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Institute
Uganda's broadcast media landscape has witnessed tremendous growth in recent years. While the public broadcaster remains the dominant national player - in terms of reach - in both radio and television, commercial broadcasters have introduced a substantial level of diversity in the industry. Public broadcasting faces serious competition from the numerous private and independent broadcasters, especially in and around the capital Kampala and major urban centres. In fact, the private/commercial sector clearly dominates the industry in most respects, notably productivity and profitability. The public broadcaster, which enjoys wider geographical coverage, faces the challenge of trying to fulfil a broad mandate with little funding. This makes it difficult for UBC to compete with the more nimble operators in the commercial/private sector. Overall, there appears to be a healthy degree of pluralism and diversity in terms of ownership.
This report is the result of research that started in 2008 with the aim of collecting, collating and writing up information about regulation, ownership, access, performance as well as prospects for public broadcasting reform in Africa. The Zimbabwe report is part of an 11-country survey of African broadcast media, evaluating compliance with the agreements, conventions, charters and declarations regarding media that have been developed at regional and continental levels in Africa. The research was carried out by Dr Sarah Chiumbu who has worked in different capacities in media in Zimbabwe and currently teaches media studies at Wits University in Johannesburg, and edited by Jeanette Minnie and Hendrik Bussiek.
This report on the broadcast media in Nigeria finds that liberalisation efforts in the broadcasting sector have only been partially achieved. More than a decade after military rule, the nation still has not managed to enact media legislation that is in line with continental standards, particularly the Declaration on Freedom of Expression in Africa. The report, part of an 11-country survey of broadcast media in Africa, strongly recommends the transformation of the two state broadcasters into a genuine public broadcaster as an independent legal entity with editorial independence and strong safeguards against any interference from the federal government, state governments and other interests. The report was written by Mr. Akin Akingbulu Executive Director, Institute for Media and Society, IMS, Nigeria.
I first encountered the work of Miriam Hansen as a graduate student in the mid-1990s when her book Babel and Babylon was the talk of the (at that time still fairly modest) film studies town – even though it was sitting somewhat uneasily on the fence. In fact, it was this position beyond the canonical that made the book so attractive in the first place. It did not fit into the raging debate of that time between psychosemiotics and neo-formalism, nor did it offer the (often too schematic and naive) way out within the cultural studies paradigm of empowering the individual or sub-culturally constituted groups.
Movies are brilliant choices to be subjects of discourse analysis since they bear resemblance to real-life phenomena. Lion of The Desert is one of the movies that actualizes the use of the English language as the dialogue and presents Islamic historical values as its content. Among a myriad of sub-disciplines of discourse analysis, this paper attempts to investigate speech act phenomena in the utterances of Omar Mukhtar, the main character of the movie. The discourse analysis is conducted on his utterances in order to extract the types of speech acts he employs. Primary data sources include the movie video file and its script. We execute several procedural steps of extracting the data, commencing with watching the movie while reading its script; re-watching it to identify the aspects like voice, intonation, and mimics; interpreting, and classifying the types of speech acts in accordance with the classification procedure of John R. Searle’s speech act theory. The findings revealed four types of speech acts, namely, representative, directive, commissive, and expressive, being identified and classified in Mukhtar’s utterances. The most frequently used type of speech act was representative, which is performed in 56 utterances, followed by a directive act which appears in 53 utterances. Commissive and expressive speech acts emerge in 9 and 7 utterances respectively.
The question of 'Fantastic motion' is whether films in the 1910s and 1920s should be viewed as merely the forerunners of patriarchal cinema, which some colleagues believe, or whether they offered - and still offer - alternatives to a female audience. The author makes a case for the latter possibility and searches for explanations for the enjoyable and liberating sensations they, as women, experienced while becoming acquainted with early film. Using a historical and contextual approach, Schlüpmann investigates genres including non-fiction, comedy and romantic drama from the early 1910s, and describes how the significance of notions such as the beauty of nature, the culture of humour and love could have been adopted into the perception of women filmgoers at the time.
Following Hannah Arendt's remarks on refugee camps as spaces of 'worldlessness', I examine how, in films on European asylum facilities, systemic violence 'makes itself known' in images of nature. Nature separates and isolates ("La Forteresse", "Forst"), it constitutes a sphere of domination and control ("View from Above"), and it functions directly as a murder weapon ("Purple Sea"). Nature, in these films, indicates the Outside within, haunted by the latent and ghostly presence of systemic violence.
