This article explores Turkey’s national cinema policy’s legal, economic, and geopolitical foundations during and after World War II. Focusing on the 1948 Municipal Revenues Law, which introduced differentiated admission taxes for domestic and foreign films, the study examines how this fiscal tool functioned as economic regulation and a mechanism of cultural protectionism. Drawing on archival records, parliamentary debates, diplomatic correspondence, and trade data, the article traces how Turkish cinema gained institutional ground against Hollywood’s dominance and Egyptian melodrama’s popularity. The analysis reveals how taxation policies, sectoral mobilisation, international agreements, and cultural diplomacy converged to open space for domestic film production. Situating Turkish cinema within broader Cold War dynamics and cultural imperialism debates, the article argues that national cinema policy was shaped at the intersection of internal industrial agency and external political pressures, challenging conventional accounts of postwar cultural development.
This article examines the physical and bodily aspects of superimposition in The Wonder Ring (Stan Brakhage, 1955) and As Without So Within (Manuela de Laborde, 2016). Creating a dialogue between Gene Youngblood’s concept of synesthetic cinema and Karen Barad’s idea of agential realism, I suggest doing a new materialist phenomenology to better grasp the ways the films experiment with more-than-human worlds. In particular, I identify superimposition as an intra-action through which grades of dissimilarity arise, vary and shape an entangled experience. My main argument is that in the decentered compositions of Brakhage’s and de Laborde’s works, the singularity of image, its temporal, spatial, corporeal and material dimensions vanish into an inescapable multiplicity. It is not just a pose, but a matter of juxtaposition in which there is no sense of superiority, perception lacks any predominant center, we are, together with nonhuman beings, in the midst of becomings, of continual metamorphoses.
Immersive environments perceived through head-mounted displays allow us to experience a tridimensional virtual space, no longer limited by the frame boundaries which have traditionally characterized our perception of images. By virtue of its capacity to overcome the image threshold, virtual reality is often described as the most powerful tool for incorporating the perception of the other, that is as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’. The idea of dissolving the image frame is also the theoretical pivot of A.G. Iñárritu’s latest virtual reality work Carne y Arena, in which the Mexican director implemented unprecedented virtual technologies in order to tell the experience of a group of refugees trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States. Through an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, I aim to undo the empathy and immersive rhetoric through which VR contents and devices are presented, and argue instead that VR experience is pierced by a number of discontinuities and gaps in perception, with largely neglected potentialities. By interrogating the overlapping of the limits of the image, the boundaries of the body and those that are established by geographical and biopolitical borders, I show how in virtual reality, if the frame of the image seems to disappear, then the very function of framing does not dissolve, but, rather, is assumed by the experiencer’s body and embodied gaze.
Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat.
Nesse artigo faço uma análise da representação da cidade do Recife no filme Febre do Rato, dirigido pelo cineasta pernambucano Cláudio Assis e roteirizado por
Hilton Lacerda. Meu objetivo é descrever e interpretar os modos de viver e experimentar a cidade que são encenados nesse filme, de forma a refletir sobre como as narrativas fílmicas apresentam as relações sociais urbanas e como podem contribuir para pensar o
urbano. O enredo se passa no bairro do centro do Recife, especificamente a parte banhada pelo rio Capibaribe, e tem como protagonista Zizo, um poeta anarquista, de vida transgressora, que carrega em si a memória e os desmandos da cidade.
This article examines the critical role visualisation plays for digital cinema studies and proposes that cinema studies has an equally critical role to play in evaluating and developing visualisation methods. The article reflects on work undertaken in the Kinomatics Project, a multidisciplinary study that explores, analyses and visualises the industrial geometry of motion pictures and which is one of the first “big data” studies of contemporary cultural diffusion. Its examination of global film flow rests on a large dataset of showtime information comprising more than 330 million records that describe every film screening in forty-eight countries over a thirtymonth period as well as additional aggregated box-office data.