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Film and movie genres play a pivotal role in captivating relevant audiences across interactive multimedia platforms. With a focus on entertainment, streaming providers are increasingly prioritizing the automatic generation of movie genres within cloud-based media services. In service management, the integration of a hybrid convolutional network proves to be instrumental in effectively distinguishing between a diverse array of video genres. This classification process not only facilitates more refined recommendations and content filtering but also enables targeted advertising. Furthermore, given the frequent amalgamation of components from various genres in cinema, there arises a need for social media networks to incorporate real-time video classification mechanisms for accurate genre identification. In this study, we propose a novel architecture leveraging deep learning techniques for the detection and classification of genres in video films. Our approach entails the utilization of a bidirectional long- and short-term memory (BiLSTM) network, augmented with video descriptors extracted from EfficientNet-B7, an ImageNet pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) model. By employing BiLSTM, the network acquires robust video representations and proficiently categorizes movies into multiple genres. Evaluation on the LMTD dataset demonstrates the substantial improvement in the performance of the movie genre classifier system achieved by our proposed architecture. Notably, our approach achieves both computational efficiency and precision, outperforming even the most sophisticated models. Experimental results reveal that EfficientNet-BiLSTM achieves a precision rate of 93.5%. Furthermore, our proposed architecture attains state-of-the-art performance, as evidenced by its F1 score of 0.9012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction offers a comprehensive context for this special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. I define the concept of transnationalism as it is reflected in the scope of the articles included, all of which discuss non-American film productions about the American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also argue that our understanding of the war film genre can only benefit from taking into account an array of different national cinematographies. The introduction contains summaries of the articles which discuss Iraqi, Afghan, British, German, Danish, Polish, Spanish, and Australian depictions of the American wars in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the role of screenwriters and dialogue writers within the more extensive filmmaking process of New Bollywood. Drawing on ethnographic data, I foreground the creative tools, research and negotiations that prompt screenwriters to conceptualise and pitch character arcs that feature disability while positioning the writer as central to diversify film genres. By building on scholarship on production cultures, scripting and disability studies, I draw upon factors that navigate the writer's gaze from non-hereditary filmmaking networks to foreground disabilities in scripts and character arcs in efforts to strategise that they do not classify as reductive pathologisations and supercripping cultures. This article pays close attention to the conditions, identity politics, biases and situated vulnerabilities of writers that shape the assemblages of scripting disability rhetorics. The data from semi-structured interviews, with an explicit focus on three films and their script ideation and production pedagogies, illustrate these interlinkages and insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between city and film? This relationship is crucial to the 1920s and 1930s city symphonies. Recent scholarship confirms that these films form a distinct genre due to their relation with the city (Jacobs et al., 2019). This article argues that to better understand the relation between city and film, including in the city symphony genre, we need to explore in more detail those specific aspects of the city that become entangled with film. I ask: in which ways is the medium of film entangled with the lived experience of the city, more specifically to the history of the material reality of city streets? To investigate, I focus on Paris, a significant landmark for the intersection of cities and cinema (Mennel, 2019, p. 2), and a key urban place of art production in a wider sense (Wilson & Chassey, 2002). Paris' transformation by Haussmann in the mid-19th century serves as the defining moment for my argument, one that changes the lived experience of Parisian city dwellers. Walter Benjamin notices how this change to urbanity impacts art as manifested in Charles Baudelaire's poetry. Expanding on this idea, I turn my attention to film and explore the ways in which it responds to the changed streets of Paris through its medium. Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien Que les Heures (1926), a Paris city symphony, is key. Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle (1960) is a later point in the history of film's entanglement with Parisian streets. By looking more closely at how the cinematic medium integrates into its mechanism the space-time of city streets, this article offers further insights on the relationship between art and street, here more specifically between film in relation to the fate of the streets in Paris. We do not need to watch films about the city to experience it, in many ways the medium of film itself integrates and parallels the experience of the city and its modern urban streets. Based on this, if the city symphony is indeed a film genre based on its distinctive relationship to the city, it compels 'genre' to engage medium among its formal parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In today's modern social context, cinema plays an important role in the development of a country. Film genres are no longer limited to their original definition because filmmakers now have mixed them to serve the audience's demand. Among them, detective films are mixed with horror elements and psychological criminal characters, which have attracted a lot of attention. This article chooses to study two detective movies from Korea and the United States, which are Dark Figure of Crimes, directed by Kim Tae-gyun and The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme. From the perspective of Syd Field's theory of character building in screenplays, the article compares and contrasts two psychological criminal characters in these two films. The article focuses on finding similarities and differences between the depiction of psychological criminals in Korean and American cinema. From this analysis, some suggestions are offered to expand the scope of creativity in the art of building psychological criminal characters which Vietnamese researchers may be interested in. In doing so, this study hopes that these suggestions will contribute to the reconstruction of Vietnamese cinema in the context of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a contribution to the international debate on non-fiction film genres in the silent period by proposing a historically and socially informed analysis of 'generic overlap' in the Portuguese documentary A Covilhã Industrial, Pitoresca e Seus Arredores (1921) [Industrial and Picturesque Covilhã, and Its Outskirts]. Made by Artur Costa de Macedo (1894–1966) for Invicta Film, a short-lived but prolific production company based in the North of Portugal, the film is a composite of different genres, such as the travelogue, the scenic view, the actuality, the industrial process film, and the local film. While in keeping with well-established international film practices, this kind of generic overlap also reflects the specific set of constraints and opportunities that the filmmaker encountered (and, respectively, sought to overcome and take advantage of) when he took on this film commission. Local newspaper research, though selective and incomplete, was crucial for gaining a deeper knowledge of this film's local and regional underpinnings. The article also discusses the film's 2002 restoration in light of its generic overlap, considering how genre-bound and genre-blind decisions resulted in a 'new version' and a 'new original' that sought to address a new set of concerns and scale configuration. It concludes that filmic genre has played (and continues to play) an active role in creating and sustaining social goals and relations in both silent filmmaking and film restoration projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to consider modern video stream classification algorithms and select the optimal option suitable for application in video hosting applications. The study analyzed various neural network architectures, including ResNet18, architectures with skip-connections, as well as architectures with multiple parallel branches, on a specially prepared dataset containing video clips from films of various genres. The main attention was paid to finding a balance between accuracy and the dimensionality of processed data. The research results show that different neural network architectures demonstrate varying effectiveness depending on the size of input images and the specifics of genre classification tasks. The obtained data allow conclusions to be drawn about the potential application of deep learning in video content analysis and the selection of the most suitable methods for classifying film genres, which can contribute to improving the quality of video hosting services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this article is to analyze the visual codes and the diegetic universe manifested in the film noir of the film director Alberto Rodríguez in order to find out if in his procedures there is a will to resemanticize the genre. For this purpose, a methodological tool has been created that combines image theory, filmic narrative and script theory, focusing mainly on the analysis of characters and spaces. The chosen sample is circumscribed to the director's last four films: Grupo 7 (2012), La isla mínima (2014), El hombre de las mil caras (2016) and Modelo 77 (2022). After the analysis and discussion of the data, it is concluded that Alberto Rodríguez's cinema represents a return to the standards of the classic film noir genre, but updating codes and adapting it to the interests of the director, who focuses on posing questions to the viewer about the reality of his country regarding issues of dubious morality. In this way, Alberto Rodriguez's work is revealed as a paradigm of Spanish Neonoir, which returns to basic patterns to connect with the viewer and stir his conscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Imaginary Archives: Archiving in Science Fiction Cinema" examines the importance of archives in the science fiction film genre. Sergio Gavilán Escario highlights the relationship between archives and science fiction, coining the concept of "imaginary archives." The author analyzes eight relevant films of the genre to explore memory, the past, and identity from an archival perspective. [Extracted from the article]

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Copyright of Imaginaires is the property of Universitaires de Reims 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.)

