Around the Bloc: Serbia Calls on Steven Seagal
Martial arts master, Hollywood action hero and self-described Russian Mongol asked to train Serbian special police.
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Martial arts master, Hollywood action hero and self-described Russian Mongol asked to train Serbian special police.
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Deemed extremist, the award-winning cartoon had previously landed an internet user in jail for six months.
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‘Anthropoid’ is most accurate film version yet of the Holocaust planner’s death and its bloody aftermath, producers say.
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This essay asks what happens to hegemonic discourses around gender, identity and subjectivity when the stable frame of reference within which they typically operate shatters under the pressure of cinematic and narrative oversaturation. Through a close analysis of Nicholas Ray’s film noir In a Lonely Place (1950), the article traces the representational undermining of post-WWII Western masculinity, which is revealed to be in a state of perpetual crisis. It shows how sexual difference is depicted as a key element informing the notion of agency, but with a surprising result: instead of the typical hierarchy of classic Hollywood films—in which the woman on the screen occupies a passive to-be-looked-at position (Mulvey 1975)—In a Lonely Place complicates the formula by giving its female protagonist more agency over the narrative than its male anti-hero, thereby marking the film as a provocative feminist text. In later parts of the essay, I focus on the film’s noir features such as narrative loose ends and plot inconsistencies, and what they reveal about the inherent violence of normative forms of storytelling, both cinematic and otherwise.
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Star Wars characters make unsuccessful runs in local and regional elections.
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There are many mysteries behind the story of the making of the earliest Bulgarian film, Bulgarian Is Gallant: the precise date of its premiere, identification of its producers, unknown authorship, and even nationality. The grandest challenge is to establish the unknown until now year of the production. The information provided by Vasil Gendov, the patriarch of Bulgarian film that it was made in 1910 disagrees with the releases of the press (1915). The article argues that the film was made in the summer of 1914.
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Following the political changes from 1989 on wards, social criticism and comic shorts are no longer the major leading models in Bulgarian animated film. The paper focuses on the modes used by filmmakers to globalise their messages in an environment of cutting back on financing and practically nonexistent market. As is the case in the rest of the former communist countries, in Bulgaria too the development of modernist styles has been disrupted, struggling desperately for its rare moments of flourishing. But then again, the new generations of animators are making their fresh contribution to avant-garde stylistics, reviving and developing a singular symbolic cinematic language to reflect situations of a crisis and transition.
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The paper deals with the aspects in the development of contemporary on-screen representation for children, exploring the way of building the type of a character, the latter’s motion characteristics, establishing the spatial solution to the film and further developing the representation in tracking shots. A major factor, determining all these components is child’s age. It sets the duration of the film, the number of characters, their appearance and should there be dialogue, i.e. the totality of the entire on-screen vision of the film. On the other hand, the issue of communicativeness in using various technological devices in contemporary on-screen representation for children is treated focusing on younger pupils aged 6-12.
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The paper deals with various dramaturgical models and expressive power of animated miniatures. Even a cursory glance of the oeuvre of our grand masters would show the invariable presence of miniature in their work, its paramount importance in shaping their manners. That is why it remains the best practical training session for students. Animated miniature could be treated as a micro model of all codes specific to animation. My case study provides as an example student miniatures from the two editions of the international student 10 Films, 10 Days showcase (2013, 2014), made jointly by Edinburgh College of Art and the New Bulgarian University and joined at a later stage by students from NATFA and from several schools of film from different countries.
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What is the preliminary montage disposition of a filmmaker in building action and shot (choice of compositional devices)? How do compositional elements influence and predetermine the principle of montage of combining shots? The paper draws on Sergei Eisenstein’s of shot composition treating major compositional elements such as ‘leading’ and ‘indirect’ lines, ‘mass’ and ‘weight’ of the objects, the rule of thirds (golden section), colour, lighting, etc., in relation to viewer’s perception.
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The paper examines director’s quest for cinematic conventionality and especially, the use of audiovisual counterpoint as a methodological reference point in an attempt to steer clear of a conventional approach. The analysis is based on the disagreement between using the poetic-musical and realistic principles in building Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables.
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Until the end of the twentieth century, audiovisual works were offered to viewers mainly on silver screen, TV channels and their derivatives, videocassettes and DVDs. The longstanding practice of such exhibition brought to the fore several formats that established themselves as being best for programming and screening: 27’, 54’ and 81’ for TV and 60’, 90’ and 120’ for cinemas and videos. The web defies the tradition. The average running time of most of the online videos on such websites as YouTube is between 2 and 6 minutes. This paper seeks to explore the changes in the formats of audiovisual contents, the reasons for these changes as well as the emerging forms of audiovisual content on the Internet. It pays special attention to the breaking off the traditional industrial relations ‘production-distribution-exhibition’ in audio-vision as a result of the advent of new technologies and communications and the issues of return, piracy and eventually, of the communication model.
