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The main research questions of this paper are based on the need to clarify some major issues concerning the changes induced in television production practices by the new technologies of content transmission. Narrowing down the topic, the central question is if the nature of televisuality, of the way television programs are consumed and produced, has been transformed in our contemporary world. The author puts forward concepts like recycled narratives, reused plots and seriality considered to be useful for describing the new types of narrative structures in television films and television series today. By re-interpreting the historical paradigm of the neo-television versus post-television, the author is questioning the classical hypothesis of Jameson about the logic of postmodern production mode. In order to further explore how the new technologies and new media practices have influenced content production, the author uses the concept of “habit loop”, used in market-driven commodities production, to explain the impact of late capitalism of television content production. Following the assumption that we are in a cultural moment when all stories have been told and there are no more creative resources, this inability of storytelling to reinvent itself leads to the dominance of the mechanisms of re-use, re-contextualization and re-focusing. Exploring the traits of post-television, the conclusion of this paper is that televisual productions have now reached the ultimate consequence of the ethos of replay. The author claims that we are beyond the era of the pastiche and we have ushered an era of promiscuous narratives.
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Abundant and vivid sex scenes have become a distinct feature of some of the most popular TV series, the phenomena transgressing producers and genres (Benioff and Weiss’s fantasy series Game of Thrones; Michael Hirst’s historical romance The Tudors and Tom Kapino’s comedy Californication; Nick Pizzolato’s crime series True Detective and Jake Manos Jr’s Dexter, Lena Dunham’s comedy Girls or Alan Ball’s vampire fantasy True Blood). Because usually these scenes show no significant impact on the story or the characters’ development, viewers often identified them as nearing soft-core pornography meant to (re)ignite the consumers’ interest in the series, by conveying various yet standardized representations of sexual activities.In 2011, American Horror Story (AHS) producers added to this the risky re-writing of well-known horror film subgenres, using for their five seasons to the day most of the genre’s strategies, from body and psychological horror to slasher and splatter. Aside from this manifest revisiting of familiar themes and motifs of horror movies, the series fired at their spectators shocking and deliberately scandalous depictions of sexual practices, ranging from the ever-going innuendo and sex scenes rather common in an erotic thriller to a paraphilic panopticon that entraps transvestites, voyeurs, frotteurists, sadists, masochists, rapists, somnophiliacs, pedophiles, incestuous characters, acrotomophiliacs, necrophiliacs and zoophiles.
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Like the technological-advances of the late nineteenth-century, one similar modern effect of emerging technology on artistic-expression concerns the changing question of film adaptation, given the democratisation of filmmaking via new digital media. With sophisticated and affordable software and internet portals such as BitTorrent applications, YouTube, and Vimeo making anyone’s professional-level edits of major film releases freely-accessible by millions, the line defining the original director’s intent becomes muddled. With a coming-age of these fan-edits being many people’s introduction to classic film characters and series, there is a new-level of discourse about the fidelity to not only the very original sources (novels, games, comics, plays), but to the films as they had been originally released in the theatres, on home-formats, or on television.Though many directors have released their own differing cuts of their same-films, notably Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone and George Lucas, it is new-territory to have critics’ cuts, or as many different-cuts of a film as there are audience members. In a nutshell, the film experience is more fluid than it’s ever-been, ever-malleable to suit the unique tastes of the participants.
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The current paper proposes to explore the concept of database in connection to narrative, identity and anime. Thus, the paper will start with the representations of identity in relation to space, time, the real and the virtual, while using the operational concepts of modular narratives (Allan Cameron, 2009) and remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) in analyzing Satoshi Kon’s Perfect blue (1997) and Paprika (2006). Is the database an exploration or a reaction to contemporary anxieties? Is it a reaction to the liquid modernity and the fragmented self (Zygmunt Bauman, 2013)? Is it a symptom or a warning for all of the above?
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Japanese cinema, one of the most eminent in the world, has a long history of interesting and distinctive modes of storytelling. Since the early beginnings of film viewing, Japanese audience was accompanied with the figure of benshi – a narrator or group of narrators “explaining” and providing an audience a “fuller experience” of what was projected on a silver screen. Considering the cinematic storytelling process, in spite of diverging from classical Hollywood narrative, the “unique” styles of the Golden Era directors – Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa have been highly commended in the West. This paper explores the extreme narrative in Japanese film Symbol (2009) directed by Hiroshi Matsumoto, in which two disparate storylines converge in the end. The first narrative follows a day of Escargot Man, a masked wrestler in Mexico preparing for the night’s match, whereas the other focuses on a Japanese man trying to escape from the surreal white room. Time and space of the white room narrative, cross-cut with the conventional episode in Mexico, operate as a plot device that engages the audience in the puzzle-solving cinematic experience. Examining Matsumoto’s method of associating the “real” to the mystic heterotopic scenery, this paper foregrounds both cultural and technological factors of Symbol (ranging from silent comedy genre to Japanese pop-cultural phenomenon of nanasensu) which contribute to its originality of the narrative form, distinctive among the postmillennial authors who have already famously strained from conventional storytelling. Furthermore, drawing on notion of both mind-game and puzzle-solving film, proposed by Elsaesser and Buckland, I argue that Symbol, as a typical postmodern mixture of elements, offers a new type of referentiality when dealing with the subject of extreme storytelling and its presentation to millennial audience.
