Academic literature on the topic 'Film societies movement'

Abstract This article attempts to delineate the cartography of alternative cinematic productions in the region of Kolkata, which, being a nodal juncture that shapes the cultural milieu of Bengal, offers the technological and cultural infrastructures and the scope for cinephilic engagement crucial to the production of non-mainstream cinemas. To explore the gradual development of independent and amateur films in Kolkata, this article emphasizes the cinephilic tradition of the city that not only triggered cinematic movements (such as the film society movement and the Super-8 movement) but also ushered in the institution of film festivals in the region. Despite the mutations due to technological shifts, both film societies (in altered forms) and film festivals occupy central positions in the contemporary city's cinephilic culture. This article analyses the cinephilic legacies of the film society and the Super-8 movements that have historically fostered the contemporary cinephilic ecology of Kolkata, spurring peripheral media products.

AbstractThis paper offers a history of the creation and development of film societies in India from 1947 to 1980. Members of the film society movement consisted of important Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, as well as film enthusiasts, numbering about 100,000 by 1980. The movement, confined though it was to members who considered themselves film aficionados, was propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements which originated in late colonial India, namely, the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian People's Theatre Association in 1942. By looking at the film society movement as an early and sustained attempt at civil-social organization in postcolonial India, this paper highlights the two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’—from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated during the time of the movement.

The inception stories of early film societies in India from the 1940s to the 1960s reveal how these groups initiated an access to international, art and alternative cinemas through a network of circulation and exhibition created separately from mainstream cinema markets thereby forming a parallel network of societies, foreign consulates, embassies, government institutions and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). This paper navigates the early history and memories of film societies in an attempt to map the cinephiliac energy of the film society movement through their erstwhile network of film travel. Using experiences, criticism and narratives of nostalgia published in film society journals, this paper reimagines the routes traversed by art cinemas and their cinephiles, enumerating specific activities around the film object. Observing urban film societies where film society cultures were initially conceptualized, thrived and whose histories are relatively renowned but also traces some significant small town societies which made the most of these circuits of film travel reaching out to non-metropolitan centers effectively transforming backyards into screening spaces and widening the scope of community participation around art cinemas.

This article exlpores what happens when a documentary film form developed within a specific social, ideological, institutoinal, and aesthetic context—namely, the so-called British Documentary Movement, under the aegis of John Grierson—is deployed in several layers of argument involved, but I will pursue only one of them in the space available here. At a kind of metatheoretical level, it is arguable that Indigenous and Asian cultures are inimical to core values of the Western documentary project: in particular, to the belief in, and rhetorical power of, the material, historical word. In these societies, what might be called 'spiritual' or 'other' worlds have as much everyday reality as Griersonian 'actuality'.

Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description; Tim Ingold (ed.), Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines; Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (eds.), Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot Phillip VanniniTom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses Nanny KimSimone Fullagar, Kevin W. Markwell, and Erica Wilson (eds.), Slow Tourism: Experiences and Mobilities Lisa CookeJennie Germann Molz, Travel Connections: Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World Giovanna MascheroniHazel Andrews and Les Roberts (eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between Jad BaakliniLes Roberts, Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool Ekaterina FenHelen Lee and Steve Tupai Francis (eds.), Migration and Transnationalism: Pacific Perspectives Elisabeth BetzDavid Pedersen, American Value: Migrants, Money and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States Federico HelfgottLeopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra and Jane Vincent (eds.), Migration, Diaspora, and Information Technology in Global Societies Giuseppina PellegrinoDaniel Flückinger, Strassen für alle: Infrastrukturpolitik im Kanton Bern 1790-1850 Reiner RuppmannRichard Vahrenkamp, The Logistic Revolution: The Rise of Logistics in the Mass Consumption Society Alfred C. Mierzejewski

Understanding social organization is fundamental for the analysis of animal societies. In this study, animal single-file movement data—serialized order movements generated by simple bottom-up rules of collective movements—are informative and effective observations for the reconstruction of animal social structures using agent-based models. For simulation, artificial 2-dimensional spatial distributions were prepared with the simple assumption of clustered structures of a group. Animals in the group are either independent or dependent agents. Independent agents distribute spatially independently each one another, while dependent agents distribute depending on the distribution of independent agents. Artificial agent spatial distributions aim to represent clustered structures of agent locations—a coupling of “core” or “keystone” subjects and “subordinate” or “follower” subjects. Collective movements were simulated following two simple rules, 1) initiators of the movement are randomly chosen, and 2) the next moving agent is always the nearest neighbor of the last moving agents, generating “single-file movement” data. Finally, social networks were visualized, and clustered structures reconstructed using a recent major social network analysis (SNA) algorithm, the Louvain algorithm, for rapid unfolding of communities in large networks. Simulations revealed possible reconstruction of clustered social structures using relatively minor observations of single-file movement, suggesting possible application of single-file movement observations for SNA use in field investigations of wild animals.

