British Cinema (Film Studies) (Film Studies)

The sports film has become one of commercial cinema's most recognizable genres. From classic boxing films such as Raging Bull (1980) to soccer-themed box-office successes like Bend it Like Beckham (2002), the sports film stands at the interface of two of our most important cultural forms. This book examines the social, historical and ideological significance of representations of sport in film internationally, an essential guide for all students and enthusiasts of sport, film, media and culture.

Sport and Film traces the history of the sports film, from the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s, its consolidation as a distinct fiction genre in the mid 1920s in Hollywood films such as Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925), to its contemporary manifestation in Oscar-winning films such as Million Dollar Baby (2004) and The Fighter (2010). Drawing on an extensive range of films as source material, the book explores key issues in the study of sport, film and wider society, including race, social class, gender and the legacy of 9/11. It also offers an invaluable guide to 'reading' the sports film as well as an analysis of the place of the genre within national cinemas, including case studies of the British, Australian and Indian sports film.

Esta dissertação propõe-se a interpretar e comparar as narrativas construídas em uma amostra de filmes de ficção alemães e britânicos feitos entre 1919 e 1933 que tratam direta ou indiretamente do trauma da Primeira Guerra Mundial. Por meio de uma Análise Crítica de Discurso, caracterizada por um movimento constante entre o texto e o contexto social no qual ele foi produzido e que ele produz, esta pesquisa tem por foco os tipos de personagens masculinos que são projetados como ideais nestes filmes, buscando identificar como o trauma da guerra afetou a construção da “masculinidade hegemônica” no cinema dos dois países. Este conceito, proposto inicialmente por Connell (1995), é modificado pelas contribuições de Elias e Bourdieu na tentativa de emprestar a ele maior plasticidade, tornando-a adaptável às especificidades nacionais (Elias) e aos campos onde emergem diversas masculinidades dominantes (Bourdieu). A hipótese inicial, de que britânicos teriam uma masculinidade hegemônica mais pacifista projetada em seu cinema, enquanto filmes alemães apresentariam múltiplos ideais de masculinidade, foi superada. Do lado alemão, chegou-se à conclusão que a repressão do duplo trauma da guerra e da derrota, somada à profunda polarização política e social que caracterizou a República de Weimar, impediu a construção de um habitus masculino hegemônico. Enquanto filmes mais conservadores projetam um mesmo ideal – uma masculinidade bélica, que enobrece o sacrifício e a morte em nome da honra e de sua comunidade de homens –, os filmes mais críticos, que buscam subverter o ideal militar, acabam por não projetar qualquer ideal de masculinidade, deixando um vácuo no lugar do herói. Em contraste, a relativa estabilidade social e política da sociedade britânica permitiu o estabelecimento de um habitus masculino hegemônico, porém tão associado ao habitus da elite (e, portanto, ao status quo) que está longe de ser pacifista. Nos filmes britânicos, o gentleman – um homem elegante e educado, membro da classe dominante e consciente de sua responsabilidade social, que inclui ir para a guerra pela nação sem demonstrar suas emoções ou reclamar – é o tipo hegemônico.

This is Farsi version of the brilliant and invaluable book has been edited by Paul Cronin.

From Amazon page: "An invaluable analysis of the director's art and craft, from one of the most revered of all film school directors. Alexander 'Sandy' Mackendrick directed classic Ealing comedies plus a Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. But after retiring from film-making in 1969, he then spent nearly 25 years teaching his craft at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

Mackendrick produced hundreds of pages of masterly handouts and sketches, designed to guide his students to a finer understanding of how to write a story, and then use those devices peculiar to cinema in order to tell that story as effectively as possible. Gathered and edited in this collection, Mackendrick's teachings reveal that he had the talent not only to make great films, but also to articulate the process with a clarity and insight that will still inspire any aspirant film-maker."

From Lessons from a master, Zoë GreenSat 20 Nov 2004:

"Perhaps the book's richness stems from the fact that Mackendrick did not intend it as his definitive comment on directing. Over the 25 years he spent at Cal Arts he amassed and refined a wealth of handouts and diagrams designed to help his fledgling directors acquire a strong sense of story structure. With this foundation laid, they studied cinematic devices and learnt how to take an idea, process it, and redeliver it to an audience as an effective narrative.