As the beginnings of the popular Japanese crime genre coincided with the end of American occupation, this genre offers a space of historically visible transnationality. Through formal analysis, this research identifies a cultural plurality embedded within crime cinema. Examining the adoption of film noir aesthetics in Japan alongside the development of the nationalistic ninkyō eiga (chivalry film), I argue the crime genre formed as a culturally hybrid genre in tension between these conflicting identities. The crime film demonstrates a dialectical tension between local and international cultural signifiers and cinematic styles, which result in a set of hybrid symbols that repeat on-end the dialectic tension embedded in their formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the art of film photography has reemerged as a topic of interest for both researchers and the community. Unlike digital photography, which relies on pixels to capture and store information, film photography employs silver halide to capture the scene. This process imbues film photos with a unique colour and textured graininess not present in digital photography. In this paper, we propose Film-GAN, the first Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method for translating digital images to film. Film-GAN generates a corresponding film transformation of the input image based on the desired reference film style. To improve the realism of the generated images, we introduce the colour-noise-encoding (CNE) network, which extracts the colour and graininess of the reference image separately. Our experimental simulations demonstrate that Film-GAN outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches on multiple datasets. Based on evaluations from both professional photographers and amateur photography enthusiasts, the images generated by Film-GAN also received a higher number of votes, indicating its ability to produce better film-effect images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of futures studies has done little work on analysis of films and movies, with the exception of the science fiction genre. There has been little attempt to wrestle with and analyze other film genres, integrating such analyses into futures studies. This article makes an attempt at bridging that gap by analyzing the 2018 Palme d'Or winning film Shoplifters by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. In the article, we examine the film as a signal of transformation in the Japanese family by comparing this new form of the family to the Japanese family in the past. Using Shoplifters as a guiding post, I contextualize the transformations portrayed in the film with research on and trends in Japanese society. By using Shoplifters, I show how we can use films as guiding posts and as valuable sources of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) begins with a critique of Depression-era public relief efforts but then focuses for the remainder of the film on the attempts of one 'forgotten man' to restore patriarchal authority to a female-dominated household. In the substitution of disciplined women for politically resistant homeless men, the film maps the consent of the subject to sovereign rule onto the screwball comedy's plot convention of female submission, thus naturalizing sovereignty, and feminizing the disciplined subject of the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jez Stewart's book, "The Story of British Animation," provides a comprehensive overview of the 130-year history of British animation. The book challenges the previous neglect of animation in British film scholarship and highlights the contributions of previously overlooked figures and areas of interest. It covers various periods, including early and silent cinema experimentation, the impact of World Wars I and II, the introduction of commercial television, and the expansion of new channels. The book also explores the international dimensions of British animation and includes profiles of leading figures and surveys of key types of animation. While the book is concise and does not offer extended critical analysis, it serves as an accessible entry point for those new to the topic and provides recommendations for further reading. Overall, "The Story of British Animation" reveals the rich history and potential for further research in this field. [Extracted from the article]

This issue of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema initially explores the dynamic changes in the Nordic audio-visual sector, highlighting the impact of subscription video on demand (SVoD) services like Netflix and its collaboration with SF Studios, which has propelled Scandinavian genre films to global audiences. The issue also examines Peter Watkins' influential work in Scandinavia, with two articles on projects completed in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as Roy Andersson's distinctive version of slow cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this essay is to isolate and describe the eschatological technophobia that is expressed by many popular films in the genre of science fiction. What I have in mind by this designation is the (irrational) fear of advanced technologies with respect to the conjectured likelihood that autonomous systems and programs will inevitably deliver a negative judgment of humankind. In expressing and/or cultivating this fear, I offer, directors in the genre tend to help themselves to the language and