Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 2019"

From Caligari to Hitler : a psychological history of the German film

Abstract: A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic, "From Caligari to Hitler" was first published by Princeton University Press in 1947. Siegfried Kracauer--a prominent German film critic and member of Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's intellectual circle--broke new ground in exploring the connections between film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer's pioneering book, which examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis," and "The Blue Angel," has never gone out of print. Now, over half a century after its first appearance, this beautifully designed and entirely new edition reintroduces Kracauer for the twenty-first century. Film scholar Leonardo Quaresima places Kracauer in context in a critical introduction, and updates the book further with a new bibliography, index, and list of inaccuracies that crept into the first edition. This volume is a must-have for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast.In "From Caligari to Hitler," Siegfried Kracauer--the German-born writer and film critic who shared many ideas and interests with his friend Walter Benjamin--made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis," and "The Blue Angel," he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film. In "From Caligari to Hitler," Siegfried Kracauer made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s, he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film. Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Benjamin's suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote "From Caligari to Hitler" while working as a "special assistant" to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, "From Caligari to Hitler" remains Kracauer's best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his "Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997."

Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions

Abstract: Covering a period from 1909 to the "end of Hong Kong cinema" in the present day, this book features information about the films, the studios and the personalities that have shaped this kind of cinema. It includes studies of the films of King Hu, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, as well as those of John Woo and the directors of the various "New Waves". The book applies a bicultural (Chinese and Western) perspective and encompasses genres ranging from melodrama to martial arts, "kung fu", fantasy and horror movies, as well as the international art-house successes.

'Hamlet' and World Cinema

Abstract: 'Hamlet' and World Cinema reveals a rich history of cinematic production extending across the globe. Making a case for Hamlet as the world's most frequently filmed text, and using specially commissioned interviews with cast, directors and screenwriters, it discusses films from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The book argues that the play has been taken up by filmmakers world-wide to allegorise the energies, instabilities, traumas and expectations that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, it rejects the Anglophone focus which has dominated criticism up to now and explores instead the multiple constituencies that have claimed Shakespeare's most celebrated work as their own. 'Hamlet' and World Cinema uncovers a vital part of the adaptation story. This book facilitates a fresh understanding of Shakespeare's cinematic significance and newly highlights Hamlet's political and aesthetic instrumentality in a vast range of local and global contexts.

Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions

Abstract: Films are integral to national imagination. Promotional publicity markets “domestic films” not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. Reviewers assess new films with reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporaries and later generations, popular cinema is embedded both in national imagination and endless intertextual and intermedial frameworks. Moreover, films themselves become signs to be cited and recycled as illustrations of cultural, social, and political history as well as national mentality. In the age of television, “old films” continue to live as history and memory. In Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions, Anu Koivunen analyzes the historicity as well as the intertextuality and intermediality of film reception by focusing on a cycle of Finnish family melodrama and its key role in thinking about gender, sexuality, nation, and history. Close-reading posters, advertisements, publicity-stills, trailers, review journalism, and critical commentary, she demonstrates how The Women of Niskavuori (1938 and 1958), Loviisa (1946), Heta Niskavuori (1952), Aarne Niskavuori (1954), Niskavuori Fights (1957), and Niskavuori (1984) have operated as sites for imagining “our agrarian past”, our Heimat and heritage as well as “the strong Finnish woman” or “the weak man in crisis”. Based on extensive empirical research, Koivunen argues that the Niskavuori films have mobilized readings in terms of history and memory, feminist nationalism and men’s movement, left-wing allegories and right-wing morality as well as realism and melodrama. Through processes of citation, repetition, and re-cycling the films have acquired not only a heterogeneous and contradictory interpretive legacy, but also an affective force.

