Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema

Barkre, M.; Mathijs, E.; Sexton, J.; Egan, K.; Hunter, R. and Selfe, M. (2007). Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema. London: British Board of Film Classification. RAE2008

Ghost/Machine: cinema in a digital age

Cinema, with its passive cinematic apparatus and linear narrative is often characterised as a contrast to new media narrative strategies, yet from Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera to Mike Figgis’ TimeCode and Wong Kar Wei’s 2046 cinema provides narrative strategies and spatial conceptualisations which prefigure or are contiguous with new media environments. Both our perception of what cyberspace constitutes and the technology that actualises those perceptions arise out of and are driven by fantasy and desire. This paper will explore the metaphors used to represent and understand new media aesthetics through cinematic representations of new media environments. Two key themes relevant to new media aesthetics emerge. Irigaray, Haraway, and Grosz are used to explore the de-essentialising haptic and penetrative potential of new technologies and their ability to collapse the boundary between the body and the machine. The second fantasy, of new media as a liminal space that expresses the memorialising function of technology and its relation to mourning, is analysed using Benjamin, Burgin and Rutsky. These altered spaces and perceptions of the body and memory of the post-cinematic subject are illustrated through an analysis of Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. [From the Author]

Representations of multicultural identities in British Cinema

This paper explores the transnational and interstitial dimensions of cultural production in Britain today, and the representation of migrant and diasporic identities in contemporary mainstream British cinema. The box office success of films like Gurindha Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and East is East (Daniel O’Donnell 1999) and their precursors My Beautiful Launderette (Stephen Frears 1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears 1987) and the TV mini-series Buddha of Suburbia (Roger Mitchell 1993) seem to celebrate and articulate a set of values around hybridity and alterity: a discourse of multiculturalism. This paper will engage with a series of key questions. Are there ideological values implicit within and common to all these texts? Can we map a rhetoric or discourse of multiculturalism within popular culture? Do mainstream representations of immigrant identities represent a discourse of resistance, a decolonising global culture or is this Western brand of multiculturalism still located within an Orientalising gaze? In what ways are multiculturalism and postcolonialism overlapping and yet opposing rhetorics? [From the Author]

Bolsa Familia Program and school enrolment: An analysis of the 2010 Brazilian demographic census

The Bolsa Família Program goal is to promote social development and poverty reduction, through the direct transfer of conditional cash, in association with other social programs. This study aims to analyze whether Bolsa Família had an association with children’s school attendance, which is one of the educational conditions of the program. Our main hypothesis is that children living in households receiving Bolsa Família had greater chances of attending school. Data from the Ministry of Social Development and Combating Famine indicated that children living in households with Bolsa Família had greater school enrolment levels. By using data from the 2010 Demographic Census, collected by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), some descriptive analyzes and binary logistic regression models were performed for different thresholds of household per capita income. These estimates were made by comparing children who lived in households receiving Bolsa Família to those children not receiving the program. We took into consideration characteristics about the household, mothers, and children. The results were clustered by the municipality of residence of the child. In all income thresholds, children benefi ting from Bolsa Família were more likely to be enrolled in school, compared to children not receiving the benefi t.

The portrait of the first poster artists of Spanish cinema: From the genre scene to the realistic portrait

The article, which is part of a more detailed piece of work, aims to highlight the use of the portrait on the film posters of the first Spanish poster artists before the Star-System was introduced in Spain. For this it is posed the evolution that occurs in the representation of the characters in the film poster from the second decade to the beginning of the thirties in the twentieth century, a historical period of profound influences of the artistic and advertising vanguards in our poster artists´ work. However, in the late twenties moving from the simple inclusion of the scene based on the picture of a film, to the chromatic and realistic representation of the star´s face. These were the years when the influence of the major North American studios began to show in Spain. Nevertheless, it highlights their technical and compositional freedom and their influence on subsequent poster artists, as many of them will integrate the portraits and settings on their posters, following the guidelines of the major studios or the independent ones. But without forgetting their own personal way of painting the film stars’ faces on their posters.

The redemption of the gaze: the crisis of observation in the "fin de siècle" and the advent of cinema

The intention of this article is not to affirm, but rather to question wether it is possible to speak of a loss of the ability to gaze in the context of the nineteenth century and especially in the context of the fin de siècle, in the bosom of the epistemological crisis that beset the Turn of the Century. And very especially, this article tries to question about the impact this crisis had, perhaps, in the birth of cinema. Is in this context that arises the work of Marey and the advent of the cinematograph of the Lumière brothers in the fin de siècle Europe, both of them showing a deep faith in a mechanical apparatus that would allow the redemption of a battered gaze. And it seems to be a dream that continues over time through the tradition of shooting the everyday life.