We hear a band strike up festive music. We see street vendors selling their wares from carts lining a city street. A man and boy, holding hands, walk past the vendors. As they recede into a distant crowd, a pair of young men, both in Western suits and tarbooshes, stroll into and out of the frame. Two riders—one in a dark galabiya and t…
Watership Down, the 1978 British cel-animated feature produced, directed and written by Martin Rosen, and the bestselling 1972 novel by Richard Adams on which it is based are indeed relatively anomalous. The novel is often considered uncategorizable: an adventure story about rabbits that might be a comfortable bedfellow with the works of Beatrix Potter and other children’…
The computer science department at Stanford University offers a course called Computer Graphics: Animation and Simulation. Many departments at other universities have offered a similar course, including the University of North Carolina, University of California, California Polytechnic, and Carnegie Mellon. A title like Animation and Simulation will sound to some like a betra…
In August 1969, a group of local Japanese martial arts masters in New York invited Ronald Duncan, a burgeoning Black1 American practitioner of the Japanese martial art of ninjutsu, commonly translated as the “art of stealth,” to exhibit his techniques as part of the second International Convention of Martial Arts hosted by Black Belt mag…
Immersed in digital 3D stereoscopic vision, we f loat in a low orbit above Earth’s atmospheric threshold, which glows blue against an otherwise black screen. A velvety, thick silence fortif ies the authenticity of this senso-rial encounter made possible by way of seamless integration between cinematographic excellence and high-performance computation. In this visually immense opening sequence…
Is film a medium of communication? This is a basic question of film studies. It is about as old as the field itself, and the discursive frameworks and underlying assumptions that make the question relevant are about as old as the medium, or the art form, of cinema itself. As John Durham Peters argues, “only since the late nineteenth century have we defined ourselves in terms our ability to co…
When the Immediations book series at Open Humanities Press was launched, it was done with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the intercessor1 in mind. We were looking for a way to give voice to a kind of collaboration that would work from within the weave of research and writing, a collaboration that would give texture to a voice (or a multiplicity of voice) toward a conversation to come. A conversa…
Can true love materialize from a transactional affair? Let me turn to a certain Akira Kurosawa in order to broach my preoccupation with this capacious question, one that preoccupied a set of commercial Hindi films in a postwar, post-independence period of the long 1960s. By “Akira Kurosawa,” I am referring to a song sequence (clip 1) from the unassuming…
Post-war social scientists and subsequent historians have debated the relative importance of the factors that led to cinema’s decline. In the early 1960s, a group of exhibitors, distributors and producers asked economist John Spraos to examine the problems facing the industry. In 1962, he published a statistical report analysing cinema’s demise, the in…
The film opens with shots of a barbed wire fence, warning signs, and bar-riers, accompanied by a dramatic score and an omniscient voice-over that embeds the historical situation depicted on screen within a particular nar-rative. The narrator explains that the film is the story of East German fac-tory worker Anna Kaminski (Eva Kotthaus) and West German border guard Carl Altmann (Eri…
Ozu Yasujiro found himself pacing through the dark. It was De-cember 12, 1936 and it seemed that the world was shifting. The director hardly ever worried, his lead actor Ryu Chishu recalled, but that morning he looked as he if were “drifting, like a frag-ment of a cloud, along an ever-widening spiral,”1 first circling around the camera, then around the dining ro…
For as long as there has been cinema, there has been the remake; and for as long as there has been the remake, there has been a sense of critical unease about the value of making a film which has ‘already been made’. And yet, wave upon wave of remakes continue to wash over audiences worldwide. Arguably the most prolific global creator of these remakes, Hollywood, has audiences geared up for…
When it came out in 1997, Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononokehime ( Princess Mononoke ) was a new kind of anime fi lm. It broke long- standing Japanese box offi ce records that had been set by Hollywood fi lms, and in becoming a blockbuster- sized hit Mononokehime demonstrated the commercial power of anime in Japan. 1 F u r t h e r , Mononokehime became the fi rst…
I disagree with such an evaluation and would rather claim that there is more meaning to the film, drawn to it from the original novel, than the audience can take in while watching the film only once, especially if those who watch it are unfamiliar with Herbert’s novel. In fact, every form of literature or visual media is in a way impacted by the time o…
The history film has played an exceptionally powerful role in shaping our culture’s understanding of the past, an influence that derives not simply from the cinema’s unequaled ability to re-create the past in a sensual, mimetic form, but also from its striking tendency to arouse critical and popular controversy that resonates throughout the public sphere. American films centered on the past…