Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Posters, Handkerchiefs And Murals: Visual Gender Separation During The Troubles, Bradley Rohlf

Irish Communication Review

The Troubles in Northern Ireland provide a complex and intriguing topic for many scholars in various academic disciplines. Their violence, publicity and tragedy are common themes that elicit a plethora of emotional responses throughout the world. However, the very intimate nature of this conflict creates a much more complex system of friends, foes and experiences for those involved. While the very heart of the Irish nationalist movement is founded on liberal and progressive concepts such as socialism and equality, the media associated with it sometimes promote tradition and conservatism, especially regarding gender. This critical study examines a sociopolitical struggle through …

Music Magazines And Gendered Space: The Representation Of Artists On The Covers Of Hot Press And Rolling Stone, Yvonne Kiely

Irish Communication Review

Over the past two decades the commercial music magazine industry has lapsed into a deepening cycle of continuous decline. The demise of the widely popular UK pop music magazine, Smash Hits, in 2006 and the announcement of the final print issue of NME in 2018 has been accompanied by music magazines worldwide reporting year-on-year declines in sales and readership. Meanwhile research has found that portrayals of gender on music magazine covers are largely unrepresentative and unreflective of social heterogeneity – yet the gendered media histories of the industry’s enduring and iconic music magazines remain largely under researched. In order …

Latin American Cinema, Mirna Vohnsen

Articles

Although studies of Argentine, Mexican and Cuban cinema continue to dominate the Latin American film scholarship, in the past two years, there has been increasing interest in examining the minor cinemas of the region. The expanding local film industries, the new technical trends and the increase in cinematic productions across all Latin America have captured the attention of academics and critics who have devoted their research to explore the lesser-known films of, for example, Uruguay, Colombia and Central America

“The Very Essence Of French Cinema”(?): Jacques Feyder’S Return To France, 1944–1948, Barry Nevin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Framing “L’Âme Des Personnages”: Performance And Affect In Jacques Feyder’S Pension Mimosas (1935), Barry Nevin

Articles

Although Jacques Feyder's authorial control over his productions and his direction of actors constituted two of the most widely appreciated aspects of his approach to filmmaking during his own lifetime, the impact of each on his mise en scene has received little critical attention. This article aims to remedy this oversight by linking both aspects in three stages: first, drawing on contemporary periodicals, recollections of Feyder's performers and his own writings, it illustrates Feyder's preoccupation with the creation of in-depth psychological portraits through his actors; second, focusing on Pension Mimosas (1935), it demonstrates that Feyder's technical style, although aligned closely …

(Re)Visions Of The Outre-Mer: Looking At The Male Gaze In Jacques Feyder’S Le Grand Jeu (1934), Barry Nevin

Articles

Cinéma colonial is regarded by certain scholars as a highly conventionalised and commercialised film practice that grants spectators a sense of control over the potentially threatening colonial Other, and Belgian director Jacques Feyder has been subject to particularly harsh criticism in this regard. This article argues that Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934), which depicts a young legionnaire’s relationship with a cabaret singer who bears an uncanny resemblance to a previous lover who jilted him in Paris, challenges dominant tendencies in portrayals of gender and colonialism in French cinema of the 1930s. Drawing on the relationship between Laura Mulvey’s theorisation of …

Be Media Smart: A National Media Literacy Campaign For Ireland, Phillip Russell

Support services (Former ITT) - Conference Papers

This paper presents Ireland’s public awareness campaign – ‘Be Media Smart’- which was launched in March 2019 to encourage people of all ages to stop, think, and check that information they see, read or hear across any media platform is reliable. Be Media Smart is an initiative of Media Literacy Ireland (MLI), an independent group facilitated by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) to enhance Irish people’s understanding of, and engagement with, media. Group members include large media and social media companies, Government bodies, libraries, academia and voluntary sector organisations.

