Academic literature on the topic 'Self-reflexivity (film)'

Self-reflexivity is a significant characteristic of Austro-German cinema during the early sound film period, particular in films that revolve around musical topics. Many examples of self-reflexive cinematic instances are connected to music in one way or another. The various ways in which music is integrated in films can produce instances of intertextuality, inter- and transmediality, and self-referentiality. However, instead of relying solely on the analysis of the films in order to interrogate the conception of such scenes, this article examines several screenplays. They include musical instructions and motivations for diegetic musical performances. However, not only music itself, but also music as a subject matter can be found in these screenplays, as part of the dialogue or instructions for the mis-en-scène. The work of Austrian screenwriter and director Walter Reisch (1903–1983) will serve as a case study to discuss various forms of self-reflexivity in the context of genre studies, screenwriting studies and the early sound film. Different forms and categories of self-referential uses of music in Reisch’s work will be examined and contextualized within early sound cinema in Austria and Germany in the 1930s. The results of this investigation suggest that Reisch’s early screenplays demonstrate that the amount of self-reflexivity in early Austro-German music films is closely connected to music. Self-referential devices were closely connected to generic conventions during the formative years and particularly highlight characteristics of Reisch’s writing style. The relatively early emergence of self-reflexive and “self-conscious” moments of music in film already during the silent period provides a perfect starting point to advance discussions about the musical discourse in film, as well as the role and functions of screenplays and screenwriters in this context.

Chris Marker’s Vive la baleine (1972) is widely hailed as a quintessential essay film. This article examines how the film adheres to essayistic characteristics using film scholar Timothy Corrigan’s definition of the essay film mode. In particular, the article highlights the film’s following traits: the three-pronged and gendered approach to narration, the intentional aesthetic and stylistic inconsistency, the underlying critique of the whaling industry, the explicit adoration expressed toward the whale, and the film’s self-reflexivity.

Tracing the direct and indirect influences and cultural connections between earlier counter-cultures and avant-garde art has been a useful method to historicize the aesthetics that is created by subcultures. Drawing from this approach, this article seeks to contribute to the study of the aesthetics and counter-cultures via analysing a specific cinematic self-reflexivity that is born out of the interconnectedness of low-budget material conditions and the subcultural environments. The contention is that Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), embodies such punk aesthetics and queer temporalities, through the temporary disruptions in narrative progression, the abundance of queer parody, the combination of camp, TV ads, musical performance and the non-diegetic insertions of comic book-style textuality. In this collage, the politics of realistic representation are thrown out of the picture via a deliberate coupling of artificiality and spontaneity. This article argues that the embeddedness of Pepi, Luci, Bom in Madrid’s subcultural movement, la movida madrileña, demonstrates perfectly how subcultural experience gives way to an aesthetic coping mechanism that transforms low-budget restrictions into self-reflexivity. The disparate narrative vantage points in the film that rupture linearity and how the subcultural environment prompted disruptive entrances through which the film’s satire emerged are taken as critical-aesthetic offerings of queer temporalities that exude through the experiential knowledge of exclusion and oppression.

Nancy Huston's Danse noire (2014) is a formidably complex novel: multilingual, composed throughout of three connected but separately told stories, highly self-reflexive in its intra-diegetic presentation of the narrative as film scenario and its use of capoeira as framing device and analogy. Some critics and readers have found this intricate structure excessive and confusing. This article, on the other hand, situates the novel within Huston's distinctive project as a contemporary French novelist who is as committed to immersive story-telling as she is to self-aware celebration of narrative form. It argues that Danse noire demonstrates fiction's power to carry us in imagination through space and time and into the subjective worlds of others, even as it invites awareness of narrative form itself. Moreover, this combination of entrancing story-telling and self-reflexivity is central to what Huston convincingly maintains is the ethical function of the novel.

Der Beitrag untersucht den Zusammenhang von Reflexivität und Medialität (das, was ein Medium zum Medium macht), indem er die Idee der Reflexion an den konkreten Formen von Spiegelungen in Literatur und Film wie zum Beispiel Doppelgänger oder Figurenspaltungen darstellt. Dabei zeigt sich, daß jedes Medium autoreflexiv verfasst ist und daß die Vorstellung von Subjektivität seit dem 18. Jahrhundert selbst auf diesem Zusammenspiel von Reflexivität und Medialität beruht. Das Subjekt gilt demnach als reflexiver Effekt der Medialität, wie es an einer Betrachtung von Foucaults berühmter Meninas-Interpretation nachverfolgt werden kann.<br><br>This article analyses the relation between reflexivity and mediality (what makes a medium a medium) by presenting concrete situations of optical and specular reflections in literature and film, such as doubles (Doppelgänger) and split figures. Thus it can be shown that since the 18th century every medium is self-reflexive and that the concept of subjectivity has its basis in the interplay of reflexivity and mediality. The subject is an effect of medialitity as may be demonstrated by a new recapitulation of Foucault’s famous Meninas-interpretation.

Abstract The paper focuses on a characteristic of Andrzej Zulawski’s aesthetics which has been ignored by most of the critics who emphasized the impact of surrealism and the taste for provocation in his cinema. Meanwhile, the œuvre’s French period is obviously characterized by self-reflexivity and media-reflexivity, autobiographical and literary background references. In these film dramas, the topic of love, beauty and artistic values are interconnected with a sophisticated narrative strategy using intermediality and intertextuality in a complex way. In Fidelity (La Fidelité, 2000), Żuławski put photography and literature in focus again in order to express thoughts and emotions in their complexity, surpassing the limitations of the linear narrative. A certain semiotic double-codedness is provided by either intertextual references or the hidden meanings based on the symbolic language of flowers, used as diegetic metaphors. Moreover, Żuławski thematizes photography that makes us conscious of our experiences from an aesthetic distance, even in an ironic manner.

