The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates discussions and research from the previous year as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles appearing for the first time in English to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies.

The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies visual arts performing arts media and cultural studies the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

Fifty years after his death the Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Rou remains a cinematic icon in Russia and many other countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Dubbed ‘King of the Fairy Tales’ and ‘The Main Storyteller of the Country’ he transformed the landscape of Soviet fantasy and fairy-tale cinema during a directorial career that stretched from 1938 to 1972.



From the heights of Stalinist propaganda cinema through Khrushchev’s Thaw and into the Brezhnev Stagnation era Rou’s films celebrated and perpetuated the nation’s folkloric traditions while constantly refreshing them for new generations of young audiences.



In English-speaking countries Rou’s work remains relatively little known having received only limited theatrical distribution in the West. With home entertainment now offering wider opportunities to discover his unique and exhilarating oeuvre this book provides a timely introduction to the work of one of the world’s great masters of fairy-tale cinema.

The book traces the developments of Rou’s work on fairy-tale film providing cultural and technical contexts of production and analysing in a competent manner the features that mark Rou’s personal style whilst highlighting variations on narratives actors and special effects. It is a joyful read and an impeccably organised text which is well structured and brings out much more clearly the various phases in the development of Rou’s films. The chapters provide excellent introductions that serve to contextualise and connect the narrative.

Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social political and cultural contexts of their production including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.



The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can without didacticism provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.



When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.

World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.

When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011 with volumes on Los Angeles New York Paris and Tokyo the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011 thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux. 

The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures from Chinatown to Forrest Gump Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.



This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.



Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors iconic locations thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.



A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes Robert Altman Nicholas Ray Michael Mann and Roman Polanski World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.

 

On their shared appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show back in 2017 actors Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet sat down with DeGeneres to discuss their performances as Oliver (Hammer) and Elio (Chalamet) in Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017). In the interview both Hammer and Chalamet talk candidly with DeGeneres about their preparation and execution of the roles and the multiple “make out” scenes they had directed by Luca Guadagnino. DeGeneres an openly lesbian host of her self-titled talk show respected Hammer and Chalamet for presenting gay characters and a queer romance in a genuine and sensitive light even though both are heterosexual males in real-life. However at the end of the interview DeGeneres cheekily embarrasses Hammer in front of Chalamet and her studio audience with a feature story in People with the magazine's claim of Hammer being the “Sexiest Man Alive.” While this is not an uncommon labeling of celebrity in US popular culture broadly put Hammer's co-star Chalamet's response to the photograph and feature story in People was: “I knew he was sexy and took risks but I didn't know if he was the sexiest risk-taker.” As such repositioning the meaning of Hammer's performance as Oliver in terms of risk aids in a more balanced understanding of Hammer's star power in Call Me By Your Name as both reference and refracting point.

Film and literature each have their own devices for character development. These differences are particularly stark when considering the adaptation of Elio from André Aciman's book to Luca Guadagnino's film where the role is performed by Timothée Chalamet. The arc is ultimately a ‘coming of age’ one where Elio processes and embraces his feelings towards Oliver. Call Me By Your Name is an '80s summer romance infused with passion longing and the dreaded heartache that comes with the closing of Oliver's departure from the Perlman household. Elio is a deeply empathetic person. We see this with how close he is with both parents who regularly display forms of non-verbal compassion. Yet when it comes to interactions with Oliver Elio struggles to comprehend and express his desires. Aciman's book is driven by Elio's manic obsessive and often conflicting inner dialogue. Chalamet's task then is a difficult one: he must convey these complex emotions not through voiceover or dialogue but largely through his non-verbal performance often aided by other cinematic devices.

This chapter analyzes the nostalgic representation in the film Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) focusing on how gender and sexuality roles are depicted and the power relations that these representations establish. The analysis is grounded in the idea that representation is a discursive practice influenced by power dynamics shaping our understanding of reality. This chapter conceptualizes queer nostalgia not as a romanticized return to the past but as a mnemonic practice aimed at creating new roots and defending a shared heritage.

The chapter analyses how Call Me By Your Name visualises a queer pastoral space and time for its characters to explore gay love. Drawing on the writing of critical theorists and extensive textual analysis of key scenes it identifies key features of the pastoral form within the film. These include an Arcadian setting narrative movements of retreats and returns and nostalgia for a lost past.

With this in place the chapter explores how the film uses pastoral conventions to construct a nostalgic or idyllic view of gay romance. Set in an unspecified location in Northern Italy it asks to what extent the film deliberately uses utopian discourses to suggest the relative im/possibilities of queer love? The final section links to how the film relates to queer time through its veiled references to the AIDS crisis.

