Watching a film by ear: An acousmatic approach to cinema

Sound film is commonly expressed as the interplay between the audio and the visual. Since the 1920s, audiences’ cinematic experience has been dramatically transformed owing to the synchronization of sounds and motion pictures. The silent film era highlights its narration performance mainly by the continuous alternation between moving images and intertitles (title cards) while its score is accompanied by a pianist or an orchestra. With more diverse sound elements (dialogue, music, ambient sound, sound effects, etc.) being synchronized to motion pictures, sound film delivers an immersive experience and strengthens its storytelling. Cinematic audiences are required to engage more intensively in the cross-modal perception of hearing and seeing. This progression appears as a breakthrough for filmmakers and, simultaneously, new advanced perceptual challenges for the audiences’ eyes and ears.

Fading morality in American Biblical film adaptations

It seems only natural that films (or any other media) devoted to retelling Biblical stories would, first and foremost, exalt their moral virtues. Like the Bible itself, they are often regarded as didactic tools with which to educate people on ethics while reasserting the Biblical god’s authority. However, this is no longer the case in American cinema. Overtime, the genre’s didactic function monopolizes what little attention it still commands from American audiences, while America’s film industry itself seems to have lost sight of the genre’s devotion to the monotheistic Biblical god. The exclusivity that makes morality in Bible adaptations “Biblical”--the willingness to proclaim God as the ultimate moral authority superior to those of every other belief--has disappeared from mainstream cinematic productions almost entirely. The result is a conflation of Biblical morality in these films with that of a more universal, humanist, and less religiously-bounded sort in the American audiences’ collective consciousness. 

An author of outsiders: Jim Jarmusch’s "Down by law"

Jim Jarmusch is an American independent film director with a dominant characteristic of his cinema; marginality. The director’s movies focused on outsiders, people who wander with no destination, at odds with themselves and others, traveling through a wasteland of modern America. This study seeks to determine how Jarmusch creates marginality via the cinematography of a film Down by Law. The primary source of this paper is the film. Secondary sources include existing interviews of the director and other related materials. The analysis part will briefly touch upon technicalities of implemented camera work and provide images from the film. The study proposed that marginality has its cycle that consists of four elements; stranger, interference stage, freedom, separation. Further analysis demonstrates the depiction of the cycle in the film. The results indicate that Jim Jarmusch employs specific camera techniques such as long shots, momentum, lighting, horizontal representation, static shots, and black and white choice of photography to underline the notion of marginality in the film Down by Law.

Two Books on Third World Cinema

Any discussion of Third World films should begin with definition of the concept of the Third World. Roy Armes in Third World Film Making and the West (University of California Press, 1987), defines Third World countries as those once colonized nations that are still underdeveloped because of their economic exploitation by the West. This, I assume, accounts for the rather strange title of this book since the emphasis here is given to the relationship between Third World filmmaking in particular, and the West in general. Yet, I did not find that this emphasis was reflected in the writing. And for good reason, since the primary concern of a Third World filmmaker is not his relationship to the West (although this may be one of his concerns) but his country and his people. It seems to me that the title points to an uneasiness that Roy Armes feels in writing about this subject. It is hard to pinpoint why he feels so uneasy.

Fan Awareness of Godzilla's Dual Identity

The value of a film can be assessed from its production and reception. What makes the Godzilla films an exceptional case is that it took longer than 50 years to fully appraise the reception on a par with the original production. Such a gap was created by a travestying version of the 1954 original that gave birth to Godzilla as both a celebrated kaiju character and a film genre. This conclusion is shared by many, even the Japanese critics and historians who mercilessly dissected the Americanized edit Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) with Raymond Burr. The sensitive historical context within which Godzilla was born understandably made its export to America more or less a process where the beloved daikaiju was stripped of his originally dark and cautionary tale about nuclear horrors that his creators intended to convey. However, the charm of the 1956 recut is indisputable and a natural given among the Western fans because it was thanks to this highly edited version that Goji-san brought tremendous financial success, along with establishing his name and his one-of-a-kind genre beyond the borders of Japan. In 2004, fifty years after its debut in Japan, the original Godzilla film was screened in American cinemas for the first time, which was a revelation to his international fans who recognized that they hardly knew him.

