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Eisenstein's 'Ivan the Terrible': A Neoformalist Analysis

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... At the centre of this attitude is, as much as possible, sensitive "centripetal" analysis of the film work, from which the more general "centrifugal" problems are approached. She called it neoformalist analysis in her published dissertation (Thompson, 1981), the programmatic essay in "Iris" (Thompson, 1983, pp. 42-49) and her book of eleven detailed formalistic film analyses Breaking the Glass Armor (Thompson, 1988). ...
... Nevertheless, how can this approach be effectively dynamised from a historical perspective? Shlovsky's concept of defamiliarisation (ostranenie), which played a vital role in the programmatically conceived version of neoformalist film analysis by Kristin Thompson (Thompson, 1981), seemed to be one possible key. ...
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Norm as a tool of structural analysis and writing of aesthetically based history is a concept designed by Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský. For several decades, American film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have been handling this notion. After a review of the original concept, the article follows three main goals: (1) The broadest aim is to reconstruct specific roles the concept played in the process of establishing the so-called neoformalist poetics approach. By returning to Mukařovský's starting points, we should be able to more clearly understand how his concept of norm was employed and transformed by neoformalist poeticians in order to solve the problems of film studies as an academic discipline on the one hand and problems in formulating concrete research projects on the other. (2) The more particular goal is to point out certain shifts in neoformalist poeticians' handling of the concept of norm after they formulated the classical Hollywood cinema model. The concept of norm was initially used by them as a tool for bottom-up research of the stylistic history of cinema, as a hollow category for its unbiased explanation. However, consequently it has also become a somewhat filled category applied rather top-down as an interpretative background for assessing its alternatives. (3) The final goal is to answer the question why this re-assessment and interrogation of roles played by norm in neoformalist poetics matters now. By returning to the original concept of norm and by the treatise of its changing functions for film study, the article aims to remind us of the usefulness and flexibility of this research tool. As is suggested in the last part of the article, we still know too little about historical poetics of so-called regional cinemas. If we want to understand them properly, the concept of norm is highly worthwhile – but only if is reached by bottom-up research as the hollow category for the unbiased explanation of certain cinematic phenomena.
... Postoj Kristin Thompsonové lze považovat za dominantně analytický; přičemž v jeho centru stojí maximálně citlivá do středivá analýza filmového díla, od níž se pak přistupuje k obecnějším odstředivým otázkám. Ona sama jej ve své publikované disertaci (Thompson, 1981), programové studii v časopise Iris (Thompson, 1983, s. 42-49) i v knize detailních formálních rozborů (Thompson, 1988) nazvala neoformalistickou analýzou. Takové označení je nicméně problematické, protože ten týž postoj nalezneme již v jejích rozborech ze sedmdesátých let (např. ...
... Jak ale tento přístup efektivně dynamizovat v historické perspektivě? Nabízí se Šklovského pojem ozvláštnění, který hrál v osmdesátých letech klíčovou roli v oné programově poja té verzi neoformalistické filmové analýzy u Kristin Thompsonové (Thompson, 1981(Thompson, , 1988. Frank Kessler ve studii Ostranenie, Innovation, and Media History popisuje tři cesty, jimiž Thompsonová tehdy pojem ozvláštnění využila jako (a) metodologickou zbraň vůči komuni kačnímu modelu umění a interpretaci coby odhalování skrytého poselství, (b) analytický ná stroj, (c) způsob zasazení individuálního filmu do historického kontextu (Kessler, 2010, s. 64). ...
... In the light of these new developments the present paper questions and challenges the understanding of Eisenstein's position as, in the words of Annette Michelson, 'indissolubly linked to the project of the construction of socialism ' (1999, 85). This point of view has been almost universally shared in Eisenstein scholarship: from Marie Seton (1978) to Jacques Aumont (1987), from Kristin Thompson (1981) to Ian Christie (1993) and from David Bordwell (1993) to Anna Bohn (2003). This article argues that the relations between Eisenstein's thought and Soviet ideology should be re-examined and problematised and that it is more constructive to think about them in terms of an overlap -at most -rather than the former expressing the latter. ...
