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Two-dimensional liquid foam systems comprised of an odd number N of bubbles arranged in a staircase configuration are studied as they are packed within a confined straight channel. Energy minimization is employed to characterize the permitted topology and geometry of the system at equilibrium. It is known that in an infinite staircase, bubble films are flat. The configuration for a finite number of bubbles, however, deviates from that of an infinite staircase at the edges. It is known that films near the edges are not flat and structures with a few bubbles (up to N=3) are well characterized. To study what happens as more bubbles are added, and how the behaviour approaches that of an infinite staircase, structures comprised of N=[5,7,...] bubbles are studied here. For these N values, minimum and maximum bubble areas are found that can pack in a staircase configuration within a straight channel. However, for an infinite staircase and also for N=3 , there are maximum areas, but no minima. Staircases with very short films, which make the structure susceptible to break in various ways, are also identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Study Design and Methods Results Discussion Blood services must consider innovative ways to encourage more Black people to donate to enhance the efficacy of treatments. We evaluate how two innovative arts‐based approaches (co‐designed and locally produced films and a large‐scale Marvel Studios'/NHSBT collaboration) can achieve this by generalizing to a wider audience from their target audiences.Four co‐designed short community films were produced in the United Kingdom: Comedy, Reciprocity, Donor‐Recipient, and Sliding Doors. In Study 1 (N = 44: Black people), these films were evaluated in the target community in which they were produced. In Study 2 (N = 1237: Black = 638, White = 599), the community and Marvel Black Panther/NHSBT films were evaluated in a nontarget general population sample. Evaluations were in terms of campaign behavioral efficacy (e.g., willingness to donate, encourage others to donate) and affect. These analyses were segmented by donor status, age, and gender.Study 1 shows that the community groups rated the films very positively, with over 90% stating that they would be convinced to donate blood. Study 2 shows the results from the community films generalized to the general population, with the Black Panther film also rated positively in the general population. Three community films and the Black Panther film were rated equally positively. There were notable differences across generations and by donor status.The results highlight the power of arts‐based approaches (both locally co‐produced community films and franchise collaborations) in encouraging donors within their target audiences and, importantly, on the broader population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way that the relationship between university students and the city is conceptualised in geographic literature is strongly determined by the studentification debate, which risks subjectifying students in redundant and unilateral ways. This paper suggests that geographic education and its spatialities can inform this debate with an alternative subjectification, by emphasising the students’ capacity to construct their own criticism on the urban phenomena that they experience. It draws empirically from a place-based workshop conducted within a master’s programme at the University of Florence, which aimed at exploring the students’ sense of place through creative methods. Life charts, mental maps, urban diaries and short films, analysed together with textual material, showcase the complexity of sense of place: for students, visuality and affect contribute significantly to their feeling of alienation and its expression, but at the same time become instrumental to negotiating it by seeking a sense of belonging in the touristified and spectacularized city. When approached as “revealed” and “claimed” space, the spatialities creatively produced through the films prove that geographic education is capable of fostering the shaping of students as critical subjectivities, thus restoring the problematic subjectification performed by the studentification debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the COVID-19 lockdown was introduced in Palestine-Israel in 2020, it changed how the everyday was negotiated, with stricter control on movement, access, and contact with family members. As the pandemic progressed, the lockdown restrictions layered over an existing framework of structural violence that determines individual movement, remembrance, access to health care, and living conditions. In the two short films analysed in this article, Lifting the Mask (سقط القناع) by Najwa Najjar (Palestine, 2020) and MAY: Locked Down with "Eva" in Nakba Anniversary (أيّار) by Maha Haj (Palestine, 2020), the lockdown stimulated a collision between the past and the present with ongoing, and at times increased, restrictions on movement and memory work in the West Bank. In each piece, the unhomely is presented uniquely, but the subject matter — memory, the occupation, and the pandemic — remains constant. As the viewer is transported (and yet also confined) to the home in both films, this article is concerned with the ways that the unhomely enhances the connection between the personal and the political in Occupied Palestine. Key to this is time and memory, and this article considers the question: How does memory become nonlinear as it simultaneously envelops the ongoing Nakba, which began in 1948, and the impact of the pandemic and its accompanying lockdown? The article concludes that the pandemic is but one strand in a narrative that weaves memory, movement and nonmovement, and the broader political circumstances into a tapestry of inequalities that pre- and postdates COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has transformed design practices, with multiculturalism influencing product and service development significantly. Incorporating global perspectives into design teams can be challenging. Learn how short documentary films inform and inspire designers to understand other cultures more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the multimedia documentation of architecture. Topics mentioned include the digital restorations of historic sites, the use of remote sensing as digital tools for data gathering, the increase in depiction of architecture and design in film festivals, and the release of architectural documentaries on social media YouTube.

