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The author attempts to define the phenomenon of film technique in the “zero point of cinema”, with reference to selected films made within the circle of Bauhaus’s “new vision” at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s ("Amateurfilm Dessau" by Ivana Tomljenović from 1930 and several films by László Moholy-Nagy, particularly "Architects’ Congress. Film Diary " /1933/). The text concerns the phenomenon based on ignoring technical standards of the medium and/or questioning them to the point of explicit denouncement of the idea of development as a negative reference point, and at times even total rejection of the idea. In the discussed films, visuality perceived as a means to manage the authority of power is contrasted with the right to look (based on “countervisuality”), which is expressed particularly in the staging of seeing the act of looking. It is about a state in which perception practices are not appropriated by visual constructs, since the social machine has not yet arranged the functioning of the photography-film machine; this creates an impression of staging and directorial poverty.
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The article attempts to define medial genealogy, which includes cinema and similar media or phenomena. Using methodology of media archeology, the author discusses terminological and logical problems involved in the efforts of indexing cinema to superior medial order. The popular term of "screen practice", coined by Charles Musser and attributed to the achievements of New Cinema History, serves as an individual example. Subsequently, based on key interdisciplinary assumptions, the author proposes his own term: skiagraphia, derived from an ancient Greek painting form. The main part of the article explores the characteristics of individual members of such media genealogy and describes the mechanisms of its development, i.e. what author calls the skiagraphic process.
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Together with the development of market orientation in the sphere of culture, the questions concerning the strategy and instruments of creation of the image of cultural institutions and artists, as well as their effectiveness are more and more frequently formulated in the discourse on art. This also has impact on development of new media that on the one hand expand the possibilities of artists’ communication with culture recipients, and on the other hand make the artist’s image increasingly more shaped by the users of new media. Furthermore, it must be emphasised that on the grounds of marketing, the image is perceived in terms of a resource. The goal of the paper is to show the multitude of factors that shape the artist’s image. The considerations in the paper are conducted while taking into consideration the dimensions of identities, as well as myths associated with artists’ work shaped in recipients’ awareness. A model of determinants shaping the artist’s image is the result of the considerations and analyses. The paper is based on literature studies and semiotic approach contained in the stream of qualitative research.
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The aim of the paper was to examine and analyze the context of activity of street performers, presented by the mass media in Poland. The research question was: How the image of street performer in media looks like? Who creates this image? The intention was to describe the way the street performers are being shown by: the media representatives, their own customers and also by themselves. Moreover, the paper highlights the aspect of social role of presenting this kind of human activity in media discourse. This text is a result of ethnography conducted among the street performers in the biggest Polish cities from 2012 to 2016. The ethnography was broadened with the analysis of various examples from media discourse: internet, television, radio, press, film and literature. The analysis includes three different meanings of media discourse: (1) as a communication occurrence, (2) as a compilation of values and (3) as an interaction. The results of the article show the media influence on contemporary meaning and shape of street performances. Moreover, the paper reveals a present social knowledge concerning the street shows.
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The Aleksander Wegierko Drama Theater in Bialystok is one of the oldest and largest cultural institutions in Bialystok. The offer of local institutions allows theater enthusiasts to choose from a variety of proposals. How to reach viewers? How to encourage them to come exactly to the Drama Theater? Until 2012, the research on consumer preferences was not conducted in this institution. Almost seven years ago, in cooperation with the Institute of Sociology of the University of Bialystok and the “SocLab” Foundation, the study was carried out and the report “Diagnosis of participation in culture in the Podlasie Voivodship” was create. The aim of the whole project was to learn about the cultural needs of the inhabitants of the Podlasie region, as well as their opinions on artistic activity and the image of cultural institutions.After six years – in 2018 – the theater staff decided to ask the viewers again to share their opinions about the institution. In May last year, a study entitled “Theater in the opinions of theviewers” was conducted. Thanks to all the information, the institution managed to find out how audience rate it’s offer, what are the expectations regarding future repertoire proposals, as well as from what communication channels viewers obtain information about the operations of the institution. The article aims to describe the most important research results also it presents the distribution channels used to inform about the offer of the Drama Theater.
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The author focuses on the relations between the new film medium and empirical physiology research. Both areas share a similar attitude towards animals and their lives, which reveals a violent discourse. Although this discourse was not always obvious, it was immanently linked with the cultural dominance of the human species. The function of animals in cinema and science is strictly pragmatic – they are a material exploited by humans. This is sanctioned by the frame of cinematic spectacle. The main aims of this article are to find animal presence in early cinema and compare these examples with animal experimentation. The author examines early-cinema examples (such as "Exiting the Factory" /1895/ by Louis Lumière, "Boxing Cats" /1894/ by William K. L. Dickson, or "Electrocuting an Elephant" /1903/ by Edwin S. Porter) with contemporary tools: posthumanism and animal studies.
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The article offers an analysis of the impact of modern digital audio-visual techniques on exhibition practices – especially in the field of cinematic exhibitions. In this context, the key factor is the antinomy of distance vs closeness, as well as the freedom of the recipient set in motion. The research focuses on five areas of institutionalization of digital non-film: new media art, gallery film, digital techniques in new museology, narrative and film exhibitions. They reveal five communication practices that extend tools in the sphere of interactivity: immersion, responsiveness, haptics, paratexts and omnipresence. The article concludes with a reflection on the institution of a digital museum.
