Table of Contents - 10/2015 Issue, Volume II
Table of Contents - 10/2015 Issue, Volume II
ToC: 2015, Issue 10, Volume II in Bulgarian and English
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ToC: 2015, Issue 10, Volume II in Bulgarian and English
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The paper is seeking to highlight the new phenomena in theatrical life that do not need a director as the figure that has been categorically established in drama all along the twentieth century through a specific educational profile, a structure- defining and meaning-defining function in the process of staging, a secured place in public identification of a production. Over the last two or three decades, director, retaining director’s artistic function, has been increasingly abandoning the pretensions to be the sole author and the final authority when it comes to the meaning of a performance. Now director’s role is gradually changing: from a supreme arbiter of meanings and messages director is rather becoming an initiator and a facilitator of a collaborative process, a provoker of actions within the social and cultural domain or just a leader of a group of creative actors. This type of theatre has emerged step by step in Bulgaria too in the new century and the term ‘post-director’s theatre’ in this instance unites stage productions by artists coming from the area of performance art, contemporary dance, visual artists, people engaged in applied theatre, etc.
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This paper is part of an extensive study of the dynamics in performing arts in an era of an explosive development of breakthrough technologies. Thе article deals with key terms such as ‘posthumanism’ (Steve Nichols, 1988; Donna Haraway, 1991; Robert Pepperell, 1995; Katherine Hayles, 1991; Manuel de Landa, 2003, etc.) in the sense of existing in a state beyond being human; ‘transhumanism’ (biotechnological development of human beings); ‘digimodernism’ (Alan Kirby, 2009); ‘cyborgism’ (David Krep, 2007); ‘hybridisation’ (Edward W. Said, 1978, Homi K. Bhabha, 1994, Philipp Stockhammer, 2012), etc. The critical discourses upon these newly coined terms are not homogenous, but are often, in fact, a series of contradictory ideas. Usually, issues of ethics and morality, language and communication between different types of social systems are also under consideration as well as of the intellectual efforts for interdisciplinarity. Some of the best examples are also considered towards creating new stage hybrids by using new technologies in Bulgaria and abroad.
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The process of making a feature film is an integral whole of several major and autonomous to a degree stages. The assumption of a working marketing communication of a feature film seeking its best placing on the market relies on an analysis of the marketing aspects as early as the process of filmmaking rather than solely of the completed product. The specifics of each of these stages offer various options for using marketing instruments, which shows in the overall result of the substantial improvement in its communicativeness compared with the previously targeted by the authors audiences.
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One of the tenets underlying both the common policy of EU on the audiovisual sector and the very essences of a cinematographic work is that of the double nature of audiovisual works. These are deemed to be at the sane time goods offering opportunities for producing economic benefits and a cultural activity, generating social values. There is another core idea, that of the major role of audio-vision and film in particular, in building and shaping European identity. Arguably, the views of European film industry thus outlined and the strong competition on the part of the American film market underlie the effort not to abandon this sector to the market drivers and free competition alone. The roots of European film protectionism could be traced back to the 1920s, when quotas began to be implemented to protect national film industries. In the 1920s again, the earliest attempts were made to take general pan-European actions pertaining to film-making and film distribution.
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The paper focuses on the shared patterns and the differences in the development of animated film in two former communist countries, Bulgaria and Romania. The passed two decades and a half allow summarizing the creative processes in cartoons within the two national film industries. The attention is concentrated on the focal point of the changes in the conditions of production and distribution concomitant with a permanent financial crisis; a creativity and an ‘identity’ crises facing a number of renowned authors; the coming of a new generation of animators with new views of filmmaking and new manner; problems in communicating with audiences, etc. At the same time new animation models are studied: turning to modernism, shifting social satire focus, animated documentary, etc.
