Film Criticism

Metropolis, the dystopian epic by the visionary German filmmaker Fritz Lang, is generally considered the first great sci-fi film. But despite the spectacular sets and the technological advancements, its contemporary reception was mixed. The general public was puzzled and the critics, not often satisfied. The aim of this paper is to present and analyse the film review written by the first woman film critic in England, the Modernist and cultural pioneer Iris Barry, which was published in The Spectator after the film’s British premier in 1927. The text will be critically approached from different perspectives, that is, taking the social context into consideration, and also from a cultural and industrial point of view.

Metropolis, la distopía cinematográfica de Fritz Lang, es generalmente considerada la primera gran película de ciencia ficción. Pero a pesar de los espectaculares escenarios y los avances tecnológicos, su recepción contemporánea fue mixta. El público en general lo desconcertaba a los críticos, no siempre los dejó satisfechos. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar y analizar la crítica de cine escrita por la primera mujer crítica de cine en Inglaterra, la pionera modernista Iris Barry, que fue publicado en The Spectator después de su estreno en Londres en 1927. El texto será abordado de manera crítica desde diferentes perspectivas, es decir,
teniendo en cuenta el contexto socio-cultural, y también desde el punto de vista industrial.

The cuteness of cats, and people’s devotion to appreciating that cuteness has established cat videos’ value in the digital marketplace. As such, cat videos are emblematic of the shifts and transformations brought to cinematic production, distribution, and exhibition in the Internet age. This paper unpacks the cat video phenomenon investigating the ways that the cat video formula reflects and revises forms and aesthetics that have been characteristic of amateur cinematic practice throughout film history and links that history to recent scholarship on the superflat. A close reading of two cat videos suggests the cat video’s adoption of the cinema of attractions model suggests that online video spectators are oriented toward affective connections with commercial interfaces.

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

Francesco Ceraolo docente di Discipline dello spettacolo presso l'Università del Salento. È componente del direttivo di "Fata Morgana" e "Fata Morgana Web". Roberto De Gaetano professore ordinario di Filmologia presso l'Università̀ della Calabria. È direttore di "Fata Morgana" e "Fata Morgana Web". Daniele Dottorini docente di Discipline cinematografiche e Coordinatore del Corso di Laurea in Media e Società digitale presso l'Università̀ della Calabria. È Film Programmer al Festival dei Popoli di Firenze. Michele Guerra professore ordinario di Cinema presso l'Università di Parma e Assessore alla Cultura della stessa città. È autore di numerosi studi, tradotti anche all'estero. Enrico Magrelli giornalista, critico cinematografico, autore televisivo (Sky) e radiofonico, nonché conduttore della trasmissione "Hollywood Party" per Radio Tre Rai. Stefania Rimini professoressa associata di Cinema, fotografia e televisione presso l'Università di Catania, dirige, insieme a Maria Rizzarelli, la rivista on line "Arabeschi". Christian Uva professore ordinario di Cinema presso l'Università Roma Tre, è autore di numerosi volumi sul cinema italiano e sul cinema di animazione.

Here is a book review published in Film Criticism of an amazing film theory textbook I assign in my film courses. I am happy to provide a syllabus of how I use this textbook if you send me a message. I use it in a specifically designed film analysis course that is anti-racist and focused on socio-political issues in the context of film and media studies. To this end, I partner it with Stam and Shohat's _Unthinking Eurocentrism_ in what has been a very successful course for nearly a decade.

The essays collected in this book focus on unusual relations and marginal objects, with the purpose to draw a portrait of Luchino Visconti less fossilized than that resulting from canonical authorial perspectives, and more vividly connected to both ideological clashes and the secular interests of cultural industry. These ten essays (five of which previously unpublished) cover neglected aspects (and the reasons of their removal) surfacing in sometimes extravagant aesthetic contrasts (between Hollywood and Thomas Mann, Greek theater and avant-garde, political commitment and popular cinema); in harmonies and dissonances in the collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Rota and Helmut Berger; in the often gross comments of the extreme right-wing press; in the hostility of the Venice Film Festival; in the distortions produced by the lens of popular culture through political or even porn parodies, post-1968 ironies, and unexpected affinities with popular genres. What come out are new readings of films such as "White Nights", "Rocco and His Brothers", “Sandra", “Ludwig" and "Conversation Piece", but also a general revision of Visconti’s career.

