Expresiones audiovisuales

Bridging the divide between humanities and social sciences, Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television: The Pulse of Our Times represents a unique collection of interdisciplinary reflections upon the emotional cultures of contemporary societies. The book contains chapters by leading historians of emotions, scholars in film and television studies, and a pioneering scholar in aging research. The collection opens up questions upon the characteristic features of our 'emotional regimes' and demonstrates possible ways of using films, emotions and therapy as a tool both to shed new light on our emotional realities, identities and sensitivities in their historically contingent frame and to understand their shifting nature. Thus, the collection offers a fresh, insightful look at emotions and society across disciplines from the early years of the twentieth century to the present.

From »Avatar« to danced versions of »Romeo and Juliet«, from Bollywood films to »Star Wars Uncut«: This book investigates film remakes as well as forms of remaking in other media, such as ballet and internet fan art. The case studies introduce readers to a variety of texts and remaking practices from different cultural spheres. The essays also discuss forms of remaking in relation to neighbouring phenomena like the sequel, prequel and (re-)adaptation. »Remakes and Remaking« thus provides a necessary and topical addition to the recent conceptual scholarship on intermediality, transmediality and adaptation.

Words in Action dedicates to the subject of film dialogue a comprehensive exploration. The book analyzes a wide series of examples, perfectly chosen in contemporary American mainstream cinema – from Gladiator to The Devil Wears Prada, from Schindler’s List to A Beautiful Mind, from Collateral to The Dark Knight – and, in some cases, also in prime time TV drama – ER, The West Wing, House M.D., John Adams.
In a screenplay, the secrets of well written dialogue are hidden in the construction of the scene, where every word should stem from the theme of the story. At the light of this basic assumption, the book explores how Hollywood screenwriters create verbal duels assigning characters different frames of values and making the hero win by «reframing» what is at stake in the scene. The author elaborates on how Oscar winner authors such as Paul Haggis, Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian create subtext. Finally, the book highlights the screenwriting techniques to cover exposition, an issue which gives the author also the opportunity to concentrate on the differences between dialogues in movies and in TV drama.

Video art emerged as an art form that from the 1961s and onwards challenged the concept of art – hence, art historical practices. From the perspective of artists, critics, and scholars engaged with this new medium, art was seen as too limiting a notion. Important issues were to re-think art as a means for critical investigations and a demand for visual reconsiderations. Likewise, art history was argued to be in crisis and in need of adapting its theories and methods in order to produce interpretations and thereby establish historical sense for moving images as fine art. Yet, as this book argues, video art history has evolved into a discourse clinging to traditional concepts, ideologies, and narrative structures – manifested in an increasing body of texts. Video Art Historicized provides a novel, insightful and also challenging re-interpretation of this field by examining the discourse and its own premises. It takes a firm conceptual approach to the material, examining the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications that are simultaneously contested by both artists and authors, yet intertwined in both the legitimizing and the historicizing processes of video as art. By engaging art history’s most debated concepts (canon, art, and history) this study provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms of the historiography of video art. Scrutinizing various narratives on video art, the book emphasizes the profound and widespread hesitations towards, but also the efforts to negotiate, traditional concepts and practices.

By focusing on the politics of this discourse, theoretical issues of gender, nationality, and particular themes in video art, Malin Hedlin Hayden contests the presumptions that inform video art and its history.

Este volumen recoge un conjunto de trabajos realizados por los miembros del GELYC (Grupo de Estudios sobre Literatura y Cine) de la Universidad de Salamanca. Todos ellos tienen en común el intento de trascender el ámbito operativo del viejo término “adaptación”, circunscrito generalmente al trasvase de textos literarios a la pantallas, para abarcar otros numerosos frentes donde se desarrollan un conjunto de operaciones heterogéneas relativas al intercambio, cada vez más enriquecedor, que tiene lugar entre los textos literarios y los medios audiovisuales.

Este libro está consagrado al estudio del proyecto de desarrollo del séptimo arte de la década del 61, conocido como “Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano”, con el que se intentó crear una alianza de las experiencias de renovación cinematográfica llevadas a cabo en diversos países de América Latina.

In the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, all five of the Chief Ministers since 1967 have been former actors. This provocative book debunks the notion of Bollywood as the synecdoche of Indian cinema to explore the hitherto less studied, yet highly influential cinema in South Asia. Developing the concept of the politics of sentiment, the author examines the ways in which actor-politicians constructed their cinematic charisma, projecting themselves as messiahs saving the people from injustices, to create a political appeal to voters. The resilience of cinematic charisma, as Indian society undergoes massive socio-economic changes, provides a compelling study of modern politics, cinema, celebrity and the culture of the subcontinent.

From advertisements to amusement parks, themed restaurants, and Renaissance fairs twenty-first century popular culture is strewn with reimaginings of the Middle Ages. They are nowhere more prevalent, however, than in the films, television series, books, and video games of speculative genres: fantasy and science fiction. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies and George R. R. Martin’s multimedia Game of Thrones franchise are just two of the most widely known and successful fantasy conglomerates of recent decades. Medievalism has often been understood as a defining feature of fantasy, and as the antithesis of science fiction, but such constructs vastly underestimate the complexities of both genres and their interactions. “Medieval” has multiple meanings in fantasy and science fiction, which shift with genre convention, and which bring about their own changes as authors and audiences engage with what has gone before in the recent and deeper pasts.

For several decades after medievalism was established as a field of legitimate scholarly inquiry in the 1981s and 1990s, popular culture iterations were largely viewed with some suspicion if not outright disdain. The twenty-first century, however, has seen growing recognition of the importance of what has been termed the “neomedieval”: medievalisms which playfully reimagine the past rather than attempting historically accurate re-creation.

