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Keywords: French New Wave; French cinema
Fifteen years after writing the monograph on the French New Wave, the author returns to the phenomenon, and presents the most important up to date work on the topic published worldwide since then. He presents Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s "Making waves" (2008), and PhD and habilitation theses writen in France and Germany. The result of this preliminary research is presented in three subsections: "New Wave as a precursor of the global breakthrough"; "New Wave as a representation of Frenchness"; “<<Breathless>> in relation to the period, gender, compulsion fields and existentialism".
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Keywords: Box office
The article is an attempt to identify the advantages and dangers of the analysis of financial results and audience frequency generated by individual films. This type of statistics, rather rarely used in Polish film studies discourse could, according to the author, become an interesting addition to the existing methods of research, but their use requires special care and far-reaching scepticism. In the article the most important methodological problems associated with the use of box office analysis are discussed, but the most important opportunities and challenges facing researchers wishing to make use of statistics relating to the popularity of video and data on their cinema audience in their deliberations are also pointed out.
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Keywords: Casares Adolfo Bioy
A short story by the Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares, elaborating the well known literary motif of the mad scientist conducting suspicious experiments on a distant island was adapted for the screen several times, and inspired serious work such as Alain Resnais The Last Year at Marien- bad and Quay brothers’ The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Casares’ book, describing a machine for recording spatial images, that are indistinguishable from the originals is not only an inspiring piece of science fiction, but also a small treatise on the essence of film reproduction of the world and the moral consequences of further development of image registering technology. Modern technology creates virtual reality ever closer to Morel’s invention. But is not the Internet its modified version? Once data is entered into the Internet it gains its independent, perhaps eternal life.
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Keywords: Film studies
The author makes a brief recapitulation of stages of development of film studies thought. She starts with the assumption that the object of study of film studies has a border character, and the discipline itself takes shape and is developed at a crossroads leading into multiple directions. In the entire history of reflection related to film, two competing trends vie for the dominant position. One of them sees film studies as an autonomic, highly specialised discipline, and the other a discipline that integrates the achievements of many other disciplines within a very wide scope. But both move towards the interdisciplinary approach. Partnership of film studies with other disciplines, the desire to keep up with their development, the tendency to constantly annex new, yet unexplored areas invigorated the discipline, and created tensions between various fields and marked the frontier areas, where new sciences develop most fruitfully. The author identifies and analyses four phases of development of film studies: pre-scientific, semiotic-structural, anthropological (also known as cultural) and the media phase.
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Keywords: Eastern Europe; Gender
In 2010 an international art exhibition "Gender Check!" was held, which showed contemporary Eastern Europe from the perspective of artistic endeavours guided by the question of gender. Reviewing the aims of the exhibition permits the author to show the possibilities given by the introduction of the notion of gender into the analysis of art and cinema. Especially after 1989 thought related to gender became in post-communist countries a way of redefining the identity of the transformation era. Interdisciplinary, comparative research on gender was carried out within the field of sociology, history, but also art, film and media studies, blurring the lines between the disciplines and widening the field of analysis and interpretation. Within thought related to the cinema of the East and Central Europe it was important insofar, as the question of gender refreshed research apparatus. It permitted to move beyond representational schemes of the identity of the entire region, the way it is shaped, and the reading of related meaning.
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Keywords: Visibility; Perception; Surface
For some time now films appear characterised by an excess of images. The films are very different from everything up till now associated with the Tenth Muse. This excess means that the experience of this other cinema – a cinema, or perhaps maybe cinema no longer – is natural and quite common. Such films exhibit a large dose of improbability, they go beyond the standards of fiction established in the cinema, thus demonstrating the qualities of autopoiesis, and especially one of them: the feature of operative closure. It is expressed clearly in the escalation of impossible angles, and therefore gazes, which make the relation of the visible to the invisible become less important. It is simply erased. Moreover, these films imply a certain degree of initiation into these fictions, their recognition as a condition of the cinema experience and a significant level of consent to their adoption – the film comes across as a game, in the sense of playing with the images, where everything is possible. It mainly concerns surface phenomenon, located on the surfaces – especially those that stimulate the expectations of the viewer – and, as such, interface, so that it is the surface, free from the coercion of ontological depth, that becomes the proper environment of visibility. The author tries to investigate the essence of this phenomenon in terms of the attributes of cultural techniques of design, when the movie reaches the level of self-organisation previously absent (based mainly on the proliferation of the digital), focused not on the hermeneutic “depth”, but on surface”. This phenomenon has much in common with the redefinition of ontology of cinema in general: in the cinema of design, cinema as a matrix of perception disappears, and increasingly as a basic space of perception also.