... A periodisation of early control versus late Eisensteinian excess has emerged following a detailed elaboration of this category in a neoformalist analysis of Ivan the Terrible by Kristin Thompson (1981). The early stage is understood as encompassing the more rigid principle of montage as an organising principle of both theory and practice. ...
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The year 2008 marked the 100 th anniversary of Russian cinema and the 110 th anniversary of Sergei Eisenstein's birth – this doubly significant date reinforces the historical and symbolic connection between the life and fate of one of the most committed theoreticians and radical practitioners of the moving image and the development of this new medium itself. On such occasions cinema scholars around the world tend to engage in a re-assessment and re-interpretation of Eisenstein's heritage with heightened vigour as a range of publications on the occasions of both Eisenstein's ninetieth and one hundred anniversaries demonstrate. 1 I do believe however that there are some substantial reasons to carry on with such a work of re-evaluation apart from the urge to continue an honourable tradition. The overall assessment of Eisenstein's theory and practice – as one that so powerfully embodied art and political dynamics – continues to generate controversy. Our position at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century delivers the advantage of a broader perspective on some overarching The author would like to thank Naum Kleiman, the curator of the Eisenstein's Kabinet in Moscow for consultations and help in accessing the Russian Government Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI).
... Due to the chosen historical framing, which concentrates on finding similarities between Eisenstein's era and the neuroscientific era around the turn of the millennium , the organic dialectics of Noël Burch in Theory of Film Practice (1973) has been excluded. Nonetheless, Burch's formalism stands out as a single and thereby even more significant landmark between the 1920s organic-dynamical views of Eisenstein (and the Russian Formalists) and the 1980s Eisenstein-inspired neo-formalist views of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (1981Thompson ( , 1988). While in his book Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) Bordwell credits Burch as an important source of his inspiration , amusingly, he seems to be in pains when trying to categorize Burch's unique 'parametric', 'style centered', dialectical', permutational, or 'poetic' ['Eisensteinian'] approach amongst the other canonical paradigms of cinema (Bordwell 1985, 274). ...
... Stalin appreciated the first part of Ivan the Terrible (1944–46), but in the second part, the psychological portrait of the tyranny turned out to be too 'psychological', perhaps too much like Stalin himself. In 1946 Soviet film censorship ordered the re-edited part two to be banned and the unedited material for part three destroyed (Thompson 1981). According to Bulgakowa (1998) , in January 1948 Stalin's anti- Semitic campaign had started. ...
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The dissertation at hand explores the very grounds, within which the phenomenon of cinema emerges. It is a study of the intrinsic dynamics of cinema author’s mind in the process of creating moving image. Alas, it is not a historical, cultural, or ideological study into the handicraft, the narrative genres, or technological developments of cinema. Instead, it discusses possible foundations of cinema in the human nature, as seems viable in the light of the contemporary biological and psychological constraints. The dissertation is set to define a kind of cinema, which reflects the recent scientific knowledge about neural underpinnings of human activity, and which draws its emotional power from one’s experimental resources of understanding and interacting with others within the everyday world. While attribute of ‘enactive’ carries the explicit sense of pragmatic doing and meaningful acting in the world, it is the embodied simulation of the world, which will provide the cognitive environment for creative enactment. Emotions, in addition to determining unconscious, involuntary understanding about the state of things, also determine all conscious, intentional, and imaginative aspects of cognition. Faithful to the spirit of Eisenstein the dissertation deliberately deviates from other mainstream cinema research: instead of the spectator, the focus here is on the author’s cognitive processes.
... In order to examine the representation of female characters, this study applies close reading analysis, conducted: via textual analysis (McKee 2003, Lincoln 2004, Chapman 2011, Bateman and Wildfeuer 2017, via formal analysis , Thompson 1988, 1981 and via audio-visual style analysis (see Bordwell and Thompson 2008, Gibbs and Pye 2005a to the Yugoslav New Film movement (including Black Wave). Initially, a preliminary viewing (of 269 films) was conducted, resembling quantitative analysis (see Rose 2016, Bock, Isermann, and Knieper 2011, Neuman 2014, Kelle and Erzberger 2004, in order to select case studies. ...
