International Journal of Film and Media Arts

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Notes towards the use of a documentary approach in the teaching of animation
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Serrazina, Pedro
Since its early days, animation film has always reflected its cultural context at the time of creation. Nevertheless, it is still widely perceived as kid’s entertainment. Reflecting on practical examples and teaching methodologies, this text argues for a practice of animation which, by adhering to documentary strategies, engages with real issues, leaving behind the traditional Disney/anime/fantasy/ game-inspired references that frame most of the animation students’ intentions at the beginning of their path. Rather than a matter of technique, and regardless of the much debated issue of realism, this text suggests that a teaching framed by a documentary approach, bringing questions of identity and social perspective to the core of the practice, reinforces animation as a thoughtful and participative role in the contemporary moving image debate.
Writing animated documentary : a theory of practice
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Wells, Paul
This short discussion provides some introductory remarks on writing for the documentary form in animation. Taking into account theories of the place of animation in utilitarian films, avant-garde works and the essay film, the analysis, based on auto-ethnographic insights, provides some methods and approaches to developing animated documentary work. These include ‘Making Animation Choices’, ‘Staging in Space’, ‘Using Attachment and Detachment’, developing ‘Episodic lists and Micro-Narratives’, and deploying ‘Transition and Associative Relations’. The analysis seeks to show that these approaches to the animated documentary reveal and evidence a theory of practice, and a practice of theory.
Drawing the unspeakable understanding ’the other’ through narrative empathy in animated documentary
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Nåls, Jan Erik
How to represent the suffering of distant others? An international exchange program between Africa and Europe was set up in 2006 to tackle this issue with the help of documentary filmmaking. A result was A Kosovo Fairytale (2009), a case study of how animated documentary can provide insights in how to represent ‘the other’. Theories of narrative empathy inform the understanding of the process as well as the final film. This paper examines animated documentary from three distinct perspectives: as a pedagogical tool to enhance cultural understanding, as a process of narrative empathy, and as a coherent text which makes use of narrative strategies endemic to animated documentary in order to create emotional engagement. Conclusions suggest that animated documentary can be a novel way of representing the other, especially if narrative empathy is present throughout a production process, and that the process involves participatory elements where the subjects contribute to the narrative.
Against animated documentary?
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Roe, Annabelle Honess
Animated documentaries have been written about in a mostly positive way that explores the way the form enhances and expands the documentary agenda. This is true of scholarly and academic writing as well as that in the popular press and film reviews. However, some authors have taken issue with the ascription of the term ‘documentary’ to animated documentaries. In addition, there are potential issues regarding audience response to animated documentary and the technical proficiency of the films themselves as they become more ubiquitous. This chapter explores the existing, and potential objections to and criticisms of animated documentary and suggests that a more ‘360-degree’ discussion of the form will enrich the scholarly discourse on animated documentary.
Stereoscopic therapy: fun or remedy?
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Raposo, Sara
Once the material of playful gatherings, stereoscopic photographs of cities, the moon, landscapes and fashion scenes are now cherished collectors’ items that keep on inspiring new generations of enthusiasts. Nevertheless, for a stereoblind observer, a stereoscopic photograph will merely be two similar images placed side by side. The perspective created by stereoscopic fusion can only be experienced by those who have binocular vision, or stereopsis. There are several causes of a lack of stereopsis. They include eye disorders such as strabismus with double vision. Interestingly, stereoscopy can be used as a therapy for that condition. This paper approaches this kind of therapy through the exploration of North American collections of stereoscopic charts that were used for diagnosis and training purposes until recently.
Stereoscopy in nineteenth century Brazil : the case of Rio de Janeiro
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Silva, Maria Cristina Miranda da
the stereographs that are part of the public collections of Rio de Janeiro. We start with an investigation of the presence of optical devices in nineteenth century Brazil, especially in the city of Rio de Janeiro, examining both users and diffusers, as well as the forms of observation and social contexts of their use. Our original research was based on the studies of the first cinema, especially the work of Tom Gunning and Charles Musser, and on art history by Jonathan Crary, authors who helped us analyse, respectively, the re-contextualization process regarding the use of optical devices and the resizing of the observer of modernity. Our empirical work was based on the systematic study of advertisements published in the newspapers of the period in question, especially in the Jornal do Commercio, between the 1850s and the 1870s. We conducted a survey of the establishments that imported and marketed these devices during the period, using advertisements published in Almanak Laemmert, between the years 1844 and 1889. We place a special emphasis on the arrival of photography in Brazil and to the precocity with which stereoscopy was developed here by the photographer Revert Henrique Klumb. We mapped themes as a reference for Brazilian visuality, and made an inventory of the Brazilian photographers who developed this technique in their works. From the information gathered, we answered research questions about the presence of optical devices in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century, especially stereoscopy considering its particularities in the historical, economic and social context of the time.