Mackendrick was tough on his students, and they (eventually) appreciated it. "Student films come in three sizes, too long, much too long, and very much too long," he told them on day one. His tactics were clever. Many of his students initially railed against absorbing traditional theories of montage, coverage and three-act structure, saying that "plots are old fashioned". Mackendrick simply asked them to follow his formula as a "temporary exercise" which they would be "perfectly entitled to discard later". Immersed in his boot camp, they found that they were putting words to ideas that they held subconsciously. Mackendrick was ready for them. "As an instructor the only things I can teach are what you already know."

This may be true, but it's overly modest; Mackendrick had developed his ideas over decades of professional directing, so he'd made his mistakes the hard way. His writing style is a wonderful mixture of co-conspiratorial musing and succinct commands. In one paragraph he'll dismiss his magnificent Sweet Smell of Success - "Looking back I cannot say I am surprised at its poor reception" - and then move forward to a string of pithy observations: "Exposition is BORING unless it's in the context of some present dramatic tension or crisis." "PASSIVITY is a capital crime in drama." His students must have loved it; a directing teacher who didn't put them down, yet rapped out opinions like gunfire.

To the meat of the matter: this is an eminently readable volume, but it is something of a challenge too, which is exhilarating. It requires focus. It's like the textbook you wish you'd had earlier; but as Mackendrick says, "Work is the only real training". Whether you use this book to help you reflect on your working practice or see it as an enjoyable insight into the development and execution of a film idea, there's a great deal packed into these pages. Part one covers dramatic construction, with an enjoyable section entitled "Slogans for the Screenwriter's Wall". I am especially fond of "BEWARE OF FLASHBACKS, DREAM SEQUENCES AND VISIONS".

You can then opt to undertake the exercises Mackendrick set his students, or proceed to the comparison of two drafts of a scene from Success. After this, there's a fantastic chapter on working with actors, taking the wise and often ignored stance that the director "must have respect for his actors". If this is a given with you, consider the concept of the actor as "meat-puppet" currently at large in some California classrooms.

Part two is more taxing, and covers film grammar. You can expect to emerge from this section with a solid understanding of the development of editing, point of view, axes, eyelines and camera set-ups. It's all beautifully illustrated by Mackendrick. As a bonus there's a chapter called "Drawing Lesson". If you can write legibly, Mackendrick argues that there's no excuse for you to be "wholly inept" in your attempts to sketch the human form. You need to be able to draw your idea of a medium long shot, and he shows you how.

Having limbered up your mind, the proponent of "making a disciplined effort in the development of fertile invention" equably signs out, leaving you raring to get back to work, six figure deal or otherwise. Which, I think, is what he would have wanted. "

Depot – Raum für Kunst und Diskussion (Wien 7, Breite Gasse 3)
Samstag, 21. April 2018, 15.30
Eintitt frei – – – –

Veranstaltungskonzept von Drehli Robnik für
für "PolitikProjektionen–>Viel*im*Film"
und das Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien (VWI)
– – – –
Die internationale Tagung gilt Spielfilmen, die heute in Massen- und Mainstreamkontexten auf den Zweiten Weltkrieg zurückblicken – in Soziotopen, die politisch wie medial verschieden sind (ohne gleich national cinemas auszuformen). Mehr als um Kriegsfilm im engen Sinn geht es um Wahrnehmungen/Bildprägungen zu totalitärer Macht und demokratischer Artikulation, historischer Agency und Genderbeziehungen, Holocaust und Rassismus, Kolonialgewalt und Flucht. In ihren ideologischen und formalen Setzungen "meinen", inszenieren, die Filme ihre Gegenwart mit: ein Heute, geprägt von nationalautoritärem Regieren (kurz vor 100. Jahrestagen erster "Ereignisse" der historischen Faschismen).
– – – –
15.30 Beginn
– – – –
16.00 Andrey Arnold, Filmkritiker für "Die Presse", Wien / Martin Thomson, Filmkritiker/Filmkurator/Filmwissenschaftler, Wien: Männerbünde mit Mission und heilige Frauen im totalen Krieg. Symptom-Lektüren rezenter Zweiter Weltkriegs-Filme aus den USA und Russland
– – – –
17.30 Amália Kerekes, Germanistin, ELTE Budapest: Ohne uns. Ein Monochrom der Entfernungen in den Kriegsfilmen aus dem neuesten Ungarn
– – – –
18.30 Drehli Robnik, Theoretiker zu Film & Politik, Wien-Erdberg: National/Democratic: Zeit-Rechnungen, Volks(ver)zählungen und "NGO-Wahnsinn" im britischen Kriegsfilm (zwischen Dunkirk und Churchill)
– – – –
19.30 Ivo Ritzer, Film- und Medienwissenschaftler, Universität Bayreuth: Vom obszönen Zeit-Bild zur digitalen Medien-Heterotopie: Transnationales Kino und Zweiter Weltkrieg in Afrika
– – – –
Moderationen:
Béla Rasky, Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien
Joachim Schätz, Filmwissenschaftler, Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Wien
Sara Vorwalder, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftlerin, Wien

