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Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy 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 aim of this text is a critical analysis of current developments and potential applications of quantitative methods in film studies. Within its scope, a concise reconstruction of the methodological foundations, historical development, and key achievements of statistical, experimental, and digital humanities tools in relation to audiovisual media research is conducted. This involves a review of the phenomena that have developed so far as well as a philosophical consideration of the sources, consequences, and potential limitations of quantitative thinking in an area traditionally occupied by the humanities. Quantitative methods are not considered here as a replacement for existing paradigms, but rather as their complement, extension, and often inspiration. This allows to understand the current transformations but also integrate them with traditional research approaches, and identify the pitfalls and difficulties associated with this paradigm shift.

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy 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 Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy 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 Postscriptum Polonistyczne is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego 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.)

Dilip Kumar has been praised for his sublime dialog delivery, for his restrained gestures, and for his measured and controlled underplay of emotions in tragic stories as well as in light-hearted comedies. His debut in 1944 with Jwar Bhata (Ebb and Tide) met with less-than-flattering reviews. So did the next three films until his 1948 film, Jugnu (Firefly), which brought him recognition and success. Unlike his contemporaries such as Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand, who propelled their careers by launching their own production companies, Dilip Kumar relied on his talent, his unique approach to characterization, and his immersion in the projects he undertook. In the course of his career that spanned six decades, Kumar made only 62 films. However, his work is a textbook for other actors that followed. Not only did he bring respectability to a profession that had been shunned by the upper classes in India as a profession for “pimps and prostitutes,” but he also elevated film-acting and filmmaking to an academic discipline, making him worthy of the title ‘Professor Emeritus of Acting’. Rooted in the theoretical framework of Howard S. Becker’s work on the “production of culture” and “doing things together,” this paper discusses Kumar’s approach to acting, character development, and the level of his involvement and commitment to each of his projects. The author of this article argues that more than the creative control as a producer or a director, it is the artistic involvement and commitment of the main actors that shape great works of art in cinema. Dilip Kumar demonstrated it repeatedly.

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy 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 21st century has seen a growing awareness of the serious impact of film and television production on the natural environment. The film industry pollutes our environment in many ways, including carbon dioxide emissions, waste production, and energy and water consumption. The initiatives for sustainable development undertaken in many sectors of the economy have also reached the film industry. In Europe and the United States, various organisations and institutions have developed a number of recommendations in the field of sustainable film production. This paper, set in the film studies trend known as production culture, presents the global context as well as the nascent Polish practices of green filming. These initiatives, based on European examples, have so far been mainly bottom-up and dispersed or in the form of non-binding recommendations. The handful of producers and authors who have undertaken them are not in any way encouraged to be eco-friendly. Driven by their concern for the environment, however, they show the forward-looking way of thinking that should be followed by the entire industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation of François Albera's article originally published in French. The article traces the relationship between film studies and art history in its diverse manifestations and aspects throughout the 20th century.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is without doubt a popular science-fiction novel, which has inspired many generations of artists and creators in popular culture and mass culture. It has also become an inspiration for scientific studies in the field of robotics and cybernetics. Modern cognitive sciences are looking for the perfect pattern that will allow artificial intelligence to be achieved. An important problem for scientists was the lack of full knowledge about consciousness. We are able to recreate the structure of the human body in a machine, but we are not able to fully simulate the neural processes that would create human consciousness. This problem is perfectly illustrated by cultural works, including literature and cinematography. We see in them both the emanations of the motifs contained in Shelley's novel and the realization of scientific hypotheses that shape our image of a conscious, thinking machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discussesa book by Patrycja Włodek entitled Kres niewinności. Obraz i upamiętnienie ery Eisenhowera w amerykańskich filmach i serialach - pomiędzy reprezentacją, nostalgią a krytycznym retro [The End of Innocence: The image and remembrance of the Eisenhower era in American feature films and television series - between representation, nostalgia, and critical retro style]. The author of the article positions her publication amongst other film studies research devoted to "nostalgic cinema" and enters into dialogue with concepts put forward by Włodek. The polemical pendants and glosses centre on searching for currents, titles, and readings both supporting Włodek's considerations and transcending her interpretive framework relating to retro nostalgic (cinema of the 1980s) and retro classic (the most recent films and television series). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a massive amount of archival material on Nazi concentration camps, references to camp translators and interpreters are random, brief and laconic. Usually they consist of dry facts as related in narratives of the Nazi regime victims. In the present paper, these records will be confronted with the picture of Marta Weiss, a fictional camp interpreter presented in the 1948 docudrama The Last Stage by the Polish film director Wanda Jakubowska, herself a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Birkenau. To this day The Last Stage remains a "definitive film about Auschwitz, a prototype for future Holocaust cinematic narratives." It is also called "the mother of all Holocaust films", as it establishes several images easily discernible in later narratives on the Holocaust: realistic images of the camp; passionate moralistic appeal; and clear divisions between the victims and the oppressors. At the same time The Last Stage is considered to be an important work from the perspective of feminist studies, as it presents the fate of female prisoners, femininity, labour and motherhood in the camp, women's solidarity and their resistance to the oppressors. The Last Stage constitutes a unique, quasi-documentary source for the analysis of the role of translators and interpreters working in extreme conditions. Moreover, the authenticity of the portrait of Marta Weiss may not be contested, as it is based on the person of Mala Zimetbaum, a translator and messenger in the Auschwitz camp, killed in 1944 after a failed escape from the camp. The present paper presents the topic of interpreting and translating in a concentration camp from three different angles: film studies, feminist studies and interpreting studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leśniak reads the works of French art sociologist Pierre Francastel in relation to the notion of atmosphere. Leśniak argues that besides analysing previously unpublished documents from Francastel's archive - including unpublished texts on the experience of film - scholars should also direct their attention to the atmosphere of the archive - the material traces of modern optimism, evidence of faith in progress. This kind of research makes it possible to think of modernity in terms of affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew Behrendt's review of Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau's edited volume Cinematicity in Media History

The author explores main subject of Kaja Silverman's diverse ouvre. The theoretician combines linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, philosophy, art history and fi lm studies to focus on a concept of a subject, with special interest for a feminine subject. Silverman promotes a concept, that signifi cation cannot be in any way separated from a subject and cultural system, which generates it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the case of reversed narration in the film Irreversible by Gaspar Noé as a one of the examples of group of films produced in the 1990's based on the reversed narration and complex, modern construction of the sujet. The author stresses that temporal aspects of metonymic contiguity shows parallels with displacement of one event on the axis of chronology and the transitions between erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit. Narratological reading of retrospective events provides dating back in time from primary narrative as a result of the use of i.e. the internal analepsa showing the time span in the story told. The shift from present and past goes beyond the linear and causal order by drawing on a comparison between J.W. Dunne's various forms of theory of time and the Moebius strip. The group of events arranged in the causal but discontinuous order show the parallels that precede climax event and initiate the secondary narrative dating back in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]