Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 2007"

The Virtual Life of Film

Abstract: Part I: The Virtual Life of Film 1. Futureworld 2. The Incredible Shrinking Medium 3. Back to the Future Part II: What Was Cinema? 4. Film Begets Video 5. The Death of Cinema and the Birth of Film Studies 6. A Medium in All Things 7. Automatisms and Art 8. Automatism and Photography 9. Succession and the Film Strip 10. Ways of Worldmaking 11. A World Past 12. An Ethics of Time Part III: A New Landscape (without Image) 13. An Elegy for Film 14. The New "Media" 15. Paradoxes of Perceptual Realism 16. Real Is as Real Does 17. Lost in Translation: Analogy and Index Revisited 18. Simulation, or Automatism as Algorithm 19. An Image That Is Not "One" 20. Two Futures for Electronic Images, or What Comes after Photography? 21. The Digital Event 22. Transcoded Ontologies, or "A Guess at the Riddle" 23. Old and New, or the (Virtual) Renascence of Cinema Studies Acknowledgments

From Story Line to Box Office: A New Approach for Green-Lighting Movie Scripts

Abstract: Movie studios often have to choose among thousands of scripts to decide which ones to turn into movies. Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process---known as green-lighting in the movie industry---is largely a guesswork based on experts' experience and intuitions. In this paper, we propose a new approach to help studios evaluate scripts that will then lead to more profitable green-lighting decisions. Our approach combines screenwriting domain knowledge, natural-language processing techniques, and statistical learning methods to forecast a movie's return on investment (ROI) based only on textual information available in movie scripts. We test our model in a holdout decision task to show that our model is able to significantly improve a studio's gross ROI.

The politics of documentary

Abstract: "Night Mail" occupies an almost mythical place in the history of British cinema. It gave John Grierson's documentary school its first popular success and launched the brilliant composing career of Benjamin Britten. But it was also a corporate promo, commissioned for political effect to stave off Post Office privatization and to improve the morale of restless and underpaid postal workers. Scott Anthony provides a lively appreciation of this vivid, witty, and often eccentric masterpiece. In doing so he uncovers the remarkable stories of civic-minded idealism, creative bitchiness and political trickery that underpin a classic of British documentary cinema.

Cinema and sensation

Abstract: This book looks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the re-emergence of filmmaking practices – and, by extension, of theoretical approaches – that give precedence to cinema as the medium of sensation. France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the work of a group of filmmakers bent on exploring cinema's unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually. Though extremely diverse, the films of Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Vincent Dieutre, Bruno Dumont, Bertrand Bonello, Philippe Grandrieux, Pascal Ferrand and Nicolas Klotz, to name but a few, demonstrate a characteristic awareness of cinema's sensory impact and transgressive nature. In effect, with its interweaving of theoretical enquiry and film analysis, and its emphasis on the materiality of film, Cinema and Sensation's approach could also apply to the work of comparable filmmakers like David Lynch, Abel Ferrara or Wong Kar-Wai. Cinema and Sensation draws on the writings of Antonin Artaud, George Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, whilst also responding to the continuing interest in theories of haptic visuality (Laura Marks) and embodied spectatorship (Vivian Sobchack) inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.Explored as forms of embodied thought, the films are shown to offer alternative ways of approaching key existential and socio-cultural questions: desire, violence and abjection as well as the growing supremacy of technology, globalisation, exile and exclusion – these are the themes and issues that appear embedded here in the very texture of images and sounds.

The Beach, the gaze and film tourism:

Abstract: Based on the book by Alex Garland, Twentieth Century Fox's movie, The Beach, proffers critical views on the effects of traveller tourism in Thailand. Yet the movie is itself bound up with tourist practices in a variety of ways. In this article, we are concerned with how such intertwining extends beyond 'film tourism', conventionally conceived. In particular, we seek to elaborate the modification of the Maya Bay set(ting) for The Beach as part a broader process whereby 'tropical environments' are staged in line with the 'tourist gaze'. In this way, film viewing itself may be understood as a form of tourism - a kind of tropical flânerie which both reflects and constitutes a range of tourist practices in Thailand. Yet these practices extend beyond the western film viewer or would-be tourist, and include Thai environmental activists, Japanese Di Caprio fans and researchers such as ourselves. Including these groups helps us displace normative constructions of the gaze, and situates The Beach within an interpretive field that considers networks of influence rather than unidirectional representation.