The growing scholarly interest in the history of film studies has arisen from and in response to the discourse on the subject's perceived disintegration. In their collection Inventing Film Studies, Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson write of the 'widespread sense of uncertainty and, in part, insecurity about the future of film study' which has accompanied the 'proliferation of moving image forms and cultures'; 1 but set out to demonstrate that 'the ideal of consolidation and clear identity often implied by conventional histories of film studies' is belied by 'the fragmented nature of the field' in the past. 2 Meanwhile Duncan Petrie and Rod Stoneman, in their book Educating Film-Makers, lament the professionalization of the academy and the commercialization of the film schools, and reconstruct a past in which 'theory and practice were frequently interdependent and mutually reinforcing facets of the educational process' as a 'crucial reminder' for the impoverished present. 3 Though the field has not been comprehensively mapped, it is nonetheless striking that in both books, and in the major monograph on the discipline's history in Britain, Terry Bolas's Screen Education, there is scarcely a mention of the country's first university film department; striking not simply because it was the first, but because its history is so germane to these concerns. Established in 1960, the Slade Film Department-housed in the Slade School of Fine Art, a department of University College London-does not warrant an index entry in Bolas's book, and is mentioned just once in Grieveson and Wasson's, only to be dismissed. The relevant chapter takes the form of a dialogue between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen intended to record the contribution of Paddy Whannel, head of the British Film Institute's education department in the 1960s, 'to the establishment of film studies as a recognized discipline'. 4 When Mulvey brings up the Slade, Wollen replies that: Paddy came from a very different intellectual background. His world was the world of people like Raymond Williams; it was not a nuts and bolts world, it was a structured intellectual world. Most important of all, he was interested in popular, commercial cinema. This was a complete break with tradition. 5

Artist, filmmaker and founder-member of Exploding Cinema, Jennet Thomas, in conversation with Kyran Joughin, London, January 2016. A discussion of Thomas' method, back catalogue and Grundy Gallery Commission, The Unspeakable Freedom Device(2015): Video and BookWorks publication.

Gartenbaukino, Wien 14. Oktober 2017  –
Vortrag im Rahmen der 70mm-Analog-Screenings von "Dunkirk" (und am Vorabend der österreichischen Parlamentswahlen) –
              ABSTRACT: Dunkirk ist ein – manchmal prätentiöser – Film über Humanität in ihrer Zeit. Auch in ihren sozialen und topografischen Räumen. In Christopher Nolans früheren Filmen, etwa der Batman-Trilogie, waren Versuche, moralisch zu handeln, von vornherein dirty, verstrickt in eine düstere, groteske Materie aus Stadt, Schmerz und Bosheit. In Dunkirk hingegen sind Häuser, Strände, Himmel hell und sauber: keine Spur von Gotham, auch nicht vom Trümmerchaos, wie es zum Fixbestand älterer Dokus und Spielfilme über die Kämpfe in Dunkerque/Dünkirchen zählt. Die geglückte britische Evakuierung unter dem Feuer der deutschen Luftwaffe im Sommer 1940 war ein erstes end of the beginning, ein zarter Anfang des Endes nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft, ihrer Blitzkampagne des Bewegungskriegs.
In einer Zeit, in der Politik national rast und Datenfluss sich zum berechneten Hass verdünnt, versucht das Nolan´sche Film-Bild zu verdichten: Zeit soll ganz Materie werden – etwa ein analoger Filmstreifen, zumal ein breiter. Und die Gegenwart umfasst verschiedene intensive Zeitlichkeiten, Erfahrungen, Räume: Branagh an Land, Rylance zu Wasser, Hardy (immer noch mit Bane-Maske) in der Luft. Steife Brise und upper lip. Für starke Sager reicht´s. Es geht um Hoffnung, Flucht, Exodus, aber nicht um Brexit: Nolan hat schon 2014 S-T-A-Y gemorst. Fast alle Brit-Boys, die auf der Flucht aus dem Krieg am Strand warten, haben auffallend schwarze Haare. Als Beach Movie ist Dunkirk mit ein Bild jener Humanität, die heute "NGO-Wahnsinn" genannt wird. Time is tight, time is tide. The tide is high: Die Leichen kommen wieder.
Mein Vortrag fragt nach der Zeit der Demokratie in Dunkirk im Vergleich mit anderen Dünkirchen-Filmen und aktuellem Kino über den Zweiten Weltkrieg.

