Space in Film Research Papers (original) (raw)

2024

In the master's thesis named „Space in the Horror Franchise Night of the Living Dead,” space in George A. Romero's seminal horror franchise Night of the Living Dead is viewed through spatial theories of philosophers and literary critics Mikhail Bakhtin and Gaston Bachelard. The meaning of Bakhtin's chronotope of the road as a dynamic place where different people meet and the chronotope of the threshold that presents a transition between two places of different values can be noticed in the franchise. Bachelard's notions of the shelter provided by the house and a room, refuge offered by a corner, boundaries drawn by doors and windows, the rationality of the attic, and the irrationality of the cellar can also be identified. With the knowledge of Bachelard's view on space, other spaces can be described: an island as either a haven or an entrapment, and communal places and cities as resources of supplies or foci of the disease. Bakhtin and Bachelard's space theory can help us understand how directors use space in their films and what they can represent.

2024, Asia-pacific Journal of Convergent Research Interchange

Recent Korean division related box-office films in South Korea have moved away from mourning the loss of the other half and wishing for unification but instead pursuing coexisting with the opposite side with amicable and respectful understanding. This paper aimed to examine the representation of the inter-Korean relationship in recent Korean division films and its possible social implications. In this line, this research was designed to conduct a comparison between earlier films that came out in the late 90s and early 2000s and films that came out from 2010 and onward. As a way to compare the inter-Korean relationship in films, this research first conducted a qualitative comparison of how the relationship between South and North Korean characters are depicted and how it ends. This research used the method of looking at narrative structures of a plot-equilibrium, disequilibrium, and restoration of equilibrium-and the differences in masculinity between the two male leads of each film. Firstly, how the equilibrium was restored in the end and what this equilibrium looks like gave a clear distinction in the inter-Korean relationship depicted in the films examined in this research. Secondly, to examine the dynamic of the inter-Korean relationship more closely, this research examined the masculinity of the male leads because in action-packed films, like the ones that were chosen for this research, masculinity is often equated with narrative authority. It was revealed that in a span of a decade, division related films changed how they use the relationship between South and North protagonists. First, the friendship between the two functioned as a key element that brings back the equilibrium in the plot, and this new equilibrium may not be perfect, but it is not tragic either. Second, it is observed that the two male leads represent a divided Korea together and deliver the possibility of being mutually cooperative and equally invested in the peace of the two Koreas. Based on the findings, this research concludes that in recent Korean division box-office films, friendship and cooperation are the central modes of South and North Korean relationship. This research is meaningful because it adumbrates recent Korean division films' major shift from earlier films by hinging upon friendship and equal partnership to exemplify possible coexistence with North Korea instead of bloodline nationalism and ultimate unification as the only way to peace.

2023, The Journal of Korean Studies

is the godfather of Korean action cinema and the director who internationalized Hong Kong action cinema when Five Fingers of Death (天下第一拳 C. Tian xia di yi quan, King Boxer, K. Chugŭm ŭi tasŏt sonkarak, 1972) became a $12 million global box office sensation. Chung delivered on his xia ethos promise to Hong Kong cinema mogul Sir Run Run Shaw to get the job done, no matter what. Despite Chung's stellar achievement, his rightful status within the annals of film history for both Korea and Hong Kong is compromised due to the practice of ethnonational film historiography. This project rescues Chung's historical preeminence by focusing on his transnational contributions to global film history.

2023, Middle Black Sea Journal of Communication Studies

As the independent production increased and factory-like production receded in 1950s, filmmakers were soon in greater control. The studios could no longer dictate all the terms and were forced to meet halfway so that both sides could profit. However, filmmakers were still dependent on the studios when it came to finance and distribution. Elia Kazan, being a former Hollywood contract director, became one of those independent filmmakers and established his own production company. By the time he first got to Hollywood in the mid-1940s, producers were already dominating the film industry. Kazan, believing the director should come first and be independent in financial, politic and aesthetic terms at all costs, refused to be a studio-contract worker. He was determined to assert greater control over the films he made, and his way of filmmaking would be less about profits and more about gaining artistic freedom. He produced and directed all his subsequent films of the 1950s and 1960s. In this study, one of these films, America America will be analyzed through analysis of narrative. As Kazan became more personal and independent; the director’s ability to define the aesthetic and narrative spines of the text and the sub-text became evident. Hence, it is possible to say that the mise-enscène started to come forth in Kazan’s films starting with America America.