Although several research programs have explored how people track changes in objects over time, it is not clear how consistently people are aware of the precise state of dynamic scenes. The importance of object tracking is put to a particularly interesting test in cinema, where editors must combine different views of dynamically changing objects (such as actors) in a way that does not disrupt viewers' perceptual experience. Film editors' intuition and several recent studies suggest that viewers precisely track configuration changes over time and that temporal overlaps in the depiction of moving objects facilitates viewers' perception of smooth visual event continuity. We tested these hypotheses by showing large numbers of participants short edited films that varied in temporal matching between views. In several experiments, we found that participants judged a wide range of temporal overlaps (from 400 ms overlaps to 400 ms ellipses) to be equally continuous. Participants did judge 1-second ellipses to be less smooth than exact matches, and when they repeatedly scrutinized films, or compared different versions of the same films, participants discriminated between exact matches and smaller mismatches. We conclude that awareness of temporal mismatches does not always occur by default, and that the importance of precise temporal matching may be overestimated in cinema and in psychological study of event perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread myth that adults with intellectual disabilities lack agency still pervades learning and research spaces, justifying ableist teaching and research methods. Bringing critical, socio-cultural perspectives on disability together with Disability Justice principles, I present a joyful counternarrative, illustrating how a group of adults with intellectual disabilities exercised agency in and through one drama-based learning and research context. Using data generated through participant observation, group interviews, and analysis of short films, I illustrate how characteristics of this drama-based context—creativity, flexibility, multimodality, and supportiveness—afforded disabled participants' interdependent agency. I explore tensions that arose during research regarding the nature of truthfulness, "good" storytelling, and systems of power. Results suggest an argument for the arts in learning and research with disabled participants, grounded not in their therapeutic benefit but in their capacity to afford agency, with implications for teachers and researchers looking to engage disabled participants in emancipatory work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) offers filmmakers a wide range of possibilities to explore new techniques regarding movie scripting, shooting and editing. Despite the many experiments performed so far both with both live action and computer-generated movies, just a few studies focused on analyzing how the various techniques actually affect the viewers' experience. Like in traditional cinema, a key step for CVR screenwriters and directors is to choose from which perspective the viewers will see the scene, the so-called point of view (POV). The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent watching an immersive movie from a specific POV could impact the narrative engagement (NE), i.e., the viewers' sensation of being immersed in the movie environment and being connected with its characters and story. Two POVs that are typically used in CVR, i.e., first-person perspective (1-PP) and external perspective (EP), are investigated through a user study in which both objective and subjective metrics were collected. The user study was carried out by leveraging two live action 360° short films with distinct scripts. The results suggest that the 1-PP experience could be more pleasant than the EP one in terms of overall NE and narrative presence, or even for all the NE dimensions if the potential of that POV is specifically exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although antibiotics are most frequently prescribed for respiratory tract infections, effective interventions for their proper use by physicians have not been fully established. We assessed the impact of educational films on the rates of antibiotic prescriptions for respiratory tract infections using fictitious scenarios. In this nationwide web-based survey prospective study, a total of 1100 physicians were included. The physicians were required to view educational short films and determine the need for prescribing antibiotics in 10 fictitious scenarios involving adults diagnosed with different acute respiratory tract infectious diseases. The antibiotic prescription rates for each scenario were compared before and after viewing the educational short film. The rates of antibiotic prescription significantly decreased after viewing the educational film, especially in cases with a narrowly defined common cold (from 51% to 15%), mild pharyngolaryngitis (from 71% to 25%), and acute bronchitis without chronic respiratory underlying diseases (from 63% to 23%). Alternatively, a slight decrease in rates was observed in cases with moderate or severe rhinosinusitis (from 94% to 79%), moderate or severe acute pharyngitis (from 88% to 69%), and acute bronchitis with chronic lung disease (from 70% to 58%), for which antibiotics are