OpenUCT :: Browsing by Subject "Film Studies"

Browsing by Subject "Film Studies"

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Absences, exclusivities and utopias: Afrikaans film as a cinema of political impotence, 1994 - 2014
(2016) Broodryk, Chris Willem; Botha, Martin P
This thesis develops a conceptual and theoretical framework within which to position contemporary Afrikaans cinema as a cinema of political impotence. Afrikaans cinema is first located within the tensions of democratic post-transitional South African society and linked to the identity politics of being identified as 'Afrikaner' or 'Afrikaans speaking'. The thesis provides a critical overview of film scholar Thomas Elsaesser's studies of (New) German Cinema and Hollywood, identifying key notions such as double occupancy to inform the study's vocabulary, and discussing how certain cultures have responded to traumatic events in which they were complicit. The thesis then links Elsaesser's studies to Fredric Jameson's views on political cinema and the political failures of postmodernism. This conceptual and theoretical framework identifies and problematises the neoliberal structures that guide much of Afrikaans filmmaking, and offers a historical overview of key moments and figures in South African (primarily Afrikaans) filmmaking in order to demonstrate that there Afrikaans cinema.
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Between the norm and a hard place: representing marginality in Harmony Korine's Gummo
(2013) De Villiers, Jacques; Smit, Alexia Jayne
This dissertation centres on an examination of Gummo, the provocative directorial debut by filmmaking enfant terrible, Harmony Korine. While largely dismissed by critics who were put off by the film's visceral intensity, unconventional narrative structure and unsentimental depictions of marginality, I want to counter such criticism by arguing that Gummo in fact offers a refreshingly new approach to cinematic representations of white poverty in the United States. While U.S. cinema has often furnished us with representations of poverty, the majority of these ï¬ lms have tended to focus on characters' economic hardships. By contrast, Gummo is almost unique in privileging the cultural and ideological dimensions - concerns with weight and sporting success, attaining and retaining certain norms of masculine strength and appearance, repeated references to celebrity culture, to name but a few examples - while locating such normative dimensions within the bleak material realities that mark life on the breadline. In so doing, Gummo draws attention to the paradoxical cultural question of poverty in the so-called First World: How does one engage with the daily barrage of ideologically imposed social and cultural norms when one's basic living conditions are diametrically opposed to such norms? While most films tend to treat the poor as always outside and in binary opposition to the normative order, I want to propose that we re-think poverty and marginality's cultural identity as always hybrid and in-between the margin and the norm. Such an interstitial position is articulated by Gummo's highlighting of two very different representational approaches: one based on an abject materiality that is often framed in an almost tactile and disconcertingly visceral manner, the other relying on the maintenance of a plastic or surface aesthetic through which symbolic cultural norms and ideals are semiotically conveyed. Rather than seeking to resolve such approaches' contradictions to one another, Gummo gives cinematic expression to the ambivalent position that results when one occupies both spaces simultaneously. This encourages us to think of marginality interstitially, rather than conceiving of it as merely 'other' to what is considered normative or mainstream. In theorising Gummo's representation of white marginality as an interstitial phenomenon, I have drawn primarily on the work of three quite different thinkers: post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, gender theorist Judith Butler and film theorist Vivian Sobchack. Chapter one engages with Bhabha's ideas about cultural hybridity, seeking to demonstrate how Gummo represents marginality as a decidedly heterogeneous affair, one that blurs all clear notions of centre and margin. Chapter two explores this breaking down of binary value further by investigating how, through subversive acts of re-signification, the norm or centre can become 'contaminated' by the margin. Here I employ Butler's notion of performativity and citation, which demonstrates how norms can be materialised and cited in non-normative circumstances that challenge the validity of the dominant discourse. Such 'non-normative' materialisation blurs the boundary between that which is normative and that which is 'other'. Chapter three expands this notion of re-signiï¬ cation and hybridity still further. Drawing upon the phenomenology-based theory of Vivian Sobchack, I explore those aspects of Korine's film that - like Sobchack's theory - privilege materiality and the body as sites of experience. I then proceed to read Sobchack in relation to Butler and Bhabha, arguing that the manner in which Korine almost tactically frames the harsh, abject materiality of Gummo's setting plays off and meshes with the presence of symbolic norms and ideals. Gummo and its characters are thus ï¬ rmly lodged in a hybrid Third Space; in-between the cultural signs of 'normalcy' and a materialised space of messy abjection. It is between these two seemingly incompatible dimensions that the film and its characters make meaning and forge a sense of cultural identity.