Science fiction and fantasy, with their necessarily impossible worlds, are perhaps the ultimate in neomedievalism. Earlier volumes have examined some of the ways in which contemporary popular culture re-imagines the Middle Ages, offering broad overviews, but none considers fantasy, science fiction, or the two together. The focused approach of this collection provides a directed pathway into the myriad medievalisms of modern popular culture. By engaging directly with genre(s), this book acknowledges that medievalist creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum, but are shaped by multiple cultural forces and concerns; medievalism is never just about the Middle Ages.

Studies of genres, moreover, often focus on a single medium—fiction, film, or television. Each section, and some individual chapters in the volume explores at least two, reflecting the multimedia nature of contemporary popular culture in general and genres in particular. By exploring the way medievalist discourses travel and shift across media within connected genres, the volume explores some of their internal complexities.

Studies of popular genres illuminate social and cultural trends and concerns, while medievalisms reveal far more about the milieu in which they were created than they do about the Middle Ages. By exploring how popular genres develop, pulling on and being pushed by changing approaches to “the medieval,” this collection sheds light on twenty-first century popular culture’s dynamic and at times conflicting moves, and those of the society which creates and consumes it. Individual chapters take diverse approaches, both synchronic and diachronic, some offering detailed case studies and others broader reviews of themes and trends. The variety enables a detailed picture of the complexities of fantasy and science fiction medievalisms to emerge.

The first section explores the reception of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the two chapters together demonstrate that fantasy’s “Tolkienian” medievalism is not that of a single author, but of many readers and creators making and remaking it in different media. The second shows that the dark and dirty medievalism of Game and Thrones and the subgenre of gritty fantasy is complex and at times contradictory. It illustrates the impact of market trends and forces on popular culture texts and the ways they are understood to engage with the past. The third section demonstrates that medievalism has been at the heart of science fiction since the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1960s, and illustrates that use of medieval material and reference points connects it with fantasy as much as it separates the two genres. The final chapter shows that in the twenty-first century, fantasy definitions of medievalisms are expanding to include more than just references to the European Middle Ages which have long been conventional in the genre.

Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms will be of much interest to scholars of fantasy and science fiction, and of medievalism.

A presença ubíqua de informação na sociedade contemporânea tem conduzido a uma rápida alteração de comportamentos do recetor face aos mass media. A premissa one to many dos média tradicionais evoluiu para uma self mass comunication (Castells, 2109), numa lógica de comunicação multimédia interpessoal e de ausência crescente do mediador entre as fontes e a notícia.

Os ecrãs disseminam-se, funcionam em rede, pelo que já não é adequada uma análise isolada da televisão. O avanço vertiginoso da tecnologia digital atirou o medium para um contexto de novos desafios e de dúvidas constantes. Vivemos a era da plenty television e da informação ubíqua na qual a opção multicanal disponibiliza uma escolha infindável não só nos tradicionais ecrãs de televisão, mas também nas novas plataformas que rapidamente emergiram e fazem parte do quotidiano de milhões de utilizadores.

O mercado da televisão generalista free-to-air (FTA) está a mudar velozmente, o que tem causado incertezas inquietantes sobre a sustentabilidade de uma atividade que foi tida, durante décadas, como uma das mais poderosas e influentes da história da comunicação.

Estas empresas, que suportam o seu modelo de negócio através do incentivo ao consumo, são agora forçadas a dividir as receitas com os canais da televisão por subscrição e com os novos concorrentes do mercado publicitário que emergiram da web, dos quais se destacam a Google, o YouTube, o Facebook, o Twitter e o Instagram.

Assistimos a uma híper-segmentação de públicos, a um aumento do poder de escolha do espectador e a um desencontro das conveniências do programador e do recetor. Estamos perante um novo contexto mediático, onde se verificam interesses muitas vezes conflituantes entre distribuidores, produtores, anunciantes, fabricantes e consumidores.

O espectador passou a ser redistribuidor, produtor e programador de conteúdos, emergindo de uma aparente passividade – decorrente do conceito de audiência dos mass media -, para um papel ativo e participante, em consequência da sociedade informacional em que vivemos, na qual a rede é elemento central.

Os editores dos noticiários televisivos passaram a difundir o produto amador (conteúdos produzidos pelo espectador sem a orientação de um jornalista), a introduzir nos alinhamentos os conteúdos mais populares das redes sociais – numa adoção das práticas dos utilizadores na rede –, e a optar pela informação-magazine como estratégia para fidelizar as audiências, cada vez mais emancipadas e independentes da programação pré-estabelecida pelos emissores.

Parece claro que, tal como a informação, os conteúdos televisivos estão presentes e acessíveis em cada vez mais locais e em aparelhos cada vez mais móveis e mais diversificados. Em suma, a proliferação da oferta e a ação mais participativa do espectador impelem a academia e os profissionais para a necessidade premente de repensar a televisão atual e perceber este medium no futuro próximo.

Foi neste contexto que surgiram as questões centrais que nortearam os trabalhos da conferência internacional “A Informação na Era da Televisão Ubíqua”, que teve lugar na UBI em 20 de maio de 2014: como chegámos ao conceito de televisão ubíqua? Qual o cenário de oferta de televisão ubíqua em Portugal? Que informação resulta na e da era da televisão ubíqua? Que implicações tem a ubiquidade da televisão na produção de conteúdos dos canais temáticos de informação televisiva em Portugal?

O livro resgata parte da história do cinema brasileiro através de resenhas de 610 filmes nacionais de todas as épocas e gêneros.