The year 2024 marks a period of consolidation and transformation for the Chinese film industry. Throughout the year, film authorities at all levels have implemented various measures to promote the prosperity of Chinese cinema and stimulate film consumption. Ongoing efforts have been made to explore regionalized, tiered, and multi-round distribution models, while “differentiated screenings” have enabled more films to precisely reach their target audiences. At the same time, the industry faces challenges such as an insufficient supply of high-quality films, uneven market performance, and a declining number of moviegoers. In the future, we must place greater emphasis on respecting the artistic, industrial, and managerial principles of filmmaking, accelerate the restructuring of the film industry chain, and solidly promote high-quality development. We will strive to convert all positive advantages into tangible outcomes.
This article explores the recording by documentary film of the imperceptible longue-durée of tectonic processes alongside the radical eventhood of volcanic eruption. Through an analysis of Romanian filmmaker Diana Vidrașcu’s Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (2019), I re-animate Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of islands to explore the temporal, philosophical, and mediatic implications of volcanic eruption, island formation, and the volcanic archive. I argue that in the film’s effort to reassert human memories of the tectonic alongside those of the landscape, it performs an incomplete reconciliation of the coeval processes and materialities of human and nonhuman, refusing to silence the human histories and archival excesses that are subsumed by narratives that emphasise the longue-durée of geological time.
Anthropology Now, 13:123–128, 2021 • Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ISSN: 1942-8200 print / 1949-2901 online • https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2021.1973858 Tunisian Cinema after the Arab Spring: Portrait of a Nation in Transition
The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic speaks to a liminal space between male and female, living and dead, human and nonhuman, which mirrors contemporary debates within Black studies around the exclusion of Blackness from the normative category of the human: the contingency of the definition of humanity based on racial exclusion. As a result, it is not only the nonhuman perspective that the ocean provides in Atlantics , but a spectral haunting of those deemed other than human by global capitalism, which disrupts, as a queer prophecy, the veneer of necessity that the neocolonial order requires to sustain itself.
While water as setting and as mirror have driven animation technologies in mainstream American animated features (requiring, in Disney’s 1937 Snow White , the enormous resources of the multiplane camera), contemporary Indigenous productions activate another relationship of viewer to screen and viewer to water, converging to form a new Indigenous screen imaginary that connects instruction with care. This article traces the integration of North American Indigenous animation aesthetics with interrelated relationships and obligations around water and water protection. Drawing on examples from an expanding corpus of short animated productions, I argue that Indigenous ways of envisioning water present viewers with instruction towards action: water conveys a teaching. Following Lenape critic Joanne Barker’s turn to water as an analytic – “a water that (in)forms, a water that instructs” – I explore Indigenous animation of water as both pedagogy and technology, a conjunction that foregrounds human creative authorship even as it decenters the human in favor of water as a teacher.
Recent environmental turns in research on the Holocaust and the moving images produced in its aftermath have suggested the potential of earth to bear “eco-witness” to atrocity and signal sites of mass burial through alterations to the topsoil and vegetation. However, the conjunction between the elemental and the human that occurs when a violated body decomposes in the earth to become ‘humus’ indicates a particularly distressing point of “trouble” for non-anthropocentric frameworks that focus on the material agencies involved in composting processes (Haraway) and trans-corporealities (Alaimo). This article examines how three documentaries (Shtetl, Neighbours and Birthplace) frame sections of Polish earth that have been re-shaped by Holocaust atrocity and human decomposition. While indicating a vaster posthumous network in which humus becomes entangled in rural soil-based activities such as cattle grazing, the article argues that human decomposition triggers attempts to cinematically recompose active earth as readable archive and fixed landscape.
Adapted from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s semi-autobiographical text, The Intruder remains one of French director Claire Denis’ most transnational and yet dreamlike works. In this article, I pair philosopher Gaston Bachelard (in particular, his concept of the material and dynamic imagination and his reveries on water and air) with Denis to explore how The Intruder enacts an imagining of the elements and an elemental poetics of film form. Bringing Bachelard into a dialogue with Saad Chakali’s, Rosalind Galt’s and Nancy’s writing on the film’s imagery, I also approach The Intruder as an image-poem that is structured by poetically ‘weighted’ images and by recurrent symbolism. Shot through with an oneiric sense of drift, voyaging and diffusion, I explore some of the ways that Denis’s elemental imaginings of air and oceanic water reflect an affective politics.
