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Animated films are highly popular in society, particularly among children and adolescents. During film production, selecting an adequate colour palette and scene dynamism is crucial for creating a visual impact on the audience. However, the influence of visual aesthetics, such as colour and scene dynamism on visual fatigue remains unexplored. In the present study, visual fatigue was assessed and compared in 30 young participants after viewing two popular films: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, an active, fast-paced film, and My Neighbour Totoro, a more relaxed film. Both films were viewed twice, once with the original colour palette and once in greyscale. Watching Spider-Man film induced a greater degree of visual fatigue than My Neighbour Totoro in two subjective questionnaires evaluating visual fatigue, and in the vergence facility and binocular accommodative facility tests. Moreover, important differences in the visual dynamics and colour aspects between both films were found. These results demonstrate that the high-paced and high-colour aspects of films directly affect visual fatigue. Future animated film producers should consider these factors that are relevant to their audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the Irish border's troubled history and heightened symbolism, filmmakers have since long relied on the border as a setting to thematise issues of national identity, belonging, and trauma. Departing from the concept of border poetics this article takes films featuring the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as its topic of inquiry. Beyond compiling a border film archive in which all cinematic representation of the Irish border is collected, a close reading is conducted of border mobilities in a sample of 43 narrative fiction films (1937–2021). The article's textual analysis makes the distinction between three border mobilities (1) border crossing, (2) border inhabiting, and (3) border (re)visiting, to investigate how filmmakers utilise the Irish border for various narrative, formal, and ideological ends. As such, the border's cinematic legacy can be better understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches first-person filmmaking as a potential home-making practice – a hometactic – that can actively negotiate reality to set forth new modes of belonging. With a focus on negotiating belonging in the context of migration, I turn to Four Journeys (Louis Hothothot, 2022) as a case study, a first-person documentary that explores the relationship between suppressed memories of violence and lived experience of in-betweenness by tracing four separate journeys between China, Hothothot's country of origin, and the Netherlands, his country of residence. My analysis of Four Journeys's home-making efforts as permeated by a praxis of care needed to enact a sustainable mode of belonging in the aftermath of migration is combined with insights from an interview between the filmmaker and the author. On the basis of the case study, the article proposes and elaborates on three forms of home-making practices in relation to cinema: hometactics in film (the documentation of home-making in the film), camera as a hometactic (the act of filmmaking as a home-making process), and cinematic hometactics (the cinematic enactments of home). While this three-part analytic differentiation serves to unpack the diverse forms of cinema and/as hometactics, the article also addresses their overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyse the ambiguous characterisation of the mzungu in Tanzanian films as well as the perception of the mzungu in general. Using the example of several films by Mussa Banzi, Mustafiri West and Kulwa Kikumba in which I acted, I discuss how, through the representation of common wazungu stereotypes, I have become the object of reflections and negotiations that – primarily satirically – process the relationship between Tanzania and Germany, East Africa and the global North. As a mzungu ethnographer and like the many white scholars before me, I was warmly and politely welcomed by the filmmakers to watch their work as well as to add a comical figure to the repertoire of Tanzanian movie characters. My performances in Swahili films opened up extraordinary opportunities to connect, become a scholar and even a “celebrity”. The Tanzanian filmmakers, on the other hand, benefited from the white guest actor as a teaser and especially as a comic extra for the films. I argue that, through this collaborative work, the role of the researcher as expert was challenged and, to some extent, the power relations between researcher and researched were reversed or at least disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to study how historical documentaries handle the development of a tale. The initial premise is that documentaries are not a mere compilation and recounting of data but rather a narration constructed based on the perspective of the audiovisual language. To understand how filmmakers create the story, we studied documentary feature-length films on the Spanish Civil War between 2000 and 2014. The sequence has been taken as the unit of analysis, and a breakdown has been made of the types of images and sounds used according to duration, order, and predominance of plot or characters. The research bears on the concept of narrative strategy, which helps to understand the format's internal mechanism, considering three issues: the production approach, the visual solution, and the narrative decision. The study of the selected corpus detected