Western Film Research Articles

Interrogating “Marginality” in Bombay Cinema: An Exhaustive Historiography

Interrogating “Marginality” in Bombay Cinema: An Exhaustive Historiography

НЕКОТОРЫЕ АСПЕКТЫ ВЛИЯНИЯ КИНОИНДУСТРИИ НА ПРОПАГАНДУ ОДНОПОЛЫХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ

This article presents an analysis of the impact of the film industry on the formation of ideas of modern society about same-sex relationships. The object of the study is Western cinema. The subject of the study is the influence of Western cinema on the representation of Russian youth about same-sex relationships. To determine what influence Western cinema had on the representation of modern Russian youth about same-sex relationships, the authors conducted a sociological study, presenting three hypotheses. The result of the sociological survey is presented in this article.

The Research on the Representation of LGBTQ in Eastern and Western Films

In recent years, increased public awareness and understanding of the LGBTQ community have led some film and television productions to venture into LGBTQ themes. However, there is still some under-representation in these films. These films often come from the independent sector of film, and there is a lack of such films in the major Hollywood studios. Stereotypes about this group still exist despite the lack of diversity and representation of this group in media. Through visual analysis, discourse analysis and other analysis methods, the author examines the representation of LGBTQ people in both Eastern and Western films and uses these three films: Farewell My Concubine, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Call Me By Your Name as examples. Through this study, the author found that the expressions of this group in Eastern and Western films and TV series differed greatly, with the expressions in Eastern countries being more subtle and the expressions in Western countries being more intuitive and diverse. This code was relaxed in the 1960s-1970s, which also signalled the dawn of the feminist and homosexual movements.

A Study of the Image of Women in Film Themes from a Feminist Perspective

Film, as an essential mass media resource, has a significant social, political, economic, and cultural impact. This essay will examine the process and reasons for the transformation of female representations on the screen by combining cultural notions and ideals of female roles in Chinese and Western film works. At the same time, it examines the role of film in society from a feminist standpoint. This study investigates the genesis and transition of feminism, as well as the development trend of the female image, through literature research, case analysis, and comparative description. It can be found that China has increasingly acknowledged the influence of Western feminist ideals in the long process of creating the image of women through network resources, historical documents, and other information transmission methods, resulting in a significant change in the image of female characters in Chinese films.

Music Video, Remediation, and Generic Recombination

Music videos continue to be one of the most adaptable forms of media due to their unique ability to remediate everything from Western films to Zoom meetings. Their relatively low budgets and ever flexible assemblages of audiovisual components make them sites for experimentation, and they regularly recombine generic conventions from a range of media. This essay makes the case that studying music video demands a multifaceted approach to genre: if we accept that music video is a moving assemblage of genres and media, we can move toward unpacking the unique configurations of genre and medium in a given music video or subset of music videos. This method might suggest a shift in the way we think through genre in the future, moving away from single genre studies (however expansive or changeable a given genre might be) and toward studies that treat genre in a more recombinatory way.

Home on the Range: Reshaping Narratives of Domesticity in Marilyn Monroe’s Westerns

ABSTRACT Although Marilyn Monroe is not best remembered for her performances in westerns, she starred in three: River of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954), Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956), and The Misfits (John Huston, 1961). Monroe’s western films contributed to mid-century domestic ideology for both men and women, firstly by featuring an independent, career-oriented woman as a prominent western co-star who ends her films no longer working in saloons and nightclubs but safely ensconced in the home, and secondly by advancing the western project of domesticating not the landscape but the male hero. Monroe’s star persona, as a sexy but not manipulative woman, when shifted into western films, shepherds the hypermasculine cowboys through a process of becoming more vulnerable, willing to choose domestic life, and more suited to a mid-century lifestyle. At the same time, for women, Monroe embodied the independent woman who would only be lured away from her career dreams by a companionate partnership of equals. During a time when both men and women had to adjust to shifting gender roles, western films starring Marilyn Monroe made those changes attractive. This article discusses how Monroe’s western films reflect mid-century gender ideology.

