{"title":"The political dimension of ekphrasis","authors":"Daniel McFadden","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2121529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2121529","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the political effects of the representation of historical paintings in film. It contends that the inclusion of this ‘older’ form, painting, and of the world associated with its popularity brings a mythological past to bear on contemporary philosophical and political issues in a novel and complex manner. Using the formal qualities of film, like montage and close-up, film makers can reimage and reimagine the place and role of painted works within the contemporary worlds in which the films are set. The interruption of one world into the other, the painted past into the photoreal present or future, uncovers new continuities and makes the distant past a matter of concern for the problems of the present. Using the philosophy and theories of Jacques Rancière, Bonnie Honig, Robert Pippin, and Roland Barthes, this article examines the representation of painting in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and the collaborative film Germany in Autumn (1978).","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"506 - 521"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44696394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time, disaster, new media: Your Name as a mind-game film","authors":"Tim Shao-Hung Teng","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2113713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2113713","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay argues that by deploying the mind-game tropes of body swap and time travel, the Japanese animated film Your Name poses questions of time, memory, and mediation that must be considered in light of the 2011 national disaster. To take up these questions, I juxtapose three lines of interrogation that situate the film at varying timescales. The first analyzes the film’s use of myth to construct a unified timeline that ensures the continuation of national history. This national time, however, is warped into a cosmic scheme. Expounding on the trope of musubi or weaving, the second, mind-game inquiry thus philosophizes time beyond the national framework to better account for the protagonists’ task of historical rescue through radical experiments with fate and contingency. Inspired by the film’s portrayal of skies and clouds, the final inquiry foregrounds the naturalized environment of new media technologies that engages time and memory beyond and beneath the human perceptual frame. To conclude, I provide some critical notes that ask how an ecologically attuned mind-game paradigm anticipates alternative modes of social imagination.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"459 - 488"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46654920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feng Xiaogang’s haunted utopia, Chinese modernity, and carnivalesque social critique in the era of Xi Jinping","authors":"Yi Lu","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2100193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2100193","url":null,"abstract":"ABTRACT This paper seeks to illustrate how Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang constructs and delivers social commentaries in his New Year comedies The Dream Factory (1997) and Personal Tailor (2013). These two films are unique in terms of narrative strategy compared to his other New Year films. Both films turn on the premise of temporarily granting people’s wildest wishes, out of which arise multi-layered utopian and dystopian elements that I connect to Feng having made these two films shortly after his realist films were censored. Exploring these two films, I argue that Feng employs the carnivalesque as an alternative narrative strategy to perform subversive resistance, to counter monolithic and hegemonic discourses of Chinese modernity, and to expose social issues in the context of China’s tightening of censorship restrictions. A comparative study of these two films reveals their value as visual records of Chinese modernity over the course of a decade and as important facilitators or mediators of societal self-critique.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"353 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45179136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interactive documentary: theory and debate","authors":"H. Mcintosh","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2106746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2106746","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"454 - 458"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46337630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The mind-game film: distributed agency, time travel, and productive pathology","authors":"Marissa C. de Baca","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2100213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2100213","url":null,"abstract":"While he pursued a mercurial breadth of topics across his career – ranging from Weimar film to early cinema to media archaeology – pioneering film scholar Thomas Elsaesser maintained a long-standing interest in Hollywood. The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology, a posthumous collection of Elsaesser’s essays edited by Warren Buckland, Dana Polan, and Seung-hoon Jeong, brings together his analyses of the complex narratives emerging in contemporary Hollywood cinema. This book, however, is not the first appearance of his evolving framework, which premiered within Buckland’s edited anthology Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (2009) and continued to mature until Elsaesser’s passing in December 2019. In The Mind-Game Film, Elsaesser expands upon Hollywood’s post-classical films and their self-referential classicism to formulate an emergent mode of contemporary cinema that plays games with either the spectator or the protagonist. As his final contribution to the discipline of film and media studies, the ‘mind-game’ continues to bear the imprint of Thomas Elsaesser’s indelible legacy.