Historical knowledge exists in all human societies. It is the cognitive appropriation of socially-determined material transformations necessary for life process. We must begin with this fact. It is a form of social consciousness, a socially-determined interpretation of the movement of those transformations. But where do we find it and how do we recognize it? Where is the place of historical knowledge? Where and how does it exist? On the printed page, in books, of course, and prior to printing and writing, in oral traditions (all those forms of a human community's collective memory--some names of people or places; songs, stories, poems, legends, tales, cosmogonic myths; drawings, carvings, cave inscriptions, tablets, bone/bamboo inscriptions; languages; old roads; etc.). Historical knowledge exists nowadays as well on tapes, cassettes, computer memory, films, pictures, etc.Historical knowledge exists in different degrees of elaboration, of truth character, of accuracy, as well as of scope. All human societies have undergone, and continue to undergo, social transformations. Some have experienced or experience more slow processes of movement than rapid ones and thus their social awareness of those processes of transformations has been or is less sharp. That is why the conscious control and social mastering of the social process of transformation has been or is less developed. Other societies at a certain level of world social process experienced or experience more rapid processes of transformations leading to sharper forms of social consciousness of those processes and specific needs of developing ways and tools for handling those processes.

In Cinema 2 Deleuze conceptualises the time-image as a cinema of infinite variation, opening the stable forms of the movement-image to an unformed and virtual outside. Five years later he would develop a similar analysis in the short ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, arguing that a new system of organisation was expanding the disciplinary formations that had reached their peak in the first part of the twentieth century. In both works Deleuze explores a world in the process of systemic deterritorialisation that has profound implications for the way that society is organised and in which the world is thought. This essay argues that the ungrounding discussed in both of these later works should be understood as part of a similar shift in the ordering of the world, where a new regime of thought has emerged. The relationship between these two concepts in Deleuze's thought has important implications with respect to our understanding of his work on cinema. I argue that this connection reveals the political dimensions of Deleuze's focus on the intolerable in the cinema books. An impoverished life, through lack of access to capital, protection and education, offers less access to life-chances and potential social transformations. I focus on cinematic depictions of poverty and powerlessness in two films by Béla Tarr to account for the significance of poverty in Deleuze's overlapping thought on cinematic creation and media control.

The article is devoted to the clan organization of the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia. Recently, scientific interest in the stated topic has decreased somewhat, due to the lack of implementation of traditional institutions of Eastern societies and the decline in the influence of the liberal mainstream on the socio-political process in post-Soviet Asia, which, in turn, significantly reduced the thoroughness of criticism of the "non-Western path" of development. The author's perspective on the problem is focused on the identification of traditional institutions, their actualization in the modern political process and variants of their socio-political evolution. The authors offer an expanded understanding of the essence of a clan organization that distributes consolidating loyalty directions both horizontally within blood-related communities and vertically, reproducing the hierarchy of connections from the elite top to the rank-and-file members of associations. The authors consider the growth of social movement, self-awareness and public disillusionment with the attempt to reproduce the Western model of social development to be the main factors that actualize the clan organization in the socio-political process of post-Soviet Asian countries. The dynamically developing socio-political reality of the Asian newly independent States actualizes multidirectional vectors of social integration.

Fethullah Gülen is Turkey’s most famous, influential, and controversial faith-based communitarian leader. Collectively known as “the Gülen movement” (GM), individuals inspired by Gülen’s charismatic teachings control organizations that span the world. Led by “aksiyon insanları” (people of action), the GM has accumulated tremendous social influence in education, media, trade, and allegedly, in unelected state office. Responding to those critical of its power, GM actors claim to be nothing more than “selfless,” “service oriented” advocates for interfaith and intercultural dialogue. The effort of this introduction to this special issue of Sociology of Islam is to situate the GM in its Turkish context. As a collective actor, the GM creates subjects and impacts societies. The social norms and communitarian social structure that are reproduced in the GM network engender identities, regulate desires, and determine social, economic, and political outcomes in Turkey and around the world. In this way, the GM constitutes a source of social power, and thus warrants academic scrutiny. In an attempt to fill a void in the literature on the impact of the GM’s collective mobilization, the contributing authors to this special issue of Sociology of Islam hope to contribute to the sociological investigation of Turkey’s GM in particular, and to the interactions between Islam and modern socio-political organization in general.

