Film Studies
Teaching screenwriting from the inside out: The importance of writers’ inner, emotional discoveries in understanding the tools of screenwriting
This article discusses the vital importance of expanding a screenwriting curriculum to demonstrate screenwriting techniques and finding originality by initially deriving story ideas from students’ life experiences emotional memories and insights. It highlights the inherent problem common to a number of screenwriting students who desire to ‘race for originality’ that tends to imitate films they have already seen rather than finding the inspiration from a world they are better familiar with. The article introduces examples and results where the stories have first been solidly rooted in the writer’s own experiences. The qualitative research question is how do students benefit from learning to write from the inside? The article challenges the order in which basic elements must be disseminated to students and suggests that alongside the traditional structures and tools of storytelling in teaching screenwriting teachers should first and foremost guide students towards the private sources of their individual experiences and memories highlighting their unique potential and originality. The article is based on qualitative research materials collected from screenwriting workshops the author has conducted in various film schools in Finland and Belgium between 2017 and 2021 using an emotional mapping method.
The stuff that dreams are made of: The Maltese Falcon and the art of adapted screenwriting
There is a close relationship between pulp fiction and film noir. The link is the adapted screenplay. While there has been extensive critical work on film noir for almost 70 years there has not been an equally intense scrutiny of the process of adaptation and its product the adapted screenplay. This article offers a critical discussion of the complex literary-cinematic ecology of the noir adaptation/screenwriting process for The Maltese Falcon and the role of fidelity in the adaptation as a key ingredient of the film’s success. The methodology involves examining the various factors methods and players involved in the creation of the screenplay with an emphasis on a comparative study of the literary text and its screenplay. The article concludes that fidelity in adaptation was central to the film’s appeal and that the film’s success raised the profile of the novel. The level of screenwriting talent the nature of the relationship between the screenwriter and the director and the depth of cultural resonance found in the original literary text were vital influences on the adaptation process and the resulting film. These factors turned The Maltese Falcon screenplay into a standard for future pulp to noir adaptations.
The accented Japanese screenplay: Transnational currents in contemporary Japanese cinema
Japanese cinema in the early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Japanese-language films written by non-Japanese screenwriters. The arrival of these screenwriters and screenplays complicates existing discourses on ‘nation’ and the transnational in Japanese cinema. In particular it adds to the tensions around East–West binaries that often permeate considerations of non-Japanese contact with cinematic representations of Japan and requires industry practitioners and researchers to re-consider notions of ‘Japan’ and cultural contact in cinema from Japan. Drawing on the concept of ‘accented cinema’ this article positions Japanese screenplays by non-Japanese screenwriters as accented Japanese screenplays. Two such screen texts are critiqued to suggest the dialogic inevitability of polyvocal interpretations of accented Japanese screenplays with regard to issues of privilege and marginalization as well as the national and the transnational.
No Simple Way Home, Akuol De Mabior (dir.) (2022)
Review of: No Simple Way Home Akuol De Mabior (dir.) (2022) South Sudan: Lbx Africa and Steps
Constructions of the Real
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form content and process.
The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate first-person works where memory and identity are explored. The second features responses to and interventions in historical and dominant relationships to place. The third explores multivarious forms of essay films. In the final section filmmakers discuss the precarity of non-fiction filmmaking in its form and financial rewards. This book is anti-colonial in that it offers diverse new voices and new practices promoting hybridity and experimentation and makes claims for knowledges that fall outside of traditional scholarship. This book presents the silenced and the marginalized.
It engages with current debates about the role of creative scholarship and makes a claim for non-fiction filmmaking as a knowledge-making practice for revealing critiquing and interpreting the world.
Contributors include Kaveh Abbasian Judith Aston Nicholas Andueza Elisabeth Brun Joanna Callaghan Gerda Cammaer Philip Cartelli Lorena Cervera Jill Daniels Kath Dooley Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz Andréa França Catherine Gough-Brady Robert Hardcastle Alex Johnston Elizabeth Miller Ros Mortimer Kim Munro Minou Norouzi Stefano Odorico Rebecca Ora Sheersha Perera Christine Rogers Isabel Seguí Jeni Thornley and Masha Vlasova.
Boxed within the frame: Tibetan masculinities in transformation in Pema Tseden’s Jinpa
The Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature Jinpa (2018) marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history culture and tradition haunt the men in the film Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of carriers of culture he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.