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The article is an attempt to look at the films "Na Wylot" ("Through and Through", 1973), "Wieczne pretensje" ("Permanent Objections", 1975) and "Tańczący Jastrząb" ("The Dancing Hawk", 1978) by Grzegorz Królikiewicz through the prism of film technology. The author refers to the memories of film operators, Bogdan Dziworski and Zbigniew Rybczyński, complementing them with accounts of other people involved in the creative and technological process of film production. The film-makers’ memories collected after many years are confronted with press reports from production plans, as well as documents obtained during extensive archival research. The aim of the article is to unveil the relationship between the artistic aspirations of the cinematographer and the director on the one hand and the technological possibilities of the cinematography of Polish People’s Republic on the other.
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The aim of this article is to present the influence exerted on cinema by Stefan Kudelski and his invention: the family of Nagra recorders. Introduced in 1958, Nagra III became especially popular among filmmakers, enabling, along with other technical breakthroughs of that time, the development of a new kind of documentary filmmaking, and later influencing feature production as well. For almost three decades, various models of Nagra recorders presented the golden standard in its field and helped shaping movements such as French New Wave and New Hollywood. It thus played an important part in the emergence of ‘postclassical’ cinema, which encompassed a new kind of cinematic realism and much more freedom in creating sound design. This important episode in the history of film technology might be instructive in understanding how technical progress might influence the culture and logistics of production but also inform strictly artistic and aesthetic choices made by filmmakers.
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The author analyses Peter Jackson’s documentary film "They Shall Not Grow Old" (2018), which was based on the archival film footage from World War I. He examines the use of the documents, arguing that the interventions made by Jackson’s team go beyond film restoration, and proposing the term “revitalization” to describe the effect of these changes. Further, the author analyses Jackson’s artistic choices, revealing the contexts and purposes of different aspects of his treatment of the footage (screenplay, colour palette, etc.), as well as discussing the preparation of the soundtrack in terms of contemporary practices of historical soundscape reconstruction. Finally, the author approaches the immersive aspect of "They Shall Not Grow Old", discussing audiovisual narratives of contemporary museums and the beginnings of film, arguing that Jackson’s documentary is in fact about the cinema itself and the memory of the Great War rather than about history.
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In the light of recent archival research, the story of Orson Welles' life and work is no longer as enigmatic and mysterious as it was in previous decades. But with new discoveries and the subsequent release of films restored and completed after the director's death, it remains a hot topic for his biographers. The author traces the influence of the technological process on the final shape of Welles' restored works mainly through the examples of "The Other Side of the Wind" (2018), the director's last film, and "Too Much Johnson" (1938), his medium-length debut found in 2013. The choice of these titles is dictated on the one hand by the fact that in both cases technology played a very important role, and on the other hand, by the fact that both films have not yet been described in depth.
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Should we boycott important films only because their authors have been accused of some misconduct? Are we to exclude works of artists who at some point sympathized with criminal regimes? Are we to remove monuments from public spaces because they served a wrong cause, even if they occupy an important place in the history of art? Should the value of a work of art be judged in the light of its creator’s life? The author asks these and similar questions and leaves them unanswered. He evokes, though, Roland Barthes’ idea that once completed, the work detaches itself from the author and starts its own life.
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Review of Marcin Adamczak’s book on the functioning of the modern film market: Kapitały przemysłu filmowego. Hollywood. Europa. Chiny [Capitals of the Film Industry: Hollywood. Europe. China] (2020). The book consists of three chapters, which describe: the Hollywood cinematographic system from its beginnings to the present day; the Eurocentric festival subsystem based on building social, cultural and symbolic prestige; and the growing role of China in the landscape of contemporary film production and distribution. The book contains also methodological proposals, which can be used in further research concerning not only the functioning of the film market, but also other creative industries, although it is impossible to predict whether in the post-covid world these markets will function according to the rules described by Adamczak.
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The text is a review of Miłosz Stelmach’s book Przeczucie końca. Modernizm, późność i polskie kino [Consciousness of the End: Modernism, Lateness and Polish Cinema] (2020). The review starts with the description of the structure of the book, where part one presents research about modernism in cinema, and part two offers a rich historical analysis of late modernism phase in Polish cinema of 1970s and 1980s. The review underlines the book’s focus not only on textual analysis, but also on institutional frameworks of late modern cinema. One of the most original sections of the book is the investigation of centre and periphery inequality in the global distribution of prestige and symbolic capital via festival networks. Stelmach also skilfully applies Deleuzian and Derridian (hauntology) concepts to the realm of Polish cinema. The book is a brilliant proposal to refresh the conceptual framework of discussion about Polish cinema of late 20th century.
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In the book Zwrot historyczny w badaniach filmoznawczych [The Historical Turn in Film Studies] (2020), Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna precisely and in great detail describes the histories (plural) of the title phenomenon. He shows the methodologies and inspirations accompanying it, places them in various contexts, and then subjects them to thorough criticism, also reconstructing disputes between representatives of the seemingly same trend. We have received a highly professional, carefully thought-out guidebook to the New Cinema History/New Film History, going beyond superficial and unifying readings. The author, however, has greater ambitions than just presenting the historical turn. If he makes the reader familiar with the above-mentioned disputes about how to write about early cinema, he also turns this into a starting point for reflecting on a more fundamental issue. His book takes part in the discussion on the methodology and self-awareness of the humanities.
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