2023, Azaleas

2023, Communication, Culture & Critique

My Little Hero (2013) is the first popular Korean film to focus on an immigrant narrative that features a non-Korean or biracial Korean-White lead. In the story of a young Filipino-Korean boy's "Korean dream" to be accepted by his father/birth country and his reluctant and cynical teacher, the film reifies dominant Korean discourses of multiculturalism that are situated within local and global hierarchies. Locally, Korean multiculturalism looks down, requiring the non-White multiethnic other to integrate into dominant culture. Globally, it looks up to seek the paternal acceptance of the United States. In the film, multicultural discourses work to support the instrumental assimilation of the multiethnic other for the purposes of assimilating Korea within the ranks of "advanced" countries.

2023, Frontiers in Psychology

Objectives: Human perception of the built environment affects emotional and physiological states. This research focused on the association between evaluating a space’s visual qualities and physiological responses by mediating film... more

2022

This essay reads the Fritz Lang film noir, Human Desire (1954) as an intertextual reworking of La Bete humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938), in turn an adaptation of Emile Zola\u27s eponymous novel (1890). I argue that whereas Renoir\u27s film worries about the impending World War II, Lang\u27s grapples with the noir legacy of a post-war world devoid of hope. This traps Zola\u27s novel in a middle ground: the novel is set on the brink of the French destruction in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, but is written twenty years afterward

2022

In 1954, Fritz Lang directed for Columbia Studios an adaptation of Emile Zola's naturalist French novel, La Bête humaine. Entitled Human Desire, the film was a quickly arranged follow-up to the successful The Big Heat of a year before. Based on a popular 1952 mystery novel by William P. McGivern, The Big Heat starred Glenn Ford as a vengeful police detective and Gloria Grahame as a femme fatale. Human Desire unsuccessfully (in terms of box office and critical attention) attempted to recapture the "sexual" chemistry between these two stars. Emile Zola's 1889 novel, La Bête humaine, is one of the last in the twenty volume series, Les Rougon-Macquart, subtitled "a natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire." La Bête humaine concerns Jacques Lantier, a descendant of Gervaise Macquart and August Lantier, characters in Zola's more famous L'Assomoir. Auguste Lantier was an alcoholic, and his infliction, passed through the generations, is the impetus for the plots of the Rougon-Macquart novels. In La Bête humaine, railwayman Jacques Lantier's disease makes him want to murder women to whom he is sexually attracted. The plot of the novel involves Roubaud, whose wife Severine was seduced at an early age by a corrupt aristocrat, President Grandmorin. Years later, Roubaud finds out about his being married to "an old man's leavings," and kills Grandmorin on a train carrying Lantier to Paris. Lantier suspects the murder, but befriends Severine and Roubaud, and does not betray them to the police. Lantier subsequently falls in love with Severine, and they begin an affair, while Roubaud wallows in guilt, gambling, and drinking. Severine tries to convince Lantier to kill Roubaud so that they will be free to marry, but Lantier backs away at the last minute. In a fit of desire, Lantier instead kills Severine due to his hereditary affliction. La Bête humaine had been adapted previously for the cinema, most famously by Jean Renoir in France in 1938. Unlike Lang's Human Desire, Renoir's film was a critical and box-office success. The critical reputation of Renoir's film has only grown in the years since. However, Lang's film has been all but forgotten, even by otherwise exhaustive studies of Lang's American films. The critical commonplace has been to position La Bête humaine as one of the most important of Renoir's films, because it preserves the Naturalism of Zola's original, while declaring Human Desire an embarrassing mistake for Lang, because it replaces Zola's Naturalism with tawdry sensationalism. 1 This paper rejects such a cultural stratification of the La Bête humaine texts; Human Desire, just as Renoir's film, adapts a great Naturalist novel, perhaps the great Naturalist novel. The fact that Human Desire emphasizes different, less canonical tendencies in the Naturalist tradition than does Renoir's film is the structuring observation of this essay. Using an intertextual approach to the adaptational 1 Tawdry sensationalism, of course, was the criticism of many Naturalisms, including Zola's, especially when Zola was imported into the United States, as I discuss below.

