Film Genre

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Page 1. Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere Kelly Ann McWilliam BA (Hons), GC Arts A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in May 2006.

ABSTRACT: Six decades after the romantic comedy emerged as a Hollywood genre in 1934, the first romantic comedies with a central lesbian couple, including Marita Giovanni’s Bar Girls and Rose Troche’s Go Fish, were released in 1994. This study argues that Bar Girls and Go Fish represent the first in a group of films whose numbers and similarities enable their consideration as a romantic comedy sub-genre, namely the ‘lesbian romantic comedy’. This study identifies and analyses this sub-genre. It contends that these films have emerged as the predominant (and perhaps only) form of mainstream lesbian feature film in the United States of America in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, despite their relative prominence for more than a decade, they remain vastly under-examined areas in scholarship on both film genre and lesbian culture. This project aims to contribute to these areas by producing the first full-length survey of the sub-genre and the first study of any length to focus exclusively on it. This study concentrates on ten lesbian romantic comedies: Bar Girls (1994), Go Fish (1994), Maria Maggenti’s The Incredibly True Adventure of 2 Girls in Love (1995), Kelli Herd’s It’s in the Water (1996), Julia Dyer’s Late Bloomers (1996), Emma-Kate Croghan’s Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), Heidi Arnesen’s Some Prefer Cake (1997), Anne Wheeler’s Better than Chocolate (1999), Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), and Helen Lesnick’s A Family Affair (2001). While this project employs textual analysis as its primary methodology to examine these films, these analyses take place more broadly within a public sphere framework. Consistent with a wider shift in analyses of lesbian and gay cultural products, this framework allows a consideration of the larger public stakes of lesbian romantic comedies and, in particular, their introduction of lesbian content into a heterocentric genre. Specifically, this project argues that the introduction of lesbian content—or the replacement of ‘boy meets girl’ with ‘girl meets girl’—destabilises the genre in significant ways, but that the genre itself equally restricts the representation of lesbianism possible within it. Ultimately, this project proposes a reading of lesbian romantic comedies as conservative and progressive, conventional and subversive, but as nonetheless complex texts that offer a range of pleasures and readings to their audiences and a range of challenges to the genre itself. Such a reading reveals the complexity and negotiation inherent in these films’ position as independent films presenting culturally and politically marginal content in a mainstream genre.

Les reconfigurations actuelles des films et documents audiovisuels, qui changent notamment de support ou de média, interrogent bien sûr les définitions acquises de ce que nous appelions sans trop d’incertitude, jusque dans les années 1990, « cinéma » ou « télévision », mais elles peuvent aussi questionner les catégories théoriques mêmes que nous utilisons couramment pour les étudier : genre, format, média. Prenons tout d’abord quatre exemples de migration et recatégorisation d’objets audiovisuels pour poser des repères. Nous approfondirons ensuite la réflexion en montrant comment la notion de « levain des médias » nous permet de clarifier certains de ces phénomènes. Avec cet éclairage, nous observerons comment les objets se déplacent et se situent de façon dynamique au sein d’une tension entre genre, format et média, pour mieux repenser la « logique des genres » aujourd’hui.

P. Dudzińskim, R. Dudziński, Zabić tysiąc kobiet na tysiąclecie państwa polskiego. Władza (ludowa) i śmierć w filmie Janusza Kidawy „Anna” i wampir [w:] Między przymusem a akceptacją. Meandry władzy w literaturze i kulturze popularnej, red. A. Gemra, K. Dominas, Wrocław 2015, s 151–168.

To kill a thousand woman for a millenium of polish country. (People's) Power and Death in “Anna i wampir” by Janusz Kidawa
This analysis concerns police procedural movie entitled “Anna” i wampir (1981), which is based on a story of polish serial killer Zbigniew Marchwicki and the 7-year long attempts to catch him. Marchwicki committed all of his killings in the area of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie and Upper Silesia. The murders started in 1964 and continued, with occasional breaks, until 1970. One of Marchwicki’s victims was the niece of Edward Gierek, Upper Silesian Communist Party leader. However, the prosecution and the police investigators denied being pressured by political forces in the criminal prosecution of Zdzisław Marchwicki. After a highly publicized show-trial, which lasted for 10 months, Marchwicki received the death sentence in July 1975. His execution took place in 1977. We approach “Anna” i wampir from two complementary perspectives: the one of cultural history and the one of film studies, especially film genre studies. Thanks to that, we show genesis of the film on two different levels: the real life story, and the nationwide panic it caused, on which it is based and deep-rooted fears that were hunting Polish society in the early ‘80. On both of those levels, discourse of the movie is connected with discourses of power, namely the powers of People’s Republic of Poland.

Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames. 
Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks
Elena Gorfinkel, King’s College London (U.K.)