Resumo

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre A Dança dos Paroxismos (1929), de Jorge Brum do Canto (1910-1994), motivada por diversas pistas de interpretação lançadas nos intertítulos iniciais, designadamente a apresentação da obra como um “ensaio visual” e como um “filme português”, e a dedicatória ao cineasta Marcel L’Herbier. Perspetivando o filme em função de alguns pressupostos do cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa, na qual se inscreve L’Herbier, identifica-se e caracteriza-se um programa estético que, no filme de Brum do Canto, se materializa numa questão que, sendo primariamente diegética, transporta também implicações teóricas determinantes: todo o filme corresponde à alucinação de um moribundo. Através de uma análise aproximada de A Dança dos Paroxismos, investiga-se, por fim, de que modo este filme — um dos primeiros casos de “cinema onírico” — pode constituir um complexo “ensaio visual” sobre o cinema da Primeira Vanguarda Francesa.

(zumal in seinen "Kleinen Schriften zum Film") in: kolik.film, Sonderheft 2, 2004 (Dossier Filmvermittlung -Filmpublizistik) Die unlängst erschienene dreibändige Sammlung 1 von Rezensionen, Reportagen und Essays, die Siegfried Kracauer in seiner Eigenschaft als Filmkritiker zwischen 1921 und 1961 geschrieben hat, enthält auch einige Exposés zu Spiel-und Dokumentarfilmen. Ein 1933, kurz nach seiner Flucht vor dem NS-Regime und der Kündigung durch die Frankfurter Zeitung im Pariser Exil verfasster (niemals realisierter) Kurzfilmentwurf Kracauers beschreibt einen Familienausflug aus der Sicht eines dreijährigen Buben. Die Ausmalung der Verzerrungen und Verwirrungen im kleinkindlich erkrabbelten Blick auf Hosenbeine, einen Hund, einen Käfer oder ein Ringelspiel, dieser vielleicht nicht rasend originelle Gehversuch eines Filmkritikers als Filmemacher, lässt charakteristische Züge von Kracauers Denken fokusiert hervortreten. Was hervortritt, ist ein Schreiben, das sich an ein Bild, eben den Kleinkindblick, anschmiegt; dieses Bild ist Subjektivität aus dem Affiziert-Sein heraus, ist Wahrnehmung, die sich die Welt gerade nicht mittels Aktion und Kontrolle erschließt, sondern ein Modus "minoritärer", in jedem Sinn "kleiner" Erfahrung-als-Empfindung, exponiert in unsicherer Nähe zu den Qualitäten und Veränderungen der Welt. Kracauer sei "ein Mensch ohne Haut", schrieb Adorno ein Jahr vor dem Tod seines Jugendfreundes, und der "Vorrang des Optischen" in seinem Denken, als Form einer radikalen "Nähe zur Dingwelt", resultiere aus einer "Fixierung an die Kindheit". 2 Wenn es im folgenden darum geht, wie Kracauer zur -in jedem Sinn gemeinten -Vermittlung des Films steht (und sich dabei einigemale umstellt), dann kommt zunächst seine Rolle als Film-Vermittler in Betracht. Weit mehr als Filme zu "kritisieren" -im schlechten Sinn von "beurteilen" auf Basis von Autoritäten (Besserwissen, Geschmack, Moral) -vermittelt Kracauer Filme, in dem Maß, wie Filme vermitteln, nichts weniger als die Welt vermitteln. Letzteres gilt bereits in Hinblick auf jenen Weltbezug des Kino, der Weltweitheit ist, Kosmopolitismus, wie ihn die Internationalität von Industrie und Markt ermöglicht (ohne ihn zu garantieren). "Überhaupt: Warum sieht man so viele ausländische Filme jetzt bei uns?" ereifert sich Kracauer 1923 in einer seiner ersten Kritiken (sie trägt die Nummer 11 unter den fortlaufend bis 807 nummerierten Texten der Edition). Später jedoch kultiviert er ein Verstehen von Filmen -auch der jeweiligen "unsrigen", d.h. bis 1933 der deutschen, ab 1941 der Filme seines dauerhaften Exillandes USA -vermittels des internationalen Vergleichs: Als Frankfurter bzw. Berliner Filmkritiker etwa schaut er auf sowjetische und amerikanische Filme nicht aus indentitär-nationaler Distanz, sondern im Modus einer Öffnung auf Bilder, die andere Optionen von Wahrnehmen und Leben bekunden. Kracauer vermittelt Film: Renoirs "La Chienne", der in Deutschland nicht läuft und dessen konsequenter Realismus in der deutschen Kinolandschaft kurz vor Hitler fremd anmutet, hat Kracauer 1932 in einem Pariser Vorstadtkino gesehen; im Rückblick aufs abgelaufene Kinojahr würdigt er ihn in der Frankfurter Zeitung vom 1. Jänner 1933 (Text Nr. 704) unter dem Titel "Der schönste Film". Kracauer geht es um Film-Vermittlung. Das heißt auch, dass er den Kontext mit bedenkt und beschreibt, der Filme als sinnträchtige vermittelt -den medialen Horizont von Kino als Rezeptionspraxis, Institution, "Kultur". Was Kracauer für heutige cultural und audience studies attraktiv macht, sind nicht zuletzt seine Weimarer Texte zur Performativität und Öffentlichkeit des Kinos: kanonisierte Essays zum rationalisierten Massenkulturbetrieb, aber auch kleine, nun erstmals wiederveröffentlichte Kommentare zu Wochenschauen, Kultur-und Industriefilmen, berichtet über die kassenträchtige "Ausgrabung" zehn Jahre alter Valentino-Filme und ein paar Zeilen darunter über die Gründung der FIAF, der "Féderation internationale des archives du film" (Nr. 744). Das ist 1938: Während Kracauer Wiedersehen mit alten Filmen erlebt -was ihm oft komisch vorkommt; für uns heute ist es ja im Zeichen des "Zitierens" von Filmen via Patschenkino, Retrospektive und DVD ganz normal, was ebenfalls komisch ist -, flüchtet er immer weiter vor den Nazis. Und er entwirft seine Theorie vom Film als Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit, zumal dessen, was an dieser so maßlos, machtlos oder unbestimmt ist, dass die Norm-Wahrnehmung es übersieht. Film als Sammlung und Neuerschließung ungenutzter Möglichkeiten des Wahrnehmens, Denkens, Welt-und Selbstbezugs: Die kleinen Schriften zum Film -nicht zuletzt die erstmals wiederveröffentlichten und die überhaupt erstmals gedruckten, die wie das Typoskript zu Rossellinis "Paisà" von 1948 (Nr. 791) bislang reine Möglichkeit waren -machen neue Angebote, seine