Animation documentaries and reality cross-boundaries
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Luz, Filipe Costa
Filmmakers aim to deliver some emotional and aesthetic coin to their works, which makes it possible that the boundaries between fiction and documentary genres could be diluted artistically. The documentary is a recognized genre in film studies that is considered to move on one side of the boundary between fact and fiction. Michael Rabiger defends the objectivity and fairness of documentaries due to the expectation of the viewer to accept the photographic image as true (Rabiger, 1998, p. 6). Bill Nichols reinforces this idea evoking that the documentaries that best witness a certain theme are those in which filmmakers “don’t interfere”, classifying them as “observational documentaries”, as the examples from the images captured in World War II or the political TV news (Nichols, 1991, p. 38). Therefore, the challenge that we propose aims to relate the documentary live action characteristics with the animated images, where the veracity is just an animation reflection. To better illustrate the curious fusion of animation and documentary image, we will examine several emergent examples of this new “film genre”.
British stereo photographers in Spain: Frank M. Good
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Fernández Rivero, Juan Antonio
Unlike French stereo photographers, who flooded the market with Spanish views, the most important British publishers and photographers rarely made Spanish views. Quite possibly this was precisely because of the rapid market penetration of the French, such as Gaudin, Ferrier and others, and in spite of the leading British photographic houses, such as Frith or George W. Wilson, also wanting to include Spanish views in their catalogues. The photographer Frank Good would be the only British photographic editor to make a collection of some importance of Spanish stereoscopic views during the first decades of the history of photography, visiting and photographing the cities of San Sebastian, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Seville and Cordoba. About one hundred views, of which more than half are of Cordoba and Seville, do not include, strangely, cities such as Madrid, Toledo and Granada.
Between the point of view and the point of being: the space of the stereoscopic tours
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Parmeggiani, Paolo
One of the most interesting features of the travel stereoview series is not their three-dimensional effect but rather the intertwined outcome of realism and “being-thereness” in the experience of early twentieth century armchair travellers. On the set of Italy through the Stereoscope, the viewer’s “path of the gaze” was a novelty compared to two dimensional photographs and stereoviews. The Underwood & Underwood publishing company created a stereoscopic multimodal tour to improve the impression of realism with a proprioceptive perception of the scene. The procedure of textual débrayage, the description of the experience as it is happening here and now, the direction of the viewer’s gaze with a narrative itinerary, the changing of the visual convergence with the variation in the points of attention: all of these elements fostered a synaesthesia for the spectator. The result was immersion in an explorable space between the “point of view” (2D images) and the “point of being” (virtual reality).
Between immersion and media reflexivity: virtual travel media in the 19th century
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Mathias, Nikita
Deviating from Oliver Grau’s notion of the panorama’s immersive features, this article will discuss the receptive impact of virtual travel media of the 19th century in a more ambivalent and nuanced manner by employing two theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist. In Berlin Childhood around 1900 Benjamin draws on and reflects his childhood experience of the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin. Brentano and Kleist’s text elucidates the authors’ ‘strange feeling’ towards Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea. What both texts share is a fundamental experience of ambivalence regarding the topographies depicted in both media. Other than merely being ‘enchanted’ and taken into a far distant land, it is precisely the mediality of the Kaiserpanorama and the Friedrich painting that provides a more complex experience, oscillating between distance and familiar terrain, between immersion and media reflexivity, between past, present and future. After introducing and discussing both theoretical accounts, I will apply their receptive principles to the analysis of the virtual travel media panorama and early cinema.
Animation Documentaries and Biodiversity Issues – is ‘Plant blindness’ a concept worth keeping? Insights from the Portuguese animation documentary ‘Viagem a Cabo-Verde’ (2010)
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Lima, M. Alexandra Abreu
From the contemporary panorama of creative media, the animation documentary A Journey to Cape Verde (2010, Viagem a Cabo Verde) is analysed in terms of its content concerning biodiversity and plant issues. The concept of ‘plant blindness’ is revisited, a term introduced by Wandersee and Schussler in 1998 (Allen, 2003) to describe “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment” and their importance in the biosphere. Some future considerations are discussed. It is hoped this casestudy displays a picture of what can be done to improve collective knowledge about biodiversity issues and could inspire and help others to develop awareness raising projects about them.
