Poetics of Seriality: Socialist Architecture in Eastern European Animation

This article reflects on the ways in which animation critically engages with the transformation of city spaces and hence with politics of space more generally. Works of Polish and Czechoslovak animators, namely Hieronim Neumann, Zbigniew Rybcziński, Jiří Barta, and Zdeněk Smetana, serve as examples of animated films that address the phenomenon of urban development in the former Eastern Bloc. Through these examples, I examine how the dominant model of architecture between 1950 and 1990—the prefabricated concrete housing project—figured in cinematic narratives of the pre-digital era. Animation engaged with the transformation of city spaces on multiple levels: in terms of aesthetics (designs, interiors, surfaces), production modes (seriality, compression, simultaneity), and sociopolitical issues. Understanding what we might today call “serial aesthetics” alongside the social concerns that these works of animation raised provides us with a valuable historical perspective on the medium as a platform for negotiating the boundaries and overlaps between public, personal, and political spaces.

THE ANALYSIS OF SARTRE’S ‘ESENSE’ AND ‘SUBJECTIVITY’ IN DISNEY PIXAR’S SOUL ANIMATION

<p>From the start, the philosophical movement that came to be known as existentialism was associated with literature. This possibility happens because there is a natural affinity between existential philosophy and narrative forms of art. On one hand, existentialist concur on the primacy of individual existence, of the lived experience of concrete human beings. On the other hand, cinematic narratives tell stories of beings such as ourselves, helping us to make sense of our existence and opening up probabilities that we might never have pondered otherwise (Shaw, 2017). Interestingly, Time.com stated that Pixar films are the philosophical of the animation world. Here lies the reason why the writer decided to analyze the portrayal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous phrase ‘Existence Precedes Essence’ in the latest Disney Pixar animation, Soul. Sartre argued that for human beings, our existence precedes our essence. In addition, Sartre’s notion of ‘existence’ characterized in terms of consciousness, free choice and ‘subjectivity’. For Sartre, the first act of consciousness is to choose. This study shows that Disney Pixar’sSoul does portray Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’ through Joe’s life – human beings have no fixed preordained essence or definition. Moreover, Sartre’s idea of consciousness or subjectivity can be seen from 22’s decision to be dared to live.</p>

Hollywood’s Bad Muslims: Misrepresentations and the Channeling of Racial Violence

The cinemas of Arab and Muslim societies encompass a substantial number of film genres produced locally or in the diaspora. Arab and Muslim filmmakers experiment with different cinematic narratives, styles, and hybrid forms: auteur, documentary, diasporic, migrant, Third Cinema, and transnational productions. Their richness, diverse thematic foci, creative stylistic characteristics, and ability to reach global audiences recently motivated film scholars and other academics in Europe and the United States to consider designating a category called “Muslim Cinema” and defining its contours. The influence of these rich cinemas in contesting Hollywood’s demonization of Muslims, the conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, and the proliferation of anti-Muslim racism in Western discourse, however, remains very limited. Therefore, this article argues that the idea of such a category, if one were to be created, should explore venues to address Hollywood’s evolving forms of racializing Muslims and their relationship with the current institutionalization of anti-Muslim racism in the United States. Through a brief survey of Hollywood’s contemporary productions about Muslims, this article analyzes the impact of moving images on representation, particularly the fossilized characterization of Muslims as evil, and identifies three areas in American cinema and political discourse that could belong to this category: the first is Hollywood’s uninterrupted flow of making essentializing and essentialized narratives that conflate Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, and normalizes violence against them; the second deals with the transition from Islamophobia to anti-Muslim racism and explains its sanctioning by the US government; the third addresses the morphing of Islam into a race.

Locating the Tawa’if Courtesan-Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation

The development of the Hindi/Urdu cinema is intimately connected to the history of artistic performance in India in two important ways. Not only did hereditary music and dance practitioners play key roles in building this cinema, representations of these performers and their practices have been, and continue to be, the subject of Indian film narratives, genres, and tropes. I begin with this history in order to explore the Muslim religio-cultural and artistic inheritance that informs Hindi/Urdu cinema, as well as examine how this heritage has been incorporated into the cinematic narratives that help construct distinct gendered, religious, and national identities. My specific focus is on the figure of the tawa’if dancer, often equated with North Indian culture and nautch dance performance. Analyzing the ways in which traces of the tawa’if appear in two recent films, Dedh Ishqiya and Begum Jaan, I show how this figure is placed in a larger representational regime that sustains nationalist formations of contemporary Indian identity. As I demonstrate, even in the most blatant attempts to define the Indian nation as “Hindu,” the “Muslimness” of the tawa’if—and by extension the cinema she informed in ways both real and representational—is far from relinquished.

