{"title":"Screening Fears: On Protective Media, by Francesco Casetti","authors":"Malte Hagener","doi":"10.33178/alpha.27.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.27.24","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"51 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141687784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive, by Naomi DeCelles","authors":"Jonathan Devine","doi":"10.33178/alpha.27.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.27.22","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"3 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141684295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Architecture, Film, and the In-between: Spatio-Cinematic Betwixt, edited by Vahid Vadat and James F. Kerestes","authors":"Shannon Weidner","doi":"10.33178/alpha.27.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.27.34","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"7 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141686402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article appraises developments in soundtracks of narrative fiction features based on the Northern Ireland Troubles, focusing on selected titles released in the post-ceasefire period that was consolidated by the Anglo-Irish (“Good Friday”) agreement of 1998. It does this with reference to earlier approaches to music and sound for Troubles-themed film, and by drawing on Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s sound-design-is-the-new-score proposition. The article advances “sonic gaze” as a pertinent critical lens through which to complement artistic appraisals of historical and contemporary soundtracks in light of political and colonial contexts and legacies. In comparison to earlier Troubles-themed film, a small number of narrative fiction features from the turn of the twenty-first century propose alternative positions and/or innovations in their overall sound design. Readings of Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998), Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) and ’71 (Yann Demange, 2014) interpret several significant soundtrack developments. These arise from the involvement of popular music producers, notably David Holmes, technological affordances (production and postproduction) and alternative artistic perspectives that interrupted a colonial-anthropological sonic gaze. The article concludes that Hunger comes closest to Liz Greene and Kulezic-Wilson’s theorisations on the integrated soundtrack and on narrative film’s potential for achieving a holistic audiovisual musicality.
{"title":"Blurring the line? Music, sound and “sonic gaze” in post-ceasefire Troubles-themed film","authors":"John O’Flynn","doi":"10.33178/alpha.27.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.27.18","url":null,"abstract":"This article appraises developments in soundtracks of narrative fiction features based on the Northern Ireland Troubles, focusing on selected titles released in the post-ceasefire period that was consolidated by the Anglo-Irish (“Good Friday”) agreement of 1998. It does this with reference to earlier approaches to music and sound for Troubles-themed film, and by drawing on Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s sound-design-is-the-new-score proposition. The article advances “sonic gaze” as a pertinent critical lens through which to complement artistic appraisals of historical and contemporary soundtracks in light of political and colonial contexts and legacies. In comparison to earlier Troubles-themed film, a small number of narrative fiction features from the turn of the twenty-first century propose alternative positions and/or innovations in their overall sound design. Readings of Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998), Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) and ’71 (Yann Demange, 2014) interpret several significant soundtrack developments. These arise from the involvement of popular music producers, notably David Holmes, technological affordances (production and postproduction) and alternative artistic perspectives that interrupted a colonial-anthropological sonic gaze. The article concludes that Hunger comes closest to Liz Greene and Kulezic-Wilson’s theorisations on the integrated soundtrack and on narrative film’s potential for achieving a holistic audiovisual musicality.","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141688590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Addressing an increasingly globalised housing crisis, European filmmakers have turned their attention to the precarity of home, generating a vast mediascape of activist documentaries, essay films, shorts, and some features. Adopting a film and urbanism approach, in this article I take a specific focus on the short film form, framing it as a space for experimentation, and offering a snapshot of a wider transnational corpus of media. I compare two 2019 short films by two emerging women artists: British Ayo Akingbade’s Dear Babylon and Portuguese Leonor Teles Dogs Barking at Birds (Cães Que Ladram Aos Pássaros). These artists’ works establish film as a form of resistance while, at the same time, being rooted in an understanding of socio-economic inequality in housing. Purposedly merging observational, participatory methods with the fictional, these two films share a focus on young people in uncertain living conditions. Grappling with their individual situations the youth at the centre of these stories build forms of resistance to their present housing struggles in the attempt to shape a better future for themselves and their community.
