Journal articles on the topic 'Film sound history'
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1
Baranowski, Andreas M., Rebecca Teichmann, and Heiko Hecht. "Canned Emotions. Effects of Genre and Audience Reaction on Emotions." Art and Perception 5, no. 3 (August 10, 2017): 312–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134913-00002068.
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Laughter is said to be contagious. Maybe this is why TV stations often choose to add so-called canned laughter to their shows. Questionable as this practice may be, observers seem to like it. If such a simple manipulation, assumingly by inducing positive emotion, can change our attitudes toward the film, does the opposite manipulation work as well? Does a negative sound-track, such as screaming voices, have comparable effects in the opposite direction? We designed three experiments with a total of 110 participants to test whether scream-tracks have comparable effects on the evaluation of film sequences as do laugh-tracks. Experiment 1 showed segments of comedies, scary, and neutral films and crossed them with three sound tracks of canned laughter, canned screams, and no audience sound. Observers had to rate the degree of their subjective amusement and fear as well as general liking and immersion. The sound-tracks had independent effects on amusement and fear, and increased immersion when the sound was appropriate. Experiment 2 was identical, but instead of canned sounds, confederates of the experimenter enacted the sound-track. Here, the effects were even stronger. Experiment 3 manipulated social pressure by explicit evaluations of the film clips, which were particularly influential in comedies. Scream tracks worked as well as laugh tracks, in particular when the film was only mildly funny or scary. The information conveyed by a sound track is able to change the evaluation of films regardless of their emotional nature.
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Pinheiro, Sara. "Acousmatic Foley: Son-en-Scène." International Journal of Film and Media Arts 7, no. 2 (December 13, 2022): 125–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.24140/ijfma.v7.n2.07.
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“Acousmatic Foley” is practice-based research on sound dramaturgy stemming from musique concrète and Foley Art. This article sets out a theory based on the concept of “son-en-scène”, which forms the sonic content of the mise-en-scène, as perceived (esthesic sound). The theory departs from the well-known features of a soundscape (R. M. Schafer, 1999) and the listening modes in film as asserted by Chion (1994), in order to arrive at three main concepts: sound-prop, sound-actor and sound-motif. Throughout their conceptualization, the study theorizes a sonic dramaturgy that focuses on the sounds themselves and their practical influence on film's story-telling elements. For that, it conveys an assessment of sound in film-history based on the “montage of attractions” and foley art, together with the principles of acousmatic listening. This research concludes that film-sound should be to sound designers what a “sonorous object” is to musique concrète, albeit conveying all sound’s fictional aspects.
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Wingfield, Nancy Meriwether. "When Film Became National:“Talkies” and the Anti-German Demonstrations of 1930 in Prague." Austrian History Yearbook 29, no. 1 (January 1998): 113–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s006723780001482x.
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Film was a relatively new commercial-entertainment medium in the summer of 1930, and newerstill were the “talkies.” Unforeseen cultural difficulties accompanied the advent of sound films, to which spoken language gave an intrinsic national character. Language accentuated national differences in feeling and thought, and since audiences could no longer “naturalize” films, they could not adopt the imaginative content of sound films as their own “cultural territory.” American audiences mocked the nasal English accents in British films, while the British hissed American accents and Parisians greeted the first American ”talkie” with cries of “Speak French!” In Czechoslovakia, historical circumstances complicated popular reaction to sound films. With the founding of the state in 1918, Czechs had rejected their Austrian legacy and attempted to enforce a Czech character in all aspects of public life.
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Abbate, Carolyn. "Sound Object Lessons." Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (2016): 793–829. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2016.69.3.793.
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Two brief film sequences, in which paper blowing down a street (The Informer, 1935) and a candle passed along a table (The Old Dark House, 1931) make sounds. Next to them lies an antique microphone. This article charts the genealogies, cultural resonances, and interactions of these sound objects, drawing on the history of sound and acoustic technologies, film music aesthetics, and music philosophy. The sound objects give expression to fables about hearing in the machine age (1870–1930), and they disenthrall the inaudible: a sign of modernity. They provoke us to consider technological artifacts not as embodying empirical truths, but as mischief-makers, fabulists, or liars; and to confront technological determinism's sway in fields such as sound studies and music and science, which has given rise to intellectual talismans that sidestep the complexities in interactions between humans, instruments, and technologies. To underline this dilemma I make a heuristic separation between imaginarium, sensorium, and reshaped hand. This separation contextualizes a return to the film sequences and their historical precedents, with an emphasis on their patrimony from sound-engineer improvisation, and as aesthetic negotiations with the microphone itself. The carbon microphone, invented in 1878, had delivered a shock to machine age imaginations; its history is largely untold, and is sketched here to suggest that a fuller history centered on microphonics would lie athwart conventional scholarly accounts of sound technologies, listening, and hearing ca. 1830–1930. The sound objects, finally, give voice to a vernacular philosophy of music's efficacy. They merit an ethical metaphysics, where metaphysical language, ironically, asks us to be attentive to mundane objects that have been disdained and overlooked.
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Altman, Rick. "Establishing Sound." Cinémas 24, no. 1 (February 26, 2014): 19–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1023108ar.
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The history of film sound has usually been configured as a series of technological upheavals. In every case, the story has been told through technological innovations, as if changes in technology were alone responsible for the development of new sound strategies. The approach offered here differs markedly from these previous treatments of sound. Instead of concentrating on technological shifts, this article stresses technical decisions made by the soundmen and directors responsible for developing Hollywood’s standard approach to sound. Through succinct analysis of two key films, The First Auto (Warner, 1927) and It Happened One Night (Columbia, 1934), along with briefer treatment of The Big Trail (Fox, 1930), a distinction is made between “shot-by-shot” treatment of sound and “scene-by-scene” treatment of sound. The systematic use of sound in It Happened One Night to establish and maintain a coherent sense of place gives rise to recognition of the increasingly common use of what the article terms “establishing sound.” Parallel to Hollywood’s familiar technique of introducing each scene with an “establishing shot,” the use of establishing sound offers filmmakers an additional method of locating auditors and maintaining their relationship to the film.
