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Interactive documentary theory has oversimplified concepts of narrative in order to accentuate the contrast between traditional documentary and interactive documentary. In doing so, there is a risk of imagining the interactive documentary as an impermeable and incomprehensible artefact, resistant to hermeneutic examination. This paper will show that by approaching the question of narrative coherence as a phenomenological proposition, a theory of narrative can be developed which is able to account for interactive documentary traits which are not shared with traditional documentaries. In order to reimagine the role of narrative in interactive documentary, the philosophical approach of Paul Ricoeur will be adapted and extended. Ricoeur's combination of phenomenology and hermeneutics encourages a nuanced and philosophically rigorous approach to narrative, which helps us expand on the role of narrative in interactive documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process Philosophy has a long history as a disciplined way of thinking about the world. Process thinking flows in film theories, too, though often unacknowledged as a framework. This essay contrasts process and substantialist accounts of the world, film, and aesthetics. Processual accounts promise new descriptions of photography, film, color, narrative, narration, fiction, the camera, semiotics, and the self. Performative aspects of aesthetic texts may be measured by such dynamic events as temporal gestalts, patterning, procedural schemata, judgment heuristics, working memory (which includes the stream of consciousness, adverbial sensing, and a flowing sense of selfhood), projections, radial associations, reidentifications (frequency, vibration), and the ever-present possibilia of paradigms and the nearly true. Processes engender immediacy and directionality – a flow toward continual becoming. The result is a new perspective on the nature of textuality – its fluid properties, its collective behavior – without necessarily displacing substantialist accounts that rely on long-term memory and the immobile signposts of sign, cue, form, and thingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers love to write about Terrence Malick. In this meta-critical essay, I examine recent philosophical evaluations of Malick’s film style – within the broader context of ‘film as philosophy’ or ‘film-philosophy’ – with the aim of laying bare the dominant motifs and values that film philosophers resort to when reflecting on the filmmaker’s pronounced stylistic hallmarks. First, I identify Malick’s widely perceived ‘contemplative style’ as a key catalyst behind philosophers’ fascination with his films and proceed to detail the diversity of stylistic devices and effects in terms of which philosophers describe it. The second movement of my analysis is to illustrate the decidedly ethical interests that accompany said configurations of Malick’s style and effects. I argue that Malick magnifies in philosophers a motive of personal transformation that is more widely at work within the project of film-philosophy. The philosophical achievements of Malick’s style, as commentators see it, always entail transformational effects on the viewer: his devices not only move us to contemplation, but potentially transform us to greater awareness, openness and connection. What are essentially value-laden interpretations of style are illustrated with reference to the three stylistic elements that feature most in philosophical writings on Malick: (1) his visual renderings of nature, (2) his uses of voice-over and (3) the ‘perspective effects’ that he is said to achieve. I conclude with some critical implications of my findings for the procedures and presuppositions underlying the project of film-philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In proposing an ontology of motion capture, this paper identifies three modalities – capture, hold, release – to conceptualise the peculiar affordances of motion capture technology in its relationship to a performer's movement. Motion capture is unique among contemporary moving image media in its capacity to re-perform a performer's recorded movement a potentially limitless number of times, for example, as applied to innumerable different CG characters. Unlike live-action film or even rotoscoping (motion capture's closest equivalent), the movement extracted from the captured performance lives on, but only by way of the inimagable (non-visible) domain of motion data. Motion data ‘holds' movement itself in inimagable form, and ‘releases' it in the domain of the digital moving image. This tri-fold conception relates an important dimension of (Heideggerian) Being to the idea of movement as fundamental to an ontology or ‘being' of motion capture. At the same time, the proposed ontology challenges the ‘illusion of life' metaphor as the accepted definition of (motion capture) animation. The Oscar's Special Rules for the Animated Feature Film Award asserts that ‘by itself' motion capture does not qualify as an animation method. The notion that a technology could do or be anything ‘by itself' affords a conceptual leap towards Heideggerian thinking on the nature of Being as embodied in temporality, in which past, present and future are unified. In its capacity to operate outside the domain of the digital moving image, the concept of ‘movement itself' not only articulates an ontology of motion capture: motion capture itself can be understood to be brought into being by movement, thus also challenging the notion that capture technology has a parasitic relationship to a performer's originary performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of ‘New French Extremity’, Michael Haneke’s films are critically received as brutal and violent.Amour(2012) addresses political and ethical questions of the treatment of the dying within the aesthetics of intimate and provocative cinema. In this article, the author explores the provocative nature ofAmourin contact with philosophical questions of death and care. He theorises death using Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on cinema, the body and ethics. Understanding death as a Nancean ‘blind spot’ – a coming to presence that unfolds and intensifies existential finitude – allows the author to centrally position the knowledge of Anne’s death in this expositional realm beyond representation. With the help of Nancy’s work, he fleshes out the evidence of Anne’s death as an intensified shared experience through the film, and analyses her corporeal ‘expeausition’. He positionsAmourontologically as a Nancean ‘transimmanent’ vehicle bringing the embodied immanence of carnal spectatorship and the transcendence of the topic of death in contact. In this reading, the film as ‘exscription’ of Anne’s body, as access proper to her body and skin, enables a sense of ‘being-with’ the images and touches upon ethics, death and the cinematic medium itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a subcategory of Art proper, it is worth reconsidering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’, mass-produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-Second World War is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed storytelling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin’s theories of mass art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Walking through Aernout Mik’s exhibitionCommunitas,dwelling in the encounter with the people and situations in front of and on the screens, one is struck by the cinematic and political qualities of the gestures in these powerful video installations. In this article I will develop some film-philosophical reflections on the silent performative force of the image as gesture and as politics. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture”, Robert Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer” and Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the modern political film, I will contextualize Mik’s work in the tradition of the modern political film. Being in between language and image, a go-between that connects people, things and the world, the gesture belongs to ethics and politics more than to aesthetics. Characters in Mik’s work perform gestures that express the possibility of resistance and of the possibility of a shared community, a gesture which is shared by the artist, his actors and the visitors of the exhibition alike. Just like the modern political film the video works manage to change our perception of familiar situations via a simple tic, a spasm or a shared bodily posture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The theme of sacrifice appears in Jean-François Lyotard's writings on cinema not in terms of any representational content but in terms of the economy of the images from which a film is formally constructed. Sacrifice is here understood in a sense derived from Bataille, and related to his notions of general (as opposed to restricted) economy, and of sovereignty. Lyotard's writings on cinema have received some attention in English-language scholarship, but so far this attention has been focused almost exclusively on two essays which have appeared in English translation: “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.” I offer an analysis which also incorporates his two other important essays on cinema, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” [Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema] and “Idée d'un film souverain” [The Idea of a Sovereign Film]. The interest of the former is that it makes most explicit the aesthetic politics – evident in many of Lyotard's writings on art – specific to cinema. In the latter, Lyotard gives his most extensive treatment of cinema, and frames it in terms of Bataille's notion of sovereignty. I offer an interpretation of Lyotard's philosophy of cinema which links these quite disparate essays, foregrounding the political dimension of the sacrificial economy of images he proposes: films of any variety, even commercial cinema, may include some sequences and images which are “sacrificial” in that they are “other” to the chronological narrative of the whole. These images liberate us from the seductive effects of the narrative, and the invitation to fantasise, which act as means of imposing and reproducing dominant social and cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with the idea recently promulgated by film-philosophers that the relationship between philosophy and film is untroubled by the encounter between reason and art. To do this I consider how in Je vous salue, Marie Jean-Luc Godard uses allegory, cinematic automatism and montage not to provide rational arguments but to raise questions about the legacy of the Christian aesthetics for contemporary cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While every discipline in the humanities worries about its future, film studies is caught in the thrall of a particular anxiety, namely the possibility that it lacks a consistent object and a compelling reason. Behind the question of film studies looms the question of cinema itself, an aging technē that seems to have hung around in the midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the image as their province. Why cinema? Against so many digital incursions, more traditionally minded critics have defended film on the basis of its indexical powers, but this article envisions an entirely different reason to return to the cinema. Where both the return to the index and the recourse to the digital effect tend to regard the cinema as a matter of visibility, I suggest that we might reclaim our faith in the cinema by virtue of what remains unseen and off-screen. Hence, this essay undertakes a brief history of the out of frame in order to induce a conceptualization of the cinema (paceDeleuze) as the art of the “Outside.” Turning to Stanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey, the essay concludes by analyzing how an ostensibly older sense of images nevertheless augurs the critical and philosophical developments with which we can learn to believe in the cinema once more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the so-called “crisis” in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their power to reveal reality under a multiplicity of aspects but to satisfy our desire for myth – to allow an aesthetic overcoming of the limits of consciousness and memory. The question I wish to explore is whether cinema has the power to restore our belief in reality, in the worlds that film can reveal, in the experience that it can capture and transfigure. My case study for exploring this question, the question of belief in cinema or what we could call a Bazinian cinephilia, will be Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose sublime aesthetics and unorthodox religiosity has provoked polarised critical responses, but whose remarkable ambition is to create a mythology – personal, historical, and cosmological – capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deleuze's philosophy of cinema departs from the standard conception of modernist aesthetics that sees art withdrawing from representation in order to reflect upon the specificity of its medium. While ambitious and influential, Deleuze's attempt fails. Overdetermined by its own metaphysics, it forsakes the real importance of the movies. It is unable to explain how they function and why they matter. This essay pursues three lines of criticism: Deleuze cannot account for the aesthetic specificity of cinema because he deposes the primacy of action in the movement-image in favour of the primacy of belief (the time-image). This failure is connected to the fact that a cinema of the virtual depends on the very Bazinian realism it is meant to displace. Realism must be acknowledged as the cinematic condition and truth of virtuality. Further, Bazinian realism is the cinematic form of philosophical modernism, preferable for many reasons to Deleuze's philosophy, which returns to pre-modern cosmology in its desire to escape the agent-based, anti-metaphysical commitments of modernism. I apply these criticisms to my analysis of Resnais'sHiroshima mon amour, a movie that prima facie looks made to fulfil the terms of Deleuze's theory but which I argue is an object lesson in realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of The Language and Style of Film Criticism (Klevan and Clayton) considers the presuppositions of romantic film-philosophy, its influence on film criticism, and its tendency towards solipsism. This review also presents a theoretical framework for analysing descriptive passages in film criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacques Derrida's Echographies de la television (1996) and Jean-Luc Nancy's L'Evidence du film (2001) mark two instances of philosophical reflection upon the ways in which cinema might be seen to do justice to worldly existence. Yet, in articulating a cinematic ethics of the look, Derrida and Nancy configure film's relation to justice in significantly different ways. This article traces these points of intersection and divergence both in relation to their responses to film (Nancy on Abbas Kiarostami; Derrida on Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance (1983)) and against the background of a range of broader ethical and political issues raised by Derrida and Nancy-issues of the singular and the common, of restitution and non-return, of fidelity and the promise. Drawing on these reflections, the article explores notions of existence, incalculability and justice in Arnaud des Pallieres's Adieu (2003) (a film on which Nancy has written a commentary). Yet whilst this allows for the elaboration of points of contact between Nancy's ontology and Derrida's hauntology, Adieu also gestures to the way in which cinema exceeds philosophy, by articulating a space of justice between being and non-being, between Nancean sharing and Derridean spectrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a resurgent interest in the philosophical dimension of cultural products—cinema, in particular. Rather than analyzing the production, dissemination and reception of particular films through literary, cultural, sociological or psychological theories, one considers film as “doing the work” of theory/philosophy. This essay argues that cinema's possibility of being/becoming philosophy will emerge only if one remains open to the inconsistencies of the cinematic text, rather than seek to posit a mythical point of origin that reduces representation to its effective functionality, thereby announcing the death of thinking. Following the ways in which Adorno and Horkheimer indicate the deep ontological significance of the myth of origin involved in the logic of Enlightenment, this essay attempts to offer responsibility, vigilance and hesitation as alternative ways of engaging with thought. Cinema, this essay finally claims, can offer a model with which thinking, as philosophy proper, can be recovered from its mythical origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as peer reviewing in motion picture production, the ontology of motion capture, and quantifying films as academic research.