From 1945 to the early 1960s, the US government undertook numerous atomic and hydrogen bomb tests. These full-scale explosions were recorded on film from various angles, and at different speeds. Indeed, it soon became required to obtain images of the very first milli-seconds of the expanding phase of the atomic fireball. Ultrahigh-speed cameras able to produce such images were specifically developed for that purpose. This article explores the different “media-temporalities” that intersect in those images. I focus on the “micro-processes happening on a technical level that are very fast,” and more specifically the ones that go into the “Rapatronic camera” designed by Harold Edgerton (head of the US national defense contractor company EG&G) to record the atomic fireball early formation. The scientific slow-motion films and high-speed photographic images operate at the junction of the micro-scale temporality of the atomic explosions’ early phases, and the macro-scale temporality of the political and ecological implications of these explosions. I argue that these films are the objects and inscriptions of micro-temporalities, macro-history and geological times.
Marcus Coelen's essay 'An Eclipse of the Screen: Jorge Semprún's Scripts for Alain Resnais' starts from the assumption that the peculiar status of film scripts (not written to be read as such) can be illustrated by the figure of their eclipse. For they are, in inverting the very logic of the figure they invite, eclipsed for the sake of and by the fractured light on the screen they help to produce. Yet just as the sun, obscured by the 'black writing' of the moon, leaves an ephemeral contour in the skies - a spectacle to many when happening - so too can the script that is made to disappear by the screen be assumed to draw its own particular and even more vanishing traits into the movie that is given not only to sight but also to thought. The analyses and critical constructions proposed by Coelen try to detect such traits in the work of Jorge Semprún the screen writer. Writing not only for movies by Alain Resnais - most notably "La guerre est finie" (1966) and "Stavisky" (1974) - but also publishing versions of them after their release and calling those versions 'scénarios' despite various divergences and subtly violent inversions of the movies' images, the screenwriter's figure describes yet another twist of the eclipse. It can be assumed not only that Semprún strongly resisted the influence of the constellation formed by writing and cinematographic shooting, as well as projecting, but furthermore that this writing was almost imperceptibly yet essentially directed against the eclipse it was drawn into. No minor forces are conjured up in this enterprise. Driven by the desire to re-appropriate cinema's a-personal and anti-psychological movement, to domesticate the images of scribbling lights drifting away from the mental and into thought - as well as into a history not mastered -, Semprún attempted to shape mastery itself and most traditional forms of authorship, along with memory and agency, in order to cloud the eclipse of script - that is, we might add, to conjure up a ghost recovering the trace of what has been eclipsed so that it may continue to haunt.
Volker Woltersdorff's essay 'Sexual Ghosts and the Whole of History: Queer Historiography, Post-Slavery Subjectivities, and Sadomasochism in Isaac Julien's "The Attendant"' discusses the controversial concept of wholeness in historiography with regard to the fascination with past horrors and the desire to do justice to their victims who retain a ghostly presence. The essay retraces how this commitment produces a dilemma, as it can result either in the aspiration to historical wholeness as full memoralization or alternatively in the radical rejection of wholeness as an impossible healing. Employing Elizabeth Freeman's notion of 'erotohistoriography', Woltersdorff introduces affect into the work of historiography in order to find an escape from the dilemmatic impasse between history's wholeness as pacified reconciliation and as ongoing catastrophe along the lines of Walter Benjamin. Sadomasochism is presented as a practice that may correspond most adequately to the paradoxical affect caused by traumatic history that continues to haunt the present. Indeed, re-enactments of historical oppression and violence occur frequently within the BDSM community. However, what distinguishes them from 'living history' re-enactments is their potential to modify affective attachments to history by altering the historical script. The essay elaborates this potential through Isaac Julien's 1993 short film "The Attendant", which, in a kind of queer re-enactment, overwrites the memory of colonial chattel slavery by a sadomasochistic encounter of a black guardian and a white visitor in a museum dedicated to the history of slavery. The film raises the ethical and political question of how to relate affectively to the legacy and ongoing presence of racism. Against this backdrop, the author argues that, through the BDSM scenario and its changes to the historical script, Julien's film represents and promotes a paradoxical way to perform both the memorialization and the forgetting of past horrors and pleasures. Here, historical wholeness acquires a conflicting double meaning of both achieving completeness and restoring integrity. Woltersdorff concludes by interpreting "The Attendant" as urging a utopian perspective, produced by the tension between the impossibility of history's wholeness and the necessary, reparative desire for it. The article concludes by highlighting the paradox that Julien's film shows wholeness 'to be impossible and yet necessary' and 'expresses a necessary desire made impossible'. While the essay explicitly engages with the figure of haunting, one could perhaps speak here also of plasticity insofar as the contradictory conjunction of remembering and forgetting seems to rely on a malleability of affects and on producing an affective economy that sustains the fantasmatic remembrance of a painful past through paradoxical pleasure but breaks with any pleasure derived from real inequality, injustice, or suffering imparted non-consensually.
