The Question of Cinema: Myth, Prophecy and Technology
This essay uses the method of Tensegrity – a means of dynamic methodological triangulation that allows for open threads and poetic interventions.
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This essay uses the method of Tensegrity – a means of dynamic methodological triangulation that allows for open threads and poetic interventions.
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The article presents the sequence through which the film describes sequences of patriarchal paternity norms in BH society. One of the most impressive, if not the most powerful, media influencing media is film. Through its action, it enables the subject to identify with a given action template through moving images. Traditional family relationships, and above all those concerning paternity as an essential feature of patriarchy, the most iconic, and most conventional, can be interpreted and presented through film art. This is the typical context of the traditional model of society.
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This article uses the medium of film to analyze masculinities at the intersection of the regionally specific with the typical: the peripheral factory town with the universalizing panelák, or apartment block. This article addresses how the private spaces in industrial regions achieve new meaning when the role of the factory or public space, idealized in communist propaganda, has undergone a dramatic transformation. After the narratives that made spaces “great” became irrelevant in 1989 and the paneláky and factories lost their metaphorical meanings, they became simply apartment buildings and privately owned worksites. Within these spaces, many working-class men in industrial regions have faced more difficult transitions than women because they, as idealized workers under socialism, were more invested in the system and lost more from its collapse. Through an analysis of common themes in films released roughly fifteen years after the Velvet Revolution, the author asks how these men relate to the panelák, or private space, when excluded from the masculine, public space of the factory. How does the employment situation impact the family unit? What solutions do directors present to these men who find themselves ill-equipped for life in the industrial periphery after the post-1989 transition? This article draws from and contributes to recent work in the field of Czech gender studies and functions as a Czech case study on the relationship between gender and space in the former Eastern Bloc.
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Beginning approximately a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a cultural wave of various artistic representations of the socialist housing projects (blokowisko in Polish) arose in Poland. Three such works, Krzysztof Bizio’s short story collection Zresztą latem wszystkie kwiaty są takie piękne [Besides, in Summer All Flowers are Beautiful] (2003), Robert Gliński’s feature film Cześć, Tereska [Hi, Tereska] (2001), and Sylwester Latkowski’s documentary Blokersi (2001), well illustrate this new cultural trend. A common feature of these works is the complete absence of cultural or national landmarks; the life of the protagonists revolves around the housing projects and the non-places of supermodernity. The atmosphere in the stories ranges from gloom to darkness and their endings are usually unresolved or tragic. However, despite the despair and even fatalism surrounding especially the young female characters, all of the protagonists manage to find spaces of refuge, where they can unlock their imagination. Drawing on Marc Auge’s study of the non-places of supermodernity and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, while comparing the works to the contemporaneous Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever (2001), this article emphasizes the transnational character of the blokowisko and its universal meaning as a non-place.
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Comedy provided the Bulgarian-born East German film director Slatan Dudow with an approach to realism that was distinct from, and ran counter to, simplistic versions of socialist realism of the time and was central to his unorthodox, practical understanding of socialist political aesthetics. It is this thinking that I propose to reconstruct in this article, discussing its emergence in the montage technique of Dudow’s first film, Kuhle Wampe (1931/1932), its development in published and unpublished writings in terms of what he called the “social comedy of character” (soziale Charakterkomödie), and its enactment in his final, unfinished film, Christine (1963/1974).
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The paper discusses The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973) by John Bellairs and its film adaptation, directed by Eli Roth (2018), from queer theory and gender studies perspectives. The author of the article aims to overview and develop existing queer in‑terpretations of the first novel in the Lewis Barnavelt series, with contextual references to the cycle’s subsequent volumes, and to conduct a queer theory ‑inspired analysis of Roth’s motion picture. The genre represented by the novel and the film is also consid‑ered by taking the scholarly reflections on the queer aspects of the Gothic and the hor‑ror into account. The author concludes that although both versions of the story fail at portraying femininity in an unconventional way, they succeed in showing that queer‑ness and, more generally, the Otherness should be highly appreciated and valued.
