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Raising this issue is important for several reasons. First of all, settling it would give an answer to the following question: if it is a public good, is then a cost-benefit analysis, which is the main method of studying public financial return, applicable to the fate of a completed movie? Utility is the major criterion in public funds spending, so is it measurable in the case of Bulgarian feature film projects and is there an answer to the question what utility unit is implemented to measure a unit of invested public resource? On the other hand, to what a degree are the methods for allocating public funds consistent with the traditional legal and economical mechanisms for spending public money? Equally important is the question of holding the project’s authors accountable for appropriate spending as well as of the options for an ex post audit by the public institution involved.
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Slovak cinema has to cope with the following conditions: the country’s small unprofitable market, small population size, underdeveloped cinematic infrastructure and lack of audience’s affinity to Slovak films. They largely predetermine its development in the coming years. The paper explores institutional conditions in the European and Central European context based on available studies on economic factors and trends in public support in the era of increasing digitalization in order to point to the current challenges of the domestic environment in relation to the systemic stabilization of the realization base of Slovak cinema.
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After the excesses of his previous terror movies, the Spanish director Jaume Balagueró returns to a more sober narrative to explore the mechanisms of anguish in an oppressive thriller behind closed doors, “Sleep Tight” (“Mientras duermes”, 2011). Influenced by Hitchcock and Polański, he proposes a new variation on the spatial motif of a building which becomes the nest of daily evil embodied by César, an ominous concierge who intrudes into the residents’ intimacy and endeavors to ruin their existence. The present article aims at analyzing the principal filmic and narrative strategies of anguish deployed in this movie. The director elaborates a Manichean costumbrista tale where he probes the atavistic fear of a nocturnal monstrous presence that may perturb the reassuring normality of domestic space. Through the construction of a rigorous rhetoric of repetition, Balagueró places the viewer in a disconcerting narrative in‑between and invites him to participate actively in the pernicious game orchestrated by his protagonist, depicted as a methodical agent of everyday terror.
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This study takes a number of popular films from the New Cinema of Turkey as references to investigate a dominant psychosocial condition in Turkishness. Based on the myth of Crazy Dumrul that represents the transition from Turkish-Paganism to Turkish-Islam where Dumrul faces the angel of death, this study looks through a subject’s conscience in the eye of the “Law”, which in Dumrul’s case restrains access to “truth” while he is trapped between two worlds: Earth and the hereafter, material and spiritual. This is conceptualized as a tragic condition, as the dominant psychosocial condition over male subjectivity in the recent cinema of Turkey.
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In the late 1970s, Steve Tesich appeared in Hollywood as a new writer with a fresh set of ideas framed within conventional narrative structures. Having found the space to present personal content within mainstream production, the Yugoslav immigrant created a nostalgic vision of America, breathing vitality into one withered social image. Permeated with the playfulness of ideals on account of which he had embraced his new homeland, his screenplays also leave traces of bitterness of an immigrant whose American Dream was dispersing before his eyes. Tesich’s cinematic expression is led by mild comedy, as well as strong characterization which enables pursuit of layered answers to questions posed by classism, immigraton and social activism. Out of six realized screenplays penned by Tesich, this article deals primarily with films Breaking Away and Four Friends as the most representative samples of his cinematic work and examines them in relation to the norms of the entertainment industry.
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Out of the numerous examples of feminine victims in the Romanian literature and historiography, three stand out as a source of inspiration for the Shakespearian narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. The foundation of moral and political values in ancient Rome is represented by the famous Abduction of the Sabines in Ab Urbe Condita, that of Virginia and the chapter of Lucrece’s rape. In his poem, Shakespeare presents Rome undergoing a period of transition, the starting point for the evolution of the Roman Republic, founded on the death of Lucrece. While in Titus Livius’ work the legendary victims are perceived as essential for the salvation of Rome, and they bring legitimacy and political pragmatism, in Shakespeare’s case Lucrece is the image of “sacrifice” turning “sacred” for its own sake.