Fear in the fantastic narrative IT: a literary and cinematographic analysis

The present study aims to analyze the manifestation of fear in the fantastic narrative It, in both literature and cinema. Supernatural themes are a constant in fictional prose, providing an increase in studies on the relationship between fear and fantastic narratives. As theoretical su- pport, we build on the literary scholarship of Yi-Fu Tuan (2005), Stephen King (2013), David Roas (2014), Marcel Martin (2003) and Jacques Aumont (2013). As for methodology, a con- tent analysis model is adopted in a bibliographic, exploratory and qualitative approach. It, A novel, as a fantastic narrative, destabilizes our sources of security by questioning the validity of the systems and beliefs created by and imposed upon on humanity. The results illustrate how the fantastic genre has been characterized as presenting us phenomena and situations that signal a transgression of our reality. This rupture with the real is, therefore, a fundamen- tal effect of fantastic narratives which have also been explored in cinematic narratives.

Practical Geopolitics in Cinematic Narratives of Marvel’s The Avengers Film Franchise

This article implies that cinematic narratives project practical geopolitical discourses by using the example of Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success – The Avengers film franchise. The conceptualisation of imaginary threats in the films that follow the main storyline of the Avengers assembly, determined by the time and the geographic space, give those threats a symbolical manifestation that tends to overlap with the practical geopolitical notions of American foreign policy, as well as contemporary international politics. The interpretative textual analysis of the films’ narratives and their relations to world politics, hence, presents the central methodology of this article. The relation between those two has a capacity to transmit a subconscious message to blockbusters’ consumers about preferable practical geopolitical visions in contemporary world politics. Simply, the paper shows how cinematic narratives form an identity that is deeply securitised and able to capture the Zeitgeist of world’s politics.

Renegotiating the screenplay: Drawing as a method for narrative development in a short film

This article considers a non-written form of screenplay. In so doing, it illustrates a trajectory of thinking where drawing methods were employed in the development of a cinematic narrative. These visual approaches replaced creative processing normally associated with writing. In discussing the author’s short film Sparrow, the exposition examines three processes. The first method, gestational drawing, was employed as a ‘story finding’ device. The second, immersive drawing, was used to refine thematic intensity in the work. Finally, directorial drawing was employed as a catalyst for discussion when collaborating with actors and production crew. In discussing these drawing methods, the article proposes the concept of ‘screenplay’ as a verb and an active space where a developer of cinematic narratives might work beyond the parameters of writing, to ideate, refine and artistically compose image-led, cinematic narratives.

Mental Health in Times of COVID-19: An Exploration of the Representation of Mental Health in Pandemic Literary and Cinematic Narratives

Pandemics though concern the medical health of a certain community or communities, also have a significant impact on the mental health of the members of that community. Each section of society is affected, albeit differently, in a pandemic. Art and literature engage with and represent society and all its mores. In a pandemic as well, these modes of representation assume a special responsibility and role. This paper seeks to analyse the representation of the mental health of individuals and society through literary and artistic mediums. In the case of artistic mediums, cinematic portrayals will be the centre of study. These representations, in turn, affect one’s mental state and understanding of a situation. The paper will thus, study and evaluate certain literary and cinematic texts, their representation of mental health, and their applicability to the COVID-19 pandemic using established theories as supporting material to substantiate the claims made in the study of the aforementioned works.

Anlatı İçinde Anlatı: “Into The Woods (Sihirli Orman)” Filminin Peri Masalı Anlatıları İçindeki Gezintisi

Myths, epics, and tales have survived for centuries in the oral expression tradition and have been permanently transcribed from oral tradition into written form. They are the most frequently recreated narratives in the cinema with their fantastic narrative structures. Hollywood cinema has been using tales as visual narratives for years. Tales, which have been turned into a structure open to the interpretation in accordance with the changing world, on the one hand is being reediting continuously. On the other hand, they gain new appearances along with intertwined narrative structures. In Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2014), four different fairy tales were used together. In this study, it is aimed to determine what kind of changes has been carried out in the film in terms of the different stages of the fairy tales. For this purpose, while collecting the data by examining the narrative structure of the fairy tales, the action areas are identified in terms of the “five components” in the Greimas’ ‘canonical narrative’. Briefly, the main object in this paper is to explicate the status of the film within the types of the cinematic narratives.