recommended. Educational short films may encourage the proper use of antibiotics for respiratory tract infections; however, the possibility of undertreatment in patients requiring antibiotics must be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Committee on International Non-Theatrical Events (CINE) and its role in promoting American nontheatrical films during the Cold War. CINE was established in 1957 to curate and submit American films to international festivals, aiming to present a positive image of the United States. The article discusses the geopolitical origins of film festivals and their use in cultural diplomacy. It also explores the clash between American and Soviet nontheatrical cinema and the significance of film festivals in generating cultural capital for nontheatrical filmmakers. CINE's growth and influence expanded over time, but it eventually became outdated and closed in 2018. [Extracted from the article]

Those who desire (Elena López Riera, 2018) and Rapa das bestas (Jaione Camborda, 2017) emerge as two distinctive endeavors within the contemporary Spanish cinematic landscape. Rather than overtly showcasing their feminist stance by directly denouncing female inequality, they do so tangentially, probing into a social practice seemingly distant from gender conflict (a pigeon competition and an ancient tradition of horse shearing). In this study, the meticulous formal work of the two short films is analyzed, drawing upon the destabilization strategies of the gaze utilized in the so-called sensory documentary, evoking an audience experience that transcends purely intellectual engagement to also involve them emotionally and viscerally. It is through the estrangement operated on both the expressive and content levels that these two examples allow for the activation of a political reading of the androcentrism that pervades social spaces without having to explicitly articulate it. Though uncommon, the intertwining of the phenomenological and the semiotic proposed here sketches out new and hopeful paths of feminist positioning within the audiovisual landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sets out to review the most influential creators in the history of dance film, both historical and recent figures. In approaching dance film I was inspired by my own experience in this field, a short dance film, and by my passion about contemporary dance. I see the communication between cinema and dance as capitalising both on corporeal expressive capacity and the technical means of editing, lighting and oratorical accumulation in the sense of a discourse, whose substance need not be epic or narrative. The studied creators demonstrate the primacy of poetry, as it is transposed into movement, in the making of a dance film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the work of four amateur filmmakers from the Canterbury area, between the late 1920s and early 1970s focusing on the films relating to the battlefield visits of First World War veterans and their families. It argues that film provides a fascinating insight into veteran behaviour and culture. Of particular interest is the manner in which the films reveal the continuities and developments in the behaviour of ex-servicemen. The films of the late 1920s and 1930s reveal a highly masculine culture which remained closely aligned with military ceremonial and codes of conduct, whereas the later, post-1945, films show the veterans with wives and family members engaging in a wider range of activities. The article also sets the films within the culture of amateur filmmaking of the time discussing equipment, techniques and exhibition, thus engaging with an element of film history which remains under-explored compared with the degree of research commercial cinema has attracted. The article is supplemented by a short film providing excerpts from all films discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender inequality in the film industry and the barriers women encounter are referred to as the "celluloid ceiling." To fully understand the structural and social causes of this phenomenon, comprehensive data collection and analysis are required. The current research aims to explore women's representation in student projects to examine how women studying in film schools encounter the celluloid ceiling before graduating and entering the workforce. For this purpose, 266 short films submitted over three years to a student film competition in Türkiye were investigated. The gender distribution in leadership positions, such as producing, directing, and screenwriting, as well as technical and acting roles, were examined. The study also looked at how having a woman in a leadership position in a film affected recruiting more women for positions behind the camera. The findings revealed that women are underrepresented behind the camera compared to men, and the proportion of women working behind the camera was higher when a female director or producer was present. A female director's or screenwriter's presence in a film also significantly affected passing the Bechdel-Wallace Test, an indicator of on-screen representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article examines the changes in production models within the Japanese animation industry during the early 1960s, with a focus on the creation of the animation director role at Tōei Dōga studio. The studio aimed to produce animated feature films at a high rate while maintaining financial sustainability. By analyzing production documents and conducting interviews with studio employees, the author explores the division of labor and power dynamics within the studio. The article also discusses the impact of the animation director position on the production structure and the challenges faced in balancing artistic freedom with management control. Overall, the article provides insights into the evolution of production models and animation direction in the Japanese animation industry during this period. [Extracted from the article]