The Ideology of Film Festivals: A Psychoanalysis of European A Festivals’ Representation of Italian Cinema, 2000-2017

Abstract: This thesis aims to answer the question: is there an ideology conditioning European A festivals’ awarding and representation of Italian cinema in the years 2000-2017 and, if so, how does it function? The project presents a systematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of such awarding and representation, examining a corpus of Italian films that have won Best Picture at a European A festival in the years 2000-2017. Its methodology is grounded in Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, which it maps on to three aspects of European A festivals: the A circuit apparatus – its histories, organisational structures and practices; festival paratexts – film synopses in festivals’ official programmes; and film texts – aspects of films that confound their institutional representation. Comparing each level, the thesis identifies and critiques the explicit ways in which European A festivals represent Italian cinema, and the implicit laws that govern such representation. The Introduction discusses the importance of research into ideology in relation to both film festivals and Italian cinema, and presents the thesis’s methodology. Subsequent chapters analyse: the auteur as a sinthome of artistic freedom in Cannes’ representation of The Son’s Room (La stanza del figlio, Nanni Moretti, 2001); the social other and fantasy of the sexual relationship in Karlovy Vary’s representation of Facing Window (La finestra di fronte, Ferzan Ozpetek, 2003); the masculinity of the artist in Cannes’ and Tallinn’s representations of The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza, Paolo Sorrentino, 2013); brutal humanism in the Berlinale’s representation of Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare, Gianfranco Rosi, 2016); and capitalist orientalism in Cannes’s representation of Gomorrah (Gomorra, Matteo Garrone, 2008). I conclude that capital constitutes the primary unwritten law that generates and regulates European A festivals’ ideological representation of Italian cinema. In so doing, I aim to highlight and challenge the ideological coordinates which govern these institutions.

‘Humphrey Jennings: Of Images, Poetry and Pandaemonium’

Abstract: The inclusion of Humphrey Jennings, the great documentary filmmaker, in a collection exploring British art cinema might cause eyebrows to be raised. This chapter will argue, nevertheless, that he belongs in any such survey. It will argue that he needs to be seen first and foremost as a poet in the broadest sense of that word, whose entire oeuvre is characterised by a fascination with images, and that any appreciation of his films needs to take into account the full scope and diversity of his work. He can thus be seen as an example of the ‘expressive individual’ David Bordwell has argued is fundamental to art cinema (1979: 720). Indeed, by virtue of his polymathic abilities, his musings on formal and stylistic art traditions and his own practice, Jennings might be seen alongside the likes of artists-as-filmmakers Pier Paolo Pasolini and Andrej Tarkovsky. As such, any study seeking to provide a more nuanced and broader understanding of British art cinema should find space for Humphrey Jennings, especially at a time when his film work has been re-released for the benefit of contemporary audiences.

Drones Over Pompeii: Cinematic Perspectives on Antiquity in the Digital Era

Abstract: Cityscapes have always been an important part of films set in antiquity, but little attention has yet been paid to the way in which digital cinema uses the ancient city to offer different kinds of access to the past. This article explores how twenty-first century cinema sees the city and apprehends history in new ways in films including Pompeii (2014), Agora (2009), and Gladiator (2000). It focuses on how digital cinema affords the opportunity to ‘see’ the past from above, a quintessentially modern perspective which prompts a range of important questions about the viewer’s relationship to history. The aerial view of the cinematic city encourages reflection on our familiarity with an ancient city, by utilizing the imagery and techniques of digital mapping and virtual reality reconstructions; and it explores our ability to gain mastery over the past, privileging godlike omniscience over the immersiveness that usually characterizes contemporary film. Finally, adopting the perspective of the drone, it suggests a more disturbing, dehumanized version of the past – and future. The discourse around these cinematic cities prompts important and timely consideration of whether digital technology necessarily improves our access to the past, or rather compromises it.

