Cinema and Media Studies

Published by Cognella Academic Publishing (San Diego), ISBN 978-1-7935-2153-8. Previous editions have been adopted at 10 universities and colleges.

"Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society" uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.

The text anthology explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics:

Memes (original meaning),
Networks (McLuhan),
Spectacle (Debord),
Hyperreality (Baudrillard).

Capitalism and Consumerism,
Freedom and Protest,
Social-Mobile Media,
Ecology and the Anthropocene,
Science and Our Place in the Universe,
Pseudoscience and Conspiracy,
Celebrity and Superheroes,
New Concepts of "Hot" and "Cool" Media,
Land Art, Dark Skies, and Technological Civilization.

The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.

Briar March’s award-winning documentary There Once Was an Island chronicles the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants of Takuu, a small atoll in the Pacific, who are faced with the gradual submersion of their home due to sea level rise.  Applying Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” to the ecological and political processes shown in the film, the chapter argues that March’s documentary is a eco-cosmopolitan project reaching out to new forms of solidarity.

Les novellisations des magazines spécialisés forment le continent oublié de l’histoire culturelle du cinéma, malgré la précocité avec laquelle ce type de presse à grand tirage s’est tourné vers les adaptations romancées de films, l’intensité des circulations médiatiques dont elles témoignent et la longévité des publications qui leur étaient dédiées : un périodique comme Le Film complet, principalement lu par un public jeune, féminin et de classe moyenne, a publié pas moins de 3297 numéros entre 1922 et 1958, chacun d’entre eux proposant a minima un récit de 10-15 pages agrémenté de photographies. Leur étude pose certes des difficultés, liées à l’absence d’archives d’entreprises de presse, au manque d’informations sur les auteur·e·s des récits et leurs publics, ainsi qu’à la disparition des films. Les « films racontés » n’en constituent pas moins une trace précieuse et significative des modes de diffusion et de consommation du loisir cinématographique avant les années 1960, comme l’ont montré les travaux ayant esquissé l’étude de cet objet.
Notre article prolonge et approfondit l’examen de cette source au regard de l’histoire des publics et de la réception, à partir de l’étude de cas des novellisations publiées dans Le Film complet dans les années 1950. Il est en effet possible d’étudier la production et les usages de ces textes médiatiques, en tant que pratiques éditoriales et cinéphiliques, en les mettant en relation avec les discours tenus sur eux dans le courrier des lecteurs du magazine, aussi bien par le journaliste chargé de modérer les échanges, qui est également un auteur de récits, que par les lecteur·rice·s.

This article discusses the ritual of self-knowledge and the process of unfolding the personality of the character Nina, in the film Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky. The theory of the double, proposed by Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Clément Rosset, allows us to see how the ramifications of person, space and time (categories of semiotic
discourse) operate in the identity construction of the subject in its relation with the social system in which is inserted. Although the study focuses on a filmic narrative, the contributions of literature and literary theory are essential, as the representation of mental processes of Nina
and the fragmentation of her personality are part of the structural changes present in the modern novel, studied by Anatol Rosenfeld. We consider the assumptions of this theoretical work in literature that refers to "the unifying spirit of the arts" to relate the dissolution in the structure of the modern novel with the techniques employed in the film Black Swan, both from the process of fragmentation of identities.

Este trabalho examina as relações que se estabelecem entre a imagem e memória quando inclinadas por um primas pós-moderno do pensamento. Essas relações aparecem no filme 'Imagens do mundo e inscrições da guerra' (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, Alemanha, 1988), de Harun Farocki, no qual analisamos algumas de suas estratégias visuais.

Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. The proliferation of media objects such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The essays interrogate how the combination of fashion and the moving-image enables us to reflect upon the ubiquitous presence of fashion in our media-saturated landscape, and at the same time upon the ubiquitous presence of media in socio-cultural practices and industrial processes such as fashion. Questioning the encounter between audiovisual media and fashion brings an elective affinity to light. If fashion is central to cinema and television and gives rise to a wide range of new genres and formats, it also impacts on the forms of representation and expression of identity and the body via personal and social media, according to the prevailing customs and tastes of our place and time. This encounter is a terrain of experimentation with new trends in the media experience – ones that rely on performativity and the enhancement of the viewer/user’s agency. After all, audiovisual media are similarly about constructing a fictional (and entertaining) world and actively and creatively inhabiting it as an essential part of the actual world.

Cet essai cherche avant tout à mettre en évidence le peu d’intérêt porté par les théoriciens du cinéma à la notion de remake. L’auteur examine les différents types de remake et les définitions proposées jusqu’ici et isole quelques-uns des traits caractéristiques de cette pratique. Il porte une attention particulière aux modifications que ce remaniement opère sur le texte d’origine. This article seeks to illustrate, first of all, how little interest film theory has shown in the notion of the remake. Beginning with a discussion of the principal definitions of the remake and its principal varieties, the author isolates some of the most characteristic practices in the process of remaking. The article draws particular

Money, Copy, Quotation, Motive, Genre.
The treatise is a reflection on the phenomenon of the remake, which plays a very exposed role in cinema, puts it in relation to the other arts and tries to find a system behind the decisions of film directors and producers when a remake makes sense and when it does not.

