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Otakar Vávra is one of the most interesting directors of the European cinema, and not only because of his perennial professional activity that lasted over 80 ears. His formula for creativity consisted in adapting the native literature, in using films to artistically comment on the world, in treating the cinema as a segment of the whole culture, and not as its exclusive centre. The director’s project had to include the 20th-century politics, which tossed Czechoslovakia back and forth from democracy to totalitarianism. After the Munich Agreement or Munich Diktat (September, 1938) Czechoslovakia broke up and what was left was transformed into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic. The Czech cinematography became then a kind of chessboard, a confrontation area for various film directors’ and producers’ ambitions, for directives of the Protector’s Office (Reichsprotektor), for the expectations of the Czechs who collaborated with the Germans, for the courage and meanness of different people. Such were the circumstances under which Otakar Vávra made 12 films; and he was in touch both with conspiring professionals who were building the foundations for the future post-war cinematography (Vladislav Vančura) and with collaborating Barandov dictators (Miloš Havel). In his films appeared German dignitaries’ favourites (Lída Baarová, Adina Mandlová) and victims of the Nazi terror (Anna Letenská). Vávra’s films made during the Protectorate (and all of them have survived) and watched now may be interpreted in numerous ways; one of them is the biographical perspective.
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Recenzja: Rafał Syska, Filmowy neomodernizm, Wydawnictwo Avalon, Kraków 2014, ss. 594
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There are pieces of classical music which, in our culture, became so deeply associated with their later use in some product of commercial popular culture that it is almost impossible to dissociate them from this use. Since the theme of the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 was used in Elvira Madigan, a popular Swedish melodrama, this concert is even now regularly characterized as the “Elvira Madigan” concert even in editions by serious classical music editions like Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft… But what if, instead of exploding in an Adornian rage against such commercialized music fetishism, one makes an exception and openly confesses the guilty pleasure of enjoying a piece of music which is in itself worthless and draws all its interest from the way it was used in a product of popular culture? My favorite candidate is the “Storm Clouds Cantata” from both versions of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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This article abstracts essential positions in the early debates on Marxist Aesthetics at the first half of the 20th century, which has been shaped by prominent Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It claims that these early debates are at large related with the competence of the audience. It also focuses the relation between these debates and film.
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Što jest nešto zbog čega o(p)staje razlikovanje zla i dobra i njihovih fetišističkih izvedenica Raja i Pakla? Ako je nešto povezano sa značenjem i ništa je također. Krenimo ovako! Torinski konj (Bela Tarr) je priča o preživljavanju u odnosu ništa i nešto, potpuno minimalistički. Ali renesansa minimalizma može se naći i u njegovom Sotonskom tangu (po predlošku Krasznahorkai-a), prilogu rođenju i stasavanju tihe anarhije. Kakvi su likovi u tom romanu i kako se odnose prema distinkcijama?
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The paper deals with a most important and large branch of the entertainment industry – commercial cinema. The author analyzes tango motifs in cinematic history and highlights the links between the Hollywood and tango dance. Screenplay writers and directors of musicals, comedies, dramas and action movies frequently switch their attention to this passionate, dramatic, however often melancholic dance. The author argues that through interest in this topic, Western film industry tends to squeeze the representation of tango into particular clichés. So called hard tango (sp. tango duro), untypical to authentic social tango dance, became dominant. Since the famous tango scene in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), ostentatious dipping, long steps, outstretched hands, sudden movements, head shaking and bending the woman back have become rooted in the Western cinematic tradition. This shape of tango dance has been used to mediate a passion, anger and other dramatic feelings and have been repeated in later movies such, as Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), Last Tango in Paris (1972), Soldier of Orange (1977), True Lies (1994) and many others. Since the last decade of XX century in the movies, such as Alice (1990), Scent of a Woman (1992), Indochine (1992), tango was depicted in more favorable context and associated with the struggle for freedom, self-assertion, though the essential clichés remain.