Representations of Psychopathy in US Cinema

Ever since the early nineteenth century when Philippe Pinel described psychopathy as moral deficiency with no sign of mental impairment, scholars have taken an interest in the condition. The ensuing discussions emphasized the role of an unsympathetic environment in making an individual morally insane and on the society's responsibility in mitigating psychopathic behavior through moral therapy. A century later, scholars interpreted psychopathy from a sociological perspective, but which bore some resemblance to the nineteenth century moral discussion. For example, Harrington's Psychopaths (1973) and Smith's The Psychopath in Society (1978) suggest that an amoral society commending individualism and personal achievement provides an environment that rewards, and thus encourages, psychopathic behavior. They also suggested that psychopaths are more successful in adapting to such a society.

The "Good War" in Recent American Cinema

The film USS Indianapolis: Men of courage–staring Nicolas Cage–which opened in US theaters in early September 2016, has once again proved the resilient interest of Hollywood movie makers in the World War II movie genre. More than half a decade after the war ended, the story of patriotic GIs fighting fiercely, altruistically or the espionage mission of Allied powers in order to defeat the evil Nazis has never failed to captivate audience’s heart. The war ended in September 1945, yet it’s no doubt that World War II-themed films still dominate our contemporary popular culture. Much of this is greatly contributed by the previously shaped the “Good War” concept of World War II in the public memory, particularly in America. The Good war memory signifies a clear division between “us,” the good, morally superior American soldiers fighting for human rights and freedom, and “them,” the evil Hitler and his monstrous SS Armies inflict horrible crimes on other human beings. This idea of Good War was again magnified and promulgated through traditional media, which is a powerful site to alter and reconstruct audience’s perception and memory of past war, especially the distant generation that only learn the history lesson through television, music or history textbooks.

Humanities and Social Sciences through World Cinema and Visual Arts

This essay is incentivized by the global trends of digitizing and sharing of knowledge through the Internet, electronic devices and online courses. These trends, while potentially rendering the physically confined, text-based, formal style of university lecturing as slow, redundant, and costly, urge serious reflection on the quality of teaching and learning in response to the changing context of higher education. What can be done to coordinate the traditional role of a lecturer and the newly equipped self-learning capabilities of students?

Six Films About Religion and Belief

When religion is examined as a social institution and belief as a set of cultural values, films sharing common religious themes come in handy for their isolated contexts and full-length storyline with clear focal points. This essay sets out to compare and discuss three arguably well-circulated themes throughout all religions and beliefs by looking at three pairs of films: We’re No Angels (USA 1989) with Marmoulak (aka The Lizard, Iran 2004); Devi (aka The Goddess, India 1960) with Bagh-e Sangi (aka Garden of Stones, Iran, 1976); and The Shoes of the Fisherman (USA/UK 1968) with Zir-e Nur-Mah (aka Under the Moonlight, Iran 2001).

Cinema Criticism and Social Class

Art films, middle cinema and commercial films in India all depend on the middle classes for legitimacy and critical acclaim. Even those producers and performers who stridently proclaim the supremacy of popular taste, or denounce the elitism of the art-film critics, are on the defensive when there is a sharp criticism of their wares in the media. Indeed, the way the producers of each of these kinds of movies try to win friends and influence middle-class opinion give the lie to their declared dependence on only the opinions of the 'common Indian.' The common Indian is rarely influenced by what Kumar Shahani says of Manmohan Desai. But Desai was distressed when Shahani took him on while Shahani in turn resents that his films do not get the patronage or support of those for whom his radical ear bleeds, whereas Desai mobilizes such support with casual ease. Nevertheless, there are clear differences in the cultural thrusts of the three; to gauge the appeal or lack of appeal of any of these forms, one must first identify the thrusts.