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In my paper I will discuss the career of, a director born in 1942 in Nis in Yugoslavia, whose career, spanning over forty years and Yugoslavia, West Germany and Serbia, excellently illustrates the concepts of independent and transnational cinema and their interface. Žilnik’s career well illustrates the advantages and pitfalls of “independent filmmaking”, especially in the context of Eastern Europe. Hence, in my paper, I will use his case to examine this concept, drawing on Marx and Marxist thought, such as the critique of the “culture industry” by Horkheimer and Adorno and the concept of “critical media” by Christian Fuchs, and the history of Eastern Europe and its cinema, with its figure of “artist-dissident” and the specific case of Yugoslavia. My main point is that there is no “independent cinema” in absolute terms; cinema can only be independent from something, hence ‘independent cinema’ means different things in different cultural contexts.
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Many discussions that began with the conflicts and historical events between the Armenians and the Muslim Turks in the last days of the Ottoman State have come up to date. However, despite the fact that about a century has passed since the events of 1915, different namings have been made for the events that happened between the two nations. Of course, being an accused target of an invented genocide is perhaps a heavier accusation than being a perpetrator. The painful situation will be even more painful if historic finds are left on the edge and the events of 1915 are drawn towards the arena of politics, and if novels, films and oral and / or local history methods are used as arguments. One of the arguments used in this study, "40 Days in Musa Dag", is emphasized, and it is emphasized that a legendary situation is shown as a reality despite the lack of evidence. As a result, it has been concluded that the source of written or visual media that appeals to a target audience cannot be verified without internal and external criticism without reaching the primary sources.
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In this paper I will analyze Serbian documentary films about guest workers dating from the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century, using the perspective of visual anthropology. I question the popular cultural notions about guest workers in films Весеље у Ждрелу (A Celebration in Zdrelo) by author Kamenko Katic, Звона позне јесени (The Bells of Late Autumn) by author Zoran Milenovic, Кад је Милорад удавао ћерку (When Milorad Gave His Daughter in Marriage) by author Vladimir Milisavljevic, Странац тамо, странац овде (A Foreigner There, a Foreigner Here) by author Sandra Mandic and 242 метра живота (242 Meters of Life) by author Novica Savic. The films deal with a number of issues: the economic aspects of guest workers’ lives, their liminal character, the issues of the second and third generations of guest workers, going away "temporarily" to work, and religious rituals. Even though the films were made recently, they all follow the lives of Vlach and Serbian, or rather Yugoslav guest workers who left to find temporary work abroad in Western Europe in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This serves the purpose of avoiding to deal with contemporary reasons for emigrating from Serbia and thus the possible critiques of current regimes or policies in power at the time the films were made.
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Цель статьи проанализировать феномен мощного влияния комедийной трилогии «Фантомас» А. Юнебеля на молодежь УССР в 60-70-х гг. ХХ века. Методологическую основу исследования составляют исторический и сравнительный подходы, позволяющие проанализировать роль и значение трилогии «Фантомас» А. Юнебеля в дискурсе социума УССР. Использован метод описания и анализа архивных документов. Научная новизна заключается в полученных результатах анализа успеха кинопроката 1967, который вызвал неожиданный взрыв подросткового хуліганства по данням следующего года, он вырос на 15% и стал объектом заинтересованности КГБ. Одной из причин, как предполагается, было подсознательное восхищение подростков уровнем жизни в Западной Европе и протест против замкнутости советского общества. Выводы. В статье выяснено, что призывы к свержению власти, уничтожение большевистской символики под маркой «фантомасов», преобладали в западных областях Украины. Однако, они не были редкостью и в других регионах УССР. Часть хулиганских выходок «фантомасов» отражали увлечение уголовной культурой и, соответственно, различными формами психологического садизма. Эмоционально близкими к ними были неонацистские и антисемитские проявления.