Ascribing to the premise that film festivals are crucial to the production of cultural memory, this article explores different parameters through which festivals shape our reception of films. In its focus on the Asian American film festival CAAMFest, the article reveals that festivals are part of a complex network of actors whose different agendas influence the narratives produced around the film, direct its role as memory object and encourage memories to travel. What is more, it shows that festival locations—from the city in which a festival takes place to the concrete venue in which a film is screened—play a significant role in shaping our experience and understanding of films. Finally, it establishes that festivals create frames for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media and live performances at the festival events. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, the article makes use of an interdisciplinary approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of acts of framing, locations and networks of actors shaping the festival’s memory production. It also draws attention to the understudied phenomenon of Asian American film festivals, showing how such a festival may actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group’s collective identity and memory.
Resolution
(2019)
Many parodies operate through temporal strategies that distort the narrative proportions of their targets. This essay discusses two texts that manipulate time for parodic purposes: the contemporary animated sitcom "Bojack Horseman" and the twelfth-century romance "Ipomedon". Their shared method involves the absurd prolongation of narrative structures of resolution and satisfaction in order to reveal these structures' arbitrary nature. But this method, in turn, shows that resolution - a retrospective determination of shape and meaning - can never be avoided entirely, even if it can be deferred.
Repetition
(2019)
Serial texts must repeat, so that they can be recognized, but they must also change, so that they can remain interesting. Unusual temporal manipulations can emerge in such texts in order to balance these contradictory demands. This essay studies two serial texts whose need for self-extension produces a suspension of historical time: the contemporary animated sitcom "The Simpsons", and medieval romance as theorized by the twelfth-century poet Wace. I suggest that we might name this temporal constraint fiction.
Recovery
(2019)
Despite the increasing incidence of eating disorders, very few films have addressed these conditions in particular. What's more, most of the US-American mainstream fiction films that deal with eating disorders tend to be built on anachronistic clichés, hardly depicting their broad array. Furthermore, the traditional narrative structure of beginning, middle, and (happy) end misrepresents the erratic temporality of eating disorder symptoms as well as the nonlinear phases of recovery and relapse.
In its elusive form between drama, novel and film, "Teorema" marks a 'new turning point in Pasolini's oeuvre'. Both the narrative and the style are remarkable, juxtaposing elements of different genres, nourishing the unresolved tensions within the film: the family members are shown in various scenes that follow one another in seemingly random order. Instead of a cohesive narrative unfolding in time, there reigns a sense of timelessness that gives rise to an oppressive feeling of drifting. Claudia Peppel's essay 'The Guest: Transfiguring Indifference in "Teorema"' explores the figure of the guest, which has always been closely connected with myth and whose appearance often triggers the dramatic conflict. Peppel focuses on "Teorema", in which a sensual stranger causes a bourgeois family to acknowledge its delusions. When he departs, the members of the family are left in a state of unfulfilled yearning, searching for new meaning. While critical literature on Pasolini regularly points to the importance of the figure of the guest but rarely analyzes it, Peppel discusses theories of the guest and hospitality to illuminate the role of the stranger in Pasolini's film. The guest's exceptional state, which is removed from everyday life and removes others from their everyday lives, is meticulously staged and resembles the evenly-suspended attention of the psychoanalyst. He triggers projections, desires, and, ultimately, existential crises.
