scholarly journals Chanchadas and intermediality

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-30
Author(s):  
Flávia Cesarino Costa ◽  
John Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Musical Performances ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
Brazilian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Domestic Influence ◽  
Is Integration ◽  
Brazilian Film ◽  
The Relationship

This audiovisual essay investigates the intermedial nature of Brazilian film comedies produced during the 1940s and 50s by exploring the musical numbers of Aviso aos navegantes (Calling All Sailors, Watson Macedo, 1950). Brazilian cinema of this period is a privileged arena of different media strategies. Its “mixed” style is informed by Hollywood cinema but also by the domestic influence of radio, Carnival, and by the local forms of comic staging of the teatro de revista (the Brazilian equivalent of music hall or vaudeville). Of particular interest in this regard are the chanchadas, a body of films made between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, that presented musical performances intertwined with comic situations, slender narrative lines and strong connections with the world of Carnival. Our aim is to show how the relationships between the different forms of cultural production in 1950s Brazil can be identified in a specific chanchada, opening a dialogue between musical performances on stage, over the radio, at Carnival and on screen. The essay also examines similarities and differences between chanchadas and the Hollywood musical comedy tradition. One area explored is integration, both in the sense in which it is often used in film studies, to discuss the relationship between the numbers and the narrative, and in reflecting on whether the different elements which feed into the numbers of Aviso aos navegantes are seamlessly combined in the film. Despite the huge popular success of his films, Watson Macedo was considered by many as the most “Americanised” of the directors of that period, adhering less to the critical mechanisms of parody than was the case with his contemporaries. However, if we pay attention to Macedo’s musical numbers, it is evident that these performances are not imperfect copies of Hollywood originals, but have a logic of their own. This audiovisual essay complements Flávia Cesarino Costa’s other contribution to this issue of Alphaville, the article “Building an Integrated History of Musical Numbers in Brazilian Chanchadas”, by exploring related ideas in the context of a single film. As well as the interest of the video essay’s own exploration and argument, the pairing of essays—traditional and videographic—enables readers of this issue to pursue their thinking about chanchadas and intermediality with specific audiovisual material in front of them

scholarly journals Os dispositivos cinematográficos no filme Cidade de Deus / Cinematographic Devices in the Film City of God

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilian Fontes Moreira
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
City Of God ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brazilian Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Brazilian Film ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTIn order to think the current culture, the communication practices, the incidence of interference image in the production of new types of knowledge, in this paper we will approach the relationship between image as cinematic apparatus and its conceptual, historical and technical aspects to analyze its performance as narration. In an era in which it appears that the images intervenes in consciousness and in the contemporary representation and thus is becoming an important device in the revelation of realities and the construction of the social imaginary, the present work analyzes the Brazilian film City of God, conducted by director Fernando Meirelles, in 2002, considered a landmark in Brazilian cinema of the period, by the boldness of the language used to convert to images the history of violent gangs fighting over the control of drug trafficking in a community of the city of Rio de Janeiro. We will try, then, to identify the techniques used by the camera as devices able to create the effects needed to immerse the viewer in the narrative of the film.RESUMOCom a preocupação de pensar a cultura atual, as práticas comunicacionais, a incidência da interferência da imagem na produção de novas formas de saber tentaremos abordar neste trabalho a relação da imagem como dispositivo cinematográfico e seus aspectos conceituais, históricos e técnicos para examinar a sua atuação como narração. Numa era em que se constata que as imagens intervêm na consciência e na representação contemporâneas e, portanto, vêm se impondo como um dispositivo importante na revelação de realidades e na construção do imaginário social, o presente artigo visa analisar o filme brasileiro Cidade de Deus, realizado pelo diretor Fernando Meirelles, em 2002, considerado um marco no cinema brasileiro do período, pela ousadia da linguagem utilizada para converter em imagens a história de gangues violen-tas em disputa pelo controle do tráfico de drogas em uma comunidade da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Tentaremos, então, identificar as técnicas usadas pela câmera como dispositivos capazes de criar os efeitos necessários para imergir o especta-dor na narrativa do filme.

World-Ecological Satire: Peat, Brian O'Nolan, and the Irish Free State's Energy Regime

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Robert Kiely
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Energy Regime ◽  
Energy History ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Site ◽  
Ecological Relations ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
The Relationship

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs  – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource.

Framing The Fosters: jokes, racism and Black and Asian voices in British comedy television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black British ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Cultural Leaders ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.

scholarly journals Bergfelder, Tim, Lisa Shaw, and João Luiz Vieira, editors. Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema. Bergahn, 2017.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cesar Braga-Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
North American ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
American Universities ◽  
Brazilian Cinema ◽  
Brazilian Film

Film studies have come to occupy a central part of the curriculum in literature and culture departments, particularly in Anglophone universities. This trend is reflected in the growing number of monographs and edited volumes on Brazilian cinema that have appeared over the last decade. Whereas the indisputable pioneers and authorities (namely, Randall Johnson and Robert Stam) are based in North American universities, it is interesting that much of the recent work on Brazilian film (in English) is authored by scholars based in British universities.