Antonia Bird worked in theatre and then extensively in television. Her BBC funded features Priest and Face address topical social and political concerns in a relatively conventional realist style enlivened by energetic direction of emotionally intense moments and action sequences. Part of Bird's agenda, similar to Kathryn Bigelow in films like Point Break, has been to demonstrate that women can direct 'masculine' genres as effectively as men. Face's eventful gangster narrative and the semi-comic, semi-macabre cannibal Western Ravenous prove her point. At the same time Face, scripted by Ronan Bennett, is more character-based and introspective than most gangster films. Bird's direction of favourite star Robert Carlyle in

En materia de guerra, la imagen es uno de los principales campos de batalla. Antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial, los conflictos se ganaban o se perdían en el terreno de combate, pero con el origen de la cámara de cine, que coincidió con el nacimiento de la industria de las armas automáticas, disparar y filmar fueron asemejándose porque “el transporte de imágenes sólo repite el transporte de balas”. Si la invención del rifle cronofotográfico (1882), de Étienne-Jules Marey, dejó fijada para siempre esa concomitancia, pasaron años hasta que la ficción –y el modelo de representación institucional– asumió el punto de vista de una ametralladora: en Sin novedad en el frente (All quiet in the Western Front, Lewis Milestone, 1930) una panorámica de la cámara va aniquilando a los soldados mientras recorre una trinchera, transformándonos en testigos y en responsables simbólicos de la batería de muertes. Las representaciones de la guerra no han de tratarse, por tanto, como una cuestión baladí porque las imágenes bélicas esconden una paradoja profunda, en tanto que tecnología, cuerpos, industrialización, propaganda y espectáculo se entremezclan para evidenciar cómo éstas “construyen ideología, porque no hay tal cosa como una representación neutral de la guerra, cada uso de un icono de guerra es político”.

"Film and the Historian: The British Experience." complements the author's "The British Working Class in Postwar Film" (MUP, 2003) and "Forgotten British Film: Value and the Ephemeral in Postwar Cinema" (CSP, 2017). A range of British films released since 1944 are explored, many of which have been difficult to access until recently.  The viewpoint is that of the historian, the objective being to examine the value of feature film as a primary source. The work is organised thematically, covering topics including housing, psychiatry, children, Ireland, gambling and the law, as well as assessing how such films were received. This will provide a basis for cross-cultural comparisons as well as shedding light on some neglected areas of recent British history.

The British ‘B’ movie had its heyday from the post-war period up until the early 1960s. ‘B’ movies were cheap feature films of around one-hour long which were shown along with ‘first’ features as part of cinema double-bill programmes. But by 1963, British film companies had ceased production of second features for a number of reasons: they were no longer commercially viable due to rising production costs,
their quality was much maligned at a time when American companies were producing higher budget, glossier fare, and by the early 1960s television was producing the kinds of low-budget crime dramas favoured by ‘B’ movie producers. However, the passing of the ‘B’ movie was mourned by some, who had seen it as a potential
training ground for talent in an indigenous industry which offered few routes in for film-makers. Some cinema exhibitors also worried about how the decline of the ‘B’s would affect the staple cinema double bill. This article will examine the events which led to the decline of the British ‘B’ movie in the early 1960s, arguing that the demise of this production mode can shed light on the structure of the British film industry in the 1960s, as well as highlighting some of the challenges which
faced film producers throughout the decade.

Danny Boyle (born Manchester, U.K., 1956) began his career directing British television programmes. Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and scriptwriter John Hodge broke into features with Shallow Grave. Trainspotting consolidated their success. Their films have distinctive visual styles and soundtracks combining a range of contemporary British music as well as astute selections from pop history. Shallow Grave and Trainspotting introduced a new sense of attitude into British cinema. Their influence is evident in subsequent films including Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic and Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Having made such an impact at the start of his filmmaking career Boyle's next projects A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach were closely scrutinised. With expectations so high it was inevitable they would not receive as much acclaim as the previous two.