Figura lacrima
(2012)
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin’s article 'Figura Lacrima', which explores Pasolini's figure of Christ, consists of two interconnected parts. The part called 'Lacrima' argues that Pasolini's Christ sheds a small tear which is analogous to the salvific tear of Dante's Bonconte da Montefeltro. This heretical tear is not explicitly referred to or shown but can only be perceived through the coherent text represented by the ensemble of Pasolini's films. The part called 'Figura' argues that Pasolini invents the new concept of 'figural integration', which extends beyond Erich Auerbach's analysis of medieval figural and typological interpretation and allows him to conceptualize a kind of non-dichotomous tension between the poles structuring his thought and art. Joubert-Laurencin argues thereby that Pasolini's scandal of Christ's small tear is not the simple provocation of a sinful Christ, but the utopian image of a West that frees itself from its own closure through the promise of another world, coming not from somewhere else but from the powers of an outside that it possesses within itself.
Pasolini's literature, film, theatre, and essays engaged with Classical tragedy from the mid-1960s onwards. As Bernhard Groß shows in his paper 'Reconciliation and Stark Incompatibility: Pasolini's "Africa" and Greek Tragedy', this engagement forms a modality in Pasolini's politics of aesthetics that seeks to grasp the fundamental transformation from a rural-proletarian to a petit-bourgeois Italy. Since the mid-'60s, Pasolini was concerned with the bourgeoisie and its utopian potentials, which he sought to make productive by reading Classical tragedy as a possibility to make contradictions visible. Pasolini realized his reading of the Classical tragedy by having 'Africa' and 'Europe' - as he understood them - confront one another without mediation. By means of film analyses and film theory, Groß argues that this confrontation, especially in the films on the ancient world, generates an aesthetic place where the incompatible can unfold in the spectators' experience.
The body of the actor : notes on the relationship between the body and acting in Pasolini's cinema
(2012)
Agnese Grieco's paper 'The Body of the Actor: Notes on the Relationship Between the Body and Acting in Pasolini's Cinema' deals with the specific physiognomy of the actor within Pasolini's 'cinema of poetry'. It argues that Pasolini's films allow the spectator to experience directly a complex and polyvalent reality beyond the traditional idea of 'representation'. As a fragment of that reality, actors quote and present themselves beyond and through their interpretations of a role. Instead of conceiving of the actor as a 'professional of fiction', Pasolini employs a variety of actors who are able fully to convey their own anthropological history. It is particularly the body of the actor, Grieco concludes, that becomes a door opening towards a deeper reality. For instance, the figure of Ninetto Davoli can push us back towards Greek antiquity, and the codified art of the comedian Totò or the iconic fixity of Maria Callas can interact with the African faces of the possible interpreters of an African Oresteia.
Manuele Gragnolati's paper 'Analogy and Difference: Multistable Figures in Pasolini's "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana"' discusses Pasolini's preference for the figure of contradiction and his opposition to Hegelian dialectics by exploring his attempt to look at Africa's process of modernization and democratization in the 1960s as analogous to the synthetic transformation of the Furies into Eumenides at the end of Aeschylus's trilogy. Gragnolati shows that Pasolini is aware of the dangers of analogy, which risks imposing the author's or filmmaker's symbolic order onto that of the 'other' represented in the text or film, and he argues that Pasolini seeks to deal with this danger by constantly shifting back and forth between differing positions. "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana" can thereby be thought as a multistable figure that is left suspended and not only resists synthesis, but also problematizes its own feasibility and challenges its own legitimacy.