In Farah Nabulsi's short film The Present (2020), the delicately interwoven simple narrative focuses on portraying the humanitarian aspect of Palestinian family life, the Palestinian daily sufferings at Israeli checkpoints, and the degradation and humiliation encountered living under Israeli occupation. Drawing on insights from theories of narration and Baker's work on the translation of narrative (2006), this article explores how the subtitler of The Present tends to alter the features of narrativity used in the Arabic version in the act of subtitling the film into English and hence reframes and reconstructs a different narrative than that presented in the source text. We argue that such a breach of narrativity, whether carried out intentionally or unintentionally, changes the meaning connotations portrayed to the Englishspeaking viewers whose outlook and decisions regarding the film motifs might be accordingly impacted. This outcome entails that film subtitling merits examination as a special kind of translation practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sri Lanka is a small-scale industry in the Global South. The hegemonic patriarchy of the industry, accelerated by various industrial, socio-political, and cultural matters directly affects the representation of women’s cinema in the country. This study aims to look at the female representation throughout the entire evolution of Sri Lankan women’s cinema and the state of their filmmaking practices, which is a rare study area. Further, the examination of the historical context and current trends of this paper will further seek to provide insights into the future development of the representation of women in Sri Lankan cinema.

The author focuses on a series of short films about road workers, created in 1974–1980 by different directors of the Georgia Film studio based on the scripts by Rezo Gabriadze. Despite the light comedic structure, each of the films in the cycle correlates with traditional art forms and is a kind of a parable about the important work of three friends who continue the work of their great ancestors in an already built-up world. This comedy cycle turns to the aesthetic foundations of Georgian cinema, which allows drawing conclusions about transformations in cinema, the processes of irony over the established film traditions, and nostalgia for the national cultural heritage. There is no large-scale epic background in the cinematic reality; it is introduced by a thin visual-semantic layer, paying tribute to national pride and history with the winding road surface, hills, endless fields, and the temperament of the characters. In the narrative and visual form, the three road workers can be interpreted as a homage to the Coward, the Fool and the Pro — the famous characters of Leonid Gaidai. With their undoubted masculinity, the Georgian trio paradoxically corresponds not only with Gaidai’s characters; it also represents a family where a strict ‘mother’ energetically raises a fidgety ‘child’ under the stern and gloomy gaze of a ‘father’. The spatial design of the filmic reality is dominated by road; most of the troubles happen when the characters consciously or forcedly deviate from the asphalt road itself. Overcoming the boundaries of this extended field, the characters find themselves in a moderately hostile world, salvation from which lies in returning to their road ‘Eden’.

The Museum of Vancouver in Canada recently held an exhibition titled "Dressed for History: Why Costume Collections Matter: Women’s Fashion 1750–2000." The exhibition showcased 250 years of women's fashion through pieces loaned from four fashion and costume collectors in British Columbia. The exhibition aimed to provide insights into period aesthetics, garment construction, and societal expectations of women's comportment. It featured a variety of styles and designers, including Dior, Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood, and Issey Miyake, representing different cultural identities and societal perceptions of women's bodies throughout history. The exhibition aimed to challenge Eurocentric perspectives, although it still had limitations in terms of representation. The article suggests that the exhibition could have been more immersive and interactive to engage visitors further. Overall, the exhibition highlighted the importance of costume collections and raised questions about collecting and preservation practices. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of TYB Akademi Dil Edebiyat & Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Turkiye Yazarlar Birligi 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.)