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Robinson, Kelly. "An Adaptable Aesthetic: Theodor Sparkuhl's Contribution to Late Silent and Early Sound Film-making at British International Pictures, 1929–30." Journal of British Cinema and Television 17, no. 2 (April 2020): 172–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2020.0518.
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The German cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl worked at Elstree from 1929 to 1930. Accounts of this period in Britain have often emphasised the detrimental effects of the arrival of the sound film in 1928, how it sounded the death knell of film as an international medium and how the film industry struggled to adapt (economically, technically, aesthetically). However, this article shows that the international dimension of the film industry did not disappear with the coming of sound and British International Pictures (BIP) was an exception to what Robert Murphy has called the ‘catalogue of failure’ during this turbulent period in British film history. Sparkuhl indisputably contributed to this achievement, working as he did on eight feature films in just two years from around July 1928 to April 1930, as well as directing several BIP shorts. Sparkuhl's career embodies the international nature of the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany he moved within very different production contexts, from newsreels to Ufa and the Großfilme; in Britain from big-budget films aimed at the international market to low-scale inexpensive films at BIP. As what Thomas Elsaesser has called an ‘international adventurer’, Sparkuhl cannot be contained within any single national cinema history. The ease with which he slipped in and out of different production contexts demonstrates not just his ability to adapt but also the fluidity between the different national industries during this period. In this transitional phase in Britain, Sparkuhl worked on silent, part sound and wholly sound films, on films aimed at both the international and the indigenous market, and in genres such as the musical, the war film and comedy. The example of Sparkuhl shows that German cameramen were employed not only for their aesthetic prowess but also for their efficiency and adaptability.
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Newland, Paul. "‘I didn't think I'd be working on this type of film’: Berberian Sound Studio and British Art Film as Alternative Film History." Journal of British Cinema and Television 13, no. 2 (April 2016): 262–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2016.0312.
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It could be said that the films of the director Peter Strickland are in many ways exemplars of a rich strain of twenty-first-century British art cinema. Like work by Andrea Arnold, Steve McQueen, Jonathan Glazer, Lynne Ramsay, Ben Wheatley and Sam Taylor-Wood, among others, Strickland's three feature-length films to date are thought-provoking, well-crafted, prestigious, quality productions. But in this article I show that while Strickland's second feature-length film, Berberian Sound Studio, conforms to some of the commonly held understandings of the key traits of British art cinema – especially through its specific history of production and exhibition, its characterisation, its narrative structure, and its evidencing of the vision of an auteur – ultimately it does not sit comfortably within most extant histories of British national cinema or film genre, including art cinema. More than this, though, I argue that in its challenge to such extant critical traditions, Berberian Sound Studio effectively operates as ‘art film as alternative film history’. I demonstrate that it does this through the foregrounding of Strickland's cine-literacy, which notices and in turn foregrounds the historically transnational nature of cinema, and, at the same time, playfully and knowingly disrupts well-established cultural categories and coherent, homogenous histories of cinema.
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Liz Czach. "The Sound of Amateur Film." Film History 30, no. 3 (2018): 75. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.30.3.04.
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Higgins, Scott. "Seriality's Ludic Promise: Film Serials and the Pre-History of Digital Gaming." Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 8, no. 1 (December 12, 2014): 101–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/23.6158.
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This essay explores the American Sound Serial film as part of a continuum to which digital gaming may also belong. By drawing on concepts derived from the study of video games, this study broadens our understanding of youth-oriented films produced in Hollywood from the 1930s to the mid 1950s. In turn, this provides a new vantage on continuities between old and new serial forms, and sheds light on digital gaming’s pre-history.
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Deggeller, Kurt. "From “Sound” to “Sound and Audiovisual”: History and Future of IASA." International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Journal, no. 52 (August 19, 2022): 7–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.35320/ij.v0i52.146.
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IASA emerged in 1969 from IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres. The interests of IAML’s members largely focused on music as manuscript or score, and musical sound recordings were dealt with in the Record Library Committee. IASA was founded to consider additional types of sound recordings, including research and oral history. From the frst years of IASA’s existence, the question of the organisation’s relationship to the moving image arose, represented by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). But as early as 1979, a delegate from the United States also brought video into play. With independence from IAML in the late 1980s, an intensive discussion began about the future of IASA and the expansion of the scope of the association to include audiovisual documents. Finally in 1999, the constitution and the name of the association were adapted. The transformation process triggered by this name change is still underway today. It could prove to be an advantage for IASA because it opens possibilities of adaptation to the rapidly changing world of audiovisual production due to digitisation and online media.
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Hirschfeld-Kroen, Leana. "Weavers of Film." Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 3 (2021): 104–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.104.
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This article uses AT&T’s 1910s–30s “Weavers of Speech” campaign to read on-screen telegraph and telephone operators as vernacular translators of cinematic syntax and hypervisible avatars for the invisible cutter girls who “knitted the pieces of film together” on studio lots. While operators largely played peripheral roles in classical films, two transitional periods saw them rise to the surface of story en masse, as if temporarily hired to sew over a rupture. A comparative analysis of telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of crosscutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound suggests women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and auteur models that dominate theories of film editing. More broadly, the article suggests that the culturally conspicuous feminization of low-level information labor offers feminist film historians a crucial “mediatrix” for uncovering woman workers hidden in the cut of film.
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Robson, Catherine. "Age and Youth, Sound and Vision." American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 1, 2019): 1793–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1019.
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Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.
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Schulze, Peter W. "The Trans/national Cultural Economy of Latin American Film Musicals (1930s-50s)." Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 5, no. 2 (December 28, 2021): 127–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.53397/hunnu.jflc.202102012.