Robert S. C. Gordon's article 'Pasolini as Jew, Between Israel and Europe' examines a remarkable trope in Pasolini's encounter with the cultures and geographies of Europe and its beyond: his imaginary identification with the figure of the Jew. Gordon examines in turn the site of Israel and its Jewish citizens; the 'Lager' and the Jews as victims of genocide; and finally the figure of Saint Paul and his earlier Jewish identity as Saul, both sacred and a figure of the Law, as a model for the twentieth-century Church and its ambiguous response to Nazism. In all three of these threads, Pasolini's Jew is a 'queer' and destabilizing trope for exploring the border of the European and the non-European, the self and the other.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's paper 'Cinematographic Aesthetics as Subversion of Moral Reason in Pasolini's Medea' explores the 1969 film "Medea". Pasolini's Medea, masterfully played by Maria Callas, betrays her homeland and her origin, stabs both her children, sets her house on fire, and dispossesses Jason of his sons' corpses. But Deuber-Mankowsky argues that it is ultimately not these acts that render the film particularly disturbing and disconcerting, but, rather, the fact that the spectator is left behind in suspension precisely because Medea cannot be easily condemned for her acts. Pasolini's film and its cinematographic aesthetics thereby not only subvert the projection of Medea into the prehistorical world of madness and perversion, but also undermine belief in the validity of the kind of moral rationality developed and constituted in an exemplary way by Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Practical Reason". In particular, Pasolini seems to relate conceptually to Nietzsche's artistic-philosophical transfiguration of Dionysus and to accuse belief in a world of reasons of failing to grasp the groundlessness, irrationality, or even a-rationality of reason itself.
By focusing on Pasolini's uncompleted film project "San Paolo", Luca Di Blasi's article 'One Divided by Another: Split and Conversion in Pasolini's "San Paolo"' analyzes the notion of split (the split in the structure of time and, above all, the split of the figure of Paul) and concentrates especially on the very moment of Paul's Damascene conversion. Di Blasi refers to the "Kippbild" as a model that can be used to understand better certain ambivalences in Pasolini's Paul. Locating Pasolini's reading of the founder of the Church in a triangulation with two major contemporary philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, Di Blasi shows that two opposing possibilities of interpreting Paul - as militant subject of a universal event and its necessary consequences (Badiou) and as representative of softness, weakness, poverty, "homo sacer" (Agamben) - fit perfectly with the two aspects of Pasolini's Paul. Pasolini's profoundly split Paul thus represents a dichotomy which disunites two major figures of contemporary leftist thought.
The subject of this paper is a recent comic movie version of Dante's "Comedy": a 2007 puppet and toy theatre adaptation of the "Inferno" directed by Sean Meredith. It is certainly not the first time that Dante and his theatre of hell appear in this kind of environment. Mickey Mouse has followed Dante's footsteps and very recently a weird bunch of prehistoric animals went a similar path: in part three of the blockbuster "Ice Age" (2009), a new, lippy guide character named Buck uses several Dante quotes and the whole strange voyage can be described as a Dantesque descent into dinosaur hell. In the following pages Ronald de Rooy argues that Meredith's version of Dante's "Inferno" is not only funny and entertaining, but that it is also surprisingly innovative if we compare it to other literature and movies which project Dante's hell or parts of it onto the modern metropolis.
'Perhaps the sodomites should be written out of Dante's "Inferno"', Jarman wrote in his journal on 1 August 1990: 'I'll offer myself as the ghostwriter.' What does he mean by 'ghostwriter' here? How queer is this odd speech-act? What is he offering to do to the homophobic landscape of the "Inferno", that forbiddingly sealed textual prison, with his Hollywood pitchman's casual bid to 'write out' the sodomites as if they were a slight embarrassment to the divine justice system? Is he speaking in jest as a writer of gay satires and sacrilegious memoirs, or in deadly earnest as an activist who had renounced the middle-class pretensions and frivolities of the pre-AIDS gay world? [...] Jarman counters the trope of homosexual theft visually with the triumphant figure of Man with Snake. The Dantesque merging of snake and thief is replaced by an erotic dance in which the gilded youth raises his phallic partner above his head and seductively kisses it on the mouth. Whereas Dante would have us notice the grotesque parody of the Trinity played out in the seventh bolgia - with the unchanging Puccio as God the Father, the two-natured Agnello-Cianfa as Christ, and the fume-veiled Buoso receiving his forked tongue from the serpent Francesco in a demonic replay of the gift of tongues from the Spirit - Jarman clears away all overdetermined theological meanings to revel in the purely aesthetic impact of the phallic dancer. All the ghosts from Dante's snakepit are conjured away in the film and replaced with the solid presence of a single gorgeously spotlit male body. Ghostwriting Dante, for Jarman, meant more than a mere appropriation of homoerotic scenes from the "Inferno" into his screenplay. It meant a complete reimagining of their aesthetic significance within the filmscape of his Dantean transformations.