... In other words, it seems that, at least to a certain extent, the content is given to us by the filmmaker rather than be completely dependent on our 'meaning-making' capabilities. But why is this a valid ' Thompson, Kristin, 1988, p. 6 ^ To argue so neoformalists rely heavily on some of the ideas of Russian Formalists, especially the notions offabula and suzhet, see for example, Thompson, Kristin, 1981, and also on some of the ideas of Stanley Fish, where he argues that meaning is made, not found (Fish, Stanley, 1995 "examples merely prove that film spectators ought to imagine things which they know they do not see, but do not show that spectators play a role in determining what ought to be imagined: they do not prove that the audience makes the meaning of films"." ...
Thesis
p>This thesis outlines an aesthetics of cinema with special emphasis on formalist ideas. Specifically, the focus is on providing a link between philosophical discussions about artistic or aesthetic form, and cinema. Furthermore, it is argued that formalist discussions are an integral part of the study of cinema, and should be revised and reconsidered and their particular importance explicated. To this end a cinematic formalist theory is proposed that is shaped by the philosophy of art, and the philosophy of film in particular, and film theory, and succeeds in synthesising these in order to enrich our understanding of cinema in a novel and productive way. From these discussions the nature of form in cinema and the centrality it holds for our experiences of films will be delineated and explained. In this manner, the aesthetics of cinema proposed here fills a gap in the current philosophical literature about cinema and expands on the nature of this art form.</p
... Steiner and Erlich's books are milestones in the study of Russian Formalism that outline both the establishment and historical development of the movement within the Russian socio-political and cultural landscape of the time, as well as its main analytical tenets and contributions to the field of literature studies. Neoformalism, first developed by Thompson (1981Thompson ( , 1988 and later Bordwell (1989aBordwell ( , 1989b, translates Russian Formalism's core ideas around defamiliarization, motivations and techniques (such as mise-èn-scene, narrative, editing techniques or sound), and the dominant to the study of film. With Bordwell, Thompson, & (later) Smith's (2019) introductory textbook into film analysis currently in its 12th edition, neoformalism has become one of the most widely adopted approaches in film studies. ...
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This article provides a general overview of the theoretical foundations of formalism to assess their usefulness for the study of videogames and thereby establish grounds for a more robust approach. After determining that formalism has been used as a go-to term for a variety of ontological and methodological approaches in game studies, this article draws more specifically from Russian Formalism to use the label for a functionalist approach interested in how formal devices in videogames work to cue aesthetic responses. Through an exploration of three pillars of Russian Formalism, a videogame formalism emerges that focuses on the workings of the game as a machine while still taking the aesthetic player response as the methodological starting point and acknowledging the importance of synchronic and diachronic historical perspectives in establishing the functioning of game devices.
... Snow White 's deployment of Classical Hollywood narrative conventions to amplify the heroine's romance with the Prince has fuelled a common critique of the fi lm that 'Disney's focus on Snow White appears to extend no further than her willingness to fall in love.' 16 However, such critiques often fail to analyse the character of Snow White as an intrinsic part of the fi lm's broader cinematic landscape. In reading Snow White through the lens of Expressionism, we can observe that, although Disney's inaugural Princess has been routinely admonished as a 'fl at and one-dimensional' heroine, she plays an integral -and, indeed, active -role in shaping the landscape that surrounds her. 17 As Kristin Thompson explains, 'Expressionism lends the expressivity of the human body to the entire visual fi eld, while simultaneously trying to make the body a purely compositional element.' 18 The apparent simplicity of Snow White's character (and her role as a reactive heroine) not only foregrounds the highly expressionist nature of the fi lm's visual style but also affords her a depth of consciousness arguably not found among Disney's later, more 'active,' heroines. This formal relationship between German Expressionism and the visualization of Snow White's subconscious can be readily observed in her iconic forest fl ight. ...