3-D Experimental VR and Art Practices
The book addresses themes such as visual perception perception of 3-D and stereo. With the event of the stereoscope and the theatre dioramas and panoramas before it vision and perception in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is seen to be marketed to a mass audience. As such the spectacle of the stereoscope and other optical devices can be seen as a precursor to mass media dissemination today.
Yet artists use the stereoscope and VR to signify the spectacle clairvoyance vision and the mechanism of vision as well as a symbol for the act of looking being looked at while looking and the gaze within an art new media practice.
Other artists have used 3-D and virtual reality to address themes such as theories of consciousness or embodied consciousness the human – machine relationship and the idea of mapping reality alternative networked realities.
The book includes an introduction and summary of chapters 86 anaglyphic 3-D images and presents a survey of artists working in 3-D and virtual reality VR art. The convergence of other fields such as new media art video art and early virtual reality art is described through many examples within the scope of the book.
Artists discussed include Mert Akbal Zoe Beloff Geoffrey Berliner Lygia Clark Dan Graham Salvador Dali Marcel Duchamp Scott S. Fisher Rebecca Hackemann Perry Hoberman Daniel Iglesia Ken Jacobs William Kentridge Susan MacWilliam Patrick Meagher Rosa Menkman Jim Naughten Tony Ousler Alfons Schilling Joel Schlemowitz Christopher Schneberger Judith Sönniken Ethan Turpin Aga Ousseinov Colleen Woolpert.
3-D glasses included with hardback book.
Anarchitectural Experiments
The book investigates speculative filmic architectural projects and animations that go beyond representing buildings touching upon issues concerning medium act of representation or conducting criticism on history culture society or urban politics along with the mediated character of contemporary spatial experience – interpreting it primarily through protocols of architectural imaging.
The book centres on the influence of simulation and cinematic design on visionary or speculative architecture. It outlines the impact of film and animation in architectural representation through key projects. The opening analysis is useful in contextualizing speculative architectural projects while the later chapters link the theory to the imagery. Stasiowski uses a diverse collection of interesting case studies that are easy to read and well-chosen to support his argument.
This is a well-researched work and comprehensive review of speculative architecture and various media that describe it. Stasiowski makes a thorough argument about the use of cinema and animation as a method of architectural visualization.
Stasiowki’s book sets itself apart from other work in the same area by in discussing speculative projects in relation to cinema. and specifically the effect that modern technologies are having on the subject now and in its potential futures.
The borderline between material environment and spatialized imagery becomes progressively more blurred while demand for visionary works that would make sense of this merging has never been greater.
It will appeal primarily to architects and designers filmmakers and academics. It may also be of interest to artists set designers and film production designers.
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
Beijing Film Academy 2020
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.
Fedor Bondarchuk: 'Stalingrad'
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field they are intended for film enthusiasts and students combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing.
This KinoSputnik about Fedor Bondarchuk's megahit Stalingrad (2013) examines the production context and reception of the film whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes.
Fedor Bondarchuk’s 2013 blockbuster film Stalingrad shattered box-office records and dazzled viewers with its use of special effects enhanced by its 3D IMAX format. The film transported viewers back to 1942 and the bloody battle that would turn the tide of the Second World War.
This new study situates the film within the context of ongoing debates about the meanings of the Second World War in Russia and previous films about the Battle of Stalingrad.
Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts but will also be of interest to anyone researching or studying the Battle of Stalingrad and the course of the Second World War.
A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Aleksei Balabanov: 'Brother'
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field they are intended for film enthusiasts and students combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing.
Ira Österberg's KinoSputnik on Aleksei Balabanov's cult film Brother (1997) examines the production history context and reception of the film and offers a detailed reading of its key themes.
Balabanov’s Brother made a mark on the new Russia’s film history as its hero Danila Bagrov quickly gained cult status and the nostalgic rock soundtrack hit the nerve of the young post-Soviet generation. This study unravels the film’s effective and ingenious mixture of genre elements art narration and almost documentary-style realism which would become trademarks for Balabanov’s oeuvre.
Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts but will also be of interest to anyone researching or studying film soundtracking.
A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Andrei Tarkovsky: 'Ivan's Childhood'
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field they are intended for film enthusiasts and students combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing. This KinoSputnik on Andrei Tarkovsky's debut feature Ivan's Childhood examines the production context and reception of the film whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes.
Through a close examination of its intricate narrative structure unique stylistic approach and deep philosophical underpinnings this KinoSputnik provides a thorough analysis of a truly remarkable debut film from an artist now considered a towering figure of Russian culture.
Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts.
A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Beijing Film Academy 2019
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.