British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Politics of Production Finance 2. The Rank Organisation 3. Ealing Studios 4. The Associated British Picture Company 5. British Lion 6. American-British Productions 7. Hammer Films 8. Independent Producers 9. Outsiders and Mavericks 10. Visual Style 11. Censorship 12. The Cinema Audience Responds Conclusion Appendix Notes and references Filmography Bibliography Index

The urban generation : Chinese cinema and society at the turn of the twenty-first century

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, while mainland China’s state-owned movie studios have struggled with financial and ideological constraints, an exciting alternative cinema has developed. Dubbed the “Urban Generation,” this new cinema is driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989. What unites diverse directors under the “Urban Generation” rubric is their creative engagement with the wrenching economic and social transformations underway in China. Urban Generation filmmakers are vanguard interpreters of the confusion and anxiety triggered by the massive urbanization of contemporary China. This collection brings together some of the most recent original research on this emerging cinema and its relationship to Chinese society. The contributors analyze the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the Urban Generation, its aesthetic innovation, and its ambivalent relationship to China’s mainstream film industry and the international film market. Focusing attention on the Urban Generation’s sense of social urgency, its documentary impulses, and its representations of gender and sexuality, the contributors highlight the characters who populate this new urban cinema—ordinary and marginalized city dwellers including aimless bohemians, petty thieves, prostitutes, postal workers, taxi drivers, migrant workers—and the fact that these “floating urban subjects” are often portrayed by non-professional actors. Some essays concentrate on specific films (such as Shower and Suzhou River ) or filmmakers (including Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan), while others survey broader concerns. Together the thirteen essays in this collection give a multifaceted account of a significant, ongoing cinematic and cultural phenomenon. Contributors . Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Shuqin Cui, Linda Chiu-han Lai, Charles Leary, Sheldon H. Lu, Jason McGrath, Augusta Palmer, Berenice Reynaud, Yaohua Shi, Yingjin Zhang, Zhang Zhen, Xueping Zhong

Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952

Abstract: From stereoview cards to large-format IMAX films, 3-D technology's heightened realism and powerful visual allure have held audiences captive for over a century and a half. The technology, known as stereoscopy, creates an illusion of depth by presenting two slightly different images to the eye in print or on-screen. The advent of stereoscopic film technology excited both filmmakers and audiences, as a means of replicating all of the sounds, colors, movement, and dimensionality of life and nature for the first time. The origins of 3-D film are often linked with a proliferation of stereoscopic films in the 1950s. By the time films like Man in the Dark and House of Wax was attracting large crowds, however, the technology behind this form of filmmaking was already over a century old. Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952, examines this "novelty period" of stereoscopic film, charting its progression from Charles Wheatstone's 1938 discovery of 3-D to the 1952 release of Arch Oboler's innovative film, Bwana Devil. Stereoscopic specialist Ray Zone argues that the development of stereoscopic film can best be understood through a historical analysis of the technology rather than of its inventors. Zone examines the products used to create stereoscopic images, noting such milestones as David Brewster's and Oliver Wendell Holmes's work with stereoscopes, the use of polarizing image selection, and the success of twin-strip 3-D films, among others. In addition, Zone looks at the films produced up to 1952, discussing public reception of early 3-D short films as well as longer features such as Power of Love in single-strip anaglyphic projection in 1922 and Semyon Ivanov's 1941 autostereoscope Robinson Crusoe. He integrates his examination of the evolution of 3-D film with other cinematic developments, demonstrating the connection between stereoscopic motion pictures and modern film production. Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952, is an exhaustive study of not only the evolution of 3-D technology and the subsequent filmmaking achievements but also the public response to and cultural impact of 3-D movies. Zone takes the reader on a voyage of discovery into the rich history of a field that predates photography and that continues to influence television and computer animation today.