为应对日益全球化的住房危机,欧洲电影人将目光转向了居所的不稳定性,拍摄了大量的活动纪录片、散文电影、短片和一些故事片。在本文中,我采用了电影与城市化的方法,特别关注短片形式,将其视为一个实验空间,并为更广泛的跨国媒体提供了一个缩影。我比较了两位新兴女艺术家在 2019 年创作的两部短片:英国阿约-阿金巴德(Ayo Akingbade)的《亲爱的巴比伦》和葡萄牙莱昂诺尔-特勒斯(Leonor Teles)的《狗吠鸟叫》(Cães Que Ladram Aos Pássaros)。这些艺术家的作品将电影作为一种反抗形式,同时又植根于对住房中社会经济不平等的理解。这两部影片旨在将观察、参与方法与虚构相结合,共同关注生活条件不稳定的年轻人。这些故事的中心人物--青年--在各自的境遇中,建立起对当前住房问题的抗争形式,试图为自己和社区创造一个更美好的未来。
{"title":"Precarity and resistance: Mediating home across contemporary Europe through the short hybrid film","authors":"Anna Viola Sborgi","doi":"10.33178/alpha.26.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.08","url":null,"abstract":"Addressing an increasingly globalised housing crisis, European filmmakers have turned their attention to the precarity of home, generating a vast mediascape of activist documentaries, essay films, shorts, and some features. Adopting a film and urbanism approach, in this article I take a specific focus on the short film form, framing it as a space for experimentation, and offering a snapshot of a wider transnational corpus of media. I compare two 2019 short films by two emerging women artists: British Ayo Akingbade’s Dear Babylon and Portuguese Leonor Teles Dogs Barking at Birds (Cães Que Ladram Aos Pássaros). These artists’ works establish film as a form of resistance while, at the same time, being rooted in an understanding of socio-economic inequality in housing. Purposedly merging observational, participatory methods with the fictional, these two films share a focus on young people in uncertain living conditions. Grappling with their individual situations the youth at the centre of these stories build forms of resistance to their present housing struggles in the attempt to shape a better future for themselves and their community.","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"4 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140733058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, by William Carroll","authors":"David Franklin","doi":"10.33178/alpha.26.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"20 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139855714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The emergence of virtual reality (VR) humanitarian filmmaking as a genre over the past ten years has generated a large body of critical debate around the efficacy and ethics of VR as a tool for generating empathy towards marginalised communities. Whilst numerous studies have indicated the potential for VR to impact empathy levels of end users, there have been recurrent critiques of the power dynamics of VR production, as well as the value of empathy as a means of producing social change. Lacking in these discussions has been a detailed consideration of VR aesthetics and the extent to which stylistic strategies impact audience positioning. Through the example of the animated VR experience The Key (Celine Tricart, 2019), this article will explore experience design in the context of ethical debates around humanitarian VR. As an interactive, narrative experience that addresses themes of loss and displacement, The Key can be productively analysed in relation to both VR ethics and wider cultural understandings of home and belonging. Responding to ethical debates around proximity within immersive experiences, the article will examine aesthetic strategies within The Key for ensuring what Roger Silverstone has labelled “proper distance” between the user and the virtually represented space. Through its use of visual abstraction and simplification, as well as the limited physical interaction it affords with its virtual world, the virtual home of The Key will be understood as a site of resistance to universalising narratives of home, one which invites critical reflection on the factors that determine our access to shelter.