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The present study analyses an anime series entitled Concrete Revolutio: Chōjin Gensō (Superhuman Phantasmagoria), produced by Studio Bones, directed by Seiji Mizushima and written by Shō Aikawa, which ran in two split cours between 2015 and 2016. Concrete Revolutio is a series removed from the arche- typal trope often plaguing the cinematic and animation landscape, namely that of a logocentric worldview constrained by binary oppositions. From a methodological standpoint, the study applies a multi-layered approach to the study of anime, in order to address the socio-political implications of a series that uses idiosyncratic characters of all shapes and sizes – from superheroes to demons, from aliens to Godzilla-like monsters – to provide a meta-critique not only of Japanese postwar history but of militarism, late stage capitalism, globalization, or exploitation to name but a few.
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René Frölke’s Le beau danger takes on the condition of the survivor-writer Norman Manea and enquires into the potential of experimental media to illustrate his life and work, and thus to engage with and perpetuate the memory of affliction. This paper explores the tension between Manea’s autobiographical pieces and his promotional activity as writer via Foucault’s concept of “beau danger” or aesthetic peril, and proposes a transdisciplinary analysis of Manea’s literary reworking of multiple traumas inflicted by the Holocaust, Communist totalitarianism in Romania and trans-Atlantic exile. In it, I argue along with Frölke that empathy and identification with the pain of others is possible by means of slow and direct involvement with Manea’s prose texts and that transmediality is apt to augment and recontextualise the message passed on by literature in an appealing and highly resonant manner.
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This paper tries to examine the way in which the “work of narrative” and the question of guilt are played out in the construction of postmodern narratives of the Fall. The visual language of a post-Christian guilt articulated inside the structure of biblical narratives will be analyzed in three of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s films: The Return (2003), Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014). The mythological aspect of the Real, in these films, will be discussed in relation to the different signifying power it gives to the visual. In Zvyagintsev’s films, the distinction between history and duration opens up the space in which the new myth of a cultural fall is formulated by the story of men becoming the story of civilian life.
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Review of: John YORKE. Into the Woods. How stories work and why we tell them. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2014.
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Review of the 15th edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival, one of the largest festivals in Eastern Europe, took place in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) in 27 May-5 June 2016.
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The object of this study is to analyse the impact of the Web on art. For this purpose I have made a distinctions between Net Art, which emerged in the 1990s and has been developing up till now, and the phenomenon of art on the Web, which views the Web as an exhibition space. Examinig the first case, I will mention such features of Net Art as networking, the rhizome, hyper-textuality, multi-subjectivity and framed objects. In the second case, I will have a closer look at several types of museums on the Web, including ordinary galleries in the form of digitalised image collections of art, galleries or museums which use augmented technologies, and galleries designed in the 3D graphic environment. I will also outline a broader perspective on the influence of technology on art and examine its paradigm, consisting in the accommodation of art on the Web at least in the two ways shown in the study. I will use some examples of net art works created in recent years, and will visit some museums on the Net. This approach assumes that the development of the Web has been a breakthrough in the history of art, which is reflected in its impact on the arts on a previously unprecedented scale. One could even say that in this case, the impact is total. The Web has not only become a medium that allows us to extend the boundaries of art, but owing to its spatial character allowing it to become an exhibition space, it has even taken over the functions of the traditional art scene. Hence, I believe that the development of technology, especially the Internet, is a turning point for the arts in their development and in the methods of their presentation and archiving
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During the fifty year period of the second half of the 20th century the field of African Art History, as well as the forms of art studies and art exhibitions have changed considerably. This article considers the evolution of the idea of African identity in contemporary arts. I would like to examine the different forms of art representation and interviewing of African fine arts in the last three decades. In order to illustrate the dynamic changes in the European approach to African Art, it is simply enough to recall the famous remarks of Carl Einstein and Roy Sieber on that subject or William Rubin’s controversial exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1984). It seems that the visibly growing practice of engaging curators of African origin in the creation of exhibitions of modern African art, particularly as a strategy to incorporate the voices of those represented, is one of the most important aspects of the “curatorial turn” of the 21st century.