Subtitles : on the foreignness of film

Abstract: Translating the experience of film: filmmakers, writers, and artists explore the elements of film that make us feel "outside and inside at the same time." "Every film is a foreign film," Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour tell us in their introduction to Subtitles. How, then, to translate the experience of film-which, as Egoyan says, makes us "feel outside and inside at the same time"? Taking subtitles as their point of departure, the thirty-two contributors to this unique collection consider translation, foreignness, and otherness in film culture. Their discussions range from the mechanics and aesthetics of subtitles themselves to the xenophobic reaction to translation to subtitles as a metaphor for the distance and intimacy of film. The essays, interviews, and visuals include a collaboration by Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan, which uses quotations from Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter as subtitles for publicity stills from Egoyan's film of the book; three early film reviews by Jorge Luis Borges; an interview with filmmaker Claire Denis about a scene in her film Friday Night that should not have been subtitled; and Eric Cazdyn's reading of the running subtitles on CNN's post-9/11 newscasts as a representation of new global realities. Several writers deal with translating cultural experience for an international audience, including Frederic Jameson on Balkan cinema, John Mowitt on the history of the "foreign film" category in the Academy Awards, and Ruby Rich on the marketing of foreign films and their foreign languages-"Somehow, I'd like to think it's harder to kill people when you hear their voices," she writes. And Slavoj Zizek considers the "foreign gaze" (seen in films by Hitchcock, Lynch, and others), the misperception that sees too much. Designed by Egoyan and award-winning graphic designer Gilbert Li, the book includes many color images and ten visual projects by artists and filmmakers. The pages are horizontal, suggesting a movie screen; they use the cinematic horizontal aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Subtitles gives us not only a new way to think about film but also a singular design object.Subtitles is being copublished by The MIT Press and Alphabet City Media (John Knechtel, Director). Subtitles has been funded in part by grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Henry N.R. Jackman Foundation, and the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council.

Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema

Abstract: Introduction, Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes Part 1: Studies of Local Cinema Exhibition 1. Race, Religion, and Rusticity: Relocating U. S. Film History, Robert C. Allen 2. Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County, North Carolina (1896-1940), Christopher J. McKenna 3. The White in the Race Movie Audience, Jane Gaines 4. Sundays in Norfolk: Toward a Protestant Utopia Through Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910-1920, Terry Lindvall, C. S. Lewis 5. Patchwork Maps of Movie-Going, 1911-1913, Richard Abel, Robert Altman 6. Leshono habo' bimuving piktshurs (Next year at the Moving Pictures): Cinema and social change in the Jewish immigrant community, Judith Thissen 7. 'Four Hours of Hootin' and Hollerin": Moviegoing and Everyday Life Outside the Movie Palace, Jeffrey Klenotic 8. Cinema-going in the United States in the mid-1930s: A Study Based on the Variety Dataset, Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick 9. Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces: desegregating the Motion Picture Theater, Thomas Doherty Part II: Other Cinema: Alternatives to Theatrical Exhibition 10. The Reel of the Month Club: 16mm Projectors, Home Theaters and Film Libraries in the 19320s, Haidee Wasson 11. Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little Cinema Movement of the 1920s, Anne Morey 12. Free Talking Picture - Every Farmer is Welcome: Non-theatrical Film and Everyday Life in Rural America during the 1930s, Gregory A. Waller 13. Cinema's Shadow: Reconsidering Non-Theatrical Exhibition, Barbara Klinger Part III: Hollywood Movies in Broader Perspective: Audiences at Home and Abroad 14. Changing Images of Movie Audiences, Richard Butsch 15. 'Healthy Films from America': The emergence of a Catholic film mass movement in Belgium and the realm of Hollywood, 1928-1939, Daniel Biltereyst 16. The child audience and the 'horrific' film in 1930s Britain, Annette Kuhn 17. Hollywood in Vernacular: Translation and Cross-Cultural Reception of American Films in Turkey, Ahmet Gurata 18. Cowboy Modern: African Audiences, Hollywood Films, and Visions of the West, Charles Ambler 19. 'Opening Everywhere': Multiplexes and the Speed of Cinema Culture, Charles R. Acland 20. 'Cinema Comes to Life at the Cornerhouse, Nottingham': 'American' Exhibition, Local Politics and Global Culture in the Construction of the Urban Entertainment Centre, Mark Jancovich

