Filme din ţările Puterilor Centrale pe ecranele din Bucureştii ocupaţi (1916–1918). Partea a II-a

Author(s): Adrian Silvan Ionescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2017

Once Romania joined the war, alongside with the Allies, by the end of the summer of 1916, the cinema theatres were closed, like all other places of entertainment. This was a significant blow to townsfolk used to spend their free time in theatre halls. However, it did not last long, because on September 11, they are reopened on special schedules, only from 3 to 6 p.m. In the first days of October, patriotic and propaganda films like ”Martiriul Românilor din Ardeal” (The Martyrdom of Romanians in Transylvania), were being run. In the first decade of the next month, it was announced the work on the ”historic and patriotic film the Great War for the Liberation of the Romanian Nation”, which followed to contain scenes of the recent fighting on the front. The flm was expected to be released on November 14 at ”Zaharia” cinema theatre. However, the situation on the front was not favourable for the Romanian armies and soon the enemy occupied the south of the country. The German occupational civil and military administration intended to make of Romania an example of good management and judicious care for the welfare and contentment of mind of the residents – even if all this was mere propaganda.

Eroul liric în ipostaza de alter ego al creaţiei lui Emil Loteanu: particularităţile dialecticii anima-animus

Author(s): Ana-Maria Plămădeală / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2017

The autobiography of romantic creation is manifested through the correlation ”dream – art” and less through the traditional ”life – art”. The artist of this spiritual texture, is however, impelled from the inside not to evoke the immediate reality, but the efervescence of the dreams and the splendours of imagination, so to transmigrate to his lyrical hero only his heroic, altruistic, and great aspirations. The predominance in the film director’s records of the heroine’s character, not of the hero’s, through the weight of confessional valences, is reinforced by the master’s persistence, even his obsession with the singing of the myth of the eternal feminine in the most varied versions and interpretations. Appealing to the ”psychology of the depths”, the following phenomenon has been stated: in the equation of the protagonists of Loteanu’s works, the power of character, courage, even possessiveness are more decisive in feminine characters, the masculine ones yielding to the vigour and vitality of their loved ones. On the other hand, the lyrical heroes are characterized by the spiritual states associated with the beautiful sex for centuries: dreamers, sensitive, always subject to turmoil and anxiety. This anthropological distortion explains the situation of the Woman in the major hypostasis of Axis Mundi, and of the man in that of the wandering son, who has forgotten his role. In Emil Loteanu’s cinematography, the nostalgia of the paradisiac myth of the androgyne is countered by empowering the lyrical heroines with the functions of protecting and saving the world, they are the ones recovering the cracks of their second halves.

Un „bumerang estetic” sau valorificarea artelor prin film

Author(s): Dumitru Olărescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2017

It is known that all kinds of art (fine arts, theatrical art, musical art, literature) contributed to the affirmation of cinematography as art so that later this synthesis – cinematography, through the film about art – to make a significant contribution to its evolution and, in particular, to the process of valorising all the arts. This aesthetic boomerang, too little researched in filmology, is contained in the film about art - a special category in the evolution of the non-fiction film, being conditioned by the use of various techniques and modalities of film expression adapted or borrowed from the arsenal of cinematic language, but also through the creation of new visions. In the film about art, the filmmaker already operates with the repercussions of an interpretation or conception of the author of the work, which is at the basis of the film. In this case, there is a complex process of interpreting the interpretations through a new language – the cinematic one (reanimation of the image, illumination, cadre, angles, etc.). These films give the opportunity to convince us of the artistic and aesthetic functioning of the mechanisms of this process of connection of the arts; the transfer of the original work in audio-visual language into a product with an autonomous aesthetic existence, realizing its multi-functional purpose, which contains important components such as the valorisation of the cultural heritage, the preservation of the images of the works of art, the cultivation of the aesthetic and artistic knowledge of the consumers of the beautiful, and so on.

Romanian New Wave Drama: a New Genre?