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Nebojša Popov, Raspamećivanje Vesna Pešić, Rat: lakše početi nego završiti Mirko Tepavac, Odlaganje sve skuplje Dušan Mojsin, Profesional-izam Ž. Mihić, Nevidljiva nacija Teofil Pančić, „Podzemlje« i komentari Muvanje s vremenom Nada Mijatović, Lepše je s humanošću Jelena Santić, Pakrac - juče, danas, sutra Olivija Rusovac, Opiranje ratu i dezorganizaciji Dušan Kecmanović, Nacionalizam, razbojništvo i lopovluk Znalac majstora smrti (Marko Vešović, Smrt je majstor iz Srbije, Bosanska knjiga, Sarajevo 1994) Novo kolo Beogradskog kruga Nebojša Popov, Čekajući katarzu Nenad Stefanov, Refleksija ili denuncijacija Džemal Hatibović, Jesu li Muslimani Srbi ili su Hrvati? Miodrag Stanisavljević, Aždajin obrok
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The pact with the devil is a well known literary theme. Other arts have also treated it in different ways. The general idea is always the price that needs to be paid for the “benefits” offered. There is always a moral: the price – losing one’s soul forever – is way too high as the contract has a limited duration and the time elapses very quickly. In a society where consumption has reached enormous proportions and the illusion of happiness it fuels is more and more fragile, talking to children in school about the traps that can come along can only be beneficial. Beside literary texts, film can also become a useful and pleasant didactical support, a starting point for fruitful debates. Moreover, the school curriculum itself recommends cinematographic exploitation when its product is according to the interests and quests of the children. School focuses more and more on the personal development of pupils. In this respect, literature is an ideal means of supporting this objective. The approach on literature in school in terms of personal development has more and more partisans among teachers. A cinematographic argument in this direction is the film Shortcut to Happiness (2003), in which we discover an entire plea in favour of writing and writers gifting worlds.
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Initially produced in 1968 as a three-part TV miniseries, and restored and re-edited in 2008 as a feature-length film, Dark Windows (Pimedad aknad, Tõnis Kask, Estonia) explores interpersonal relations and everyday life in September 1944, during the last days of Estonia’s occupation by Nazi Germany. The story focuses on two young women and the struggles they face in making moral choices and falling in love with righteous men. The one who slips up and falls in love with a Nazi is condemned and made to feel responsible for the national decay. This article explores how the category of gender becomes a marker in the way the film reconstructs and reconstitutes the images of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The article also discusses the re-appropriation process and analyses how re-editing relates to remembering of not only the filmmaking process and the wartime occupation, but also the Estonian women and how the ones who ‘slipped up’ are later reintegrated into the national narrative. Ultimately, the article seeks to understand how this film from the Soviet era is remembered as it becomes a part of Estonian national filmography.
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The article argues that Wojtek Smarzowski’s film Rose (Róża, Poland, 2011) undermines the dominant bigendered logic of screen death and suffering in the Polish films depicting the experience of World War II. In these films, there is a significant absence of images of female suffering and death, which is striking when compared to the abundant images of wounded and dying male bodies, usually represented as a lavish visual spectacle. This unrepresented female death serves as a ‘structuring absence’ that governs the systematic signifying practices of Polish cinema. Most importantly, it expels the female experience of World War II from the realm of history to the realm of the mythical. This representational regime has been established in the Polish national cinema during the 1950s, especially in Andrzej Wajda’s films, and is still proving its longevity. As the author argues, Smarzowski’s Rose is perhaps the most significant attempt to undermine this gendered cinematic discourse. Specifically, the essay explores the ways in which Smarzowski’s Rose departs from previous dominant modes of representation of the World War II experience in Polish cinema, especially its gendered aspect. Firstly, it examines how Rose abandons the generic conventions of both war film and historical drama and instead, utilises selected conventions of melodrama to open up the textual space in which to represent the female experience of historical events. Then the author looks more closely at this experience and discusses the film’s representation of the suffering female body to argue that it subverts the national narrative of the war experience that privileges male suffering. A close analysis of the relationship between sound and image in the scenes of bodily violence reveals how the film reclaims the female body from the abstract domain of national allegory and returns it to the realm of individual embodied experience. The article concludes that Rose presents the female body as resisting the singular ideological inscription, and instead, portrays it as simultaneously submitting to and resisting the gendered violence of war.
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This article is devoted to the theme of women and war in the films of Jānis Streičs, possibly the most influential Latvian film director. In the course of his career, which spanned nearly 50 years, Streičs made films that were popular in Latvia, as well as throughout the Soviet Union. He is one of the few Latvian film directors who managed to continue a comparatively stable career in the newly reindependent Republic of Latvia. Streičs skilfully used the canonised means of expression of classical cinema and superficially fulfilled the demands of socialist realism to provide appealing and life-asserting narratives for the audiences. Being a full-time film director at Riga Film Studio, and gradually becoming a master of the studio system, Jānis Streičs managed to subordinate the system to his own needs, outgrowing it and becoming an auteur with an idiosyncratic style and consistently developed topics. The most expressive elements of his visual style can be found in his war films, which are presented as women’s reflections on war. In this article, Streičs’ oeuvre in its entirety provides the background for an analysis of two of his innovative war films. Meetings on the Milky Way (Tikšanās uz Piena ceļa, Latvia, 1985) rejects the classical narrative structure, instead offering fragmentary war episodes that were united by two elements – the road and women. In Carmen Horrendum (Latvia, 1989) Streičs uses an even more complicated structure that combines reality, visions and dreams. After watching this film, the only conclusion we can come to with certainty is that war does not have a woman’s face and, in general, war has no traces of humanity. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how World War II, a theme stringently controlled by Soviet ideology, provided the impetus for a search for an innovative film language.