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Modernism as a trend in architecture is rarely associated with the colonial policy of the European powers. Nevertheless it was one of the tools of the "Western" expansion in Africa, simultaneously a constructive and a destructive force. It was a reflection of the changes in the modern world and at the same time it led to an unavoidable break with the local identity and tradition. “The Year of Africa" (1960), when as many as 17 states proclaimed independence, paradoxically did not bring any radical changes in architectonic solutions. Public facilities were still constructed according to "Western" modernist convention. Political dependence of the new countries on their respective "mother states" has been to a significant degree reduced and sometimes even broken. At the same time their relations on the level of architecture have remained almost unchanged, thereby pushing the "periphery" to the role of a "province". Critical analysis of the effects of colonialism merges post-colonialism with neo-colonialism, understood as control exercised by the metropolis over the decolonised peripheries.
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The article places „The Last Stage” in the midst of these film testimonies and representations of which revisionist reinterpretation produces interesting outcomes in the area of gender studies. The author analyses two films for which Jakubowska’s work served as an iconographic model: Stanisław Różewicz’s „Three Women” (1956) and Andrzej Munk’s „The Passenger” (1963). Talarczyk-Gubała considers the „Three women” to be a polemic with Jakubowska’s film and her views on the indestructible bond between former prisoners. The author points to the left wing views shared by the directors, grounded in Polish socialist tradition and the ambivalence inscribed in the image of the SS overseer in the creation of Aleksandra Śląska. The analysis of the intertextual relationship between the first feature film about concentration camps and the films that refer to it indicates that both in the beginning and towards the end of the Polish film school, Jakubowska’s work was a non-negotiable starting point for Polish films on labour camps.
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The author asks the question of whether there is a theory of long shots? He then presents elements of such theory present in the writings of André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze and other authors. Then he discusses selected shots from the films of, amongst others, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, Miklós Jancsó, Theo Angelopoulos or Chantal Akerman. He reserves a special place among these for Mikhail Kalatozov’s opening sequence of „I am Cuba” (1964).
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Book review of Rafał Syska’s „Filmowy neomodernizm” [„Neomodernism in Film”] (2014). The very concept of “neomodernism”, though closely associated with categories describing trends in contemporary cinema, such as slow-cinema or contemplative cinema, is entirely original in character. Syska, in describing a thoroughly modern phenomenon, sees it as a reincarnation of the spirit of film modernism of 1950s and 1960s. His book on the one hand shows the network of links between neomodernism and modernism, and on the other hand proposes determinants constitutive of the work of neomodernists. The more general parts of the book contains essays depicting profiles of individual artists.
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Book review of Justyna Budzik’s „Filmowe cuda i sztuczki magiczne. Szkice z archeologii kina” [„Film Wonders and Magic Tricks. Sketches in Archaeology of Cinema”] (2015). The book is an interesting example of practical application of non-archaeological (variant based) concept of research in media studies. The analysis of Siegfried Zielinski’s views together with Tom Gunning’s notion of cinema of attraction lead the author of the book to formulate her own set of research tools, the usefulness of which she presents in the analysis of such films as „Mirror, Mirror” (2012), „Oz the Great and Powerful” (2013), „The Illusionist” (2010), „Hugo” (2011), „Jack et la mécanique du coeur” (2012), „Monster” (2005) and „Babadook” (2014). One of the qualities of Budzik’s book is that it can be used in film education. The appendix contains lesson plans that can be used to promote the knowledge of film history among students of various ages.
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Book review of „<<Świat był przemoczoną pustką>>. Czarny kryminał Raymonda Chandlera w literaturze i filmie” [‘”The world was a wet emptiness”. Raymond Chandler’s Crime Noir in Literature and Film’] (2015) by Patrycja Włodek. The book is devoted to the work of Raymond Chandler, one of the best crime writers ever. At the same time it is an attempt to rehabilitate a genre that is often looked down upon as popular or devoid of artistic qualities. Włodek convincingly shows that Marlowe and the world he lives in and in which he solves murder mysteries is not only literary fiction aimed at pure entertainment, but also a mirror image of existential anxieties that plagued Chandler, his era and the next generations. In this monograph the author not only vividly and convincingly presents the profile of the writer himself (a person as unique as the detective he created) and diligently examines his literary output, but also considers film adaptations of Chandler’s novels. Film noir and neo-noir undoubtedly immortalised the author of „The Little Sister”, but it is he who gave them the momentum and tone.
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