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This essay traces the tensions between national imaginaries and transnational global media flows of tango, samba, and ranchera film musicals, taking into account their cross-media and intercultural configurations as well as interconnections between these three “transgenres.” From a comparative perspective and by means of a “histoire croisée,” or crisscrossing history, it touches upon developments in early Latin American sound film, Hollywood’s Spanishlanguage films and its Pan-Americanism, Spain’s cinematic Hispanoamericanismo, and Pan-Latin American film productions. The essay makes a case for the multifaceted trans/national cultural economy of the tango, samba, and ranchera film musical productions during their main phase, in the 1930s and 40s.
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Zryd, Michael. "História e ambivalência no Magellan de Hollis Frampton." Revista Laika 3, no. 5 (October 26, 2014): 1–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-4077.v3i5p1-28.
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Magellan is the film project that consumed the last decade of Hollis Frampton’s career, yet it remains largely unexamined. Frampton once declared that “the whole history of art is no more than a massive footnote to the history of film”, and Magellan is a hugely ambitious attempt to construct that history. It is a metahistory of film and the art historical tradition, which incorporates multiple media (film, photography, painting, sculpture, animation, sound, video, spoken and written language) and anticipates developments in computer-generated new media
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Frank, Hannah. "The Hitherto Unknown: Toward a Theory of Synthetic Sound." boundary 2 49, no. 1 (February 1, 2022): 71–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9615403.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States created synthetic sounds by printing photographic or drawn patterns directly onto a filmstrip's optical soundtrack. This essay examines these practices alongside the radical film theories of Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein in order to test the limits of sonic epistemology—and, ultimately, to imagine what it might mean to conceive of synthetic sound as documentary sound.
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Fiebig, Gerald, Uta Piereth, and Sebastian Karnatz. "The Cadolzburg Experience: On the Use of Sound in a Historical Museum." Leonardo Music Journal 27 (December 2017): 67–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/lmj_a_01021.
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The museum at Cadolzburg Castle in Germany, opened in 2017, uses a sound installation to present aspects of the building’s history that could not be materially reconstructed. In this article, the curators and the sound artist explain how the installation alternates between sound effects and musical signifiers to engage visitors with their environment and to spark reflection on the problems of “authenticity” in museums. While the musical thread offers quotes from musical styles representing the castle’s history, the sound thread gradually deconstructs a “castle soundscape” inspired by film soundtracks.
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Novakovic, Monika. "Silentium est aurum: The relationship between silence and sound in film as illustrated by films Le Samourai (1967) Goya’s Ghosts (2006), The Artist (2011) i Acts of Vengeance (2017)." Muzikologija, no. 26 (2019): 143–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz1926143n.
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Silence in film and understanding of silence in the seventh art poses many questions. The results of the analysis of these four films gave their unique answers to the said questions. The unique relationship of silence and sound was considered, and the reason for dedicating equal attention to both ends of this important spectre was to reach better understanding of the films that served as case studies, as well as to understand message or messages that were given to the viewers in conjuction with the action on screen (or lack thereof). Special attention was also given to several elements that, I believe, play vital part in understanding the usage of silence in film, such as: character?s behaviour and body language as well as his appearance, his relationship with other characters, and, maybe most important, the reason why director chose to build specific sound world around the particular character. Jef Costello (Le Samourai), as a character, is defined by his cold exterior, few words and little to no dialogue he exchanges with other characters - silence is inherent to him as a person. Goya?s Ghosts is the perfect example of the biopic that can be built around one specific information from a person?s biography. Of course, I?m speaking of Goya?s loss of hearing which was illustrated in the film via his relationship with other characters and also via the fact that, like Costello, he expresses himself using body language, except it is for entirely different reasons. In the third case study, George Valentin is a character whose profession is silence and who refuses to give it up for the sake of new technological advancement in films - sound, the sole enemy to his professional survival (the very film The Artist is a silent movie depicting this golden era of film history). Last case study provides an insight into the nature of vow of silence, especially in stoic sense of the word. Namely, character Frank Valera takes a vow of silence until he avenges his family and the basis for his vow is the book Meditations which Marcus Aurelius wrote. Equipped with the appropriate theoretical apparatus, these four ?views? on silence show how silence can be understood and presented in diverse ways. Directors may use it to reach better effectiveness of the film they direct and that fact has been, ultimately, manifested through four unique types of silence: 1) silence as the absence of dialogue and as dominant ?sound landscape? of the film, filled with ambient sounds and, therefore, realistic (Le Samourai), 2) loss of auditory world and entrance into the embrace of silence (Goya?s Ghosts), 3) genre-specific silence (The Artist) and 4) stoic silence (Acts of Vengeance).
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Keefe, Anna V. "The unspoken languages of Alain Gomis’s cinema: space, sound, and the body." Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 47, Issue 1 47, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 67–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2022.4.
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This article examines the body, space, and sound in three of Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis’s feature films, Andalucia (2007), Tey (2012), and Félicité (2017). These narrative and aesthetic strategies situate Gomis’s work within Hamid Naficy’s concept of accented cinema and Laura Marks’s category of intercultural cinema. The multisensoriality of Gomis’s films, notably evoking the aural and tactile senses, expand my discussion beyond the visual and align his approach with current areas of inquiry in film studies. I argue that these unspoken languages offer new possibilities for considering the decentering project of cinéma-monde as they transcend geographical borders, linguistic boundaries, and historically defined binaries.
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Birtwistle, Andy. "Jack Ellitt as Director: Documentary Films of the 1940s." Journal of British Cinema and Television 18, no. 3 (July 2021): 329–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2021.0577.
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This article examines the work of the film-maker and composer Jack Ellitt (1902–2001) who remains something of an enigmatic and marginal figure in historical accounts of British documentary cinema. Research on Ellitt has so far focused on two key aspects of his life and career: firstly, his association with the New Zealand-born film-maker and artist Len Lye, and secondly, his pioneering work as a composer of electro-acoustic music. However, little research been undertaken on the work that he produced during the three decades he spent working as a documentary director in the British film industry, beginning in the early 1940s and ending with his retirement in the 1970s. He was a member of the remarkable generation of film-makers associated with the British documentary movement, and a composer whose radical experiments with recorded sound might well have secured him a more prominent place in the history of experimental music than is currently the case. Focusing on films made by Ellitt during the 1940s, the primary aim of this article is to offer a chronological appraisal of his early work as documentary director, while also considering what new perspectives this group of films might offer on his earlier creative collaboration with Lye, and the extent to which his radical experiments in electro-acoustic composition may have influenced the use of sound within the films he directed.