This article examines the multiform appearance of elemental earth in the 1990s films of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, including Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry , and The Wind Will Carry Us . Its aim is to consider the elemental aspects of global art cinema, arguing that art cinema treats elements intermedially. Art cinema’s alliance with the elemental has been comparatively overlooked given its associations with the cosmopolitan sites of global modernity, but this essay asserts that modernism is as much geophysical as geopolitical. I read Kiarostami’s films as staging encounters between human action and elemental agency; they set their characters in agonistic relation to the seismic movements and obdurate resistance of the earth. Drawing on elemental philosophy, this article demonstrates that the existential questions regarding life and death in Kiarostami’s filmmaking are oriented toward the earth (as ground, stone, and dust).
As billowing masses averse to stillness and defined by perpetual variability, clouds, fog and mist share common ontological properties. This article will group them together under the rubric of the “nebulous,” and probe its conceptual and aesthetic relationship with film. Fog, smoke and mist are pervasive through the entire history of cinema and crop up in an array of genres and modes. What would film history look like if traced from the perspective of these cloud forms? The article hopes to sketch out the first contours of such a history by honing in on a durational cinematic tradition, from the “landscape film” of the 1970s through to contemporary slow cinema. It will conceive of such a history as intermedial both in the sense that it extrapolates the boundaries of the film medium and in that it treats fog, mist and clouds as elemental “media” in their own right.
In “Cinema Seen from Etna”, Jean Epstein makes an enigmatic comparison between cinema and the volcano. In witnessing the exploding Etna, Epstein proclaims that he saw cinema itself. This essay examines this connection between cinema and the volcano through an exploration of Werner Herzog’s documentary Into the Inferno (2016) and Malena Szlam’s geological films ALTIPLANO (2018) and MERAPI (2021). Drawing on literature in environmental humanities – especially those on the lithic and the elemental – I think the cinema through the volcano to arrive at the proposition that cinema, at least a certain kind of ‘volcanic cinema’, is a means of approaching something we might call ‘volcanic thinking’. This is a thinking alongside the elements, one that bears particular affinity with the sometimes explosive churning of rock and fire, a thinking that is necessary and critical for our volatile age.
The basis for works by such filmmakers as James Benning and Kevin Jerome Everson, the “Great American Eclipse” of August 2017 demonstrated the desire of artists’ film to capture the unique phenomenon of totality, when the moon completely obscures the sun for a period of several minutes. Beyond the borders of the United States, the transnational efforts of Lukas Marxt’s Double Dawn (2014) in Australia and J.P. Sniadecki’s The Yellow Bank (2010) in China also render the solar eclipse as a phenomenon of great cultural and ecological scope. While the astronomical event in each of these films itself provides a singular and contingent spectacle for the camera, this article argues that the eclipse’s mythical conjugation of the elemental forces of fire and earth also resonates unexpectedly with the diverse environments that fall under the moon’s shadow.
This article examines the interconnections between fire and Indigenous politics, geographies and epistemologies. More precisely, the article focuses on how different modes of emergent nonfiction media practice are engaging with the pyrological and interrogating its entanglements with Indigenous forms of existence and ecological-political struggle in a moment of escalating climate catastrophe and capitalist settler-colonial exploitation and extraction. The article explores how the pyrological and the ecological are framed and taken up in markedly contrasting discursive, visual and formal ways across these modes of nonfiction media practice. At a broader conceptual level, I examine these divergent engagements with pyro-ecologies to map out how countervailing currents in contemporary documentary practice differently approach conceptualisations of both the evidentiary and the epistemological in relation to Indigenous politics and ontologies. I argue that these engagements manifest differently across these works depending upon the degree to which they remain attentive to – and engaged with – Indigenous modes of ecologically-conscious land-based knowledge, pedagogy and evidence.
Since 2014, a typical phenomenon emerged and still survives in the film creations of new directors: return to the homeland. This is emphatically reflected in various aspects such as the spatial production and modes of expression as modernity. Firstly, new directors use memory and landscape to imagine and create their homeland in mainly four forms: “temporal rhetoric,” “childhood perspective,” “humorous atmosphere,” and “sense of surrealism,” endowing their films with a unique character. Secondly, as a creative method, it has a strong influence on the film production of new directors. Thirdly, new directors use their homeland to construct a “spatial system” and “spirit of place,” as a way of completing the reflective expression of “personal history” and “social history.”
