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Some of the most crucial debates surrounding Islamic legitimacy and cinema rotate around the question of the permissible (ḥalāl) and prohibited (ḥarām) in Islamic law and how these function for Muslim theology and politics. Emerging from these debates, halal cinema has been one of the recent critical interventions in the field of Indian and Islamic cinema. Rather than making cinema Islamic from an ideological position, the new halal experiments with the visual language of cinema without compromising the popular dimensions of its viewership. This article looks at the politics of halal cinema within the context of the state of Kerala in South India and argues that the space of halal cinema shows the aspirations and negotiations of the Muslim community in Kerala. Halal cinema thus becomes an immanent critique of Islamic cinema by destabilizing the dominant practice that connects the relationship between Islam and cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most crucial debates surrounding Islamic legitimacy and cinema rotate around the question of the permissible (ḥalāl) and prohibited (ḥarām) in Islamic law and how these function for Muslim theology and politics. Emerging from these debates, halal cinema has been one of the recent critical interventions in the field of Indian and Islamic cinema. Rather than making cinema Islamic from an ideological position, the new halal experiments with the visual language of cinema without compromising the popular dimensions of its viewership. This article looks at the politics of halal cinema within the context of the state of Kerala in South India and argues that the space of halal cinema shows the aspirations and negotiations of the Muslim community in Kerala. Halal cinema thus becomes an immanent critique of Islamic cinema by destabilizing the dominant practice that connects the relationship between Islam and cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores toxic masculinity in Indian cinema through an analysis of Arjun Reddy. It examines how film perpetuates patriarchal norms and reinforces gender inequality. By examining the portrayal of the protagonist and society's reactions, it reveals the impact of film representations on real-life attitudes. The study highlights the need for alternative narratives that challenge traditional gender norms and promote diversity in masculinity. It advocates a critical analysis of film discourse to promote a more inclusive portrayal of gender identities in Indian cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del CILHA is the property of Universidad Nacional de Cuyo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores different approaches to the study of audiovisual metaphor: the semiotic and linguistic perspectives and the transition from the semantic to the pragmatic one, which has seen the convergence between film studies and Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT). Starting from this scenario, a specific case study will be proposed: the serial fiction Stranger things (Netflix, 2016). The series works on the encyclopedic stratification of one of the most consolidated metaphorical relationships in the repertoire of the genre, especially since the 1980s: the (reciprocal) substitution between the semantic plane of adolescence and that of otherness and the supernatural verging on horror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of IBEROAMERICANA. América Latina - España - Portugal is the property of Vervuert Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Beginning with the release of The Birth of a Nation through the mid-twentieth century, the film industry began featuring African Americans on the silver screen. The emergence of race films—major film productions made by African Americans and featuring Black artists—were frequently reported and reviewed in the Black press. This examination of the coverage of race films in three major Black newspapers, the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American, traces coverage of race films by the Black press between 1915 and 1950. This study builds on literature from journalism and communication studies, as well as film studies to illustrate how the Black press fulfilled its role as an advocacy press and served its mission of racial uplift through its race film coverage. It argues that Black newspapers achieved this by giving positive coverage to race films, their actors, producers, and crew members, and by unreservedly criticizing Black members of the entertainment industry if the Black press perceived that they were acting in ways detrimental to the greater cause of improving attitudes toward the Black community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the possibility and importance of cinematographic representations of dementia that offer an alternative to its popular medicalized stigma. This is explored by comparing two film adaptations of the same theatrical play by Florian Zeller, The Father. While The Father's (2020) film version by Zeller himself does not depart from the notion of dementia as a story of decline, Le Guay's Floride (2015) focuses on the main character's ability for imaginative storytelling. Through narrative analysis, we demonstrate that while Anthony's confusion in The Father is an utterly despairing sign of cognitive decline, that very confusion is a vehicle for playful imagination in Floride. The vitality underlying such acts of unbridled imagination, along with a matter- of-fact approach to the interruptions of dementia, challenges the negative, deeply seated stigmas of persons living with dementia. Juxtaposed in this manner, these two adaptations provide a unique opportunity to re-examine the role of popular culture in dementia discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Musicology of Lithuania / Lietuvos muzikologija is the property of Lithuanian Academy of Music & Theatre and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The object of this research is Nia Dinata’s film, Ca Bau Kan (The Courtesan), which was adapted from Remy Sylado’s novel. The research focuses on the cultural representation of Chinese-Indonesians which pertains to the context of the maritime spice trade route and the concept of nationalism. Set in Batavia in three different decades, namely the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s, the film depicts the journey of a Chinese-Indonesian character from the Dutch colonial era and the Japanese colonial era to the era of the independence revolution. The research method used is a qualitative method through film studies, which is juxtaposed with the semiotic approachto see how Chinese-Indonesians are represented in the film. The findings show