Third Cinema in the Third World

With the first screenings of films like The Hour of the Furnaces by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (1968), Black Girl by Ousmane Sembene (1966), or Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1968), moviegoers were confronted with a new spectrum of ideas, emotions, and images. A new cinema emerged from countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin American that directly assaulted the colonial past. The forebearers of Third World Cinema proclaimed both the necessity and the capability of defining the terms of their cultural expression. In his book Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (UMI Research Press, 1982), Teshome H. Gabriel not only analyzes some of these films, but examines interrelationships that determine Third World cinema: not simply films produced within the Third World, but an alternative cinema, '...a cinema of decolonization and for liberation... a Third Cinema.'

Cinema and Representation in China

The distance between Hong Kong and China can perhaps be measured by what is considered representable in each culture. Hong Kong is permeated by advertising, like a Western city. It is dominated by writing: signs of all descriptions festoon city buildings and stretch across the street. The Chinese cities we visited in 1981 (including 'sophisticated' Shanghai) treated sign writing functionally, to indicate a locale or slogan that needed indicating; advertising had begun to appear, but tentatively. In cinema, too, the same contrast appears. Hong Kong cinema has developed a strong tradition of depictions of violence, involving its own system of performances and special effects, its own codes and conventions. The Chinese film-makers we met in Shanghai were assessing their first foray into the explicit depiction of familial violence: a scene in Family Festivities (1980) in which a husband slaps his wife who has been intriguing to break up the extended family group into a series of independent nuclear households. Such a level of aggression is new in Chinese cinema, and the scene was shot so as not to emphasise the physicality of the moment of husband striking wife. However, it is dangerous to treat such comparisons as emblematic of general features of a society. All that we can do is to record certain impressions.

Redefining Black Independent Cinema

In August 1984, the Los Angeles Times first-string film critic, Charles Champlin, devoted his column to the subject 'A Black Film Bonanza Hollywood Ignored.' He--and the Los Angeles filmgoing audience--were discovering for the first time the wealth of Black cinema that had been produced in recent years. Beneath the facade of Hollywood'd glitter and Southern California's 'me' culture, Los Angeles is becoming a city of color. The largest ethnic group in its public schools is Latino, and it has one of the largest Asian populations in the US. It is a city with a long history of organizing for affirmative action in the workplace and schools. Los Angeles has been the source of some of the most pioneering and important independent works in recent years, much of which has been produced in these Third World communities.

Politics and Femininity in 'The Chess Players'

Like most great Indian myth-makers of the last two hundred years, Satyajit Ray is at his most creative when dealing with problems of women and femininity. There can be no better way of acknowledging his 'presence' in the contemporary Indian consciousness than by recognising the social criticisms his construction of womanhood offers. I shall try to give some flavour of this presence by partly re-reviewing a film of his which is apparently concerned only with men and with a 'manly' pursuit, politics. This film, 'Shatranj Ke Khilari' ('The Chess Players'), is based on a famous short story by Munshi Premchand and is Ray's only full-length Hindi film, directed at what may be called a pan-Indian audience. That it failed to reach its intended audience is of course well known. We do no know how far the failure was due to the film itself and how far to the structure of the Indian film industry, but that is not a specially relevant question in this context. For my concern in this re-review is to show that there is not only a politics of statecraft but also a politics of culture, and that all great artists have to deal with the second kind of politics, even when overtly refusing to challenge its basic axioms.

The Linguistic Mediation of Film Subtitles

The challenge of film translation took on special complexity with the advent of sound. Major film industries experimented with diverse approaches; initially, dubbing, subtitles and native language translators were tried. In 1929, MGM embarked on an expensive programme to replicate all its feature films in three different linguistic versions and in 1930, Paramount established a studio near Paris to create foreign films in five languages. The British, French, and German industries, meanwhile, followed Hollywood's lead in multiple versions, albeit on a smaller scale, as noted by Douglas Gomery ('Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism; Europe Converts to Sound,' Yale French Studies, Cinema/Sound, no. 60, 1980). In Czechoslovakia, Josef Slechta invented a 'sound camera' which sharply reduced dependence on German and American sound equipment. Eastern European audiences flocked to the movie theatres to hear local stars speak and sing in their native language. In Latin America, similarly, local industries were encouraged by the arrival of sound.