imagery of the Biblical Day of Judgment, especially as it is prophesied and characterized in the Abrahamic religions of the global West. This fear, I maintain, is itself an expression of a deeper anxiety pertaining to the possibility (or likelihood) that the achievements of humankind matter very little, if at all, especially when evaluated on a cosmic scale. Following my critique of several films that rely, uncreatively, on the trope of eschatological technophobia, I turn to a consideration of two relatively recent films in the genre: Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016). From these directors, I suggest, we receive subtler and more thoughtful treatments of the judgments of humankind that superior intelligences are likely to pronounce. What emerges in these two films is the exploratory expression of a religiosity or spirituality that I associate with an updated, epoch-appropriate version of humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western is, in many respects, the essential American film genre, "a cornerstone of American identity" (Kitses). Yet, despite its distinctly American character, the genre has exerted a fascination all over the world. This contribution examines the Western as a site of transnational cultural exchange and as an illustration of what Stephen Greenblatt calls cultural mobility. In the work of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), Western elements are evoked, which provide complex comments on the influence of American culture on Japan in the post-WWII years. While Seven Samurai appears to embrace the promise of class eradication as a result of Westernization, its American remake The Magnificent Seven (1960) shows a particular fascination for the decidedly Japanese aspects of the material, namely the idea of a warrior class dissociated from society. The Italian remake of Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars (1964), shows how the Western can function not only as an external comment on American culture, in its cynical redefinition of the cowboy hero, but also as an amalgam of cultural practices and symbols, reaching from Japanese samurai codes to Christian Catholic redeemer imagery, that through their stylization expose the performativity of culture as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matthew Brown's book, "Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address," offers a valuable contribution to the field of Nollywood studies. Brown builds upon existing scholarship to provide new theoretical propositions and a historical perspective on Nollywood's development. He emphasizes the role of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) in shaping Nollywood's narrative and aesthetic features, challenging the notion that Nollywood emerged independently of state intervention. Brown explores the concept of "indirect subjectivity" in Nollywood's forms and styles, connecting it to colonial modes of administration and the liberal project. He analyzes the gender dynamics in Nollywood melodramas, highlighting their potential for social criticism. While the book raises questions about audience agency and the complexities of media consumption in Nigeria, it provides readers with new conceptual tools and invites further investigation into Nigerian films and their relationships with audiences. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the 2019 film The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers, which follows the descent into madness of two 19th-century lighthouse keepers as they become stranded on a desolate New England island and confronted with threats both natural and supernatural. The focus of the article is primarily on the film's employment of the cinematic language associated with the horror genre, discussed primarily in reference to the theoretical framework proposed by Noël Carroll, and thus it serves as the argument for The Lighthouse's inclusion into the genre. I place particular emphasis on the considerations of human nature present in the film. The Lighthouse illustrates the disastrous impact of finding oneself outside of the boundaries of civilization; without the constraints imposed by society, but also without the sense of security it offers, the evil that can be found in every human being is revealed and the characters turn against each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study is to analyse the development of the Baltic film distribution markets and to provide new recommendations for its potential growth based on mission economy approach and bigger role of the states in co-creating and co-shaping the markets especially for the Baltic co-production of films and their distribution. The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods for data extraction and analysis. Firstly, descriptive statistics as a method was used to analyse the market shares of the main film distribution companies in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian film industries. Furthermore, 5 semi-structured interviews with experts from the Baltic film industries were conducted. As a result of the research, the author concludes that there is a potential in family genre films that are produced in the Baltic States, but in general the Baltic co-production films lack quality, storytelling that would arouse the interest of the audience and potentially new regional film fund "Baltic Film and TV Fund" would have to focus not only on increased financing for co-productions, but