The development of the 'new cinemas' leads to the institutionalization of 'auteur cinema' as an alternative to classical and popular cinema. Carlos Saura is one of the greatest representatives of 'auteur cinema', maintaining this position for over two decades. During this period (1959–1979) he develops the main features of his work, which should be valued not only as a manifestation of Spanish sociological realities but also as an expression of artistic and cinematographic modernity. Saura abandons literary realism to focus on the interior world of his characters. The identification of the 'auteur' with his protagonists is clear from La prima Angelica (1973), but is not complete until Elisa, vida mía (1976) and Ojos vendados (1978). The self-referentiality of Mamá cumple 100 años (1979) completes the cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs the conceptual opposition of the red and blue pill that is presented in The Matrix trilogy as a mechanism for investigating the philosophical antagonisms and structural conflicts commonly associated with the 'information society'. The text is divided into two main parts: The first reconsiders the logical structure of this pharmacological dialectic, arguing that the choice between these two alternatives originates in the history of western thought and demonstrating how this binary arrangement organizes not just science fiction narratives but our understanding of social reality. The second part reconsiders the choice of the red pill. It critiques the assumed value of 'true reality' that is expressed in the cinematic narrative and suggests alternative ways to think outside the box of this rather limited binary structure. The objective of such an undertaking is not simply to question the philosophical assumptions of what has been defined as the 'right choice' but to learn, through such questioning, to intervene in and undermine its very system. The article, therefore, suggests an alternative method by which to challenge and critique the established network of conceptual oppositions that goes beyond mere revolution and the other familiar strategies of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text will reply to eight reviews of my 2006 book Filmosophy: Alexia Bowler in New Cinemas, Mark Cousins in Sight and Sound, Ils Huygens in Scope, Tony McKibbin in Senses of Cinema, Brian Price in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Richard Rushton in Screen, Robert Sinnerbrink in Projections, and David Sterritt in Film International. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between enjoyment and film to advance a theory of cinema based on an innovative use of Lacanian theory. Until now, psychoanalytic film theory has privileged the Lacanian category of the Imaginary and the corollary question of audience identification (spectatorship theory). In so doing, it has overlooked the order of the Real, which in Lacan overlaps with enjoyment. The article assesses whether cinematic fiction is able to evoke enjoyment as the disavowed core structuring not only film but also our perception of social reality itself. The main focus is Lacan's theory of sexual difference, understood as a universal antagonism (Real) that cuts across any attempt at symbolizing reality. By conflating sexual difference and the cinema of Federico Fellini, the aim is to identify a specific cinematic context where the excess of representation becomes visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films in the post Cold-War global setting. It discusses two common interpretive approaches to Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films - French auteurism and 'national allegory' - and puts these two approaches within their historical context of Cold-War and post Cold-War global politics. The article places the rise of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films parallel to the rise of the mainland fifth generation of film directors, pointing out that their apparently opposite directions - Hou Hsiao-Hsien going political in his Taiwan trilogy and the fifth generation film directors going apolitical - are part and parcel of the same phenomenon of alternative politics in its particular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics. Particular attention is given to Hou's Taiwan trilogy, Flowers of Shanghai, and Coffee Jikou. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with cultural researcher Mary Ann Doane. Doane discusses how philosopher C.S. Peirce's view of time negates everything but the present. She comments on how the deterioration of film material represents contingency and forgetting. She discusses how digital media offers no materiality and may not qualify as a medium.