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Schmidt, Uta C. "Soundscape of the Ruhr: Sensitive Sounds. Between Documentation, Composition and Historical Research." Prace Kulturoznawcze 26, no. 1 (July 22, 2022): 99–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/0860-6668.26.1.6.
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The following article discusses the Sound Archive of the Ruhr. Our project touches upon a set of questions that are of interest to sound studies. They concern intention and modes of archiving sound, working for museums, exhibitions, film, theatre productions, education and science, recordings as testimony as well as cultural heritage. Working on and with the archive made us sensitive to the aurality of the confined space and to the horizons of meaning that people attributed (and still attribute) to the acoustic dimensions of their everyday life. As a result, we began to conceptualize history based on the sensual constitution of reality and thus were able to take a different view of social transformations. The sounds in the Sound Archive of the Ruhr are not “sensitive” like surveillance tapes that document state repression and blackmail, uncover political scandals or are used for propaganda purposes. These sounds are sensitive because they are endangered and therefore should be recorded with respect for cultural heritage. Moreover, they raise questions about the political power, which defines when and how sound is considered noise in a changing social order.
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Stille, Max. "Conceptual History and South Asian History." Contributions to the History of Concepts 14, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 91–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/choc.2019.140205.
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This review article provides an overview of important, recent approaches to conceptual history from scholarship on South Asia. While conceptual history is not a consolidated field in South Asia, the colonial encounter has greatly stimulated interest in conceptual inquiries. Recent scholarship questions the uniformity even of well-researched concepts such as liberalism. It is methodologically innovative in thinking about the influence of economic structures for the development of concepts. Rethinking religious and secular languages, scholars have furthermore stressed the importance of smaller communicative units such as genre or hermeneutical practices to shape ideas e.g. of the political. As part of global and imperial formations, scholars are well aware of the link between power and colonial temporalities. Lastly, they have suggested new sources for conceptual history, such as literature, film, and sound.
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Frumkin, R. A. "Hearing Is Believing." Resonance 2, no. 1 (2021): 19–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/res.2021.2.1.19.
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This essay explores music’s power to explicate, exaggerate, and even undermine moving images, examining first the marriage of sound and film through the invention of the Vitaphone and later illustrating the maturation of this marriage through an exegesis of Nicholas Britell’s score for the popular television show Succession. The Vitaphone debuted with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, a film that made Jolson a household name and further popularized the vaudeville tradition of blackface. It is no coincidence that the synchronization of sound and film—a major innovation that would change the way we think of both for decades to come—had such racist origins, as the history of American innovation is also the history of capitalist white supremacy. Succession concerns the Roys, a legacy media family whose scion, Kendall, considers himself an innovator. Through Britell’s instrumentals, which are written to reflect Kendall’s ups and downs, we come to understand the score not as a simple, uncritical accompaniment of Succession’s images (as the Vitaphone was for The Jazz Singer) but as an anticapitalist voice of its own, delivering criticisms of Kendall’s avarice and cultural appropriation while still evincing compassion for him as he plunges deeper into addiction. This essay maintains that sound in film, a technology with troubling origins, is now capable of asserting itself apart from that film and thus delivering a dialectical criticism of those very origins.
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Hess, Franklin L. "Sound and the Nation: Rethinking the History of Early Greek Film Production." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 1 (2000): 13–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2000.0008.
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Fyodorova, Anastasia Aleksandrovna. "Soviet Film Expeditions of the 1930's through the Eyes of Greater Tokyo Inhabitants." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 5, no. 4 (December 15, 2013): 21–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik5421-28.
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The early 1930's were a turning point in the history of Japan and its cinema. The transition to the sound film, the rapid development of documentary genre and use of it for propaganda purposes took place in the context of the filmmakers' interest to the experience of Soviet cinema, its highly expressive editing, documentary style and ideological partiality. The sound documentary «Greater Tokyo» (1932) by V. Shneiderov was created in these years. The film has been forgotten for a long time due to various reasons. The author tries to return the film into the historical context of the early 1930's and analyze the perception of Soviet documentaries in the pre-war Japan.
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Palis, Eleni. "Uploading the Archive, Copy/Pasting the “Classical”." Frames Cinema Journal 19 (February 18, 2022): 301–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2392.
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This video essay combines a series of fiction feature films, made between the late-1990s and 2010s, in which futuristic androids and robots trade in digitised classical Hollywood archival film fragments as pedagogical and expressive traces, amassing an amateur archive. I call these fragments “film quotations” to denote the process of selection, citation, and reappropriation in these film-within-a-film moments. In this video essay, Flubber (Mayfield, 1997), S1m0ne (Niccol, 2002), Teknolust (Leeson, 2002), WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), and Prometheus (Scott, 2012) all “quote” classical Hollywood films, in the form of short excerpts of sound and image, projecting (or uploading?) Hollywood’s archival past onto their imagined versions of the future. As this cohort of robots explore and amass personal visual archives, mining Hollywood history for meaning and mimicry, their viewership reveals several interrelated classical Hollywood ideologies and biases: the robot-amassed archives replicate hyper-traditional behaviour, both in conforming to strict copyright rules and in depictions of gender, sexuality, and monogamy. While only Teknolust self-consciously and critically replicates hegemonic, heternormative media logics, this essay seeks to reveal how these robots’ sensorial experience of the archive select and project a misleading selection of history into the future. While touting a paradoxically easy-to-access Hollywood history, these robots cling to a tightly limited, licensed, entirely white and compulsorily cis-het digitised Hollywood archive.