eleven narrative strategies-eleven ways to portray the same event from the past, with different purposes and intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary cinema is a type of film in which facts are conveyed through the language of film and the director's original approach. The 2022 documentary Love, Deutschmarks and Death tells the story of the immigrants from Turkey to Germany since 1961 and the generations that followed them through their music culture. Migration from Turkey to Germany and its effects have been analyzed in many studies. There are also studies examining how migration is conveyed in fiction films and documentary cinema. However, there is no study that examines how migration is conveyed in documentary cinema with German in particular and music culture. This situation shows the importance of this study. The music culture described reflects realities in an artistic style, just like documentary cinema does. When the music depicting the problems of immigrants is combined with the documentary's depiction of immigrants through this music, a layered and effective narrative emerges. This study examines how the documentary Love, Deutschmarks and Death conveys immigrants and music culture through the elements of documentary cinema. How the music, interviews and archives in the content of the documentary are used, how they are connected or edited with each other, and how the music used reflects social realities are analyzed through content analysis. It has been observed that the documentary Love, Deutschmarks and Death narrates the social effects of migration by blending it with music culture and uses interviews and archives, which are the prominent elements of documentary films, with a subtle editing style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although meditating on death has long been a central philosophical practice and is gaining prominence in modern European public discourse, certain misconceptions still persist. The Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke does not shy away from confronting real and performed images of death, combining a denouncing cinematic approach with no less polemic aesthetic and ethical theories. Certainly, visually shocking and disturbing films can, in their own way, challenge the boundaries of what is thinkable, at times even touching upon the unthinkable. Images of death and death-related themes are particularly pervasive in Haneke's films. His films raise significant philosophical and ethical questions about mortality, violence, death, and ageing. This analysis is a tentative attempt to map how Haneke explores representations of death and dying in Benny's Video (1992) and Funny Games (1997), with particular reference to the rewind gesture depicted in both films. In doing so, it aims to examine the conversation such films prompt between moving images and the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the accuracy and efficiency of box office prediction, this study deeply discusses the application of the optimized eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model in this scenario and its advantages compared with other commonly used machine learning models. By comparing and analyzing five models, involving the Deep Neural Network, Light Gradient Boosting Machine, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, and CatBoost, several key performance indicators such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, generalization error, stability, robustness, and adaptability score are comprehensively investigated. The research results reveal that the optimization model proposed in this study is superior to the comparison model in most evaluation indicators, especially when the data volume reaches 2500, showing obvious advantages. For example, the accuracy is increased to 0.9, the F1 score is 0.9, the generalization error is reduced to 0.09, and the stability score is as high as 0.98. The robustness and adaptability scores are both 0.97, which proves its strong prediction ability and high stability and robustness on large-scale datasets. Therefore, this study provides scientific data support and a decision-making basis for the film industry in the formulation of marketing and distribution strategies. Moreover, film producers and distributors can reasonably estimate their market performance early in film shooting, optimize investment decisions, and reduce economic risks through accurate box office predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on extensive archival documentation, newspapers, and periodicals, examines the impact upon the Soviet film industry of shifts in top‐level policy relating to representation of the war. It contends that Leonid Brezhnev's May 8, 1965, speech on the eve of Victory Day propounded an inclusive vision of the war (later sections of the speech comprise an exhaustive inventory of different representatives of military and civilian society who had been responsible for victory). Yet, in lending encouragement to participants of all kinds to consider their experience valid, the speech opened up a discursive space in which validity might be contested. Further, the emphasis in the film industry upon innovation and the need to avoid predictability ran directly against the requirement that commemoration of the war should fit highly ritualized and easily recognizable patterns. The article traces the results of these overall contradictions in the arguments about overall policy on the war film between representatives of the High Command, film managers at Goskino, cinema's central bureaucracy, and filmmakers themselves, and the controversies around individual films, including Iurii Ozerov's Liberation (1968–72), Andrei Smirnov's The Belorussian Station (1970), Aleksei German's Operation "New Year" (1971, released as Checkpoint, 1985), and Larisa Shepit'ko's Ascent (1977). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the utility of Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theories in developing dialogic and decolonial filmmaking practices. Using the example of our research-led documentary film, All That Is Buried, we challenge traditionally hierarchical structures of film production in which primary authorship lies with the Director/Producer, by implementing dialogic methods of co-creation between filmmakers, researchers and participants. We explain how Bakhtin's work on dialogism, chronotope, transgredience, polyphony and participative thinking provides the production and filmic tools and methods to host the distinct and equal voices of the South African creatives featured in the film – Zizipho Bam, Sindiswa Busuku, Haroon Gunn-Salie, and Dizu Plaatjies – maintaining throughout a sense of shared and equal investment in the project, and ethical responsibility to the collective. All That Is Buried shows the four participants discussing their work, ideas and experiences as they move between their homes, places of work, sites of inspiration, and artistic installations in and around Cape Town over the course of a day. In both process and product, we demonstrate how our co-creative methods support, and are supported by, practices of decolonial filmmaking, and provide a model useful and replicable for capturing Arts and Humanities research on film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is based on İlker Çatak’s contemporary German film The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), which reflects on a society beyond the classroom, raising questions about policing, prejudice, racism, tolerance, hierarchical manifestations. The analysis includes teacher portrayal, talks about cinematic language, directorial choices, visual elements, female coping strategies, highlighting the fact that more and more filmmakers today feel the need to talk about education from a reflexive point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution consists of two new translations of Francesco Pasinetti's essays on documentary filmmaking. In 'The meaning of documentaries' (1934) Pasinetti rhapsodizes on the cinema of Joris Ivens, Dziga Vertov, Robert J. Flaherty, among others, arguing that contemporary Italian documentarians are capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with these remarkable foreign filmmakers. He suggests that the documentary form is an invaluable pedagogical tool and should receive more support from the governing bodies. In 'The sense of documentary' (1941), Pasinetti outlines his poetic and practical principles for documentary filmmaking that truly possesses 'the sense of cinema'. He insists on the need for a central theme, marked figurative continuity, intensive research and planning stages – including best exhibition practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, filmmaker and scholar Simone Brioni talks about the two most recent documentaries which he wrote, Maka (Moutamid 2023) and Oltre i bordi (Beyond the Frame) (Brioni and Sandrini 2023), which share reflections about the visual representation of Africans in media and Italy's colonial legacy. He discusses the similarities and differences between these films and the documentaries he made in 2012 with/about writers Kaha Mohamed Aden and Ribka Sibhatu, respectively, called La quarta via (The Fourth Road) (Brioni et al. 2012b) and Aulò (Brioni et al. 2012a). In particular, Brioni focuses on the collaborative process with director Elia Moutamid and protagonist Geneviève Makaping to make the documentary Maka. Brioni also talks about how the dialogue from which the documentaries have emerged has progressively become the theme of the film themselves. Other topics of the interview include the use of the documentary to produce academic research, the impact of COVID-19 on the making of the films and the circulation and distribution of the films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the treatment of the face in the work of Palermo filmmakers Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco and proposes several considerations regarding the stark nudity of the face, its rawness and strength, and the relationships that the two filmmakers establish between face and mask. Through an analysis of the cinematic fiction of Maresco and Ciprì – Lo zio di Brooklyn (The Uncle from Brooklyn) (1995), Totò che visse due volte (Totò Who Lived Twice) (1998) and Il ritorno di Cagliostro (The Return of Cagliostro) (2003) – as well as their television work on Cinico TV (1989–96), this article demonstrates how the face emerges as a powerful tool that combats aesthetic homogeneity and narrative indoctrination of the media, as well as outlines a grotesquely attractive world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extensive, enigmatic, and singular work of the Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira (1908–2015) has been analysed from many perspectives, emphasising the importance of literary adaptations and the historical and cultural contexts in which the main characters are situated, as well as the pictorial or visual references. This research, however focuses on ways of integrating and preserving theater within the language of film, particularly those produced in the 1970s and 1980s. This study selects and analyzes some of the characteristics