Sidney Lumet's harrowing psychological study, The Offence (1972), spotlights one of society's most elusive and reviled, but seemingly necessary figures: the pedophile. Lumet's film blurs the usual boundaries between normal and pathological to ultimately expose the "latent" pedophile within society at large. Here James R. Kincaid argues that society needs the pedophile to explain the attraction of the eroticized child; provided society can keep the pedophile at a distance by turning him into the figure of the "other." The Offence moves the pedophile to center stage, forcing viewers to get to know the "unknowable," and entertains, but ultimately rejects, the "dirty old man" stereotype—opting for a far more paranoid McCarthyesque outlook where the pedophile is "one of us" and is not reassuringly other [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the use of cinematic techniques in video games to involve the player in the game environment. The article uses the example of the video games "EverQuest" and "Doom II" to illustrate a theory of video game analysis that is rooted in cinema studies. The article discusses how people identify and imitate, both physically and psychologically, with motion pictures, with the author extending that theory to video games. The psychological aspects of play are discussed including Sigmund Freud's theory that play is a way masochistically reliving trauma.

This paper studies the use of four popular films (The Lord of the Rings, Dead Poets Society, The Matrix and The Simpsons) to promote philosophical reflections in pre‐service teachers. Based on a study of 25 pre‐service teachers in Singapore, the findings show that the teachers’ reflections fall under five main categories: (1) question and modify personal aims, beliefs, assumptions; (2) confront and solve personal and professional obstacles; (3) apply the implications to the local context; (4) consider the students’ specific educational needs, and (5) review and change personal instructional goals, methods and resources. This paper explores how the four films draw out different types of reflection in the teachers, and how the teachers’ reflections based on the films help to prepare them for the teaching profession in Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the way the problem of theory and practice can be constructed in different ways. It develops a form of constitutive analysis in which the 'problem' is not assumed as a given, but seen as the product of particular ways of defining theory, practice, and their relation. In order to develop this approach I discuss several encounters between different conceptions of theory and practice, specifically Weddle's discussion of the meeting of film theory and film-making, critical media pedagogy, the theory/funding nexus, Geuens' discussion of the film school, and finally Wayne's discussion of the division of theory and practice. These examples provide a way of examining the tension between different ideas of theory and practice, and also between at times divergent ideas about media education and production pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing numbers of students are enrolling for PhDs in the moving image field and submitting practice-based outcomes of their research for examination. However, discussions with colleagues around the country suggested that Media Departments are working with a number of different models of the relation between theory and practice, and with somewhat differing expectations about what is submissable at PhD level. This symposium was designed to offer a forum in which academic staff could share information and debate ideas about supervising and examining PhDs in the moving image practice area. It was well attended (by more than 60 people from around the country and from abroad), suggesting that there was a pressing need for discussion in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorising film and the practical activity of making films are too often seen as mutually exclusive activities. This paper provides a reminder that many film makers, including Eisenstein, Godard, Hitchcock, Sam Fuller, Kubrick and Ridley Scott were and are fully engaged in exploring conceptual implications of montage, with reference to mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing. Observations on the theoretical aspects of work of some of these practitioners are connected with a Tense - Mode - Aspect model of narrative drawn from linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that contemporary cinema is restoring the primacy of music to the dramatic and challenging the camera-centered nature of modern film theory. Isolating Mike Nichols' "The Graduate," as a dividing point between traditional scoring and contemporary film, this essay makes a case for the use of popular music in film. Using the theories of several directors alongside several cinematic works, the author binds music to primordial loss and suggests that music makes audible the sound of silence. The question of music in film is generally raised near the end of film textbooks, if at all. Likewise in film production, music is adhered to the filmstrip last, in postproduction, and synched to the image. One of the myths quickly dispelled by any serious study of sound cinema is that of a silent cinema. The story is that even in the beginning there was no silent cinema. What is called silent film simply refers to an early technological limit: sound recording technology was not yet synchronized to image technology. Early cinema remained parasitic in many respects on the theater, and the picture palace staged an alliance not merely of sound/image but of presence/absence, or life and recording.