Drawing on David Harvey's conceptualisation of neoliberalism as the accumulation of capital by dispossession, this article considers representations of work in Estonian auteur cinema of the last decade, in particular in Agent Sinikael/Agent Wild Duck (2002) by Marko Raat, Sügisball/Autumn Ball (2007) and Püha Tõnu kiusamine/Temptations of St. Tony (2009) by Veiko Õunpuu, and Kirjad Inglile/Letters to Angel (2011) by Sulev Keedus. In different ways and from the perspectives of various types of labour (professional, working class, artistic, etc.), these films criticise the hegemony of the free market philosophy and its characteristic processes that undermine, in the name of capital, public interests and the social and personal sense of security of workers, atomising society in all aspects.
Abstract The year 2023 marked a period of burgeoning opportunities and a return to rationality for the Chinese film industry. Throughout the year, favorable policies continued to guide the comprehensive recovery of the industry. The film market flourished again, and segmented distribution officially commenced, with new directors achieving notable successes. However, the Chinese film industry also faced challenges, such as lukewarm investment enthusiasm, uneven market demand during different periods, a shortage of high-quality films, and the rise in profit share for micro and short dramas. In the future, it will be necessary to adhere to policy-driven, creativity-driven, market-driven, enterprise-driven, and technology-driven strategies to achieve high-quality recovery and sustainable development.
21世纪初期,伴随科学技术与哲学思辨的发展,形成了声势浩大的后人类主义思潮,深刻影响了科幻电影的创作与发展,并形成了崭新的影像实践.屏幕作为信息与文本获取的主要工具,已成为科幻影像中不可或缺的组成部分.科幻电影中的屏幕空间不仅展示了科学技术的发展,还凸显了后人类主义思潮的深化趋势,象征着从人类中心主义向后人类主义的文明转型,从一个方面表现了令人深思、发人深醒的忧患意识与警示意义.本文以经典科幻电影中的屏幕元素为研究对象,从屏幕在影像中差异化的场域形态出发,分析屏幕空间的视觉效果与表征实践,考察后人类视域下屏幕与人类的交互关系,以期在虚拟与现实、信息与物质、科技与人文等多重维度的思辨中审视与反思人类中心主义文化.
随着电子信息科技的进一步发展,VR技术作为一种集先进视、听、触、感技术于一体的新兴科技,使音乐鉴赏、音乐教学过程变得更加形式丰富、体验良好,并逐渐从商业化的音乐市场渗透至学校音乐艺术教学课堂,推动着学校声乐教学模式的创新.基于VR技术对声乐教学内容与形式的巨大创新,以及对学生视唱练耳等基础声乐能力的显著强化效果,许多学校已经构建了一套VR+声乐创新教学体系,逐渐替代了传统声乐教学体系.
电影意象叙事是将意象思维与电影叙事相结合所形成的一种具有民族审美特质的叙事形态.意象思维深度参与了中国电影媒介本体性探索与影像语言实践的过程.20世纪80年代,在中西、古今交汇的语境中,意象叙事得到与电影本体属性的深度结合,形成了既立足本土又能够中西对话的民族电影叙事形态,成为开拓民族影像语言与完成中国电影艺术现代转型的重要探索.
本文从审查费用、审查地点和中文字幕三个行政层面考察民国时期的外片审查制度,此三者与内容层面的审查如修剪、禁映构成互补性力量.不论是针对外国电影的高额审查费,还是执意将南京作为审查地点,抑或在中文字幕问题上有条件的妥协,都是国民政府力图维护国家主权、彰显国家实力的积极举措.遗憾的是,三种行政举措并未从实质上扭转外片在中国的压倒性地位,甚至不切实际的配额放映制也不了了之.这不仅是国民政府电影审查工作的缺失与民国时期国产电影产能的不足,更是半封建半殖民地时代弱政府表现出的结构性乏力.
在《白塔之光》中,北京的游荡者与精神漂泊者勾连起暧昧不明的"多人行"情感关系,看似从异质性的空间意象中寻求慰藉,实则困顿于晦暗处理的历史阴影与家庭创伤.诗歌与梦境、互文性与媒介自反是破译电影文本的注脚,也在修辞层面上实现了主角与自身、与父辈、与时代变幻之间不可能达成的和解.文本被误读的几率极高,轻盈和厚重、趣味和严肃、尴尬和文艺都搅在一起,但张律导演仍像以往一样,将谜题和缺如留给观众猜测和填补.