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A death in the family: meditations on mourning in contemporary cinema
(2012) Petousis, Simone; Marx, Lesley
This thesis examines cinematic depictions of traumatic loss and mourning, with particular focus on representation. My study merges a theoretical and analytical investigation. I aim to defend cinema against the wider post-structuralist claim that trauma refutes the possibility of representation and argue, instead, that an increasing array of filmic examples demonstrate cinema's potential to provide valuable insights into the complexities of the subject. I use Freud's discussion of trauma as a belated, repetitious experience as an entry point to illustrate the ways in which cinema, a medium bound to temporality, can develop a relationship between linear and traumatic time...
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Die ongelooflike avonture van Afrikaanse filmaanpassings: filmic adaptations of Afrikaans literature with specific focus on novels, youth literature and stage plays
(2014) Du Plooy, Alta; Botha, Martin P
South African cinemas, and Afrikaans cinemas in particular, have mostly been studied for its political, representational and socio-political value and its often-problematic furnishing in these categories. This dissertation explores different lenses through which Afrikaans cinemas can be studied. It models itself on Alexie Tcheuyap’s framework in Postnationalist African Cinemas (2011) which directly questions the notion that African cinemas have to be revolutionary, nationalistic, subversive and/or post-colonialist. These demands were clearly set out by FEPACI in the 1960s and many scholars never revised their strategies of scholarship or kept up with the vast political, social and cultural shifts of most of the continent’s cinemas and audiences. Tcheuyap argues for a new way of studying these cinemas that allows for emphases on genre, myth construction, sexuality, dance and the refraction of some cultural practices in the imagination of filmmakers, audiences and the screen (2011). Because this study models itself on new frameworks of investigating African cinemas, it contextualises Afrikaans cinemas within African cinemas. Afrikaans as a language should own its connections of a history of oppression and terrorisation of around 90% of South Africans for a very long time before, during and even after apartheid. It is however imperative that the language’s function, representation and literary and artistic contribution to South African culture is revised and included in studies of African cinemas. The unabashed subversiveness of Afrikaans filmmakers like Jans Rautenbach and Manie van Rensburg during the height of apartheid is often overlooked. Even though scholarship of Afrikaans cinemas is relatively limited, the domain of the discipline is rather large with a history that spans across 83 years. The parameters for this study beacon off one sector namely that of filmic adaptations of Afrikaans literature. Specific focus will be given to adaptations of novels, youth literature and stage plays. Adaptation theory has, like the study of African cinemas, only very recently moved away from the popular essentialist, page- to -screen view of what filmic adaptions should be or do. Kamilla Elliott teases out a complex history and development of scholarship and tendencies in adaptation studies in her book, Rethinking the Novel/Film debate (2003). I unpack Elliott’s tracing of interart wars and interart analogies and concepts of adaptation in chapter two. This proposed framework for adaptation studies is used to map some of the primary texts ’ film aesthetics and strategies of thematic moulding in Roepman (2011) in chapter two. Chapter three explores the special interaction between adaptation and particular narrative component and how the director uses a mixed film aesthetic to move between a character’s interiority and exterior environment in Die Ongelooflike Avonture van Hanna Hoekom (2010) . This chapter also analyses how Afrikaans films have posed challenges to the nuclear family – both Skilpoppe (2004) and Hanna Hoekom feature overt explorations of this theme. A contemporary stage play has never been adapted for Afrikaans film. Chapter four regards two adaptations from stage plays – Moedertjie (1931) and Siener in die Suburbs (1975) to observe how space and genre, with specific reference to melodrama, has entered into and functions in these texts.