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution gave place to different mutations in every order of life in this nation. From the point of view of the individual, as for the institutional, the political or even the spiritual it is possible to realize about a transformation of those projections and lines which had guided life since then. In that frame appears the cinema created by the ICAIC. In its will of documenting that cultural change from a new filmic grammar, able of desalinating the pre-revolutionary spectator, it reached the qualification of a true cinema of Avant Garde. The current term paper explores the relationships between cultural change and cinematographic Avant Garde within documentary cinema from that era.

The film withholds memory and history from us, always knowing more than us, plot-wise, but inviting and compelling our projection of how we fill the space of our own friendships. In every frame, someone loves more, and variously; in every frame, someone is remembering or forgetting; in every frame, someone is grateful or guilty, someone is telling the truth or concealing it. It's for the friends to decide consciously or subconsciously whether the gain is worth the work. * * * I recently taught Kelly Reichardt's film Old Joy, and I learned far more than I'd taught. I'm accustomed to leading vibrant class discussions in which college students make discoveries, think passionately, raise hands enthusiastically. Yet this film more than any other resulted in a palpable dampening of my students' spirits, as we searched each other's faces and tried to reconcile conflicting ideas about the film's muted evocation of a friendship as it ages. People grew quieter and more sullen instead of active and energetic. As I stood before my class and posed questions and threaded contributions, I felt a sinking feeling, "what am I doing wrong?" Class came to a close; students submitted their papers, and then something fascinating happened. A trail of students, more than usual, began to form around the screen; these students and I talked together, each with a startling realization they'd felt finally emerging in the last minutes of class, without time enough to share it in our actual conversation.