2022

Neke od najvažnijih karakteristika modernističkog filma su filmski prostor i vrijeme, ali i odnos tih dviju odrednica prema memoriji protagonista u filmu, kao i njihov odnos prema gledatelju koji percipira modernistički film. U ovom radu obrazložene su različite definicije, kao i različita poimanja prostora. Zatim se kroz analize reprezentativne modernističke filmove hrvatske kinematografije tematizira filmski prostor i vrijeme uz interpretacije različitih shematskih prikaza za pojedine filmove

2022, Urban Studies

High-rise flats occupy an ambiguous position in contemporary discussions of urbanism. While allowing for densely populated walking environments, they are widely seen as culturally inappropriate and, whether based on theories of life cycle or lifestyle, especially unsuitable for families with children. Despite the frequent discussion, empirical research into the impact of housing on daily life is rare and, because of strong selection effects, lacks generalisability. The high-rise flats of Singapore provide the opportunity for a natural experiment isolating the impact of neighbourhood density from domestic density in that the prevalence of high-rises with large flats makes it possible to isolate the treatment effects of apartment living on families from the selection effects of housing choice. On the basis of comparisons of adult time-use diaries across household types and societies, it is concluded that the direct effect of apartment living on families is minimal. Nevertheless, plann...

2022

Copyright This online paper may be cited in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download it for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author's explicit permission Please note that: • it is a draft; • this paper should not be used for commercial purposes or gain; • you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following or similar form:

2022, il Saggiatore

Un'immersione nel cinema dei fratelli Dardenne attraverso i diari di Luc: le riflessioni, le scelte e i ragionamenti che hanno accompagnato la creazione dei loro film Luc Dardenne Addosso alle immagini Viaggio nel nostro cinema «Siamo... more

2022, The Italianist

is a curious and intriguing case in film history. It was originally begun by French director Jean Renoir, but finished by his German screenwriter-turned-director Carl Koch. Koch's wife Lotte Reiniger and the young Luchino Visconti contributed to the film, while its producer was the grand old man of Italian silent film, Arturo Ambrosio. While Visconti was always open about his French experience with Renoir as his aesthetic, moral and political revelation, he always denigrated Tosca afterwards. However, visual analysis of the film reveals striking similarities with his films, particularly Ossessione (1943). Moreover, reception research shows Tosca had a critical but not entirely unfavourable reception in Italy and in Germany, too easily overlooked in Italian and German post-1945 historiography. Additional sources from the Lotte Reiniger archive and the Federico Patellani photo archive deepen the research.

2022, acta.sapientia.ro

Abstract: In the last years, film and media studies are more and more discovering or rather appropriating ideas from art history and art theory, in particular iconology. This has led to great attention for the work of Aby Warburg and... more

2022, Tarbiat Modares University

The subject of the present thesis is the cognitive reconstruction of human in space - time and space by analyzing the deconstructive events of everyday human interactions from the perspective of cinematic sequences. The overall process of this research is based on a test of the theoretical characteristics explained by the common themes between cognitive psychology, space-time-place in architecture, and the foundations of cinema. The main purpose of the research in this thesis is the cognitive restructuring of human beings through the redefinition of the architectural elements derived from cinematic sequences and techniques. This study investigates what kind of spatio-temporal relationship will lead to human cognitive reconstruction, as well as the factors that influence the changing of everyday structure and enhancement of human interaction with space, as well as the mechanism that enhances human cognitive restructuring in elemental architecture. Space-time and place that influence the everyday and event-driven creation of cinema. The ten theoretical indicators of the philosophy of space syntax, the twenty indicators of the normalized quality of space, the self-evaluation of the human sense of space, as well as those derived from human biological properties. The research method in this study is developmental in terms of descriptive correlational and quasi-experimental descriptive research method and in terms of documentary and survey data collection and software derived data. The method of analysis is based on descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, content analysis and comparative analysis. The determination of space-time variables and metrics in architecture and cinema is done using documentary method and comparative study. The Delphi method is used to validate the measures. Logical reasoning and comparative analysis will be used to test the hypotheses and the method of survey and quantitative analysis will be used. Data collection was done using questionnaire and observation while watching movies related to residential complexes. Examination of the tests of theoretical features shows that the emotions and emotions of individuals influence their cognitive perception while viewing architectural spaces in cinematic sequences. Biofeedback tests have shown significant results in arousing people while viewing more stimulating spaces, or in other words more destructive events. Also, the results of the tests related to convexity and space adjustment qualities have led to the criteria such as: geometric structure of space, area and plan isovist compactness, surface difference, maximum visual connectivity and spatial variability.