Author(s): Marian Tutui / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

It seems that the XIXth century realism, cinéma vérité, Italian neorealism and Free Cinema have not exhausted the flmmakers’ ability to innovate in their attempt to achieve veracity. Critics from everywhere, both favourable and unfavourable, have noticed a new way of making cinema, later called the New Romanian Wave, which has caused changes in the aesthetics and concept of the fiction flm, but regretfully which did not affect the nonfiction film as well. The author attempts to elucidate the premises of the appearance and the artistic and aesthetic characteristics of this new direction in the Romanian film – an essential stage in the imposition of a new cinema. The most important feature of the New Wave, in addition to technical features such as direct sound and hand-shot, is a new type of sombre drama, alongside of which the neorealist dramas seem like melodramas. In order to convince that this is a different drama from the one in neorealism, the author uses quotations from prestigious foreign critics and comparisons made between the films “Death of Mr. Lazarescu”, “Aurora”, and “Police, Adjective” and some neorealist films such as “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.” Thus, the specifics of the aesthetics of the creation of the young filmmakers Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu and others is configured.

„Sayat-Nova” – iniţiere în tainele vieţii şi artei

Author(s): Elena Dulgheru / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2017

The study is a breakthrough operated with the means of ethnographic, plastic and intercultural analysis in the works of the Armenian filmmaker Serghei Paradjanov, made from the perspective of his nucleus film ”Sayat-Nova”. The atypical hermeneutical method is meant to decipher an atypical cinematic language, which does not allow to be decorticated according to the usual film codes. ”Sayat-Nova”, this resonator of Paradjanov, is considered the last great medieval Armenian poet and the most representative Caucasian poet since the XVIII century. The stages of the hero’s life are presented vertically to the relationship of man with God, in the definition of which all the stylistic means of the film compete through some revealing pictures. The ”Sayat-Nova” biographical poem is literally a dense and nonlinear depiction of symbolic objects, evoking the great themes reiterated throughout the director’s creation: love, pure beauty, death, sacrifice, and eternal life. These aspects are analysed from a new aesthetic-artistic perspective.The text adapts fragments from the author’s book, ”Scara raiului în cinema. Kusturica, Tarkovski, Paradjanov” (Bucharest: “Arca Învierii” Publishing House, 2011).

Следуй за прыгающим мячиком и пой с нами. К истории создания первой звуковой анимации (I)

Author(s): Natalia Krivulea / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2017

With the invention of moving images, the creators sought to supplement their sound. Before the invention of cinema, E. Reynaud gave performances in the optical theatre, where the moving images were connected to the sound. It was a pre-cinema experience, and it represented the theatre model of the audio-visual show. Attempts to synchronize the dynamic image and the sound were taken by T. Edison, S. Meshes, L. Gaumont, O. Kellum, E. Tigerstedt, J. Engel, G. Phocht and J. Massol. But the systems of these inventors were not perfect. The appearance of the optical sound-of-film systems ”Phonofilm” by Lee de Forest was a step towards the sound film. In 1923, he was acquainted with brothers Fleischer – outstanding American animators. With the participation of H. Riesenfeld and E. Fadiman, they formed Red Seal Pictures Corporation and began to shoot ”Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes”, a series of animated sing-along shorts (featuring the famous ”bouncing ball”). It was a kind of multimedia shots, as there was no plot, no character in them, as there was no narrative structure. They created them based of popular songs, but did not illustrate them. ”Sing-along” shorts were produced in order for the audience to sing along their favorite songs before the session, reading the words from the screen. The animated ball bounced on the syllables helping the audience to follow the rhythm of the melody of a song. Films became the prototype for the modern karaoke and music animated show.

Filmul de animaţie moldovenesc în Ţara soarelui răsare (HIROSHIMA 2016)

Author(s): Violeta Tipa / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2017

Dumitru Olărescu: supravieţuirea prin ştiinţă (70 de ani de la naştere)

Author(s): Ana-Maria Plămădeală / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2017

The Language of Gestures in the Romanian Films of the New Wave

Author(s): Mariana Mantu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

The complex language of the non-verbal is a communicational variant through which words are completed or replaced. In accordance or not with the verbal, the gesture represents a modality of expressing the manifold nuances of thought and emotion. Moreover, when not accompanied by words, a gesture can create a language of meanings that are universally acknowledged and accepted. Mainly based on a minimalist pattern of artistic expression, the New Romanian Cinema enriches the gesture with a multitude of symbols that characterises a cinematic discourse in which non-verbal elements are much used. The new modality of thinking and making a film increases the symbolism of gesture, that, in many cases, is not accompanied by words, but by moments of silence. The present paper analyzes the endings of some films of the New Romanian Wave and demonstrates the relationship among words, gesture and silence, or, in other words, the connection that emerges within the non-verbal model that supports the process of communication.