Even with a film industry as resistant as France's to the American invader, its popular cinema is showing signs of exhaustion in the face of Hollywood competition whilst auteur cinema is taking a lead. It is in this context that, at the beginning of the 1990s, a new movement emerged full of energy, the jeune cinéma français which is backed by a funding policy and supported by an auteur cinema audience that is already well established in France. This movement has proved propitious for the construction of star images of the 'vernacular', which have developed against the grain of the traditional values of the star system and which have more of a political than economic cachet. Jeanne Balibar is the most striking example of this. Her image incorporates, other than a strong affinity with the intellectual world, paradoxical elements that prevail in her film roles and which make of her a star in the sense that she is today the woman actor, par excellence, who best embodies the ambitions and difficulties experienced by this jeune cinéma français . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with professor Noel Burch on film theory, practice, and education. In response to a question about what kind of theory is taught to film practice students and why has film practice gone towards a mini-industrial process, Burch stated that if he had to teach students film production, he would be teaching them how to be inside the codes of what was used to be called dominant cinema. Such is because Burch thinks it is the only thing that is readable. According to Burch, he became very critical of the avant-garde in general, be they political or not. Burch feels that it is not through documentary that anything political or culturally dynamic, provocative and expressive of dissident currents can express themselves, but that it is through fictions. Meanwhile, in responding to a question regarding voyeurism, Burch said that such is a kind of distancing. Voyeurism implies an erotic dimension to it, for which one can call it a kind of erotic distancing.

