CINEJ Cinema Journal

An Examination of Red Dragon (2002) in Light of the Deleuzian Theory of Becoming‑Animal

2021-08-30T11:07:02-04:00

This paper explores the character development in the movie Red Dragon (2002) in relation to the Deleuzian theory of becoming-animal, and paintings by William Blake. A character analysis is made on Francis Dolarhyde in light of the theory of becoming, and parallels are drawn between connectionism and relationality, apparent in both Blake’s paintings and the Deleuzian theory. It’s argued that the theory of becoming‑animal resonates with the character development in the film, and the connectivity and contradictions of concepts in Blake’s paintings by which Dolarhyde’s character is inspired. Dolarhyde’s character is described in terms of a continuous, non‑teleological process where he disrupts binaries between the man persona and the dragon alter ego, and is characterized by virtue of his becoming.

Reading Bhadralok Cultural Memory, Kitsch And Culture Industry In Ritwik Ghatak’s Films

2022-09-26T06:54:44-04:00

The paper problematizes Ghatak’s Marxist treatment of the Bengali as well as the Brahmanical repertoire of cultural knowledge, for the purpose of carving out a Communist significance of the period. Rather than a recontextualization of traditional myths, the paper reads in this attitude a nostalgic particularistic abstraction of a rich array of aesthetic ideas, which are best appreciated in their diverse cultural context. The paper argues that Ghatak utilizes creative opuses of vast potential to serve political goals, with an aim of strengthening the East Bengali immigrant population in post-Partition West Bengal. The paper criticizes how Ghatak breaks down the traditions from different spatial and temporal coordinates for serving the representation of the plights of the Bengali Refugee – making a powerful integrated identity of the traumatized subject at the expense of erasing class, caste, communal and gender distinctions. In this, there is an effort to fashion an imaginary unified East Bengali sub-national entity, which is politically evened out for realization of unique identity and clout.

When Silence Becomes Overstretched: Exploring the Loud Silence in Women's Struggle for Liberation in Contemporary Nollywood

2022-04-13T05:44:59-04:00

Lots of debates, contestations and criticisms have continued to trail the subjugation of women in Nollywood narratives. Film scholars and critics, especially those who tow the feminist line, keep bemoaning the manner in which patriarchy and male hegemony take centre stage in many Nollywood movies to the detriment of women. Employing the mixed research methodology (qualitative content analysis and key informant interview), this study explores the loud silence in women’s struggle for liberation in contemporary Nollywood narratives. Three widely acclaimed and contemporary movies – Muna (2019), Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020) and Fine Wine (2021) – were content analysed to foreground and highlight male chauvinism and hegemony as well as women’s struggle for their liberation. Though women’s silence in the movies is as prolonged as it is loud, the fierce fight they later put up against male oppression comes as a great solace. Therefore, it is concluded that Nollywood film-makers should continue to give preeminence to such issues in subsequent narratives.

Demystifying the state of Minorities in Contemporary India: Reading Amit Masurkar's Sherni (The Tigress) from the Vantage Point of Marginality

2022-11-05T05:13:30-04:00

Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party of an emergent Indian nation-state, has, from its genesis ventriloquized and brandished its exacerbating agenda of Hindu Fundamentalism in a flawed myth of an anecdotal Hindu Nationalist past where non-Hindus are conveniently ostracized. This political gambit is deployed to manufacture an overblown theory of a decline in Hindu culture, the best resonance of which is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019, discriminating, and interrogating the legitimacy of specific communities on sheer grounds of religion. Amit Masurkar's film of 2021, Sherni (The Tigress) provides a critical insight into this brutal Racial Politics pervading an upper caste Hindu society, in the guise of a subtle sub-text, camouflaged within a distracting narrative of Man versus Nature. This paper facilitates the reading of this hidden discourse of Realpolitik alongside the predominant cultural narrative of gender and natural domination. Through a palimpsestuous reading, it explores themes of racial exclusion and segregation in an Ultra-Right Hindu Nation that the film silently addresses. Furthermore, this paper challenges the dominant narrative of Ecofeminism, to instead investigate the categories of race and ethnicity that intersect gender issues.