2022, Frontiers in Environmental Science

Objectives: Converging architecture with cinema and cognition has proved to be a practical approach to scrutinizing architectural elements’ significant contribution to engineering science. In this research, a behavioral analysis has been... more

2022

2021

Korea is known in the world as a country that is still divided. It is not currently unusual to hear about North Korean refugees from various social classes, all of whom have individual reasons for their plight, as a result of the current political atmosphere in Kim Jung-Un’s North Korea. Until today the divided Korea is issued in the various parts of South Korea, especially in films from the beginning of the South Korean film history. Korean conflict films are defined as films about political issues regarding national breakdown and the relationship with North Korea as the key topic, and are of nationwide interest. This paper starts by asking how conflict films describe the division of Korea into north and south and how Koreans relate to this. I will analyze how the lives of Korean women from North and South Korea are visually represented by the different filmmakers in this special local film genre. The cinematic rewriting of past and present describes how the Korean War influenced t...

2021

Zhai, Runlei. Ph.D., Purdue University, May 2015. Chinese Eco-Films and their Pastoral Myth. Major Professor: Charles S. Ross. This dissertation is a cross-cultural study of Chinese ecocinema after 1978. It begins by introducing the Hollywood practice in simplifying the conflicts between garden and machine, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, and Tityrus and Meliboeus in American pastoralism, then explains why such simplification does not work on Chinese screen, and finally studies how Chinese filmmakers reconstruct their pastoral myth in three major steps: first, to recognize Chinese social and cultural realities; second, to establish the human-nature connection, and third, to affirm the nature-culture unity. The conclusion is that Chinese eco-cinema exists in a hybrid form. While Hollywood influences Chinese eco-cinema in terms of production, promotion, and distribution, it manages to develop its own voice by reconstructing a pastoral myth that Chinese audiences could understand and...

2021, The Journal of Popular Culture

CHINESE FANTEPIAN (COUNTERESPIONAGE OR ANTI-SPY) FILM ON the Trail (Genzong zhuiji, Lu Jue, 1963) opens with a crowd flowing through the border gate from British colonial Hong Kong to Shenzhen, an outpost in southern China, on a foggy morning. The sequence that follows uses these two locations-the old, corrupt colony and the young, independent nation-to contrast capitalism and socialism with evocative audiovisual style. On the British colonial side, the guards appear arrogant, ignoring the people in need, and the atmosphere is chaotic and gloomy. On the Chinese side, the ambiance suddenly becomes vivacious and optimistic: We see a giant board bearing the slogan "Long Live the Great Unity of the People of the World" and a close-up of the national flag, while upbeat extradiegetic music accompanies a disembodied female voice on a loudspeaker that welcomes visitors arriving to celebrate the National Day. A change in musical tone, however, soon implies that a menace lurks underneath this seemingly peaceful fac ßade: Explosives are discovered during a border inspection. Police officers must foil the sabotage plan of secret agents from Hong Kong targeting the power supply of nearby Guangzhou (Canton). This opening sequence poses an urgent question that drives the entire film: How can the saboteurs be stopped? It also dramatizes the regional (Guangzhou and Hong Kong), national (state security), and transnational (Cold War geopolitics) dimensions of Chinese fantepian.