Under the Skin of the City

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's 'Under the Skin of the City' animates an essential question of political filmmaking: how to balance fidelity to social reality with the often more compelling and convincing dictates of dramatic fiction. In the opening scene of the film Tuba, a late-middle-aged woman, stares with bewilderment into the lens of a documentary crew's camera and is unable to answer their questions about an upcoming election. She and her fellow gray-haired, shawl-covered factory workers are too involved in the problems of their everyday lives to be concerned. She says that she hopes the politicians will address these issues. Her coworkers' voices join hers, creating a cacophony that seems to chase the image away as the screen fades to black. We continue to hear their voices while the opening titles roll. When the image returns, it is in the midst of a fictional world, or at least a world where the camera does not acknowledge its own presence.

Black African Cinema and the Legacy Colonialism

The failure to build a black African film industry during the 1970s and into the 1980s--despite the valiant efforts of individual film-makers and a number of governments--is hardly surprising in view of the fact that modern industry of any kind in Africa dates only from World War II when, as John Iliffe points out in 'The Emergence of African Capitalism' (London, Macmillan, 1983, pp. 64-65), 'several circumstances came together to change the old pattern of exported raw materials and imported manufactures': colonial governments seeking to diversify their economies, local European settlers aiming for greater autonomy and foreign firms seeking commercial advantages. As late as 1950 in Nigeria, which was later to become something of an economic giant in black African terms, Iliffe notes (p. 65) that the manufacturing sectors still provided 'only 0.45 per cent of GNP, (the smallest proportion of any country producing statistics).' To the problem of late capitalism was added that of foreigner control: since the initial industrialisation occurred under colonial rule, early industrial enterprises tended to be owned by foreign capital. All Third World film industries have been created by indigenous capital attracted by the profits to be derived from catering to the entertainment needs of the new audience composed of those drawn into the cash economy by urban industrialisation and the rural exodus.

Images of Native Americans in US Cinema

The handling of American Indians and American Indian subject matter within the context of commercial U.S. cinema is objectively racist at all levels, an observation which extends to television as well as film. In this vein it is linked closely to literature, both fictional and non-fictional, upon which may if not most movie scripts are at least loosely based. In a very real sense, it is fair to observe that all modes of projecting concepts and images of the Indian before the contemporary American public fit the same mold, and do so for the same fundamental 'real world' reasons. This essay will attempt to come to grips with both the method and the motivation for this, albeit within a given medium and examining a somewhat restricted range of the tactics employed. The medium selected for this purpose is commercial cinema, the technique examined that of stereotypic projection. The matter divides itself somewhat automatically into three major categories of emphasis. These may be elucidated as follows.

Religion and Indian Cinema

Since the early 1990s Indian society has undergone some of the greatest changes it has seen since Independence in 1947. Several key events at the beginning of the 1990s inaugurated the processes that occurred during the decade. These years saw the rise and fall of the political parties who support Hindutva or policies of Hindu nationalism, while economic reforms brought in a new age of consumerism and liberalism that has taken root across the Indian metropolises. While other major social transformations also took place during this decade, such as the rise of lower castes, this period can be said to be one in which a new social group, 'the new middle classes,' rose to dominate India economically, politically, socially and culturally. The impact of these new groups was felt outside of India as they were part of transnational family networks and the diaspora that became increasingly important as a market for Hindi films, alongside other global audiences.

Race and Class in the Cinema of Apartheid

To write a Marxist history of an art form or a cultural process in a time designated as postmodern--or at least with the logic of postmodernism dominating cultural debates--is one of the central challenges of our time. In Europe, three responses from a Marxist perspective have been put forth as the dominance of poststructuralist theory begins to ebb. Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri has argued convincingly that the essential task of today is not so much writing a history of modern art forms as writing a modern history of those forms. In his discussion of the politics of history writing, French philosopher Louis Althusser has theorised the imperative of producing a dialectical concept of the history of an art form rather than merely presenting a narrative account of its history. And in England, writing about the history of structure of the State, Perry Anderson has postulated that history writing should be theoretical and analytical as well as factual and descriptive in order to be adequately comprehensive.