Excursion among the Countries, Documentary, and Essay: Layered Narratives and Self-Representation in A Dog Called Money

2023-02-21T13:52:24-05:00

The film elements, especially in the documentary or essay films, carry the director's point of view more prominently. A Dog Called Money (2019) is a film with essayistic and documentary features by photographer Seamus Murphy about the creation process of British musician PJ Harvey's latest album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. The film focuses on the artists' journey in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington DC and the album's production process, which takes place in a live museum exhibition. Murphy uses visual narrative, while Harvey takes on the role of the textual and auditory narrator with voice-over, text, and music. Therefore, this study analyses the textual and audio-visual features of the documentary film that reflect the self-representation of both artists. The representation form created by the layered narrators that the film's narrative varies between the essay and the documentary genre is interpreted in the context of image, sound, and text.

Autobiographical Traces in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Meetings with Anna

2022-09-26T10:35:26-04:00

This article explores two seminal films Akerman wrote and directed early in her career, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings with Anna) (1978), in the context of her later autobiographical writings, Une famille à Bruxelles (1998) and Ma mère rit (2013) (My Mother Laughs). While scripted many years earlier, the two films address themes later developed in Ma mère rit and Une famille à Bruxelles, notably Akerman’s intense relationship with her mother and the trauma of the Shoah. The article outlines the key elements of the two films and autobiographical works and then explores a number of shared themes between the films and autobiographical writings. Firstly, it analyses the two films in the context of Ivonne Margulies’ identification of “hindered communication” as a key feature in both films. It next develops an analysis of the privileged role Akerman attributes to communication within the family. The traumatic and pervasive influence of the Shoa in Akerman’s films and autobiographical works is then examined in the context of her mother’s history as a survivor of the camps. The article then contextualises Akerman’s use of the French language in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of a minor literature. Akerman’s treatment of the notion of home and her usage of Freudian themes - the oedipal complex, the incest taboo and mother-daughter ambivalence – is examined with examples from both Jeanne Dielman and Meetings with Anna. In conclusion, the value of a reading of Akerman’s autobiographical works, Une famille à Bruxelles (1998) and Ma mère rit, is highlighted as a means of furthering an understanding of Jeanne Dielman and Meetings with Anna.

Exploring Time Travel Rules in Time Travel Films

2022-05-30T04:40:37-04:00

Throughout film history, time travel has been an intriguing concept revisited time and again by film productions, creating a universe of time travel principles and becoming a discipline of scientific import. With some of the greatest minds and thinkers of our time contributing to the living discourse, time travel has gained global significance and has developed several rules films attempt to follow. Time travel theory postulates several theories concerning the effect of an individual traveling through time and coming into contact with themselves; some benign, some many catastrophic. This study reviews time travel films to determine the cinematic consistency of three of these rules; the grandfather paradox, time-traveling for self-benefit, and meeting oneself in an alternate time.

Experimenting with Epos: 3 Characters from 3 Directors in Turkish Cinema

2023-01-09T11:08:47-05:00

While the narrative tradition, which has been developing for thousands of years, can be examined by dividing it into three parts as Drama, Lyricos and Epos, since the discovery of cinematography 127 years ago, narrative in cinema has developed narratives parallel to the two most basic theories of cinema, Realistic Film Theory and Formalist Film Theory, as well as contributing to experimental, feminist, etc. narratives in addition to these theories. The main purpose of this article is to examine three different pioneering films and heroes of Turkish Cinema (Umut-Yılmaz Güney-hero: Cabbar, Anayurt Oteli-Ömer Kavur-hero: Zebercet, Uzak-Nuri Bilge Ceylan-hero: Mahmut), which were shot in a realistic theme, and to reveal how they developed their heroes and what kind of experience they offered to the audience with the heroes they presented, starting from the literary narrative genre Epos. Based on the concept of objectivity, the presentations of the heroes were examined by using the cinema's own language and forms with the cooperation of the screenwriter-director.

Framing the Subaltern: Humanitarian Violence in Liz Mermin’s documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul

2022-10-06T16:40:18-04:00

This paper examines how the encounter between the “First World American women” and “Third world Afghan women” is framed to inadvertently enact a form of representational violence in Liz Mermin’s documentary film, The Beauty Academy of Kabul. The paper shows that despite its ostensibly progressive stance of giving space to Afghan women’s voice, the film, serves to validate the new form the colonial self has taken in the globalized world - the humanitarian identity - and reaffirms the American imperial agenda. Employing Judith Butler’s insights in Frames of War, where she points out how the frame delimits the domain of representability and the confines of “reality” itself, the analysis explores how Mermin’s documentary frames the Afghan women as the first world audience is meant to recognize, grieve and intervene for.