2021

Primo posto Premio Adelio Ferrero 2021 (categoria Recensioni). Sironi sembra provenire da una coscienza di orientamento neorealista, ripiombata al centro dello stato di crisi contemporanea; riscoperta negli occhi, nei corpi e nei... more

2021, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), You, the Living (Du levande, 2007), and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron, 2014). The Swedish director depicts the human condition afflicted by the loss of its humanity through a personal style that he calls “the complex image,” a tableau aesthetic that instigates social criticism, and is dependent upon long shots, immobility, unchanging shot scale, and layered compositions. The author establishes a connection between artistic and social space and scrutinizes the challenges that this “complexity” poses for the film viewer from an intermedial perspective in which cinema enters into a dialogue with two other art forms: painting and theatre. Four specific issues are discussed: (1) the intertwining of reality and artificiality as a “hyperreality;” (2) the visual compositions which are simultaneously self-con...

2021, The Italianist

Tosca (1941) is a curious and intriguing case in film history. It was originally begun by French director Jean Renoir, but finished by his German screenwriter-turned-director Carl Koch. Koch's wife Lotte Reiniger and the young Luchino Visconti contributed to the film, while its producer was the grand old man of Italian silent film, Arturo Ambrosio. While Visconti was always open about his French experience with Renoir as his aesthetic, moral and political revelation, he always denigrated Tosca afterwards. However, visual analysis of the film reveals striking similarities with his films, particularly Ossessione (1943). Moreover, reception research shows Tosca had a critical but not entirely unfavourable reception in Italy and in Germany, too easily overlooked in Italian and German post-1945 historiography. Additional sources from the Lotte Reiniger archive and the Federico Patellani photo archive deepen the research.

2021, acta.sapientia.ro

2021, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

2021

Luchino Visconti’s 1943 film Ossessione is considered one of the earliest examples
of Italian neorealist films even though it doesn’t reflect all its conventions. On the other
hand, one can notice elements of the American film noir tradition. Both are styles emerging after the Second World War as an expression of the collective consciousness and traumas. This paper examines Ossessione as a great film to study the edges of film noir in an international context implemented near the beginnings of a groundbreaking movement in Italian cinema.

2020, Canadian Journal of Film Studies

Les premiers écrits sur le cinéma international, dont la plupart soumettaient les cultures de l'image en mouvement aux impératifs dogmatiques des cinémas nationaux, révèlent les limites associées au choix d'aborder le sujet sous l'angle du lieu. Le « cinéma international 2.0 », illustrant l'effort des chercheurs pour relancer le sous-domaine, a été conçu en réaction à ces limites. La grille de circulation est une méthode importante qu'utilisent les chercheurs participant à cette relance du cinéma international, qui met en relief la façon dont les films sont mobilisés dans les vastes réseaux regroupant les canaux matériels et virtuels. L'auteure se demande s'il se peut qu'une nouvelle limitation de l'ex-pression réside dans l'accent mis sur le cinéma, évoquant à titre d'exemple le cas du ci-néma « médian » de Calcutta. Abstract: The early literature on World Cinema, much of which funnelled moving-image cultures into the categorical imperatives of national cinemas, is indicative of the limitations of a place-based approach to the subject. "World Cinema 2.0, " a scholarly reboot of the sub-field, was conceived as a response to these limitations. The rubric of circulation is a key method utilized by scholars affiliated with this renewal of World Cinema, which emphasizes how films are mobilized across vast networks that span material and virtual channels. This article asks the question of whether a new-found limitation of the term lies in its emphasis on cinema, taking the example of Kolkata-based "middle-of-the-road" cinema as a case study.

2020, Cineforum; Torre Boldone

Questo saggio esplora il legame tra il cinema di Rohrwacher e l'uso dello spazio, inteso come territorio, luogo simbolico e spazio cinematografico. L'analisi dei movimenti delle protagoniste all'interno e attraverso luoghi specifici suggerisce un uso dello spazio non solo come ambiente narrativo, ma come luogo figurato in cui queste women-to-be si trovano dislocate, arricchendo il repertorio cinematografico sulla condizione adolescenziale con nuove riflessioni. Alice Rohrwacher usa lo spazio non solo come elemento della mise-en-scène o come cornice narrativa, ma lo trasforma in un dispositivo attraverso il quale le protagoniste negoziano il loro essere in divenire.