On its reception Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) remained insufficiently explicit for some critics who lamented instances such as the pan shot that takes us away from Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) in bed together: ‘Once the two lovers begin having sex for the first time however the camera coyly drifts over to an open window their early coital moans gentle in the background – the kind of tasteful dodge that practically nods to Code-era Hollywood’. This response is certainly understandable and recalls a similar rallying cry from Rose Troche's 1994 film Go Fish: ‘What would you rather our collective lesbian image be? Hot passionate say-yes-to-sex-dykes or touchy-feely soft-focus sisters of the woodlands?’ Guadagnino in making a mainstream high-profile adaptation has in the eyes of some critics opted for the ‘touchy-feely soft-focus’ route. However I would like to suggest that the film locates its explicitness in its sound design. This clever strategy is used to clearly convey actions which are not shown directly on screen. The film is filled with the sound of clothing slipping on and off of bodies and with the sound of bodies in contact. In the scenes in which Oliver fellates Elio there is audible sound design that articulates the action taking place. Drawing on work that discusses the importance of sound audio design and affect I would like to counter the suggestion that Call Me by Your Name is overtly coy in its display of sex. By attending to the details of the film's sound design we can see that it deliberately evokes the affect of pornography in order to amplify the film's explicitness.

Rather than being a ‘blueprint’ statement of instruction and following propositions made by Thomas Leitch adaptation screenplays are ‘recipes’ that both record a ‘doing’ and serve as a performance space of engagement with production teams. This is explicable in terms of how they propose a new enargeia by way of clear narrative idea that they frame through quasi-recursive recontextualization of both the literary field and the specifics of originary texts and then express via an integrated set of linguistic acts by way of axiological statement of intentionality for a film of a particular sort. The progression of this logic is explained through exploration of a seminal instance of Basque literature-to-film adaptation of Bernard Atxaga’s book Obabakoak written as a screenplay for the film Obaba by Montxo Armendáriz.

Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.



A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.



This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general between the open and the hidden and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.

This article analyses two South Korean feature films representing the traumatic memories of the ‘comfort women’ – Spirits’ Homecoming (2016) and Tuning Fork (2014). While both of these films share some thematic and stylistic similarities as depictions of the sexually enslaved women by Imperial Japan during the Second World War there is a crucial contrast in their narrative structure. This article analyses Spirits’ Homecoming as a fiction whose narrative structure conforms to Amsterdam/Bruner’s conservative account while Tuning Fork illustrates Strejilevich’s account of victims’ stories that defies traditional narrative conventions. Although both films find creative ways to disseminate the once-silenced stories of the victims and hold different sociocultural meanings this analysis suggests Tuning Fork highlights a distinctive intergenerational remembrance of the ‘comfort women’ which eschews dominant nationalistic discourse.

A wide-ranging career interview with Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To. The interview canvasses To’s early career and filmic influences the founding of his production company Milkyway Image his flirtation with Hollywood his taste in acting and his adjustment to new film technologies. In addition To recounts the making of key films in his oeuvre reveals his views on the current state of Hong Kong cinema and ruminates on the prospects of a second Election sequel.

Indonesian documentary filmmaking has been riding the global wave of unprecedented interest in the creation distribution and viewing of environmental documentaries. One of the frontrunners is investigative journalist and filmmaker Dandhy Laksono (b. 1976). With his production house Watchdoc and other collaborators since the late 2000s he has created an extraordinary quantity of thought-provoking environmental and sociopolitical documentaries many of which have received millions of views. In addition to public screenings in hundreds of Indonesian villages the popularity of these documentaries has been driven by their streaming on online platforms particularly YouTube. I argue that Laksono’s work is not merely about nature but about the politics of the environment. The film director not only criticizes political and social structures and practices with a destructive impact on the natural environment but also presents alternative more sustainable visions for our planet based on Gunter Pauli’s model of the Blue Economy. His documentaries address these environmental politics and alternative visions not only through their content but also through their participatory modes of representation and distribution. This article discusses the politics of the participatory by focusing on the aesthetic modes of address for inviting audience involvement; the promotion of the commons as a cause or ideal in communication and social and environmental affairs; the representation and expression of diverse social cultural and political voices including those of marginalized groups; the use of public screenings and interactive media for the sharing and creating of content and the social debates connections and actions established through these communicative processes.

There is now no shortage of media for us to consume from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations though is the maker: in particular the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.



How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging as well as thinking through time editing sound and the stream Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice. 

The result is a personal journey through media theory history and technology furnished with practical exercises for teachers students professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.

This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world. 

The primary readership will be among academics researchers and students in the creative arts as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers cinematographers and social media content producers. 

Designed for classroom use this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production and may also be of interest to students at MA level particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.

It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.