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The issue of understanding, empathy and the relationship to the poor, the socially and economically marginalized segments of most contemporary societies, represents one of the most challenging political socio-economic, humanist, and scientific problems of today. The paper compares two ways of understanding and representing the urban poor – anthropological and cinematographic. The theoretical and practical achievements of Oscar Lewis and his idea of the “culture of poverty” are given as an example of the anthropological study and understanding of the poor. On the other hand, an analysis of the representation of the poor in Vittorio De Sica’s film Miracle in Milan (1951) is given as an example of the cinematographic treatment of the issue. The aim of this comparison is the confronting of two viewpoints – one which aims to get to the scientific truth about poverty and the other – which gives a subjective artistic interpretation of the “old and romantic story about the rich man and the pauper” and the consideration of their cognitive and interpretative effects and potential for an anthropological theory and practice on the issue which would be “better” and wider in scope.
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The paper uses the example of the movie Happiness (1998) to analyze cultural ideas on which the (de)construction of a happy American family and happy individuals who “have everything” is based. The paper also analyzes the director’s reflexive imagining of every character in the film, whose appearance is based on cultural attitudes and values of individuals, and which arises as an obstacle for establishing intimacy with other people and achieving happiness. Thus, this paper strives to show how culture paradoxically becomes “an obstacle to itself”, or rather, how culturally determined attitudes about oneself and others function as an obstacle in achieving culturally determined goals and life purposes.
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The cultural communication attempted by this film in the context of science fiction as part of popular culture is analyzed. The message of the film pertains to the inexistence of a solution to the instability of the relationship between the normative order and human behaviour – which is the description of human social existence in the film, and is interpreted as a pessimist view of this existence. The message is arrived at through a string of binary oppositions.
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Following the path established in Serbian anthropology by the subdiscipline of the anthropology of film, as well as the anthropological “section” for the study of science fiction, the analytical focus of this paper is the film Men and Chicken. Contrary to critics who saw in this film “an unreadable, morbid and cynical postmodern horror”, the basic thesis of this paper is that the film helps us not only to question public ideas about science, but also to shed light on the hopes, fears and conceptual dilemmas caused by the advance of biotechnologies. It helps us to, using a product of popular culture close to the experience of the general public, analyze the way in which the imaginarium of the film deals with the “paradox at the heart” of western thought – the simultaneous claim that humans are animals and that animality is the polar opposite of what we hold to be human. The paradox in question need not be an intellectual chew toy for a bored mind, nor an opportunity for demonstrating the wondrous power of an analytical process of Levi-Straussian calibre, rather a very relevant question in current institutional and public discussions on creating hybrid embryos/species at the heart of which are attempts to establish the biological, moral and cultural status of humans, non-humans and hybrids.
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The paper analyzes the dystopian narrative of the film The Lobster (2015, dir. Y. Lanthimos) as a political act. Rather than strictly focusing on what the film exposes as problematic (romantic and sexual relationships, emotional intelligence, and love in general), the analysis examines how this problem is presented through its dystopian vision, its narrative’s trajectory and characters’ actions, with what kind of critical potential these are endowed and consequently, what kind of political message the film communicates. It does so by looking more closely at three important narrative elements of the textual dystopia: the space of the film, the protagonists, and the language. Lastly, it examines the interpretative possibilities of its open-ended structure. The analysis aims to show that the film resembles abysmally looping narrative structures through which it acquires an enclosed mythological quality that debilitates any agential potentials of the narrative, fails to provide a utopian impulse, and consequently ends up supporting status quo.
