Showing papers in "Screen in 2012"
116 citations
73 citations
43 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a phenomenologically richer perspective on the aesthetics of mood is presented, with a focus on the role of character, action, and narrative content in analysing our affective and emotional engagement with film.
Abstract: Contemporary cognitivist theories of emotion, narrative, and genre tend to focus on character engagement, narrative content, and the cognitivist bases of film understanding. Noel Carroll argues, for example, that we can explain the puzzle of emotional convergence in film—that viewers typically respond in similar ways to particular movie scenes—by the “criterial prefocusing” of narrative cues that elicit and direct cinematically appropriate affective and emotional responses. Carl Plantinga, who emphasizes more than Carroll the interplay of cognitive, emotional, and generic factors, also foregrounds the role of character, action, and narrative content in his analyses of our affective and emotional engagement with film. One could object, however, that such approaches overlook the broader aesthetic and cinematic setting of narrative drama. It is not just character action and narrative content that elicit emotion but the whole repertoire of cinematic-aesthetic devices (lighting, composition, montage, rhythm, tempo, colour, texture, gesture, performance, music, and sound). Films do not simply present characters in discrete emotional states in order to convey narrative information. Rather, their aesthetic effect depends on the sensuous-affective background or encompassing “mood” against which our complex flow of emotional responsiveness becomes manifest; the background against which we are able to recognise, align, and ally ourselves with particular characters within specific narrative scenarios. To explore different variations in the aesthetics of mood I shall consider selected scenes from three generically distinctive films, Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), and Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003). My aim is to suggest the theoretical virtues of a phenomenologically richer perspective on the aesthetics of mood.
31 citations
30 citations
TL;DR: The advertisement promoting the launch, "Make any room your TV room" as mentioned in this paper, consists of a series of quick cuts between scenes of people watching their tablets, often holding them at arm's length, in various locations throughout a range of middle-class, presumably suburban houses.
Abstract: In March 2011, Time Warner Cable (TWC) launched an iPad application that would allow its subscribers to stream some of its television content to their iPad, a total of approximately thirty cable channels. Like other digital delivery platforms, the app was announced as a transformative way of watching television and films. The advertisement promoting the launch, ‘Make any room your TV room’, consists of a series of quick cuts between scenes of people watching their tablets, often holding them at arm’s length, in various locations throughout a range of middle-class, presumably suburban houses: a businessman holds it in front of his entertainment centre; another man watches baseball on an iPad propped on his exercise machine; a third follows a cooking show as he prepares a meal in the kitchen; an African American woman watches in a clothes closet, presumably while doing housework; another woman watches with the device propped on her bath, her polished toenails appearing just above the water’s surface. In each case the tablet is placed in the centre of the frame, creating a graphic match that suggests the continued presence of the screen within or near the family home, quite literally placing the iPad at the centre of the media world. At the same time, the advertisement presents most of the scenes as point-of-view shots, promoting the perspective that platform mobility encourages personalized viewing, and all of the subjects appear to be alone; it suggests that the individualized viewer is in control, able to choose when, where and what he or she watches. The most suggestive shot is of a young boy, the only person fully visible onscreen. He has propped up his tablet against a wall and gathered
19 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors place the bright lights of the cinematic city at the centre of a series of explorations, starting with the lure of the city for characters within fiction film.
Abstract: This essay places the bright lights of the cinematic city at the centre of a series of explorations. Commencing with the lure of the city for characters within fiction film, I then proceed to map the growing fascination of the cinematic city for scholars from many disciplines. What does the study of the cinematic city offer to scholars in the period of cinema's declining significance as a mass urban entertainment? I explore the contours of the cinema/city canon and what I characterize as a crossdisciplinary ‘city discourse’. How does this discourse function within the academy, and how should we understand the continuing scholarly romance with the figure of the flâneur? What does the cinematic city do in contemporary scholarship? Are its attractions specific to cinema, or could they carried by television – and to what extent are the attractions of the cinematic city a symptom of broader transformations in the study of the moving image?
15 citations
14 citations
TL;DR: The authors proposes that a position of foreignness clearly emerging from biographical aspects of Jules Dassin's career also surfaces in textual practices of his films and substantially characterizes critical responses and evaluations of his work.