2019, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies

In the last years, film and media studies are more and more discovering or rather appropriating ideas from art history and art theory, in particular iconology. This has led to great attention for the work of Aby Warburg and Ernst Panofsky. In particular the concept of motif has lead to publications such as Michael Walker’s Hitchcock’s Motifs (2005), and, most recently, the article ”Medienwissenschaft der Motive” (2009) by André Wendler and Lorenz Engell. In the article, the motif of the door in the films of Luchino Visconti will be researched, in comparison with, in particular 17th century, painting. The framing by doors in art and film will be compared with the motif of the framing window, while differences with mobile framing will be traced. Finally, the results will be embedded within contemporary ideas on intermediality.

2019

Still Life (2006) is a realistic genre film by Jia Zhangke, a leading independent film director in China. The film takes two-lane structure, telling the story of two outsiders from Shanxi finding their missing families in the Three Gorges. On the searching journey of the two protagonists, the audiences witness the intricate weave of people, things, and objects in the context of Three Gorge demolition and the life trajectory of people at different classes facing the rapidly changing social reality. A featured environmental backdrop in the film, the image of ruins is profoundly animated to showcase the tension of life through its inherent authenticity and compelling forces. Jia successfully captures the forming process from a lively town into silent ruins, presenting the tangling of ruins and bodies in multiple dimensions. This paper examines the cinematography of expressing the life and space in Still Life, unpacking the multi-layer implications of the image of ruins in the film.

2019, Pascal Klenke u.a. (Hg.): Writing Worlds. Welten- und Raummodelle der Fantastik.

2018, Critical Studies in Media Communication

Better Late than Never is a remake of a Korean reality T.V. travel show, which aired on N.B.C. in August 2016. The show’s premise features four elder celebrity men – Henry Winkler, William Shatner, Terry Bradshaw, and George Foreman – with their mid-30s companion Jeff Dye as they travel through the “exotic” lands of East Asia. Through the use of two popular narrative tropes, the bromance and the Western journey for self-discovery in Asia, the show argues that the interaction with the Asian other is beneficial primarily in masculine self-discovery and masculine homosocial bonding. Borrowing from Steeves’s use of the hybrid encounter, I argue that B.L.T.N. positions the strange Asian other as valuable only as a reference for becoming reacquainted with the U.S. American self and emotionally connected to his fraternal companions. Thus, B.L.T.N. rejects hybridity and reinforces U.S. American masculinity through the reification of ideologically preferred contact with the other that is shallow and that benefits the Western traveler.

2018

General agreement exists today that David Wark Griffith, while not the “inventor” of crosscutting, is nevertheless a key figure in its development. But what does that mean exactly? Or, more precisely: how does one establish a list of Griffith’s concrete contributions to the development of the technique? The goal of this article is to present a new theoretical framework for evaluating the evolution of various parameters of crosscutting during cinema’s transitional era. This framework results from the combination of our hypothesis concerning actorial and narratorial cuts with a new theory on the articulations of spatial language. This new theoretical tool allows us to detect variations in the presence of an underlying narrator as the agent responsible for filmic enunciations and to establish, in the end, a typology of cuts connecting the shots in a crosscutting sequence.

2018

The architectural discourse of Singaporean public housing is focussed primarily on efficacy. Its performance has been substantiated heavily through statistics. Such a method not only presupposes implicit objectivity but ultimately also limits the kinds of perspectives and conclusions that can be drawn. This procedure has resulted in a more or less self-serving discourse wherein the aim of public housing has been principally framed as teleological, and subsequently traced and retraced through a progressive trajectory. However, in this paper, I argue that these standardised measures and methods fail when they are applied to two public spaces of the housing block-the void deck and the common corridor. These two spaces articulate the overlapping boundaries between two separate but often conflated categories: housing (embedding architectural type and state ideology) versus domesticity (embedding lived practice and spontaneous spatial production). I make the case that the discourse of efficacy ultimately represses the affective nature of these public spaces. The paper reappraises the void deck and the common corridor through the domestic situations of keeping cats and hoarding. I discuss how these situations can be adopted as critical spatial devices to allow a different entry into, and understanding of, the void deck and the common corridor. In conclusion, the paper posits that such spontaneous occupation of public space might offer a different frame for rethinking housing renewal and for understanding the changing role and use of housing's public space by its own multiple publics.