A leitmotif of the interviews Werner Herzog gave throughout several decades is his portrayal of himself as an anti-intellectualist, an anti-theorist, and an anti-philosopher. The text resorts to an established philosopher, who may have actually welcomed Herzog’s anti-intellectualist and anti-theoretical posture: Ludwig Wittgenstein. They both attempt to do justice – the former cinematically, the latter philosophically – to what is sometimes called the “human condition,” its quirks and fancies included. And they are both concerned with the trouble we experience in putting up with what there is, with what there may be at hand or before our eyes. Thus, the obstinacy of Herzog’s protagonists to achieve something come what may, and the dogmatism of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors to conceive of something in just one way, are two sides of the same coin. This coin is the unbounded attachment to a theory: one’s exclusive manner of acting upon, or looking at, the world around oneself.

บทความเรื่องนี้เป็นการนำเสนอการวิเคราะห์ภาพยนตร์เรื่อง ฉลาดเกมส์โกง กำกับโดย นัฐวุฒิ พูนพิริยะ ด้วยทฤษฎีแนววิพากษ์ (Critical Theory) ซึ่งภาพยนตร์ได้หยิบประเด็นของการโกงข้อสอบเล่าเรื่องในภาพยนตร์แนวอาชญากรรม ระทึกขวัญ อันเป็นความหมายแทนของกระแสการสร้างภาพยนตร์อาชญากรรมหลังสมัยนิยม (Postmodern Film) ที่เป็นภาพสะท้อนของการให้ความหมายของคำว่าอาชญากรรม ในอีกแง่มุมหนึ่ง ซึ่งการสร้างภาพยนตร์เรื่องนี้เกิดขึ้นในยุคของเสรีนิยมสมัยใหม่ ภายใต้ระบบเศรษฐกิจแบบทุนนิยมสมัยใหม่ และเป็นสื่อในสมัยบริโภคนิยม ภาพยนตร์ได้พยายามเสนอทางออกของระบบการศึกษาเปรียบเสมือน ระบบอื่นๆทั่วไปของรัฐ ซึ่งเป็นการต่อสู้ ท้าท้าย ขัดขืน ระบบการควบคุมของรัฐ จากระบบโครงสร้างกลไกของสังคม ด้านเศรษฐกิจ สังคม ที่กระทำต่อตัวละครในฐานะของซับเจค และได้เสนอแนวทางการปลดปล่อยที่อาจเป็นไปได้ จากการต่อสู้ของการขัดขืนโครงสร้างและหาช่องว่าง ด้วยการกระทำที่ไม่ได้เป็นความผิดทางอาญา แต่เกิดผลกระทบต่อความมั่นคงของรัฐ แต่อย่างไรก็ตามการวางโครงเรื่องของภาพยนตร์ดังกล่าวนั้นก็ไม่อาจหนีพ้นจากบ่วงของการรับใช้ระบบแห่งความหมายของอาชญากรรมอันเป็นอุดมการณ์ของทุนนิยมที่กำหนดโดยรัฐไปได้ และการสร้างให้ตัวละครต้องสยบยอมต่อความละอายใจก็เป็นเรื่องของการดับฝันของอุดมคติแห่งการปลดปล่อย และอาชญากรรมก็ไม่อาจหนีออกไปจากความรับผิดไปได้ ดังนั้นภาพยนตร์เรื่องนี้ก็เป็นการสร้างอุดมการณ์ของการสยบยอมต่อระบบอันขัดขวางการปลดปล่อยมวลมนุษยชาติ ที่เป็นปัญหาของการย้อนแย้ง(Paradox) ของอุดมการณ์ที่ไม่สามารถหลีกหนีออกไปได้