Chapter
Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) occupies a central place within the history of global animation. Based on the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the film was the first feature-length animated film produced by the Disney Studio and served to announce the animated cartoon as an industrial art form. Yet Disney’s landmark version not only set in motion the Golden Age of the Hollywood cartoon, but has continued to stand as an international sensation, prompting multiple revisions and remakes within a variety of national filmmaking contexts. This book explores the enduring qualities that have marked Snow White’s influence and legacy, providing a collection of original chapters that reflect upon its pioneering use of technology and contributions to animation’s visual style, the film’s reception within an American context, and its status as a global cultural phenomenon.
... Por ejemplo, los juegos digitales deben prescindir de su potencial capacidad de desdoblamiento y de su prolongado tiempo de juego, para ceñirse a los límites de un largometraje cinematográfico y a las estructuras dramatúrgicas perennes en Hollywood. En este aspecto, deben adaptar su propio relato -muchas veces escaso (y, según casos, carente de profundidad)-así como las múltiples microestructuras narrativas que lo conforman entre niveles, para adecuarse al uso de la dramaturgia aristotélica (Riambau, 2011: 112) y a los estándares de este tipo de cine espectáculo producido por Hollywood: lo que Jullier (2004) denomina películas concierto, y Thompson (1981) cine del exceso o desmesura. Un cine "hiperabundante" de datos (Laferla, 2009), en el que la pantalla se llena de componentes estilísticos muchas veces superfluos para la unidad y el discurrir del relato (Darley, 2002). ...
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La ‘adaptación’ cinematográfica es un término que, hasta hace relativamente poco, el cine reservaba a la literatura, al teatro y a su propia “autorrevisión” en forma de remake. Hoy esta operación se ha impuesto con fuerza en el cine contemporáneo, especialmente en lo que respecta a la producción sustraída de los objetos de la cultura de masas: cómics, series de TV, atracciones de parques temáticos o, como este artículo analiza, videojuegos, se erigen también como una fuente importante de producción para las películas abanderadas por Hollywood.Resulta necesario examinar cómo estas adaptaciones de videojuegos han cobrado fuerza en el ámbito audiovisual (especialmente en el cine mainstream), cuál es su trayectoria, y como trasladan su narrativa y su lenguaje a la pantalla de cine. Una tarea que se llevará a cabo analizando a las principales precursoras, a las grandes apuestas de la industria del cine (alto presupuesto) y las adaptaciones de medio o bajo presupuesto (orientadas a un público más entendido), teniendo presente aspectos como las particularidades de la plataforma a adaptar, las diferentes condiciones del videojuego (acción, interfaz, algoritmo) u otros aspectos como la intertextualidad, la intermedialidad o la autorrenferencia que, de un modo u otro, también se entrelazan con las particularidades del cine espectáculo contemporáneo y sus fórmulas de rentabilidad y seriación.
... I suppose it's hard to train flies but their presence in swarms around dead bodies leaking fluids is a stunning image that I've always thought says a lot about the brutality of war and the results of human combat. (Dye, email to the author, 31 August 2011) Of course, there is a combination of what a neoformalist analysis would call realistic and artistic motivation (Thompson 1981) in the wording Dye uses to justify this imagery-the flies are a "stunning image" that "says a lot about the brutality of war." However, I am interested in an aspect of Dye's description that becomes clearer when compared with another combat veteran and filmmaker, Sam Fuller. ...
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A clear definition of realism is understandably difficult for critics and theorists to agree upon when applied to texts such as the war film or combat shooter, which can have a very direct connection to events that have actually taken place. This article uses textual observation and analysis to advance the concept of “reported realism” as an alternate analytical tool to account for the impression of truth and authenticity produced by specific stylistic components of these representations of combat violence. Drawing on cognitivist theories of meaning and the imagination (Torben Grodal, Stephen Prince) and neoformalist film studies (Kristin Thompson) this article points toward some of the significant developments in the evolution of violence in war films as well as the adjacent genre of the first-person shooter video game. The article shows that the intensified audio-visual detail in contemporary screen representations of war enable film viewers and game players to construct more vividly imagined mental simulations, thus offering a greater affective realism.
... So even Tristram Shandy, or an impossible-looking setup by Escher, or an experimental film, is incomparably more motivated than unmotivated, let alone than device-34. See, for example, Bordwell 1985 on classical as against highbrow film; Thompson 1981Thompson , 1988 on cinematic motivation in both; and Buckland 2012 in the previous note. baring. ...