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Death, sadness, alienation, and confusion are themes that are rarely associated with children’s animated series. Nevertheless, there are multi-episode TV programs that – similarly to books, video games, and films – raise such issues even though they are created for young viewers. In that way, they not only break the cultural taboo, but also offer aesthetics and sensitivity that complement the image of mainstream children’s programming as laid-back and cheerful. As an interesting example, one might point to Patrick McHale’s Over the Garden Wall (2014), an animated series that deals with such themes as fear or death in a unique way, showing them against the background of adventure and wandering. In this article, the authors focus on the ways in which the work resonates with the mentioned motifs, but also with history and popular culture. The analysis leads to a conclusion that Over the Garden Wall is an intertextual series, open to interpretation for younger and older viewers alike, as well as enabling the experience of a Thanatic catharsis – a cleansing from the negative feelings associated with death and loss.
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The National Theater, with an archive of plays put in this theater since 1945, has a large number of files of theatrical performances, which list the title of the play, author, director and year. In this archive, the file "The General of the Dead Army" contains important materials for one of the most dignified performances in the history of the Albanian Theater, staged in 1972 by the National Theater Troupe by director Pirro Mani. This play is a dramatization by the director himself, based on the novel with the same title by the great writer Ismail Kadare. The “General ”by Pirro Mani, another variant of this play is put, this time with the title“ Pilgrimage in anxiety ”, by the director Serafin Fanko. In the archive of the theater of this city, which begins its work in 1950, there is a large number of files, which, although fewer in number, are richer than those of the National Theater. Inside the file of the play "Pilgrimage in anxiety" of this archive, typed by the director himself, there is the text dramatized by the most representative director of this theater, Serafin Fanko, along with the directing platform. Both archives have, in addition to costume sketches, posters of each show, a considerable number of photographs taken during the shows. The photographic archive is of great importance for recording the history of Albanian directing in a period when performances were not recorded. Through them a mosaic of the visual way of constructing the show, mise-en-scène, makeup, costumes and scenography can be constructed. This visual documentation creates the opportunity also to get to know the great actors, and in the paragraph on actors, the photographs serve as a guide for the construction and conception of the characters visually. The photographs found in these files of the National Theater Archive and the “Migjeni” Theater Archive turn into a cognitive tool for future generations. Finding these materials of great importance for the theater in these archives was a discovery, without which we would not have been able to create a Confrontation between the generals of the Mani-Fanko theater, a study that has not been done to date.
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The article examines Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (Przypadek, 1981) as a film with a distinct philosophical significance. According to the interpretation proposed, in Blind Chance Kieslowski touches on both universal philosophical topics (death, meaninglessness, quest for certainty and truth, deciphering silence) and “local” themes (East-European historical pessimism, geography as destiny, “terror of history”). In spite of Kieslowski’s self-declared religious agnosticism, Blind Chance could be—thanks even to the aesthetics of the film—read as a paradoxical theological statement, not so much about God per se, as about the necessity of his existence. In the same vein, the film occasions a series of meditations on historical fate and the role of geography in history, about hope and hopelessness, existential exhaustion, and legacies of silence.
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Screen and Novel on Stage: a Cross Reflection on three Krystian Lupa’s Shows. Through the analysis of three shows – City of dream based on The Other Side by Alfred Kubin, Gargoyles and Cutting Timber based on Thomas Bernhard’s novels – this article aims at highlighting the specificity of on-stage video in Krystian Lupa’s work. Best known for his adaptations of long novels focusing on conscience and interiority, Lupa supersedes a basic use of video and uses it as a real means for the exploration of the characters’ psyche. More than a mere visual element facilitating the transition from novel to stage, video is for Krystian Lupa a way to interrogate the relationship between all the elements of theatre: indeed, it questions the actor’s relationship to the character he embodies, as well as the relationship between the spectator and what happens on stage.
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The Theatrical Potential in David Foenkinos’ Work. Analysis of the Novel, the Scenario and the Film “La Délicatesse”. Our interest, especially when it comes to the subject of literature, is to show the manner in which the text processing done by the author (script writer/director) brings to light the guidelines of the novelistic text’s semantics, which under careful analysis reveals a kind of personal myth of the novelist. The skewed, syncopated, interrupted writing which disrupts the chronotope serves the needs of the script as well as the director’s selective vision. Unconsciously, the novel seems to follow the structure of the theatrical model. These traits can also be found in the cinematographic structure of the film.
