Blaxploitation! A Video Essay

Video essay on the history of Blaxploitation, included as an extra on the Blu-ray "Coffy", produced for Arrow Films

All About the Girl: Remembering the Girl Who Knew Too Much

Feature length documentary by Calum Waddell, including new interviews with filmmakers Luigi Cozzi and Richard Stanley, alongside Alan Jones and Mikel J. Koven.

Deep Red: The Quintessential Giallo

Essay exploring the giallo genre using Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso/Deep Red as example. Produced for Arrow Video's Blu-ray of Deep Red, and included as part of the full colour booklet.

9 Lives of the Black Cat

This is a short essay included in the accompanying booklet for Arrow Video's Blu-ray collection titled "Edgar Allan Poe's Black Cats": The Black Cat (Lucio Fulci, 1981) & Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key (Sergio Martino, 1972)

You play your part – participatory media and older women.

This chapter will examine participatory and collaborative production strategies that create opportunities for older women to participate in media production. It draws on practice-led research in participatory and community-based media in the Govan area of Glasgow, Scotland. In particular, it examines the production process of a participatory documentary I produced and directed with senior citizens who are members of the Govan Seniors Film Club, based at the Portal Arts Centre in Govan.You Play Your Part is a 20-minute documentary about campaigning women in and around Govan.

I film therefore I am: process and participation, networks and knowledge – examples from Scottish community media projects.

This chapter examines community media projects in Scotland as social processes that nurture knowledge through participation in production. A visual and media anthropology framework (Ginsburg, 2005) with an emphasis on the social context of media production informs the analysis of community media. Drawing on community media projects in the Govan area of Glasgow and the Isle of Bute, the techniques of production foreground “the relational aspects of filmmaking” (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2005: 7) and act as a catalyst for knowledge and networks of relations embedded in time and place. Community media is defined here as a creative social process, characterised by an approach to production that is multi-authored, collaborative and informed by the lives of participants, and which recognises the relevance of networks of relations to that practice (Caines, 2007: 2). As a networked process, community media production is recognised as existing in collaboration between a director or producer, such as myself, and organisations, institutions and participants, who are connected through a range of identities, practices and place. These relations born of the production process reflect a complex area of practice and participation that brings together “parallel and overlapping public spheres” (Meadows et al., 2002: 3). This relates to broader concerns with networks (Carpentier, Servaes and Lie, 2003; Rodríguez, 2001), both revealed during the process of production and enhanced by it, and how they can be described with reference to the knowledge practice of community media.

O uso de filme como recurso pedagógico no estudo das epidemias: possibilidades na aprendizagem significativa

Acompanha: Epidemias na escola? Só em filmes: possibilidades de contaminação na aprendizagem significativa

Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture: fiction to film

Abstract available: p. [ii]-[iii].

Subtitling Chinese cinema: a case study of Zhang Yimou’s films

In recent years, more and more Chinese films have been exported abroad. This thesis intends to explore the subtitling of Chinese cinema into English, with Zhang Yimou’s films as a case study. Zhang Yimou is arguably the most critically and internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker, who has experimented with a variety of genres of films. I argue that in the subtitling of his films, there is an obvious adoption of the domestication translation strategy that reduces or even omits Chinese cultural references. I try to discover what cultural categories or perspectives of China are prone to the domestication of translation and have formulated five categories: humour, politeness, dialect, history and songs and the Peking Opera. My methodology is that I compare the source Chinese dialogue lines with the existing English subtitles by providing literal translations of the source lines, and I will also give my alternative translations that tend to retain the source cultural references better. I also speculate that the domestication strategy is frequently employed by subtitlers possibly because the subtitlers assume the source cultural references are difficult for target language subtitle readers to comprehend, even if they are translated into a target language. However, subtitle readers are very likely to understand more than what the dialogue lines and the target language subtitles express, because films are multimodal entities and verbal information is not the only source of information for subtitle readers. The image and the sound are also significant sources of information for subtitle readers who are constantly involved in a dynamic film-watching experience. They are also expected to grasp visual and acoustic information. The complete omission or domestication of source cultural references might also affect their interpretation of the non-verbal cues. I also contemplate that the translation, which frequently domesticates the source culture carried out by a translator who is also a native speaker of the source language, is ‘submissive translation’.

La literatura y el cine: una historia de relaciones

La literatura y el cine se relacionan en cuatro aspectos básicos: la literatura determina, en sus orígenes, la naturaleza de los filmes, sus motivos y estrategias; la literatura y el cine son formas narrativas, por lo que comparten estructuras míticas, populares y de relato; ambos se vinculan mediante el problema de la adaptación; y el cine ejerce una influencia estética en las obras literarias y en el concepto tradicional de literatura. Este artículo examina estos vínculos desde una perspectiva conceptual e histórica.Literature and cinema are related in four main aspects: in its origins literature determines the nature of films; literature and motion pictures are narratives, and share mythical, popular and narrative structures; both are linked because of the issue of adaptation; and movies influence literary works and the traditional concept of literature. This article examines these relationships from a conceptual and historic perspective.

Film policy in practice: a case study of Scottish Screen’s funding schemes

This thesis examines cultural policy for film in Scotland, from 1997 to 2010. It explores the extent to which the industry is shaped by film policy strategies and through the agency of public funding bodies. It reflects on how Scottish Screen, Scotland’s former screen agency, articulated its role as a national institution concerned with both commercial and cultural remits, with the conflicting interests of different industry groups. The study examines how the agency developed funding schemes to fulfil policy directives during a tumultuous period in Scottish cultural policy history, following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament with the Scotland Act 1998 and preceding the Independence Referendum Act 2013. In order to investigate how policy has shaped the development of a national film industry, a further two case studies are explored. These are Tartan Shorts, Scotland’s former flagship short film scheme, and the Audience Development Fund, Scotland’s first project based film exhibition scheme. The first study explores the planning, implementation and evaluation of the scheme as part of the agency’s talent development strategy. The outcomes of this study show the potential impact of funding methods aimed at developing and retaining Scottish filmmaking talent. Thereafter, the Scottish exhibition sector is discussed; a formerly unexplored field within film policy discussions and academic debate. It outlines Scottish Screen’s legacy to current film exhibition funding practices and the practical mechanisms the agency utilised to foster Scottish audiences. By mapping the historical and political terrain, the research analyses the specificity of Scotland within the UK context and explores areas in which short-term, context-driven policies become problematic. The work concludes by presenting the advantages and issues caused by film funding practices, advocating what is needed for the film industry in Scotland today with suggestions for long-term and cohesive policy development.