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This paper deals with “motivation” as fiction’s twofold logic of patterning and relates it to other concepts or lines of sense-making (e.g., integration, naturalization). The argument is best summarized through the paper’s headings. 1. Why Is the Discourse Like That? Motivation as Twofold Reason-Giving 2. Reality, Artifice, and Motivation: Doctrinal Biases, Variable Products, Universal Modes; 2.1 Aristotle’s Mimesis of Nature by Art; or, Why Plot above Character?; 2.2 Viktor Shklovsky and Mimesis Fallen below Art 3. How the Extremes Compare: Toward an Alternative Theory 4. Conceptualizing Motivation: Basic Requirements 5. Motivation and Integration: The Concept of Functional Mediacy; 5.1 Motivation in Tomashevsky’s “Thematics”: The Shift from Cover to Coherence; 5.2 From Polarity to Threefold: The Typology of Motivation; 5.3 Motivating and Integrating Distinguished in Face of Persistent Mix-Up; 5.4 Naturalization 6. Integral and Differential Motivation: The Mimetic Function 7. Motivation and Communicative Structure: Point of View as Sense-Making Construct; 7.1 Who Motivates, and from Whose Standpoint?; 7.2 Motivating Fictional as against Factual Discourse: The Difference Made by Quotation; 7.3 Appeal to Existence or to Perspective? Unrealistic World and/or Unreliable Subject?; 7.4 Fictional Motivation under the Proteus Principle; 7.5 Sibling Rivalry and Contingent Resolution within the Family of Mimesis I am an art theoretician.... I know what motivation is! Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey
... Writing on the art of film in the general press is usually anchored in immediate sensory experience and personal opinion. While the neoformalist approach is widespread and influential among film scholars (see Bordwell 1985; Thompson 1981Thompson , 1988Bordwell and Thompson 2001), it is heavily based on technical analysis. The important role of film in general culture means that scholars from many fields have begun to analyse film for its properties as art, including scholars in philosophy, law, theology, literature, psychology and anthropology. ...
Article
Despite the broad interest in film as an essential aspect of contemporary life, there is no generally accepted and theoretically rigorous method for film analysis suited to a broad range of scholars. The rich tradition of hermeneutics provides such a method. Using Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical theory to interpret film requires a structure anchored in five key themes. These five themes are (1) explanation and understanding, (2) symbol, (3) metaphor, (4) narrative and (5) imagination. These five themes permit us to understand how a text or film communicates and builds meaning. Each of Ricoeur's five themes offers a specific way to understand the text, in this case, the film. All five themes work together to demonstrate the text or the work as a communicative and artistic whole, a single unit of several interlocked parts. This article will examine the five themes to show how they function together, establishing their role in interpretation. As an example, I apply Ricoeur's hermeneutics to Clint Eastwood's (1992) Western Unforgiven.
... Here estrangement no longer affects our perception of the real world around us (''clothes, furniture, one's time by Stoll in, e.g., 1962Stoll in, e.g., [1933. Regarding film itself, compare also the ''neoformalist'' appeal to defamiliarization throughout Thompson 1981on Eisenstein and, more generally, in 1988. In the novel's own development, a more radical analogue still would be experimental (meta)fiction: Sherwood 1976, Hutcheon 1984, Waugh 1984, Abbot 1991, and Orr 1991 indeed apply the Shklovskyan doctrine to it. ...