The horror genre is a particularly fraught category in academic and mainstream critical discourse about Australian film genres. Australian horror films are often framed as either ‘Australian Gothic’ or ‘Ozploitation,’ terms that prioritise issues of national identity, class and taste rather than genre. The oppositional relationship of these terms presents an obstacle to the widespread acceptance – both scholarly and popular – of local horror films. This is illuminated by a comparison of two recent Australian horror releases and their domestic receptions, Wolf Creek 2 (McLean, Greg. 2014. Wolf Creek 2. Film. Adelaide: Duo Art Productions and Emu Creek Pictures) and The Babadook (Kent, Jennifer. 2014. The Babadook. Blu-Ray DVD. Melbourne: Umbrella Entertainment). Wolf Creek 2 was one of the most lucrative Australian films of 2014, however it was critically panned in large part due to its perceived commercialism and low-genre status. By contrast, The Babadook was the most critically praised Australian film of 2014, however the film received a limited domestic release. This paper explores how both The Babadook’s meagre domestic release and its near-universal critical praise can be related to its association with the high-art Australian Gothic tradition. Yet the film unsettles firmly entrenched art/genre, nationalism/commercialism dichotomies.

This research project, "Criticism: An Encounter between Print Culture and Internet Culture", explores the relationship and connectivity between print and internet criticism in five areas, namely visual arts, theatre, literature, Thai classical music and cinema. It also tries to identify the creative characteristics of both media of criticism, as well as various factors that impact on criticism in those five areas. The methodologies include content analysis from both local and international sources, interviews, and the conduct of, and participation in, related activities. The result of the study shows that print and internet criticisms in the five areas are connected in very different ways, depending on the nature and development in those individual areas. There is minimal connection in the fields of literature and Thai classical music. In theatre and visual arts, the connection is mainly one-sided, whereby critics in print media occasionally cross over to the internet or use its space as an archive for their writings. Film critics, on the other hand, invariably publish in both print and internet. However, greater creative ideas are found more in print than in online criticism. In many cases, innovative modes of expression often take precedence over content. Last but not least, contemporary criticism is inspired by the dynamism in the political, economic and social arenas, and this phenomenon is especially discernible in internet criticism.

This essay explores how The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film about a television "reality" show, deserves more sustained analysis than it has received since its release in 1998. The Truman Show problematizes the binary oppositions of cinema/television, disruption/stability, reality/simulation and outside/inside that structure it by suggesting that such binaries exist in a mutually implicating relationship. This deconstructionist strategy not only questions the film’s critical position, but also enables a reflection on the very status of film analysis itself.

It comes as little surprise that Hollywood films have traditionally stereotyped Arab Americans, but how are Arab Americans portrayed in Arab films, and just as importantly, how are they portrayed in the works of Arab American filmmakers themselves? In this innovative volume, Mahdi offers a comparative analysis of three cinemas, yielding rich insights on the layers of representation and the ways in which those representations are challenged and disrupted. Hollywood films have fostered reductive imagery of Arab Americans since the 1970s as either a national security threat or a foreign policy concern, while Egyptian filmmakers have used polarizing images of Arab Americans since the 1990s to convey their nationalist critiques of the United States. Both portrayals are rooted in anxieties around globalization, migration, and US-Arab geopolitics. In contrast, Arab American cinema provides a more complex, realistic, and fluid representation of Arab American citizenship and the nuances of a transnational identity.

Exploring a wide variety of films from each cinematic site, Mahdi traces the competing narratives of Arab American belonging—how and why they vary, and what’s at stake in their circulation.

This book discusses slow cinema, a contemporary global production trend that has recently gained momentum in film theory and criticism. Slow films dispense with narrative progression in favour of a contemplative mood, which is stretched out to the extreme in order to impel viewers to confront cinematic temporality in all its undivided glory. Despite its critical reputation as an oblique mode of film practice, slow cinema continues to attract, challenge and provoke audiences. Focusing on filmmakers Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, this book identifies nostalgia, absurd humour and boredom as intrinsic dimensions of slow cinema and explores the ways in which these directors negotiate local filmmaking conventions with the demands of a global cinephile niche. As the first study to treat slow cinema both as an aesthetic style and as an institutional discourse, Poetics of Slow Cinema offers an illuminating perspective on the tradition’s historical genealogy and envisions it with a Janus-faced disposition in the age of digital technologies—lamenting at once the passing of difficult, ambiguous modernist film and capitalizing on the yearning for its absence.