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Father, God and Tyler's ghost : Fight Club as masculine quest and postmodern pastiche
(2008) Tessendorf, Clint David; Rijsdijk, Ian
This study seeks to account for the numerous ways critics in reviews, magazine articles, journal articles and books have interpreted David Fincher's Fight Club. It also seeks to account for growing appeal of the film even though it was initially described as a failure at the box-office. The film clearly engages with many provocative ideas, leading to the many ways it has been interpreted. This exploration is facilitated through an exploration of the various labels that have been placed on the film and investigates to what extent the film manages to provide a coherent message beyond its mixed bag of 'hip' allusions.
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The Great Dance : myth, history and identity in documentary film representation of the Bushmen, 1925-2000
(2005) Van Vuuren, Lauren; Bickford-Smith, Vivian; Mendelsohn, Richard
This thesis utilises a sample of major documentary films on the Bushmen of Southern Africa as primary sources in investigating change over time in the interpretation and visualisation of Bushmen peoples over seventy-five years from 1925 to 2000. The primary sources of this thesis are seven documentary films on the subject of Bushmen people in southern Africa. These films are as follows The Bushmen (1925), made by the Denver African Expedition to southern Africa; the BBC film Lost World of Kalahari (1956) by Laurens van der Post; The Hunters (1958) by John Marshall; the 1974 National Geographic Society film Bushmen of the Kalahari; John Marshall's 1980 film N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman; and the South African films People of the Great Sandface (1984) by Paul John Myburgh and The Great Dance (2000) by Craig and Damon Foster. All of these films reflect, to varying degrees, a complex interplay between generic images of Bushmen as pristine primitives and the visible evidence of many Bushmen peoples rapid decline into poverty in Southern Africa, a process which had been ongoing throughout the twentieth century. The aim of the thesis has been to explore the utilisation of film as a primary source for historical research, but focussing specifically on a subject related to the southern African historical context. The films under analysis have been critically appraised as evidence of the values and attitudes of the people and period that have produced them, and for evidence about the Bushmen at the time of filming. Furthermore, each film has been considered as a film in history, for how it influences academic or popular discourses on the Bushmen, and finally as filmic 'historiography' that communicates historical knowledge. This thesis, then, utilises a knowledge and understanding of film language, as well as the history and development of documentary film, to assess and consider the way in which knowledge is communicated through the medium of film. This study has attempted to investigate the popular and academic indictment of documentary film as progenitor and/ or reinforcing agent of crude, reified mythologies about Bushmen culture in southern Africa. It is shown here that the way major documentary films have interpreted and positioned Bushmen people reveals the degree to which documentary films are acute reflections of their historical contexts, particularly in relation to the complicated webs of discourse that define popular and academic responses to particular subjects, such as 'Bushmen', at particular historical moments. Critical, visually literate analysis of documentaries can reveal the patterns of these discourses, which in turn reflect layers of ideology that change over time. A secondary finding of this thesis has been that documentary film might constitute a source of oral history for historians, when the subjects of a documentary film express ideas and attitudes that reflect self-identity. It is proposed that the approach to analysis of documentary film that has been utilised throughout this study is a means of 'extracting' the oral testimony from its ideological positioning within the world of the film. The historian might evaluate the usefulness of a subject's oral testimony in relation to the ideological orientation of the film as a whole, to decide whether it is worthwhile being considered as das Ding an sich or should be seen purely as a reflection of values and attitudes of the filmmaker, or something in between. It is shown in this thesis that documentary film constitutes an important archive of oral testimony for historians who are properly versed in reading film language.