Sea Changes: Representations of Fluid Adolescences Through Literature and Cinema

Abstract: The research carried out in the present study comprises the media of literature and cinema, and it covers a timespan of about six decades, roughly starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. The two main foci of analysis are English literary Modernism, which developed in the 1920s, and the French nouvelle-vague cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s. My corpus of primary works is composed by several texts and authors, yet special attention is dedicated to selected novels and short stories by Irish modernist James Joyce and to selected films by French director Francois Truffaut. By means of a comparative analysis of literary and cinematic texts, I identify the category of fluid anti-developmental narratives. This category is composed by narrative works whose protagonists are adolescents or young adults who are unable (or unwilling) to develop into what is commonly considered as mature adulthood, thus remaining stuck in a fluid condition of ‘never-resolving adolescence’. This condition is both symbolised and determined by their peculiar relationship with water in general, and with sea water in particular. The intrinsic fluidity of water indeed is a pivotal element of my investigation: not only does it serve as a metaphor for the protagonists’ fluid identities, but it also describes a distinguishing quality of the language and style in which these works are composed, and through which the characterisation of the protagonists is rendered. Indeed, throughout my analysis, I pay particular attention to the coincidence of linguistic transformations in literature and in cinema, taking as a starting point the mutual connections between literary Modernism and early cinema. Their common tendency towards an aesthetic that productively fuses visual and aural elements aim at creating a new and innovative language and a fluid style that aptly describe a reality in rapid and continuous transformation, of which the fluid adolescent becomes a quintessential representation. By means of this focus on the interrelationship between literature and cinema, the present investigation sheds light on some of the most important artistic and cultural transformations that marked the twentieth century, and which remain relevant today, especially as to the way we read reality through images.

Technological advances in audiovisual translation

Abstract: This chapter maps out the field of audiovisual translation (AVT) in conjunction with technology by investigating emerging trends and discussing some critical aspects of the increasing pervasiveness of digital accelerationism and the globalized (r)evolution that has affected the entertainment industry in the last decades. By adopting a diachronic perspective, this chapter opens with an historical trajectory that spans from the invention of cinema to the rise of Web 2.0 in the new millennium. In order to take stock of the impact that technological advances have had on AVT practices, the most prominent areas of the field, i.e. subtitling and revoicing, are analysed to unveil the specific technologies, architectures and software programs developed to enhance and optimize translation tasks as well as global localization workflows. In the last section, a set of conclusions highlights the implications of technological innovation in the professional practice of audiovisual translators.

Cinema and cultural memory in the Bahamas in the 1950s

Abstract: This thesis is a cultural, social and historical research of cinemagoing and the memory of cinema audiences in the city of Nassau, Bahamas in the 1950s. Drawing from the methodological toolkits of New Cinema History and Memory Studies, the research situates oral history narratives within the broader contexts and underlying structures of cinemagoing as a social activity in a particular place and time. It is an exploration of everyday life in this small British colony through the recollections of persons who would have been young adults during the 1950s, at a time when the Bahamas was going through a period of social and political challenges to the status quo in this post war era. This history of the cultural effect of cinemagoing is revealed through the locations of cinemas and cinema space; the positioning of cinemagoing in the leisure activities of the Bahamian youth during that epoch; the influence of racial divides; and the impact and significance of the remembered film texts. The thesis offers a history of the cinema trade in an island nation, documenting the city’s main commercial cinemas, as well as their management and film supply structures. It then aims to understand how the cinemas worked as places within the city, and how they fit into the population’s leisure practices. This investigation reveals the profound effect of race relations on the distribution and exhibition of films and the practice of cinemagoing during this selected decade. It offers an audience perspective on segregated and mixed cinema spaces, as well as on the different experiences of the city according to gendered and racial divisions. This thesis thus provides not only cinema history for the designated time period, but it also contributes to the social and cultural history of The Bahamas. Accordingly, it is a memory study that reveals how race, space, location and leisure choice evolved around the memory of cinemagoing in the 1950s in Nassau, Bahamas and the contribution of those remembered experiences to the development of their future lives and the evolved history of a nation.