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Keywords: Film audience
The author describes the history of research on film audiences in the Western cultural sphere – from scientific works created during the silent film era, through studies undertaken on behalf of Hollywood by Gallup, the paradigm of “impact and influence” in the research on the theory of communication, the semiotic-poststructural breakthrough, up to modern works inspired by the so called New Film History. Polish research on film audience are presented separately. It was first carried out by pedagogues, then – sociologists, finally – cultural studies and film scholars.
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Keywords: Weimar Cinema; German Cinema
A book review of Tomasz Kłys’ "Od Mabusego do Goebbelsa. Weimarskie filmy Fritza Langa i kino niemieckie do roku 1945" ["From Mabuse to Goebbels. Weimar films of Fritz Lang and the German cinema until 1945"] (2013). The book consists of two thematic parts: the films of Fritz Lang until his departure from Germany after the coming of the Nazis and the sound cinema of the period of the Third Reich. There are also two structural layers to the book: a nuanced analysis and interpretations of the films of the German master and descriptions of economic, social and cultural conditions of life in Germany during the Weimar Republic and under Hitler’s rule. At all these levels Kłys demonstrates rich factual knowledge, aesthetic sensitivity, insightful interpretation, and a talent for words. This combined with rich film material analysed by the author, makes Kłys’ book one of the most interesting work in the field of film studies published recently in Poland.
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Keywords: New Film History; Historiography of film; Archeology of cinema
The past of film historiography is now a domain of myth and requires work in restoring awareness of the variety of material conditions of production of knowledge, their ideological base, and consequently multiplicity of places that are sources of critical thought on cinema. The author agrees with the diagnoses of Philippe Gauthier, and analyses the way in which film historians describe their own history. This narrative is based on the opposition between the New Film History and the “traditional historiography”. The opposition of these two formations gives an oversimplified image of methodological progress and obscures the fact that researchers unified under the label of New Film History, represent often conflicting perspectives. Discontinuities that are impossible to miss, make one reconsider the category of “traditional film history”, which seems to concoct “joyful brightness” at the expense of historical antinomy.
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Keywords: German cinema; Early film
Taking the assumption that early films are a late form of the historical art of projection, rooted in the culture of magical lanterns and variétés theatres, as a starting point, the author points to the features of the cinematographic shows, that gave them the character of a spectacle: commenting the action on the screen, musical accompaniment, interactions with the audience, and the interactions between members of the audience themselves, while watching sets of short films forming a larger whole. This model can be found in country fair travelling cinemas (also in rented halls), as well as in first proper and purpose-built cinemas. The character of this last category is presented more closely using the example of cinemas from Wrocław, and is supplemented by a discussion of other German examples. It is only the media breakthrough, that began in Germany in the years of 1910-1911, that lead to the individual viewer following the narration of feature lenght films.
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Keywords: Film Technology; 3D
Since the premiere of James Cameron’s "Avatar" the potential of 3D cinematography for creative expression and commercial profit has been widely recognised. Referring to historical examples of periods of intense, yet transient, popularity of 3D cinema, the author argues that contemporary renaissance of stereoscopic 3D technology is the result of a wider trend linked to the competition between “traditional” cinema and alternative modes of film reception. Reflections on modern systems of film screening lead the author to define two competing aspirations: the desire to maintain film as art, with the cinema screen as the main place of its transmission, and the desire to maximise the imitation of reality expressed through attempts of eliminating the two dimensional barrier of cinema screen.
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Keywords: Film studies; Media studies; Journalism
The article deals with the participation of film studies experts in cultural media studies research, understood as a dynamically developing discipline dealing with theories and practices of audiovisual media. The author ponders why is it so difficult to convince social scientists among media studies researchers to read, promote and popularise valuable publications about media by film studies experts and cultural studies specialists. Polish media studies experts representing social sciences dealing with the audiovisual, focus on analysing the function and content of media transmissions, while ignoring their cultural dimension. It is the representatives of the humanities, and especially film studies experts, that developed the history of the audiovisual, create theories and popularise Western thought in Poland. However their work goes unappreciated by their media studies colleagues from the social sciences. Within media studies study programs history and theory of audiovisual culture is increasingly popular among students, yet highly marginal in relation the history of the printed media.