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This article proposes eco-intermediality as a cross fertilization between what has been the hitherto predominantly thematic orientation of ecocriticism and the more form-oriented concerns of intermediality studies. To explore the transformative potential of this eco-intermedial conceptual framework, I focus on the 2013 manga adaptation of Hōjōki by the Japanese visual artist Mizuki Shigeru. Hōjōki (1212)is a medieval essay written by the Japanese poet-monk Kamo no Chōmei and bearing witness to a string of environmental disasters that overtook Kyoto at around the end of the twelfth century. The combination of a poignant environmental theme with a long history of translations and adaptations makes this work particularly amenable to an eco-intermedial approach. My main argument is that the post-Fukushima adaptation by Mizuki is a game-changer in such history, inasmuch as the artist brings his unique environmental imaginary and the distinctive formal affordances of manga to bear on Chōmei’ s text, so as to convey the sense of a world where objects and phenomena are endowed with agency and thus outside full human control. The ultimate aim of the present article is to highlight the far-reaching ecological implications of the intermedial textures that Mizuki creates in his manga Hōjōki to express an environmental imaginary hinged on material agency and empathy.
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This article presents a comparative analysis of HBO’s mini-series Chernobyl (2019) and Svetlana Alexievich’s literary testimonies Voices of Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997) – both of which represent the events and the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. As a case study in intermedial ecocriticism, the comparative study investigates the ability of each media product to make perceptible the forces of radiation, focusing in particular on what it feels like to inhabit the atmospheres of contamination that the two media products invite their viewers and readers to enter. The article proposes the neologism ‘spectral toxicity’ as a means to describe these atmospheres in which the presence of a threatening nonhuman force feels immanent and impending while also remaining imperceptible. Methodologically, the article is situated in the intersection of ecocriticism and intermedial studies, as it seeks to elucidate the phenomenologically distinct ways in which Voices of Chernobyl, as a literary work, and Chernobyl, as an audio-visual work, employ different aesthetic strategies to represent radiation and to mobilize affective experiences. The article argues that both works employ a type of indexical aesthetics, but that the choice of index differs depending on the modality of the media product. Whereas the mini-series constructs a rich soundscape and striking images of bodily decay, Voices of Chernobyl provides a polyphony of first person testimonies about the dehumanizing experience of radiation exposure. By comparing the two media products in terms of the experiences they create, the study illustrates the varying affordances of literary and audio-visual media for representing the phenomenon of radiation and the consequences of nuclear disaster.
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This article analyzes creation works of Wladyslaw Starewich (1882-1965), who is pioneer of puppet (also known as spatial, volumetric) animation. Filmmaker’s works cover even several countries. W. Starewich personality as a creator was formed in Lithuania (in that historical period as part of the Russian Empire), first documentary and entomological films and first spatial animation film were created. The artist continued his animation film creation in Russia, but feature films are the major part of films created here, which have a lot of mysticism, mystery, fabulosity. Creative period in France is the longest and often seen as the most successful. W. Starewich films frequently were created based on motives of fairy-tales or fables, although the artist has created and completely original script. For animation pioneer always since the beginning of his career it was important to experiment with film technical solutions, to improve them, to create new effects. Animation creator designed all his movies by himself from the beginning to the end (only family members, wife and daughter helped him) and he never intended to work in film companies. Maybe perhaps this is why he created peculiar, well-recognizable style which fascinated and influenced other filmmakers at that time.
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This paper is analysing the relationship between totalitarianism (particularly in its Nazi form) and art. The following questions are being thematised: whether totalitarianism and art can actually coexist and whether their conflict is truly inevitable, whether and what kind of art can exist within the totalitarian framework, and, in line with the basic concept of this paper, whether any significant artwork was produced during the Nazism era. This paper also considers the attitude of Nazi ideology towards certain forms of art, such as sculpture, film, literature and painting, as well as the segments of Nazi repression in terms of artistic expression.