Carthage imagined. From Giovanni Pastrone’s ‘Cabiria’ (1914) to ‘Game of Thrones’ (2012)

Author(s): Dorota Gorzelany,Patrycja Matusiak / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The purpose of this paper is to present the historiophotic image of Carthage andCarthaginians and also to demonstrate what made-up stories take from the image of antiquity present in our collective consciousness, what motifs were an inspiration for the creators of both the film and the TV series (hictorical motifs but also architecture – very important for the background, e.g. Punic temple of Moloch in Cabiria or frequent Egyptian borrowings – and 19th century paintings by J.M.W. Turner), how ancient code was used to discuss politics of the day (in Cabiria, the fights between pacifists and nationalists calling for the conquest of Africa), whether D’Annunzianism had any impact on the film and how Cabiria fits into the historical-Roman trend. Antiquity presented and imagined as above were analysed on two levels – philological and archaeological (including architectural elements building up urban structures, decorative sculptures, interior decoration, everyday objects and clothing).

Representações da violência no cinema de Pedro Costa

Author(s): Guilherme Figueiredo / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 15/2016

This article aims to reflect about the violent reality represented by the Portuguese film director Pedro Costa in the Letters from Fontainhas trilogy. Fontainhas, an old slum in the outskirts of Lisbon, was the place where the Portuguese and people from the former Portuguese colonies lived until its demolition, by the end of the last century. The slum, which was built by the hands of the inhabitants, was the place where they established their relations, surrounded by poverty, but with an impressive community spirit. Due to the demolition they were relocated to new public housing. Pedro Costa reveals, in documental and fictional narratives, the hard reality of the Fontainhas inhabitants as well as the demolition and the bizarre transition to their new home.

ЖАНР ІСЛАНДСЬКОГО ВЕСТЕРНУ

Author(s): Oleksandr Golozubov / Language(s): Ukrainian Issue: 1/2013

The article analyzes the cinematic version of the epic narrative of the Icelandic sagas, which is presented in the genre of so-called "Cod westerns". Movies directed by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson and other Scandinavian filmmakers have been put into the context of the Western world’s cultural development.

Narodziny kina z ducha triku

Author(s): Andrzej Gwóźdź / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The author points to the ideology of attraction as a cinematic element that constitutes its nature, from its birth in the nineteenth century to the present. He highlights the continuity of the ontological affinity of early attractions and contemporary digital special effects (e.g. trick of substitution with penetration and multiple exposure and contemporary aesthetics of blue screen surface compositing, Méliès’ actor-figurante and modern motion capture technique). Gwóźdź also argues that Méliès creatively and perfectly played the interface: theatre – cinema. By enriching the theatre with moving images and by maintaining the stage at the cinema (preserving, for example, the status of the performer arranging the action environment), he has been running advanced media games. In this sense, Gwóźdź recognizes Méliès as the precursor of modern film design methods that work from the “image” (rather than from the mise-en-scène), thus making the right environment for the trick and leading to the escalation of the impossible: the impression of reality based on mimesis being replaced by impression of reality as a trick.

Ze sceny na ekran kinowy: zniknięcie damy

Author(s): Joachim Paech / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The article is devoted to the detailed anatomy of Georges Méliès’s basic trick, first presented at the Robert-Houdin Theater as variétés, and later, in the form of a substitute technique, transferred to “Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin” (1896). The author follows the tension between the illusion of the stage and the tricks of substitution in film, pointing to the intermedia nature of the effect that combined the stage illusion with the cinema, which turned Méliès into the author of both theater and the cinema. Paech also points to its vitality in contemporary cinema, analyzing various strategies for adaptation of substitution tricks in films such as “Prestige” (2006) by Christopher Nolan, “The Lady Vanishes” (1938) by Alfred Hitchcock, “Scoop – Hot Topic” (2006) and “Magic in the Moonlight” (2014) by Woody Allen and “The New York Stories” (1989) by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen.

„Flânerie”, cielesność i film W music-hallu. Georges Méliès w świecie modernistycznych przyjemności miejskich

Author(s): Stéphane Tralongo / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The article deals with the notion of “broken space” in music-hall, analysed as an example of new urban space, in which, in the beginning of the 20th century, cinema is an object of regular consumption under conditions similar to these in which the practice of flânerie takes place. Trying to restore cinema to the “transient” architecture that music-hall creates, the author explores the idea of audience mobility, starting from the ways in which space is occupied and used, which emphasize the role of seeing and looking (la vision), and aimless wandering without consumption. It turns out that the films by George Méliès and those with the participation of Harry Houdini analysed from this angle, take central place in the constellation of attractions aiming at re-awakening the fear of an accident among the spectators, especially between that which is alive and the mechanical, in space, which it would appear, protects the public from the dangers of the boulevards.