For historians of psychology, Hugo Münsterberg is best remembered as William James' successor as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and a pioneer of applied psychology. By contrast, for film and media studies scholars, Münsterberg is recognized less for his contributions to experimental psychology than for those to film theory, a field in which his penultimate book, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), is frequently claimed as an inaugural text. However, lost in the blind spots of both disciplinary perspectives has been a thorough examination of Münsterberg's collaboration with Paramount Pictures, translating psychological tests into experimental short films. Despite reaching millions of moviegoers in 1916, Münsterberg's 'Testing the Mind' series has received little attention from historians of science and early cinema alike. One reason for this neglect is that, to date, not a single extant copy of a 'Testing the Mind' release has been located. This article is about the author's efforts, in collaboration with students, to reanimate these lost psychological tests for the screen through meticulous historical reconstruction based on the original scripts, journalistic accounts, and correspondence between Münsterberg and Paramount. This reconstructive process, I show, yields new insights into the relationship between psychology and early cinema and an opportunity for reflection on this promising new space for research at the intersection of media archaeology, the history of psychology, and experimental history of science. Film URL: https://archive.org/details/munsterberg_paramount.pictographs [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on examining the process of adapting André Maurois' "Thanatos Palace Hotel" into a short film and comparing it with the original literary work, particularly exploring how changes in audience expectations. Topics include the essence of artistic expression shared between literary and cinematic adaptations, the challenges of adapting works from different cultural and temporal contexts, and theoretical framework of semio-stylistics in analyzing aesthetic effects of adaptations.

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

This article investigates humorous representations of marriage in digital comics, stand-up comedy and short films created by Emirati artists and content creators who primarily rely on social media as their most effective form of distribution. Studied against theories of humor in the Western and the Arabic traditions, selected examples demonstrate that the story-based genre appears less light-hearted in its combination of comic with tragic plot turns, while the snapshot characteristic of graphic art allows comics and social media skits to focus on the joke. The latter is thus more appealing to larger audiences, especially via electronic media. Depending on whether the image is accompanied by text in either Arabic or English, the content targets specific viewer groups. Relying on content analysis and audience reception, this study demonstrates that the relief regarding marital dilemmas provided through humor, particularly satire, is greater in the less text-based presentations. Generally, humor is a preferred mode by artists and content creators in the UAE to represent marriage because it can take the edge off sensitive topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eskalera Karakola (EKKA) is a feminist self-organized social center in Madrid, Spain. The project has been compiling their own archive of audiovisual materials. There are mostly two kinds of material in its shelves: first, about one hundred VHS and DVD copies of short films and feature films, and second, close to seventy miniDVs documenting meetings, demonstrations, workshops, actions, roundtables and also interviews with activists. The recordings are mostly about feminism and lesbianism themes but also about migrant activism, neighborhood movements in Lavapiés, and some international events. At this moment, some of the activists involved in the Eskalera Karakola have created a group, to decide what to do with this material. This article wants to participate in and document the debates, reflections, and discussions around this archiving process, analyzing every step of the way and all the challenges and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of content in the online environment in the 21st century required the emergence of new methods to attract an audience to online products. This trend is a response to the exponentially growing amount of content generated online and is aimed at improving the interaction between users and online products. Thus, this evolution has become a mainstream field of study as scientists seek to understand the implications of audience engagement practices for various sectors of the digital economy. Currently, users devote their attention and time to a limited number of topics and consume information that goes beyond their interests as a synopsis. In such circumstances, new media formats are emerging online. The Internet community has adopted various traditional genres from the classical arts and media, which are constantly evolving into new formats. One such genre that has emerged in recent times is microcinema. The presented study aims to analyze the specific features of a phenomenon, define it, and determine its position in modern media. The authors understand the concept of microcinema as a hybrid genre that emerged at the intersection of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We argue that this genre inherits its roots from classical cinema while embracing new technological advancements and cultural shifts. This study analyzed the ultra-short-length films (N = 180, 2022-2023) nominated at the microcinema festivals. This analysis of the trends in the genre's development revealed the high potential of this genre to solve educational, political, economic, and cultural problems faced by specialists of different profiles, as well as in the search for answers to important