Film, Media and Music
This article explores serial production strategies and textual seriality in Hollywood cinema during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Focusing on John Hughes‘ high concept family comedies, it examines how Hughes exploited the commercial opportunities offered by serial approaches to both production and film narrative. This article first considers why Hughes‘ production set-up enabled him to standardise his movies and respond quickly to audience demand. The analysis then explores how the Home Alone films (1990–97), Dennis the Menace (1993) and Baby‘s Day Out (1994) balanced demands for textual repetition and novelty.
Just six years after the last American sound-era serial, Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman brought James Bond to the screen, launching the longest-lived and most influential film series of the post-studio era. This article considers how the first Bond films adapted the regular imperilments,and operational aesthetics of sound-serials. Early Bond films benefitted from a field of expectations, viewing strategies and conventions planted by the over 200 B-grade chapter-plays produced between 1930 and 1956. Recourse to these serial strategies conferred tactile immediacy and ludic clarity to the films, and facilitated engagement with the Bond beyond the cinema.
This article explores the rise of the Hollywood sequel in the 1970s and 1980s, analysing contemporary industrial and popular discourses surrounding the sequel, sequelisation, and film seriality. Drawing on recent sequel scholarship as well as a wide range of film examples and paratexts it examines how industry insiders, trade papers, and film critics tried to make sense of the burgeoning sequel trend. The ensuing discourses and cultural practices, this article argues, not only shaped the contexts of sequel production and reception at the time but also played into the movies‘ serialisation strategies and their increasingly self-referential manoeuvres.
Halit Refiğ had impact on debates around Turkish national cinema both as a thinker and as a practitioner. Instrumental in establishing the Turkish Film Institute under MSU along with his director colleagues like Metin Erksan and Lutfi Akad, Refiğ lectured for many years at the first cinema training department. This translation is from his 1971 collection of articles titled Ulusal Sinema Kavgasi (Fight For National Cinema). Here Refiğ elaborates on the concept of national cinema from cultural perspectives framing Turkey as a continuation of Ottoman Empire and its culture distinct and different from western ideas of capitalism, bourgeoisie art and Marxism. For Refiğ, Turkish cinema should be reflected as an extension of traditional Turkish arts. Refiğ explores the potential to form a national cinema through dialogue,and dialectic within Turkish traditional arts and against western cinematic traditions of representation.
Agustín Tosco Propaganda was published in the Argentine film journal El Amante Cine. It was written by Israel Adrián Caetano before his film Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes (Caetano and Stagnaro, 1998) triggered the concept of New Argentine Cinema. In this provocative text, Caetano criticised the way Argentine cinema had usually been made and, in a form of manifesto, he presented the principles that his own films – and those of many other young directors – have followed since then. Although New Argentine Cinema has been thoroughly studied in the English-speaking academia, only a few authors have made reference to this seminal text. Being aware of the principles set in this manifesto more than twenty years ago will help researchers and students understand some important features that tend to be overlooked when exploring not only Argentinean cinema, but also many other cinemas of the region.
This article traces what Élie Faure believed to be the racial, ethnic and geographic origins of art. Influenced by the writings of Gobineau and Taine, he asserts that the taxonomisation of species provides a model for the taxonomisation of artistic productions. The mixing of various races is evidenced in their artistic production, with the relative presence or absence of the rhythmic serving as an index for the presence or absence of certain types of blood, or racial/ethnic origins. Similarly, the qualities of the land where art is produced results in visible effects upon the (artistic) forms created by the people living in that geographic area. Métissage is considered a positive characteristic, and cinema the apogee of modern artistic production because of its integration of machine rhythms into the rhythms of human gesture.
Written in French exile, the following text by Siegfried Kracauer from December 1936 outlines a research project that the German-Jewish intellectual undertook with funding from the Institute for Social Research. The work outlined here would be a study of totalitarian propaganda in Germany and Italy through sustained comparison with communist and democratic countries, especially the Soviet Union and the United States. Appearing in English translation for the first time, this document from Kracauer‘s estate is crucial for a full understanding of his career as a sociologist, cultural critic, film theorist and philosopher, demonstrating the global scope of his engagement with cinema, mass culture and modernity.