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"446 - 449"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45082459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contemporary Balkan cinema: transnational exchanges and global circuits","authors":"Murat Akser","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2101847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2101847","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"450 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49379044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"There is no such thing as one realism: systematising André Bazin’s film theory","authors":"Lourdes Esqueda Verano","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2088979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2088979","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, film scholarship has experienced a renewed interest in the theory of André Bazin. This French film critic is most commonly quoted regarding the ontological basis of realism, prompting some highly varied – and sometimes unexpected – readings of his most renowned essay, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Of course, it is no mere accident that he chose this ontological study as the opening text for Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? However, as I will argue, what Bazin classified as ‘true realism’ relates to aesthetics and encompasses different elements present in film: (1) the ontology of the image; (2) the style of film language; and (3) the veritative level (aesthetic truth or ‘deep meaning’). The aim of this paper is to provide a definition of these three levels of realism. Special attention will be given to the third and least explored of the three, the veritative, which, as this level has hitherto received little scholarly attention, constitutes the most original contribution of this article to studies of Bazinian theory.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"401 - 423"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43056241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Problems with Kubrick: reframing Stanley Kubrick through archival research","authors":"James Fenwick","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2091888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2091888","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Through three archival case studies, this article explores problematic aspects of Stanley Kubrick’s relations of production and the power underlying his role as a film producer by the 1960s and 1970s. The case studies explore Kubrick’s practices in the casting of women, his attitude toward trade union regulation and labor relations, and his interactions with politicians in the UK in the 1970s in attempting to lobby for more favorable tax conditions. This article makes a critical intervention in Kubrick studies to argue that the use of the Stanley Kubrick Archive is vital for future research to reframe scholarly understanding of Kubrick. The filmmaker instigated a ‘myth’ about himself that continues to dominate, a self-promotional strategy that has obscured the relations of production on his films. Empirical evidence is required to reveal new perspectives on his attitudes and professional behavior. The article concludes that wider comparative research is imperative in Kubrick studies to ascertain the level of Kubrick’s uniqueness or otherwise in these relations of production and to determine whether they are indicative of wider systemic behaviors across the American and British film industries in the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"329 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48729249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisionary metaphysics in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980): on the ontological subversiveness of psychedelic sequences","authors":"Vik Verplanken","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2091887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2091887","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the ontological subversiveness of psychedelic sequences in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). Exposing the viewer to a mode of experiencing the world that radically deviates from his/her standard mode of experiencing, these sequences call into question the foundations of the viewer’s ‘folk ontology’. Distinguishing between two levels of subversion, the article’s first section explores the notion of an experiential field that is the outcome of a subject-object interaction, opposing the common-sense view that the perceiver is separate from the perceived. Building on but also deviating from this reading, the second section introduces a second and more radical level of subversion. Specifically, the article suggests that the psychedelic sequences expose the viewer to a ‘subject-less’ experience not anchored in any perceiving entity. By maximizing the incomprehensibility coefficient in both the characters and the interpreting viewer, this second level of subversion exposes us to our folk ontological fallacies more directly than the first level does. In this way, Altered States potentially facilitates a process of revisionary metaphysics in the viewer.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"15 7-8","pages":"377 - 400"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41301862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Gulliver effect: screen size, scale and frame, from cinema to mobile phones","authors":"M. Beugnet","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2081461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2081461","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The encounter between the cinema image, originally created to be seen on a large screen, and the mobile phone used as screening device, stands as one of the most striking instances of what Erkki Huhtamo calls the ‘Gulliverisation’ of our contemporary environments: “a two-directional optical-cultural ‘mechanism’” that works “against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale”. In what follows, I focus on the aesthetic impact of the coexistence of images coming from extremes of the representational scale, from the cinema to the monumental projections that typify the contemporary trend in spectacular displays in museums and public spaces, to the tiny screens of our mobile phones. With reference to practices of collecting, archiving and possessive viewing, as well as to the relationship between off- and on-screen space, I suggest that strategies of making strange help us historicize, as well as appreciate the aesthetic complexity such shifts in scale produce.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"303 - 328"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49169041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}