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Heroines, victims and survivors: female minors as active agents in films about African colonial and postcolonial conflicts
(2018) Mdege, Norita; Botha, Martin
This thesis analyses the representations of girls as active agents in fictional films about African colonial and postcolonial conflicts. Representations of these girls are located within local and global contexts, and viewed through an intersectional lens that sees girls as trebly marginalised as "female," "child soldiers" and "African." A cultural approach that combines textual and contextual analyses is used to draw links between the case study films and the societies within which they are produced and consumed. The thesis notes the shift that occurs between the representations of girls in anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial wars as a demonstration of ideological underpinnings that link these representations to their socio-political contexts. For films about African anti-colonial conflicts, the author looks at Sarafina! (Darrell Roodt, 1992) and Flame (Ingrid Sinclair, 1996). Representations in the optimistic Sarafina! are used to mark a trajectory that leads to the representations in Flame, which is characterised by postcolonial disillusionment. On the other hand, Heart of Fire/Feuerherz (Luigi Falorni, 2008) and War Witch/Rebelle (Kim Nguyen, 2012), which are produced within the context of postcolonial wars, demonstrate the influences of global politics on the representations of the African girl and the wars she is caught up in. The thesis finds that films about anti-colonial wars are largely presented from an African perspective, although that perspective is at times male and more symbolic than an exploration of girls' multiple voices and subject positions. In these films, girls who participate in the conflicts are often represented as brave and heroic, a powerful indication of the moral strength of the African nationalists' cause. On the contrary, films about African postcolonial wars largely represent girls as innocent and sometimes helpless victims of these "unjust wars." The representations in the four case study films are significant in bringing to the fore some of the experiences of girls in African political conflicts. However, they also indicate that sometimes representations of girls become signifiers of ideas relating to local and global socio-political, economic, and other interests rather than a means for expressing the voices of the girls that these films purport to represent.
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Mediating identity through orality in West African films adapted from literature
(2023) Chibogu, Kenechukwu; Modisane, Litheko
This work critically examines the complexity of the ways by which filmmakers are mediating oral tradition forms as secondary orality in West African Films. The study aims to show that filmmakers mediate orality as an aesthetic source. The goal is to examine the value of the oral narrative on the screen. To study the oral qualities of the literature in the audio-visual primarily because of its aesthetic and stylistic feature in the narrative by interrogating the oral aestheticsin African films. To analyze the mediation of oral tradition in films, I combine orality theory, adaptation theory, and postcolonial theory to develop a model that treats film theoretically as ‘secondary orality adaptation (SOA)', which is interpreted using textual analysis in films such as Xala (1975), Karmen Gei (2001) and Invasion 1897 (2014). In the process, the study has explicitly engaged the aesthetic value of ‘orality' within the ambit of film studies thatrecognizes its wide reach and filmmakers' mediation and agency in the construction of identityusing the audio-visual method. The study finds that each mediation process involving oral tradition forms in West African films adapted from literature adds to the understanding of howfilm functions as a secondary orality adaptation. Whereas some filmmakers endorse cultural practices, others promote protest and contestation metaphorically using filmic codes (aural narratives) that are understandable to audiences and employ language as orality to construct identity in contemporary African postcolonial societies.
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(Re)Defining Local Animation: An Exploration Of South African Animation In Terms Of Local Production, Local Relevance And Local Ownership
(2023) Rogerson, Arabella; Rijsdijk, Ian-Malcolm
There is a pressing need to better understand how we speak about South African animation and what we mean by it. This study interrogates three particular interpretations of South African animation in order to build a multifaceted and nuanced understanding of the industry, its outputs and its value. Using a qualitative research approach, this study investigates South African animation in terms of content that is made within South Africa, content that is relevant to South Africa and content that is owned by South Africa. In extension, this research underscores the intricate interplay between supply and demand factors, production conditions, and production environments that shape the dynamics of the local animation industry. This research offers a new framework for discussing animated texts from the lens of the production landscape which departs from the more prevalent textual analysis approach and discussions of narrative, iconography, and representation. Ultimately, this research serves to contribute towards the efforts to reposition Africa and its creative outputs within the global animation conversa
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Responsible filmmaking: ethics and spectatorship through the lens of Michael Haneke
(2017) Weys, Daniël Jan; Botha, Martin P
My dissertation uses, as starting point, an interview with Michael Haneke in which the Austrian filmmaker criticises Downfall and Schindler's List for manipulating audiences and for generating entertainment from real-life and unspeakable horrors. He argues that filmmakers have a responsibility to enable audiences to form their own opinion regarding a film and its subject matter. I set forth to engage, theorise and develop Haneke's call for responsibility by asking the following questions as I move chronologically through his films: why is responsible filmmaking important, how does Haneke approach his own filmmaking and how does a responsible approach to filmmaking influence the position of spectators. Firstly, I draw from Stanley Cavell's film theory to read our current experience in a media saturated society, describing the ways in which the media positions and influences the characters' understanding of the world and their relationships with each other in The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Thereafter, I discuss Haneke's use of genre in Funny Games, the long take and continuity editing in Code Unknown, music in The Piano Teacher and sound in Time of the Wolf to analyse Haneke's approach to filmmaking. My readings are underpinned by Cavell's understanding of automatism and the manner in which Haneke uses and reflects upon film's automatisms. Finally, I illustrate Levinas' concept of responsibility for the Other through a reading of Georges and Majid's relationship in Caché, Kelly Oliver's work on witnessing in The White Ribbon and Judith Butler's work on responsibility in Amour in order to demonstrate how Haneke's responsibility ensures the audience's response-ability.