Part 1: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics

Chapter 2: Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema
Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Chapter 3: Frame
Adrian Martin, Monash University (Australia)

Chapter 4: Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China
John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge

Chapter 5: The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary
James Tweedie, University of Washington

Part 2: Global Ideality, History, Representation

Chapter 6: Toward an Archeology of Global Rhythms: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, 1929) and its Reception in France
Laurent Guido, University of Lille (France)

Chapter 7: When Cinema was Humanism
Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick

Chapter 8: African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation
N. Frank Ukadike, Tulane University, New Orleans

Chapter 9: Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema
Patricia White, Swarthmore College

Part 3: Kinships, Identifications, Genres

Chapter 10: Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul University

Chapter 11: Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Peter Y. Paik, Yonsei University (Korea)

Chapter 12: The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández
Gilberto M. Blasini, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Chapter 13: The Gangster Film as World Cinema
Jian Xu, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Chapter 14: Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema
Tami Williams, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/global-cinema-networks/9780813592725

"Thanks to their huge market success, animations from The Disney Company and blockbuster franchises like Harry Potter have dominated 'family film' production. Yet there is a long, varied and largely untold history of films made for 'family' audiences of adults and children outside the United States, and of non-Disney family films in Hollywood.

Family Films in Global Cinema is the first serious examination of films for child and family audiences in a global context.  Whereas most previous studies of children’s films and family films have concerned themselves solely with Disney, this book encompasses both live-action and animated films from the Hollywood, British, Australian, East German, Russian, Indian, Japanese and Brazilian cinemas.  As well as examining international family films previously ignored by scholars, the collection also presents a fresh perspective on familiar movies such as The Railway Children, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Babe, and the Harry Potter series.

Coinciding with a surging critical interest in children’s culture, Family Films in Global Cinema brings together film and television critics and historians, children’s literature scholars and folklorists. Contributors interrogate the generic aspects of family films, analysing their key formal and thematic characteristics, revealing their commonalities and variations across social and cultural borders, questioning what makes them enduringly popular for adults as well as children, and underlining their enormous richness and diversity."

Introduction: Children's Films and Family Films; Noel Brown and Bruce Babington

PART I: QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY

1. Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls: Babe and Babe: Pig in the City; Bruce Babington
2. 'A film specially suitable for children': The Marketing and Reception of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Peter Krämer
3. 'Why Can't They Make Kids' Flicks Anymore?': Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the Dual-Addressed Family Film; Adrian Schober
4. 'This is Halloween': The History, Significance, and Cultural Impact of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas; James M. Curtis

PART II: THE CHILD AND THE FAMILY

5. Sabu, the Elephant Boy; Jeffrey Richards
6. The Classical Hollywood Family on Screen: Living with Father and Remembering Mama; Bruce Babington
7. The Railway Children, and Other Stories: Lionel Jeffries and British Family Films in the 1970s; Noel Brown
8. 'Luke, I am your father': Toys, Play Space, and Detached Fathers in Post-1970s Hollywood Family Films; Holly Blackford

PART III: CINEMA AND STATE

9. 'Films to Give Kids Courage!': Children's Films in the German Democratic Republic; Benita Blessing
10. Post-Soviet Parody: Can Family Films about Russian Heroes be Funny?; Natalie Kononenko
11. A Brief History of Indian Children's Cinema; Noel Brown

PART IV: NATIONAL IDENTITIES

12. Brazilian Children's Cinema in the 1990s: Tensions Between the National-Popular and the International-Popular; Mirian Ou and Alessandro Constantino Gamo
13. Narrative, Time, and Memory in Studio Ghibli Films; Tom Ue
14. Dark Films for Dark Times: Spectacle, Reception, and the Textual Resonances of the Hollywood Fantasy Film; Fran Pheasant-Kelly"

Este artículo reformula un análisis de Machuca (2004) de Andrés Wood como una película de género(s), reconsiderando los aspectos melodramáticos y a la vez, examinando estrategias narrativas del cine de horror. Machuca produce una reacción emocional y física. El público, según entrevistas y datos etnográficos, reaccionó con el cuerpo (lágrimas y sollozos).2 Mi énfasis en el artículo será consolidar los vínculos entre la película y el pasado histórico/testimonial, vinculando el largometraje con la novela autobiográfica Tres años para nacer (2002) del poeta-profesor Amante Eledín Parraguez (1956).3 Se hará una lectura atenta (close reading) y reflexiones del efecto perturbador u horroroso del final. Será contextualizado a la actualidad (2019) de las marchas y protestas en Chile.