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The paper deals with the history, facilities, and development of technologies of motion capture. It starts from rotoscoping by hand to proceed to electromechanical system to the latest achievements and innovations with the advent of optical and laser devices and software, combining the ‘motion capture’ facilities with 3D scanning of objects. The article explores ingenious and innovative solutions to build authentic and convincing behaviour of 3D characters with an opportunity for real-time compositing of computer characters placed in a real or digital environment. Innovative visual techniques are presented achieved through using ‘Universal Motion Capture’ to enrich the digital image.
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Stars was the first coproduction between East Germany’s DEFA Studio and Feature Film Studio, Bulgaria. The Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes International Film Festival 1959 was just one of the awards it had won. Its story was marked by hardships typical of the socialist era and it had been even promoted for years as ‘banned’ in Bulgaria. The study presents a timeline of the events and documents of the age, giving a different picture. Stars was the first movie allowing for a different view of Germans in World War Two. The film was an appeal for peace and unity, made in the days of the Cold War. ‘A must-see’ was the category assigned to the film in GDR for its exceptional qualities. In 1995, in Germany Stars has gone down in history as one of the country’s Top 100 movies, while in Bulgaria it has been almost forgotten.
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The First World War, in addition to producing an extraordinary boom in technology, also saw a proliferation in film production. New media, which had existed for less than two decades when the war broke out, were generally regarded as vulgar forms of entertainment. The war years radically changed the assessment of film, which in many countries was elevated to the status of a national art, able to rouse the population to battle and reveal the “true face” of the enemy. The First World War was unquestionably a period during which cinema rose to supremacy. Its dominant position among the other arts led both policy-makers and film producers to realise that the specificity of the new medium was its ability to create, not just record reality, and that the “truth of time” and “the truth of the screen” were two distinct things that were often impossible to reconcile. In the decades following the war, a canonised cinematic discourse arose that continues to influence the aesthetics and ethics of storytelling about war. Around 1930, the means used to construct film narratives took the shape that today in a virtually unchanged form is still considered de rigueur, and is transferred from one armed conflict to another. To understand contemporary film visions of conflicts, threats and dehumanization, it is necessary to reach back to the films produced during and after the war.
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In the study "Cinema in Shadow" Assoc. Prof. Petia Alexandrova, PhD shares her thoughts about cinema after 1989, which ceases to be a prestigious and wealth bringing occupation and becomes a shadow of itself from the 70s and 80s of the twentieth century. But somewhere off the main stage is formed a niche for small and medium formats as an alternative: short movies, movies omnibuses, independent, experimental and art projects, hybrid forms between video, performance and avantgarde.
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The focus of the article "Pirate Distribution of Audio-Visual Content" of Assist. Prof. Stoyko Petkov, PhD is not so much on the battle of corporations to define, criminalization and prosecution of pirate practice, but on finding solutions for independent artists and creative groups, which have the unique opportunity to communicate directly with their audiences.
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Abraham Icek Tuschinski was born in Brzeziny near Łódź on 14 May 1886. He was a Dutch businessman of the Jewish-Polish descent. While immigrating to the United States in 1904 he decided to remain in Rotterdam. Fascinated by the magic of the cinema he raised money to fulfill his dream – a movie theatre of his own. He opened his first cinema in 1911. His most luxurious cinema, the Grand Theater in Rotterdam, was opened in 1928. The jewel in his ‘cinema crown’ was the Theater Tuschinski in Amsterdam, opened on 28 October 1921. The design of this building represents a unique mixture of three modern styles: Amsterdam School, Art Nouveau and Art Déco. When World War II broke out, Tuschinski lost all his cinemas in Rotterdam when the city was bombed on 14 May 1940. During the Nazi occupation he was deprived of the rest of his property. In July 1942 Tuschinski was transported to the Westerbork concentration camp in the northeast of the Netherlands, and from there to Auschwitz, where he was murdered on 16 September 1942. The Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam was restored to its former glory in 1998-2002. It is located at Reguliersbreestraat and is the most unique and attractive cinema in Amsterdam.
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Experience of time in cinema is a paradox. Cinema as a time art makes temporal transcendence. Film as a kind of Nietzsche’s eternal return determines subjective experience of time. According to A. Pawełczyńska it is possible to indicate three essential ways of understanding of time in cinema: substantialist, attributive and subjective. Deleuze’s theory of time in cinema represents subjective approach. According to Bergson time is creation therefore cinema must be based on a transcendence of time.
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