Contratiempo es un título muy inteligente para una película que retoma técnicas de construcción narrativa propias del thriller, pero que explora a la vez sendas no tan frecuentadas por cineastas del mismo estilo. Para empezar, su título hace referencia a dos aspectos desarrollados por el filme: uno, el suceso que desencadenó el desastre en la vida de Adrián Doria (Mario Casas) y su amante Laura Vidal (Bárbara Lennie); el suyo fue la clase de sucesos pequeños, minúsculos, pero capaces de cambiar de un momento a otro sus destinos, como las piezas de un dominó que, apiladas una junto a otra, caen sin detenerse.

Most of the prominent filmmakers of New Greek Cinema – a politicised, auterist and art-oriented trend which dominated the Greek filmscape of the 1970s and 1980s – started their careers as assistant directors and film practitioners in the studios of the Greek commercial film industry of the 1950s and 1960s. Theo Angelopoulos, one of New Greek Cinema’s leading directors, followed, however, a different path and entered the field professionally as a film intellectual. After studying filmmaking in Paris, he returned to Athens and, from 1964 to 1967, worked as a film critic for the newspaper Δημοκρατική Αλλαγή (Democratic Change), while between 1969 and 1971 he contributed occasionally to the journal Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος (Contemporary Cinema). The time frame of Angelopoulos’s critical activity is particularly intriguing since the 1960s were the formative years of New Greek Cinema. It was also a period of political upheaval and instability in Greece, of exceptional vitality in the arts and, in terms of production and attendance, unparalleled growth of the domestic film culture. This chapter focuses on the most intensive period of Angelopoulos’s critical writing – his criticism for Democratic Change – during the turbulent but creative pre-dictatorship 1960s. It attempts to throw light upon unknown aspects of his cinéphile background; to trace critical attitudes, emerging ideas, early tastes, and unexplored influences; and to consider how his criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices.

This article explores an overlooked aspect of Agnès Varda’s pioneering La Pointe Courte (1954)—its function as a literary adaptation. La Pointe Courte was significant to the French New Wave not only in its use of American literary modernist narrative strategies but in its execution of a new model of adaptive poetics that brazenly flouted expectations of fidelity to a literary source. La Pointe Courte’s adaptation of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner—a central literary reference for French film critics after the Second World War—supplied an important, but often uncredited, blueprint for directors like Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, whose films modelled on literary modernist prose and abstracted, deliberately unfaithful filmic adaptations would be more readily recognized by critics for their originality. Varda’s analogical literary adaptation anticipated shifts in cinematic style that would echo throughout later works by directors affiliated with the Nouvelle Vague, including Godard and Resnais. This article seeks to revise how we understand the Nouvelle Vague’s origins, which, as Geneviève Sellier has argued, has all too often been told from the perspective of the masculine singular.

11 books (free access to full PDF texts):
Media Literacy Education and Film and Media Studies


Media and Information Literacy Education Dictionary:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311675000_Media_and_Information_Literacy_Education_Dictionary

Media Literacy Education:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267623006_FEDOROV_A_MEDIA_LITERACY_EDUCATION_MOSCOW_ICO_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_2015_577_P?ev=prf_pub

On Media Education:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260230477_On_Media_Education

Violence on the Russian & American Media Screen and Youth Audience:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260230555_Violence_on_the_Russian_American_Media_Screen_and_Youth_Audience

Film Criticism:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277009139_FEDOROV_A_FILM_CRITICISM_MOSCOW_ICO_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_2015_382_P

Film studies in the university students' audience: from entertainment genres to art house:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271155569_FILM_STUDIES_IN_THE_UNIVERSITY_STUDENTS%27_AUDIENCE_FROM_ENTERTAINMENT_GENRES_TO_ART_HOUSE