The 1935 Fox Films "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship's boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film's social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later 'infernal' sequences. [...] Spectacular admonition and concern about the ruthless pursuit of wealth are the main features which link this "Inferno" of the thirties to the one that had appeared some six hundred years earlier. Wealth and avarice were, of course, demonstrably serious concerns for Dante: as Peter Armour, for example, has shown, there is a recurrent and pervasive concern with money, its meaning, and its misuse throughout the "Commedia". So it is not surprising that the "Inferno" should also have been appropriated by social critics some hundred years before the 1935 Hollywood fable. [...] Some of the narrative and visual patterns in "Dante's Inferno" imply an uneasy underlying vision of the movie industry and its practices. Other productions, publicity, and journalism of the time reinforce suggestions of such a metafictional approach to movies, morality, and the market in the 1935 "Dante's Inferno".
This contribution consists of an explanatory introduction and extracts from recent fiction works, 'White Tales' (novel) and 'Peep Show' (novel in progress). Both fiction works explore the spiralling tensions between intensity and excess, desire and jouissance, via the structure and methodology pioneered in the author's previous work with 'subconscious narrative' film. The result of this prior work was the 18-minute subconscious narrative film 'The Dangers', which explores an experimental narrative structure and is fascinated by the creation and sustenance of suspense, particularly when created with the notion of the uncanny in mind.
The article provides a close reading of the video "Sometimes you fight for the world, sometimes you fight for yourself", dir. by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2004, 5'). It reads the video as promoting what it calls a 'queer politics of paradox', that is, a politics that acknowledges desire as a constitutive moment of the political and at the same time challenges the political via a queer understanding of desire in order to make room for the political articulation of the Other. The article argues that a reworking of the political - one that aims at de-centring its hegemonic dynamic and creating space for Otherness - becomes possible if one invites paradox as a specific, anti-identitarian, and agonistic mode of tension to function as a constitutive moment of desire and of the political.
This commentary on Edwin Carels’ essay “Revisiting Tom Tom: Performative anamnesis and autonomous vision in Ken Jacobs’ appropriations of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son” broadens up the media-archaeological framework in which Carels places his text. Notions such as Huhtamo’s topos and Zielinski’s “deep time” are brought into the discussion in order to point out the difficulty to see what there is to see and to question the position of the viewer in front of experimental films like Tom Tom the Piper’s Son and its remakes.
Whiteout: animal traces in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly man and encounters at the end of the world
(2017)
Literary animal studies are confronted with a systematic question: How can writing, as a human-made sign system, represent the nonhuman animal as an autonomous agent without falling back into the pitfalls of anthropomorphism? Against the backdrop of this problem, this paper asks how the medium of film allows for a different representation of the animal and analyzes two of Werner Herzog’s later documentary films. Although the depiction of animals and landscapes has always played a significant part in Herzog’s films, critical assessments of his work—including those of Herzog himself—tended to view the role of nature imagery as purely allegorical: it expresses the inner nature, the inner landscapes of the film’s human protagonists. This paper tries to open up a different view. It argues that both Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World develop an aesthetic that depicts nonhuman nature as an autonomous and lively presence. In the close proximity amongst camera, human, and nonhuman agents, a clear distinction between nature and culture is increasingly blurred.
Nolan brings a fairly recognizable style to all his movies, often described as "dark" or "gritty." The tone is relentlessly serious, and the narratives are infused with the ambiguity and pessimism of film noir. His protagonists are, without exception, tortured, obsessed men, struggling with the loss of loved ones or past mistakes. Not only do these men face an uncaring world with murky morality, their sense of self is also unstable. To go along with the faulty memories and self-deceptions of his characters, Nolan also has a knack for misleading his audience with convoluted narratives. As Fisher puts it, he specializes in puzzles that can't be solved. 'Inception', to my mind, makes an excellent showcase for all these themes. Therefore, through an examination of its use of space and architecture as metaphors for the mind, I aim to determine the concept of the malleable self that underlies all of Nolan's movies.
The following list includes all traceable films of at least 30 minutes length, which explicitly address the current financial, economic and debt crisis as a main topic and have been available in English or German via European cinemas, television stations, or the internet. This includes dubbed or subtitled versions of films produced in other languages. The film descriptions mostly come from the films’ or television stations’ websites or other marketing material, so they are not necessarily objective (although often informative).