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Film in its earliest decade was short, so to speak, under constraint. Or for technical reasons. Which of the lessons of that catchpenny period (1895–1908) could be drawn on by contemporary short film? The paper shows this in the light of the fundamental questions: ‘Who?’, ‘What?’, ‘Where?’, ‘When?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ People of various walks of life and interests have dealt with cinema. The greatest advantage of the short film programme lies in its wealth and diversity. Movies were screened at fairs, but also at clubs and coffee shops. They were already attractive and independent; short film was cheap and accessible. Success stemmed form spontaneity, simplicity, realism, and freshness of vision.
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The paper treats the influence wielded by some twentieth-century art movements such as Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Pop Art on the stylistics of animated film. A comparative analysis is made of certain paintings and prints and animated works, whose manner has been influenced by those artworks. The significance of plastic arts is underscored as a source of inspiration in the process of quest and invention of new devices in animated film.
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The article deals with the ways connecting poetry to animation and studies the poetics of the latest work of Compote Collective, Mark & Verse. The project includes six original visual interpretations of contemporary Bulgarian poems. The dynamism of the poetic images is studied in translating them from literature to the realm of animation with all the variants of the relationship between word (either spoken or written) and the moving visual images. To reach this new metaphoric unity the young authors would opt for a surrealistic key as the most adequate one to expressing their states of mind and visions.
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The paper outlines the development of art strategies seeking to criticize the principles of functioning of art institutions in the face of the condition of their democratism and transparency. ‘Institutional criticism’ means an art strategy emerging in the 1960s and developing until now, taking on an ever widening variety of forms of art practices such as activism, performance, site-specific as well as expressing itself in texts. This article gives the timeline of the development, the philosophical grounds as well as representatives of the movement. The sources used are texts by widely quoted researchers into the phenomenon and texts by the artists themselves.
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The article expands on artist Damien Hirst’s views of art. Looking in detail into his creative career, the study gives the major challenges facing the artist’s accomplishment. The factual selection traces key events and problems in Hirst’s artistic development. This paper is an attempt at following, on the one hand, the role of PR in art that brought about his undoubted popularity, and his creativity, on the other hand. The analysis is based on Damien Hirst’s personal contribution as a PR promoter of his own work. Hirst challenged audiences through his arrogant behaviour. He radically changed the views of art, using basically Minimalism, Pop Art and Francis Bacon. His style, manner, image, and behaviour played a major role in the artist’s career as PR techniques, developed by Hirst himself in this particular case. The analysis deals with the consistent building of Damien Hirst’s personality, his ideology, gaining popularity and establishing him as a an emblem of one of the best known artists in contemporary world, underscoring the role of the PR campaign he himself carried out.
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The study deals with a form of visual communication, packaging of goods and services, which is gradually becoming an art in its own right by dint of new technologies. In an era of mass consumption of goods and services and of hurrying busily people, abstract and ingenious solutions are required for the supply of goods that would attract the attention of consumers luring them into buying. The rapid development of technologies and media, styles and methods of design solutions make impact on the various forms, models and devices of packaging products rendering them more beautiful, but also functional, smart, funny and striking. Their aesthetics please the eye, tempting buyers for beauty is always arresting, occasionally boosting unnecessary consumption. One feels like buying goods just for the fun of marvelling their look, just to enjoy them, which has already turned them into artworks.
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The paper explores the characteristics, the use, and the significance of le temps mort (dead time) as an element of contemporary film language. A major reference to the theoretical reasoning on this term is Gilles Deleuze’s views of image-time (l’image-temps) in film. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (2011) and Winter Sleep (2014); Michael Heneke’s Amour (2012); Lisandro Alonso’ Jauja (2014) and The Sinking of Sozopol (2014) by Bulgarian director Kostadin Bonev provide case studies of different uses of dead time. All works under consideration suggest a single main goal in the use of dead time in contemporary film: revealing the metaphysical dimensions to existence. Le temps mort proves to be a major cinematic tool used to generate spiritual contents, elements of the film language through which film provides evidence of its ability to be their mediator and by coding them into the very structure of the film too.