Hacking stereoscopic vision: the nineteenthcentury culture of critical inquiry in stereoscope use
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Bantjes, Rod
While recent scholarship has emphasised the narratives of immersive realism that surrounded the parlour stereoscope, my aim in this paper is to better understand the counter-currents of nineteenth century stereoscopic culture – the artefacts, practices and discourses that powerfully undermined realist assumptions about spatial perception and the “truth” of stereoscopic representation. Wheatstone’s original stereoscopes were designed to “hack” spatial perception and subject each of its component principles to artificial manipulation. What Wheatstone uncovered were glaring anomalies in the prevailing theories of veridical sight, which had relied upon the principle of binocular convergence (understood as a precise trigonometric measure of depth). Following a popular tradition of critical inquiry known as “rational recreation,” amateurs too used their stereoscopes to reflect on the perplexities of binocular spatial perception. Analytic line drawings highlighted the inexplicable binocular suture of strikingly disparate images. Stereoviews with their images transposed revealed the capacity of the mind to constitute volumetric objects irrespective of binocular cues. Hyper-stereo images (taken from a wide separation and therefore at an increased angle of binocular convergence) sparked debate and perceptual uncertainty as to whether their 3D effects, or indeed all stereoviews, were distorted – elongated along the z axis and/or miniaturised. Realists, including some astronomers hoping to use hyper-stereo photographs as visual evidence of the shape of the moon’s surface, sought unsuccessfully to solve the problem of elongation by ensuring that the angles at which stereo photographs were taken were reproduced in the angles at which the eyes viewed them in the stereoscope. Astronomers were forced to quietly abandon the stereoscope as a reliable witness of spatial form. Others, artists in particular, revelled in the anti-realist implications of a spatial imagination which constructed the perceptual world in a sometimes capricious fashion.
A debt repaid. Shoutout to videogame adaptations
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Wassermann, Jacopo
Trouble awaits the scholar who decides to study movie adaptations of videogames – or, as they are more commonly called, ‘videogame adaptations’. Literary and post-literary biases, an unfriendly critical environment and the lack of systematic references are but a few of the many obstacles on her or his path. By addressing these issues and attempting to understand them against the historical and theoretical backdrop that informed them in the first place, this paper aims at a reevaluation, however partial, of these productions as symptoms of a self-reflexive tendency present in contemporary commercial cinema. In the process of nearing a new understanding of these cultural and industrial artifacts, a cross-examination of key concepts belonging to three fields of studies (game studies, film studies and adaptation studies) opens up the possibility of an interdisciplinary cooperation aimed at the adjustment and rectification of mutual assumptions and misconceptions.
Memories in decay : 360º spatio-temporal explorations of the past
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Debackere, Brecht
The present case study focuses on 'Memories in Decay' is a 360º immersive experience which explores what happens when the past meets the present using the cinematic medium of the future: omnidirectional video. This project is a VR documentary which does not only transport the immersant – the 'spectator' of an immersive experience – to the ruins of a long-forgotten place, but also balances between past and present, providing access to a different time through the use of oral histories and archive photos and documents. In the paper, the author not only discusses the potential of VR but how it affects tradicitonal cinema and its processes.
Suspense mechanics in narrative video games
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Sayol, Lluis; Colom Pons, Àngel
We put forward a suitable analytical model for studying suspense in video games. This model is based on the analysis of perspective, focalization and the figure of the implied player, which is fundamental to understand the relationship between game, player and emotional effects. We critically review the previous research on point of view in films and video games with the aim of achieving a better understanding of audiovisual narration. The resulting model is a proposal for, in the first place, systematising the relationship between the player -considered here as a theoretical concept: the implied player- and the game. Once this is done, it allows us to study suspense in video games from a narrative perspective and leads us to the conclusion that in video games suspense is not related to a waiting situation –like in films- but to the effort of overcoming difficulties that we know from a previous play.
Moldear a la audiencia : sobre la génesis del efecto en el discurso audiovisual
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Marino, Iván
El siguiente artículo explora los primeros en- sayos soviéticos destinados a investigar la función del «efecto» en el discurso audiovisual, relacionándolos a su vez con las corrientes del pensamiento dominante de su época. El obje- tivo de esta investigación consiste en volver a las fuentes de la retórica del audiovisual —una de las técnicas discursivas de mayor e cacia y capacidad persuasiva de la cultura contem- poránea— para identi car elípticamente sus reminiscencias en los discursos actuales del cine y la televisión. Siguiendo esta línea de trabajo, analizamos, entre otras, las primeras ideas de Pudovkin (2006), Kuleshov (1974) y Eisenstein (2010a) en torno al tema planteado, deteniéndonos con especial interés en las no- ciones de «atracción» y «efecto» que, a nuestro criterio, subyacen transformadas en los discur- sos audiovisuales del presente.