{"title":"The key: Abstraction, embodiment, and proper distance within the virtual home","authors":"C. Holohan","doi":"10.33178/alpha.26.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.09","url":null,"abstract":"The emergence of virtual reality (VR) humanitarian filmmaking as a genre over the past ten years has generated a large body of critical debate around the efficacy and ethics of VR as a tool for generating empathy towards marginalised communities. Whilst numerous studies have indicated the potential for VR to impact empathy levels of end users, there have been recurrent critiques of the power dynamics of VR production, as well as the value of empathy as a means of producing social change. Lacking in these discussions has been a detailed consideration of VR aesthetics and the extent to which stylistic strategies impact audience positioning. Through the example of the animated VR experience The Key (Celine Tricart, 2019), this article will explore experience design in the context of ethical debates around humanitarian VR. As an interactive, narrative experience that addresses themes of loss and displacement, The Key can be productively analysed in relation to both VR ethics and wider cultural understandings of home and belonging. Responding to ethical debates around proximity within immersive experiences, the article will examine aesthetic strategies within The Key for ensuring what Roger Silverstone has labelled “proper distance” between the user and the virtually represented space. Through its use of visual abstraction and simplification, as well as the limited physical interaction it affords with its virtual world, the virtual home of The Key will be understood as a site of resistance to universalising narratives of home, one which invites critical reflection on the factors that determine our access to shelter.","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"34 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139854311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Utilising interviews from a range of caregivers and teachers alongside textual analysis of circulating and non-circulating videos made by children during the COVID-19 quarantine, this article examines the collaborative, experimental models of media making that emerged at this unique time. Children’s media-making practices during quarantine provided a window into and between personal dwelling spaces and private details, disrupting conventions of family self-representation while forcing a confrontation with the capitalist imperative to separate work and private life and for parents to produce, share, and monetize personal media content. This transformation in home mode media is bound up in making visible the incommensurability of home life and office labour, and the insistence of care (for each other) over careful production (of family and professional images).
{"title":"When contexts collapse: How ubiquitous video cameras in the home during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns transformed family representation","authors":"Lauren S. Berliner","doi":"10.33178/alpha.26.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.11","url":null,"abstract":"Utilising interviews from a range of caregivers and teachers alongside textual analysis of circulating and non-circulating videos made by children during the COVID-19 quarantine, this article examines the collaborative, experimental models of media making that emerged at this unique time. Children’s media-making practices during quarantine provided a window into and between personal dwelling spaces and private details, disrupting conventions of family self-representation while forcing a confrontation with the capitalist imperative to separate work and private life and for parents to produce, share, and monetize personal media content. This transformation in home mode media is bound up in making visible the incommensurability of home life and office labour, and the insistence of care (for each other) over careful production (of family and professional images).","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"28 51","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139795354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema, by William Carroll","authors":"David Franklin","doi":"10.33178/alpha.26.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"17 16","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139796037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A prominent trope in so-called banlieue cinema—French cinema focused on housing projects on the outskirts of large French cities largely inhabited by migrants and their descendants—represents precarious migrant homes, and by extension entire neighborhoods, as dysfunctional and cut off from social life. This essay explores representations of precarious migrant homes that resist such polarising media images, and that insist on a porous privacy as a precondition for narrative and subjective development—for the ability to thrive—while pointing out the often gendered and precarious nature of such porosity. The natural and built specificities of the Mediterranean coast have often provided a productively rich set for such revisions, including for auteurs such as Claire Denis and Abdellatif Kechiche to develop their distinctive styles. Lesser-known filmmakers, such as Bania Medjbar and Hafsia Herzi, emerge in the wake of earlier revisionist films. Less focused on developing distinctive styles, they are invested in character-driven stories, and on stories that feature a range of characters and thus narrative options, while pointing out the gendered complexities of precariously porous homes.
{"title":"Porous privacies: Gender, migration, and precarious homes in early twenty-first century narrative films from the French Mediterranean","authors":"Sabine Haenni","doi":"10.33178/alpha.26.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.26.03","url":null,"abstract":"A prominent trope in so-called banlieue cinema—French cinema focused on housing projects on the outskirts of large French cities largely inhabited by migrants and their descendants—represents precarious migrant homes, and by extension entire neighborhoods, as dysfunctional and cut off from social life. This essay explores representations of precarious migrant homes that resist such polarising media images, and that insist on a porous privacy as a precondition for narrative and subjective development—for the ability to thrive—while pointing out the often gendered and precarious nature of such porosity. The natural and built specificities of the Mediterranean coast have often provided a productively rich set for such revisions, including for auteurs such as Claire Denis and Abdellatif Kechiche to develop their distinctive styles. Lesser-known filmmakers, such as Bania Medjbar and Hafsia Herzi, emerge in the wake of earlier revisionist films. Less focused on developing distinctive styles, they are invested in character-driven stories, and on stories that feature a range of characters and thus narrative options, while pointing out the gendered complexities of precariously porous homes.","PeriodicalId":378992,"journal":{"name":"Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media","volume":"63 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139796836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}