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Intimacy in contemporary digital cinema
Get PDFCritical discourses on contemporary digital cinema tend to be either overtly negative, framed within a rhetoric of loss or disenfranchisement, or unilaterally positive, celebrating the user agency and freedom digital technologies enable. Both these conceptual positions are unhelpful because they either focus on what contemporary digital cinema fails to do or what it should do, without examining more closely how it actually functions. What is needed is a third, neutral approach which takes both sides into consideration but is also aware of their limitations and weaknesses. This thesis takes as its impetus Giles Deleuze’s suggestion that, just like the cinemas of the movement-image and the time-image before it, contemporary digital cinema needs a basic will to art – a new aesthetic principle, a new function of the image, a new politics, a new representational potential distinct from those that have come before it. The aim of this thesis is therefore to establish this will to art and explore its ramifications for and manifestations in contemporary digital cinema. Taking into consideration a variety of filmic texts from the 1980s to the present day which prominently feature diegetically recorded footage, as well as amateur film-making practices from the home movies of the 1960s to the video clips now uploaded to online media sharing platforms, the increasing relevance of home media in the reception of contemporary digital cinema, and most crucially the process of convergence inherent in digital media, this thesis argues that the will to art of contemporary digital cinema is intimacy
Characters as social beings: social performance in the French and Czechoslovak New Waves
Get PDFThis thesis investigates the aesthetic presence of social performance in six French and Czechoslovak New Wave films of the 1960s. The New Wave was particularly interested in portraying everyday life, and the film corpus studied in this thesis focuses specifically on the representation of the characters' social lives. In addition, the films share the commonality of being made with an aesthetic of authenticity inspired more or less by the 1960s observational documentary genre of cinéma vérité.
In the film corpus, ordinary social situations occupy a more prominent place on screen than usual, and instigate a social kind of engagement with the films. Where narrative context conventionally provides the framework for a characterâs actions, in these unconventional films, it is the characters' social environments that more precisely contextualize their way of being. The aim of the thesis is to engage with these social contexts to understand the characters' social behaviours, and to examine how the 'vérité aesthetic' evokes a social kind of reading of the films.
To this end, I develop in the first chapter a Goffmanian approach to the films, inspired by sociologist Erving Goffman's writings on social reality as a performative realm. I use his notions of social performance, social framework, and social perception to engage with each film through what I call a 'social gaze' that inspects the social dynamics of the charactersâ behaviours. Over the course of three case study chapters, I apply this approach to the films to unearth and discuss their social range of meaning.
This thesis thus aims to contribute both to film historical scholarship on the 1960s European New Wave, and to a study of the aestheticization of social reality in film in general.</p
Eastern Europe does not exist: Hannah Arendt and the politics of the everyday in Loves of a Blonde
Get PDFIn this article I propose to show that film can challenge some of our political and geographical common sense. The article will be about Eastern Europe, while arguing that Eastern Europe does not exist. To illustrate what I mean by that statement, I will will begin with a conversation I had a few months ago with a friend. We talked about the German novelist Günther Grass and I said that I didn’t much appreciate his writing in the Tin Drum, because it is so rooted in East Germany. By that I meant the flat planes of Eastern Prussia. My friend, who thought that I referred to the DDR, said, “Yes, but Günther Grass was a West German author.” I replied, “That is true, and he was born in Gdańsk.” So at stake in this nice example of miscommunication was the use of the term ‘East’: is this a geographical or a political term
The mythopoetics of debt: exploring the works of Ismail Kadare
Get PDFThis thesis examines the novels of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. It studies four novels: Les Tambours de la pluie [Kështjella], Qui a ramené Doruntine ? [Kush e solli Doruntinën], Le Général de l’armée morte [Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur], and Le Palais des rêves [Pallati i Ëndrrave]. The methodological angle of this thesis is two-fold. It investigates the formal devices of repetition, circularity and intertextuality in these texts, but it does so with the aim of exploring one central thematic complex: the idea of Albanian identity as it is imagined and refracted through a variety of perspectives in the novels. This dual methodological perspective―textual and thematic―also means that the aim of this thesis is two-fold. It makes a contribution to scholarship on Kadare by demonstrating a formal and thematic coherence within some of his major works. It also makes a contribution to a wider context of critical and scholarly discourse on the Balkans. First, the intervention I make in this field is characterised by the decision to follow Kadare in his predominantly national, rather than a more broadly regional, perspective. In his works, this national perspective is self-reflexive. As his novels show in their rewriting of historical events and salient elements of folk morality, a reflection upon national identity is part of the national identity of Albania.