that the film attempts to represent the Chinese-Indonesians accurately, albeit with the continuous presence of inaccurate stereotypes. The findings show Chinese-Indonesians’ economic contribution that reflects the history of the spice trade maritime route in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of amateur filmmaking within the academy largely exclude the works of shot-on-video horror filmmakers, who typically embody the label to its greatest extent. While not high art or canonical works, these sub-generic features perform a number of fascinating functions that often clash with all established notions of cinema. This paper examines two features in this style--Tales from the Quadead Zone and Demon Dolls--via the lens of cinematic realism in order to investigate their commitment to authentic presentations of daily life. Long considered the most undesirable form of genre filmmaking, this essay works to instate their unique contributions to film language into a more serious discussion which brings light to their challenging aesthetic and thematic contents. The analysis of these two features encourages the consideration of an untapped area of Film Studies via available techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's experience of teaching Indigenous literature and Indigenous film courses by preparing courses using Indigenous films without formal film studies theory and analysis as the film is an effective storytelling medium. She mentions tailoring the Film Genres course to examine mock documentaries as she got influenced by Māori filmmakers Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement.

Transhumanism, race, gender, and cultural identity in early 21st century popular culture movies: Black Panther; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Wonder Woman is the focus of this essay. Transhumanism refers to a super-powered human, able to transcend conventional human capabilities and accomplish physical, psychic, intellectual, and emotional feats of strength and perseverance such as extra sensory perception and the ability to fly. Three authors examine how their positionality impacted their experiences of the movies' narratives, characterizations, and significance. Each author considers their own enculturated, racialized, and gendered backgrounds to contemplate the personal impact of the films as empowering and inspirational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Ciencias Sociales (13159518) is the property of Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad del Zulia Venezuela and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Images of jumpers represent an emotionally charged symbol of 9/11, yet just after 9/11 their circulation was quickly and dramatically censored. Yet twenty years later, the 9/11 archive continues to be curated in this way. As the 9/11 archive particularly supports the justification of many military tactics and international interventions, it becomes important to look at what has been excluded and why, including photographs and video. This paper will turn to representations of jumpers in three forms – in photography, in literature, and in film. It will address Richard Drew's famous 'Falling Man' photo, literary representations of the photo in Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man, and film of jumpers in Alejandro González Iñárritu's short film from the collection 11ʹ09"01: September 11th. This article thinks through how narratives surrounding jumpers serve to maintain governmental support for international intervention, while very few representations seek to propel another story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Discurso is the property of Universidade Aberta and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Even though Instagram has been the subject of numerous studies, none of them have systematically investigated its potential as a narrative medium. This article argues that Instagram's narrative capabilities are comparable to those of literature and film. To support our claims, we analyze a number of prominent female Instagram creators and demonstrate how they employ the platform's diverse features, functionalities, and interface to create multi-year biographical narratives. Furthermore, we discuss the applicability of theories developed in literary and film studies in analyzing Instagram's narrative capabilities. By employing Bakhtin's influential chronotope concept, we examine in depth how these narratives make specific use of space and time. Additionally, we compare time construction in film and Instagram narratives using the cinema studies' theory of narrative time in movies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short provocation considers the entangling potential of visible needlework mending, using Tacita Dean's 2007 film Darmstädter Werkblock to question how paying attention to sites of repair can highlight ongoing, often unnoticed, forms of maintenance within an institution. During the film Darmstädter Werkblock, Dean pays homage to the markers of age in the original textile paneling of Block Beuys, giving attention to the frayed, faded and restored areas of the walls. In contrast to the large-scale refurbishment chosen by the gallery, the earlier needlework repair presented by Dean reflects a slower, more ongoing form of maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining the dialectic between the diasporic subject's homes--both the absent and adopted home--this monograph maps out the ways through which collective memory and postmemory mediate traumatic experiences of dislocation. The literary and cinematic representations of mobility in Hannah Espia's film Transit (2013), Clement Baloup's graphic novel Vietnamese Memories and Lian Gouw's novel Only a Girl reveal a dual-displacement that characterizes the experience of diasporic mobility in the 21st century--a displacement in both space and time. This dual-displacement, which is a result of the inability to reduce the "many temporal worlds" they live in, that is, "the past of the motherland ... a present that is often precarious, and an uncertain future," simultaneously into one, constitutes the migrant's out-of-sync subjectivity (Köhn 109). This out-of-sync subjectivity is manifested in what I call the poetics of "asynchronicity" that undergirds the narratives of these Southeast Asian--specifically Filipino, Indonesian, and Vietnamese--stories. Asynchronicity, as postcolonial poetics, enables these texts to act as counter-memories, offering alternative ways of understanding the migrant's multi-faceted identity and belonging to place(s) in the world. By compelling readers to remember and to re-member--that is, to engage in a conscious re-building of one's