Abstract: This essay proposes that a position of foreignness clearly emerging from biographical aspects of Jules Dassin's career also surfaces in textual practices of his films and substantially characterizes critical responses and evaluations of his work. Dassin was often marginalized by studios, producers and government agencies, while at other times he positioned himself as an outsider in a selfconscious manner. Critical responses are fragmented, demonstrating an eclectic engagement with Dassin that focuses on individual films or very specific aspects of his work (such as film noir aesthetics, the use of voiceover, representations of the city, adaptation of novels/plays, the politics of national cinemas and his blacklisted status). The essay considers tensions of inclusion/exclusion, proximity/detachment, surfacing in textual practices that include themes of belonging, loyalty and betrayal, the abundance of ‘foreign’ characters, observational/distancing visual structures, voiceover, the use of urban space and theatricality. It proposes cosmopolitan authorship as a concept that usefully describes Dassin's work and speculates on how such category might be further appropriated.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the ontology of television artworks is embedded in the critical practices of TV artworks and argue that a more precise use of language will help clarify ontological matters.
Abstract: nThis essay suggests that television aesthetics, as a research project, would benefit from attending to relevant theoretical debates in philosophical aesthetics. One reason for this is that assumptions about the ontology of television artworks are already embedded in our critical practices. We ought to be more aware of what these assumptions are and state them more explicitly. Moreover, I argue, for debates in television aesthetics to get off the ground, we need to ensure we bring the largely the same ontological assumptions to the table. We need to roughly agree about how television works are identified and individuated to ensure we are talking about the same works and that our debates are coherent. Referring to television works as 'texts' can make their ontology seem radically different from what our common creative and critical practices suggest, but I argue that a more precise use of language will help clarify ontological matters. Furthermore, I argue that the tacit ontological conceptions embedded in our creative and critical practices cannot be overturned by revisionist theories; rather, they actually determine the sort of ontological things to which we refer with terms like lepisoder and lseriesr. I conclude by attempting to show that our standard critical practices involve the tacit assumption that successfully realized artistic intentions establish the spatio-temporal boundaries of television works.
TL;DR: In this article, a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Screen following peer review is provided, along with a summary of the review.
Abstract: © The Author 2012. This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Screen following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version vol. 53 issue 1 pp. 54-71 is available online at: http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/content/53/1/54.abstract.
TL;DR: In the context of a resurgence in film production in Argentina over the past decade, the internationally acclaimed art house films by nuevo cine argentino (New Argentine Cinema) directors such as Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero have been overshadowed at the domestic box office by releases which reenvision Hollywood-style crime genre narratives in a local context as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the context of a resurgence in film production in Argentina over the past decade, the internationally acclaimed art house films by nuevo cine argentino (New Argentine Cinema) directors such as Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero have been overshadowed at the domestic box office by releases which reenvision Hollywood-style crime genre narratives in a local context. Many of the local productions that have had the greatest popular success – Fabián Bielinsky’s intricately plotted Nueve reinas/ Nine Queens (2000), for example, and Marcelo Piñeyro’s graphically violent Plata quemada/Burnt Money (2000) – capitalize on the dizzying plot twists, dynamic action sequences and highly colloquial dialogues of the heist film and neo-noir genres, drawing on the styles cultivated by directors such as Bryan Singer, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino in Hollywood during the 1990s and early 2000s. This diverse group of recent Argentine crime films, which I will collectively refer to as the ‘new policiales’, has given a new twist to conventional narrative tropes such as the ‘perfect crime’, ‘the last job’, and ‘the big score’. Bielinsky’s Nine Queens and his 2005 follow-up El aura/ The Aura focus respectively on an intricate scam and an elaborate casino heist in which the protagonist (played in both cases by Ricardo Darín) participates without fully comprehending the true stakes of the game; crime functions both as moral conundrum and intellectual puzzle. In Pizza, birra, faso/Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes (Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro, 1998) a group of petty criminals’ idea of a big score – the inept 1 See Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: a Map of Neo-Noir (New York, NY: Limelight, 1999), and Ronald Schwartz, Neo-Noir: the New Film Noir Style from Psycho to Collateral (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005). 2 The term implies a police procedural, but is often used to refer to a broad range of mystery films and thrillers.