Second, and in continuity with this emphasis on self-reflexivity, the perspective that this thesis presents on cultural themes is always textual: it examines how themes are embedded in stories and how they become reinterpreted by narrative. Across this corpus of texts, and from the perspective of a movement from history to modernist abstraction, this thesis shows a fundamental continuity in Kadare’s artistic concern with questioning Albanian identity
The weaponisation of the camera: filmic interventions into (and out of) extraordinary political events
Get PDFI begin this thesis by exploring the postmodern status of the camera, theory, and audio-visual art in early reactions to 9/11. I outline my theoretical framework: from the concepts of weaponisation and the frame to the responsive eye and reflexive intervention. In Chapters 2 and 3, I offer a genealogy of the ‘weaponised camera’ by showing how Jean-Luc Godard has visibly practiced his own frame-work in his explicitly political films. Beginning with a modernist self-obsession with failing to enact a political event in the 1960s, he moved further into strident Maoism after the failure of May ’68, attempting to immerse himself in collectivist filmmaking. By Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), he was using montage and sustained juxtaposition to force a series of postmodern confrontations with the ‘cinematographic form’ of twentieth-century French history and collective memory.
Chapter 4 traces how the concept of ‘the event’ has developed across academic disciplines and the arts. Chapter 5 considers ethnographic docufiction films by Jean Rouch, Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh which, through acts of performance and reconstruction, have made reflexive interventions into significant political events in national histories. Each filmmaker stages confrontations with and through ritual, propaganda, trauma, and culturally enforced silences. These films, I argue, are positioned as performative, Austinian ‘film acts’: they reorganise the enduring narrative and ‘documentary’ forms of past events. In turn, they are intended to provoke ‘film events’, which might reorganise cultural understandings of the past. In Chapter 5, I describe how some protesters of the Arab Spring sought to use the distributed technology of the ‘global village’ as a weapon of revolution: not simply to record the event as it happened, but using this mediatisation as a reflexive frame itself, to bring the event into being as a global event and simultaneously as an act of postmodern filmic autoethnography
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Modern Tragedy
Get PDFThis thesis is an interpretation of three films by the Greek Cypriot director Michael Cacoyannis: ΣÏÎλλα (Stella, 1955), Το κοÏίÏÏι με Ïα μαÏÏα (To koritsi me ta mavra/A Girl in Black, 1956) and Το ÏελεÏÏαίο ÏÎμα (To teleftaio psema/A Matter of Dignity, 1958). These films appear early in Cacoyannisâ career and very little has been written on them. My thesis seeks to show that they are accomplished and complex films, which merit close attention, both in virtue of their dramatic form and because of the ethical questions they raise regarding individual autonomy and the force of archaic ethical norms. The aim of this thesis is to interpret these films by examining the evolving motivations of their protagonists. The thesis seeks to show that the dramatic form of the films renders the agency of the protagonist partly intransparent. In order to show this, my thesis examines, on the one hand, how characterisation, perspective, character relationships and the development of the drama provide an internal context for agency in each film. On the other hand, the interpretation seeks to tease out the ethical implications and stakes of the dramatic action in each film. These implications, I argue, are structured by a thematic ambivalence running through these films between modernity, understood as subjective freedom, and archaic ethical norms, implying a limit to subjective freedom. In the approach to the filmsâ dramatic form and their ethical implications, I am indebted to Hegelâs aesthetic and ethical theory. I use the Hegelian term âmodern tragedyâ to characterise both the dramatic form of these films and the ethical situation of their protagonists. I also situate these films within international auteur cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s. The thesis aims, thus, to contribute to scholarship on European auteur cinema of the mid-20th century. It also aims to be a contribution to the study of agency and ethics in film in general.</p
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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