and features of the theatrical forms identified in Manoel de Oliveira's films, and unravels them. These include the use of spaces and frames to denote narratives, the duality between the static and the dynamic, and the importance of the spoken word in his films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although numerous theoretical references have been made to subliminal stimuli in filmmaking, no quantitative studies to date have sought to specify their temporal limits. Since the 1920s, several filmmakers have aimed to elicit an emotional impact on the viewer through the inclusion of isolated frames, which supposes the minimum possible temporal extension in films. Through two experiments, this study analysed the threshold between subliminal and supraliminal stimuli in films containing potential subliminal stimuli comprising one to four frames, played at frame rates of 25, 30, and 60 frames per second. The first experiment involved asking participants to view a film excerpt, including these stimuli, and then answer a survey. The second required participants to identify potentially subliminal stimuli whilst viewing a film clip. The stimuli analysed could not be defined as subliminal for 100% of viewers for any number of frames per frame rate, but were predominantly unidentified for one-frame stimuli in films played at 24 or 30 frames per second, and one- to three-frame stimuli in films played at 60 frames per second. Furthermore, three- and four-frame stimuli at 24 and 30 frames per second were found to be supraliminal, whilst the results for two-frame stimuli played at 24 or 30 and four-frame stimuli played at 60 frames per second were inconclusive. Future research is needed to analyse the effect of the nature of the image used as a stimulus and its location within a shot or in a cut between shots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adaptation of novels to cinema causes problems between the novelist and the film producer. Although the novelist and the film producer are at the forefront in this relationship, there are also important actors such as the director, script writer, dialogue writer, who are essentially the authors of the film. However, considering the position of the film producer, it is accepted that the film producer is also responsible for the acts and actions of the authors of the cinematographic work. While the author wants that the movie is faithful to the book, the film producer wants to create a film that attracts the attention of the cinema audience, and the owners of the cinematographic work want to create a cinema work that bears their own characteristics within the scope of freedom of creation. In order to prevent disputes between the parties, a detailed assignment agreement must be concluded between the producer and the author of the novel, and the author of the novel must clearly specify the changes to be permitted by the author. Changes made without the author's authorisation will violate the right to make changes to the work. If the author has not given explicit permission to change the plot, characters, basic thoughts and feelings of the book within the scope of loyalty to the work, changing them is a violation of moral rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the hypothesis that the verbal component of a cinematographic production, long apprehended as non-authentic and not spontaneous enough, can constitute a verbal material capable of being the object of a scientific study by applying the same methods as for any verbal component of a so-called "ordinary" interaction. We have endeavoured, in this article, to show that the mainspring of comedy, in Salut Cousin! by the Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache, is essentially based on linguistic interferences, a dynamic related to the linguistic contacts between Algerian Arabic and French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the Special Focus section on the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene argues that the fiftieth anniversary of Xala (1974) provides a timely opportunity to revisit and reengage with his work as a whole. This is due not only to the availability of new, digitally restored versions of Sembene's features like Xala, but also to the establishment of new archive collections of both Sembene and his longtime producer, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. It is argued that the archive provides a springboard for fresh modes of critical enquiry that move beyond the standard framings and periodizations of Sembene and recapture his experimental drive and visionary energy. After outlining the main themes of the three contributions to the section, the introduction suggests further ways in which one might productively open up Sembene's work, including a focus on its documentary forms, greater acknowledgment of its complex formal and conceptual challenges, and a celebration of its aesthetic "imperfections" which elude the well-worn tropes and templates of engaged African cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Film and television coverage of the “Little Hungarian World” following the Second Vienna Award remains incomplete. The media products, mostly funded by Hungary, usually portray the period between 1940 and 1944 in a one-sided manner, resulting from the lack of an unvarnished and honest confrontation with our own history. The question arises: if we try to understand this phenomenon based on the available audiovisual productions, how distorted will our perception become? Is it possible to create a media product about this subject without nationalistic