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Giuffre, Liz. "Kylie: A Celebration – the collection (National Film and Sound Archive Online Exhibition)." History Australia 18, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 178–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2021.1880275.
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Duncan, Pansy. "Lights, Camera, Lumino-Politics: LightingThe Searchers, from Paraffin to LED." Film-Philosophy 22, no. 2 (June 2018): 184–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0072.
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Across the past decade or so, “politically committed” strains of film studies have undergone a much-vaunted aesthetic turn. It is now widely acknowledged that political struggle is as likely to converge in and around the tangible, audible and/or visible surface of the filmic image as it is to involve forces operating “within,” “beyond” or “behind” that surface. Yet while this so-called aesthetic turn has restored questions of film sound, film form and film colour to the film-political agenda, questions of film lighting are yet to feature prominently in these discussions. This essay addresses this situation through a re-reading of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), a film whose ambivalent engagement with America's troubled settler-colonial history has seen it mortgaged to depth-oriented reading methods. Countering these approaches, I argue that, even before the filmic image signifies or symptomatizes settler-colonial struggle, that struggle is played out across the surface of the filmic image in the form of efforts to control the diffusion, distribution and dissemination of light itself. In arguing this, I will show how The Searchers situates its own formal and technical efforts to regulate light's movement across the surface of the cinematic image within a history of settler-colonial efforts to regulate light's movement across varied domestic, civic and geographic surfaces. In doing so, I contend, the film both foregrounds cinema's complicity in, and delivers a searing critique of, Western efforts to control light.
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Benitez Rojas, Raquel Victoria. "CRISTIANI AND THE FIRST ANIMATED FEATURE FILMS IN HISTORY- FROM ARGENTINA TO THE WORLD." MEDIA STUDIES AND APPLIED ETHICS 3, no. 1 (September 12, 2022): 127–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.46630/msae.1.2022.09.
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On December 21, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand, Jackson, Pearce, Sharpsteen, Morey, Cottrell, 1937) was released, produced by Walter E. Disney. The press immediately ranked it as the first animated feature film. However, this claim was not true. The Italian-Argentinian animator Quirino Cristiani with his work El Apóstol (Cristiani,1917) was responsible for the first animated feature film in the world twenty years before the North American release. His 1931 film Peludopolis (Cristiani,1931) was also the first animated feature film with synchronised sound recording. Cristiani patented a new and revolutionary system for creating animations using only cardboard cut-outs. The aim of this paper is to give recognition to his work by analyzing his contribution to the seventh art through qualitative documentary research.
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ANDERSON, LAURA. "Musique concrète, French New Wave cinema, and Jean Cocteau'sLe Testament d'Orphée(1960)." Twentieth-Century Music 12, no. 2 (August 26, 2015): 197–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572215000031.
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AbstractJean Cocteau (1889–1963) is recognized as one of France's most well-known film directors, directing six films over a thirty-year period. This article argues that his film soundscapes occupy a unique position in the history of French film sound, providing a key link between contemporary experimentation in art music and the sonic experimentation of the New Wave filmmakers. This argument is best exemplified byLe Testament d'Orphée(1960), which represents the apotheosis of Cocteau's artistic output as well as the stage at which he was most confident in handling the design of a film soundscape. Indeed, Cocteau was comfortable with the selection and arrangement of sonic elements to the extent that his regular collaborator Georges Auric became almost dispensable. Nevertheless, Auric's willing support enriched the final film and Cocteau created a highly self-reflexive work through his arrangement of the composer's music with pre-existing musical borrowings. Cocteau's engagement with contemporary developments in film and art music can be heard throughout this film, highlighting his position as a poet simultaneously establishing himself in the canon of art and looking to the future.
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Knotek, V., P. Korandová, R. Kalousková, and M. Ďurovič. "Study of triacetate cinematographic films and magnetic audio track by infrared spectroscopy." Koroze a ochrana materialu 62, no. 1 (February 1, 2018): 26–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/kom-2018-0005.
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Abstract Most of the cinematographic film collections stored in film archives are made on a triacetate base, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, a magnetic track was used to record sound. With a large number of archive materials, archives often do not know the chemical composition of film bases, history of use and degradation rates. Therefore, the chemical composition of three films with a magnetic audio track and one representative of the modern film FOMAPAN were investigated by infrared spectroscopy. Selected samples were artificially aged at elevated temperatures and humidity, and the rate of degradation of the film was evaluated by infrared spectroscopy, dimensional changes and gravimetric analysis. Based on the measurements, all of the examined films were made from cellulose triacetate and the binder of the magnetic trackswas cellulose nitrate. To determine the degree of degradation of the binder of the audio track and the triacetate base, a degradation index was created which expresses the ratio of the bandwidths of the characteristic groups in the infrared spectra. It is shown that infrared spectroscopy makes it easy to determine the chemical composition of cinematographic films and to quantify the rate of degradation and the current state of the film base using a suitably chosen degradation index.
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Baek, Jiewon. "The Ethics of Uncovering Something Else in Histoire(s) du cinema." Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22, no. 1 (September 19, 2014): 40–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2014.642.
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In lieu of an abstract, here is the essay's opening paragraph:Marguerite Duras prefaces the second edition of Le navire night, from which an excerpt is cited above, by explaining that after writing the story of a man named J.M., everything came too late, including the realization of the film version of Le navire night. Once the event has been written and the common night of history been closed up, did she have the right to flash a light into the darkness to go back and see? The only seeing through cinema that was possible, she continues, was to film the failure, the disaster of the film. But how does one film the failure of realizing a film adaptation of a written text, which itself was transcribed from an oral re-telling of a story, which itself was adapted from memory? The event already took place – writing, “this history here” –, leaving cinema to film what never took place, namely, the film itself. As Jean-Luc Godard confirms in a chapter titled Seul le cinéma in Histoire(s) du cinéma, not only in the form of his project as a whole but also more explicitly in one shot that positions two close-up photographs of his face with the sound of Paul Hindemith’s “Funeral Music” and this text: “Faire une description précise de ce qui n’a jamais eu lieu est le travail de l’historien.” Describing the rise of the film Le navire night from its disastrous death, Duras writes: “On a mis la caméra à l’envers et on a filmé ce qui entrait dedans, de la nuit, de l’air, des projecteurs, des routes, des visages aussi.” The camera turned upside-down, or in the other sense, inside-out, Duras films the entrance of the exterior, a sort of a Levinasian visage. The question no longer is one of having the right but of the duty to re-write history, as is insinuated by the reference to “The Critic as Artist” written across one of the photographs mentioned above, which is again a gesture of Godard’s positioning himself as the critic whose role Oscar Wilde defined: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
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Rusinova, Elena. "Sergei Eisenstein’s Ideas in the Context of Contemporary Cinema. Stereo Film and Stereo Sound." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 11, no. 4 (December 13, 2019): 25–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik11425-32.