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Keywords: Crowdfunding; Film production
The author presents a new context of film production and promotion in the light of the emergence of the phenomenon of crowdfunding. It offers an answer to the needs of the audience who demand greater involvement in the planning, financing, and managing cultural goods. Their activities form part of the new paradigm of marketing, which assumes consumers’ contribution into the final product, which process is aided by the development of media technologies, especially social media. In the article the author presents the best known examples of crowdfunding campaigns dealing with film. At the same time, while pointing to the controversies and doubts connected with these projects, the author provides an outline of a framework for discussing this new phenomenon and its further development.
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Keywords: Internet
This article is an attempt to reinterpret the imagery characteristic of network media based on different forms of wireless connectivity. Images circulating in these media are the effect of an intensive processing of data, and their ecology is different from the traditional forms of audiovisual culture: they are situated much closer to the environment within which they are produced (the examples come from artistic practices such as the art of climate, but they can also include participation mapping), as a result of a series of exchanges between human and non-human actors. Drawing on the theoretical propositions of James Gibson, especially to the theory of affordances considered within the context of his overall proposal related to ecological optics, Nacher suggests a departure from the representational model. Within this proposed approach the described types of images appear to be not individual units of representation, but a form of exchange of energy with the surroundings.
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Keywords: Polish cinema; PRL
The article consists of two parts: a diagnosis of the current state of research on the cinema of the socialist period, and a postulate. According to the authors Polish film historiography focuses mainly on the aesthetic aspect (the description of the work of film directors recognised as authors and artists dominates). Referring to the methodological assumptions of the new historicism and New Cinema History, the authors express concern caused by a lack of historism in the historiography of cinema of the socialist era. They therefore suggest “a return to the source”, that is the archives; a certain restrain in one’s interpretative ambitions, thorough research allowing the description of specific film projects in relation to their economic, social and political context; research on the culture of production in Polish cinema; research of film paratexts (stills, posters, trailers, movie advertising, etc.) and marginalised phenomena (such as educational cinema or “Polish school of dubbing”) and research on film reception (both audience and written film reviews).
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Keywords: Film audience
The article deals with the meaning of practices and contexts that are not part of films themselves, but are important in the area of film studies. The author analyses the relation between Polish film studies and social science research. He argues for closer ties between these two disciplines, especially in the context of technological changes that introduce film to new audiences. In the article the author also reflects on the participation of researchers in the production of “institutionalised knowledge” and its consequences. The author also suggests a change in the understanding of film itself. He argues that one needs to take into the account elements of social network within which the film is present.
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Keywords: Remake
The author describes and analyses the category of a remake as a cultural practice rated as a “worse” version of a box office hit or a phenomenon belonging to the postmodern “culture of exhaustion”. The tendency of repetition results from the very nature of the medium – reproduction. What then is the difference between a remake and other kinds of repetition: allusion, citing, adaptation? Film is a medium that operates in the sphere of representation. Remake is remarkable, in that it is a representation of a representation. In examining this phenomenon, we emphasise the relationship between the persistent need for repetition and cinema as part of the cultural field of production (which are different discursive practices). Cinema is a place of social and cultural memory, and each movie is in fact “re-made” – distributed and transformed in each new context and re-watching. Aesthetic and cultural trajectories defined by a remake refer to the origins of cinema. The remake is also a specific, institutional form of the structure of repetition. How a remake functions as both a stand-alone text and just a remake? Remake is a category that is part of the film industry (marketing strategies, author, brand), textual category (genre, plot, structure) and critical category (viewers – reception, the institution). Remakes just like Altman’s genres, make sense in transcending the whole body of films. Remaking is therefore not only an internal property of texts or audiences, but a by-product, a secondary result of the wider discursive activity.
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Keywords: New media art
In his article the author analyses the concepts of new media, new media art, and cybernetic art, which is considered to be the historically the earliest form of new media art, and one that is continued in many ways in the present. Kluszczyński approaches the concept of new media not by placing it on a timeline, but by considering it to be a paradigm of properties, new media rely on. The most important of these are: technical character, a numeric representation, virtuality, modularity, automation, use of variations, telecommunication, telematics, autonomy, digitisation, interactivity, hypertextuality, providing of information, networking, non-linearity and spatial orientation, navigability, structural opening, hybridity, interface, convergence. In the same way the concept of new media art is characterised. In this case the most important paradigmatic properties are technical and electronic character, digitisation, interactivity and networking. Numerous new media arts identified by the author configure the properties in diverse ways, combining them with other properties, non-specific to new media, thereby building a complex landscape of new media art.
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