Audiophilia: audiovisual pleasure and narrative cinema in Jackie Brown

Screen ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-304
Author(s):  
R. Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Cinema

On Landscape in Narrative Cinema

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lefebvre
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Cinema

An audio-visual Gallivant: Psychogeographical soundscapes in the films of Andrew Ktting

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimee Mollaghan
Keyword(s):  
Fine Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Environmental Sound ◽  
Powerful Effect ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Independent Existence

Andrew Ktting is one of the most innovative film-makers working in Britain today, using his distinctive Punk multimedia aesthetic to circumvent not only the conventions of narrative cinema, but also the conventions of experimental film and fine art. One of Ktting's enduring concerns is the psychogeographical use of landscape and soundscape as a catalyst for arresting and inventive investigations into memory and identity. Composer R. Murray Schafer uses the word soundscape to identify sound that describes an environment, actual or abstract, but always a sound relevant to a place (Schafer 1994). The sounds of our environment have a powerful effect on our imaginations and memories and Ktting exploits this effect across his body of work. The use of the disembodied voice is another marked feature of Ktting's films, creating both implied narratives and the evocation of memory. Ktting's bodiless voices have a schizophonic quality to them. Kotting rips sounds and voices from their sources and imbues them with an independent existence that is at liberty to emanate from anywhere in the landscape. This article investigates Ktting's idiosyncratic creation of soundscapes as a filmic reproduction of the human psyche, exploring memory, identity and community through an interweaving of voice, music and environmental sound.

Vestiges of Motherhood: The Maternal Function in Recent Black Cinema

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rizvana Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Historical Imagination ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Cinema ◽  
Black Mother ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Maternal Function ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Current Task ◽  
Film Genres

While the lack of black femme presence is theorized explicitly with respect to film genres and the canon of American cinema in the work of Kara Keeling, the ontological position of the black femme (whom Keeling understands to be both visually impossible and interdicted yet full of cinematic possibility) has long been a point of interrogation in Black Studies with an extensive critical genealogy. In Saidiya Hartman's book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, the loss of the black mother animates the historical imagination of transatlantic slavery, just as her loss is irreducibly felt in relation to its afterlife. In the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, there is an explicit rejection of the potential of the black woman within film, specifically the viability of her maternal function, insofar as the black mother remains categorically essential to the construction of black (masculine) subjectivity. In light of the contradictory arc of this genealogy, the current task is not only to theorize the black maternal as an extension of the black femme, but to bring that position into view as the unthought. The black mother tends to be dramatized as the singular figure through which the cinema cultivates a distinctly black visual historiography. Even when placed under narrative erasure or withheld from view, the mother crystallizes a cinematic black aesthetic that fashions and envisions diasporic culture and forms of black collectivity as tied to a speculative and fraught filial genealogy. The critical arc in black narrative cinema over the last ten years from Get Out to Pariah, to Mother of George, and finally to Moonlight insists upon black motherhood as integral to the aesthetics of form and the genre-making capacities of film. One could go so far as to claim that the elements of cinematic form that drive these narratives reflect aesthetic choices that have to do with coloration, shot position, and narrative flashbacks that are themselves bound up with and inflected through the haunting and cipher-like construction of black maternal figures. Furthermore, these films insist upon simultaneously marking and excluding the mother from the emotional drama of black subjective life and its complex and contradictory expressions of intimacy, which have as much to do with the breaking and splintering of familial bonds as bridging gaps. It is clear that the mother sutures these bonds; she is a scar, a visible reminder and remainder of a terrible historicity that cannot be assimilated into the idealization of the American family.

scholarly journals Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Movie Script

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228

“You can be John Malkovich”: Celebrity, Absurdity, and Convention in Being John Malkovich

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-85
Author(s):  
Kim Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Viewing Practices ◽  
Existential Concerns

Throughout Being John Malkovich, reflexive narrational strategies, diegetic absurdities, and fantastical plot points seek to disrupt the expectations and viewing practices associated with the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema—yet Jonze and Kaufman’s film does not abandon these conventions. Being John Malkovich (like all of Jonze’s films to date) is not comfortably categorized as “arthouse” or “experimental.” Rather, Jonze’s work employs the conventions of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with eccentric plot devices and irony at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Wilkins argues that the most absurd, or eccentric, narrative elements of Being John Malkovich—its ironic focus on celebrity and the ludicrous Malkovich portal—are precisely the mechanisms that enable an essentially unresolvable existential conundrum to be shaped into the conventionally linear narrative structure. Yet these utterly bizarre narrative inclusions also function as diversions; they aim to distract from or make humorous the very existential concerns they narrativize.

Storyboarding, Spectacle and Sequence in Narrative Cinema

Storyboarding ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 84-110
Author(s):  
Chris Pallant ◽  
Steven Price
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Cinema

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

2018 ◽  
pp. 232-266
Author(s):  
Kimberly Lamm
Keyword(s):  
Post Partum ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Collective Reading ◽  
Maternal Bond ◽  
Maternal Desires

Chapter 6 focuses on Laura Mulvey’s theoretical writings on film and her essay film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which it reads in relation to the feminist collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey that took place at the height of Women’s Liberation in Britain. Like Post-Partum Document, Riddles of the Sphinx creates a hieroglyphic aesthetic that mines the feminist possibilities of repressed maternal desires and draws out their connections to British colonial history. Replete with images of writing, the consistent attention to text in Riddles is the means by which Mulvey represents the pleasures of the maternal bond and transfers them into a form of fetishisation that opens onto collaborations between women that move across the lines of race and class. By placing the hieroglyph and the colonial extractions for which it figures in the context of women’s atomised struggles with reproductive labour in late capitalism, Riddles writes collective feminist reading practices that might allow women to correspond across the divisions created by colonial, racial, and class hierarchies and therefore create what Mulvey identifies in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), as a ‘new language of desire.’

Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
Erik Born
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Frame Narrative ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Wax Figures ◽  
Historical Periods

“Cinema Panopticum” explores the central conceit of Waxworks—wax figures that come to life and threaten their creator—in the context of popular wax displays in the Weimar Republic. Commonly credited as a cult classic horror film, Waxworks is better understood in the period’s terminology as an “Episodenfilm,” a popular form of early narrative cinema that presented distinct episodes within a unifying frame narrative. Like other early German anthology films, Waxworks participates in the Weimar critique of historicism, foregoing the particularities of historical periods in favour of universal drives and philosophical themes. In this case, the framing narrative updates the classical Pygmalion myth for film-obsessed German modernity. The film is a testament to early cinema’s so-called “encyclopaedic ambition” and a cautionary tale about the potential fetishisation of the filmic image during the transitional period when cinema was establishing itself in opposition to older forms of representation such as wax figure displays.

Thinking About the Concept of Social Gender With a Film

2020 ◽  
pp. 228-247
Author(s):  
Berceste Gülçin Özdemir
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Public ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Public Sphere

The concept of social gender is an interdisciplinary matter of debate and is still questioned today. Making sense of this concept is understood by the ongoing codes in the social order. However, the fact that men are still positioned as dominating women in the contrast of the public sphere/private sphere prevents the making sense of the concept of gender. This study questions the concept of social gender through the female characters and male characters presented in the film Tersine Dünya (1993) within the framework of Judith Butler's thoughts regarding the notion of the subject. The thoughts of feminist film theorists also bring the strategies of representation of female characters up for discussion. Butler's thoughts and the discourses of feminist film theorists will enable both making sense of social gender and a more concrete understanding of the concept of the subject. The possibility of deconstruction of patriarchal codes by using classical narrative cinema conventions is also brought up for discussion in the examined film.

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