{"title":"Finance Film on Must-See Lists: A Tale of Positivization","authors":"C. Parvulescu","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2022-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article shows the way must-see film lists hosted by financial publications positivize, after the 2008 crisis, the message of feature and documentary films representing finance. Here positivization refers to the detouring or softening of the critical edge of the message of a film in the interests of the hosting website and the profession of finance in general. Emphasis falls on financial literacy and on a film’s artistic prestige and entertainment potential. The author argues that positivization is a semantic strategy indicative of a neoliberal business ontology that informs the interpretation of cultural artifacts. It instrumentalizes signification processes in order to foreground exchange value and present film reception as an investment in human capital.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74679355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narratives of Historical Memory and Their Touristic Function: The Case of Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz","authors":"Nerijus Milerius","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2022-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article discusses a documentary film, Austerlitz (2016), by the Ukrainian film director Sergei Loznitsa. The film shows massive flows of tourists visiting Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, therefore, it is interpreted through the prism of dark tourism. The article argues that by functioning as a piece of virtual dark tourism, Austerlitz is constructed as a re-enactment of a collision with places of death. By refusing to moralize or condemn bored concentration camp visitors, Loznitsa enables the viewer to understand how radical experiences of mass destruction and death are being recorded in tourism practices in today’s society. The French semiotician and philosopher Roland Barthes argues that death is most clearly perceived when it opens up as an act that has already taken place in the past, but at the same time will also take place in the future – this has been and this will be. The article concludes that exactly this is the effect of the documentary film Austerlitz. By showing crowds of visitors walking in the empty spaces of concentration camps, Loznitsa opens up a tragedy of mass destruction and death that has already taken place, but at the same time will also happen.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80724198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crisis, Sociology and Agency in 1970s Hungarian Documentary Cinema","authors":"Zsolt Győri","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2022-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores synergies between Hungarian critical sociology in the 1960–70s and the documentary films made in Balázs Béla Stúdió in the same period. It treats the rationalization of social phenomena as a battle ground for meaning and claims that both representatives of the social sciences and filmmakers, on the one hand, called upon deficient social mechanisms and the inner contradictions of existing socialism and, on the other hand, pointed to the discrepancy between ideological and empirical perceptions of reality as the root cause of the crisis characterizing the consolidated Kádár regime. Adopting Clifford Geertz’s conceptual matrix of the experience-near and the experience-distant production of social meaningfulness, the article explores how sociologists and makers of sociographic documentaries alike resisted the prevailing epistemic regime, more specifically how they punctured and undermined the ideological meanings of such concepts as maternity, the Romani, and cooperative democracy.1","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87995627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Captivity of the Present. Approaches to Son of Saul by László Nemes Jeles","authors":"Miklós Sághy","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2022-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Son of Saul, the Hungarian director, László Nemes Jeles’s film about Holocaust was released in 2015 with great international success: Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. In my essay, I approach the film from a variety of perspectives. First, by analysing the visual and aural level of the film I intend to show how – in a very original way – Son of Saul is capable of depicting the understandably limited perspective and numb state of mind of the protagonist, a member of the Sonderkommando. In the second section, I compare Son of Saul with the Nobel Prize winner novel, Fatelessness (1975) by Imre Kertész. I argue that these two works show strong similarity in their storytelling and staging of the Holocaust. Both works miss a looking back in hindsight and the historical perspective, confining their protagonists to the present. Thirdly, I examine the relation between the absurd mission of Saul saving the dead boy and the problem of remembering and commemorating the Holocaust. Finally, I try to map the traces of popular genres in Son of Saul. I recon the film applies – on the one hand – the audiovisual techniques of the POV-horror genre while – on the other hand – the media and presentation tactics of first-person-shooter video games. The application of well-known media procedures can thus bring the historical event that can be hardly visualized or verbalized closer to the younger generation. With the Holocaust fading away in the past and the number of survivors and witnesses radically decreasing, this is certainly becoming more and more important.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78880262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Exquisite Corpse of History. Radu Jude and the Intermedial Collage","authors":"Ágnes Pethő","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2022-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article argues for the relevance of intermediality in the interpretation of Radu Jude’s films made after 2016: The Dead Nation (Ţara moartă, 2017), I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari, 2018), The Marshal’s Two Executions (Cele două execuţii ale Mareşalului, 2018), To Punish, to Discipline (A pedepsi, a supraveghea, 2019), The Exit of the Trains (Ieşirea trenurilor din gară, 2020), Uppercase Print (Tipografic majuscul, 2020), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc, 2021). Instead of framing Jude’s aesthetic in terms of the Eisensteinian montage, as many reviewers have done, the article addresses the way in which these films insist on the tensions between media, on creating an ontological collage, not only a cinematic montage. The collage effect of the films materializes in sensuously and intellectually layered permutations that connect different media and shares some traits with the Surrealist play of the cadavre exquis. The mixture of heterogeneous materials becomes a strategy (informed by the ideas of Walter Benjamin) to reflect on history