CINEJ Cinema Journal
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New Media and Film Festivals in the Middle East
Get PDFThis paper is about two things. On the one hand it tries to observe some of the changes after the digital revolution, changes that had an impact on film festivals. The digital projection and acceptance of digital films to film festivals have been achieved. Yet an aspect of this digitization is under attack. The film submissions through digital portals. The second aspect is often neglected and an under the other topic: short film festivals, especially for and by the young
A Film Buff’s Paradox: The Evolution of Illusion vs. Reality
Get PDFIn this cinematic realm, the concept of illusion vs. reality is a theme that has attracted artistic exploration, and has proven to be an enduring and significant storytelling framework in the realm of contemporary cinema. This theme of illusion vs. reality is witnessed in films from as far back as George Méliès 1902 A Trip to the Moon, to the 1964 version of Mary Poppins, to contemporary offerings such as The Matrix in 1999
The City on Screen: A Methodological Approach on Cinematic City Studies
Get PDFThe city has a strong memory and it never forgets its own experiences. The past, the present and the future of the city can be read in its streets, buildings, sounds, myths, rhythms and stories. More importantly, if the city is portrayed through a camera, it becomes as fictional and designable as films. At this stage, there is no difference between watching a film and seeing a city. Also, cinema itself turns into a paradigm that belongs to the city. This parallelism between the city and film is like an inevitable destiny so much so that they constitute and develop each other. Accordingly, those who attempt to understand the notion of the city should consult the films made about them and vice versa; hence, this paper deals with the question of how the city is cinematized, but this question involves another question: how does the cinematic imagination fictionalize itself in the city
Subtitling in the Nigerian Film Industry, Informative or Misleading?
Get PDFSubtitles are captions displayed at the bottom of a cinema or television screen that translate or transcribe the dialogue or narrative. Nigeria and indeed Africa should be a major beneficiary of the subtitles considering the number of ethnic groups in the continent. The emergence of different film industries in countries around Africa has helped in showcasing Africa to the international community. Hence, subtitles came in handy, considering the fact that most viewers cannot understand the language with which the movies were produced. This paper explores the battle for meaning by English subtitles to movies produced in African languages especially the Nigerian film industry. The paper will look at the Hermaneutic Theory of Mass Communication to buttress the relevance of deriving meaning out of movie subtitles. The Hausa and the Yoruba film industries are the subjects of this study because of the large viewership they enjoy by people even outside Nigeria. The research came up as a result of the persistent errors which I have noticed while watching Yoruba and Hausa films with subtitles. Subtitles convey a summary of the dialogues taking place in a movie. Viewers who cannot understand the language used for the dialogue rely on the subtitles to make meaning out of the movie. If they are unable to make meaning out of the subtitles because of some inadequacies as a result of carelessness in the process of production, the aim of having the subtitles is defeated
Fiction Criticizing Reality: Abbas Kiarostami and the Cracked Windshield of Cinema
Get PDFThis article argues that Abbas Kiarostami uses documentaries and fiction films to examine the distinction between reality and fiction. Through the use of an arthouse style of filmmaking, the insertion of a surrogate director into the narrative and a recurring breakdown in technology, Kiarostami demonstrates that film’s ability to capture reality is a flawed, sometimes broken, endeavor
Review of Masculinity and Gender in Greek Cinema
Get PDFThis is a historical-sociological study based on the premise that cinema is a social institution that is ‘interactively changing along with the society in which it is produced and viewed’. As such, the representation of masculinity in the Greek films produced in this transitory period ‘becomes obscured, uncertain and problematic’
Review of Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading
Get PDFControversial and unconventional designer of formal experimentations, simultaneously celebrated and despised around the world, performative to a point that realism is achieved through the manipulation of realistic conventions hidden in everyday forms of human interactions, von Trier is indeed one of the most important contemporary filmmakers within European cinema, as well as the protagonist of Koutsourakis’s Politics as Form in Lars von Trier: A Post-Brechtian Reading
Review of Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader
Get PDFThe essays in this new edited collection are, therefore, designed to address how monstrosity has come to represent the fears that the new century has brought with it, from terror threats through to changes in our identifications with race, gender and sexuality
The Role Of The Refugee And The Impact Of Fragmented Identities In Diasporic Filmmakers. A Review Of Dogville By Lars von Trier
Get PDFIn this article I will review the film Dogville by Lars Von Trier through the perspective given by Hamid Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. The main purpose is to understand how identity is described and performed through the allegory of Grace and the image of the refugee, and the role homelessness and displacement play both for the filmmakers and the content of diasporic films. I will demonstrate how the relationship between minority (Grace-the refugee) and the majority (the population of Dogville) is a topic of transnational cinema, and which conclusions can we make by taking into account the role of identity and sense of belonging for transnational productions