lifeworld using the bricks of individual memory--new narratives emerge wherein the dislocated subject finds themselves included in a history written on their own terms, one that transcends the colonial grand narratives that have once delimited diasporic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the life of Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer and Fletcher 2018) is a popular cinematic product that received little critical acclaim on its release; however, it became the biggest grossing music biopic of all time. Rocketman (Fletcher 2019), an impressionistic portrayal of Elton John's rise to fame was released in its wake. Both are among the most widely debated films to emerge in recent years. Paradigmatic of the modern biopic, they recount the lives of iconic rock stars who struggle with fame, identity, and most crucially, their sexuality in seventies and eighties Britain. From a cross-cultural perspective, conveying the narratives of a more or less explicit homosexuality set in a specific spatio-temporal context to a mainstream international audience presents complex translational implications. Focusing on Anglo/Italian contexts, Ranzato (2012: 382) has argued, "the language of homosexuals has long remained in Italy the language of a ghetto and even today the relatively poor lexicon available is an objective obstacle even for the most unprejudiced translator". This study, therefore, aims to investigate the ways in which the linguistic representations of homosexuality have been negotiated across time and space comparing the source language and dubbed versions of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman to ascertain whether those obstacles have been overcome and if so, how. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Filmed T hought, Pippin's most c ommon touchstone in the film-philosophy canon is Stanle y Cavell. Pippin's o v erarching characterisation of film's po tential is its ability to present a challenge to what he c onsiders a fundamental principle of Hegelian thought, that: 'there is no thing in principle unkno wable, and that the logic of the kno wable can be determined'. Pippin's c orpus is drawn largely from canonical and mainstream w orks of US film: tw o more Hitchc ock films, tw o films b y Nicholas Ray, T erenc e Malick's T he T hin R ed Line and R oman P olanski's Chinatown. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Via Panorâmica: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies / Revista de Estudos Anglo-Americanos is the property of Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A novel ZnO film of two dimension ordered spherical structure has been synthesised via RF magnetron sputtering method using monodispersed polystyrene spheres as template. The 2D-ordered spherical ZnO film was characterised by SEM, TEM, XRD, and DRUV–vis. In this work, growth process and photocatalytic ability of the 2D-ordered spherical ZnO film were studied. The 2D-ordered spherical film shows 2.3 times higher catalytic performance than that of the reference ZnO flat (R-ZnO) film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Pädagogik is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista FAMECOS - Mídia, Cultura e Tecnologia is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Leveler is one of the crucial factors to fabricate electroplated Cu with excellent electrical property in advanced interconnect metallization. Little attention has been paid on the effects of leveler on the electrical resistance of electroplated Cu during self-annealing. In this study, the impacts of three different levelers on the sheet resistance of the electrochemical deposited Cu films are studied in terms of microstructure, impurity and electrochemical behavior. Three levelers show differences in inhibition ability on Cu deposition and levels of impurities introduced into Cu films, the former influences the original crystal grain size. The driving force originated from grain boundaries and hinder effect of impurities are two opposite factors which work competitively for grain growth. This study shows the direct evidence on the impacts of the two opposite factors on the resistance performance of deposited Cu films during self-annealing.We find that the leveler with the strongest inhibitory ability and a reasonable level of introduced impurities shows the largest resistance drop during recrystallization process, indicating the considerable improved conductivity.We believe this work will provide a scientific basis for the selection of levelers to obtain the Cu films with excellent electrical property and microstructure in electronic industrial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes Kinolab, a platform for the digital analysis of narrative film language. While the work of literary scholars has benefitted from the application of computational methodologies to text analysis for decades, researchers who work with moving images have faced technological and legal obstacles that hinder their ability to analyze large corpora of film and other media. Recent modifications to U.S. copyright law and technological advances in the annotation of moving images have created new opportunities to harness Digital Humanities methodologies for film and media research. Kinolab, which originated as a digital clip archive for Italian films and series set in Rome, has taken advantage of these advances to expand its collection beyond Italian film and media with the goal of building a platform for the analysis of film language that is broadly representative of diverse historical periods, cultures, and genres, thereby enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of how formal elements of narrative media relate over time and across geographical boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista FAMECOS - Mídia, Cultura e Tecnologia is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Metal dissolution and passivation of Fe-20Cr alloy in an alkaline solution were investigated using in-situ polarized neutron reflectometry. The dissolution of the alloy, the thickness of sub-layers in the passive film, the interfacial roughness between layers, and the scattering length density profile of the passive film were measured with sub-nanometer resolution. An anodization ratio for oxide growth of 3.4±0.4 nm/Vwas determined. The oxide formation efficiency and the layer density at different applied potentials were also quantified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, the two dimensional (2D) pit growth method is applied to Mg thin films to study the anomalous hydrogen evolution phenomenon exhibited by Mg. By analyzing 2D pit growth, it is possible to accurately track the active dissolving surface, which in this