This paper comprises an overview of film education institutions in India, mapping orientations and concerns centred on the interface between theory and practice. The paper posits that film education in a country of a developing status, such as that of India, is influenced by the interplay of complex factors which mould the role of students as film-makers. These factors include qualifications of faculty and heads of institutions; accessibility to amenities; location of film education, first in the context of the film and television industry and then within the wider context of development; and funding patterns of these institutions. This paper looks at three particular instances and attitudes in the institutions: the proposal for syllabus revision and the spate of student strikes at FTII since the mid-1990s; technology reification prevalent in the film schools in particular and Indian society at large; and the lack of Film Studies as an organized, academic discipline. These instances and attitudes are discussed as not simply inherent within the institutions, but as comprising responses on behalf of the institutions to changes around them. These point at the role the film schools perceive for themselves as educational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the concept of the screen idea (as outlined by Philip Parker 1998) and uses it to mean 'any notion of a potential screenwork held by one or more people, whether or not it is possible to describe it on paper or by other means', and whether or not that notion has a conventional shape. This concept leads towards a clearer understanding of the process of screenwriting, which in turn helps consideration of what is being evaluated when looking at the products of that practice. The screen idea is the essence of the future screenwork that is discussed and negotiated by those involved in reading and developing the screenplay and associated documents; it is shared, clarified and changed through a collective process. This concept of the screen idea is developed with reference to the work of Roland Barthes in order to clarify the influence of norms and assumptions used during that process that may otherwise be hidden or unacknowledged. The process of script development has been explored in the CILECT conference 'Triangle 2' (Ross 2001), and this article takes two of these projects to examine how the screen idea is 'rewritten' by the collective process. In these examples it is not possible to attribute single authorship in the face of this dynamic and complex process of creating meaning. The underlying normative drive for a readerly text is made according to assumed, though often unacknowledged and unquestioned criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the authority of connection in Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness. According to the author, Cavell has showed how his study of the genre of the unknown woman flows naturally from his examination of the comedies of remarriage. He added that Pursuits of Happiness can be understood as an investigation of the formulations of the human need for society and the equal human need to escape it in the important genre of remarriage. Moreover, the analysis of the genre reveals that films also contain formulations of the following subjects.