overtones and, if so, how? In this paper, I begin to reflect on this question primarily as a filmmaker who has produced a documentary on this subject. In 2015, in our film Sweet Transylvania, We Were Here, we attempted to reconstruct the brief period of Northern Transylvania's return to Hungary based on oral history collections. I now aim to examine this phenomenon through the lens of available audiovisual products, complemented by the interviews collected for our documentary. This examination will focus on the following keywords: Second Vienna Award, the relationship between Hungarians from the Homeland and those from Transylvania, anti-Semitism, regime change, and sense of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering comfort women as both a contested object of knowledge and a productive figure, this article examines the representational endeavours undertaken by Chinese filmmakers in the past three decades. Specifically, it analyses three fictional films – How Many Levels are Hells (1992), Zhenzhen (2002), and City of Life and Death (2009) – which were produced in disparate socio-political and historical circumstances. Central to this article is a careful examination of women's violated bodies on screen that have aroused nationalistic sentiments and concomitantly unsettled the very nationalism produced under the rubric of an ingrained masculinist public culture. The article highlights how these cinematic representations address the thorny problems of commodification and objectification of women's sexuality, the crisis of survival faced by former comfort women, and the universal suffering of comfort women regardless of their nationalities. In a broader sense, by interrogating the comfort women issue as a purveyor of knowledge, the article contributes to the film studies of female sexuality and the memorialisation of World War II in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay combines autoethnographic narratives along with the films of U.S. film director Wes Anderson to provoke and unlock a buried grief of serving as a pediatric hospital chaplain. Anderson is one of the most well-known U.S. film directors. Even if an individual has not seen one of his eleven feature-length films, his aesthetic, eccentricity, and production design are well known and have reached meme status on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Buried within the pastel pastiche are themes of grief and trauma. The author moves through these themes alongside Anderson's cinematic universe and offer possibilities for communal care in an Andersonian manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the concept of heterochrony in Wes Anderson's films, focusing on how the director manipulates time to create a unique cinematic experience. It specifically analyzes Anderson's use of past and future elements, particularly in "The French Dispatch," to explore different temporal layers and their narrative implications.

If Gaelic has been symbolically appropriated to represent Scotland, then it follows that we need to look more closely at the part played by documentary film both of and from the Scottish Hebrides, in furthering the dissemination of what is an idealised and contested identity. As documentary is a negotiated contract between the producer and those they 'represent', the discussion needs to consider whether the representation of a Hebridean identity, and by extension a mythical Scottish identity, is constructed by the filmmaker, and if so, how filmic constraints and practices inform this representation. Within this framework is an acknowledgement of the extent to which Hebridean identity has been mediated by books, photographs and films for the past 300 years. This article will deliver the findings of a research project undertaken in the in the Outer Hebrides (also known as the Western Isles and Lewis & Harris). The research investigates the extent to which interviewees themselves collude with documentary makers in presenting a view of the Gael that reflects the Gaelic-speaker's own self-assigned role as guardian of the land and traditions. As this research marries practice with research, it will present it in a semi-autobiographical style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filmmakers have established editing rules that aim to create cinematic continuity across filmic cuts, thereby avoiding viewers' confusion despite the abrupt changes in perception. In our present project, we investigated the impact of 3D films, as opposed to 2D films, on the salience of filmic cuts. We employed a cut detection task and focused on within-scene cuts with mere changes in camera perspective. We presented short video clips to our participants and asked them to press a key whenever they noticed a filmic cut, and we measured their cut detection performance. In addition to viewing mode (2D vs. 3D presentation), we considered cross-modal auditory influences (visual vs. audiovisual presentation) on the salience of filmic cuts. Participants detected cuts more accurately and faster when the video clips were presented in 3D rather than in 2D and when the video clips were presented only visually (without soundtrack) rather than audiovisually (with soundtrack). Both factors influenced cut detection performance independently. We conclude that while the regular audiovisual presentation of films supports the filmmakers' mission to achieve cinematic continuity, filmmakers should also be aware of the additional salience of cuts that comes with 3D film presentation and consider its effects on cinematic continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]