in the conditions of postmemory as well as a way to explore the relationship between media and reality through various positions of spectatorial engagement and the affective metalepsis between reflexivity and immersion.1","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87790408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spectres of War in Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections","authors":"Lukas Brašiškis","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2022-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2022-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This text discusses Deimantas Narkevičius’s Legend Coming True (Legendos išsipildymas, 1999) and Sergei Loznitsa’s Reflections (Отражения, 2012), two films by contemporary artists and filmmakers that revisit war traumas – the Holocaust in Lithuania and the Siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia – indirectly, without narrative reconstruction of the events or use of the archival images to display their atrocities of these two tragedies. Instead, these two experimental films, I argue via Jacques Derrida, evoke spectres of the war in the contemporary urban setups to activate the half-mourning in the present. Aesthetic strategies used to expose the haunting past are closely scrutinized and compared in order to demonstrate the films’ aesthetic potential of walking the spectator through war traumas without departing the present.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83405951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Silence as a Metaphor in the Polish Radio Reportages during the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Aneta Wójciszyn-Wasil","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2021-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2021-0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Silence became one of the important aspects of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article discusses how this social experience was presented in radio reportages, for which silence is not only a topic but also an element of the construction of the message. The reports of the Polish Radio, produced in lockdown conditions, document silence in a double perspective: the transformation of the broadcast sphere of large metropolises and the private sound space of the characters. Silence, as a phonic phenomenon, functions as a universal metaphor for fear, threat, “curse of isolation,” but also hope. Experiencing silence goes beyond the individual feeling thanks to a metaphoric line through which the recorded stories gain a universal context. The analysis of audible materials shows the mechanism of the constitution of these meanings, as well as selected media functions of silence as a tool for modelling content and managing the recipients’ attention.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84663620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Non-Normative Gender Performances Fat Video Game Characters","authors":"Agata Waszkiewicz","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2021-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2021-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While video games unquestionably became more diverse and inclusive in the past decade, there is still a striking underrepresentation of characters whose bodies do not conform to the heterosexist concept of normativity, including those perceived as fat. My article begins with the introduction of fat studies as the interdisciplinary field concerned with the ways media construct fat people as unattractive, undesirable, and asexual. Next, it discusses how these prejudices are reflected in a medium in which fat has been historically coded as villainous and monstrous. The last part includes two case studies of positive fat representation: Ellie from the mainstream game Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software 2012) and the eponymous character from the independent title Felix the Reaper (Kong Orange 2019). Their gender performances are coded equally as non-normative.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84421115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Considering Eye-tracking as a Validation Tool in Cinema Research","authors":"G. Dimitriadis","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2021-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2021-0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The use of eye-tracking in data collection, when accompanied by the proper research questions and methodology, is a powerful tool that may provide invaluable insights into the way viewers perceive and experience movies. Film theory can use eye-tracking to test and verify research hypotheses not only with unprecedented accuracy, but also with the ability to address a significant variety of theoretical questions. Eye-tracking can help build contemporary film theory by supporting its various fields of research, and also even assist the production of films themselves by helping filmmakers make more informed creative decisions. The present article is an overview of eye-tracking and its gradual implementation in cinema research; in the context of discussing some recent examples of academic work based on eye-tracking, it considers the technology of eye-trackers and the way in which human vision handles visual information on screen. By testing the attentional behaviour of viewers, eye-tracking can produce more solid answers to questions regarding the way films are experienced; therefore, it may very well prove to be the spearhead of a more robust body of film theory in the near future.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80959737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Body, Telephone, Voice: Black Christmas (1974) and Monstrous Cinema","authors":"M. Thomsen","doi":"10.2478/ausfm-2021-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2021-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates the role of the telephone as both an engine of suspense and a metaphorical double of cinema in Black Christmas directed by Bob Clark (1974). Employing Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic voice, the article first explores the role of the telephone in creating both narrative suspense and diegetic cohesion. It then investigates how the film implicitly establishes a pattern of resemblance between the telephonic and cinematic mediums centred on their capacities for diffusion and disembodiment. Finally, the article explores the meta-cinematic implications of its preceding findings, arguing that the fears and anxieties associated with the telephone in Black Christmas ultimately concern cinema itself and its possible cultural impact. Although it attempts to enforce certain categories of knowledge and identity, Black Christmas ultimately engages with cinema’s capacity for subverting rather than enforcing ideology.","PeriodicalId":40721,"journal":{"name":"Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Film and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87959830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}