Fashioning Socialist Visual Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Patriarchal Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Xia Yan

Xia Yan, the underground leader of the left-wing films in the 1930s and top official of the film industry in the PRC since 1954, embodied the cultural history of the CCP. A brief biography of this Communist feminist artist leader disrupts the reductive dichotomy of the Party vs. artists in film studies and illuminates a tension-ridden history of socialist filmmaking that constituted a highly contentious site in the socialist revolution. Situating his politically engagingartistic creativity inside ashiftingpolitical process, this chapter traces Xia Yan’s major role in transmitting the New Culture agenda of transforming a patriarchal culture in socialist cultural production and delineatesdiverse and contradictory politicalpositions and artistic preferences in artists’ innovative experimentsofcreating a socialist new culture. It also analyzes his films that continued the paradigm of revolutionary heroines.

scholarly journals Sisyphean Unproductivity in Narrative Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-320
Author(s):  
Juan Velasquez
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Labour Productivity ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
Charles Chaplin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Film ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between labour, productivity and film. The purpose of this intervention is to suggest that narrative film can show us the unproductive tendencies that humans carry within them but that cannot always make themselves known. These leisurely desires erupt as musicality, ecstasy, and the undoing of the self when we carry out the repetitive gestures of work. This article compares Camus's freedom and Georges Bataille's sovereignty as they share an interest in anti-futurity and anti-productivity and it uses these concepts to propose worker's ecstatic escapes from labour as Sisyphean unproductivity. Using this theoretical framework, I carry out a comparative and formal analysis of Sisyphus (Marcell Jankovics, 1974), Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), The Apartment (Billy Wilder,1960) , Saut ma ville (Chantal Akerman, 1971) and Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000). While the field of film studies has highlighted the role of cinema as a tool for propagating ideologies of productivity, the scenes examined suggest that film also has a history of subverting ideologies of productivity through repetitive, Sisyphean unproductivity. By updating the plight of the Greek hero to 20th and 21st century capitalism, these directors uncover a fundamental, yet impossible, human desire for non-productive activities This re-centering of the unproductive could be useful in future academic re-categorizations of the working class through its desires to not work, that is, it provides preliminary materials for understanding class identities through their deformation, and not just their formation.

The cultural production of Cabaret Voltaire: Marxism, the politics of modernism and post-punk

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the contribution of Cabaret Voltaire to the history of industrial and electronic music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Heavily influenced by the music of Kraftwerk, the Cabs drew upon the dystopian landscapes of William Burroughs to create a paranoid soundscape. Like Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire’s music was influenced by the artistic movements of the twentieth century (most prominently Dada) and drew upon modernist techniques. Especially significant in this regard was their location within post-industrial Sheffield and the ideologies of post-punk more generally. This discussion offers a critical assessment of Cabaret Voltaire as a form of avant-garde music that sought to carefully position itself in the context of the cultural politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Primarily through the work of Marxist aesthetic theory, I seek to offer a critical appreciation of the relationship between Cabaret Voltaire and the influence of Dada and modernism. The aim of the discussion is to reclaim a more critical understanding of Marxism while exploring its arguments in relation to artistic forms of modernism and popular culture. Especially important at this juncture is the rejection of the cultural populism of postmodernism and the reclaiming of a more critical language of evaluation and critique. Here the argument is that whatever Cabaret Voltaire’s limitations they continue to remind us of modernism’s ongoing capacity to offer arresting forms of art and critique.

Sergei Eisenstein

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masha Salazkina ◽  
Katarina Mihailovic
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Standard Curriculum ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
The Relationship

Sergei Eisenstein (Sergei Mikhailovich Eizenshtein, b. Riga, Latvia, 1898–d. Moscow, 1948) remains one of the most celebrated filmmakers and theorists in the history of cinema. He achieved this status internationally during his lifetime, and since his death the overall volume of critical and theoretical writing exploring his work, life, and legacy is surpassed only by that on Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. At least one of his films—Battleship Potemkin (1925)—is inevitably included in every list of “the greatest films ever made,” and both his films and his theoretical writings are a regular part of the standard curriculum of film studies. Eisenstein’s canonical status as a filmmaker from the 1920s through the 1980s can largely be accounted for by the fact that his films have been seen as models for radical political filmmaking, combining antirealist avant-garde cinematic technique with a commitment to the transformation of the political consciousness of the spectator. The availability of archival materials and restorations of unfinished films in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with a renewed interest in historiography within the field of film studies, has led to a reconsideration of Eisenstein’s film legacy. The enduring question that has shaped much of the critical and historical writings on his films has been about the relationship between the ideological mandates of the Soviet state, particularly of the late Stalinist period (1930s–1940s), and the evolution of Eisenstein’s cinematic style.

The Cultural Dynamics of Reception

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Marie-Louise Coolahan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Geographical Regions ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
International Comparative ◽  
The Relationship

The cultural dynamics of reception are best understood as a reiterative process of reshaping and reframing. Reception as an object of critical study embraces first the history of how texts were read, disseminated, and consumed across media, languages, and geographical regions. But if this is the first port of call, such analysis quickly draws in questions about the relationship between reception and production, audience and agency, about contemporary and posthumous reputation. This special issue investigates the ways in which the act of reception is a reiterative process on a continuous spectrum with cultural production. Receivers — of texts, events, reputations — are mediators, creatively reconstituting that which they receive according to their own agendas and contemporary imperatives. The articles in this collection embrace international, comparative, and new material contexts for early modern reception studies as they address poetry, romance, letters, history, hagiography, autobiography, and literary reviews. The transnational perspectives that emerge lead from the Low Countries to Italy, Ireland to France and the Spanish Netherlands, Spain to England, and England to France. The introductory essay for the issue additionally examines recent digital projects concerned with the history of reading and reception, exploring in particular how digital resource design foregrounds questions of representation and our immersion, as critics, in the act of reception.

scholarly journals Undivided object: language, ethnography and sources

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 510-535
Author(s):  
Heloisa Pontes
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Object Language ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Argument ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that anthropology should not avoid studying the world of art and the specialized fields of cultural production. To do this it is necessary to examine the relationship between ethnography, language and social processes, as well as the way in which we make use o four sources (written, oral and visual) in our research. While this is the basic argument of the text, it also moves into a discussion of the sources that are available for the social history of the theater and Brazilian intellectual life from 1940 to 1960: photographs, interviews, reminiscences, biographies, autobiographies as well as books and theater repertories.

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