Film, Media and Music
This article investigates the emotive potency of horror soundtracks. The account illuminates the potency of aural elements in horror cinema to engage spectators body in the light of a philosophical framework of emotion, namely, the embodied appraisal theories of emotion. The significance of aural elements in horror cinema has been gaining recognition in film studies. Yet it still receives relatively scarce attention in the philosophical accounts of film music and cinematic horror, which tend to underappreciate the power of horror film sound and music in inducing emotions. My investigation aims both to address the lacuna, and facilitate dialogue between the two disciplines.
This article analyses the production cultures of two film and television companies in the United Kingdom – RED Production and Warp Films – by discussing the companies formation and identity, aims and ethos, internal structures and their networks of external relationships. The article argues that although managing directors and senior personnel exercise considerable power within the companies themselves, the companies depend on the extent to which they are able to engage with other industry agents, in particular the large-scale institutions that dominate the film and television industries. By situating analysis of these negotiated dependencies within shifting macroeconomic, historical and cultural contexts, the article argues that the increasing power of multinational conglomerates and the cultural convergence between film and high-end television drama marks a threshold moment for both companies which will alter their production cultures significantly.
This article focuses on the Monthly Film Bulletin, a magazine devoted to what is often regarded as the lowliest and most ephemeral form of film criticism: the film review. Studying the Bulletins publication history, with a particular emphasis on the 1970s, the article challenges the dismissal of journalistically motivated film criticism in academic discourse. It argues that the historical interest of the Bulletins late period lies in its hybrid identity, a journal of record in which both accurate information and personal evaluation coexisted as values, and in which a polyphony of individual critical voices creatively worked through a routinised reviewing practice and a generic discursive format.
This article reveals how screenwriter Stephen Volk‘s idea for a sequel to The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) became, over the course of fifteen years, the British horror film The Awakening (2011, Nick Murphy). It examines practitioner interviews to reflect on creative labour in the British film industry, while also reorientating the analysis of British horror film to the practices of pre-production, specifically development. The research reveals that female protagonist Florence Cathcart was a major problem for the project and demonstrates how the Florence character changed throughout the development process. Repeatedly rewritten and ultimately restrained by successive male personnel, her character reveals persistent, problematic perceptions of gender in British horror filmmaking.
What role do individuals play in sustaining the so-called global film festival network? This article considers this question through case studies of four specialist Chinese-language film festivals in London. It argues that while the global circuit shapes the institutional appearance of these smaller events, the kinds of strategic collaborations that the organisers of the latter effect at the former – striking up connections with directors and sales agents at film markets, for example – are key ways in which global relationships and A-list events are built from the ground up. These mutually related but unstable interactions allow us to rethink the network as an assemblage of events and individuals, addressing the analytical problem of scale in film festivals studies in the process.
This article sets out to reinvigorate national cinema studies in an Irish context through a quantitative analysis of films financed by the Irish Film Board between 1993 and 2013. In constructing and coding a database of titles produced with the aid of state finance during this period, the authors argue for a methodology that broadens the inductive approaches of textual analysis that have dominated discussions of Irish cinema to date. By establishing recurring genres, narrative patterns, themes and character types present in IFB-funded films during this period, this article demonstrates how the professional objectives of IFB personnel have shaped institutional funding outcomes.
Since its inception by the Council of Europe in 1989, Eurimages has been to the fore in financing European co-productions with the aim of fostering integration and cooperation in artistic and industry circles and has helped finance over 1,600 feature films, animations and documentaries. Taking as its thesis the idea that the CoE seeks to perpetuate Europes utopian ideals, despite the dystopian realities that frequently undermine both the EU and the continent at large, this article analyses select Eurimages-funded dystopian films from industrial, aesthetic and socio-cultural standpoints with a view toward decoding institutionally embedded critiques of the European project.
The outsourcing of film shoots has long been adopted by US producers to cut costs and improve box-office performance. According to the academic literature, outsourcing is exploited mainly for low- and middle-budget films, but this article aims to demonstrate that blockbusters are also migrating towards other states and countries to take part in an even more competitive film location market. It investigates 165 blockbusters released between 2003 and 2013. The collected data show that blockbuster shoots are not an exclusive to California, but are re-drawing the map of film production in favour of an even more polycentric and polyglot audiovisual panorama.