A book that looks at the relationship between melodrama, gender, sexuality and nationalism per se, and with reference to Hindi cinema between 1970-2000.
Table of Contents:
1. Political History, Political Economy
2. Bombay Cinema and Questions of Form
3. Towards a Theory of the Sexual Economy
4. Femininity and the Regulation of Pleasure and Desire
5. The Changing Faces of Masculinity
6. Gender, Sexuality, Nation
7. Communities and Their Others
8. Wounded Identities

This book starts from the empirical analysis of five drama series: /The West Wing/, NBC: 1999-2006;/ Lost/, ABC: 2004-2010; /Desperate Housewives/, ABC: 2004-/; House, M.D., /Fox: 2004- and /CSI: Crime Scene Investigation/, CBS: 2000-.

The first season of each series were analysed with respect to the production context (the programme’s audiences, social repercussion, awards, strategies of interactivity and the characteristics inherent in US industrial television production) as well as to generic features, invariant motives and the use of thematic and mythical recurrences. Each of the series analysed pertains to an important genre of drama (politics, adventures, soap-opera, medical and police), within the television production of the /era of drama/, as defined by Longworth (2000-2002).

Series are being described in relation to its genre, and thematic recurrence presence is also analysed. Intertextuality, generic hybridization, autoreferenciality and the several TV eras (paleoTV, neoTV and metaTV) are also studied in this book.

En los primeros años del siglo XXI, el documental mexicano ha incrementado sus niveles de producción, distribución y exhibición, llamando la atención de nuevos espectadores pues ha diversificado notablemente sus temas y ha aprovechado los recursos narrativos del cine de ficción. En casi todos los festivales de cine en el país hay un espacio para el documental. De hecho, algunos de los más prestigiosos están dedicados íntegramente al cine documental, y en ellos se presenta lo más destacado de la producción mundial. Se vuelve necesario dialogar desde la academia, con una mirada plural e interdisciplinaria, sobre los temas, las narrativas, los discursos, de esos documentales que en variadas formas representan las identidades, los intereses, las preocupaciones, las formas de vida en México; lo que precisamente tiene el lector en sus manos.

Telling the story of the American frontier and the rise of a nation, the Western has usually been associated with what is called ‘Americanness.’ Of the richest genre of Hollywood both in number of the films produced, and the timespan survived through, Westerns have been produced in and outside of the U.S. with different, yet not so different, stories. The dynamism of the genre is shaped by cultural, political, and economic contexts in which its examples circulate. To understand the generic evolution within a culture, as well as cross-cultural inflections on genre, and the ways objects operate in different temporo-spatialities, I will analyze cross-cultural adaptations of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films.
The effect of multiple cross-cultural encounters on the use of objects and the spaces in which they operate in the formation of Western genre conventions will be discussed through Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Antoine Fuqua’s post-western The Magnificent Seven (2016). With Leone’s spaghetti western, even though the obvious cross-cultural encounter will be the one with Asia and Europe, the other interaction is the one which is among the genres; in other words, how something that is associated with Americanness founds a voice in another space (Italy) and the ways in which the same genre makes and remakes itself in different spaces while sharing the same temporality. While looking at Antoine Fuqua’s 2006 Magnificent Seven, on the other hand, even though the product situates itself to the same space (U.S./Hollywood), I will look at cross-cultural encounters in terms of time and how genre changes itself within the same culture/space. While I use Rick Altman’s “semantic/syntactic” approach as the overarching theoretical discussion of this paper to understand the materiality of the narrative and the evolution of the genre, I will also refer to theories of remaking and the ways in which space is used and misused within given structures, by analyzing selected films. These case studies will enable me to analyze the relationship between remake and genre, and remake as genre.

Franny Armstrong’s climate change-documentary The Age of Stupid (2009) presents itself as a film about ecological risk and environmental injustice in different geographical regions, while at the same time appealing strongly to our emotions by showing us something we are not yet able to see: the possibly catastrophic future consequences of our present behavior. Through the use of spatial and temporal framing, Armstrong creates a strong cognitive and affective link between the documentation of current social and environmental practices and the imagination of future ecological devastation. Drawing on cognitive film theory, the article investigate how The Age of Stupid mediates threatened ecological spaces and associated environmental risks in order to provoke strong affective and cognitive responses from viewers and, ideally, move them to action.

Este estudo monográfico busca analisar a suposta permanência do gênero “chanchada” no cinema contemporâneo brasileiro. Em um primeiro momento, analisaremos os filmes estrelados por Xuxa Meneghel e Renato Aragão depois da retomada nos anos 1990 a partir de características geralmente atribuídas às chanchadas, a fim de investigar através de uma abordagem semântica/sintática se tais poderiam ser considerados continuidades do gênero. Posteriormente, em uma abordagem de viés pragmático, discutiremos o recente processo de generificação do termo “neochanchada”, seus diferentes usos e significados, enfatizando o papel do crítico na criação de terminologias genéricas no Brasil.

