention. Nevertheless, Williams has not written a simple film-by-film round-up ofCocteau's works in the genre; true, after a general introduction setting up both the backgound and Cocteau's ideas on and contribution to the cinema, both Le Sang d'un poete and Orphee have theirown individual chapters, but these are se parated by a chapter entitled 'The Tricks of theReel', inwhich theothermajor films are dealt with inpairs: L'Eternel Retour with La Belle et la bete,L'Aigle a deux tetes with Les Parents terribles,and La Villa Santo-Sospir with Le Testament d'Orphee. The importance of that last film is also fully recognized by the ample attention it receives in the second of the two essays that follow, the firstdevoted to Cocteau's collaboration with JeanMarais and the second to the importance of both depictions of themale body and theuse of reversemotion inhis cinema. A final shorter section 246 Reviews discussing the influence of Cocteau's cinema on subsequent directors, particularly Godard, brings thework to a close. This structuremeans that any students looking only for,say, a section devoted to La Belle et la betewill find it to be relatively short, but, if they take the trouble to read thewhole ofwhat is,after all, a relatively compact study, theywill be rewarded bymany more general insights and a sense of the range and diversity of Cocteau's cinematic achievement, including his theoretical approach and the practical means used to...

Françoise Pfaff, ed. Focus on African Films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 327 pp. Photographs. Index. $65.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper.

Francoise Pfaff, ed. Focus on African Films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 327 pp. Photographs. Index. $65.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. The introduction and fourteen chapters of Francoise Pfaff's Focus on African Films address reader with very little exposure to or knowledge about African cinema. Many of essays include extended film summaries and fair amount of contextual and historical information newcomer to African might appreciate. Most authors opt to survey several films unified by theme or approach instead of reading one or two films closely. As result, students embarking on discovery of African in an undergraduate course will find collection informative and accessible. The scholar of African cinema, however, may find little that is new in Pfaff s volume and may be frustrated by its limited thematic and methodological scope. Although title of collection promises look at films from entire continent, majority of essays in Focus on African Films adopt much tighter focus on films from Francophone Africa. Among these, films of Sembene Ousmane receive disproportionately large amount of attention (seven of volume's fourteen essays discuss Sembene's films at length). Furthermore, many of authors included in Pfaff s book employ very similar, and by now very familiar, critical approach. Operating from within cultural-nationalist paradigm, contributors align themselves with, and locate film's significance in, filmmaker's intended and unified meaning, elucidating and celebrating union of artistry and political commitment African filmmaker achieves. Samba Gadjigo, for example, in an examination of Sembene's historical films, describes Sembene as a committed artist and activist for change (38). Brief discussions of Emitai, Camp de Thiaroye, and Ceddo serve to illustrate how Sembene's films established dominant Hollywood tradition of historical representation (37). Mbye Cham's survey of recent African films explains how films, based in the African heritage of oral traditions and memory (50), contest official, Eurocentric historical narratives. N. Frank Ukadike reads Allah Tantou and Afrique, jet te plumerai as examples of social documentary meant to combat false image of Africa presented by traditional cinema (160), and Brenda Berrian's article Manu Dibango and Ceddo's Transatlantic Soundscape examines how film's soundscape embraces two men's Pan African vision (153). In each analysis, critic stands beside filmmaker, amplifying his conscious intention through careful explication of important scenes in film text. Kenneth W. Harrow's provocative deconstructive reading challenges this approach, contesting claim that filmmaker can have last word on what his film means. …

Digital Transformations

Digital Transformations

Reading the rabbit: explorations in Warner Bros. animation

Despite the success of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and their Looney cohorts, Warner Bros. animation worked in the shadow of Disney for many years. The past ten years have seen a resurgence in Warner Bros. animation as they produce new Bugs Bunny cartoons and theatrical features like Space Jam as well as television shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. While Disney's animation plays it safe and mirrors traditional cinema stories, Warner Bros. is known for a more original and even anarchistic style of narration, a willingness to take risks in story construction, a fearlessness in crossing gender lines with its characters and a freedom in breaking boundaries. This collection of essays looks at the history of Warner Bros. animation, compares and contrasts the two studios, charts the rise and fall of creativity and daring at Warner's, and analyzes the ways in which the studio was for a time transgressive in its treatment of class, race and gender. It reveals how safety and commercialization have, in the end, triumphed at Warner Bros. just as they much earlier conquered Disney. The book also discusses fan parodies of Warner Bros. animation on the Internet today, the Bugs Bunny cross-dressing cartoons, cartoons that were censored by the studio, and the merchandising and licensing strategies of the Warner Bros. studio stores. Contributors are Donald Crafton, Ben Fraser, Michael Frierson, Norman M. Klein, Terry Lindwall, Bill Mikulak, Barry Putterman, Kevin S. Sandler, Hank Sartin, Linda Simensky, Kirsten Moana Thompson, Gene Walz and Timothy R. White.