Cinematic Mythology in the Narrative and Design of Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells

2023-10-23T06:52:47-04:00

This paper examines the Irish animated film The Secret of Kells. The conflict of the pagan world with the monotheistic world has been going on for millennia, and the reflections of these conflicts are clearly manifested both in the religious and artistic fields. In different geographies of the world, the call of mother nature still resonates in the depths of the subconscious of most people, images of pagan faith are transmitted from generation to generation and become visible in the works of artists. The life story of Brendon, the hero of the film, which is the subject of this article, makes viewers feel the sensitivity of cinematic aesthetics and folkloric narratives and mythologies through a characteristic Irish animation. The ethnic expressive style of Irish animation has been studied in detail in this article both in the sense of animated cinema and cultural studies.

Seeking the Political Function of Time-Image in New Turkish Cinema from a Deleuzian Perspective

2023-09-23T10:53:15-04:00

In the study, minor-being is discussed together with Deleuze's cinema approach and the concepts he produced in philosophy. In this context, the film A Tale of Three Sisters, which allows a wide contextual analysis and focuses on micropolitics, has been examined. In the film, it was seen that subjects such as being-woman, being-other, poverty, class difference and majority domination were included. The study aims to analyze Deleuze's thoughts on modern political cinema, which he associates with minor literature, and to show that there are minor components in Turkish cinema.

Cinematic Views on Critical Representations of the Economic Policies of the Democrat Party Era: Social Realist Film Initiatives in Turkish Cinema

2023-09-26T09:49:47-04:00

The Democrat Party era (1950-1960) sparked radical changes in Turkey. The economic practices of the party administration during the country's administration, as well as some of the negativities it created in the political and social field, have long been on Turkey's agenda. This agenda continued even after the May 27th 1960 Military Coup removed the party from power. The Turkish Constitution of 1961, which was put into effect after the coup, created an environment suitable for looking at various problems of society from different perspectives. This environment was also reflected in the cinema, paving the way for the birth of a movement called Social Realism in Turkish Cinema. It is thought that the Social Realist Movement (1960-1965) and some of the films shot under the influence of this movement mirror the economic policies implemented during the Democrat Party era and the adverse developments it brought with it. In the study, the reflections on the harmful effects of the Democrat Party's economic policies on social realist films in Turkish Cinema are discussed. The films selected within the scope of the study were criticized through critical discourse analysis, historical, sociological, and ideological criticism methods, and the political, sociological, and class aspects of the Democrat Party's policies, as well as their economic aspects, were analyzed.

Short History of Industrialization: A Cinematographic Approach

2023-11-19T15:45:06-05:00

The ultimate purpose of this study is to scrutinize industrialization via movies in a thematic ways. Actually, industrialization, which occurs at the end of the 18^th and the outbreak of the 19^th century, is the process of mechanization of production and the rationalization of policy as a whole. It is economically the onset of mechanization, commercialization or fabrication of goods in a massive way and the utilization of logic on a political basis. Without logic or ration, it is quite impossible that there will be no transformation like this. At the same time, it is the direct outbreak of capital accumulation. There are a great many factors for its emergence to be debated; however, there is a green reality that this is not a linear process. In the stark contrast, it is eclectical as well as progressive. History also whispers us that this innovative stage ranging from Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0 converts into a development culture, which has been dominated by the West since Renaissance and Reform. Comprehending the reasons for the formation of this innovative culture is of great significance for all of us. In this study, our main objective is to read these spheres of improvement on the basis of four movies for four stages. Industry 1.0, associated with steam power is represented by Oliver Twist (2005); Industry 2.0 is related to Modern Times (1936), as for Industry 3.0, it is based upon A Beautiful Mind (2001) while Industry 4.0 is overviewed with Replicas (2018).