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The article deals with the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden in 1946 as represented in Per Olov Enquist’s novel The Legionnaires: A Documentary Novel (Legionärerna. En roman om baltutlämningen, 1968) and Johan Bergenstråhle’s film A Baltic Tragedy (Baltutlämningen. En film om ett politiskt beslut Sverige 1945, Sweden, 1970). The theoretical framework is taken from trauma studies and its equivalent within film studies, where trauma is seen as a repeated occurrence of a past event. In this regard, literature and moving images become the means of reaching the traumatic event, a way to relive it. What separates the extradition of the Baltic soldiers from other traumas, such as the Holocaust, is that it functions as a guilt complex related to the failure to prevent the tragedy, which is connected to Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II and the appeasement of all the warring nations. It is argued that this is a collective trauma created by Enquist’s novel, which blew it into national proportions. However, Bergenstråhle’s film changes the focus of the trauma by downplaying the bad conscience of the Swedes. In this way, the film aims to create new witnesses to the extradition affair. The analysis looks at the reception of both the novel and film in order to explain the two different approaches to the historical event, as well as the two different time periods in which they were produced. The authors argue that the two years that separate the appearance of the novel and the film explain the swing undergone by the political mood of the late 1960s towards a deflated revolution of the early 1970s, when the film arrived on screens nationwide. However, in terms of creating witnesses to the traumatic event, the book and film manage to stir public opinion to the extent that the trauma changes from being slowly effacing to being collectively ‘experienced’ through remembrance. The paradox is that, while the novel still functions as a vivid reminder of the painful aftermath caused by Swedish neutrality during World War II, the film is almost completely forgotten today. The film’s mode of attacking the viewers with an I-witness account, the juxtaposition and misconduct led to a rejection of the narrative by Swedish audiences.
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The present paper analyses the role of social and cultural background knowledge in the cognition of meaning. Language and culture integrated studies have long been in the focus of attention. In order to study the language of a target culture, one should understand how human beings construct meanings, understand processes of meaning-making, account for different meanings, and examine their effects in social life. The language cannot be interpreted in the right way without taking the target culture into account. In the knowledge-based society people of all professions have realized that they will be more successful if they take “cultural“ factors into consideration.
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Suha Arın (1942-2004) broke a new ground with over sixty documentaries produced from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1990s. Arın is accepted as an ecole in the field of documentary cinema because he trained many students during his life time. According to Arın, documentary cinema is an intersection where science meets art. Therefore, a documentary filmmaker must be both a scientist and an artist. Arın conducted a rigorous research process in his own documentaries and tried to put the subject he had handled into a “framework”. Reevaluation of Sinan Through Hüseyin Anka (1989) is one of Arın's works that brought his views on documentary cinema the closest to the ideal level. The aim of this study is to analyze the creative approach of the documentary which combines science and art. Suha Arın's creative approach which handles the subject in three planes keeps the documentary away from being an ordinary artist portrait. In the first plane, sculptor Hüseyin Anka Özkan's (1909-2001) reevaluation of the sculpture of Sinan the Architect (1489-1588) by inspiring his image in a newly discovered miniature and his memories is presented. The pile of mud on the bench evolves into an impressive figure of Sinan the Architect in the skillful hands of Hüseyin Anka who works with great passion. In the second plane, the story of the chief architect of the Ottoman Empire is conveyed through the mouth of one of the most important sculptors in the history of the Republic. Hüseyin Anka reshapes the sculpture according to the course of the events he tells. In the third plane, Suha Arın establishes a parallelism between the lives of these two great artists -one from the Republic and the other from the Ottoman Empire. The artworks of three great masters are exhibited in a single documentary.
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