Divided Images: Black Female Spectatorship and John Stahl's Imitation of Life

In her discussion of the maternal melodrama, E. Ann Kaplan notes that the mother is usually marginal in traditional cinema. Stories told from the viewpoint of the husband or child displace the mother's perspective, a displacement that Kaplan recognizes in other arenas such as psychoanalysis and the women's movement itself. She ends her essay by stating the necessity for feminists to examine the absent position of the mother and the coding of her negativity in films (Case 126, 135). Melodrama provides a fertile space for such questioning because of its emphasis on the family and its contradictory presentation of the mother. As Linda Williams notes, device of devaluing and debasing the actual figure of the mother while sanctifying the institution of motherhood is typical of 'the woman's film' in general and the sub-genre of the maternal melodrama in particular (138). The importance of the maternal has long been recognized by black feminists. Not only has the mother figure been employed as a means for the discussion of black feminism, but this figure has also been articulated in ways that often differentiate it from conventional paradigms. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, seeking to illustrate the type of mothering that occurs in black communities in which a network: of women care for children who are not their own, has suggested the term othermothers to incorporate these non-related women into the discussion on black families (119). The space created by these women provides a location for the potential formation of black feminist ideas. The term womanist, used to connote a special kind of feminism among women of color, stresses the mother or maternal figure who acts as a mentor for other, usually younger, women and recognizes the pressures of being a mother in academia (Phillips and McCaskill 1008). Both of these definitions emphasize the respect granted to the black mother. When discussing cinema, black women also turn to a melodramatic film. Imitation of Life provides a unique intersection of feminist film theory and black female spectatorship. In both John Stahl's 1934 film and Douglas Sirk's 1959 film of Fannie Hurst's novel, black women occupy a space closer to the center than in most other Hollywood movies, for Hurst's novel portrays the strained relationship between a black mother and her light-skinned daughter, who wants desperately to be white. Significantly, this drama has been the focus of black feminist discussions on the portrayals and reception of black women in films. Jacqueline Bobo analyzes both movies to discuss black women as cultural interpreters. In particular, she suggests that Nana Peazant, the influential grandmother in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, provides an alternative to the black mothers in Imitation of Life. Several women wash Nana's feet to show respect to her, while both versions of Imitation of Life show black women rubbing the feet of white women, suggesting their subservience (46-50). For bell hooks, Stahl's film initially caused her to stop going to movies, yet as an adult helped her form an oppositional with which to question the imaging practices of Hollywood cinema (121). hooks's term suggests a wide variety of distinctions from the white masculinist gaze described by Laura Mulvey. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey argues that cinema employs two mechanisms to create pleasure in the male viewer. Men in the audience engage in scopophilia, or the pleasure in looking at an object. This pleasure is derived primarily by gazing at the image of a woman, scantily dressed or heavily made up. The second method that creates pleasure combines scopophilia with narcissism in that male viewers find pleasure in looking at the male protagonist of the film. The film's hero is often portrayed as superior to most men. In a cinematic enactment of Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, the male viewer is fascinated that he looks somewhat like this ideal person on the screen and is pleased in recognizing himself. …

Why Do People Go to the Cinema?

THE QUEST FOR CULTURAL IDENTITY: WHY DO PEOPLE GO TO THE CINEMA? WE ARE currently witnessing an unprecedented wave of international symposia devoted to the attempt to save traditional cinema viewing systems from total industrialisation. In an epoch ever more characterised by a world economy based entirely on profit, and by what I would call a New Pragmatism deriving from the population explosion, it may in fact be understandable that artistic criteria suffer. Centralised, intensive industrial monopolies exist by virtue of a levelling of public taste on a lowest-common-denominator basis, and thus appear to be imposing it. Subsistence of the American movie machine depends on popularising the mediocre. The temptation therefore grows to forego quality simply to maintain the cinema as a form of popular culture. It is overlooked that "popular" and "culture" do not always coincide. Mass acceptance becomes the measure; all other criteria become luxuries....

The Old and the New in Brazilian Cinema

The first stirrings of the Cinema Nôvo movement were in the early 1950's, when some young filmmakers began to protest the expensive imitations of Hollywood and cheap musical comedies (chanchadas) that made up the traditional Brazilian cinema. This protest found an immediate echo among young film critics.In 1952, Italian neo-realism was the main inspiration of my first film, Agulha no palheiro (Needle in a Haystack), for which Nelson Pereira dos Santos served as assistant director. Neo-realism dominated dos Santos’ own first two films, Rio, 40 grans (Rio, 40 Degrees), 1955, and Rio, zona none (Rio, Northern District), 1957, as well as his production of Roberto Santos’ O grande momenta (The Great Moment) in 1958. From 1958 to 1962, there was a series of experimental short films.The name of the movement, Cinema Nôvo, appeared for the first time around 1959-60, but even then it was as fluid and undefined as that of the French nouvelle vague.