Palavras-chave: gênero cinematográfico; cinema brasileiro; televisão; neochanchada.

ABSTRACT

This study aims to analyze the supposed persistency of the chanchada genre in contemporary Brazilian cinema. First, we will analyze movies starred by Xuxa Meneghel and Renato Aragão after the “rebirth” of Brazilian cinema in the 1990s based on assumed semantic/syntactic features generally attributed to the chanchadas, in order to investigate if they could be considered continuities of the genre. Later, through a pragmatic approach, we will discuss the recent genrification process of the term neochanchada, its different uses and meanings, highlighting the role of the critic in the creation of generic terminologies in Brazil.

Keywords: film genre; Brazilian cinema; television; neochanchada.

A close study of John Ford's Indian images in his Western movies, from Iron Horse to Cheyenne Autumn. While many believe that Ford's Native American portrayals began as negative (Stagecoach) and developed into more sympathetic treatments (Cheyenne Autumn), I argue that his Indian images have always been diverse (although not necessarily accurate). What never changed was Ford's depiction of Native Americans as a separate culture and identity outside of white society. In this way, Ford differs from Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, 1950) and other filmmakers of his era whose Westerns advocated an assimilationist point of view. In other words, no "melting pot" for John Ford.

Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)

The constant, if not growing, popularity of horror makes the question in the title even more intriguing: why do people buy a product for which, out of the context of the movie, they feel different negative and increasingly stronger emotions, from fear to terror, from shock to disgust? What are the psychological mechanisms which allow viewers, not only to bear with intrinsically unpleasant if not repulsive images and sounds, but also to feel pleasure in this experience? In other words, how is it possible to be shocked or disgusted and, at the same time, lured and charmed by what we see and hear?

PALABRAS CLAVE: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, locura, compromiso,
héroe

Mediante el análisis de algunas escenas seleccionadas del último capítulo de la sexta temporada de Homeland y de la película Sully, reflexiono sobre el origen etimológico del término “compromiso” y su relación con la figura del héroe. ¿Son ámbitos diferenciados, irreconciliables o, en momentos determinados, él héroe puede lidiar con cierta locura que implicaría la realización del acto heroico, de un compromiso con su sociedad?.

KEYWORDS: Homeland, Sully, Clint Eastwood, madness, engagement, hero

Through the analysis of selected scenes from the last chapter of Homeland's sixth season and the film Sully, I reflect on the etymological origin of the term “commitment” and its relation to the hero‟s character. Do they belong to different or irreconcilable areas, or at certain moments, can the hero deal with a certain madness that would imply the accomplishment of the heroic act, of a commitment to his/her society?.

Mother earth tied to the train tracks: The scriptive implications of melodrama in climate change discourse abSTracT This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) as paradigmatic. It engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse and expands on that scholarship by introducing a performance studies methodology to examine how melodrama offers the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The essay examines the tropes of melodrama – which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action – in order to analyse their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change. This essay engages in close readings of performances struc-tured by generic scriptive discourse to argue that, for climate change activists, the forms that environmental narratives take, may communicate as much as the content of those narratives.

Este artigo pretende examinar a trajetória na cultura midiática do ciclo de faroestes populares italianos (produzidos nas décadas de 1960 e 1970), em particular a obra de Sergio Leone, através de uma análise dos processos de valoração atribuídos aos filmes do movimento, tendo como eixo a dicotomia história entre gênero e autoria.

This course will examine the surreal, whimsical, grotesque, and weird films of director Tim Burton. We will come to know his body of work as a series of narrative, visual, and thematic preoccupations that have influenced a variety of film artists. Students can expect to examine a varied body of work from a mix of critical lenses, including class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

In 1996, The Quiet Man topped an Irish Times poll for the best Irish film of all time. Almost ten years later, with many more Irish (and Irish-themed) films made, The Quiet Man still occupied number four in a poll of 10,000 people across Ireland. John Ford's greatest commercial success, the film also set a template for Ireland's representation, and promotion, for over half a century.

This book, The Quiet Man ... and Beyond, involves both critical analysis of aspects of The Quiet Man as myth, commodity and fetish and the celebration of a film that has sustained considerable academic attention and popular appreciation since its release in 1952. Among the topics considered are the complexity of the film's relation to Ireland, to Irish literature and to John Ford's other films; its perceived place with regard to indigenous Irish cinema; and the phenomenon of its circulation and reception as a cult film over the years.

Contributors include Ruth Barton, James P. Byrne, Sean Crosson, Fidelma Farley, Roddy Flynn, Adrian Frazier, Luke Gibbons, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Conor Groome, John Hill, Des MacHale, Barry Monahan, Brian O'Conchubhair, Diog O'Connell, Caitriona O'Torna, Tom Paulus, Sean Ryder, Eamonn Slater and Rod Stoneman.