Men, War and Film
The Calling Blighty series of films produced by the Combined Kinematograph Service produced towards the end of the Second World War were one-reel films in which soldiers gave short spoken messages to the camera as a means of connecting the front line and the home front. These are the first ever films where men speak openly in their regional accents and they have profound meaning for remembrance documentary representation and the ecology of film in wartime.
Of the 400 films (or ‘issues’) made 64 survive. Each of those contained around 25 individual messages. Men – and a very few women - from a particular city town or region were grouped together for the films to make regional screenings back in UK cinemas and town halls possible. Personnel from all three services are featured but the men are predominantly from the army units. Screenings took place at a cinema in the subjects’ local area and were usually organised by the regional Army Welfare Committee. The names and addresses of those to be invited to the screenings were sent to the UK along with the films.
Until now these films have barely been researched and yet are a valuable source of social history as well as representing a different mode from the mainstream of British wartime documentary. This book expands the history of Calling Blighty and places it in a broader context both past and present. New research reveals the origins of the film series and draws comparisons with written and oral contemporary sources.
Steve Hawley is an artist/filmmaker whose work has been screened worldwide and has collaborated closely with the North West Film Archive UK. He is emeritus professor at the Manchester Metropolitan University UK.
Using memoirs and diaries Steve Hawley has researched the roles in the Burma campaign of participants in the surviving films and traced over 160 of the families of the men – and two men still alive – and recreated these wartime screenings.
Hawley’s book is part description of the films part reclamation of a largely unknown genre of wartime filmmaking partly an account of the Burma campaign and partly a discussion of war and memory. Engagingly and warmly written.
It will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of war studies especially those specializing in the social rather than military history of warfare and historians of British wartime cinema and documentary. Also useful for an undergraduate audience in history media/film studies.
Potential for readers with an interest in the Second World War particularly the war in Burma and those with an interest in family history of the period.
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories
Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories comprises fourteen essays on the history and influence of cultural Islam on Bombay cinema. These essays are written by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents. Following Marshal Hodgson the term ‘Islamicate’ is used to describe Muslim cultures in order to distinguish the cultural forms associated with Islam from the religion itself. Such a distinction is especially important to observe in South Asia where over a thousand-year history Muslim cultures have commingled with other local religious and cultural traditions to form a rich vein of syncretic aesthetic expression. This volume argues that the influence of Muslim cultures on Bombay cinema can only be grasped against the backdrop of this long history an argument that informs the shape of the whole.
The book is divided into two sections. The first ‘Islamicate Histories’ charts the historical roots of South Asian Muslim cultures and the precursors of Bombay cinema’s Islamicate idioms in the Urdu Parsi Theatre the Courtesan cultures of Lucknow the traditions of miniature painting poetry song and their performance and the various modes of story-telling that derive from Perso-Arabic traditions. The second section ‘Cinematic Forms’ discusses the way in which these Islamicate histories are partially constitutive of the traditions of representation performance and story-telling that give Bombay cinema its distinctive character traditions that have continued into Bollywood. It explores ‘Islamicate’ genres like the ‘Oriental’ film and the ‘Muslim Social’ as well as forms of poetry and performance like the ‘ghazal’ and ‘the qawwali’.
Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories is published at a time of acute crisis in the perception and understanding of Islam where Islamophobia stereotypes Muslims as incipient fifth column and Hindu fundamentalism is ascendant. It demonstrates that Muslim and Hindu cultures in India are inextricably entwined and shows how the syncretic idioms of Islamicate cultural history inform the very identity of Bombay cinema even as that cinema has also instrumentalized Islamicate idioms to stereotype and even demonise the Muslim especially in contemporary Bollywood.
This book argues that many of the idioms of Bombay cinema that we love are derived from the historical influence of Muslim cultures as they interacted with other traditions in the Indian subcontinent. It traces the emergence of cultures of poetry dance song performance and story-telling out of the thousand-year history of Islam on Indian soil and describes the ways in which they underlie and inform the expressive forms of Bombay cinema. It is timely to be reminded of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the distinctive and widely recognized popular cinema of India at a historical moment when the cultural influence of Islam on India is being denied by forces which seek to turn the country away from cultural pluralism towards Hindu fundamentalism. Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories features contributions by major scholars of both South Asian cultural history and Indian cinema working across several continents.
The audience for this book will be primarily graduate and advanced undergraduate students of film studies. The writing is accessible and lively and individual chapters will be suitable for classroom use.