philosophical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that the use of short film clips is one of the most successful and widely-used methods of emotion elicitation. Nevertheless, there is a high degree of audiovisual variation across film clips, resulting in a trade-off in terms of controllability. To address this complexity, the present study aimed to investigate the potential effects of sound and color on film clips' emotion-elicitation levels. For this purpose, four different film clips were selected for each of the eight emotion categories: amusement, tenderness, calmness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and neutrality. All film clips were manipulated in terms of features of sound (sound versus silent) × color (color versus BW). In total, 128 film clips were tested online on various parameters: intensity of target emotion, valence, arousal, discreteness, and non-target emotions. The results revealed that sound was a mild contributing factor in increasing the degree of target emotions and evoking less boredom and more interest. However, color effects were less pronounced in emotion-elicitation using film clips. Furthermore, the study provided preliminary evidence that for most of the film clips, there was no significant difference in emotional reactivity in response to subtitled versus dubbed film clips. In conclusion, the current study showed that film clips (with a few exceptions) can evoke moderate to high levels of emotions independent of their bottom-up features, such as sound or color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, a leading investigative television program in Israel launched a series of short documentaries entitled "Four Minutes," each dedicated to an Israeli political leader. This paper focuses on three of these documentaries, dedicated to then-president Shimon Peres; then-Knesset member Tzipi Livni, who 2 years earlier had won the elections but failed to form a government, and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the founder of the Ultra-Orthodox Sephardi "Shas" party. Our goal is to outline the means by which these films construct and deliver their condensed messages, and to explore how, despite the rigid constraints of the format, they create a cohesive and complex portrait of these political figures and their strategic agendas. We analyze how the films' multimodal language is used to reflect the messages promoted by each of the figures as well as by the filmmakers themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic communication technology in the 6G wireless system focuses on semantic extraction in communication, that is, only the inherent meaning of the intention in the information. Existing technologies still have challenges in extracting emotional perception in the information, high compression rates, and privacy leakage due to knowledge sharing in communication. Large-scale generative-model technology could rapidly generate multimodal information according to user requirements. This paper proposes an approach that leverages large-scale generative models to create animated short films that are semantically and emotionally similar to real scenes and characters. The visual content of the data source is converted into text expression through semantic understanding technology; emotional clues from the data source media are added to the text form through reinforcement learning technology; and finally, a large-scale generative model is used to generate visual media, which is consistent with the semantics of the data source. This paper develops a semantic communication process with distinct modules and assesses the enhancements garnered from incorporating an emotion enhancement module. This approach facilitates the expedited generation of broad media forms and volumes according to the user's intention, thereby enabling the creation of generated multimodal media within applications in the metaverse and in intelligent driving systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, Objects of the Mind: engaging publics in the material cultures of media and mental health (AH/W002140/1), which was co-investigated by academics at the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester and curators from across the Science Museum Group (SMG). Through this coinvestigation we sought to tap into public interest in the SMG object collections and the accessibility of popular films (supplied by partners StudioCanal) to engage new audiences for our research on the interactions of psychiatry and cinema. From the museum perspective, we sought to use this research to ask new questions and tell new stories about the SMG objects, and to foster crosscollection dialogue between medicine (Science Museum) and media (National Science and Media Museum) collections. We discuss a range of events, activities and outputs we delivered towards these aims, but focus particularly on three new films we produced that (re)combined museum objects, feature film clips and expert interviews to tell new, enhanced or entangled stories about and across the collections. We will use these three short films to demonstrate three dialogues the project fostered: between museum collections; between histories; and between academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial article titled "Virtual Facts" highlights the virtual theme and the confrontation between the virtual and the real. It mentions the short film "Everything's Fine" by Diana Acién, which addresses the subjective experience during confinement. It also highlights Dr. Nea Ehrlich's article on documentary animation and the virtualization of culture. Other contents include a study on animation in Germany during the Third Reich, the adaptation of fairy tales into anime, and the modeling of otaku culture in the series Hakuoki Shinsengumi Kitan. The magazine issue concludes with a study on the setting of environments in Virtual Reality. [Extracted from the article]