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Trumpeted as the artistic hallmark, central to Russian Formalism, and persistent ever since, estrangement yet remains an ill-defined term. We have nothing like a comprehensive approach to it, equipped to specify its workings by kind, medium, art form, discourse level, historical context. Narrative, Shklovsky's own forte, would appear the paradigm case, as the most inclusive genre and the most akin to art's and life's temporal movement. I accordingly revisit “making strange,” with its branches and afterlives, from the viewpoint of narrative theory and history—especially in relation to my account of narrative dynamics, in this “Telling in Time” series and elsewhere. Above all, given Shklovsky's perceptual emphasis, does his master effect constitute the genre's universal, overlapping and/or rivaling the dynamics of prospection (“suspense”), retrospection (“curiosity”), and, especially, recognition (“surprise”)? Or is it only a pretender to the title, a fortiori to literature's and art's supreme value and motive power? The answer hinges on the equation, current since Formalism, of perceptual estrangement with temporal disarrangement: artistic sjuzhet is disordered, hence defamiliarized, fabula, à la Tristram Shandy. Itself a variant of the anti-chronologism that has always dominated narrative study—as early as in medias res—this formula proves untenable in all its versions and reversions. But the inquiry into it, and them, is nonetheless instructive. The versions consist in two silent Formalist logics of making strange: one absolute and universalist, the other more relativized to history, both originating in Shklovsky's own ambivalence, or thoughtlessness, and still going strong. The reversions include the underground pushing of the idea to some extremein (Post)Structuralist narratology—Genette's anti-perceptual, mind-less formalism, Barthes's drive against all sequentiality (actional, textual, historical) in the name of “writerly” license—as well as open follow-ups, in cognitivist and literary-empirical circles, for example. Through these lineages, inter alia, the argument develops a set of key issues and counterproposals. Thus the shifts of estrangement, as a value, between top and low priority; its affective, or experiential, constants and variables; its relation to narrativity, their respective limits included; its correlation of narrative's unmatched time repertoire with the temporalities of history, via survival tactics and more strategic dishabituating resources; the models that capture, or emplot, its birth-death-revival (hi)stories; its transfer from the life of art to the art of living; and, most fundamental, its endless form/function interplay in both synchrony and diachrony, under the Proteus Principle.
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Bordwell stwierdza, że narracja parametryczna nie jest związana z żadną szkołą narodową, okresem historii czy gatunkiem filmu. Wydaje się, że jego normom brakuje konkretności historycznej, która cechuje np. narrację klasyczną czy narrację kina artystycznego. W narracji parametrycznej system stylistyczny filmu kreuje struktury odmienne od wymogów sjużetu. Styl filmu można zatem ukształtować i uwypuklić do takiego stopnia, że wydaje się, iż co najmniej dorównuje on ważnością strukturom opowieści. Autor szczegółowo charakteryzuje rozmaite aspekty narracji parametrycznej, odwołując się m.in. do teorii formalistów rosyjskich, strukturalizmu czy analogii z muzyką serialną. Dla unaocznienia zasad tego rodzaju narracji autor przedstawia rozbudowaną analizę Kieszonkowca (Pickpocket, 1959) Roberta Bressona. Jak zauważa Bordwell, wśród zalet analizy formy parametrycznej jest również ta, że pomaga ona ujawnić formalne przyczyny aury tajemnicy i transcendencji, którą publiczność i krytyka powszechnie przypisują dziełu Bressona. Jednym ze źródeł tego efektu jest to, że układ stylistyczny jest odmienny od układu sjużetu. Tekst jest tłumaczeniem rozdziału Parametric Narration z książki Davida Bordwella Narration in the Fiction Film, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1985. © 1985 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Ze względu na ograniczenia praw autorskich artykuł jest dostępny tylko w wydaniu papierowym.
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Desde Boca de ouro (1963) até Perdoa-me por me traíres (1983), o cinema carioca conviveu com uma leva de produções que utilizava, segundo certa crítica da época, uma mise-en-scène pesada e incômoda. Esses filmes baseados na obra de Nelson Rodrigues apresentavam um estilo expressionista de atuação que causava certa incompreensão pelo seu etos criativo e, ao mesmo tempo, paroxístico e excessivo, revelando uma herança com as vanguardas históricas europeias.
