Film (a novel)

After viewing first chosen films and reading the correlating chapters in Kristin Thompson’s 1999 book "Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique," I gained a greater understanding of film narrative. “One of the potential sources of complexity in Hollywood films…is the medium’s ability to move about freely in time and space (Thompson 1999).” Each type of media has developed its own narrative rules and traditions, each with recognizable elements. In film, genres, conventions and effective filmmaking techniques such as the misc-en-scene influence narrative logistics that include logic, aesthetics, and movement.

From Latin America to Hollywood: Latino Film Culture in Los Angeles, 1967-2017, 2017

In this article I profile filmmakers interviewed as part of the Academy’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA project, starting first with women whose works embody a female perspective in shaping a cinema of her own. This “cinema of her own” is neither monolithic nor one-dimensional. It reflects the diversity of women’s stories, histories, cultures, and languages.

Scope Issue 4 October 2012

Since the birth of cinema, and throughout its history, there have been movies set in the world of cinema itself, portraying, e.g. a film being made, or an audience watching it, or the society revolving around the film industry. Very often such movies are centred on the life of the many kinds of people who are involved in filmmaking, from producers to directors, from scriptwriters to actors and actresses. And yet Hollywood "movies about the movies", in particular, are inherently paradoxical in this respect. If they allow you to peep at their secrets, they only do so up to a certain point, because Hollywood, as a myth, must preserve its aura and cannot risk losing its somewhat magical, even mysterous appeal to mass cultures. This Dossier is a general introduction to a project which includes more specific explorations of the topic of "movies about movies". The other Dossiers in the project, which are all available at ResearchGate.net or at www.cinemafocus.eu, are: * The star system: the rise and fall of stars * On the set: watching films being made * The "Hollywood system": behind the scenes of the "dream factory" * "Films within films": viewers watching viewers * Directors on and off the set * Producers and screenwriters: the "hidden figures" of filmmaking * "Meta-cinema": when movies reflect on themselves

2023

Cinema and Literature are two distinct but equally extraordinary works of art. Literature is looking for new ways of unfolding the plot, building text space, cinematography, new ways of interpreting the stories and developing a verbal layer of cinetext. Cinema becomes a way of transformation, of recognition, of perception of a person, by the method of familiarising the individual with a cultural layer. Through screening, Cinema not only indirectly acquaints a person with the texts of literary classics, but also participates in the development of literary text preventing its necrosis. Literature is becoming more and more pictorial and has been a way of artistic expression for centuries. Literature takes its readers on a journey of imagination that is away from the real world while cinema shows such an imaginative world before the audience and they do not have to put much pressure on their minds to delve into their imaginations. Literature is an art which is developed through writing while Cinema brings to life those writings to life through sound, music, visuals, and actors. Cinema is a filtered version of reality and it truly reflects society. Films are frantic and really look forward to connecting with their audiences, trying to fulfil what society truly desires. Cinema is the most popular of cultural practices reflecting a plethora of social, economic and cultural phenomena in modern society.

In American cinema of the 1930s the image of the modern woman and the trajectory of female desire present two different models. Between the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, American cinema continued to focus on the image of the young, self-assertive, and sexy woman in her multiple facets: Working girls, gold diggers, flappers, show girls, and kept women inundated the talkies and perpetuated the cult of New Womanhood that emerged in the early years of the century. This tendency would wane as the decade progressed. From about the mid--1930s, the dominant narrative of female desire was tuned to the formation of the couple and to marriage while the figure of the emancipated woman became marginal. In this process the representation of class rise and upward mobility were also questioned and the heroine's social aspirations were more often thwarted than supported. One need only compare Baby Face (1933) and Stella Dallas (1937), both starring Barbara Stanwyck in the leading role, to realize how the convergence between gender and class changed dramatically in just a few years. In the second half of the 1930s, only the upper-class protagonists of screwball comedy enjoyed sexual freedom and independence while workingclass women were denied both upward mobility and gender equality.

The Dawn Journal

Cinema and Literature are two distinct but equally extraordinary works of art. Literature is looking for new ways of unfolding the plot, building text space, cinematography, new ways of interpreting the stories and developing a verbal layer of cinetext. Cinema becomes a way of transformation, of recognition, of perception of a person, by the method of familiarising the individual with a cultural layer. Through screening, Cinema not only indirectly acquaints a person with the texts of literary classics, but also participates in the development of literary text preventing its necrosis. Literature is becoming more and more pictorial and has been a way of artistic expression for centuries. Literature takes its readers on a journey of imagination that is away from the real world while cinema shows such an imaginative world before the audience and they do not have to put much pressure on their minds to delve into their imaginations. Literature is an art which is developed through writing while Cinema brings to life those writings to life through sound, music, visuals, and actors. Cinema is a filtered version of reality and it truly reflects society. Films are frantic and really look forward to connecting with their audiences, trying to fulfil what society truly desires. Cinema is the most popular of cultural practices reflecting a plethora of social, economic and cultural phenomena in modern society.

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2015

Recent developments in film theory have seen an attempt to integrate formalist and cultural modes of film analysis that have traditionally been opposed. In diverse ways, scholars such as John David Rhodes, Nick Davis and Rosalind Galt have mobilised close attentiveness to visual style and mise en scène as a means of exploring broader social issues like race, class, gender and sexuality. At its best, this approach demonstrates that the performance of stylistic analysis in film studies-which David Bordwell claims has long been overshadowed by a "literary turn of mind" (33) that privileges the study of narrative, theme and identity politics-need not lead to a dead end of aestheticism for its own sake. Also exemplary of this approach, and its fruitfulness, is Stella Bruzzi's Men's Cinema: Masculinity and Mise en Scène in Hollywood. Starting from her conviction that the surfaces and textures of film are frequently more expressive than the representation of character, Bruzzi deftly interweaves sociological and psychoanalytic theories of gender, desire and identification with vivid close readings of the aesthetic tropes and stylistic effects that define male-centred genre films to evaluate how images of masculinity are conveyed in classic and contemporary cinema.

2017

In my doctoral dissertation I explore the narrative function of cinema in twentyfirst century fiction. In this study literary representations of films are regarded as a narrative strategy through which literary texts accentuate, reflect, and give rise to their principal themes and questions. Since filmic insertions have a noticeable impact upon the narrative construction and hence turn out to be pivotal in the reader’s inferential process, I also investigate this narrative phenomenon in the context of reader’s meaning-making. I have chosen four novels for my study, namely The Book of Illusions (2002) by Paul Auster, Point Omega (2010) by Don DeLillo, The Understudy (2005) by David Nicholls, and The Ice Cream Man by Katri Lipson, published in Finnish in 2012 as Jäätelökauppias and translated into English in 2014. In these works the dominant meanings are closely linked to the representations of cinema, and films appear both at the discourse level and within the fictional world. Owing ...

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2012