Radical Communication: Politics after 1968 in/and Polish Cinema

Abstract: The anniversary of 1968 provides an opportunity to revisit its unique intersection of revolutionary politics and collective creativity, in which cinema was caught up as never before—in the production of a certain political affect, global in its scope. This dissertation pursues what followed in its wake, using the case of People’s Poland, which saw an unprecedented labour struggle in the region just as things had begun to dissipate elsewhere—from the mid-1970s on—culminating in one of the largest social movements in human history, in 1980, the independent and free trade union Solidarnośc (Solidarity). In recuperating these years, we locate a corresponding, alternative history for Polish political aesthetics and radical cinema practice after 1968, using a combination of historical documentation, close reading, and theoretical intervention. Like the politics of 1968, and the horizontal organizing of Solidarity, these films put pressure on existing categories of “the political,” locating it an aesthetics of participation and the spirit of research, in which viewers play a large part in constructing meaning, rather than it being a function of a self-contained “political text.” Much of this grows out of the strong documentary tradition in Polish cinema, which the film artists under discussion then subvert, pushing beyond its limits. We see how, in different ways, contemporaries Grzegorz Krolikiewicz (Ch. 1) and Krzysztof Kieślowski (Ch. 2 and 3) call into question this tradition—the former using an avant-garde/film-theoretical approach, and the latter developing an immanent critique of the capacity of cinema to represent (i.e., speak for) political reality. Piotr Szulkin (Ch. 4) adds to these a haptic, affective element that explicitly theorizes labour as the subject of cinema. Finally, Andrzej Żulawski (Ch. 5) pushes these haptic, affective, elements into the red, using a visceral approach that marries genre cinema and historical embodiment, drawing on the traditions of Polish Romanticism and utopianism. In sum, these films use viewer participation to forge an embodied, affective, negativizing cinema aesthetic able to encompass a wider array of human experience than that circumscribed by Party politics or the (male) discourse of the intellectual opposition. This we call radical communication.

The French Cinema Book

Abstract: Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors General Introduction by Michael Temple and Michael Witt General Further Reading PART ONE: 1890-1930 Introduction: Hello Cinema! Michael Temple and Michael Witt 1. PEOPLE: The Men And Women Who Made French Cinema Richard Abel 2. BUSINESS: A Re-Examination of Key Milestones in the Development of the Industry Michelle Millar 3. TECHNOLOGY: The Drive to Mechanisation and Digitisation Alison McMahan 4. FORMS: The Shifting Boundaries of Art and Industry Ian Christie 5. REPRESENTATIONS: Mutability and Fixity in Early French Cinema Vicki Callahan 6. SPECTATORS: The Cinemising Process: Filmgoing in the Silent Era Elizabeth Ezra 7. DEBATES: Thinking About Cinema: First Waves Monica Dall'Asta Further Reading 1890-1930 PART TWO: 1930-1960 Introduction: Classicism and Conflict Michael Temple and Michael Witt 8. PEOPLE: Migration and Exile in the Classical Period Alastair Phillips 9. BUSINESS: Anarchy and Order in the Classic Cinema Industry Colin Crisp 10. TECHNOLOGY: Imported Technologies in French Film-Making Charles O'Brien 11. FORMS: The Art of Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Classical French Cinema Ginette Vincendeau 12. REPRESENTATIONS: The Geography and Topography of French Cinema Keith Reader 13. SPECTATORS: The Golden Age of Spectatorship Gregory Sims 14. DEBATES: Critical Debate and the Construction of Society Christopher Faulkner Further Reading 1930-1960 PART THREE: 1960-2004 Introduction: A New World Michael Temple and Michael Wit 15. PEOPLE: The Other Auteurs: Producers, Cinematographers, and Scriptwriters Alison Smith 16. BUSINESS: A Certain Idea of the Film Industry Laurent Creton and Anne Jackel 17. TECHNOLOGY: From Images of the World to the World of Images Laurent Jullier and Lucy Mazdon 18. FORMS: For it is the Critical Faculty that Invents Fresh Forms Nicole Brenez 19. REPRESENTATIONS: Parisian Images and National Transformations Naomi Greene 20. SPECTATORS: The Decline, Fall, and Rebirth in Cinemagoing Sue Harris 21. DEBATES: The Exercise has been Useful, Monsieur Daney James Williams Further Reading 1960-2004 Selected On-Line Resources Further Reading on Films and Film People List of Illustrations Index