case is the pit wall, and to measure the anodic, net and cathodic current densities. It was found that 2D pits in Mg thin films grow under mixed ohmic/activation control at lower applied potentials and under mass transport control at higher potentials. Determination of the exact metal film thickness is critical in making accurate assessments of the current densities, and the issues associated with measuring the metal film thickness are addressed. The anodic current densities for these very thin films are extremely high, on the order of A/cm2. The hydrogen evolution current densities are also very high in the ohmic/activation control region and consume around half of the anodic current density. The hydrogen evolution current densities were shown to increase with increasing applied potential, which is direct evidence for the anomalous hydrogen evolution behavior. It is clearly shown that the anomalous hydrogen evolution phenomenon happens at the active dissolving sites, which in this case is the 2D pit wall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The female image in cinema has always been a reflection of socio-political transformation, thus, changes in the social status of women are directly related to their artistic representation. The image of a modern Uzbek woman in cinema combines traditionalism peculiar to the Central Asian region and glamorous femininity inspired by the West. Although the female image has undergone diversification in commercial film production, the willingness to build a family remains an integral part of women's aspirations and desires. The search for personal happiness as a wife and mother is an obligatory element of the plot narrative, and success in personal life despite various circumstances is almost the only possible happy ending for a female protagonist. In the latest art cinema, there is a general trend toward the reverse evolution of the female image-from a modern woman to a traditional one. In these movies, spiritual values, morality, and traditions as the principal factor of society's well-being are brought to the foreground, while female characters are mostly depicted in a traditional environment and within an ethnographic context. This paper mainly focuses on Bakhrom Yakubov's film Superbride (2008), which became a national hit and box-office sensation in the domestic market. Superbride is a particularly successful example of a fiction film that through the prism of youth comedy promotes an ideal and frankly banal female image based on patriarchal mentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with analysis of Roland Barthes's concepts of photographic time, punctum and third meaning as integral parts of his version of film theory. The aim of the article is to reconstruct Barthes's film theory incorporating not only his "cinematographic" concepts but also his key ideas from photography theory. The article starts with the review of literature dealing with Barthes's studies on film and with his famous book Camera lucida. Then, through Barthes's idea of cinema as a phenomenon able to hold both realities (that of the screen and that of the cinema theatre) the author comes to the analysis of Barthes's concept of photographic time and its connection with the notion of punctum. This bond between punctum and photographic time seems to be a key element of Barthes's cinema theory. This element refers to the ability of film to involve a spectator into unique affective experience and affective time. The idea is revealed through the example of photographic film, specifically La Jetée by Chris Marker. The last part of the article is devoted to the notion of the third meaning and its conceptual connections with the ideas of punctum and photographic time. Thus, the article in some sense represents an attempt to reconstruct Barthes's possible film theory which does not exist as one big text but is dispersed in a number of notes and articles. This theory would be closely connected with phenomenology and film experience, and based on ability of film to keep a viewer in two realities at the same time. A split between a viewer's as a voyeur identifying herself with anything within the screen reality, and a viewer as a person who possesses a human body and sits in the cinema, is never experienced as traumatic. It rather allows cinema to put a comma within film narrative, to pause development of a film in order to incorporate viewers' real experience and affect. Key ideas expressed in the article are based on comparative analysis of Barthes's texts on film and photography from different years, and on the whole belong to phenomenological framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the presence of a large American animation studio in Ireland, under the stewardship of ex-Disney animation director Don Bluth, played a pivotal role in the development of the indigenous Irish animation industry, and constituted a colonial moment in Irish animation history. This paper aims to discuss the nascent Irish animation industry prior to the arrival of the Don Bluth studio, and to consider aspects of indigenous production onto which a global North American industrial model was imposed. Aspects of postcolonial theory are used as a method of describing the historical circumstances that have determined the emergence of an indigenous Irish animation industry in the late 20th century, and also deployed to illustrate how the social and historical aspects of animation production in Ireland reflect the postcolonial conditions of Irish society itself. In considering the pre- Bluth period of animation production in Ireland this paper offers insights into models of production, aesthetic expression and processes of cultural transmission, and provides commentaries on work of Irish animators overlooked by Irish film studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the experience of teaching film in the International Baccalaureate programme, this article presents the intellectual and emotional learning that film can enable as well as the possibilities of using film as a pedagogic tool for the collaborative construction of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of University of Cumhuriyet, Faculty of Sciences & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article looks at film education in Paris, France during the early 1920s through discourses from daily newspapers, the emerging film press, the trade press, municipal council meetings, speeches and lectures to determine the cultural complexities associated with the emergence of cinephilia. Topics covered include impact of the 1920 tax increase on the French film industry, opposing views of cinema as an educational medium and artistic medium and the French First Wave cinema.