The article provides information on the criticism on the legacy of the film noir. According to the author, film noir has been the source of many program's thematic, narrative and stylistic elements. He added that it complicates the film-television relationship because it is a genre defined as much by style as by content. Moreover, film noir has been argued as fundamentally antitraditional in its visual style that consistently violates the code of classical film making. He emphasized that the style in film noir signifies character dynamics.

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with a critical assessment of postmodernism as an empirical phenomenon. It strives to examine the claims of postmodern theory by investigating whether it is possible to claim that postmodernism is emerging in contemporary industrial, capitalist societies and, in particular, whether it can be found in the sphere of popular media culture. To do so, it will first be apposite to give an outline of the basic features which define postmodernism, illustrate them with reference to examples) from architecture, cinema, advertising, television and popular music, and give an outline of some of the reasons that have been proposed to account for the emergence of postmodernism. Some trends towards postmodernism are claimed to be apparent in the examples of popular media culture that have been selected for discussion. However, the paper should finally demonstrate why--if a specific example, i.e. cinema, is assessed more critically and studied in depth--the arguments of postmodern theory appear less novel and original and are open up to doubt and contention. It is suggested that postmodernism cannot be taken for granted nor considered in a purely conceptual manner, but rather needs to be subject to both theoretical and empirical criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses contemporary cinema. Poststructuralist theory decisively transformed the structuralist project of elaborating the specific codes of the language of film. The place of contemporary film as a narrative form is, in a society transformed by television. The formalist project is one of preservation of stability of psychological causality as the basis for the representation of human action in an ideal fiction called the fabula. It is an effort to preserve this classic moment of film through the transcendental categories of Kantian epistemology and aesthetics vested finally in the figure of the ideal spectator.

This article focuses on the auteur theory of motion pictures by illustrating and evaluating four concerned books. These books are: "Theories of Authorship: A Reader," edited by John Caughie; "Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation," edited by Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta; "Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange," by Keith Cohen; and "Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images From Film and Literature," by Frank McConnell. It is claimed that the evolution in thinking about auteurism, or the auteur theory, is fully documented in "Theories of Authorship." The major outlet in Great Britain for auteurism, reportedly, was the journal "Movie" in the period 1962-1972. For Keith Cohen in his book, matters of authorship are bound within larger matters of the film image's authority over spectators. Cohen argues that motion picture technology stands as a major influence in the history of perception. Frank McConnell's book, reportedly, Literature shares with the Cohen book a conviction in the incarnational power of film to produce verisimilitude.

This article presents the description and classification of types of images, or of the implications of computer-generated images, with focusing on psychological concepts related to pictorial and visual phenomena. The author also discusses any classification of formal features in photography into: features specific to photography, that is, which did not exist until photography was invented; features which photographs share with other images; and visual features which specify and dominate pictorial and photographic ones. Many film theorists have commented on the problem of analyzing visual images, particularly with reference to their resistance to all linguistic paradigms. In the case of verbal language, the form of the signifier is sometimes called "arbitrary." The term relates to correspondence between signifier and signified. It is argued that vision requires a modern, true structuralism. It resists that older, "atomistic" structuralism, which assumed that the elementary units of optical sensation specified visual perceptions which build up, by regular recombination, into higher-level structures.

This article focuses on the film noir and the dangers of discourse, specially considering Robert Aldrich's film "Kiss Me Deadly." In its convoluted plot and social themes Aldrich's film is considered to be an accurate reflection of the film noir as it is commonly conceived. Remarks given on this film and the noir formula considering that of by the character Christina, suggestively, points up a distinctive problem of communication that impels the film's action. According to the author, Christina's comment suggests a pervasive noir concern with the nature and function of human discourse that contributes a formulaic marking as distinctive as the lighting style, narrative twists, and cultural anomie on which most discussions have focused. The author argues that "Kiss Me Deadly" schematizes the difficulty and danger of discourse subtly infusing the noir form. For such films noirs repeatedly confront people not simply with alienated, confused, or pathological figures, but characters whose voices long to speak in a social sphere, a sphere that would seem to depend on the possibility of numerous speaking voices.