The Role of Association: New Thinking on “Exposition, Comparison, Association” in Films

Abstract Crucial to the exploration of the nationalization of Chinese films, the concept of exposition (赋 fu), comparison (比 bi), and association (兴 xing) in films has gained much significance. While these concepts still need refining, an in-depth exploration of the terms is still necessary. This article reviews the theoretical term exposition, comparison, association, and argues that it should not be treated simply as pure rhetorical discourse. In particular, any interpretation of association should address the historical and cultural context of early Chinese society, and the early analogical thinking implied in association should be taken as an entry point for exploring the ambiguous ideographic role revealed by this aesthetic concept and extend it to film studies, so as to capture the unique image thinking in Chinese films and other Eastern cinema, which differs from the aesthetic logic of Western films.

Perspectives on Narrative Time in Chinese Cinema

Abstract The unique view of time rooted in traditional Chinese culture is distinct from that of Western countries. In the Eastern perspective, eternity and evanescence are unified in the axiom: “The passage of time is like flowing water.” This concept also creates a different perspective on narrative time in Chinese films, compared with Western films. In the Chinese perspective, firstly, traditional laws of time are fully respected, and the four seasons, solar terms, and festivals are often seen as time nodes; secondly, a nationally imagined unity of time and space is followed, and expressions of time are likely to be integrated into artistic images such as objects, weather phenomena, and natural landscapes; thirdly, the cognitive laws of nature are respected whereby the linear or circumferential track is adopted and therefore a sense of leisure comes up in resonance; finally, the time scale is based on perception, and Chinese aesthetic style is thus construed while fulfilling the needs of narrative.

Invective Lexicon in the Foreign Film Discourse of the Last Decade

Invectivity is an ambiguous but integral feature of modern cinema. The author used a complex linguistic approach to describe the obscene vocabulary of foreign movie discourse. The article attempts to answer the following questions: Why do films need invectives? Who they are addressed to? How many invectives fit in one movie line? How emotionally colored are invectives? How do they fit into the idiomatic composition of the language? What kind of shock power do they carry? What sacred values do they attack? Who swear more, male or female characters? Are invectives perceived literally or figuratively? How can they be avoided? The scientific novelty of the taboo studies is in tracking and maintaining the balance between two conflicting trends: the oversaturation of mass media with obscenities vs. the current purist movement. The theoretical significance lies in the comprehension of the ongoing cultural interaction. The author believes that the choice of invectives depends on the filmmaker, their sense of humor, and the style of character imagery. The method of continuous sampling from modern film scripts provided extensive exemplary material, which was subjected to cognitive-semantic, stylistic, pragmatic, and quantitative analyses. Western cinema often uses invectivity to make a line catchy. In addition, obscene vocabulary designates subgroup affiliation, encourages immediate interaction, and demonstrates a dominant social position. In a cultural society, invective vocabulary refers to criticized signs of verbal aggression, and the negative connotations of invectiveness can be eliminated in euphemisms. However, foreign cinema demonstrates and facilitates the degradation of the cultural background.

Review: Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang, by Nicholas de Villiers

Review: <i>Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang</i>, by Nicholas de Villiers

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Peculiarities of the Functioning of the Taboo Lexicon in the Modern Western Cinematography

Introduction. The article reviews peculiarities of functioning of taboo lexis, which is a manysided and indispensable aspect of modern filmmaking. The study aims at the analysis of taboo functioning in the linguistic field in order to improve foreign content application in compliance with censorship requirements. The implementation presupposes analysis of taboo lexical units, revealing their functioning features as regards to acceptable implementation of the taboo and to depict the possible ways of optimization of its use in modern cinema.Methodology and sources. The article presents results of the analysis of the taboo lexis in Western filmmaking, the former being based on a complex semantic-discursive and pragmatic approach. Specific linguistic methods of observation, description and quantitative measurement are used in the article together with the general linguistic methods of comparison. Informative basis of the study is comprised of more than 300 examples selected by the method of continuous sampling from 19 Western films and y means of the internet-resource scripts.com, as well as slang and jargon dictionaries.Results and discussion. Taking into account many-sided study of the taboo lexis, the article reveals more than 60 units representing gender, and social features of taboo in the English language carrying an imprint of directive connotation. These taboo units are ubiquitously used in the Western filmmaking degrading the speech value of film characters and the general cultural level of film industry. The analysis demonstrates that taboo lexis is able to create veritable images of film characters and their scenic behaviour in spite of the unacceptability of taboo usage in mass media.Conclusion. As was shown by the study of the taboo lexis its application by English-language speakers in film is conditioned by considerations of magnified emotional and evaluating expressivity of the speech. It is particularly noticeable that marginalized strata and theme scope of communication on topics of crime of illegal income with the help of taboo is defined by directivity of the discourse and language play.