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The contemporary popular idea of the East and the Asian film is a complex product depositing in its compendium a number of aspectual lines. Mnemonic communities, i.e. communities where memory plays a leading role in the reproduction of the clichéd, over generations, image also weighed in on the reception. This image may go down to posterity, but may also be replaced by more powerful cultural artefacts and phenomena that are actual and adequate to contemporaneity. This paper focuses on cinematic examples from Japan and Korea that have strongly influenced the generation of viewers of the late communist era, i.e. of the 1980s, tracing how these ideas have been transformed or even replaced by contemporary phenomena of the subcultures and the global cultural phenomena.
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The paper attempts to conceptualise the term ‘creativity’ in the context of architecture, to give the broad outlines of the approaches to formulating a theoretical construct, which would systematically bind together the elements of both areas. Such a conceptual model has not been developed so far regardless of the wide range of studies on the issues of creativity and innovations. Concrete methodology has been developed and applied for the purpose allowing for seeking possible definitions of the term ‘creative architecture’. A version is also offered of a definition oriented towards that component of an architectural work, which more often than not is associated with the term ‘creativity’: its form.
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Media music is hybrid, which is especially true of the musical remix culture of digital media. The paper, part of a more extensive study on folk and folklorised music in Bulgarian media, seeks the discourses of hybridism and authenticity in TV commercials, containing Bulgarian and Balkan ethno music (folk, ethno pop, world music). Imbued with substantial symbolic values, the audiovisual images of the local tradition join in the construction of an imagined group identity, where music components play an important role. This study could shed light on the processes of stereotyping and autostereotyping of the Bulgarian and the Balkan as part of an enabled marketing of ethnicities and identities. It is argued that the nationalisms and Balkanisms in/via music are not results just of a sought for ideological constructing and political influencing, in terms of their content, but are preset by the nature of the media culture as a medium. The new media with their inherent to their technological, media industrial and marketing nature traits of synthesis, eclectics, hybridism, commodification and subliminal influence are able to change both their consumers and their own products. The music of the commercials is much more than just a soundtrack and a building element of the TV, entertaining and advertising industries. Media music provides a substantial link between the product, the producers (of the product and of the media as a product and communicator) and the consumers through the psychological, cultural, and social resources it has.
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The subject matter of the relations between individual arts within a dance performance as a genre combination has been classically interpreted on many occasions. The contemporary professional language of dance traditionally borrows from the actual everyday dances, but increasingly, from the popular street dances of various social and ethnic communities, which in the process influence the techniques and the aesthetics of movements as a whole. Urban styles seek to catch up with the professional art of dancing in its accomplished forms: a system of mastering the techniques and organised public presentation. This paper sheds some light also on the improvisational principle in the new technological environment, which evolves into an organised staging system, classically modelled too.
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Hybridism is treated as one of the key characteristics of postmodern art related to the blurring of various lines between, say, ages, genres, forms of art, art and life, etc. Considering the new art practices (installation, performance, etc.) as part of postmodernism, different examples of hybridism (eclecticism) could be adduced. First of all, it shows as a combination of different art forms, an example of which is the actionist art of performance. It is a short stage action, which, however, could be combined with a visual image (video, painting, etc.). An example of performance was the action of Varna-based artists in the courtyard of the Varna Archaeological Museum in 1985. Musicians (Yildiz Ibrahimova, Theodosii Spassov) joined the event recorded by a film team. The article also deals with the art of installation, which is of a hybrid nature too. Installation in its essence is a three-dimensional ‘construction’, which may consist of various objects (sculpture, objects) or may be a video or more often than not a sound installation. Besides, intermixing traditional art forms (sculpture, painting, etc.) with non-art objects (everyday objects) is typical of this art and could, for example, be observed in Vladimir Ivanov’s installation Dutch Landscape, analysed in this paper.
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The paper deals with the architecture of museums of the last two decades, established in different cultural environments and regions. Such examples pose a challenge to architects, designers and artists, being a high-profile field of creative work. The article seeks to trace and highlight major trends in the stylistic, creative and plastic imagery in the latest designs of museums as well as to underscore the approaches of the authors using and intermixing old creative ‘paradigms’ with new ones.
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