The list is based on an extensive internet search but nevertheless will probably be incomplete and sometimes imprecise. For instance, there is virtually no information about how often the cinema films have actually been shown in theaters; many of them may have been shown just a few times. There are lots of interesting shorter films like The Financial Crisis (Session I–V) (Denmark 2009, Superflex) or RSA Animate: Crises of Capitalism (GB 2010, RSA/David Harvey). Those short films are not listed here, but often they can be easily found and watched online.
In the first years of cinematography, the exhibitors mostly used magic lantern slides to project films titles before the film’s projection. In Europe and in the United States, around 1902–1903, motion pictures started to be sold with edited titles on films, and edited subtitles on multi shot films. From around 1907, as the length and number of shots, subtitles and words increased, there was a kind of competition between the subtitle and the lecturer to explain the films to the audiences. In the transitional period – 1907–1916 –, the trade press and scenario manuals constantly debated subtitle usefulness and limits. On one hand the dream of cinematography as a universal language was incompatible with this device, and the strong ideal of the titleless film advocated that moving pictures should tell stories by themselves, without the aid of any external narration, like theatre plays. On the other hand, there were more realistic approaches: subtitles were unavoidable, as they were essential to make a film understandable. The main recommendation, however, was to use them very sparingly, and only when it was absolutely necessary, because they might spoil suspense by giving a summary of the action in advance, they were also considered to have an adverse impact on the “reality effect”, to be exterior to the story and to interrupt the flow of images. Despite the reluctances and ambivalences towards it, as the industry organized itself in the 1910’s the subtitle was retooled, and became conventional and largely used for the construction of the classical narrative film.
Seymour Chatman (born 1928) is an American film and literary critic, a professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the most significant figures of American narratology, being regarded as a prominent representative of its Structuralist or "classic" branch. Among his works are not only some analyses of Antonionis‘s films, his narratological books and articles – especially on problems of perspectivity – found much interest in filmtheoretical research.
Since the fall of the Wall, a new era of East German literature has emerged. This genre of literature exists even though East Germany’s borders dissolved over a decade and half ago and is challenging the way we think about the former German Democratic Republic. East German author Thomas Brussig is pivotal in this new genre of literature. His novels Helden wie wir (1995), Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (1999) and Leander Haußmann’s cinematic adaptation, Sonnenallee (1999), confront the negative associations and stereotypes connected with East Germany to deconstruct how formal history has portrayed its past and its citizens. Brussig’s texts take a completely different approach to remembering the GDR, which simultaneously challenges history’s dominant perspective as well as the Ostalgie phenomenon. Through his texts’ recollection, Brussig subverts the East German state in hindsight and begins the construction of a new mythology with which to associate former East Germany.
German Expressionist cinema is a movement that began in 1919. Expressionist film is marked by distinct visual features and performance styles that rebel against prior realist art movements. More than 20 years prior to the Expressionist movement, Sigmund Frued published "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899, a ground breaking study that links dreams to unconcious impulses. This thesis argues that the unexplained dream - like imagery found in two Expressionist films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and Dr. Mabus, the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922) - can be seen in terms of Freud's model of dreaming.
This thesis examines three made-for-television ‘Event Movies’ from the German production company teamWorx, made between 2006 and 2007 – Dresden (2006), Nicht alle waren Mörder (2006) and Die Flucht (2007) – within the context of contemporary debates of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ or ‘coming to terms with the past’ in Germany. It will deal with specific debates in memory of the National Socialist past, namely representations of Germans as victims of the Second World War and memory of the Holocaust. Although in recent years the importance of teamWorx’s television films has begun to be acknowledged by scholars in both Germany and the UK, this thesis represents the first attempt to analyse these three Event Movies as a unit and to explore in-depth the teamWorx company and its attitudes to historical film. As such, two interviews will be relied on throughout this thesis, with chairman of the board Nico Hofmann and Die Flucht’s director Kai Wessel. In order to place the films within the context of contemporary debates on memory of the Nazi past in Germany, the thesis will undertake a filmic analysis of the Event Movies, supported by both the intentions of the filmmakers and critical responses in the contemporary press. Of primary importance for the thesis will be the twin concerns of the authenticity of teamWorx’s productions, as claimed by the filmmakers and the Event Movies’ borrowing of filmmaking devices from Hollywood genres, in particular the melodrama. Following this analysis it will be asked to what extent the Event Movies affect and reflect contemporary debates on the legacy of National Socialism and how these films contribute to the normalisation of the Nazi past in Germany.