Against a Migrant Cinema. Critical Reflections on the Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract: “What? You did not include any reference to the Tahrir Square uprising?” In the final scene of La Vierge, les Coptes et Moi (Namir Abdel Messeeh, 2012), an autobiographical film in which the director, an Egyptian Copt residing in France, stages the alleged apparition of the Madonna in his native village, the (French) producer blurts out, reproaching the director for speaking about himself, and not about the political situation in his country. That same year, Tahrir , by the Italian Stefano Savona, documented masterfully that social reality, with an insider's eye, although the author was a foreigner. This discomfort of the autochthonous, for which the foreign filmmaker is admitted only to the extent that he tells us of his “strangeness”, calls into account the cinephile approach, intimately Eurocentric, to the “marginal” cinemas. To seek an image “Other”, indeed, would do nothing but replicate, by its very nature, the alterity it attempts to eliminate: it is a paradox that seem to characterise part of the European contemporary cinema (Capussotti 2009; Cincinelli 2009; Corrado, Mariottini 2013, Garosi, Trapassi 2016; De Franceschi 2013; Jedlowski 2001; Schrader, Winkler 2013) and literature (Fracassa 2012; Negro 2015, Proglio 2011; Romeo 2018). This has given rise to a re-evaluation of postcolonial studies, applied to the film studies (Heffelfinger, Wright 2011; Ponzanesi, Waller 2012). The minimal common denominator of both domains seems to be the notion of gaze, with the subtle ambiguity that this approach entails: the “Other” is, by definition, “other than Us” (Baggiani, Longoni, Solano 2011). The process of othering intrinsic in any European view of the “Other”, being Eurocentrism not a rhetorical choice but an inescapable perspective (Shohat / Stam 1994), is therefore a double-edged sword: on the one hand it tends to recognise the specificity of non-European cinematographic forms, questioning some aesthetic and narrative rules of “western” cinema (where the very notion of "West", as Said notes, is intimately Eurocentric) (1978). On the other hand, this risks to flatten the “Other” to his own culture of belonging, forcing the will of non-European directors to express themselves exclusively within more or less conscious processes of media segregation, that prevent the expression of a subjective gaze (De Franceschi, 2018). The very notion of “migrant cinema”, therefore, on the one hand tends to historicize a phenomenon, recognizing in the current socio-political context a common ground on which such products, despite their diversity, can grow; on the other hand, like any codification, this historicization tends to bring back to the collective sphere what is often an individual artistic expression: as it does not speak of society, it is simply not interesting. In this sense, as we will try to argue in this essay, the postcolonial perspective on the one hand proves to be effective, as it opens up film studies to important methodological contaminations; on the other hand, as a negative consequence, it tends to treat “migrant cinema” as a genre in its own right, thus transforming the “eye of the migrant” into an “eye on migrant”. In a critical-theoretical perspective, this paper will debate on how the denial of the existence of a migrant cinema is not an attempt to deconstruct a consolidated historiographical frame, but on the contrary, it is a way to avoid that this historicization implies and replicates the same dynamics of abjection that it tends to eliminate.

Cinema Attendance and Cinema-Going Audience in Malaysia

Abstract: Cinema audiences’ behavior interests both industry professionals and academics. Cinema-going is still indisputably popular form of entertainment in Malaysia. This study discusses cinema-going in the era of omnipresent screens. It aims to verify Malaysians’ cinema going behaviors and the sustainability factors contributing to the Malaysian film industry. The various factors affecting cinema and movie-going behavior would include encouragement, theme, motivation, perception, gratification, and genre. The local filmmaking industry fell into a decline after 2014 based on observation of annual film production. In the context of westernization, this small market presents a challenge for the government in promoting local popular films. With the influx of genre films from abroad, Malaysian cinema is struggling to the hilt to survive. To understand this situation from the perspective of the audiences, this study, using data from surveys conducted in Malaysia in 2018, discusses the fandom of Malaysian cinema, their cinema-going behavior, and the association with their identities.