The paper will provide an overview of this national campaign, …

Keepers Of The Port: Visualising Place And Identity In A Dublin Dock Community, Moira Sweeney

Doctoral

This practice-based thesis responds to the absence of documentary film or photographic studies and scholarship that embrace the contrasting experiences of different dock working constituencies in the transforming early twenty-first century space of Dublin Port. It is a filmic investigation into how the experiences and memories of this community of workers in Dublin’s surviving port space shape their urban identity and sense of place, undertaken with regard to the sensuous, haptic qualities of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. In the ever-shifting world of neoliberalism, its narratives – in relation to labour practices – prioritise faceless markets over the humanity of working …

Recollection And Social Status, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

Television sets appeared in homes across the world during the 1950s and 1960s. Early audiences were researched in terms of ratings and so on, but the perceptions and experiences of early television viewers went unrecorded. There are no ready-made, bottom–up companion pieces to top–down institutional histories. In the absence of such work, life- story research offers one of our best means of attempting to capture the experiences of early viewers. This chapter offers an argument about the nature of memory. It argues that personal recollection, in memory interviews and other contexts, is practical; that people announce their pasts in a …

'Elle T'Aime Trop, Et Moi, Pas Assez': Jacques Feyder's Melodramatic Mise En Scène Of Female Desire In Pension Mimosas (1935), Barry Nevin

Articles

Extract

Melodrama ‘à la française’: Feyder and French cinema of the 1930s

By the end of 1934, Jacques Feyder had led a distinguished career in French silent cinema, had directed a critically acclaimed adaptation of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1928) in Berlin, had returned from a three-year contract in Hollywood, had brought Le Grand Jeu to the screen (the greatest box-office success of the 1933–34 season), and appeared to be virtually unstoppable as he proceeded to direct his next film, Pension Mimosas. The film was described by one critic as ‘sans aucun doute l’une des œuvres les plus attendues …

Working The News: Preserving Professional Identity Through Networked Journalism At Elite News Media, Jenny Hauser

Doctoral

The concept of journalism as a profession has arguably been fraught and contested throughout its existence. Ideologically, it is founded on a claim to norms and a code of ethics, but in the past, news media also held material control over mass communication through broadcast and print which were largely inaccessible to most citizens. The Internet and social media has created a news environment where professional journalists and their work exist side-by-side with non-journalists. In this space, acts of journalism also can be and are carried out by non-journalists. Through the new news distribution channels offered by social media, non-journalists …

The Bullet In The Brick: The Materiality Of Conflict In Museum Objects, Siobhan Doyle

Articles

Tangible traces of conflict in visual artefacts can take viewers uncomfortably close to the realities of war—violence, destruction and fatalities. This article questions the evidential force of objects associated with conflict and their eventual display in exhibitions. Through a study of the display of a brick in which is embedded a bullet that is said to have passed through the body of Francis Sheehy Skeffington when he was executed by firing squad during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, this article explores the historical configuration of the brick and analyses its public display in the National Museum of Ireland …

An Investigation Of Therapeutic Rapport Through Prosody In Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Carolina De Pasquale, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan

Conference Papers

Therapeutic alliance, a concept closely related to rapport, is one of the most important variables in psychotherapy. High degrees of synchrony/coordination in the therapeutic session are considered to contribute to rapport, and have received attention in the psychotherapy literature. Coordinative behaviours are observable in speech, and they manifest in phenomena such as prosodic accommodation, a dynamic phenomenon closely related to conversational success. A preliminary investigation of interpersonal prosodic dynamics in psychotherapy was performed on a database obtained in collaboration with the University of Padua, consisting of 16 recordings making up the entire course of a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy intervention for …

Categorisation Of Isolated Sounds On A Background - Neutral - Foreground Scale, William Coleman

Conference Papers

Recent technological advances have driven changes in how media is consumed in home, automotive and mobile contexts. Multi-channel audio home cinema systems are not ubiquitous but have become more prevalent. The consumption of broadcast and gaming content on smart-phone and tablet technology via telecommunications networks is also more common. This has created new possibilities and consequently poses new challenges for audio content delivery such as how media can be optimised for multiple contexts while minimising file size. For example, a stereo audio file may be adequate for consumption in a mobile context using headphones, but it is limited to stereo …

Irish Journalists And Journalism During The American Civil War, Michael Foley

Conference Papers

Irish journalists played a significant role in the lead up to the US Civil War in ensuring the Irish population supported the Union and volunteered for the army.