also on other measures that would help to produce better quality genre films including co-productions and their distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the script of the film "The Secret of Kara-Tau" (1932), created by Vera Inber, as summarizing the artistic attitudes of this author and anticipating Inber's literary achievements in the period of the Leningrad blockade. The film is considered in the context of Inber's work, which is characterized by the variation of different genres, melodramatic and sensitive to new trends in art, such as Expressionism and Art Deco. The article substantiates the concepts of synchronization of affects, sublime experience, and catastrophic experience in relation to Inber's work, with reference to contemporary studies of the impact of the siege of Leningrad on Russian culture. A number of clues are found in her prose to reconstruct her film ideas, such as Gorky's play At the Bottom, Chaplin's film "The Gold Rush", the activities of André Citroën, and others. It is proved that Inber formed her own concept of denouement, in which the important thing is not the turning point of events, but the special attention that synchronizes affects in the experience of common fate, in contrast to the dis-synchronization of affects when combining different genre strategies in one work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on metaphor has over the past decades increasingly been extended to its visual and multimodal varieties. While analysts of verbal metaphors are helped by the fact that languages have grammars and vocabularies, researchers of visual and multimodal metaphors need to rely on other methods for identification and interpretation. One approach that claims to have developed a robust method for analyzing metaphor in moving images is FILMIP, which has hitherto focused on the specific genre of commercials. In this paper it is argued that there are serious problems with FILMIP. First, the theoretical basis of FILMIP and two empirical studies drawing on it are discussed. Subsequently, its limited use for analyzing metaphors in the genre of feature films is demonstrated on the basis of four case studies. The paper ends with sketching some general advice pertaining to researching metaphor in film, and provides a cautious alternative to FILMIP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This paper aims to study the gendered representations of robots, cyborgs, ginoids, clones, holograms, and female artificial intelligences in science fiction film. It is hypothesized that the sexist stereotypes widely studied in female film characters are perpetuated in female artificial creations in science fiction film. Methodology: A sample of 83 characters was taken from the IMdB database. After their classification, we proceeded to carry out a qualitative analysis on representation, gender roles and stereotypes of the characters. Results: The results obtained confirm that the science fiction genre is intensely masculinized and vertical occupational segregation is the dominant note. In addition, gender roles and stereotypes that are common in other film genres are also replicated in science fiction. Discussion: The representations do not manage to get rid of sexist precepts that are maintained over time as a result of the persistence of a male gaze. Conclusions: This study confirms the need to establish tools that allow women to access a highly masculinized cultural industry as well as the need to carry out a representation of female fictional characters far from the gender stereotypes traditionally associated with women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Comedy, one of the film genres with the largest audience, serves as a means to analyze social problems and reflect the culture and identity of the different territories. Methodology: This investigation carries out eleven in-depth interviews with the directors and producers of seven comedies financed with public aid from the Aragonese Radio and Television Corporation, from 2013 to 2022. A semi-structured questionnaire is applied that addresses the creative process, the narrative keys and the relationship between culture and identity and financing. Results: Aragonese comedy professionals show a trend marked by creative diversity, although with roots in classical comedy and personal experiences that, in the background, are intertwined with social criticism aimed at attracting the general public. For this, various themes are addressed with stereotyped, but novel characters, in which irony prevails, thanks to comic actors as a sample of characteristic humour, although not a priority. In addition, they highlight the preference for the locations in Aragon to contribute to an identity comedy that, together with the promotion and regional financing, promotes the dissemination of the own narrative, encourages local talent and generates a positive economic impact. Conclusions: Finally, the filmmakers express the need to develop more ambitious projects, backed by larger financial aid and tax incentives that make Aragon a true film destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The current presence of hybridity between documentary and fiction filmmaking has taken many senses, with disparate results, which have the purpose of delivering works that provide new looks on reality, which is understood as an entity represented through images. Methodology: The objective of this research is to analyze four films