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The text (continuation of the article Vestnik VGIK, No. 3 (41), 2019). deals with the ideas of S.M. Eisenstein, presented by him in the theoretical work On Stereoscopic Films, in the context of the subsequent development of cinema phonography and modern scientific and theoretical discussions on the problems of correlation of technological and aesthetic aspects of cinema art. Eisensteins article focuses on and analyzes new and controversial technical achievements of cinema, but the authors thoughts reach a high level of understanding the history and prospects of the development of cinema and art in general as an expression of the organic human need for creative and artistic activity. Turning to the history of the theater as the forerunner of cinema, Eisenstein emphasizes the moment of separation of the actor and stage action from the audience. The director sees the technical possibilities of stereo cinema as a way of returning the viewer to the space of direct co-action, complete immersion in the artistic space, integration with the artistic image. Modern multichannel sound technologies have come close to fulfilling Eisensteins dream of drawing the viewer into the screen space and merging it with the artistic creation. But when and to what extent is the use of stereo effects justified, how do the technological and artistic aspects of film production correlate These are issues that are currently the subject of theoretical discourse in the framework of not only film studies, but also interdisciplinary knowledge, affect the development of audiovisual concepts in the practice of filmmaking.
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Hughes, Stephen Putnam. "Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema." Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 1 (February 2007): 3–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021911807000034.
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During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.
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Meyer, Jessica. "Sound and Silence in Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old." American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 1, 2019): 1789–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1020.
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Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.
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Porter, Laraine. "‘The film gone male’: women and the transition to sound in the British film industry 1929–1932." Women's History Review 29, no. 5 (December 20, 2019): 766–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2019.1703534.
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Niazi, Sarah Rahman. "White Skin/Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses From Silent to Early Sound Period in Bombay." Culture Unbound 10, no. 3 (February 13, 2019): 332–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.2018103332.
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My paper explores categories of gender, ethnicity, modernity and performance through the figure of the ‘white’ actress in the early years of Indian cinema (1920-1940). Film was a lucrative site of business for intrepidly ambitious individuals in search of reinvention in Bombay. For women from ‘white’ backgrounds, cinema became a means to recast their identity; helping them reclaim the public sphere in new and radical ways. The trace of ‘white’ actresses in the history of Indian cinema configures and transforms the status of performers and performance from the silent to the early sound period. The industry attracted a large number of Anglo Indian, Eurasian and Jewish girls, who became the first group of women to join the industry uninhibited by the social opprobrium against film work. I use hagiographic records, film reviews and stills to map the roles women from the Anglo Indian and Jewish communities were dressed up to ‘play’ in the films. These roles helped perpetuate certain stereotypes about women from these communities as well as impinged on the ways that their identity was configured. Through the history of the Anglo Indian and Jewish women in the larger public sphere I lay out and highlight the field from where individuals and personalities emerged to participate in the cinematic process. I see the community as marking and inflecting a system of signs on the body of these women through which identity was constructed and their attempts at reinvention were engendered - a process of individuation, of ‘being’ and of being framed within a particular logic of the popular imaginary frames of representation.
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Duckett, Victoria. "An Introduction to the Interviews." Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 87–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2016.2.1.87.
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This article explores the work that female archivists undertake today. It is based upon a series of six interviews—conducted largely in Europe in 2015—with noted female archivists, curators, and programmers. Through conversations with Bryony Dixon (British Film Institute), Giovanna Fossati (EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam), Karola Gramann (Kinothek Asta Nielsen, Frankfurt), Mariann Lewinsky (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna), Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam), and Meg Labrum (National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra), it argues that women have a disproportionate impact upon the programming of silent film at festivals. It also suggests that there is a growing public that is attracted to festivals such as Il Cinema Ritrovato precisely because these festivals give us access to a vision of film history and feminism that we cannot find in traditional history books. Finally, it asks how these women work and, specifically, how the change to digital has impacted archival outreach and access today.
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Elsaket, Ifdal. "SOUND AND DESIRE: RACE, GENDER, AND INSULT IN EGYPT'S FIRST TALKIE." International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (May 2019): 203–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743819000023.
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AbstractThis article explores the coloniality of gender, sexuality, and desire, and the links between nationalist and commercial imperatives, in the making of Egypt's first sound film, or talkie, in 1932. Through an analysis of the politics, economy, and memory of Yusuf Wahbi's filmAwlad al-Dhawat(Sons of the Aristocrats), it shows how the interplay between new sound technologies, the global film trade, and nationalist and racialized narratives of gender and resistance shaped the contours of ideal femininity and masculinity during the interwar period in Egypt. The article also shows how the film's representations formed at the intersection between the filmmakers’ attempts to challenge colonial stereotyping and their efforts to capture an ever-expanding global film market. Often neglected in cinema scholarship, early filmmaking in Egypt, I argue, is critical to understanding wider processes of nation formation and gendered characterizations.
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Neely, Sarah. "‘The skailing of the picters’: The Coming of the Talkies in Small Rural Townships in Northern Scotland." Journal of British Cinema and Television 17, no. 2 (April 2020): 254–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2020.0522.