Demonstrating the contemporary religious aesthetic amid the growth of digital theological productions, the short film production initiatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are noteworthy considering their outreach scope and production quality. These elements of a theological aesthetic can be understood through Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics due to the theory's open-ended prescription for narrative didactics, which assists in explaining the value of those aesthetic pieces, with particular attention to the Church's The Will of God short film. The implication of the digital mediated experience asks us to consider the emergence of religious existentialism amid contemporary religious storytelling. Digital theology's presence emerges as online engagement of social issues has a significant presence in contemporary life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sri Lanka is a small-scale industry in the Global South. The hegemonic patriarchy of the industry, accelerated by various industrial, socio-political, and cultural matters directly affects the representation of women's cinema in the country. This study aims to look at the female representation throughout the entire evolution of Sri Lankan women's cinema and the state of their filmmaking practices, which is a rare study area. Further, the examination of the historical context and current trends of this paper will further seek to provide insights into the future development of the representation of women in Sri Lankan cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a discourse approach, this study examines online news and opinion pieces about calls for the British Museum to return Chinese artefacts. We examine the interpersonal meanings conveyed by the linguistic choices made in these texts. This study uses the appraisal system in the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) framework to examine how news discourse addresses the issue and constructs interpersonal meanings. Graduation resources, as a subcategory of appraisal system, can underpin the degree of meanings and perspectives, allowing writers to adjust the gradability of attitudinal meanings conveyed to readers. This research first examines how the writer's voice is embedded in graduation resources, and later, how these graduation resources are used in online news articles calling for the return of the artefacts. This study also examines how online newspapers covered a short film by vloggers called "Escape from the British Museum", which sparked massive social media reactions, offering new perspectives on how social media and traditional news organisations interact to construct meanings through language. The results show that quantification and fulfilment (completion) resources are the two most common subcategories of graduation resources. The findings shed light on the language strategies used in news and social media discourse, as well as the interpersonal meanings behind such requests for cultural heritage repatriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on few dissertations exploring various aspects of Italian cinema and media history. Topics include the reception of post-war Italian cinema in France, the influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini on Global South directors, the analysis of still photography in Italian cinema between the 1950s and 1960s, the feminist films of Neapolitan filmmaker Lina Mangiacapre, and Umberto Eco's novel "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" in relation to mass culture.

In this interview, director Sebastiani and producer de la Fuente discuss their short film which investigates the inner world of Zheng, a young Chinese immigrant living in Turin who is responsible for managing newly arrived migrants from China. They describe the inspiration for this film, its mode of expression and the challenges surrounding its creation, including the selection of actors, direction in a foreign language and funding of the project. This interview considers the evolution of Chinese–Italian collaboration in filmmaking against the background of Zheng's tale of marginalization in a strange land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cinema has always sought to be an art of synthesis, not only by wedding art and science and integrating the aesthetic beauty of the other art forms, but also through attempting to involve all of the viewer's senses, not just the dominant ones of sight and hearing, in the artistic experience of motion pictures. Bearing witness to this are the previous century's myriad initiatives to transform the movies into a multisensory experience. Nonetheless, none of these proposals has managed to take hold and, for now, film is an art form enjoyed strictly in audiovisual terms. That said, given the context of ever-dwindling movie theater audiences, could the incorporation of the olfactory attract spectators once again? In this paper we employ an empathy and identification with characters (EIC) scale to analyze whether the incorporation of smells increases enjoyment in the viewing of an audiovisual production – in this case, the multisensory short film Xmile – by an experimental group (with scents) and a control group (without scents). The results indicate that with the incorporation of scents viewers' identify much more with the fictional characters and further enjoy the experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The French Studies Bulletin provides updates on recent conferences and events related to French studies. The Society of Dix-Neuviémistes' annual conference in 2023 focused on the theme of "Magic: Enchantment and Disenchantment" and featured presentations from scholars around the world. Another event, "Teaching Medieval French," aimed to develop sustainable approaches to teaching medieval French materials. The "Surroundings" conference explored the concept of surroundings in ecological, sociological, and aesthetic terms. The "Passages" conference examined the theme of passages in francophone contexts, and the "Nancynéma" symposium celebrated the contributions of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy to cinema. [Extracted from the article]