2018

"Epifania dei corpi e scrittura della verità nel cinematografo di Robert Bresson", in Corpo a corpo. Il cinema e il pensiero, a cura di T. D'Angela, Edizioni Falsopiano, Alessandria 2006, pp. 266-283.

2018, D. W. Griffith and the Emergence of Crosscutting, in Charlie Keil (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to DW Griffith, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 107-136

Co-authored with André Gaudreault

2017

Survey of upcoming art exhibitions in Washington DC for Fall 2017

2016

The goal of this paper is to present a multimodal framework for analysing a particular dimension of space in moving images, namely, narrativised space. In particular, this paper unravels how the framework offers effective methods for addressing empirical questions which have been extensively debated in recent decades in the studies of moving images such as transmediality and narrative complexity. To achieve this end, I first provide a specific definition of the dimension of narrativised space and move on to discuss what essential properties of narrativised space might support viewers' meaning interpretation paths. This leads to a more finegrained categorisation of features which function so as to lead the viewers' navigational routes within and across different narrative levels and event spaces. Through applying the framework to analysing Brian De Palma's war film Redacted (2007) and Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2003), this paper will show the analytical strength of the proposed methods and the potential of the framework for addressing corpus-based empirical questions with regard to puzzle films and transmedial comparison.

2016

A re-reading of Rem Koolhaas's (in)famous essay on Singapore "Singapore Songlines" that attempts to find in Koolhaas's text moments where the city is discussed in terms of cinema and montage aesthetics. It recognises the need to re-examine Koolhaas's seminal text, to prevent the latter from being reduced to simply a one-liner critique of Singapore as a perpetual tabula rasa. The essay is co-published with images by artist Geraldine Kang, from her series "This city by any other name (Would smell just as white)"; it first appeared in a published post on poskod.sg.

2016, Journal of the Regional Association of Architectural Institute of Korea

To be published at Journal of the Regional Association of Architectural Institute of Korea, August 2016 (forthcoming)

2016

This is forthcoming in a special section of essays on the work of Singaporean sociologist Chua Beng Huat, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Vol 17 No 2, 2016. Penultimate version.

2016

This paper is a first draft for discussion that explores representations of North Korean men in South Korean action film.

2016

The research started by asking the question: "How is the meaning and memory of home communicated through the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky?" The meaning this question was seeking entailed elements such as architectural experience, perception, memories and dreams, and the research thus enquired film's mechanisms for rendering legible such ineffable concepts, with a foucs on the two particular case studies of Tarkovsky and Bergman.
Building upon claims that film has the ability to communicate direct experiences of lived space, the thesis peruses theoretical intersecting findings that encircle the research quest: architecture and film, phenomenology, as well as other adjacent fields. The aim is to draw creative splices that outline an original view on the architectural experience of home, as read throughout the work and life of these two artists. Therefore, among the main outputs of the thesis was to rewrite the biographies of Bergman and Tarkovsky based on their spatial element, a recreated life-writing in which place gains a central role of life journeys and choices. From these reconsidered biographies, new understandings about home, dwelling and place attachment are drawn.
The methodological aim of the study is to propose an architectural phenomenography (literally a writing of phenomena), a redefined view on architectural phenomenology that uses autobiographical film as a research tool to allow explorations on the concept of home. The established routes of phenomenological inquiry make use of linguistic material in order to read and write descriptions and in such a manner to reach the essence of phenomena. By replacing the majority of the linguistic research data with audiovisual material provided by the films, the novelty of the present approach lies in considering moving images as portent of inscribed phenomenological descriptions, legible through film viewing. The essential factors for selecting Bergman and Tarkovsky as the case-study filmmakers was the strength of their works to communicate the space of home in its lived form. Due to this peculiar quality, the present study looked at these works attempting to trace a method of writing spatial experience on the imponderable surface of film. Throughout the thesis, this method was termed as architectural phenomenography, and it was defined as a communicative medium through which, once spatial experiences have been written on film, they silently await a proper deciphering.
This study therefore strives to answer the silent call of these experiential moving images and to disclose them as categories of architectural experiences.