Games can play us: the power of disempowerment in "emotional engineering"
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Filipe, Eva R.
With the paradox of interactive emotion as a starting point, this study will try to understand what is the cause for this limitation of video games’ emotional power, identifying some requirements for it to be overcome. Through this singling out, the concept of disempowerment is drafted as a model for theoretical inquiry, critical counterpoint and set of practices that stand opposed to the forces that go through, define and are themselves firmed on the diverse layers of the interactive experience. Beyond trying to grasp the emotional potential yet to realize and how the rupture with the established and expected practices may unlock it, the proposal of the disempowerment model will overflow the inside of the game experience. From its construction within a game to its use on discourse about video games, its importance on broader and interwoven dynamics will be highlighted. All along the way, a critical proposal will gain shape, which will seek to, cyclically, magnify video game’s power as a medium of experiences and the power of the medium as a cultural object
Ventura : a character’s mental landscape as history
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Cordeiro, Edmundo
Pedro Costa’s last film, Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money, 2014], continues the work with Ventura in a way that could be seen to overtake Vanda’s role in his series of films since Ossos [Bones, 1997]. In Juventude em Marcha [Colossal Youth, 2006], by means of «the power of the false» (Deleuze), Ventura is a stratigraphic character, the result of a confrontation between fictional and documentary powers which permanently shifts, in Ventura himself, the actually existing Ventura from the invented Ventura. This builds a portrait that, with the ritornello of the film — Ventura's insistent recitation of a love letter —, moves across centuries of Portugal and world’s history. But in Horse Money, both concentration and fragmentation increase. There are all kind of coincidences and clashes between the past and the present time, which are presented in a glossolalia, voices that spread memory everywhere, as in the final sequence in the elevator, when we have Ventura and a soldier of the 25 April Revolution completely mummified, transformed into a golden statue. I want to highlight the everlasting present created through the length of time and the scarcity of space (we don’t get out of the elevator for a prolonged period of time). This is not a time that corresponds to confusion or delirium; this is the time built by the film, and I will particularly focus my paper on this coincident mental and historical landscape that, by entailing the body and the life of a person transformed into a character, allows to the filmmaker to ride through history with Ventura’s horse-money (‘money’ is the name of Ventura’s horse left in Cap Vert). We have no predefined thoughts and Pedro Costa does not provide us with any exits, but “the nerve-wave that gives rise to thought” (Artaud, via Deleuze) mixes with the noise of the tremor of the elevator that continues without stopping.
Multi-task cinema, or a “whatever style”
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Viveiros, Paulo
This text seeks to reflect upon the impact that new imaging technologies — from video introduction to computers dependency — have had on more recent generations of cinema, and its effect on film language. The context of the analysis is North American cinema and the Hollywood industry in particular which, as a large production system, absorbs and transforms technological novelty in order to enlarge the scope of its action (in line with the idea of general audiences and the phenomenon of globalization which loses its cultural specificities). From the cinematographic point of view, the immediate consequences of such impact are felt in film language rooted in classical narrative, with particular focus on action and science fiction films; and, from a cultural standpoint, how they precociously manifest themselves in school movies done by a generation with a visual culture also marked by music videos and YouTube cultures.
Right, left, high, low : narrative strategies for non–linear storytelling
(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2017) Meyer, Sylke Rene
Based on studies of affect, and on theoretical works concerning spatial semantics by Yuri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and others, spatial story design provides a seven step algorithm of story development for inter- active audio-visual narrative. Following spatial semantics and its application in interactive storytelling, the author no longer creates the protagonist, his or her want or need, nor con- trols the story arc. Instead, spatial story design allows the author(s) to make the formative cre- ative decisions by designing a narrative space, and spatial dynamics that then translate into user generated storylines. Spatial story design serves as a framework for interdisciplinary col- laborations, and can be used to not only create interactive digital narrative but also screenplays, improvisational theatre, 360° lms, and walk-in story world experiences for a number of users in either live or holographic virtual reality spac- es. Spatial story design could inspire creators of interactive narrative, storytellers in time-based media, and possibly also technology developers for authoring tools.

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