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Seeking the other shore : myth and history in the films of Terrence Malick
(2007) Rijsdijk, Ian-Malcolm; Marx, Lesley
Terrence Malick is a unique director in contemporary film, an enigmatic and resolutely independent filmmaker who operates successfully within the studio system of Hollywood. His unusual career - which includes a twenty-year 'sabbatical' during which he appeared to have dropped out of the industry altogether - has produced comparatively little in the way of academic research, though there has been increased activity since the release of The Thin Red Line in 1998. The title - 'Seeking the Other Shore' - provides a thematic approach to the central exploration of the thesis: myth and history in Malick's films. As I argue in the introduction, Malick's characters constantly seek new shores within historical realities, but in so doing they imagine returns to mythic spaces that are either in the past or unattainable in the present. The films themselves provoke us to reconsider particular myths and their historical context. The Introduction includes a brief synopsis of Malick's career and a critical overview of both journalistic and academic writing. A major feature of his films - their intertextuality, from poetry and novels to visual art and music - is also introduced as it plays an important part in all the subsequent chapters. With the release of The New World (2005), I argue that the two recent films should be seen not only as continuing the major themes of historical reality and mythic quest in his 1970s films (Badlands, 1973, and Days of Heaven, 1978), but also as expanding those themes to include colonial encounters with strangeness which underpin the emergence of America as a modem cultural and political entity. Chapter One sets out the historical and mythic terrain upon which all of Malick's films are built, particularly America's nineteenth-century, post-independence character, the idea that America is a nation constantly seeking to renew itself but is never able to outrun the terrors of its previous incarnation, the sins of its fathers. In the section, 'Manufacturing Myth' I use definitions by Claude Levi-Strauss and Richard Slotkin to begin the conversation between history and myth, finding that myth is constructed, laid claim to, and used continuously, and whose claims and uses are inevitably contested. Myths based in history, are, in Richard White's words, "historical creations", and it is this ideological tension between myth and history that one finds in Malick's films. History provides the context for explorations of America's mythic character, myths of innocence, renewal, ambition, and robust individualism. Chapters Two through Five examine the feature films in chronological order. Badlands is discussed in terms of its hybrid genre (drawing on the western and the road movie), before I investigate Holly and Kit's "competing fantasies"- their different views of their adventure and the land through which they travel. Days of Heaven represents a complex examination of the Turnerian myth of the frontier and its transformation at the turn of the twentieth century. Malick's use of period photography is observed as is the influence of American literary naturalism. However, a more significant discussion emerges around the art of Edward Hopper and his modernist interpretation of America coming to terms with its twentieth-century character. The analysis in this section includes Badlands, and illuminates the influence of Hopper on both early films. The Thin Red Line poses something of a problem as it appears to depart from the first two films and The New World, which follows eight years later. As a combat film, it is part of a fairly well-defined and fiercely debated genre, while it's largely male cast and multiple voiceovers differ from the single adolescent female voiceovers of Holly and Linda. However, it challenges the norms of the combat genre in significant ways, particularly in its balancing of personal experience (Malick's screenplay is a subtle adaptation of James Jones's war novels) with historical context (the viewer is alerted, as one rarely is in this genre, to the world outside of the battle). In The New World, Captain John Smith literally seeks the other shore and, like Private Witt in the previous film, encounters a division within himself. In reaffirming the mythic romance between Smith and Pocahontas, Malick opposes the ambition of Enlightenment discovery (m the turbulent heart of Smith) with the sure sense of humanity's relationship with nature (m the calm spirit of Pocahontas). Once again, the film's historical context is the bedrock for its examination of myth, though as the revelatory conclusion, shows, Malick reaches for more spiritual meaning than affirming or revising the historical record. The four feature films that constitute Malick's directorial career thus far are all concerned with fundamental American myths; however, they are also unusual interpretations these myths. Young girls narrate the stories of violent men possessed by the possibilities of a frontier that has passed while young men struggle to come to terms with the extreme violence of battle and the overwhelming strangeness of their surroundings, no matter how 'right' the cause. These are myths born out of history and rendered as cinematic revelations by Terrence Malick.
