Celluloid dreaming : cultural myths and landscape in Australian film 1970-1990

Examines the way in which cultural myths in selected Australian feature films of the 1970s and 1980s reflect changing attitudes towards nationalism, Australian identity, gender roles, mateship and how the Australian settler culture defines (or fails to define) its relationship with indigenous Australians.

Web Classroom Application. Digital technologies to study theory, history and criticism of architecture at Escuela Superior de Arquitectura UPMadrid. The search for some guides to direct the inquiry learning

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The theatre of the Greeks, a series of papers relating to the history and criticism of the Greek drama.

The first 3 editions of this work appeared under the name of the original author, P.W. Buckham. cf. British Mus. General cat. of printed books.

Buzz in motion pictures : what is buzz and how can marketing create it?

In the movie industry, the extraordinarily successful theatrical performance of certain films is largely attributed to buzz. Despite longstanding commentary about the role of buzz in successful movie marketing and the belief that it accelerates new product diffusion, limited scholarly evidence exists to support these assertions. This is primarily due to the lack of conceptual distinction of buzz from word-of-mouth, which is often used as the main basis for conceptualising buzz. However, word-of-mouth does not fully explain the buzz surrounding films such as 'Gone With The Wind', 'The Dark Knight' and 'Avatar'. Informed by valuable insights from key experts who have launched some of the most successful movies in box office history, as well as a range of moviegoers, this thesis developed a deeper understanding of what buzz is and how it is created. This thesis concludes that buzz is not the same as word-of-mouth.

Betty Friedan speaks at "Films and Women" meeting about violence against women in motion pictures

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History, and the Child

"In Perpetual Motion is an "historical choreography" of power, pedagogy, and the child from the 1600s to the early 1900s. It breaks new ground by historicizing the analytics of power and motion that have interpenetrated renditions of the young. Through a detailed examination of the works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Herbart, and G. Stanley Hall, this book maps the discursive shifts through which the child was given a unique nature, inscribed in relation to reason, imbued with an effectible interiority, and subjected to theories of power and motion. The book illustrates how developmentalist visions took hold in U.S. public school debates. It documents how particular theories of power became submerged and taken for granted as essences inside the human subject. In Perpetual Motion studiously challenges views of power as in or of the gaze, tracing how different analytics of power have been used to theorize what gazing could notice."--BOOK JACKET.

(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties

This article examines Len Lye’s film-making in the 1930s within a broader visual arts context, seeking to clarify the nature and extent of his involvement in British documentary film culture at this time. In particular, it demonstrates how Lye's method of fusing 'live action', found footage, and animation techniques created the possibility of a radical documentary practice that could reconcile promotional advertising and commercial art with avant-garde abstraction and kinaesthetic experimentation. In particular, the article focusses on Lye's N. or N.W. (1937, 35mm, b&w, 10 mns), arguing that his work from this period should be regarded as central - and not marginal - to any serious reassessment of Britain's “Documentary Movement” of the inter-war era, and its relations to any history of the cinema and visual culture.

History of Art and Art Criticism: A System in Crisis

This article aims to reconstruct the critical debate regarding the examination of the crisis in the disciplines of art history and criticism with a particular focus on the proposal formulated by U.S. theorists who contributed to October journal. The discrediting of many modernist critical methods, particularly that of Clement Greenberg – the formalist diktat – marked the birth of the journal and gave rise to proposals set forth by critics committed to a new approach. Their divergent positions, nonetheless, have contributed to undermining the traditional concepts of the autonomy of art and criticism. The proposals discussed over the course of publication were the result of a reappraisal of the disciplinary instruments of art history and criticism pursuant to the crucial cultural changes which took place in the 1980s.

A probabilistic framework for extracting narrative act boundaries and semantics in motion pictures

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract the important narrative structure, the 3-Act storytelling paradigm in film. Widely prevalent in the domain of film, it forms the foundation and framework in which a film can be made to function as an effective tool for story telling, and its extraction is a vital step in automatic content management for film data. The identification of act boundaries allows for structuralizing film at a level far higher than existing segmentation frameworks, which include shot detection and scene identification, and provides a basis for inferences about the semantic content of dramatic events in film. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 and 2 is derived using a Bayesian formulation under guidance from film grammar, tested under many configurations and the results are reported for experiments involving 25 full-length movies. The result proves to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film, with potential application to analogues occuring in many other domains, including news, training video, sitcoms.

Novel approach to determining tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

This paper presents an original computational approach to extraction of movie tempo for deriving story sections and events that convey high level semantics of stories portrayed in motion pictures, thus enabling better video annotation and interpretation systems. This approach, inspired by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel continuous measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are derived for several full-length motion pictures and edge detection is performed to extract dramatic story sections and events occurring in the movie, underlined by their unique tempo. The results confirm reliable detection of actual distinct tempo changes and serve as useful index into the dramatic development and narration of the story in motion pictures.

Indexing narrative structure and semantics in motion pictures with a probabilistic framework

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract an important narrative structure, the 3-Act story telling paradigm, in film. This narrative structure is prevalent in the domain of film as it forms the foundation and framework in which the film can be made to function as an effective tool for story telling, and its extraction is a vital step in automatic content management for film data. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 is derived using a Bayesian formulation under guidance from film grammar, tested under many configurations and the results are reported for experiments involving 25 full length movies. The formulation is shown to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film.

Role of shot length in characterizing tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

Motivated by existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, we proposed a computational approach to determine tempo as a high-level movie content descriptor as well as means for deriving dramatic story sections and events occurring in movies. Movie tempo is extracted from two easily computed aspects in our approach: shot length and motion. Story sections and events are generally associated with changes in tempo, and are thus identified by edges located in the tempo function. In this paper, we analyze our initial founding of the tempo function on the basis that the distribution of both shot length and motion in movies is normal. Given that the distribution of shot length is approximately Weibull as confirmed in our experiments, we examine the impact of modelling and modifying the contributions of shot length to tempo. We derive an appropriate normalization function that faithfully encapsulates the role of shot length in tempo perception, and analyze the changes to the story sections identified in films.