of hybrid fiction and documentary narration, in order to determine the elements used to create significant and unusual cinematographic experiences. A film analysis is carried out with four categories of analysis: fictional elements, documentary style, temporal manipulation and interaction with the viewer. Results: Four hybrid fiction/documentary films were analyzed. Elements such as dramatized situations and narrative tones that mix fiction and reality to question truth and lies were identified. It was observed that temporal manipulation and interaction with the viewer are crucial to create meaningful cinematic experiences. Discussion: The fusion of genres allows for new ways of representing and questioning reality. The films studied show how fiction can enrich documentary, providing an additional layer of meaning and reflection. Conclusions: The hybridization of genres in film offers a powerful tool to explore and represent reality in an innovative way, challenging traditional boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Renowned narratologists, especially those focusing on film studies, have little interest in the prologue as a narrative device. I argue that this film segment is crucial in postmodern narratives, usually characterized by their nonlinearity. In films that feature it, this introductory scene/sequence is part of the work’s complex embroidery and is formally produced in the same style of the overall film, alerting to its tone, nonlinearity, self-reflexive nature, theme, and metanarrative discourse. Like all prologues, it explains part of what is to follow and engages the viewer’s curiosity. I call these segments hermeneutic decoders. However, in complex narratives they also deliberately hide the film’s full story and/or real meaning in plain sight. They engage the viewer’s cognitive abilities but manage to be as enigmatic as the rest of the film (despite containing most of the clues to its understanding). I will provide examples from several established categories of complex films and will deal with a specific case study in more detail: David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2006), which belongs to an undecipherable category of narratives that Kiss and Willemsen call “impossible puzzle films.” After a detailed analysis of the hermeneutic decoder, I will explain how it provides all the clues for an account of the film as an allegory of spectatorship from two theoretical standpoints: Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image and Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze. The aporetical enunciation and the duplicated gaze, in tandem, form the key to the film’s narrative enigma, open to an intense hermeneutic activity that is nevertheless, and necessarily, frustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Many accounts of film genre reiterate a familiar narrative of growth to “classic” maturity and subsequent parody and/or deconstruction, and the biopic is no exception. However, rock music biopics have reversed this narrative, so that the genre begins in parody and only gets serious later. This is partly because rock and roll music began as parody, mainly by white people imitating African Americans, what is known as blackface minstrelsy, in which music and humour are necessarily (because of racism) mixed. In turn, the 60s rock counterculture took many of its cues from this untimely birth, appropriating African-American marginality in modes that were at once serious (concerns about authenticity) and ironic (mockery of Establishment values). This collision of opposites helps explain both the counterculture’s preference for documentary, especially of live performance, over Hollywood fiction, and its predilection for mockery of both (for example, mockumentary). As the single most influential proto-rock act, whose inventive wit and comic antics, rendered in newsreel, direct cinema, cartoon, and on record, were keys to their commercial and critical success, The Beatles were the perfect subjects for such ironic canonisation. Their filmic career highlights the intersection of documentary and comedy, as well as reality and fiction, via musical performance, a mode which can problematise documentary/ comedy, and reality/fiction distinctions. In line with this argument, I have focused on key live performances from the Beatles’ career, and how they are parodied in The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978) henceforth The Rutles, which doubles as the first filmic biography of the Beatles and the first rock mockumentary. The Beatles’ later career saw their public image shift from intentional to unintentional comedy, a shift mapped in the The Rutles, which gradually moves from parody towards satire. It is argued that The Rutles is open to a range of audience identifications and readings: it is at once a text for “true fans”, a playful deconstruction of their investments, but also one with real-world reverberations (some of its predictions came true). In this sense, it is a “media savvy”, peculiarly contemporary text that questions the priority of reality over fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay looks at Olivier Assayas’s The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) both as a female mountain film and a revision of the genre altogether. Like the German Bergfilm, Sils Maria is framed by a tension between modernity and mountains, where protagonists escape to an isolated and privileged space high up to find