The Comparative Research on the Color Application of Chinese and Western Film Directors

As one of the common elements of films, color has always played its unique value. It not only decorates the pictures of the films but also assists in expressing the emotions and states of the characters. The extensive use of color in films reflects the self-innovation and technological breakthroughs of modern film and television art. From early black and white films to modern color films, the aesthetic trend of human beings is also evolving with the times. Chinese and Western directors have also made certain differences in the use of color due to subjective and objective factors. This paper takes the different color use styles of Chinese and Western film directors as the research object and adopts the comparative analysis method. Firstly, it briefly describes the development of color films, color functions, and several characteristics in films, and then introduces the different concepts of color used by Chinese and Western directors through specific examples and analyzes the reasons in detail. Finally, the differences in color consciousness and use style between the two are obtained. Chinese directors pay more attention to the symbolic expressiveness of color and are experts in using the freehand style of color, while Western directors attach significance to the structure of color in films, and the color use style is more realistic.

Cowboys: Abstract Expressionism, Hollywood Westerns, and American Progress

Abstract Expressionism has been influenced heavily by the popular theory of America’s undying, progressive spirit, originally conceived by Frederick Jackson Turner and given its most potent form in Western films. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was embodied in stories of John Wayne and other cowboy heroes taming the supposed edges of civilization. The mythic West as constructed by Turner and these films cemented American identity as one of exploration and innovation, with the notable condition of Indigenous Americans ceding their sovereignty. While Abstract Expressionism was commonly connected to the mythic West through the origin stories of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, the critical understanding of this movement as the height of painterly achievement built on Native American precedents evinces a deeper connection to Turner’s popular Frontier theory. As critics like Clement Greenberg cast flatness as the last frontier of painting, and as artists like Pollock and Barnett Newman claimed Native American ritual practices as a part of their aesthetic lineage, Abstract Expressionism proved as effective as Hollywood Westerns in corroborating and perpetuating the idea of America’s frontier spirit.

Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus

Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick (bio) My dissertation project Shifting Focus: Asian German Film Representation since 1910 constitutes the first full-length critical history of Asia and Asians within German cinema. Chunjie Zhang maintains that the new sub-field of Asian German studies "diversifies the paradigm of German national literature in a meaningful way," by challenging Eurocentrism, by expanding beyond canonical writers and thinkers, and by laying bare transnational and transcultural links between Germany and Asia.1 For this project, it was my intention to use an Asian German studies lens to do the same for German film studies. One common way of polemically formulating the state of representation for Asians in Western film is to describe them as invisible or unsichtbar, but I insist on a different perspective inspired by film's formal category of camera focus.2 Instead of being wholly invisible, Asians on German screens are figuratively blurry and out of focus, in a depth of field beyond our line of sight. What happens when we bring those Asian people, characters, and elements, which are seemingly unimportant, marginal, and decorative within the German film frame, into sharp [End Page 134] focus? Recalibrating our focal plane and attuning our ears enables us to trace the visual and aural construction of these Asian German Others, over the last century of film. The main criterion of my selection process for films to analyze was the presence of South, Southeast, and/or East Asian topoi; that is, Asian settings, filming locations, characters, credited actors, coded props, and/or film titles referencing Asia. Through strategic essentialism, the rubric of Asianness helped to bring over 300 films from a variety of different time periods, styles, genres, and contexts into conversation with one another in ways not previously considered. Rather than implying that all of these films signify in the same way, the diversity inherent within my use of Asianness ensures that differences can also be discussed in a productive way. My dissertation begins with a chronological overview that writes Asian representation (back) into all of the typical periodizations of German film history. From the Wilhelmine era to the 2020s, I demonstrate how Asian presences have existed throughout all major periods of German film history, in a variety of styles and genres. Filling in these collective glaring omissions within German film and cultural studies offers new perspectives on the canon, as well as a greater understanding of how Germany has framed and continues to frame Asian racialization. Most notably, Germany's interest in Asianness adapts over time, as illustrated by the number of German films related to China, India, and Japan during the silent and early sound eras, to Hong Kong and Thailand in the 1960s, or to Vietnam during the German Democratic Republic, as well as in post-unification Germany. With this chronological overview as our foundation, the next chapter systematically explores recurring tropes in German cinema's vast archive of Asian racial images, tracing how certain filmic stereotypes employed a century ago reappear throughout history and may still even be present today. As exemplified in productions from the 1910s to the twenty-first century, German cinema has amassed a broad arsenal of enduring strategies for projecting Asian inscrutability and alterity. For example, the Madame Butterfly trope of the beautiful East Asian woman who tragically dies is something seen from the 1910s to the 2010s. I end this chapter with a small selection of brief case studies of films warranting a more thorough and holistic analysis of how a single work can egregiously represent a variety of Asian tropes, thematically and formally. Subsequently, I outline a selection of subversive and empowering moments in film history that complicate the aforementioned representational stereotypes. Films can surprise us when they exceed perceived representational constraints of the times and run counter to the prejudice we attribute to the past. For example, despite cinema's villainization and/or emasculation of Asian men for much of the twentieth century, occasional pictures from as early as the 1920s depict Asian men as heroes and desirable romantic partners. There is an affirming potential for film viewers of the present to learn about lesser-known milestones and...

