Film Studies
Beijing Film Academy 2021
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.
Outback
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
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.
Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.
Architecture, Film, and the In-between
The long-established dialogue between architecture and film offers an interdisciplinary platform for a critical examination of spaces of in-between.
Apart from architecture informing scenography and cities serving as backdrops to the moving image films have actively participated in shaping the public opinion about architecture and its allied disciplines. While architecture and design may not necessarily be central themes in a film their spatial contextualization of the narrative informs cinematic productions. Screen Space and the In-Between looks at both the filmic imagination/representation of architectural in-betweenness as well as the in-between spaces within the inherent architectural structure of filmic expression.
On the one hand cinematic production serves as a site to project utopian fantasies of the built environment and on the other hand the processes tools and methods involved in both architecture and film function as mediators between abstract ideation and its materialized manifestation.
The book interrogates the filmic creation of spatial imaginaries through the anthropological lens especially as the disciplines in the built environment react to the liminal spaces of the cinematic. It adopts cinematic experiences of the built environment as a vantage point to reframe ongoing theoretical debates about liminal spaces.
Foreword by Mark Foster Gage
Contributors: Giuliana Bruno Beatriz Colomina James F. Kerestes Graham Harman Ferda Kolatan Juhani Pallasmaa Eva Perez De Vega Mehmet Sahinler Patrik Schumacher Maria Sieira Alican Taylan Vahid Vahdat Jason Vigneri-Beane Jon Yoder Michael Young
Call Me by Your Name
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.
Material Media-Making in the Digital Age
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.
Ulrike Ottinger
The first English language scholarly collection of articles on the leading Berlin based German artist and film-maker Ulrike Ottinger. The articles engage with the full range of the works from the early Berlin feature films of the 1970s and .'80s to the ethnographic documentaries also including the art exhibitions photography shows installations and artist books. The book brings together feminist film theorists with art historians and cultural theorists each with a distinctive and detailed perspective on the queer fabulist genres of Ottinger now in her 80s.
Reframing Berlin
Reframing Berlin is about how architecture and the built environment can reveal the memory of a city an urban memory through its transformation and consistency over time by means of ‘urban strategies’ which have developed throughout history as cities have adjusted to numerous political religious economic and societal changes. These strategies are organised on a ‘memory spectrum’ which range from demolition to memorialisation.
It reveals the complicated relationship between urban strategies and their influence on memory-making in the context of Berlin since 1895 with the help of film locations. It utilises cinematic representations of locations as an audio-visual archive to provide a deeper analysis of the issues brought up by strategies and case studies in relation to memory-making.
Foreword by Kathleen James-Chakraborty
A new volume in the Mediated Cities series from Intellect
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
A narrative of women and war: The Finnish silent era film ‘On the warpath’
This article discusses the film Sotapolulla (‘On the warpath’) (1922) a pioneering work in the early years of Finnish cinema. By highlighting the role that women played during the Finnish Civil War (1918) scriptwriter and director Teuvo Pakkala a well-known conservative writer created a model of femininity for the post-war period. The construction of the female characters accords with the standards of femininity in Hollywood silent film which featured strong assertive women committed to the social order. Thus Pakkala’s film in significant ways follows the classical model that Noël Burch identifies as an institutional mode of representation.
Scenographers, set and costume designers in the Alessandro Blasetti Archive
The Alessandro Blasetti Archive is a unique source of information that traces the profiles and work of many professional figures of the film industry including scenographers and costume designers. An examination of the director’s filmography reveals the names of the numerous maestri of Italian cinema who between the 1930s and the 1970s elevated the art of set and costume design beyond Italy. Among them were pioneers such as Virgilio Marchi Gastone Medin Gino Carlo Sensani and Dario Cecchi. The archive holds rare documents that concern them as well as documents relative to Marina Arcangeli and Maria de Matteis two women who were as important as their male colleagues to the success of Italian talent in this sector.
Fashion, migration and identity in Italian cinema: The case of Billo il grand dakhaar and Bangla
This article analyses the insightful role that fabric fashion and clothing shops have in Laura Muscardin’s Billo il grand dakhaar (Billo the Grand Dakhaar) (2008) and Phaim Bhuiyan’s first feature film Bangla (2019). Billo portrays the story of a young tailor from Senegal who dreams of becoming a fashion designer in Rome; Bangla fictionalizes the life of its director Phaim Bhuiyan a second-generation Italian of Bangladeshi descent. By analysing flashbacks and dream sequences as signifiers of cultural ties and by examining the role of the shops as emblematic spaces where the local and the transnational forge a new intersecting reality the article aims to investigate how both protagonists become active agents of change and how fashion contributes to the reshaping of the landscape of the city of Rome.