Open Access
A strange mirror : realism, ambiguity and absence in the work of Harmony Korine
(2007) Smit, Alexia Jayne; Marx, Lesley
This dissertation examines the work of Harmony Korine with a particular focus on his use of realism as a disruptive critical tool. My study combines a theoretical and an analytical project. My aim is to defend Korine's works against charges of naive realism by revealing the limits of a structuralist approach to Korine's realism and arguing, instead, for the adoption of the phenomenologically grounded, realist criticism of Andre Bazin. I use Bazin' s observations about the referential or indexical relationship between the camera and the physical world and his definition of 'phenomenological realism' to argue for a privileged and fruitful relationship between Korine's realism and the physical or affective dimensions of the cinematic image. I supplement this discussion with a critical application of theories of affect forwarded by such theorists as Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, as well as theories of the grotesque. In addition, my thesis extends the links that Bazin draws between the restraint defining phenomenological realism and a productive ambiguity to argue that, rather than presenting an unsophisticated realist approach, Korine's realism operates as the primary critical tool in a confrontation with dominant sign systems and, ultimately, with the limitations of both verbal and filmic language.
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The Relevance of the Biopic Krotoa (2017): A Mis-Representation of History?
(2021) Sheldon, Amy Gabrielle; Botha, Martin P
This dissertation examines the representation the Khoi woman Krotoa in the film of the same name directed by Roberta Durrant (2017). It draws on scholarship by Pamela Scully (2005) and Julia C. Wells (1997), who argue that Krotoa adapted well to her circumstances, following the arrival of Jan Van Riebeeck at the Cape in 1652. Krotoa used her gender to influence Van Riebeeck's decision-making, regarding trade relations with the Khoi people. This thesis shows these views to be complicated and contested, especially considering evidence of victimisation and sexual assault of indigenous women by colonial authorities – as Pamela Scully (2005) has noted. Yvette Abrahams (1996) also wrote that Krotoa's alcoholism indicated some form of trauma. Simultaneously, indigenous people were also stereotyped based on race. They were deemed immoral and generally inferior to Europeans. These ideologies were perpetuated by European writings on encounters with indigenous people, as scholars like Nicholas Hudson (2004) write. Additionally, indigenous women such as Sarah Baartman, were perceived by Europeans as sexually deviant and hyper-sexual – as written by Zine Magubane (2001). It is for this reason therefore, that issues of identity, sexuality and gender are significant to this study on, Krotoa (2017). Furthermore, in bringing together the narratives of Sarah Baartman and Krotoa, it emphasizes how indigenous women have been marginalised and abused within a colonial society. Critical analysis of the film indicates that history has been distorted by the way Krotoa is represented. This was largely due to the perception that the film is told from the perspective of a ‘white' man, as Rusana Philander (2017) discusses. Moreover, due to the extent to which Durrant's film has been influenced by the past, I argue that Krotoa is mis-represented – both in history and in her representation on-screen.