Watching «The Lord of the Rings»: Tolkien’s World Audiences

Abstract: How did audiences across the world respond to the films of The Lord of the Rings? This book presents findings from the largest film audience project ever undertaken, drawing from 25,000 questionnaire responses and a wide array of other materials. Contributors use these materials to explore a series of widely speculated questions: why is film fantasy important to different kinds of viewers? Through marketing, previews and reviews, debates and cultural chatter, how are audiences prepared for a film like this? How did fans of the book respond to its adaptation on screen? How do people choose their favorite characters? How was the films' reception shaped by different national and cultural contexts? The answers to these questions shed fresh light on the extraordinary popularity of The Lord of the Rings and provide important new insights into the global reception of cinema in the twenty-first century.

Postcolonial African Cinema: From Political Engagement to Postmodernism

Abstract: Preface: Out with the Authentic, In with the Wazimamoto Introduction: The Creation of a Cinema Engage1. Did We Get off to the Wrong Start? Toward an Aesthetic of Surface versus Depth 2. Sembene's Xala, the Fetish and the Failed Trickster 3. Cameroonian Cinema: Ba Kobhio, Teno, and the Technologies of Power 4. From Jalopy to Goddess: Quartier Mozart, Faat Kine, and Divine Carcasse 5. Toward a i ekian Reading of African Cinema 6. Aristotle's Plot: What's Inside the Can? 7. Finye: The Fantasmic Support 8. Hyenas: Truth, Badiou's Ethics, and the Return of the Void 9. Toward a Postmodern African Cinema: Fanta Nacro's "Un Certain Matin" and Djibril Diop Mambety's Parlons Grand-mere

South African national cinema

Abstract: South African National Cinema examines how cinema in South Africa represents national identities, particularly with regard to race. This significant and unique contribution establishes interrelationships between South African cinema and key points in South Africa’s history, showing how cinema figures in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid. This study spans the twentieth century and beyond through detailed analyses of selected films, beginning with De Voortrekkers (1916) through to Mapantsula (1988) and films produced post apartheid, including Drum (2004), Tsotsi (2005) and Zulu Love Letter (2004). Jacqueline Maingard discusses how cinema reproduced and constructed a white national identity, taking readers through cinema’s role in building white Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. She then moves to examine film culture and modernity in the development of black audiences from the 1920s to the 1950s, especially in a group of films that includes Jim Comes to Joburg (1949) and Come Back, Africa (1959). Jacqueline Maingard also considers the effects of the apartheid state’s film subsidy system in the 1960s and 1970s and focuses on cinema against apartheid in the 1980s. She reflects upon shifting national cinema policies following the first democratic election in 1994 and how it became possible for the first time to imagine an inclusive national film culture. Illustrated throughout with excellent visual examples, this cinema history will be of value to film scholars and historians, as well as to practitioners in South Africa today.

Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema

Abstract: During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.

Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema

Abstract: Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni claimed, three decades ago, that different conceptions of time helped define the split in film between European humanism and American science fiction. And, as Garrett Stewart argues here, this transatlantic division has persisted since cinema's 1995 centenary, made more complex by the digital technology that has detached movies from their dependence on the sequential frames of the celluloid strip. Brilliantly interpreting dozens of recent films - from "Being John Malkovich", "Donnie Darko", and "The Sixth Sense" to La mala educacion and Cache - Stewart investigates how their treatments of time reflect the change in media from film's original rolling reel to today's digital pixel. He goes on to show - with 140 stills - how American and European narratives confront this shift differently: while Hollywood movies tend to revolve around ghostly after-lives, psychotic doubles, or violent time travel, their European counterparts more often feature second sight, erotic telepathy, or spectral memory. Stewart questions why these recent plots, in exploring temporality, gravitate toward either supernatural or uncanny apparitions rather than themes of digital simulation. In doing so, he provocatively continues the project he began with "Between Film and Screen", breaking new ground in visual studies, cinema history, and media theory.

Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a Disciplinary History of Film Studies 1. First Forays in Film Education: The Pedagogy of Photoplay Composition at Columbia University 2. A Brief Interlude as the Movies March On: Terry Ramsaye and the New School for Social Research 3. "Younger Art, Old College, Happy Union": Harvard Goes into the Business and Art of the Movies 4. Between Academia and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The University of Southern California Ventures into the Cinema 5. Politics as Pedagogy, Pedagogy as Politics: The Rather Brief Moment in Time of Harry Alan Potamkin 6. Appreciations of Cinema: Syracuse Discovers Film Art 7. Cinematic Diversions in Sociology: Frederic Thrasher in the World of Film Appreciation 8. Middlebrow Translations of Highbrow Philosophy: The Film Fandom of the 1930s Great Books Intellectuals Notes Index

Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools, and American Culture:

Abstract: and border patrolling [my term] as important contexts to the “doing of race” in this high school as she explores the racial projects called upon and created by the kids in their everyday experiences. The title of the book, Learning Difference, does not quite speak to the analysis Staiger provides (or the work the students are doing). In fact, upon reading the book, it becomes clear that the students are doing and teaching difference as they patrol the borders and create alliances, as much as they are learning. At a minimum, Staiger shows, they are very active learners. Staiger writes: “Racial meanings and structures intersect and evolve through the interplay between institutions, individuals, and groups, who are at once influenced by and influence and shape racial structures and meanings” (p. 19). Staiger’s strength lies in her keen insights into the daily production of race. She aptly identifies the myriad influences on the racial dynamics. Boundary maintenance is one of the more interesting pieces of the analysis. The students use the tools creatively, defining boundaries between racial groups, showing clearly the way these students are more than learning about race—they are teaching, creating, and patrolling racial ideologies and actions. Some boundaries are set for them: tracking, housing, gangs, and immigrant histories. However, Staiger shows the unending creativity of students to work these boundaries. Another wonderful piece of the story is the way white students seem to take their privilege for granted. Staiger does not spend time analyzing why the white students are overrepresented in the “GROW” track, but, with that as a starting point, she is able to show the way students of color, denied access to upper tracks, are compelled to negotiate racial meanings in almost every nuance of their lives, while many of the white students are blind to the inequalities, the problems caused by the racial order. In a few instances, white students did recognize race, but as the old telling goes, not racism. This piece more than any other shows that while white is a race, in terms of the racial order, whites are permitted to ignore race as they are protected and well-situated to move onto college and place their energies into preparing to become the next generation of those with institutional power. One piece of the research and analysis could have been shifted to explore a needed area: young women and the construction of race. Staiger shows the role of gangs in the intersecting production of masculinity and race. In the analysis, gangs are nearly reified and thus become the explanatory tool for why the analysis is largely played out through the world of males. My dispute is not with the strength of gangs or the production of race and masculinity—her analysis is right on. I would have liked to understand how race is being produced at the intersection of race and gender through the lens of women/girls—this is the much less analyzed piece of racial production and given the strength of Staiger’s research and insights, a piece she could likely tell—and tell well. Instead, I left this book wondering about the salience of race in the young women’s lives. Overall, this book is well-researched and written in a clear, concise, and accessible manner. I recommend this book for undergraduate and graduate level courses in sociology, race studies, and of course, education.

Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking

Abstract: Poet and polymath A. K. Ramanujan once wrote a serious article that he playfully titled, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" It began by querying its own question, for Ramanujan was aware of the risk of essentialism (and its past deployment by Orientalists, Marxists, nationalists, and so on) when approaching a vast region of perhaps greater ethnic and linguistic diversity than Europe.1 Yet as a trained linguist and folklorist, he was indeed interested in the recurring patterns and themes that lend a distinctive flavor to South Asian culture?a flavor that may be especially recognizable to an outsider, or to an insider who steps out. That Indian popular films likewise have a definite "flavor" is generally recognized (and one indigenous descriptor of them is indeed as mas?l? or "spicy"), even by Anglo Americans who encounter them while surfing cable TV channels?and not simply because the actors happen to be Indian. The films look, sound, and feel different in important ways, and a kind of cinematic culture shock may accompany a first prolonged exposure. An American film scholar, after viewing his first "mas?l? blockbuster," remarked to me that the various cinemas he had studied?American, French, Japanese, African?all seemed to play by a similar set of aesthetic rules, "but this is a different universe." Experienced viewers are familiar with the some times negative responses of neophyte visitors to this universe: the complaint that its films "all look the same," are mind-numbingly long, have incoherent plots and raucous music, belong to no known genre but appear to be a mish-mash of several, and are naive and crude imitations of "real" (that is, Hollywood) movies, and so on?all, by the way, complaints that are regularly voiced by some Indians as well, particularly by critics writing in English. They also know that millions of people, including vast audiences outside the subcontinent, apparently understand and love the "difference" of these films.

Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006

Abstract: With actress Pam Grier's breakthroughs in Coffy and Foxy Brown, women entered action, science fiction, war, westerns and martial arts films - genres that had previously been considered the domain of male protagonists. This ground-breaking cinema, however, was - and still is - viewed with ambivalence. While women were cast in new and exciting roles, they did not always arrive with their femininity intact, often functioning more as a pseudo-male rather than female character. This volume contains an in-depth critical analysis and study of the female hero in popular film from 1970 to 2005. It examines five female archetypes: the dominatrix, the Amazon, the daughter, the mother and the rapeavenger. The entrance of the female into films written by, produced by and made for men is viewed through the lens of feminism and post-feminism arguments. Analyzed works include the "Alien" films, the Lara Croft franchise, "Charlie's Angels", and television productions such as "Xena: Warrior Princess" and "La Femme Nikita".

It's So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture

Abstract: The recent history of cultural exchange between France and the United States would appear to be defined by "freedom fries" and boycotts against Beaujolais - or, on the other side of the Atlantic, by enraged farmers toppling statues of Ronald McDonald. This dismal state of affairs is a long way from the mutual admiration that followed World War II, epitomized in a 1958 cover of "Look" magazine that declared "Brigitte Bardot conquers America." "It's So French!" explores the close affinity between the French and American film industries that flourished in the postwar years, breaking down myths of American imperialism and French cultural protectionism while illuminating the vital role that cinema has played in the globalization of culture. Hollywood was once enamored with everything French, and this infatuation blossomed in a wildly popular series of films, including "An American in Paris", "Gigi", and "Funny Face". Vanessa R. Schwartz here examines the visual appeal of such films and then broadens her analysis to explore their production and distribution, probing the profitable influences that Hollywood and Paris exerted on each other. This exchange moved beyond individual films with the sensational spectacle of the Cannes Film Festival and the meteoric career of Brigitte Bardot. And in turn, their success led to a new kind of film that celebrated internationalism and cultural hybridity. Ultimately, Schwartz uncovers an intriguing paradox: that the road to globalization was paved with nationalist cliches, and thus, films beloved for being so French were in fact the first signs of a nascent cosmopolitan culture. Packed with an array of colorful film stills, publicity photographs, paparazzi shots, ads, and never-before-seen archival images, "It's So French!" is an incisive account of the fertile collaboration between France and the United States that expanded the geographic horizons of both filmmaking and filmgoing, forever changing what the world saw and dreamed of when it went to the movies.