The Shadows of Dreams: Cinema's Layers of Medialization

Abstract: Cinema figures as the crucial site where the anthropological drive to grasp the world in images finds a media outlet. Media in this sense are eternally constituted and re-constituted psychocultural ‘prosthetics’ giving space to sensation, emotion, and thought. This process of medialization condenses and sediments in media artifacts, embodying human experience in an externalized form and inviting our aesthetic engagement. Cinema seen from this perspective consists in a coupling of three anthropologically crucial domains of existence, which assume the shape of layers of medialization. This project will start with an examination of the cinematic transformation of external physical and social reality. The testing grounds for this will be the strain of sociocritical U.S. horror cinema, the analogous melodrama (where everyday experience becomes horrific), and the movie adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels. As recorded motion adds both significance and force to the expressive gestures and poses of the human body, transitional performance states loom large in a medium which gives meaningful forms to the self in action. It is the highly ambiguous nature of physical interactions that sets the parameters for the second chapter, which turns to the cinematic duality of dancing and fighting. The fascination with seeing oneself from the outside is the third crucial domain this thesis will explore. Cinema provides the material structure for the staging of imaginary processes of projection and identification as compelling apparitions of the self. The claim that the self is in dire need not only of being manufactured, but also of being staged is explored in the final set of film analyses, which focus on the cinema of Werner Herzog. By way of conclusion, the tension between the ‘reality of pictures’ and ‘pictures of reality’ (a notion explored by Ludwig Pfeiffer across various contexts) is transmuted by the assertion that instances of cinematic experience embody perceptual thought.

Finding Scotland's cinema factor: from the cinema in education (1925) to the film in the classroom (1933)

Abstract: This article discusses two experiments that aimed to establish the educational value of cinema: the 1925 Cinema Commission’s report The Cinema in Education, and The Film in the Classroom, an experi...

DVFx, and Modernization of Technology: Audience’s Changing Taste in the 21st Century

Abstract: The changes from analogue to digital in the film industry occurred rapidly and triggered a change in the landscape, especially in the usage of digital visual effects (DVFx). Thus, films that use the digital visual effects have developed a demand for technology exploitation among audiences. The most powerful effect afforded by digitization is the changes in the relationship between film and audience, especially in the aspect of cinema spectacle. Previously, the use of digital visual effects served merely to fix or modify damaged or negative elements in the post-production process, but it also has contributed to transformation of the tastes of audiences in 21st century cinemas. Tastes and aesthetic judgments are manifestations of aspects of class inequality and social, cultural and reproduction ideology. To evaluate tastes especially within different systems of society is not a simple matter as there has been a change in various aspects of society due to technological advances. This judgment involves complex processes and variables. This paper explored how globalization impacts audiences’ changing tastes with the juxtaposition of the digital visual effects revolution. The research used qualitative research methods, which is focus group discussions involving three groups of moviegoers from Malaysia, India and Australia. The analysis of the findings is divided into two main themes: modernization and technology. In general, the findings show that taste among movie audiences is a typical representation of the middle class society. Keywords: Audience, digital visual effects, film studies, genres, technology.

A Spatio-temporal Recommender System for On-demand Cinemas

Abstract: On-demand cinemas are a new type of offline entertainment venues which have shown the rapid expansion in the recent years. Recommending movies of interest to the potential audiences in on-demand cinemas is keen but challenging because the recommendation scenario is totally different from all the existing recommendation applications including online video recommendation, offline item recommendation and group recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal approach called Pegasus. Because of the specific characteristics of on-demand cinema recommendation, Pegasus exploits the POI (Point of Interest) information around cinemas and the content descriptions of movies, apart from the historical movie consumption records of cinemas. Pegasus explores the temporal dynamics and spatial influences rooted in audience behaviors, and captures the similarities between cinemas, the changes of audience crowds, time-varying features and regional disparities of movie popularity. It offers an effective and explainable way to recommend movies to on-demand cinemas. The corresponding Pegasus system has been deployed in some pilot on-demand cinemas. Based on the real-world data from on-demand cinemas, extensive experiments as well as pilot tests are conducted. Both experimental results and post-deployment feedback show that Pegasus is effective.

