From Songfilms to Telecomics: Vallée Video and the New Market for Postwar Animation

From 1948–1952, Rudy Vallée, a successful performer whose career spanned radio, film, recorded music and stage entertainment, expanded his operations into the burgeoning US television market with the launch of his independent production company, Vallée Video. One of hundreds of forgotten companies that arose during this period to meet growing demand for programming content, Vallée Video offers an important case study for understanding animation workers’ role in postwar television production. Drawing on corporate records and films preserved in the Rudy Vallée Papers at California’s Thousand Oaks Library and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the authors’ analysis documents Vallée’s use of freelance artists and external animation houses for work ranging from camera effects for illustrated musical shorts to animated commercials and original cartoon series. These productions demonstrate the fluid movement of animation labor from theatrical film to small screen markets and participated in larger aesthetic shifts toward minimalist drawing styles and limited character animation that would soon dominate mid-20th century US television.

What constitutes risk for a theatrical film distributor? Evidence from the Hindi film industry

Purpose This paper aims to examine the strategic issues of risk for independent theatrical film distributors in the Hindi film industry in India. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted qualitative grounded theory approach to explore contextually relevant strategic issues of risk for independent theatrical film distributors. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with Hindi film distributors helped to gain explorative insights about the risk behaviour of film distributors operating in Mumbai “circuit”. Findings The findings suggest that risk faced by distributors is a function of product (film content) features, contractual terms, resources such as finance and strength of strategic alliances with the producers. The study develops a business risk model for the film distributors from a series of propositions. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature on motion picture industry by highlighting the importance of distribution risk in the film value chain.

The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously

The chapter outlines the posthumous constellations that led to the making of Thomas Elsaesser’s essay film The Sun Island, about his grandfather, Martin Elsaesser, chief city architect in Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic. It reflects on the migration of non-theatrical film material into archives and art spaces, encouraging the emergence of found footage as essay film, but it also makes a case for The Sun Island as ‘home movies re-purposed’ in order to highlight the specifics of home movies as a historically and politically important practice. While acknowledging his father as ‘author’, whose images the film ‘appropriates’, The Sun Island also revisits topics associated with Thomas’s own film historical writings: family melodrama; German cinema; media archaeology; history, memory, and trauma.

Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance Through Shakespeare

This chapter foregrounds the essential role of critical analysis in an era when facts, feelings, opinions, news, and propaganda have become increasingly hard to disambiguate. Carla Della Gatta explains that Shakespeareans are in an excellent position to help students navigate this terrain, thanks to our field’s “lengthy, cross-cultural, and international history of determining, disputing, and reinterpreting facts,” a habit that can be put to especial use in identifying various modes of misinformation and bias. This chapter relates exercises in introductory scholarly editing and comparative theatrical/film analyses that enable students to be makers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Putting primary sources directly in students’ hands empowers them to apply rigorous analysis, solve interpretive problems, and hone their confidence in questioning established authority and venerated “facts.” The payoffs span from the understanding of Renaissance literature to informed encounters with “fake news,” biased sources, or unresearched content.

The Hundred-Year-Old Question: Can American Cinema Be Saved?

The Art House Convergence conference annually brings together hundreds of independent theater owners and supporters of arthouse cinema during the days preceding the Sundance Film Festival. When the organizers invited James Schamus to deliver the keynote address at their 2016 gathering, it was a commission he did not relish. The expected argument of such speeches is pretty much set in stone these days: cinema, understood primarily as feature films meant initially for theatrical exhibition, is under attack, and the keynote speaker's task is to rally the troops in its defense, soliciting applause for recent victories on the battlefield, and railing against the encroachments of the enemies of film, in particular the digital streaming services whose assaults on the sanctity of the theatrical viewing experience, and thus on the aesthetic object known as the theatrical film, grow ever more ferocious with each passing year. Schamus took on the task of delivering that speech, and then transforming it into this article for FQ. He concludes with a rousing plea to all regarding what he terms, “This vicious spiral of longer movies, higher costs and higher ticket prices,” that can only spell disaster for the supporter of truly independent American cinema. Schamus urges readers to stand with him (and all who love the genuine American film experience), to advocate for vibrant, varied, open-ended, hybrid, serial and ongoing open storytelling and entertainment.

The Interface Affect of a Contact Zone: Danmaku on Video-Streaming Platforms

This essay interrogates the transmedial, transnational expansion of platforms by analyzing the mediation functions and affective experiences of a discursive interface, danmaku. It is a unique interface design originally featured by the Japanese video-sharing platform Niconico to render user comments flying over videos on screen. The danmaku interface has been widely adopted in China by video-streaming websites, social media, and theatrical film exhibitions. Examining the fundamental incoherence that is structured by the interface – the incoherence between content and platform, between the temporal experiences of pseudo-live-ness and spectral past – the paper underlines the notion of ‘contact’ as the central logic of platforms and argues that danmaku functions as a volatile contact zone among conflicting modes, logics, and structures of digital media. Such contested contacts generate affective intensity of media regionalism, in which the transmedial/transnational processes managed by platforms in material/textual traffic are mapped by the flow of affect on the interface.

Translation of temporal dialects in the dubbed versions of Shakespeare films

This paper intends to provide a thorough analysis of some linguistic features of Early Modern English present in three Shakespeare movies and how they have been transferred in the Spanish translation for dubbing. To achieve it, a close observation of forms of address, greetings and other archaic formulae regulated by the norms of decorum of the age has been carried out. The corpus used for the analysis: Hamlet (Olivier 1948) and Much Ado about Nothing (Branagh 1993), highly acclaimed and rated by the audience as two of the greatest Shakespeare movies. A more recent version of Hamlet (Branagh 1996)—the first unabridged theatrical film version of the play—will be analyzed too in the light of the translation choices, and the results will be compared with those of the other two films.

A genealogy of electronic moving image displays

This essay addresses one element of the ongoing process of moving image culture “going digital”, a process which includes the move to digital terrestrial broadcasting, the introduction of the digital video recorder, and the shift to digital formats in theatrical film exhibition. Specifically, I would like to explore some of the promotional strategies associated with the recent shift from cathode-ray tube to flat panel display technologies, not only in domestic television receivers, but also in flat panel displays outside the home ranging in scale from hand held devices to massive electronic billboards in public venues.