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Like that of many other nations, Scotland's film history has been characterised largely by its focus on its great metropolitan centres. The occasional studies which do look outside the ‘Central Belt’ stretching between Scotland's two greatest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, are likely to concentrate on two of its other sizeable cities, Aberdeen and Dundee. This article will consider cinemas north of Inverness (Scotland's most northerly city), including those in Wick, Thurso and the islands of Orkney and Shetland. The talkies arrived late to all of the townships considered. Cinema audiences dwindled as silent films fell out of favour with local audiences well aware of the ubiquity of the talkies elsewhere in Britain. When sound finally did arrive, the return of audiences to local picture houses had a great impact on the small rural townships, forcing councils to deal with the ‘problem of the talkie queues’ and the ‘skailing of the picters’ (the audiences spilling out into the town after a film). Using a variety of archival sources – local newspapers, council reports, oral histories and diary entries – this article focuses on the various economic and social impacts resulting from the arrival of sound.
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Nechushtan, Tomer. "Mouthing off: Contesting cinematic synchronization in digital music media." Soundtrack 13, no. 1 (October 1, 2022): 43–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ts_00015_1.
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The article explores the ways in which the boundaries of cinema are being tested by the transformation of historically formed lip-synching conventions by recent pop music films. While films based on computer-generated imagery rely on the familiar conventions of synchronizing images with the embodied voices of recognizable singer celebrities to regain an impression of corporeality, films created by and starring these same popular musicians choose to forgo this cinematic synchronization aesthetics. This asynchronization is not presented as an interruption within the film, as was often the case in the past, but rather as an alternative to sound cinema’s established vocal conventions of gender and race, as well as its hierarchies of technologies, industries and platforms.
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Zernetska, O. "The Development of Australian Culture in the XX Century: Australian Film Industry." Problems of World History, no. 11 (March 26, 2020): 174–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.46869/2707-6776-2020-11-10.
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This article represents the first attempt in Ukraine of complex interdisciplinary investigation of the history of Australian film development in the XX-th century in the context of Australian culture. Analysing films in historical order the peculiarities of each decade are taken into consideration. The periods of silent films, sound films and colour films are analysed. The best film productions, their film directors and prominent actors are outlined. Special attention is paid to the development of feature films and documentaries.
The article concentrates on the development of different film genres beginning with national historical drama, films of the first pioneers’ survival, adventure films. It is shown how they contribute to the embodiment in films of the main archetypes of Australian culture, the development of Australian identity. After World War I and World War II war films appear to commemorate the courage of the Australian soldiers in the war fields. Later on the destiny of the Australian women white settlers’ wives or native Australians inspired film directors to make them the chief heroines of their movies.
A comparative analysis of films and literary primary sources underlying their scripts is carried out. It is concluded that the Australian directors selected the best examples of Australian national poetry and prose, which reveal the historical and social, cultural and racial problems of the country's development during the twentieth century.
The publication dwells on boom and bust periods of Australian film making. The governmental policy in this sphere is analysed. Different schemes of film production and distribution are outlined to make national film industry compatible with the other film industries of the world, especially with the Hollywood. The area of a new discipline - Australian Film Studios - is studied as well as the works of Australian scholars. It is clarified in what Australian universities this discipline is taught. It is assumed that the experience of Australia in this sphere should be taken by Ukraine.
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Kropova, Daria S. "Traits of Mystery (miracle play), Tragedy and Commedia Dell'Arte in a Fairy-Opera-Film." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 8, no. 4 (December 15, 2016): 76–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik8476-83.
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This article deals with a fairy-opera-film and its specifics. The author reveals traits of mystery (miracle play) in a fairy-opera-film, basing upon a notion of mystery of Carl Orffs theory, in the way as Orff meant it. Syncretism in different kinds of art, specifics of word as an art facility (meaning of a word and a word as sound) are specified. As examples the following films are taken: Bluebeard's Castle (composer Bela Bartok, filmmaker W. Golovin,1968), Iolanta (composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, filmmaker W. Gorriker,1963) and animated musical The Snow Maiden (composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, filmmaker I. Ivanow-Vano,1952). Special attention is drawn to the opera film The Queen of Spades (composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, filmmaker R. Tihomirov,1960). The author discloses in fairy-opera-film elements of commedia dell'arte, that is improvisation and masks. For example in films The Love for three Oranges (composer Sergei Prokofiev, filmmakers W. Titov and J. Bogatyrenko,1970) and The Magic Flute (composer Wolfgang A. Mozart, filmmaker I. Bergman,1975). The author comes to the conclusion concerning the targets and tasks of a fairy-opera-film. Through watching fairy-opera-films children should live cultural and psychological history of humanity step by step in its development through music, dance culture and drama (theater). The main task of fairy-opera-film is to save an entity of a human being, to prevent a childs mutation into either a superman (or bermensch in F. Nietzsches term) or degeneration.
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KORSBERG, HANNA. "Remains of a Past Production: A Short Film, Theatre (1957)." Theatre Research International 45, no. 3 (October 2020): 321–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883320000322.
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This paper discusses the use of a documentary film as source material for theatre history. The central case study analyses Theatre, directed by Jack Witikka in 1957. This film presents the making of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Finnish National Theatre, which premiered on 5 October 1954. The paper follows the process of an event turning into an object, and at the same time I explore how the film preserves and traces material conditions of the theatre production: the physicality of the actors, their moving bodies, their position on the stage and the sound of their voices.
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Landry, Olivia. "Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner’s Halfmoon Files." New German Critique 46, no. 3 (November 1, 2019): 103–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-7727441.
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Abstract Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner’s documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner’s film as the site of the collision of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, through which new media revisit the old. The article asserts that the ghost of the storyteller, which haunts this film, returns not in the form of a person but as a hypermedial experience.
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Cross, Ian. "Music, Memory and Narrative: The Art of Telling in Tale of Tales." Animation 17, no. 3 (November 2022): 334–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17468477221114596.