meaning and face death. Unlike their heroic masculine counterparts in the mountain film, however, the two women encounter no climbing dangers and conquer no peaks. Yet they too are guided and changed by an imposing and dynamic landscape while wandering among the Swiss Alps and skinny-dipping in icy mountain lakes. Like in the German Bergfilm, the protagonists’ (homoerotic) relationship is developed, tested, and strained in the mountains where desire, jealousy, and loneliness come to the fore, with the important difference that characters navigate different languages, nationalities, age groups, and social status as they act, mirror, and switch roles for the play within the film, The Maloja Snake. Instead of the summit position as the ultimate goal of mountaineering, the film thus outlines a mountain position less determined by gender, physique, and nationality. In the symbol of the rare and unexplained cloud formation likewise called the Maloja Snake (captured in time-lapse photography by both Arnold Fanck and Assayas), Clouds of Sils Maria offers a contemplation on deep time, timelessness, and the passage of time, and opens a space for a contemporary mountain film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luftsprünge, a 13-episode television series from 1969-70, represents an early color series. The co-production of the Second German Television (ZDF) and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) not only occupied a prominent broadcasting slot, but also represented a kind of high-quality mainstream program designed to meet the diverse expectations of transnational audiences. Alongside the young Tyrolean ski instructor Toni (Toni Sailer), 77-year-old South Tyrolean Luis Trenker plays the temperamental hotelier and ski school owner Hannes Kogler. In the area of tension between sporting pleasure and tourist work, the light-hearted series strategically brings together atouts from different generations, genres and media sectors. The analysis of Luftsprünge thus explores the question of how television adapts the genre of the mountain film. This adaptation process is closely related to Trenker’s notoriety. Due to his advanced age, he skillfully used the new medium of television from the late 1950s on to change his public image. Luftsprünge is a prime example of this strategy. We argue that the television series takes key elements of the mountain film and remediates the genre according to the advanced age of its protagonist, the affluence achieved in Western Europe, and the changing media landscape. The televisual reappraisal leads to a different mode of representation that deviates from the narrative concerns of the classic mountain film. While earlier mountain films glorified masculinity and self-discipline in the context of conquering pristine mountain peaks, what we call mountain television softens these outdated values by staging the Alps as a site of transnational tourism and tourist labor. Mountain television softens the inherent drama of the mountain film genre, replacing alpine life-and-death struggles with comedy and love stories between the slopes and the hotel. In Luftsprünge, the mountains are no longer conquered, but consumed by relaxed vacationers. Aesthetically, mountain television adopts the conventions of the conventions of the television play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sean M. Maher's book, "Film Noir and Los Angeles: Urban History and the Dark Imaginary," explores the relationship between the city of Los Angeles and the genre of film noir. Maher argues that Los Angeles is a key city in the transition from modern to postmodern urban studies, and that film noir reflects this shift. The book covers the history of Los Angeles, the impact of car culture on film noir, and the evolution of the genre in the 1980s and 1990s. Maher also examines how neo-noir films blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and memory, in postmodern Los Angeles. Despite the lack of photographs, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of urban and cultural theory, making it a valuable resource for interdisciplinary research. [Extracted from the article]

Romanian cinema after 1989 was mainly oriented towards creations through which directors sought to win critical acclaim and awards at international festivals, but which were not addressed to the general public, as films belonging to a cinematic genre generally do. In this paper we discuss how Romanian director George Bogdan Apetri, now living in New York, represents a distinct voice in Romanian cinema today. In his films Unidentified and Miracle, he manages to harness his dual cultural perspective (American and Romanian), combining the conventions of the crime fiction genre but also elements specific to the Romanian New Wave, making two films that are pleasing to the audience but at the same time part of the arthouse circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advancement worldwide has impacted the cinema's narratives, and Indian cinema is no exception to this. Science fiction is one of the fascinated genres of the Indian film industry. Incorporating science concepts in plots with the usual commercial elements provides a unique platform for the creators. This hybridisation by the creators instigates imagination among the audience. This paper explains the scientific concepts handled in the sci-fi genre of contemporary Tamil cinema (2010–2020). The study aims to track down how science concepts are