Representations of the reasons and actions of terrorists have appeared in German literature tracing back to the age of Sturm und Drang of the 18th century, most notably in Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and Friedrich Schiller's Die Räuber, and more recently since the radical actions of the Red Army Faction during the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as in Uli Edel's film, The Baader Meinhof Complex. By referring to Walter Benjamin's system of natural law and positive law, which provides definitions of differing codes of ethics with relation to state laws and personal ethics, one should be able to understand that Michael Kohlhaas, Karl Moor, and the members of the RAF are indeed represented as terrorists. However, their actions and motives are not without an internal ethics, which conflicts with that of their respective state-sanctioned authorities. This thesis reveals the similarities and differences in motives, methods, and use of violence in Schiller, Kleist, and representations of the RAF and explores how the turn to terrorism can arise from a logical realization that ideologies of state law do not align with the personal sense of justice and law of the individual.
Krzysztof Zanussi has been an increasingly major figure on the European film scene for the past decade, and today his reputation is beginning to spread throughout America. Critic Roger Ebert has called him "the best living maker of films about ideas" and his presence is constantly demanded by a growing list of American film festivals. The Museum of Fine Arts is most pleased to present the first major American retrospective of this important artist's work in film.
This study analyzes storyline structure in three Hausa home videos; Mai Kudi (The Rich Man), Sanafahna (with time truth shall dawn) and Albashi (Salary). The study measures storyline structure in these films against a Hollywood film industry model of story writing “the Hero's Journey”. It uses narrative analysis as its analytical tool, and narrative theory as its framework. After analyzing these videos, the study found that the major elements of storyline structure in Vogler's model formed the framework of the storyline structure in Hausa home videos analyzed. However, in spite of the preponderance of these elements within the storyline structure, there are significant variations to Vogler's model. Specifically, Vogler's model has some twelve stages spread on the universal structure of storytelling, i.e. beginning, middle and end. Few of these stages were found to exist in Hausa narrative structure, perhaps due to cultural differences between Western, Indian and Hausa cultures. The study therefore recommends screenwriters and producers to be aware of the existence of standard models of scriptwriting. It also recommends more training for script writers in the Hausa film industry.
Hollywood musicals combine two distinctive features: narrative and musical numbers, also referred to as “the real and the expressive” (Telotte 1980a, 4). These two equally important parts of any successful musical have to harmonize such that both seem appropriate in each scene and, ideally, supportive of each other. As musical numbers are traditionally seen as a “source of a tension” (ibid., 2) within the narrative, harmonization is not easy to achieve, and different directors as well as different sub-genres of the film musical have found different ways to deal with this tension. In this work, I will discuss two methods of integrating musical numbers into the plot of Hollywood musicals: the stage-worlds and the world-stages. While the former entails a certain kind of storyline, the latter refers to the setting of single numbers within the plot.
At the beginning of every story of murder there is always a body. If the murderer is a serial killer, there is, of course, more than one. More importantly, the bodies left by the serial killer are not likely to be intact and whole. What he leaves behind and what we, the audience, will get to see is the body in pieces, dismembered, scattered. A series of snapshots, partial views, and close-ups, inflicting cold sharp shocks, is all we may glimpse: the head of Benjamin Raspail floating in a jar of formaldehyde in The Silence of the Lambs, a finger removed by the serial killer from his landlord’s hand in Kalifornia, a ziploc bag of fingers recovered from a flooded drainpipe in When The Bough Breaks, a surgically severed hand used to leave misleading fingerprints on a wall at a crime scene in Seven.
On the following pages you will meet a strange cast of characters: field slaves from Mississippi, steel bands from Trinidad, sheriffs from Puerto Rieo. Mexican campesinos and senioritas, and, of course, the European musical stars who performed these American stereotypes in one of the most disparaged genres of German cinema, the 1950s West German revue film.
Sustained by well-established anti-American stereotypes and clichés, the romance between German and American culture has been a key ingredient of German cinema since its inception. The encounter with American mass culture produced compelling stories of infatuation and seduction, but also of conquest and surrender.
Wunschkonzert
(1994)