Film architecture and design has existed almost as long as cinema itself. In 1976, Leon Barsacq argued in Caligari’s Cabinet And Other Grand Illusions that the fantasist sets developed by Georges Melies at the beginning of the 20th century were a considerable improvement over anything that had been done previously in that they created a deeper reality and gave the image a more substantial meaning. He further added that cinema escaped its primitive phase once it moved away from simple backdrops to three-dimensional sets, thereby creating an architectural space within cinema[1].

Read more »

‘Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the results of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them’
Hume
Read more »

To attempt to define the exact meaning of realism would be a useless excercise, one that would be most likely bound to fail. Countless critics and historians have offered their own interpretations over the years, providing valuable insights into the subject, but succeeding only in offering partial explanations of the concept. Through this ‘extreme relativity of the concept of realism’[1], any effort to develop a universal definition of realism becomes trivial and secondary to the more interesting study of the various branches that a desire for capturing reality can engender in art and, specifically here, in cinema.
Read more »

British Science Fiction cinema has always lived in the shadow of its American counterpart, either as a result of a direct effort to emulate an American style to enable the films to reach broader markets or as an indirect consequence of the fact that, since the 50’s, Science Fiction cinema has been associated with America, drawing on its rich heritage of comics and magazines.

Read more »

The transition from silent to sound proved quite a challenging one for French cinema. Considering that Leon Gaumont started to experiment with sound at the turn of the century, it is rather unfortunate that by the 1920s, practically all attempts to bring sound to film had ended in France. And by 1926, when Warner’s Don Juan came out in America, most French production companies still did not have the foresight to understand the full implications of Fox’ Movietone or Western Electric’s Vitaphone.
Read more »

To understand the Japanese film industry’s reaction to the coming of sound, it is necessary to look at it in the context of the country’s relationship to performance arts and particularly, to the art of Katsuben. While Japan’s official transition to sound did not come until the year 1935 (and even at that time, silent films continued to play a prominent role), some have argued that sound had in fact existed in Japanese films and foreign films distributed in Japan since the turn of the century.

Read more »