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This article examines Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange through the concept of neobaroque. Starting with the basic elements of mise-en-scène such as costumes, scenography, and positioning of the body inside the shots, the aesthetic analysis of the film will move towards more abstract concepts such as spectacle and violence. By identifying these elements inside the film, the film itself could be understood, I argue, as a neobaroque film. Neobaroque film neither refers to a genre or a period in film history. It is an aesthetic term, with implicit references to changes in modern society, denoting a specific but also dynamic constellation of expressive and thematic elements in a given film. Occasional references to Baroque art are included not to make closer ties between two periods or forms of expression, but to suggest and show more clearly where neobaroque concepts stand in relation to the Baroque ones. A Clockwork Orange is not of the only neobaroque film. However, one thing that singles out A Clockwork Orange, is the number of traits, or neobaroque topoi, which are condensed in it. In this article, I will point out the most prominent ones, which are firmly embedded in the aesthetics of the film
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Reading the popular culture may contribute to the reflexive view on a discipline such as archaeology. Film, as a part of popular culture, frequently unveils the hidden messages, which may be an echo of a discipline or its distorted image in the mirror. Film and archaeology share not only the common origins in the modernity, but also the imaginary spaces where the past and the present meet and intertwine. The subjects treated in films, the contexts in which archaeology appears, speak of the place the discipline holds in the society, reminding us at the same time of all the elements encompassed by the archaeological discourse. On the other hand, if we compare the portraits of the imaginary archaeologists (such as Professor Mihajlo Pavlović, Vera Zarić), with the witnesses of archaeology in Serbia over the 20th century (Nikola Vulić, Dragoslav Srejović, Milutin Garašanin), we shall approach the meeting point between academic and general public, science and the audience, theory and practice. Extraordinary individuals, unemployed dreamers living at the borders of the worlds, charming connoisseurs of the underworlds – these are but some of the qualities ascribed to the discipline by the films. However, these stereotypes do not generate out of the void, they are the consequence of the self-representation. This mystification of the discipline leads us back to the debate on the responsibility and ethics of the social scientists inside the society they live in. Of course, the suggested reading is one of the many possibilities, one of the archaeological interpretations.
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Głównym założeniem artykułu jest fakt, że kultura filmowa, jako część kultury popularnej jest przestrzenią wielu szans edukacyjnych i socjalizacyjnych.
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The immediate motive for the writing of this paper is the renewed interest in the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose name, scientific work and authority (or the dubious value thereof) is firmly linked to the Yanomami people of South America. The image of the "paleolithic -neolithic" warrior culture of the Yanomami in the contemporary world, which was construed by the American anthropologist through his books and ethnographic films, was received by millions of people all over the world, including members of the Yanomami community. At the turn of the 21st century, this image - backfired at its author, his ethnographic subjects and the discipline itself, and began to disintegrate. The ensuing controversies are the topic of this paper.
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Cultural memory as symbolic heritage is objectivizes and externalized in texts, ritual, monuments, commemoration ceremonies, objects, images and other media. Contemporary studies of cultural memory and communication investigate Issues of remediation of cultural memory and communication. Cultural memory functions in different cultural communities depending on media technologies and mediums: printed texts and books, photographic, phonographic, audio-visual records and monuments, memorial sites. The article deals with the social aspects of remediation, communication and reception of cultural memory. Cinematic reflections of the past get particular attention.
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Celem poniższej pracy jest zbadanie postkolonialnych obrazów we współczesnym kinie włoskim, których produkcja w ostatnich dwudziestu latach uległa znacznemu rozwojowi, nie tylko we Włoszech, ale i w całej Europie. Mówiąc o postkolonializmie w filmie, należy najpierw przedstawić kolonialne dziedzictwo Włoch, aby płynnie przejść do postkolonialnych studiów nad filmem, a co za tym idzie do analizy konkretnych tytułów filmowych.
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Adaptation – the transformation of the work and the interpretation of its contents in the same or a different type of media. The aim of the article is to identify adaptation as a concept and as a phenomenon also to introduce its specific properties. Adaptation is most commonly associated with film media and with the transfer of literary works into movies. However, the article introduces adaptation both in the context of cinema and theater. Film and theater studies often try to establish a connection between the original (usually literary) work and the adapted version. Representatives of both media studies set up possible links between the first and the second text, usually by excluding certain features, offering classifications of adaptations The article includes several of the classifications: by D. Andrew and by P. Pavis, also the article attempts to purify their features, present the similarities of adaptation and the transfer of the narrative of the media.
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