This essay will first present a description of the realist film based on notions of cinematic realism by Georg Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer. It will then affirm the cinema of Lino Brocka as being realist. Lastly, it will discuss Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag [Manila in the Claws of Light] (Brocka, 1975) in terms of cinematic realism shaped by ideas proposed by Lukács and Kracauer, and Brocka's own statements as artist and activist. Drawing on the ideas of Kracauer and Lukács, a realist film can be characterized as seeking redemption from the damaged modern condition by cinematically foregrounding the humanity of the ordinary man, who is organically grounded in physical reality.

Between 1945 and 1954, some politics, religious, economic and cultural manifestations had been fomented by the dissemination of the anticommunism in the Brazilian and United States society. From a conception of Social History of the Cinema, we intend to analyze the social impact of U.S movies with anti-communist messages exhibit in Brazil and, in this way, contribute for a better reflection and agreement of the construction of these ideas in both the countries. The movies produced in Hollywood with anti-communist messages, and certain news in periodicals and magazines had formed part of a communicational circuit composed for manifestations, brochures, diplomatic dispatches, programs of radio, lectures, amongst others. The emission/mediation/reception circuit of these products and its transnational character disclose that passionate defenses of the necessity of fight and contain the communism hadn’t been motivated by ethical, moral or religious principles, especially when observed mindfully one of the vehicles that more contribute in the dissemination of the anticommunism, the cinema. The way as communist and anti-communist was represented in these movies, and as such representations was treated by periodicals and magazines of the period was interpreted in its context of production to understand how they had related with the domination structures. Likewise, we investigate the forces of resistance to these representations, the ideological positions that noised in the debates and social fights of the period. It is frequent in the historiography that study the anticommunism in Brazil, the
conception of the anticommunism was less intense in the 1940’s and 1950’s of that in the years that precede and succeed this period. However, when studying the historicity of the practical anti-communist we unveil an extensive and impetuous effort of different social actors to prevent and to fight the communism. That picture demonstrates the difficulty in understanding the anticommunism of the period without one withheld examination of the actions of the State, social organisms and individuals. Despite its variants, the differences of its ideas and its practical politics, its social influences, especially in the cinema, are visible.

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The 'tensive motifs' of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams and offer embodied forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of 'Neurofilmology'—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

« On n’en finirait pas de vous comparer, et quelque fois de vous opposer, n’est-ce pas Jean-Luc ? » dit Marker en voix off dans Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1992). En effet, cela va de soi, ils travaillent ensemble en 1967 et 1968 (Loin du Vietnam, Ciné-tracts), on les verra ensuite basculer tous les deux d’un cinéma collectif à un cinéma essayiste réflexif quand la révolte collective s’estompe. Si l’un se cache, l’autre se montre : la sous-exposition de Marker tranche avec la surexposition de Godard. On cherchera ici à caractériser les postures opposées de deux auteurs dont l’exposition de la personnalité tient une importance particulière dans le développement de l’œuvre. Plus précisément, on abordera un aspect de cette posture, la mise en scène du secret chez Marker et l’exposition de soi chez Godard. L’analyse de ces mises en scène de la personnalité symétriquement inverses nous amènera à questionner les positions singulières des deux auteurs dans le champ cinématographique : l’un tend à s’effacer tout en consolidant le mystère de son nom tandis que chez l’autre le « personnage » tend à remplacer l’œuvre.

Even in the day and age of converged media, discussion regarding media industries’ regulations is one that takes a while to uncover since it encompasses various fields with their own individual perspectives. However, in order to do so, discussion of narrower case studies are necessary in order to understand different perspective from different sides of the phenomenon of media convergence. Even though nowadays, media seemed to emerged into one unity which provides people with entertainment, knowledge, and community, it is really a combination of different fields and industries. Cinema is one of the fields that is widely effected by media convergence, and for the purpose of giving an in depth analysis regarding media convergence, this essay would focus solely on the film industry and the challenges they face as a result of the change.

Reviewed at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.43.2.0189
This book offers a much-needed focus on Palestine solidarity films, supplying a critical theoretical framework whose intellectual thrust is rooted in the challenges facing scholars censored for attempting to rectify and reverse the silencing of a subject matter about which much of the world would remain uninformed without cinematic and televisual mediation. Its innovative focus on Palestine solidarity films spans a selected array of works which began to emerge during the 1970s, made by directors located outside Palestine/Israel who professed support for Palestinian liberation. Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle analyzes Palestine solidarity films hailing from countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Iran, Palestine/Israel, Mexico, and the United States. Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle is an effort to insist, constructively, upon a rectification and reversal of the glaring and disproportionate minimization and distortion of discourse critical of Zionism and Israeli policy in the cinematic and televisual public sphere.