O governo do presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, no período de 2003 a 2010, foi marcado pela adoção de uma nova concepção de cultura, sustentando a necessidade de assumi-la enquanto valores, posturas e comportamentos sociais. Isso exigiu do Estado uma nova postura, sustentada pelas políticas culturais, cabendo destaque ao esforço de democratização promovido com a reestruturação do Ministério da Cultura (MinC) como tentativa de combater o problema da exclusão cultural. Em relação ao cinema, a atitude assumida foi de encontro à de mecenas praticada até então, especificamente baseada em políticas de financiamento, ilustradas pelas Leis Rouanet (1991) e do Audiovisual (1993). Voltada à questão do audiovisual, a iniciativa que se destacou foi o Cine Mais Cultura, parte do Programa Mais Cultura, que tem por objetivo a implementação e a ampliação de espaços de exibição audiovisual fora do esquema comercial, essencialmente representados pelas atividades cineclubistas – organizações formadas por cinéfilos e pessoas interessadas em cinema, que se reúnem para apreciar e refletir sobre essa arte. O alcance dessa ação acontece através da disponibilização de equipamento audiovisual para projeção digital, formação em oficinas cineclubistas e acesso ao acervo da Programadora Brasil. Á luz da teoria de redes, definiu-se como objetivo desta pesquisa verificar e analisar como as políticas culturais do período entre 2003 e 2010 (re)constituíram os laços, a estrutura e a arquitetura da rede cineclubista gaúcha. O método investigativo selecionado para o desenvolvimento dessa pesquisa foi o estudo de caso (YIN, 2005). Foram selecionadas para a coleta dos dados a análise de dados secundários, a observação direta e a entrevista, realizados de março de 2011 a maio de 2012. Os dados foram analisados a partir da análise de conteúdo (BARDIN, 2011; BAUER, 2002), realizada com base nas categorias nomeadas pela teoria de redes – atores, laços, rede, estrutura, arquitetura. Para complementar a análise, alguns índices e figuras foram extraídos do software UCINET 6 (BORGATTI; EVERETT; FREEMAN, 2005). Em relação à análise dos impactos dessa política cultural na atuação dos antigos e novos cineclubes, cabe destacar a entrada de novos atores, decorrente da criação de um grande número de cineclubes por todo o estado. Além disso, também merece destaque a qualificação de espaços de exibição já existentes, que se candidataram aos editais do governo federal e passaram por formação cineclubista. Outro ponto consiste ainda na intensificação da articulação entre os cineclubes, fortalecida por meio do CNC e das ferramentas de horizontalização do movimento por ele criadas. Estruturalmente, a rede teve um aumento significativo em seu tamanho, devido à criação desses novos cineclubes, além da alteração dos atores considerados centrais e periféricos ao longo dessa trajetória. Em geral, as políticas cumprem com sua proposta, na medida em que novos cineclubes foram criados, espaços foram aprimorados e o cinema brasileiro teve maior alcance no território nacional, em especial, o gaúcho, foco deste estudo. Por outro lado, existe a crítica de que aproximar o cineclubismo de uma formatação governamental impede que essa atividade democrática alcance seus objetivos de maneira ampla.
The government of president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in the period 2003 to 2010, was marked by the adoption of a new conception of culture, supporting the need to take it as values, attitudes and social behaviors. This required a new attitude of the State, sustained by cultural politics, being highlighted the democratization effort promoted by the restructuring of the Ministério da Cultura (MinC) in an attempt to combat the problem of cultural exclusion. Concerning the cinema, the stance taken was moving the patrons position practiced so far, specifically policy-financing-based, illustrated by the Lei Rouanet (1991) and Audiovisual (1993). Facing the issue of audiovisual, the initiative that stands out is the Cine Mais Cultura, part of the Programa Mais Cultura, which aims at the implementation and expansion of audiovisual exhibition spaces outside the trading scheme, mainly represented by the film societies activities – organizations formed by cinephile and people interested in cinema, who gather to enjoy and reflect on the art. The scope of this project is through the provision of audiovisual equipment for digital projection, film society training workshops and access to the collection of Programadora Brasil. Based on Network Theory, the aim of this research was defined by verify and analyze how the cultural politics of the period between 2003 and 2010 (re)constituted the ties, the structure and architecture of the film societies network from Rio Grande do Sul. The investigative method selected for the development of this research was the case study (Yin, 2005). The techniques selected for data collection were analyze of secondary datas, direct observation and interview, realized from March 2011 to May 2012. The data was analyzed by the content analysis (Bardin, 2011; BAUER, 2002), realized based on categories designated by the Network Theory – actor, ties, network structure and architecture. To complement the analysis, some indexes and figures were extracted from the software UCINET 6 (Borgatti, Everett, Freeman, 2005). Regarding the analysis of the impacts of cultural policy in the performance of old and new film societies, we highlight the entry of new actors, due to the creation of a large number of film societies throughout the state. Besides, it also deserves the qualification of existing exhibition spaces, which have applied to the edicts of the federal government and have gone through a film societies training. Another point is still the intensification of links between the film societies, strengthened by CNC and flattening tools of the movement it created. Structurally, the network had a significant increase in size due to the creation of these new film societies, besides the alteration of central and marginal actors along this trajectory. In general, the policies comply with its proposal, as those new film societies were created, spaces were enhanced and Brazilian cinema has greater reach in the national territory, in particular, in the Rio Grande do Sul, focus of this study. On the other hand, there is disapproval that the approach of film societies to a government formatting prevents this democratic activity to achieve its goals broadly.

