CINEJ Cinema Journal
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Historical “Truth,” Constructed Memory: Restaging Germany’s Reunification in Thomas Berger’s Television Melodrama Wir sind das Volk. Liebe kennt keine Grenzen (We are the people. Love without limits) (2008)
Get PDFFilm and television are popular media for the (re)presentation of history and the depiction of momentous past events. Germany’s reunification is no exception. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany has witnessed a proliferation of media production that endeavors to historicize and aestheticize the past. This coincides with the need to forge a post-Wall identity of the new Germany. My discussion of Thomas Berger’s award winning television drama Wir sind das Volk. Liebe kennt keine Grenzen (2008) examines how reunification is presented in a mixture of fictitious elements and authentic historical reconstruction based on shared memories of this past. Following a melodramatic trajectory, the film aims at the reconciliation of German society as a people twenty years after reunification
Return to Reality: Towards A More Tactile Cognition of Film Theory
Get PDFFilm theory has lost itself in the woods among debates of the mind and the senses. Ther are those who are interested in a more tactile sense of the real in film studies. This issue of CINEJ focuses on the documentary truth and how it aims to present us a real and a better world
Music, Magic, and the Mythic: The Dynamics of Visual and Aural Discourse in Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen
Get PDFThe 1980s saw a wave of African films that aimed to represent, on both local and international screens, a sophisticated pre-colonial Africa, representing ancient myths and traditions while simultaneously debunking notions of the continent as primitive. Toward this aim the films inscribed the conventions of oral performance within their visual styles, denying spectator identification with the protagonists and emphasising the presence of the narrator. However, some critics argued that these films exoticised Africa, while their use of oral performance’s distancing effect echoed the ‘scientific’ distance structured by the ethnographic film, in which African societies were represented as ‘the other’. Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen exemplifies this tension, transposing into cinematic form oral storytelling techniques in the depiction of a power struggle within the covert cult of the komo, a Bambara initiation society unfamiliar to most non-Bambara viewers. This paper demonstrates how the film negotiates this tension via music, which interpellates the international spectator by eliciting a greater identification with the protagonists than that determined at a visual level, while encoding a verisimilitude to rituals that may otherwise be read as the superstitious practices of ‘the other’. In this way, music and image in Yeelen operate as parallel, though often overlapping, discourses, bridging the gap between the film’s culturally specific narrative and formal components, and its international spectators
Response to “Seeking God in Early Bergman: The Cases of The Seventh Seal and Winter Light”
Get PDFThis article offers alternate readings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1963) to those proposed in a preceding article by Esma Kartal. It argues against the contention that the two films express optimism about one’s ability to resolve spiritual-existential angst and the possibility of ultimately reaffirming one’s faith. Through close analysis of pivotal scenes, including that of Death in the Castle in The Seventh Seal and the Frostnäs church service in Winter Light, the article exposes the unremitting pessimism that pervades the films’ atmospheres. In essence, the article asserts that the two films, Winter Light in particular, are among the most pessimistic in Bergman’s cinema
The impact of sound technology on the distribution of shot lengths in Hollywood cinema, 1920 to 1933
Get PDFThe impact of sound technology on Hollywood is analysed through looking at the median shot lengths of silent films from the 1920s (n = 54) and early sound films (n = 106). The results show a large increase in the median shot lengths with the introduction of sound (Mann Whitney U = 554.0, Z = -8.33, p = <0.01, PS = 0.0968), estimated to be 2.0s (95% CI: 1.6, 2.4). The dispersion of shot lengths measured using the robust estimator Qn shows a similarly large increase in the dispersion of shot lengths with the transition to sound (Mann Whitney U = 319.0, Z = -9.18, p = <0.01, PS = 0.0557), estimated to be 2.0s (95% CI: 1.7, 2.4)
Garden of Ambivalence The Topology of the Mother-child Dyad in Grey Gardens
Get PDFThe Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens, portrays the lives of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith, known as Little Edie, the aunt and first cousin, respectively, of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. The mother and daughter live together in their East Hampton house that is literally falling apart. As their identical names imply, the Beales share a symbiotic relationship which is reflected in every aspect of their life. I argue that Grey Gardens calls for Julia Kristeva’s insistence on abjection as a crucial struggle with “spatial ambivalence (inside/outside uncertainty)” and an attempt to mark out a space in the undifferentiated field of the mother-child symbiosis. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva (1982) states, “abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship” (p. 10). Grey Gardens portrays the topology of the mother-child dyad, which pertains to a particular spatio-temporality: where this primordial relationship is concerned, object and subject crumble, and the distinction between past and present is irrelevant
Islam goes Hollywood. An exploratory study on Islam in Turkish cinema
Get PDFAbstract By means of two case studies, this article demonstrates how differently Islam is depicted in a Turkish film composed by a secular, intellectual director and in a film considered to promote an Islamic way of life. Yılmaz Güney’s art house film Umut/Hope (1970) depicts Islam as an integral part of Turkish reality. In the story of a poor carriage driver in South East Anatolia, who turns to treasure hunting guided by an imam, folk Islam is compared to a (secular) national lottery ticket: neither are the solution to existential problems. İsmail Güneş’ film The İmam (2005) can be regarded as an example of the return of Islamic values into Turkish society, showing compatibility with modernity. However, whereas Umut is showing (folk) Islam as an existing reality in Turkish society of the 1970s, The İmam is teaching a moral lesson to Turkish society of the 2000s
The Avenging Females: A Comparative Analysis of Kill Bill Vol.1-2, Death Proof and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Get PDFThis paper provides a comparative analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.1-2 (2003, 2004), Death Proof (2007) and Park Chan Wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geumjassi, 2005). The primary objectives of this study are: (1) to reveal the gender-biases inherent to the fundamental discursive structures of the foregoing films; (2) to compare and contrast the films through an analysis of the ‘gaze(s)’ and possible ‘pleasures’, which are inherent in their narratives, in relation to Laura Mulvey’s and Carol Clover’s approaches; and (3) to distinguish Kill Bill Vol.1-2 from the foregoing two and the ‘avenging female’ clichés of the other horror/violence movies in the context of the replaced positionings of its protagonist and antagonist inherent in its distinct narrative style
The Thin Blue Line: How can we destroy actuality with editing?
Get PDFReviews referring to Francis Ford Coppola’s Columbia Pictures Bram Stoker’s Dracula classic of 1992 recurrently mention the images owing to the camera work of Michael Ballhaus as the striking feature of the movie and highly praise them for their thematically coherent effect.. The colours, if mentioned at all, leave reviewers undecided to sceptical when it comes to evaluating their contribution to the overall composition of the film, though. By providing a semiotic analysis of colours and symbolic imagery the below article will show how colours and imagery in their inter-relatedness create coherence and cohesion with Coppola’s interpretation of Stoker’s Dracula as a religiously inspired morality play set in the context of Victorian cultural values and self-perception.
Transperance Me I Want to be Visible: Gay Gaze in Tom Ford’s film A Single Man
Get PDFClassic gaze theory that was underlined by Laura Mulvey in 1975 which claims the male gaze objectifies woman and turns the woman into a sex object, is lack in the explaining gaze from man to man. In Tom Ford’s A Single Man the gaze is used from man to man different from man to woman and it is not perceived as something negative. By providing a queer gaze analysis, this article will show how homosexual people live their intimate feelings by gaze and how gay gaze can be different from the classic gaze in a way that it does not reduces the other one in an interior position