Oedipal Anxieties in HBO’s Westworld

In recent decades, scholars have recognized close connections between Western film and Greek and Roman antiquity, a relationship HBO’s Westworld brings into sharp relief through classical themes, characterizations, and allusions. Two episodes from season 2 in particular have a heavy classical bent. Episode 4 (“Riddle of the Sphinx”) casts park owner James Delos as an Oedipus figure who, in attempting to avoid his fate, runs right into it, as he is confronted with the truth about his nature and identity. In episode 9, William too is identified with Oedipus, when his wife commits suicide after recognizing her husband’s true nature, and William murders his own kin through a failure of recognition, while quotations from Plutarch and Plotinus highlight the issues of identity, fate, and self-knowledge that resound throughout the episode. While the series more broadly is concerned with patriarchal overreach and issues of free will and identity, these two episodes, when examined through a classical lens, offer a concentrated view. In the end, much like its Sophoclean predecessor, Westworld works as an implicit criticism of unbridled ambition, patriarchal narcissism, and lack of self-awareness.

Tabula rasa: the Western under erasure in The Rider and Jauja

ABSTRACT This article aims to realise a methodological de-Westernisation of the Western film genre through a comparative analysis of Chloé Zhao's The Rider and Lisandro Alonso's Jauja. Through the Derridean concepts of sous rature, différance, the trace and hauntology, several conventions of the Western genre are discussed and analysed, including the landscape, masculinity and the denial of climactic endings. The search for meaning is present in the two main male characters, but whereas Brady (Brady Jandreau) crafts a gentle approach to a cowboy masculinity in the twenty-first century through both riding and a sense of belonging to the landscape, captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) in Jauja finds himself lost because of his rigid colonial approach to the Patagonian landscape. The endings of the two films are deferred, indicating, in The Rider, the continuity of the search for meaning beyond the conventions of the Western, and the disjuncture of time as a result of colonial violence in Jauja. Ultimately, this article proposes that this Derridean methodology, when suffused with a World Cinema perspective, can debunk established notions of centrality and ownership in relation to genre studies.

Filmul despre și pentru copii în cinemaul stalinist din România

While the ’50s represented a new decade of expressiveness in western cinema, along with new ideological approaches, the feature film in the European communist space was determined by the nature of the political totalitarian regimes and the specific phenomena of the “cultural revolution.” In totalitarianism, the relation between civitas/community and the feature film followed the ancient model of the rapport of the Greek city to the civic and ethical finality of the theatre. Under these circumstances, the film becomes the most vulnerable of arts. Cinema was confiscated and transformed into engaged art, with an essential role in building the paradigm of the “new man.” Although the ’50s meant the development of the technical-material modern background, the increase of film production and consumption of feature film, in Romanian cinema, the artistic references were few. The concern for film production of the prewar and interwar periods were drastically limited by the political class and the cultural ignorance of the politruks. The films Nufărul Roșu [The Red Water Lily] (1955), Mingea [The Ball] (1958), and A fost prietenul meu [He Was My Friend] (1963) followed the directions of the Stalinist ideology that lasted longer than in the USSR. Only Elisabeta Bostan overcame the limits imposed by the communist regime and the censorship of the era. Thus, her films still retain the unaltered charm of childhood.

Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou

Reviewed by: Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou Zhuoyi Wang (bio) Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China by Chenshu Zhou. University of California Press. 2021. 282 pages. $85 hardcover; $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. Winner of the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best First Book Award. In Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China, Chenshu Zhou places two ontological questions at the center of its historical investigation of film exhibition and moviegoing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to 1992. First, quoting Brian Larkin, she asks if the cinema has “a stable ontology that simply reproduces itself in different contexts over time and across space.”1 Second, she asks, “what does it mean for our understanding of cinema if we stop treating the ‘alternative’ as a mere ‘alternative’?”2 Engaging in a dialogue with works of such scholars as Charlotte Brunsdon, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Julian Hanich, and Laura Wilson, Zhou’s investigation poses a convincing and productive challenge to the habitual critical standpoint that over-generalizes Western cinema’s practice of directing audiences’ attention to films alone as the basis of a universal definition of cinema. Based on her empirical study of screening practices and moviegoing experiences, Zhou instead views cinema as “a system of interfaces.”3 In this system, viewers are active agents interacting with not only films but also such extra-filmic interfaces as “surfaces (screen, seats, etc.), atmospheres, bodies (the projectionist’s, other viewers’, and their own), objects, landscapes, and weather in a [End Page 208] manner that involved their entire bodies.”4 This was particularly true during the mobile, open-air screenings common in early PRC. Each of the book’s six chapters is organized around an extra-filmic interface. The first three chapters draw on archival sources such as newspapers and magazines, government documents, and publications intended for film exhibition workers to flesh out the Communist Party’s strategies for exploring, inscribing, and controlling extra-cinematic interfaces. The last three chapters examine viewers’ memories of their moviegoing experiences, focusing on where their interactions with interfaces “[exceed] textual reception and challenge us to rethink what cinema is.”5 The interface that chapter 1 focuses on is the film exhibition space, which the newly established PRC “de-associate[d] . . . from its former connections to luxury and foreign domination” in order to “reframe moviegoing in terms of ‘serving workers, peasants, and soldiers.’”6 Theatrical spaces were Sinicized through name, signage, and spatial changes; made accessible to low-income masses; and changed from an urban commercial business to communal gathering spots in work units, rural areas, and military camps. Zhou moves beyond the conventional dismissal of this transformation as simply “propagandistic” and instead points out that it was intended “to serve the goals of both political education and mass entertainment.”7 Both goals, as well as the tensions between them, were manifested in renamed, relocated, redesigned, and reorganized film exhibition spaces. Chapter 2 examines how the PRC state cultivated through heroic narratives an idealizing gaze on the projectionist’s laboring body, which “not only constructed an essential figure in the operation of the socialist cinematic apparatus, but also participated in the larger campaign to produce the so-called Socialist New Man.”8 Unlike those hidden figures working in theatrical projection booths, early PRC projectionists were a focus of the audience’s gaze, especially in rural open-air cinema. “If Western commercial cinema seeks to erase labor from its final products,” Zhou argues, “the importance of corporeal practices and bodily techniques in building a national film exhibition network was fully acknowledged and celebrated in socialist China.”9 The projectionist’s laboring body hence “functioned as an interface in the socialist cinematic apparatus.”10 With a focus on two interfaces, slide projection and projectionists’ live performance, chapter 3 examines the intended pedagogical functions of early PRC film exhibition. As a pre-screening activity, slide projection was designed to introduce and explain to audiences local news and weather, national events, agrarian knowledge, and the content of the film to be shown. In addition to complementing pre-screening slide shows with vocal and bodily performance, projectionists were also expected...

The horror genre in the world art. Iberian and Western folklore motifs

Modern cinema, including horror films, in search of artistic and commercial success, is persistently looking for successful projects, where the right path is certainly the right choice of characters and plots. The article deals with horror in game cinema, based on the motives of folklore and post-folklore. As an example, the use of images of monsters from the Iberian ethno-folklore, as well as other similar characters in other cultures, is analyzed. The advantage of such scenarios is their originality. Films based on them are guided by traditions, the artistic images of which develop organically in the collective memory of ethnic groups. In addition, invariants are formed that differ in a greater variety than those generated by the imagination of individual cinematographers. Such a direction of horror development is a possible way to overcome cliches in horror films as an essential direction of modern Western cinema.