Translating the Essay into Film and Installation

Abstract: This article investigates whether or not it is possible to translate the philosophical essay into a two- and later three-dimensional audiovisual form known as the `essay film'. This genre is increasingly gaining recognition as a distinct branch of international cinema. This text traces the essay film's origins back to early silent cinema and the abstract, experimental films of artists and then follows its development and the forking of paths into non-fiction `art cinema' and non-fiction film, concluding with recent experiments that blur the distinction between art and film and which seek to transform the essay into a sculptural installation.

The Emerging Video Film Industry in Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects

Abstract: MOTION PICTURES WERE REPORTEDLY FIRST SCREENED IN NIGERIA in August of 1903, when Nigerian nationalist Herbert Macaulay, in association with the Balboa film company of Spain, introduced the new medium to an audience assembled in Glover Memorial Hall in Lagos (Owens-lbie). Over five decades later, the first film production companies, Latola Film (founded in 1962) and Calpeny Nigeria Limited (1970), were established in Nigeria (Amobi). In addition to Latola and Calpeny, members of the Nigerian theater community promoted film culture as well. In fact, the current video film industry in Nigeria owes a huge debt to the pioneers of Nigerian theater, particularly practitioners of the Yoruba Traveling Theater, who branched off from mainstream theater to experiment with celluloid. While the introduction of mobile cinema by the British during colonial times may have created awareness and interest in film, the medium was used primarily to educate Nigerians about such issues as health, sanitation, and nutrition. In the late 1960s, dramatists Hubert Ogunde, who recorded his plays on celluloid, Moses Adejumo (alias Baba Sala), and Duro Ladipo were responsible for elevating the cinema to a popular art that also contained social commentary (Ekwuazi 9). The legacy of those indigenous filmmakers was bequeathed to Ola Balogun, Ade Love, and Eddie Ugbomah-prolific filmmakers of the 1980s who extended the pioneer efforts of the early dramatists and ushered Nigerian moviemaking into the modern age. The collapse of movie-theatergoing culture in the 1980s, caused by the incessant harassment of innocent citizens by criminals, the country's economic downturn, and various problems affecting celluloid film production, gave rise to the video film-"a less powerful but more convenient [form of] film making utilising UMatik, super VHS and ordinary VHS cameras" (Dike). Video films, known in Nigeria as "home movies," are a new initiative in popular culture, though their impact is already phenomenal. Although many productions preceded it, Kenneth Nnebue's successful Living in Bondage (1993) is credited with "jumpstarting" the video film industry. Since the early 1990s, the industry, now stylishly called "Nollywood," has churned out thousands of titles and brought many producers, marketers, actors, and technicians into the limelight. The video film is a household word in contemporary Nigeria and has become a popular form of audio-visual entertainment. The industry has also become too significant for the world to ignore. According to a press release for a 2005 international convention on Nollywood held in Los Angeles, it has been estimated that the industry produces an average of fifty movies per week, though this is surely an exaggeration (Bequette). Video films gross an estimated 200 million dollars a year and Nigeria has been ranked the world's third-largest film industry, after Hollywood and Bollywood (India) (Vasagar). Video films are not only popular in their native Nigeria and other African countries, but in less than twenty years they have attracted the attention of many media practitioners, film festivals, and some American and European universities. In fact, DSTV (Digital Satellite Television), a digital satellite service in Africa, features "Africa Magic" (Channel 102), a channel devoted to Nollywood films. Nollywood films are popular in Nigeria because they have Indigenous content and address issues relevant to a mass audience. Through an amalgam of Nigerian narrative techniques (African storylines) and Western technology, these films document and re-create sociopolitical and cultural events that occurred within and beyond the country's borders.1 The industry has also saved poor Nigerians the cost of procuring expensive films from the West (the price per film ranges from N200 to N400-about $2.50). Ogunleye contends that with the global world united under the sway of visual culture, the emergence of the video film in Nigeria is timely and crucial as it serves as the voice of its people and responds to the drudgery of a socioeconomic existence characterized by high unemployment and dwindling opportunities (ix). …