This essay investigates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s representation of the declining Catholic identity in twentieth-century post-war Italy and juxtaposes to it an alternative Marxist vision of Christianity in his short film La ricotta, included in Alfredo Bini’s Ro.Go.Pa.G (1962).  It presents the cultural and political circumstance of the film production and deconstruct Pasolini’s narrative strategies in the light of his unorthodox Marxism, attentive to the poor people on Cinecittà set, namely the protagonist Stracci (literally “Rags”) and his fellow proletarians the production’s extras.

L’histoire du XXe siècle a produit un nombre d’images sans précédent : depuis la Grande Guerre aucun événement n’a eu lieu sans laisser une multitude d’images fixes et animées. A partir de l’œuvre du cinéaste et artiste Chris Marker (1921-2012), cette étude – essai historique et philosophique – s’intéresse au rôle du cinéma dans la médiatisation de l’histoire contemporaine. Révolution de 1917, seconde guerre mondiale, guerre du Vietnam, luttes de décolonisation, Mai 1968, 1973 au Chili, effondrement de l’URSS et du bloc de l’Est, 11 septembre 2001, etc., tout au long de sa vie, Chris Marker n’a cessé de réfléchir sur les soubresauts de l’histoire. Toute son œuvre, foisonnante et polymorphe, traite ces sujets et plane sur cette longue durée.
Quel est l’intérêt du cinéma de Chris Marker aujourd’hui ? Penseur autant que cinéaste, photographe, archiviste…, il est celui qui a le plus profondément et systématiquement réfléchi à la mise en scène cinématographique de l’histoire, en montrant ses envers et revers. De cette œuvre très actuelle on peut tirer une leçon de philosophie et une réflexion inédite sur le temps et la mémoire. L’analyse des rapports complexes entre image et réalité est ainsi explorée au travers des événements, petits et grands, du XXe siècle.
Écrire l’histoire au cinéma c’est questionner les sources (archives) et la forme d’écriture offerte par le médium (montage). Pour Marker, écrire l’histoire au cinéma c’est aussi écrire une histoire du cinéma et penser l’histoire c’est penser le cinéma. Ecrire l’histoire grâce au cinéma c’est aussi bien faire l’histoire du cinéma et des médias que rendre sensibles des moments de l’histoire contemporaine (ce qui n’intéresse pas les médias). L’étude se fonde sur des analyses de films, de vidéos et de textes de Chris Marker mis en regard avec des textes de philosophie, de théorie de l’image et du cinéma ainsi que d’histoire et de sciences sociales.

The essay investigates how science fiction visceralize our experience of threatened and threatening environments, looking at two pertinent examples: John Hillcoat’s 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (2006) and Tim Fehlbaum’s Hell (2011). It argues that together with the performances of the human actors and the tension and suspense built by narrative structure, the spectacle and insinuated agency of virtual ecological space is centrally responsible for the films’ emotional force and for their ability to engage viewers in stories of global ecocide and human survival.

Partendo dalla problematica definizione di "documentario di animazione" e dalle questioni che essa solleva sul rapporto tra realtà e disegno, questo saggio sostiene che "Valzer con Bashir" di Ari Folman può essere definito una "narrazione documentale". In questo film, infatti, un processo di "autenticazione intermediale" sfrutta le possibilità creative e le risorse retoriche della finzionalità insieme a quelle testimoniali e referenziali del documentario con l'obiettivo di superare una rimozione traumatica. In questo modo Ari Folman tenta di costruire una memoria dei fatti narrati che sia critica e soggettiva, ma anche fortemente ancorata alla realtà.

Starting from the problematic definition of "animation documentary" and the questions it raises about the relationship between reality and drawing, this essay argues that Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir" can be defined as a "documentary narrative". In this film, a process of "intermedial authentication" exploits the creative possibilities and rhetorical resources of fiction together with the testimonial and referential resources of documentary, aiming at overcoming a traumatic removal. In this way Ari Folman attempts to construct a memory of the facts narrated that is critical and subjective, as well as strongly anchored to reality.

This dissertation explores the complicated relationship that exists
between non industrial, local and industrial filmmaking practices in India post the digital turn.Such an exploration of diverse filmmaking practices will enable reflection on a moment of transformation that is currently taking place in India’s explosive media context.

The sustained achievement of the Kimetsu no Yaiba film in the number 1 spot at the box office and claim to the highest grossing film of all time in Japan marks an important achievement for late-night TV anime. While two other anime, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi and Kimi no Na ha, have reached similar levels of sales and popularity, neither of these works were based on an established late-night TV anime like Kimetsu no Yaiba is. This may invite questions of what makes Kimetsu no Yaiba so special as to achieve this degree of fame. However, instead of pursuing the question of Kimetsu no Yaiba’s uniqueness, this presentation will instead explore how conventional the anime actually is, through an examination of its media-form, exploring how Kimetsu no Yaiba performs as an anime. Such an exploration will examine some of the recent trends in anime that are employed in Kimetsu no Yaiba, including certain character types, narrative tropes, and character designs. In addition, I will examine some of the patterns of production, and, in comparison with the manga, reveal how the media-formal elements of both mediums reveal divergent types of transnationalism.