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Two shadows in the moonlight : music in British film melodrama of the 1940s
(2008) Morris, John; Marx, Lesley
In this thesis I examine the differences between music in the two cinemas. Concentrating on exemplary films from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, I show how the apparent differences are manifested, and by analysing a number of key British films, I illustrate the modes of musical expression used. There are many ways to approach film music. My own interest lies in the connection between music of the romantic period of the 19th century and what became of it during the 20th. "Serious" music from Schoenberg onwards became increasingly dissonant, but the rich melodic tones of romantic music appear to have found a new home in the cinema, and in this thesis I explore how film composers kept the previous traditions alive.
Open Access
Unconventional story-weavers and their "Ecstatic Truth": An analysis of voice-overs in documentary film
(2014) Drummer, Aurora; Van Vuuren, Lauren
This dissertation takes theories of voice-over narration that are typically applied to fiction film and applies them to documentary film. It looks at issues of representation and truth values in the documentary films of Werner Herzog, John Marshall, Luis Buñuel and Karin Jurshcick. It argues that the choices filmmakers make regarding types of voice-over affect these issues and are therefore worthy of study. It argues that the unconventional story-weavers in documentaries like those of Marshall and Herzog‘s can inadvertently marginalise their subjects. It looks at Buñuel‘s Land Without Bread as an extreme example of an (intentionally) manipulative narrator. It suggests that a voice-over narrator that follows Chion‘s conceptualisation of the complete acousmêtre encourages audiences to engage on a more critical level. Finally, it argues that even a seemingly traditional narrator as seen in Jurshick‘sIt Should Have Been Nice After That can be unconventional and reveal an - ecstatic truth.
Open Access
What is 'Surreal' about Surrealism? An investigation of Surrealism as seen through the looking-glass of Jan Svankmajer
(2015) Cohen, Rachel Mary Winefride; Botha, Martin
This dissertation investigates the filmic representation of surrealism in the films of Jan Švankmajer between 1964 and 2010. These films were analysed in light of two key areas expressed in recent literature regarding the representation of surrealism in film. The first key area is the complicated relationship between surrealism, film, and fantasy film, which has resulted in misconceptions about surrealism and its relationship with reality. This was examined with regard to the misconception of surrealism equating to fantasy and escapism. The second key area is how the filmic representation of surreality by the surrealist filmmaker Švankmajer supports the relationship of the movement with reality. This is analysed in terms of Švankmajer’s filmic engagement with the socio-political context at the time of production and his beliefs regarding a civilisation in crisis. Contingent to Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality is an examination of his style, aesthetics and techniques used to convey surreality or the notions of surrealism in his films to depict the affinity of the movement with reality. The main issue addressed in relation to all his films is the narrative on repression. This dissertation examines his narrative on repression, its dimensions and its role in reaffirming the affinity of surrealism with reality. The examination in this study of the subject matter included a diverse field of relevant sources, which was necessitated by the status of the surrealist movement as a belief rather than a formal theoretical framework. This includes, but is not limited to, surrealism and its main considerations and the relationship between surrealism and film compared to fantasy and film with regard to their relationship with reality. This was extended to include significant theoretical considerations with regard to Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality, including the representation of loss, the significance of childhood, the presence of objects and the role of tactility. The study entailed an analysis of his films within the ideas expressed in Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality. The films were then analysed within the context of the socio-political atmosphere at the time of their production, specifically during the former Czechoslovak communist oppression, followed by the emersion of the Czech Republic into the global consumerist market. The findings of the study indicate that the filmic representation of surreality in Švankmajer’s films portrays a heightened awareness of the socio-political reality of the former Czechoslovakia as well as the current Czech Republic, while resonating universal truths on civilisation. The films challenge the misconceptions on surrealism and its filmic representation as equating to fantasy and escapism. The findings further revealed that Švankmajer’s filmic representation of surreality counters such misconceptions, with the films reflecting Švankmajer’s experiences in Czechoslovakia as well his intimate account of the destructive nature of civilisation.

Browsing by Subject "Film Studies"

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