Copyright of Dixit. Comunicación, Profesión, Conocimiento is the property of Universidad Catolica del Uruguay Damaso Antonio Larranaga and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article is dedicated to the analysis of technological challenges and theoretical shifts in the field of cinema archives. Film archive as a 'repository' of collective memory finds itself in a complex situation of rapidly changing visual and media environment as well as of cultural landscape. Taking such aspects as acquisition, capacity, digitalization and promotion as key parameters of these changes, the author elaborates on three case studies of post socialist film archives and proposes the alternative scenario of cinematheque-attractions as a possible gateway to solve the challenges of a digital turn in the domain of preservation and exhibition of classical film culture. Moreover cinematheque-attractions can be one of the possible solutions to revive the collective memory of the nation and solve the cinema consumer challenge of losing the teen audience, as attraction may bring the young generation back to the theater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A preface to the June 2019 issue of the journal "Arthuriana" is presented, which focuses on the work of U.S. educator and author Kevin J. Harty in literary and film studies.

This paper explores the representation of food in Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón’s film Half of Heaven (Spain, 1986) and Silvio Caiozzi’s The Moon in the Mirror (Chile, 1990) as it depicts the political transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain and Chile. While the Spanish transition was initiated with Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, and the Chilean transition with Augusto Pinochet supposedly stepping down in 1989, in both cases the dictatorial power structures ensured that such a shift in political ideology did not come into effect overnight. As a result, well after Franco’s death and Pinochet’s defeat, the regimes’ institutions remained in place. With this political context in mind, food features prominently as a metaphorical representation of the complex power struggles and political shifts that were occurring in these two countries at this time. In this way, the relationship of food—presented as either good or bad, edible or contaminated—is conflated with character development in such a way that it establishes a new set of semantic networks among characters that illuminates sociocultural dynamics and political debates in transitional Spain and Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The screen adaptation of the novella Devdas by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay is an important landmark in early Indian cinema. A prominent film, screened in four Indian languages (Bengali, Hindi, Telugu and Tamil), it seems to offer a novel vision of romantic love and romanticism. This article critiques the fanciful interpretations of the film provided by some postmodern academics in the field of comparative literature. It endeavours to place the film both as text and cinematic work into a broader perspective based on the study of intertextuality of three renditions: Raghavaiah’s Devdas (Telugu, 1953), Bimal Roy’s Devdas (Hindi, 1955) and Bhansali’s Devdas (Hindi, 2002). Grounded in cultural theory and Indian performative aesthetics coupled with moving image analysis, this study highlights the underlying, deep-rooted romanticism embedded in Indian philosophical and aesthetic traditions of devotion between atma (individual soul) and paramatma (absolute soul), personifying Paro/Chandramukhi as atma and Devdas as paramatma. This article, part of a larger project on de-Westernising media studies, makes a critical intervention in current South Asian Studies by aiming to provide a novel theoretical framework to which the philosophical and traditional tenets grounding the novella of Devdas can be anchored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following paper we explore the utopian theme of revolution in two filmic works of art: the movie Fight Club (1999), directed by David Fincher, and the very recent TV series Mr. Robot (2015), created by Sam Esmail. We will argue that Fight Club is an existential meditation on simulation, dehumanization and the capitalistic tyranny of the objects combined with a nihilistic pursuit of authenticity through violence. Closely following Fight Club's rumination on madness as "revolution of the self," Mr. Robot allows us to take a peek into the mystery of revolutionary freedom: will it change everything or will we come to regret our former tyrants? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]