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]

Reading of audiovisual productions of contemporary art in art education

This article focuses on the reading of audiovisual productions of contemporary art as a creative process, seeking to analyse which effects of meaning the articulations between the visual and sound systems produce, and the meaning that children give to then. It describes a video art, identifying the languages that compose it and the relationships that link them. Such reading exercise had as corpus of analysis the Chair video art, by Masaru Ozaki, and counted with the theoretical and methodological support of the discourse semiotics, especially with studies on assembly procedures that articulate visual and auditory languages. Also, it presents a focal study with the meanings that a group of children gave to the video art. The findings indicate the importance of including the reading of audiovisual productions of contemporary art at school through the problematization of effects of meaning produced by the interrelation between different languages. And they suggest some subsidies that allow teachers from different areas of knowledge to reflect about the visuality in their pedagogical practice; the choice of the audiovisual materials taken to the classroom and other ways of seeing these texts edited.

La evolución de destinos turísticos litorales consolidados. Análisis comparado de Balneario Camnoriú (Brasil) y Benidorm (España)

El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en estudiar la evolución de los destinos turísticos litorales consolidados a partir del análisis comparado entre Balneario Camboriú y Benidorm. Se trata de dos destinos localizados en contextos territoriales y turísticos diferentes, en los que se contrastan de manera empírica los indicadores de evolución de los destinos y se vinculan las dinámicas evolutivas con el modelo territorial-turístico resultante en cada destino. El análisis realizado permite contrastar los postulados de los modelos evolutivos clásicos (Butler, 1980) e incorporar los nuevos planteamientos de la geografía económica evolutiva. La investigación delimita cronológicamente los periodos de desarrollo de ambos destinos para identificar los factores con mayor incidencia en la evolución de los mismos. Una evolución marcada, fundamentalmente, por la ubicación geográfica, la planificación y gestión urbanoturística a diferentes escalas, la dependencia de determinados mercados emisores y la influencia de factores macroeconómicos. Un conjunto de factores interrelacionados que dibujan trayectorias dispares para los destinos analizados.

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.

Applying the Paradigm: Shakespeare and World Cinema

The essay discusses films that have been made of the plays written by dramatist William Shakespeare, particularly films that were made outside of Great Britain and the U.S. The Chinese film "The Banquet," directed by Xiaogang Feng, is a retelling of Shakespeare's play "Hamlet." The film demonstrates how Shakespeare's play could be successfully repositioned to demonstrate problems in 21st century Asia.

Modes of Griot Inscription in African Cinema

A recurring idea in criticism of African cinema has been that the films frequently deploy the narrative techniques of ‘the griot’, the storyteller of African tradition. In particular, Manthia Diawara (1989) has alerted us to the inscription of the oral narrator within the visual discourse of particular African films, while other critics have considered how the films recall the narrative forms of traditional oral tales. However, these critics’ exclusive attention to the visual track and/or narrative form overlooks another inscription of the griot - an inscription that exists at the level of music. Examining music and image relationships in an aesthetically diverse set of African films, this paper demonstrates how griot inscription emerges as a major variable, modulating between music and image within and between texts. This propels music, and the griot, to a status of primary importance in terms of understanding the ways in which the films engage with, and re-appropriate, notions of ‘African-ness’, while negotiating the tensions of address generated when oral forms of narrative meet the literate, industrial form of cinema.

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts

Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts develops an interdisciplinary approach to documentary film, focusing on its cultural and formal relations to other visual arts, such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot but interrogate the validity of its own narratives and representational modes. Combining close analysis with cultural history, Regarding the Real calls for a re-assessment of the influence of the modern arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary filmmaking.