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The book focuses on the possibilities of analyzing a film as a system. It aims to deal with the process of asking questions in such a way that their answers will contribute to convincing solutions of precisely formulated tasks related to the structure of film work. It is not a broadly conceived exposé of numerous kinds of analyses of numerous types of films; it rather follows the method of in-depth study of a limited scope of issues. As such, it consists of four sections. Each of these sections offers different questions and answers, presents different findings to the reader, and follows different work methods with the explication. All sections logically follow from the others and thus analysed topics reappear in various contexts, as well as complement and develop each other. The first section presents the basic tools for analysing a work of art. The subject matter of the explication is film work. The subject matter of the second section’s explication is the analysis as such. The subject matter of the third section is explication is a written analytical text. The final section makes it easier to understand the various ways of structuring analysis and its functions on a higher level. It presents three formats of such texts: an analytical essay, an analytical study, and poetic study. The subject matter of the explication is a unity of approach on the one hand and a variety of issues-solving on the other hand. The book aims to show the broadest range of the explanatory possibilities of its approach, which it labels a poetics of fiction. It repeatedly proceeds in the chapters from formally playful films to structurally complex works when working with its case studies. It enables it to cover a wide range of challenges, which one can encounter in the process of an analysis of film works. And finally, the last chapter introduces the theme of a historiographic dimension of the book. It presents original research of the beginnings of Czech cinema.
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In this conversation, Tom Gunning and Annie van den Oever return to Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostrannenie (making strange), a neologism coined in what turned out to become a modern art theory that was developed by the young Shklovsky in the midst of the great popularity of film shows in Russia in 1913. Tom Gunning is a film historian and a theorist who wrote a series of foundational texts about early cinema that helped establish the ‘hermeneutics of wonder’ as a foundational method for a cultural archaeology of media and New Film History.[For more on Gunning’s foundational work on early cinema, see ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, and his co-authored work with André Gaudreault, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’]. Annie van den Oever is a film scholar who published on defamiliarization and edited Ostrannenie (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), which features an excavation of the seminal Shklovsky text, ‘Art as Technique’, reread within the context of early cinema. Both are Shklovsky enthusiasts and for this special issue they address a series of questions concerning the formal and neoformalist methods, ostrannenie as a method in research and teaching, and ‘wonder’ as a heuristic and creative tool in research and educational practices.
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In Hard Candy (USA 2005, R.: David Slade) trifft sich eine 14-Jährige in einem Coffeeshop mit einem 32-jährigen Fotografen, den sie beim Chatten im Internet kennengelernt hat. Wenig später sitzen die beiden lachend und flirtend mit hochprozentigen Getränken in der luxuriösen Wohnung des zwielichtigen Mannes. Auf den ersten Blick scheint sich das zierliche Mädchen mit ihren provozierenden Scherzen völlig naiv und arglos einer Situation auszuliefern, die aus der Sicht der Zuschauerin von Anfang an nichts Gutes ahnen lässt. Von einer Sekunde zur nächsten erhält die Szene jedoch eine ganz andere Qualität. Denn wir bekommen plötzlich einen scharfen und kalten Blick des Mädchens mit, der ganz und gar nicht zu ihrem sonstigen albern-koketten Verhalten passt und mit dem sie offenbar genauestens prüft, ob das Glas ihres Gesprächspartners sich schnell genug leert. Wir sehen diesen aufmerksamen Blick in einer Einstellung, in der sie hinter dem Mann steht, der ihr Gesicht größtenteils verdeckt, und in der der Kamerafokus alles außer diesem einen Auge unscharf lässt. Mit dieser auffälligen Bildkomposition gibt der Film dem Zuschauer einen Hinweis, der zur Interpretation einlädt.
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This article explores the relationship between Sergei Eisenstein and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, arguing that Solzhenitsyn's use of `screens of variable form' in his film script Tanks Know the Truth and of `screen' fragments in his epic novel The Red Wheel was influenced by Eisenstein's approaches to cinematic art. While Solzhenitsyn engaged with Eisenstein's methods in his fiction, he polemicized with Eisenstein's films, especially the later works Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, both through his fictional characters (notably in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and in his public statements. The article then continues to position Solzhenitsyn's experiments with `script-like' literary form into the wider context of literary and cultural conventions of the 1920s-1960s. The formal and aesthetic experiments in which Solzhenitsyn and Eisenstein engage are read as the continuation of avant-garde experiments and a modernist discourse that continued throughout the years of Stalinist repression and monolithic artistic forms: that of an `Epic Polyphonic Agitational Art', which has no formal status, but brings together elements of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s with socialist realist conventions and thus echoed left-wing trends in western art.
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