A Bollywood Commercial For Ireland: Filming Ek Tha Tiger In Dublin, Giovanna Rampazzo

Books/Book chapters

The spectacular representation of overseas locations has traditionally been a generic trope of Hindi cinema (AKA Bollywood). Notably, stunning places unfamiliar to Indian audiences are constantly featured in commercial Indian films, mostly for their visual qualities, in order to add a further element of entertainment to the story.

‘Prochainement: Arizona Jim Contre Cagoulard’: Framing The Future Of The Front Populaire In Jean Renoir’S Le Crime De Monsieur Lange (1936), Barry Nevin

Articles

Gilles Deleuze remarks that Jean Renoir’s entire œuvre displays the most fundamental operation of time, constantly holding the embodied past and the potential creation of a genuinely new future in tension. Although he fails to address Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, the film that cemented Renoir’s association with the Front populaire, Deleuze tantalisingly remarks that this dialectic stems partly from Renoir’s attitude towards the Front populaire. How Deleuze’s framework allows spectators to interpret this film as an expression of Renoir’s own ambivalence regarding the future of the Front populaire has yet to be sufficiently addressed. Drawing on Ida, …

Dans La Serre: Framing The Greenhouse In Le Jour Se Lève (1939) And La Règle Du Jeu (1939), Barry Nevin

Articles

Beyond the year of their production, their notoriously foreboding references to contemporary national and international politics, and their shared status as canonised classics of French cinema, Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se lève (1939) and Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) both portray the romantic union of two parties within a greenhouse. This article aims to elaborate on these images in two central ways: first, it theorises glass in cinema with reference to the writings of André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze; second, it situates Carné and Renoir’s greenhouses within their respective dramatic, aesthetic and political contexts. In both cases, the …

“After Hollywood And Its Ever-Blue Skies, How Beautiful Paris Looks!”: Jacques Feyder Between France And America, 1928-1934, Barry Nevin

Articles

Although generally relegated by present-day historians to the footnotes of film history, Belgian director Jacques Feyder (1885–1948) strove to elevate the artistic standards of French film production throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His departure for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios on the cusp of the transition to sound in France was viewed as a crisis, and his return was hailed as an event. Drawing on contemporary periodicals, this article answers two fundamental questions: Why did France's leading am bassador leave his adoptive homeland? And what factors motivated his return to France despite the country's notoriously anarchic mode of production? Core concerns include Feyder's …

Tradition And Novelty: Food Representations In Irish Women’S Magazines 1922–73, Marzena Keating, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Based on a qualitative content analysis of selected Irish women’s magazines, this paper provides a brief overview of Irish food culture from 1922 to 1973. It illustrates how selected texts from women’s magazines, mainly recipes, food columns, practical suggestions for cooking and housekeeping, as well as articles on food topics mirrored social, cultural, economic, and religious characteristics of a particular period. The paper discusses various culinary trends apparent in the content and style of cookery pages focusing on a paired category of novelty and tradition adapted from the quantitative research conducted by Alan Warde.

Perception Of Auditory Objects In Complex Scenes: Factors And Applications, William Coleman

Conference Papers

Over the past twenty years, technological advances have driven the development of media consumption in both home and mobile contexts. While not ubiquitous, multi-channel audio home cinema systems have become more prevalent, as has the consumption of broadcast and gaming media on smartphone and tablet technology via mobile telecommunications networks. This has created new possibilities and poses new challenges for audio content delivery such as how the same content can be presented to greatest effect given that it may be consumed via either a surround-sound home entertainment system or in a mobile context using stereo headphones. This paper outlines research …

Un Nino Judio En El Equipo: Futbol E Identidad En Pelota De Trap (De Leopoldo Torres Rios), Mirna Vohnsen

Articles

Este art ículo se centra en la representación de Abrahamcito, un niño judío que aparece en la película argentina Pelota de trapo (Leopoldo Torres Ríos, 1948). Se explora la relación que el niño tiene con su padre y los demás niños del vecindario, así como también la manera en que el fútbol como metáfora de integración promueve una alianza superior a cualquier otra. Se demuestra que Abrahamcito, quien hace frente a los ideales de su padre y se une a los otros niños en los juegos de pelota, forja su identidad de pertenencias múltiples en la que integra su identidad …