Soviet Tableau: Cinema and History under Late Socialism (1953-1985)

Abstract: During the Late Socialism (1953-1985), the geographic peripheries of the Soviet film industry demonstrated an upsurge in both the number of the produced films and in the boldness of the cinematic experimentations. This dissertation focuses on the peculiar cinematic trend that emerged in this context of the artistic reinvigoration of the Soviet periphery. In particular, I analyze films of Iurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, Evgenii Shiffers, Tengiz Abuladze, and Sergei Parajanov. I propose that the films of these filmmakers exemplify a distinct cinematic trend and label this trend tableau cinema for two reasons: first, to avoid overgeneralization and homogenization of the commonly used term “poetic” cinema; second, to emphasize the predominance of a static painterly quality and integrate my analysis into a broader tradition of visual arts (Chapter 1). The central stylistic feature shared by the tableau films is their avoidance of linear perspective and kinship with non-perspectival painterly traditions, such as Persian miniatures or Orthodox icons. I argue that this stylistic feature is related to tableau cinema’s transformation of spectatorship (Chapter 2) and rejection of (Soviet) modernity’s insistence on historical progression, which are underpinned by linear perspective and reinforced by conventional use of cinema (Chapter 3). This dissertation demonstrates that tableau cinema created, by cinematic means, alternative histories to the evidently fragile project of Soviet modernity. In doing so, the filmmakers on the peripheries revive the genealogy of the “primitive” in Russian and Soviet cultural history. Unlike the future-oriented invocation of the “primitive” in the post-revolutionary cinemas, in tableau cinema the invocation of the “primitive” is oriented toward the rethinking of the past and the redefining of the cinematic medium itself. In this sense, the dissertation proposes to consider tableau cinema as a case of Socialist Modernism (Chapter 4). By investigating the history and aesthetics of the tableau cinema, this dissertation contributes to the largely understudied field of Soviet ethno-national cinemas and makes a theoretical contribution to rethinking the long-standing opposition between the (Greenbergian) modernism and (Lukacsian) realism in the twentieth-century art.

Do consumer and expert reviews affect the length of time a film is kept on screens in the USA

Abstract: We evaluate the effect of critical reviews by consumers and experts on a film’s running time at movie theaters in the USA using survival regression analysis. In addition to the usual expert critics’ reviews, we employ the consumer reviews rating and their affectivity about films as proxies for the consumer influence effect. To provide measures for consumer affectivity, we perform affective computing using mining techniques of sentiment and emotion on consumer reviews. We build a very rich film dataset by collecting information from the Box Office Mojo and the Rotten Tomatoes sites, including all matched films released between 2004 and 2015 that are available on these sites. We find evidences of consumer ratings matter in keeping a film running longer at the theaters, but experts’ ratings have a larger influence on the movie market as a whole. Estimates by genre indicate that the influence of expert reviews on the length of run of widely opening film releases, which include blockbusters, is null, but that their influence on narrowly released films is large. Also, film running times of genres like foreign, drama and action films are greatly influenced by sentiments and emotions spread by consumers through their reviews.

Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II

Abstract: In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events."Mexico on Main Street" locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation in the era s film culture. Gunckel s innovative approach combines media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. "Mexico on Main Street" demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles."

Change Your Past, Your Present, Your Future? Interactive Narratives and Trauma in Bandersnatch (2018)

Abstract: For a television show that has often seemed to delight in shocking viewers since its very first episode in 2011, which, in case we needed reminding, featured the Prime Minister of Great Britain having carnal relations with a sus scrofa domesticus, Black Mirror saved one of its greatest surprises for 28 December 2018 with the release of the 20th instalment in the series, Bandersnatch, directed by David Slade. While two of its previous episodes had centred on video games: the highly regarded dystopian vision of gamification en masse, “Fifteen Million Merits”, and the horror-inflected augmented reality tale of “Playtest”, in an unexpected turn of events for both Netflix and the creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, Bandersnatch was not just about video games, it was one. This chapter explores the significance of Bandersnatch as an intriguing combination of video game and film, an example of what many referred to as an “interactive movie” or what Nitzan Ben Shaul called “hyper-narrative interactive cinema” in his Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (2008). The authors interrogate how far Bandersnatch emerges as a text immersed in some of the defining thematic elements of what we might call “the Black Mirror experience” but also uses the interactive nature of the project in original and compelling ways connected to the protagonist’s experience of trauma which the audience or “interactors” are forced to share.