Joker: Film, Working Class and Post-Truth

2023-11-19T16:58:39-05:00

The film Joker (2019) garnered huge interest from audiences worldwide and honored at the box office with an amount exceeding one billion dollars. Indeed, Joker has a class and political reflection on society. This article claims that the film Joker is a manifesto against the political forces that prioritize populist, authoritarian, and ruthless capitalist policies all over the world. The aim of our study is to analyze how the class movement is shown and examined in Joker. Joker's anti-system and anti-capitalist stance needs a sociological analysis; this analysis examines how Joker reflects people's subconscious and inspires class resistance. Another important point is to analyze the movie scenes with a descriptive analysis that will help us understand the transformation of the social movement. How the characters are assigned semiotically in the script is another requirement in terms of emphasizing what the film tells implicitly. It is important both to understand the chaos of the working class, which has not yet positioned itself in the production relations of the postmodern period after, and to see the film's recipe for why the working class should not incline towards right-wing populist politics. Understanding these two points will be the most important result and achievement of our study.

A Corpus-Based Socio-Onomastic Analysis On Turkish And American Horror Film Naming

2023-06-20T11:40:24-04:00

Both fear and horror have been extensively explored as universal unpleasant emotions with significant effects on psychological well-being. It is believed that horror is the feeling aroused when watching a horror film, and a sense of suspense and resolution is behind it. The present study explores how cultural, social, interactive, and cognitive contexts influence Turkish and American horror film naming. The present study aims to analyze Turkish and American horror film titles based on a socio-onomastic approach. So, 223 Turkish (1949-2021) and 2840 American (1898-2023) horror movie titles were investigated. The hypothesis was that Turkish horror film naming uses religious elements due to religious background. But according to the present study's findings, religious elements are also available in USA horror film naming. Yet, while making and naming their films, American horror film producers pay more attention to cultural events than Turkish filmmakers. On the other hand, the keywords used in naming Turkish and American horror films, regardless of their languages, were the same.

The Embodiment of the Post-human Child in Malayalam Films

2023-11-19T17:18:42-05:00

The adult-child binary positions the child in a developmental process toward rationality attained through becoming an adult. The child is not considered a ‘whole human’ or given the status of an ‘individual’ in a social context, as seen in the representations of child and childhood in Malayalam films. This study aims to analyze the post-human identity of children in films focusing on how social and cultural systems are portrayed in the selected films titled Manjadikuru (2008), Keshu (2009), and Philips and the Monkey Pen (2013). The article intends to problematize the inequalities, biases, and lack of agency experienced by the post-human child and argues against awarding humanist identity to the child and childhood(s).

Representation of Teachers in Turkish Cinema Between 1940 and 1980

2023-11-21T05:12:51-05:00

The film of the destruction of the Russian monument in 1914 is not only the history of Turkish cinema, but also of a country. The aim of this study is to reveal the representation of teachers in Turkish cinema, which is one of the professions that shape a nation, in films that reflect the effects of the periods spent in all its positive and negative aspects. The reflections of the political and social changes experienced in the historical process on the cinema, the emphasis in the representation of the teacher and the quality of the added value created in the society were analyzed in comparison with the periodical conjuncture. With the purposeful sampling management, the films in which the teacher was represented from 1940 to 1980 were compared with the conditions of the period in which they were shot, and their reflections on the society and the teacher were examined.

Existence is a Location: “The Others” in the Form of Conceptual Metaphor

2023-05-01T23:46:12-04:00

The need for a safe, stable, and suitable place of residence is fundamental for human beings. Nevertheless, having such a place, particularly in a city, remains unattainable for too many people. This study aims to examine how “the others” are metaphorically represented in contemporary South Korean films that portray city dwellers struggling to find a place of residence in urban areas and fighting for their existence. The multimodal analysis of conceptual metaphors enabled us to comprehend how the metaphor of EXISTENCE IS A LOCATION emphasized the significance of physical space for one’s being. Furthermore, the vertical movements in visual representations, such as GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN, connect to more abstract meanings of precarious existence, social hierarchy, and otherness.

Beyond The “Joker” Movie: Cinema As A Politainment Agent

2023-12-16T12:18:40-05:00

In the scope of this study; Joker (2019) film will be analyzed and examined as a political entertainment medium through cinematic narration. The film is assessed both in terms of scene analysis and in terms of the film's current discourse. Within the framework of this study, Joker film evaluated thematically as a political entertainment thus this article aims to enlighten the relationship between cinematic representation and political circumstances through the perspective of Douglas Kellner's Cinema Wars narrative. The goal of this study was to break down Joker film to examine its ideological and aesthetic representations within the social, political and cultural context in the timeframe when the film was released to build up a bridge between political reality through the employment of cinematographic machinery.