Western World in the Soviet and Russian Screen: From Epoch of Ideological Confrontation (1946-1991) to Modern Time (1992-2016): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307587864_Western_World_in_the_Soviet_and_Russian_Screen_From_Epoch_of_Ideological_Confrontation_1946-1991_to_Modern_Time_1992-2016?ev=prf_pub

The White Movement Image in the Mirror of the Russian and Western Screen:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305441604_THE_WHITE_MOVEMENT_IMAGE_IN_THE_MIRROR_OF_THE_RUSSIAN_AND_WESTERN_SCREEN?ev=prf_pub

Reflections: West about Russia / Russia about West. Film images of people and countries:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307905692_Reflections_West_about_Russia_Russia_about_West_Film_images_of_people_and_countries?ev=prf_pub

Cinema in the Mirror of the Soviet and Russian Film Criticism:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311953725_Cinema_in_the_Mirror_of_the_Soviet_and_Russian_Film_Criticism

Russia in the mirror of the Western screen:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269992854_RUSSIA_IN_THE_MIRROR_OF_THE_WESTERN_SCREEN

Popular American Film, which reached its peak in the 1980s, declined in terms of quality in the following years. In 1990s, American Film Industry has managed to survive thanks to blockbusters such as "Terminator II", "Titanic" (D: James Cameron) and thanks to the works of extraordinary directors such as David Fincher, David Lynch, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino. The works of these artists, who created a different understanding in Popular Cinema reached a wider audience. The films of Quentin Tarantino, who was active in this alternative understanding were at the pinnacle of this new cinema. The film "True Romance" written by Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott was a prototype of Tarantino Cinema. This was followed by "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" which earned him worldwide success. Quentin Tarantino has made progress in every film he has made, compared to his previous one. His film can be reviewed for the Postmodernist elements it contains as well. In our study, we first investigate the Cinema Environment of the 1990s, which created the conditions for the emergence of Tarantino Film, then the birth of Postmodernism in Arts. In the chapter that forms the basis of our study, we examine Postmodernism in Tarantino Cinema with examples from his films.

Superman, also called Kal-El or Clark Kent, is a comic book superhero that emerged in the first issue of Action Comics in June 1938 (Siegel, 2013). Director Zack Snyder's film Man of Steel (2013), which is titled after one of Superman's most common nicknames, is a testament to how the character has adapted to remain relevant in American culture. The film not only rebooted the Superman franchise but also added explicit religious context to the story. Superman is heavily compared to and associated with Jesus Christ in the film, which may seem surprising to some viewers. However, Peter Malone argues, "It is not fanciful to link films, even commercial Hollywood movies, to Christology" (21). It is a secular film, but Man of Steel presents Superman as a cinematic savior for audiences as a biblical film might offer Jesus Christ to its viewers. Superman's messianic nature did not initiate in Man of Steel, though, and it will be explored beyond this particular film. From his roots in Judaism and eugenics as shown in Action Comics #1 to his parallels with Jesus Christ in Man of Steel, Superman's distinct otherness has contributed to his messianic roles and lasting legacy in America. Jewish Messianic Origins Because of the time period when he was created and the ethnic identities of his creators, Superman began as a eugenically perfect American in Action Comics #1. According to Chris Gavaler in "The Well-Born Hero," eugenics, Latin for "well born," became a popular subject for research and literature starting in the 1880s. He says that Friedrich Nietzsche's eugenic concept of "Ubermensch," or Supermen, "found its ultimate expression in Nazism" (Gavaler). Unsurprisingly, the concept of perfected humanity would quickly go awry. Nationalist leaders

Technicians of the unknown cinema: British critical discourse and the analysis of collaboration in film production, by Martin Stollery Since the early 1970s British cinema history has conventionally been characterized as an unknown landscape, a tradition for which even those who created it knew little and cared less. This essay argues instead that especially in the mid 1930s and late 1940s there was an active discourse with the film industry's technical community, a debate that was particularly concerned with issues of collaboration and authorship. Concentrating on the work of Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu and their associates, notably film editor Ian Dalrymple, the essay outlines one aspect of this debate, and observes its traces on the production of Berthold Viertel's Little Friend (Gaumont-British, 1934).