From Europe with Pride: Heritage, Community and Queer Moves

Abstract: This paper takes Pride (2014) as a focal point for a discussion of a popular European cinema that looks back on key moments in the twentieth-century political past(s) through the re-enactment of queer scenarios of activism and resistance. My contention is that, as significant as identity politics is the notion of movement itself. Pride’s intersectional retro-politics injects queer moves into heritage cinema, literally including musical moments of (camp) dance and song that dislodge characters from constraining social spaces and sedimented subjectivities. I look at Pride alongside other examples of new heritage filmmaking through their use of the movement-image (Deleuze) to retrieve the memory of political moments in history through queer moves. Encounters set to music underscore the road trip of a Swiss feminist journalist and her team of radio broadcasters adrift in the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in Les Grandes Ondes (a l’ouest)/Longwave (2013); out-of-step punk musical performances punctuate a queer coming-of-age girl narrative set in the 1980s in El Calentito (2005); dance scenes of queer female eroticism derail heteronormative trajectories of marriage and family in Anni felici/Those Happy Years (2013) and La Belle saison/Summertime (2015), two stories that intersect with the international women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. These films suggest a European heritage cinema as interzone (Randall Halle, 2014). I explore the ways in which these films eschew nostalgia via the stress on movement, queer performativity and the possibility of (not yet formed) communities. By retrieving Pride in (and for) a broader European cinematic context, this paper makes a move towards a reading of the film’s intersectional politics as a timely response to the incompleteness of the European social project of integration.

Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema

Abstract: Frank Lehman, Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema New York: Oxford University Press, 2018 [xvii, 292 pp. ISBN: 9780190606404 $39.95 (trade paper)]. The Oxford Music/Media Series.

The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Abstract: What is the child for Latin American cinema? This book aims to answer that question, tracing the common tendencies of the representation of the child in the cinema of Latin American countries, and demonstrating the place of the child in the movements, genres and styles that have defined that cinema. Deborah Martin combines theoretical readings of the child in cinema and culture, with discussions of the place of the child in specific national, regional and political contexts, to develop in-depth analyses and establish regional comparisons and trends. She pays particular attention to the narrative and stylistic techniques at play in the creation of the child's perspective, and to ways in which the presence of the child precipitates experiments with film aesthetics. Bringing together fresh readings of well-known films with attention to a range of little-studied works, The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema examines films from the recent and contemporary period, focussing on topics such as the death of the child in ‘street child’ films, the role of the child in post-dictatorship filmmaking and the use of child characters to challenge gender and sexual ideologies. The book also aims to place those analyses in a historical context, tracing links with important precursors, and paying attention to the legacy of the child’s figuring in the mid-century movements of melodrama and the New Latin American Cinema.

Waiting for (African) Cinema: Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quest

Abstract: Throughout his career, Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo has been searching for cinema; not African cinema, just Cinema. In order to explain properly this claim, the essay will first consider Bekolo’s work within the context of the ever-ongoing conversation regarding the framing and aesthetics of African and Third Cinemas. Second, for a closer perspective on what will be termed “neurotic cinema,” the essay will key on Bekolo’s latest effort, Naked Reality (2016), a purposely unfinished work that echoes absurdist theater, mimics frantic contemporary thought, and proposes that cinema should not yield finalized products because that may go against its very nature.

Get Out of La La Land! Naturalizing the Colour Line with “Colour-Blind" Cinema

Abstract: This thesis is grounded in semiotics, discourse, and critical race theory to identify and analyze contemporary racial representations in Hollywood cinema during the "post-race" era. This ideology minimizes the impact of historical racisms and uses racial "colour-blindness" to construct a false sense of racial harmony. In the United States, Hollywood has been an important vehicle of discursive formation and narrative control and contributes to the cementing of America's "post-race" la la land. In this thesis, I conclude that Hollywood films continue to placate concerns of race relations for the dominant ingroup through cinematic escapism, glamour and romance. In refining its art of "naturalizing" an ideological racial status quo, Hollywood has evolved from its blatant racial cinematic representations of the past. Now, mainstream cinema employs racial "colour-blindness" to maintain the colour line, further embedding racism into the fabric of American society.

‘These Intimate Little Places’: Cinema-Going and Public Emotion in Bolton, 1930-1954

Abstract: Building upon the methodological approach offered by the history of emotions, this article re-examines the records of Mass Observation’s Worktown to explore how cinemas in Bolton functioned as site...