W mgnieniu migawki. Nowe życie trików Eadwearda Muybridge’a

Author(s): Natalia Gruenpeter / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The aim of this article is to show the role that Eadweard Muybridge’s work and wide-angle snapshot photography, perfected at the end of the 19th century by the Lumière brothers, played in the development of the levitation technique. The author emphasizes the visual fascination with spectacular images of a body suspended in the air, which can take various forms: from the stop motion effect, bringing to mind the notion of a frozen time, by suggesting the suspension of the law of gravity, to the visualization of the various time dimensions possible through the film mobilization of the gaze. Taking the affinity between Muybridge’s studies and the bullet time effect as her starting point, the author also looks at the relationships between the various versions of the trick of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the present time. Gruenpeter considers the popularity of this theme in modern audio-visual culture using selected films, and in the context of recreational photography and the art of illusion.

Od sztuk widowiskowych do kina atrakcji, czyli o intermedialności triku filmowego

Author(s): Andrzej Dębski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

In his article, Dębski draws attention to the inter-media links of cinematography and its roots in the nineteenth-century culture of spectacles. By referencing the work of Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, and Martin Loiperdinger, and analysing German and Wrocław based examples (eg Schenk’s Eden-Theater spectacles, plays of the Liebich’s theatre, Fiedler’s advertisements of magic lanterns), he shows the broad context of the beginnings of cinematography. He also points to the affinity of film tricks with “tricks” known from the older media (theater illusion, magic lantern, mechanical theater) and deconstructs the myth that Méliès invented the “first movie trick”. The author further emphasizes the richness and diversity of the early cinema of attraction, which was characterized by the “joy of experimentation”.

Widłak – od pirotechniki do kserografii. W stronę (bio)archeologii mediów

Author(s): Tomasz Majewski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The article is an attempt to present the plant called the lycopodium clavatum as an agent that informed the changes in the aesthetics of theatrical performance of Giovanni Servandoni’s late baroque spectacles in the 18th century, and catalyzed new forms of pyrotechnics which found their continuation in early cinema period, and even today in the performances of German industrial music band Rammstein. Lycopodium reveals a new dimension of intermediality connecting music, theatre, painting, as well as – excluded from the domain of art – implements like sound waves measuring equipment, combustion engine and xerography. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory is tested here on the grounds of technical developments in metallurgy, pyrotechnics and theatrical tricks, all connected and mediated by certain plant. The study of lycopodium is also a proposal to introduce a perspective of bio-archeology of media as complementary to the geology of media already established by Jussi Parikka.

Błąd jako trik w kontekście fotografii i filmu

Author(s): Janusz Musiał / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The author considers the acceptance of an error by the author (creator) as a deliberate act of creating visual space. It is an error used as a trick in the context of the medium of photography and film. Musiał considers selected examples in which the medium of the film utilizes a number of autonomous means of expression, technologies and visualization techniques that have been developed over the decades by the medium of photography. In this article, the topic of camera-free images, stroboscopic and afterimage effects, negative images, using archive images and remixing them, and images created by photo-chemical, electromagnetic or digital faults are discussed. Aesthetics of error is a kind of creative approach to creation that is based on the destruction and reduction of the essential function of the medium (i.e. faithful documentation). Trick images based on faults and errors express the desire for the overarching goal of finding visual phenomena dormant in the medium itself and in the manner of subjective recording and transformation of information about the surrounding world.

(Re)konstrukcja rodzinnej historii. Fotograficzny błąd w funkcji triku

Author(s): Justyna Hanna Budzik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 99/2017

The author considers the trick character of two photographic images that accidentally overlap, and therefore do not belong to the category of recreational or spiritual photography. Interpretation of photographs from the family archive is inscribed in the broader context of the philosophy of photography with references to the theories of Roland Barthes, François Soulages, Pierre Bourdieu and Marianna Michałowska. Budzik also touches on the relation between photographs and family narration, wondering how unintentional imagery influences the construction of a fantasy genealogy (a term coined by Joanna Bator)