A Roman holiday with ‘open heritage’? Exploring copyright law and cultural heritage law’s role for our collective cultural interest in Italian film and Italian fashion
This article explores how the law affects an audience’s collective recognition that a film and fashion in film is of cultural interest. It argues that copyright law today can play an important and crucial role in a film’s continued relevance and in the preservation and valorization of cinema as copyright law regulates the copying and display of a film and its images including the fashion images within it. Likewise it shows how cultural heritage law plays an important and crucial role in the preservation and continued relevance of fashion through film as cultural heritage law applies certain rules and norms to the preservation of film reels and the archives and institutions in which they are stored. The article uses Roman Holiday (Wyler 1953) and La Dolce Vita (Fellini 1960) as case studies and considers Cinecittà’s description of itself as an ‘open heritage’ to explore the relationship between law fashion and film.
L’abito di domani: Storia della moda nel tempo, Giovanna Gagliardo (dir.) (2009), Italy: Luce Cinecittà
Review of: L’abito di domani: Storia della moda nel tempo Giovanna Gagliardo (dir.) (2009) Italy: Luce Cinecittà
‘Vetrine della Moda’: Forms and models of femininity on the pages of fascist movie magazines
Italian fascism of the 1930s dominated more than just politics particularly as it spilled over into styles of clothing. This article demonstrates that despite the manipulative ideology of fascism women found other ways to affirm their femininity. American fashion and costumes conveyed through the movie magazines of the same period became evidence of new cultural models that stood out in opposition to the Duce and his familiar and domestic ideals. Magazines such as Stelle and Cinema Illustrazione which were considered ‘cultural intermediaries’ proposed an image of a new woman built through exotic and sensual clothing and looks. Many columns were dedicated to building a direct relationship between the audience and the entertainment industry. As the industry sprung up with more advertisements and fashion articles it promoted new clothing styles make-up use and acting. This cultural orientation represented a historical contradiction which this article will consider.
Malavita chic: Fashion and fandom in the Italian crime series
This article analyses how fashion in the Italian crime series Suburra and Gomorrah is a significant facet of how these programmes’ visual and narrative discourses work upon audiences to communicate a privileged vision of the criminal subcultures they represent. Clothing and style are crucial to the series through the narrative dimension in which costuming reveals character development and symbolizes shifts in plot and theme as well by articulating the characters’ adherence to and deviation from their cultural milieu. Moreover by presenting an ethnography of criminal subcultures as articulated through dress these series have engendered a complex network of fashion fandom raising significant questions about viewer identification and the reification of mob wear within mainstream culture. This in-depth analysis of the role of fashion in Suburra and Gomorrah aims to deepen our understanding of how these series constitute a significant intervention on the interplay of fashion and identity in Italy today.
The costumes of an archaic dream: Pasolini, Danilo Donati and Oedipus the King (1967)
This article examines the collaboration between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Danilo Donati. Pasolini wanted the aesthetic of Oedipus the King to evoke an ‘indistinct barbaric’ feel and asked the great costume designer Danilo Donati for a mélange of Persian Sumerian Aztec and African art. Pasolini sought the shapes the drawings and the sculptures of an archaic civilization but mixed together adhering to the Pasolinian method of contamination so that they would lose their original identity in a new form that at the same time recalled ancient cultures or in the case of the African art even tribal history.
Fashioning: Women and gender in film and fashion
This article introduces the interviews featured in this issue of the journal with filmmaker Alina Marazzi and creative director of the Maison Christian Dior Maria Grazia Chiuri. In 2020 Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned Alina Marazzi to make a short film about the work of Lucia Marcucci a feminist visual poet and artist active in the 1960s and 1970s who combined the language of mass media and advertising and addressed themes such as the changing values of family domesticity and the role of women. Focusing on the work of Alina Marazzi and Maria Grazia Chiuri this article provides a framework to explore the long history of fashion and film as well as the collaboration between Chiuri and female artists. In addition to discussing the digital genre of the ‘fashion film’ the essay contextualizes the emergence and development of the field of fashion studies and its relationship with feminism women the media and the history of women and fashion.