It will be of value in disciplines outside film studies where the Islamicate tradition in general and its impact on film in particular is taught. It will find an audience in disciplines such as history cultural studies women's studies visual studies and South Asian area studies. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know how cinema negotiates the parameters of Muslim identity in response to historical and contemporary events in India.
Remembering Paris in Text and Film
This new book explores aspects of Paris from the time of Baudelaire within the context of nostalgia and modernity. It seeks to see Paris through written texts and movies from the outside and as both concrete reality and a collection of myths associated with it.
This collection of essays contains original research on the intersections of several disciplinary approaches to Paris and modernity. It is designed to make these complex concepts speak to an academic audience but also to an undergraduate readership. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines.
The book springs from two interdisciplinary courses on Paris and modernity – Paris at Dawn which looks at modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Paris at Midnight which looks at left-bank culture following the Second World War – coordinated by Associate Professor Alistair Rolls (French studies) and Professor Marguerite Johnson (classics and classical reception) at the University of Newcastle Australia.
While it is driven by original research notably by examining the intersections of any number of disciplinary lenses and positions on Paris and modernity it is also designed to make these complex concepts understandable for a wider readership including undergraduates. It will therefore create intersections and problematize what are otherwise considered the remit of single disciplines (with their monoliths and taxonomies); at the same time it will also provide clarity and importantly make logical links between for example the past and present myth and reality poetry and history and various schools and movements including psychology poetics poststructuralism and critical theory classical reception feminism and existentialism. All contributors are academics working in the School of Humanities and Social Science who have contributed to the development and delivery of these twinned courses.
Remembering Paris investigates Paris as an urban and poetic site of remembrance. For Charles Baudelaire the streets of Paris conjured visions of the past even as he contemplated the present. This book investigates this and other cases of double vision tracing back from Baudelaire into antiquity but also following Baudelaire forwards as his poetry is translated received and referenced in texts and films in the twentieth century and beyond.
Primary readership will be academics educators scholars and students – both undergraduate and postgraduate. The chapter structure and the relatively classic choice of authors and filmmakers is well suited to course use.
Many universities are now turning to interdisciplinary courses which combine historical cultural literary and artistic approaches to thematic studies. This book therefore will also be of interest to academics teaching courses on French language literature and culture; literary studies; film studies; cultural studies; women studies gender studies; LGBTQ+ studies; even human geography.
Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film
This will be the first edited collection in English on urban space and architecture in Spanish popular film since 1898. Building on existing film and urban histories this innovative volume will examine Spanish film through contemporary interdisciplinary theories of urban space the built environment visuality and mass culture from the industrial through to the digital age.
Architecture and Urbanism in Spanish Film brings together the innovative scholarship of an international and interdisciplinary group of film architecture and urban studies scholars thinking through the reciprocal relationship between the seventh art and the built environment. Some of the shared concerns that emerge from this volume include the ways cinema as a new technology reshaped how cities and buildings are built and inhabited since the early twentieth century; the question of the mobile gaze; film's role in the shifting relationship between the private and the public; film and everyday life; monumentality and the construction of historical memory for a variety of viewing publics; the impact of the digital and the virtual on filmmaking and spectatorship.
Primary readership will be those researching teaching and studying Spanish film international film studies urban cultural studies cultural studies and architects who are interested in interdisciplinary endeavours.
The Return of Twin Peaks
In 2017 twenty-five years after its initial release a new season of Twin Peaks shook the world of television.
This new book is a detailed analysis of the third season of the television series and aims to elucidate some of the meanings of Twin Peaks: The Return and explain these in terms of philosophical mythological and spiritual approaches. It focuses on the third season of Twin Peaks but also refers to the first two seasons and to the film Fire Walk with Me.
Divided into three sections the book first examines the third season as expanded storytelling through the lens of Gene Youngblood's theory of synesthetic cinema intertextuality integrationist and segregationist approaches in the realm of fiction and focuses on the role of audio and visual superimpositions in The Return. It goes on to question the nature of the reality depicted in the seasons via scientific approaches such as electromagnetism time theory and multiverses. The third and final section aims to transcend this vision by exploring the role of theosophy the occult and other spiritual sources.
The author’s focus on the role of spirituality and science in Twin Peaks is what distinguishes this book from other works on the famous television series. The work of a scholar who is also a fan the book should appeal to any hard-core Twin Peaks viewer.
Foreword by Matt Zoller Seitz editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com and the television critic for New York magazine.
This will be essential reading for fans of Twin Peaks and academics writing about it.
Also of interest for students with an interest in philosophy religion science or spiritualism in visual and popular culture.