This chapter focuses on International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage, who defended amateurism seemingly with religious conviction throughout his bureaucratic career. His deeply conservative views and passionate defense of the amateur ideal set the tone for the IOC in the Cold War years, helping insulate the movement from the radical currents that were transforming postwar societies and global affairs. Both in his lifetime and in the years since, portrayals of Brundage depict a Quixote-esque idealist providing the Olympic Movement's only firm line of defense against professional and commercial encroachments. However, the orthodox view of Brundage as an unwavering apostle of amateurism overlooks the finer, more nuanced realities of his administration. Despite his anticommercial rhetoric and investigatory crusades, Brundage also appeased, compromised, and even spearheaded initiatives that broke with the Olympic Movement's amateur traditions.

This book is an ethnographic study of Christian groups in contemporary Goan society that come under Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity. Most studies on the Pentecostal movement in India are from a theological perspective. This book is an attempt to fill this gap, to satisfy the need to understand the rapidly expanding and overtly evangelistic movement of Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity within pluralist, non-Christian societies, both as a social process and as an embodied everyday practice, as well as its sociocultural implications in the twenty first century. It assesses the impact of religion on society and analyses how the symbols, beliefs, ritual practices, and the organizational structure of two different living strands of Pentecostal Christianity in Goa, namely, the independent neo-Pentecostal sects and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) shape and influence religious and sociocultural identities, world views, and the everyday life activities of individual adherents. This study is specifically an ethnographic exploration, into the religious journey of a neophyte from their conversion and initiation into the new movement to their religious life, worship patterns, world view, and life cycle rituals till death. Several important interrelated themes such as mission, conversions, Christian fundamentalism, the Pentecostalization of the Catholic Church, Charismatic habitus, sacred spaces and time, prosperity gospel, and gender paradox are discussed threadbare in this book to arrive at a mosaic understanding of contemporary Pentecostal–Charismatic Christianity. This book is an important contribution to the growing field of new religious movements in India, characterised by their distinct modes of interaction with mainstream religious establishments and their specific religious identities, beliefs, rites and rituals.

The moment of liberation in Western Europe, 1943-1948, regards the final two years of World War II and the immediate post-liberation period as a moment in twentieth century history, when the shape and contours of postwar Western Europe appeared highly uncertain and various alternatives and conflicting visions were up for grabs. After close to six years of total war, Nazi terror and brutal occupation policies, a growing number of Europeans were no longer content solely to fight for national liberation from fascist control. Having staked their lives in military and civilian resistance to Nazism and Italian fascism across the continent, surviving activists were aiming to ensure that such a political and social catastrophe would never befall Europe again. In the closing moments of World War II, hundreds of thousands of antifascist activists had begun to identify with the famous quote penned by the exiled German social theorists, Max Horkheimer, who had boldly proclaimed in early September 1939: ‘Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.’ The economic and political elites in prewar societies were increasingly regarded as co-responsible for war, fascism and occupation policies, from which many had benefited significantly and often enthusiastically. There were extensive popular social movements at work in almost every single state which aimed to construct postwar societies in which grassroots democracy and the free association of rank-and-file activists would replace the profit principle and the top-down Jacobin orientation by traditional elites. This book for the first time reconstructs the parameters of this contest over the shape of postwar Western Europe from a consistently transnational perspective.