Indian Literature and Popular Cinema : Recasting Classics

Abstract: Introduction Part 1: Indian Epics in Film 1. Bending the Bharata: Two Uncommon Cinematic Adaptations Philip Lutgendorf 2. Family, Feminism, and Film in Remaking the Ramayana Vidyut Aklujkar Part 2. Casting Classical Sanskrit Drama 3. Sakuntala: The Look and the Image in Literature, Theatre, and Cinema Gayatri Chatterjee 4. Mrcchakatikam to Utsav: Recreation of a Sanskrit Classic by Girish Karnad Vidyut Aklujkar Part 3. Saints on the Screen 5. Bhakti Songs Recast: Gulzar's Meera Movie Heidi Pauwels Part 4. Genre and Themes from Indo-Islamic Culture 6. Religious Culture and Folklore in the Urdu Historical Drama Anarkali, Revisited by Indian Cinema Alain Desoulieres 7. From Ghazal to Film Music: The Case of Mirza Ghalib Naseem Hines Part 5. Classics from Colonial Literature 8. Remembering, Repeating, and Working through Devdas Corey K. Creekmur 9. The Political Aesthetic of Nation and Gender in Rituparno Ghosh's Chokher Bali Mandakranta Bose Part 6. Agenda-Driven Literature 10. Lyrically Speaking: Hindi Film Songs and the Progressive Aesthetic Ali Mir 11. Dharmputra and the Partition of India Cecilia Cossio. Conclusion

Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia

Abstract: Two periods of Brazilian film history are particularly notable for their artistic momentum: the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early '70s, and the film revival from the mid 1990s onwards What makes them especially strong, this book argues, is their utopian impulse By adopting Utopia as a theme, as well as a method of film analysis, Lucia Nagib unveils, organises and interprets a fascinating wealth of recurrent images, which are a bridge between a cinema strongly concerned with the national project and another informed by global culture Outstanding recent films, such as "Central Station", "Perfumed Ball", "Hans Staden", "Orfeu", "City of God" and "The Trespasser", are illuminated by Nagib's sharp analysis, which detects utopian, anti-utopian and even dystopian impulses in them They are at once representatives of a political arena in constant struggle against underdevelopment and legitimate (as well as critical) heirs of past cinematic traditions Throwing new light on a large selection of Cinema Novo and contemporary films, this book thus presents a national cinema that rejects the end of history and of film history, while benefiting from, and contributing to, a new transnational aesthetics

Beyond the (trans)national: towards a cinema of transvergence in postcolonial and diasporic francophone cinema(s)

Abstract: The aim of this article is to explore the current state of theorizing around questions of national and transnational cinema and to propose an approach which I am calling a ‘cinema of transvergence’ as a means of better understanding the complex relationship between national, transnational and postcolonial/diasporic cinemas. The work and situation of Algerian film-makers Merzak Allouache and Mahmoud Zemmouri are referred to in the final section of this article as an example of how this idea of a cinema of transvergence might be applied to postcolonial emigre or diasporic film-makers working in France.

Desire, Youth, and Realism in Tamil Cinema

Abstract: This article first examines representations of women's desire in Tamil cinema, from highly implicit and non-transgressive representations of desire in an older movie to linguistically explicit and transgressive representations of desire in a recent hit movie. We then examine how such contemporary filmic representations are related to what we call a mode of realist spectatorship, and how this mode of spectatorship is linked to a particular social group (male youth) and to film form. We argue that the emergence of this mode of spectatorship, the films associated with it, and their connection to male youth are due to changes in the film market and to differential socialization by generation. Finally, we argue for realism in film as holding when film form and spectatorship are highly calibrated in the following way: some set of filmic representations are evaluated by viewers and filmmakers through culturally mediated classifications of "real" and "unreal" which are operationalized truth-functionally in events of evaluation; such representations presuppose these classifications, and by virtue of regular presupposition can entail an experience of "reality" for viewers.