The article presents report on the 5th International Film Theory Conference at Cinema and Language Center for Twentieth Century Studies, in the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin between March 27 and 30, 1979. The fifth annual film theory conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee took the work of Jacques Lacan as a central subject around which flowed discussion of developments in film theory from the last two or three years. Featured lecturers were Steven Heath, Teresa de Lauretis, and Annette Kuhn. This conference had a unique group of participants and attendees that were mostly different faces from the more mainline conferences held yearly by the Society for Cinema Studies and the University Film Association.

This article presents an essay, which analyzes the subject of "phenomenological film theory." In the light of this subject the author also presents notes from the book "The Psychology and Aesthetics of Film," by Jean Mitry. This projected essay was to do two general things, as the author saw it. First, it was intended as a contribution toward a historical project whose importance it was also to argue a reconstruction of the history of theorizing about film. Second, the projected essay was to turn the subject "phenomenological film theory" into a question, which asks about the relationship between phenomenology and film.

This article discusses the subject of "Film Language" in light of the book "The Language and Technique of the Film," by Gianfranco Bettetini and translated by David Osmond-Smith. Film does not admit the use of an organized lexicon and grammar, which exists previous to the manifestation of the individual text. Therefore film language of the recent times consists of the history and development of its part within the texts appearing over the course of the past eighty years, and this development coincides precisely with the history of the film.

This article reports that although different in their methodologies, both film scholarship and impressionistic film criticism have their applied functions. Film scholarship begins where pertinent impressionistic criticism ends. Hence, they do not exclude each other; rather, they complement and even may stimulate each other, provided they are executed with competence and responsibility. To demonstrate this, the author presents a comparison of an impressionistic and a scholarly approach to the same film. It is the famous finale in the film "City Lights," one of the most discussed sequences in the history of cinema.

This article presents an essay by the author, which discusses film theory and history. During the 1970s and early 1980s, film theory and film culture constituted a kind of Self, assimilating other intellectual trends for its own growth. The author does not intend to imply anything shameful here-any academic or popular movement might be described the same way-but sooner or later film theory threatens to become the "canon," the "tradition." In the mid-1980s, a degree of self-consciousness set in among those influenced by literary theory and cultural studies which has as yet barely touched the hierarchy within conservative institutions like the American or Canadian Society for Cinema Studies. The introduction of the terminology of Self or Other, post colonialism and postmodernism, essentialism and pluralism, might once have been called an "intervention" into this world and the new jargon was useful and timely. Yet to invoke these terms, Self or Other and so on, is to increase sensitivity to language and also to remind that it is vital to understand how and why people name themselves and others and their world in the way they do.

This article examines the papers presented at a conference on the rerelease of noteworthy films of Alfred Hitchcock. Judging from the papers presented, auteurism has hardly been rooted out of the academy. The papers also show that an ongoing interest in key directors such as Hitchcock cannot be traced to vulgar, journalistic auteurism.

This article presents details about the 40th Edinburgh International Film Festival in August 1986. The event hosted filmmakers, critics and theorists from the Third World and the West in a special conference on the theory and practice of Third Cinema. The conferences included addresses and panel discussions on cultural theory, criticism and media production. A discussion was held focusing on the questions of whether Western aesthetics can or even should be discarded and what the criteria for an alternative aesthetics might then be.

In this article, the author discusses the impact of the film series "Twilight" to the popular culture. The author says that the series draws on various types of entertainment including books, magazines, and motion pictures. He says that the series had influenced the perception of the people regarding gender and race. Brief information on the flow of the story of the film are also mentioned.

This article presents a note on the "Challenge of Third World Culture" conference held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The conference demonstrated the growing importance of the Third World to any First World consideration of literature, film, or critical theory. One of the major issues of the conference was the loss of cultural identity.