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Realnost poratnog postjugoslovenskog društva dominantno je oblikovana etnonacionalističkom ideologijom koja u ratu 90‑ih pronalazi izvor formiranja kolektivnog identiteta. Jedno od fundamentalnih toposa (po)ratnog narativa i njegovih medijskih reprezentacija jeste samoviktimizacija, odnosno autoreprezentacija žrtve. Kao identitarno obilježje kolektiva, pozicija žrtve (etnije ili nacije kao žrtve) osigurava moralnu superiornost etnije ili nacije, homogenizira, unificira, mobilizira zajednicu polarizacijom ratnog sukoba na odnos žrtva‑zločinac koji implicira svijest: ako sam žrtva, ne mogu biti zločinac. Eksplicitna etnonacionalistička ideologija postjugoslovenskog društva, a time, kao njen dio, i diskurzivna borba za status žrtve, određuje značajan dio poetike postjugoslovenskog igranog filma. Nakon prvog dijela rada u kojem razmatram važnost samoviktimizacije za etnonacionalističku ideologiju, u drugom dijelu analiziram uticaj takve ideologije na filmsku produkciju, uticaj koji je rezultirao nastansku tzv. filma samoviktimizacije kao posebnog žanra unutar postjugoslovenskog igranog filma. Film samoviktimizacije analiziram unutar tri postjugoslovenske kinematografije: srpske (Nož), hrvatske (Bogorodica i Četverored) i bosanskohercegovačke (Go West). U radu se ne bavim historiografskim, faktografskim, statističkim podacima, niti uzrocima, razlozima, krivcima, već autoreprezentacijom žrtve putem analitičkog metoda razumijevanja logike i mahanizama samoviktimizacije i njenog značaja za oblikovanje nacionalnog poratnog identiteta.
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Franczak surveys the vast cultural phenomenon called the post-apocalypse. The selection of texts and practices, based on formal criteria, is treated from various perspectives: as a late-modern refiguration of the apocalyptic imaginary, as an epochal adaptation of the main themes of catastrophism, as a substitute expression of traumatic historical experiences, and as a unique philosophical and anthropological laboratory. Franczak concludes by suggesting ways to identify the collective phantasms that shape the postapocalypse and to consider its ambivalent political nature.
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Leśniak presents an interpretation of selected works and texts by contemporary German artist Hito Steyerl. Drawing on Nicolas Bourriaud’s version of the concept of digital realism and the notion of enrichment proposed by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Leśniak demonstrates that Steyerl’s practice is characterised by an exceptional ability to thematise current problems. Her works are not only extremely relevant in the way they refer to problems related to the mechanisms of visuality in the digital age, but also in the way they tackle the functioning of institutions – museums and galleries – as a process of enrichment that is key to the logic of capitalism in the post-industrial era.
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The article analyses Bernardo Bertolucci’s screen adaptation (1970) of Alberto Moravia’s novel “The Conformist” in comparison with the censored version of the film released in the Soviet Union in 1976. Attention is paid foremost to the dubbed Russian version’s visual cuts and translation shifts, which amount to the creation of a new, castrated version that is approximately 30 minutes shorter than the original film and that ideologically corresponds to the then-dominant Soviet discourse of representing fascism. The article demonstrates how in this new, censored version where Bertolucci’s complex narrative is transformed into a linear narrative (that surprisingly makes it closer to the original novel by Moravia), the characters’ psychological inner worlds and Bertolucci’s storyworld conveyed through images, sounds and language have become lost in translation.
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The dominance of excessive eroticism, which is being used as a culture over our mentality and is being given high priority to social networks, is described in this paper. Another phenomenon is the approach of adolescents to this phenomenon who through social networks encounter “cultural” portals, different newspapers, which are the first news of provocative images. What results does this education bring to us in Kosovo? Some regional and international comparisons have been made with portals, media that “bombard” the site with erotic images. The paper also discusses why this phenomenon is used, its impact on massive scale? To what extent has our consciousness provoked and this phenomenon is growing massively, while it is known that actors, singers and, more generally, more artists are exposing body to values than values. In the paper, it is also about how to get out of this phenomenon.
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