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Skazka Skazok/Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979) has delighted and puzzled audiences and critics ever since its release. It presents a series of beautifully-animated episodes that seem to make narrative sense at the micro-level and that appear to fit together as a whole, but leaves the audience bemused as to why this should be so. The article discusses the history and context of the film, arguing that the ways in which sound and, particularly, music are deployed in relation to its visual elements provide powerful clues and cues as to the film’s over-arching narrative significances. Close analysis of the film’s music, sound and visuals reveals teleological underpinnings that are realized by means of alignment and re-alignment of music and image, leading to a new understanding of how the film and its success can be interpreted.
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Basu, Priyanka. "Between presence and absence in Tuni Chatterji’s Okul Nodi." Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 54–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00083_1.
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This article examines the layers of vistas of landscape, archival audio, ambient sound and documentation of history and culture in Los Angeles‐based filmmaker Tuni Chatterji’s experimental documentary film Okul Nodi (Endless River) (2012). Chatterji’s film consists mainly of luminous shots of boatmen travelling along Bangladeshi rivers. During key sequences, recordings of Bangladeshi boatmen’s songs known as bhatiyali are heard on the soundtrack. Interspersed among these shots and tracks are brief interview scenes with anthropologists and archivists of this musical form and musicians who perform or study the genre. This article shows how the film fuses experimental filmic approaches from artisanal to structural with documentary, ethnographic and archival modes, including that of ‘ecocinema’, highlighting questions of seeing and knowing. It also traces how the film obliquely brings to light a history of twentieth-century engagement with and archiving of this musical genre on the part of collectors of folk and Indigenous music, as well as radical subcontinental modern artists, thinkers and activists across Partition’s borders.
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Porter, Laraine. "Women Musicians in British Silent Cinema Prior to 1930." Journal of British Cinema and Television 10, no. 3 (July 2013): 563–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2013.0158.
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Referencing a range of sources from personal testimonies, diaries, trade union reports and local cinema studies, this chapter unearths the history of women musicians who played to silent film. It traces the pre-history of their entry into the cinema business through the cultures of Edwardian female musicianship that had created a sizeable number of women piano and violin teachers who were able to fill the rapid demand created by newly built cinemas around 1910. This demand was further increased during the First World War as male musicians were called to the Front and the chapter documents the backlash from within the industry against women who stepped in to fill vacant roles. The chapter argues that women were central to creating the emerging art-form of cinema musicianship and shaping the repertoire of cinema music during the first three decades of the twentieth century. With the coming of sound, those women who had learned the cinema organ, in the face of considerable snobbery, were also well placed to continue musical careers in Cine-Variety during the 1930s and beyond. This article looks particularly at the careers of Ena Baga and Florence de Jong who went on to play for silent films until the 1980s.
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Bell, Melanie. "Rebuilding Britain." Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 4 (2018): 33–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.4.33.
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Women's marginalization in the British feature film industry is well documented: gender discrimination, and sometimes overt segregation, shut most women out of senior creative roles after the introduction of sound. What has received less critical attention is their participation in nonfiction filmmaking, which offered women greater employment opportunities, especially in the decades after World War II as Britain rebuilt its economy. This article provides the first historical mapping of women's involvement in sponsored nonfiction filmmaking in Britain in the period between 1945 and 1970, using newly available statistical data from Britain's film trade union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT). It also draws on oral histories, extant films, and specialist trade publications to outline two case studies, one featuring three editors, and the other a director (Sarah Erulkar) who between them produced, directed and edited more than two hundred shorts on topics ranging from mineshaft sinking to French cookery. It argues that evidence of women's creative agency in this sector offers new ways of thinking about film history.
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Yao, Shuo. "On the Awakening of Female Consciousness in It Happened One Night." Journal of Language Teaching and Research 13, no. 2 (March 1, 2022): 357–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1302.16.
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In the 1930s, the United States was at the beginning of the Great Depression, while at the same time its film industry was booming. The screwball comedy as a new type of film became popular. One of the most representative and successful screwball comedies, It Happened One Night by Frank Capra in 1934, which not only won five awards of the Seventh Oscar, but also saved the Columbia Pictures from bankruptcy, can be called a miracle in the history of American film. As a pioneering work of the screwball comedy, the film's theme, narrative and other aspects have exerted profound influences on the subsequent films of this kind. Among the many advantages of this film, it is worth noting that the image of the heroine breaks people's traditional idea about women, which is ahead of its time. Besides, we can see her gradual awakening of female consciousness. Therefore, combining with the social and historical background at that time and the characteristics of the screwball comedy, this paper attempts to reveal the female image of the heroine Ellie and give a general view of the course of her consciousness awakening by analyzing lens language of the film, including shots, lighting and sound, together with the narrative.
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Henkel, Dennis. "The two sides of the scalpel: The polarizing image of surgery in early cinema." PLOS ONE 17, no. 12 (December 21, 2022): e0279422. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279422.
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This paper uses extensive database research, film viewing and literature review to show how the field of surgery was staged in the early days of film history. It can be shown that–although surgical medicine was a subject in transition, and many scientific breakthroughs (anesthesia und antisepsis) made surgery less painful and more complication-free–filmmakers still frequently resorted to horror memories of the past and created a questionable, or ambivalent image of the surgeon, sometimes as extreme as the “lunatic with a scalpel” stereotype, blurring the line between genius and madness. But there were also positive staging’s: The surgical intervention was often captured on the screen as a last resort for clinically hopeless cases, with the surgeon often presented as a “deus ex machina”, the savior out of nowhere. Other specialties, however, such as plastic surgery, were mostly positively dramatized, which reveals a stark contrast to research about the representation of the field in the sound film era. A view at the fields of neurosurgery and (selectively) opthalmo-surgery rounds out the panorama of forty-one surgical films. In summary, it is shown that the early surgical film depicts the specialty and the surgeon in a highly ambivalent way, from savior to monster thereby reflecting one of the most significant transitions in the history of surgery and showing us what image was presented to the public–and thus to potential patients–in the movie theaters.