dealt with in contemporary Tamil films. Films are classified into five categories based on the themes identified from the plots. A survey was conducted among the Tamil audience to know their opinion about Tamil sci-fi films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper aims to propose a conceptual model which will unveil how fans of different film genres observe the importance of elements of marketing mix when consuming products in the film industry during COVID-19 pandemics. To verify the proposed conceptual model, a survey was conducted during the lockdown and the responses of 1606 individuals from Serbia, who declare themselves as film fans, were analyzed using structural equation modelling analysis. The results support the assumption that the respondents who prefer different film genres give different importance to elements of the film marketing mix. Our findings show that based on the genre of the film marketing activities can be tailored so as to improve their effects, especially during the pandemics and post-pandemics period. It is believed that the herein presented research could initiate further research on the issue of modelling marketing activities in the film industry based on consumers' genre preference and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Order's cultural politics of development of national identity were applied to Indonesian films made during this period as a form of cinema politics. The New Order conceived of cinema as a medium for ideological propaganda which could and should be controlled in order to maintain political stability. Most Indonesian films made during the New Order regime depicted children as part of a discursive strategy to promote national identity within an ideological framework defined by theories of social development and discourses of social and political stability. This article focuses on Ratapan Anak Tiri [Lament of step-children] (1973), Ratapan Anak Tiri [Lament of step-children] 2 (1980), and Arie Hanggara (1985), melodrama genre films that featured suffering children among the main characters was the result of a narrative shift initiated to avoid political problems with the regime. The typical narrative of these films includes the representation of a family with the father figure as the apex, a demonised woman figure, and helpless children at the bottom of the family structure. Primary child characters are predominantly depicted as weak, dependent, and less imaginative. These melodrama films emphasised this pattern in their narrative by presenting an image of the state's apparatus as a solver of family domestic problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on five recent performances described in different ways as essay or as essayistic by the artists themselves. Inspired by how the essay form has disseminated, over the last decades, into film, resulting in the established genre of the essay film, it explores what the transposition of the essay onto the stage looks like. The works of Ogutu Muraya, Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, Ho Rui An, Mobile Akademie Berlin, and Jozef Wouters serve as case studies to examine how a performance can be discussed as an essay or as being essayistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early sound film and "classical-style" Hollywood film periods were important representatives in the history of Hollywood films, producing many classic films as well as many famous film music composers. Among them, Bernard Herrmann was a unique and distinctive representative with his own personal compositional style, and was also the representative composer for thriller, horror, mystery and science fiction films during this period. When analyzing film music, especially Bernard Herrmann's works, using tonal music analysis, many harmonic progressions cannot be accurately expressed. Harmonic function analysis emphasizes the principles of tonality, while neo-Riemannian theory breaks away from the framework of tonality and harmonic functions, emphasizing the spatial progression between chords. For Bernard Herrmann's music, using neo-Riemannian theory can reasonably analyze the characteristics and patterns of musical progression, and explain many chord progressions that harmonic functions cannot. One of the films that can be given as an example of this situation is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The Day the Earth Stood Still is a Hollywood science fiction film made in 1951. This work played an important role in the development of later science fiction films. Bernard Herrmann chose to abandon the traditional orchestral instrumentation and used a specific instrumental ensemble to form Herrmann's unique science fiction film music space. Transformational analysis shows that the music uses modes, hexatonic scales and octatonic scales to form melodies and harmonies with ambiguous characteristics, and the use of these modes and scales also provides important color elements for film music of specific styles. Neo-Riemannian theory has been around for less than 50 years. As an emerging music theory system, it is not yet mature and complete, and is still expanding and improving. However, as an analysis tool for nonfunctional tonal film music, it can provide a brand new perspective. This researcher also believes that neo-Riemannian theory can provide theoretical basis for analyzing various styles of film music as an analytical tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]