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: 1950s Audiences And British Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

The first television broadcasts in Ireland were watched in the 1950s. These initial programmes were British. This history of these early viewers, however, has been ignored. A dominant narrative has addressed the history of television in Ireland as the history of the public broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). Thus, the history of Irish television often begins in 1961, overlooking Irish people’s experience of the medium in the preceding decade. This paper breaks with traditional historiography by employing life history interviews to explore the uses, rituals and feelings attached to television in the years before RTÉ.

Irish people who watched television …

Television In Ireland: A History From The Mediated Centre, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies and critiques a dominant narrative in the history of Irish television, which is too often passed off for, or accepted as, the history of television in Ireland. The his- tory of television in Ireland has been written within an institutional framework and depends on the cultural binary of tradition and modernity, ‘old Ireland’ and ‘new Ireland’. This dom- inant narrative fails to interrogate television as a medium. It provides an account of the Irish broadcaster RTÉ rather than an account of the arrival of a new medium. Ironically this nar- rative which hinges on the role of …

Why Does Film And Television Sci-Fi Tend To Portray Machines As Being Human?, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies, and attempts to explain, a lack of diversity in the way that cinema and television science fiction represents robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a qualitative content analysis of recent film and television portrayals, it is argued, that a limited and limiting vision predominates. This limitation may serve to ideologically reinforce the power of corporate elites. It may also hamper discussion and debate around technological possibilities and their relationship with society.

There has been a slew of entertainment productions since 2013 that represent AI and robotics. This work examines Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Interstellar (2014), Chappie (2015), …

Why Does Film And Television Sci-Fi Tend To Portray Machines As Being Human?, Edward Brennan

Other

This presentation identifies, and attempts to explain, a lack of diversity in the way that cinema and television science fiction represents robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a qualitative content analysis of recent film and television portrayals, it is argued, that a limited and limiting vision predominates. This dominant form of representation is, in turn, a by-product of screen entertainment's need to allow audiences' s to psychologically identify with characters. This industrial constraint may hamper discussion and debate around technological possibilities and their relationship with society.

Formations Of Indian Cinema In Dublin: A Participatory Researcher-Fan Ethnography, Giovanna Rampazzo

Doctoral

This thesis explores emergent formations of Indian cinema in Dublin with a particular focus on globalising Bollywood film culture, offering a timely analysis of how Indian cinema circulates in the Irish capital in terms of consumption, exhibition, production and identity negotiation. The enhanced visibility of South Asian culture in the Irish context is testimony to on the one hand, the global expansion of Hindi cinema, and on the other, to the demographic expansion of the South Asian community in Ireland during the last decade. Through varying degrees of participant observation in and across sites of film production and consumption, alongside …

The Production Of Ek Tha Tiger: A Marriage Of Convenience Between Bollywood And The Irish Film And Tourist Industries, Giovanna Rampazzo

Articles

This article examines a collaboration between the Irish and Hindi film industries, adopting the production of Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger (2012) in Dublin as a case study. It critically narrates the arc of the film’s production, foregrounding the intersecting concerns of Yash Raj Films and Irish creative and cultural institutions. Ek Tha Tiger represents Ireland through constructed idyllic images which proved to be successful in attracting tourists. Tracing the links between the production of the film and the promotion of tourism to Ireland, this article explains how the film was used to construct a ‘tourist gaze’ for audiences in …

Techno-Apocalypse: Technology, Religion, And Ideology In Bryan Singer’S H+, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This essay critically analyses the digital series H+. In the near future, adults who can afford them, have replaced tablets and cell phones with nanotechnology implants. The H+ implant acts as a medical diagnostic and can overlay the user's senses with a computer interface. The apocalypse comes in the form of a computer virus which infects the H+ network and instantly kills one third of humanity. The series represents the anxiety and religiosity that surrounds the possible social consequences of digital technology. It also explores the tensions and intersections between technology and faith. This essay makes the case, however, that …

Ragged Football, Mirna Vohnsen

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.