Abstract In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (tiankong xiaoshuo dianying 天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother's Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.

This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism.

The advanced stage of capitalism that we now live in has brought many changes to the way that society consumes and produces. One of the biggest shifts to the modern economy was the use of visual culture to distract, pacify, and exert power over the masses; a cultural change French theorist Guy Debord named the Society of the Spectacle. As a result, Debord and the Situationist International developed a movement of resistance to reclaim the territories of everyday life being eroded by the spectacle through separation and alienation. Since the term was coined the use of visual culture has accelerated and become even more pervasive in the postmodern world which led Jean Baudrillard to claim that the real has been replaced by simulation and hyperreality. This thesis explores this cultural shift to determine whether the practices of resistance theorized by Debord and the Situationists are still relevant as the reach of postmodernism increases. Link to associated video file: https://vimeo.com/64727252

Fondée sur un corpus de huit films allemands réalisés entre 1919 et 1924 (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Genuine et Raskolnikow de Robert Wiene, Algol de Hans Werckmeister, Von morgens bis mitternachts et Das Haus zum Mond de Karlheinz Martin, Torgus/Verlogene Moral de Hanns Kobe et Das Wachsfigurenkabinett de Paul Leni), cette étude porte sur l'esthétique et la réception du cinéma expressionniste, dont l'étiquette fait aujourd’hui encore l'objet de confusions. Pour identifier des traits constitutifs de son esthétique, trois axes sont envisagés : la réception critique, l'esthétique fantastique et la réflexivité. Le retour à la première phase de la réception repose sur un corpus de 225 documents d'archives majoritairement inédits, principalement extraits de huit revues de cinéma allemandes, et notamment des trois périodiques qui font alors autorité : Der Kinematograph, Lichtbild-Bühne et Film-Kurier. Le recours aux critiques et aux premières théories esthétiques qui précédent les célèbres ouvrages de Siegfried Kracauer et de Lotte Eisner permet d'appréhender l'horizon d'attente de la critique. Dans le contexte du débat sur la valeur artistique du cinéma, l'expressionnisme est perçu comme l’avènement d'un art du cinéma, caractérisé par la volonté des créateurs de faire œuvre d'art, qui s'exprime par l'unité stylistique, la conception des décors et l'opposition au naturalisme. La réception se fait aussi au prisme du fantastique et témoigne à la fois de l'héritage du romantisme et de l'importance du renouveau du fantastique. L'enjeu de l'analyse filmique proposée est de dégager en quoi la tension entre les deux pôles du fantastique est constitutive d'une esthétique des frontières, à l'origine de la structure narrative, de la configuration de l'espace et d'une réflexion ontologique. Enfin, ambition artistique et fantastique se rejoignent dans l'esthétique d'un cinéma qui se prend lui-même pour objet. En recourant à la notion d'écran second, élaborée dans le cadre de l'énonciation cinématographique, l'analyse identifie des formes de mise en scène du regard et de l'expérience cinématographique, dans leur rapport au désir
Based on a corpus of eight german films made between 1920 and 1924 (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Genuine and Raskolnikow by Robert Wiene, Algol by Hans Werckmeister, Von morgens bis mitternachts and Das Haus zum Mond by Karlheinz Martin, Torgus/Verlogene Moral by Hanns Kobe and Das Wachsfigurenkabinett by Paul Leni), this thesis investigates the aesthetics and the reception of German expressionist film. Up until today, there is still some confusion over the definition of expressionist cinema. In order to identify constituent characteristics of its aesthetics, three areas of research are explored: the critical reception, the fantastic aesthetics and the self-reflexivity. The analysis of the first period of reception is based on a corpus of 225 mostly unpublished archival documents. These documents come from eight different film periodicals, mainly from the three leading trade journals of the early twenties: Der Kinematograph, Lichtbild-Bühne and Film-Kurier. By focusing on film reviews and on the first theories of aesthetics that preceeded Siegfried Kracauer's and Lotte Eisner's famous works on Weimar cinema, we get a sense of film critics' expectations back when the movies were first released. In the context of the debate about cinema and its artistic value, expressionism was perceived as the advent of film art, caracterised by the deliberate will of its contributors to create art. This ambition expresses itself through stylistic unity, a very distinctive conception of set designs and an opposition to Naturalism. Expressionist film is also perceived through the lense of the fantastic, which shows both the legacy of German romanticism and the importance of the renewal of fantastic literature and film in Germany. The film analysis of the present work aims at showing how the tension between the two poles of the fantastic is a constituent characteristic of the aesthetics of borders that caracterises expressionist film: it accounts for its narrative structure, its configuration of space and the ontologic reflexion it offers. Finally, cinema itself appears to be one of the main topics of these films. This is both the result of the artistic ambition of expressionist filmmakers and the explanation for their predilection for the fantastic: in some respect, films are fantasies, in that they manipulate the spectator and produce illusions. This is why spectatorship plays a major role in expressionist cinema: thanks to the notion of secondary screen, borrowed from the field of filmic enunciation, our analysis identifies characteristic representations of looks and gazes as well as of cinematic experiences, and reveals their relation to human desires

The Dissertation titled Documentary Approaches in Contemporary Fine Art Moving Image focuses on the practical and theoretical research of documentary approaches to videos and films in the art field. It notices especially the self-reflexive strategies as a consequence of critical approach towards the medium itself and lack of belief in its ability to mediate reality or truth. Attempts to convey reality by audiovisual means are accompanied by the reflection of the way this happens. The Dissertation also reflects on the uncertain relation between the documentary and truth, which has been described in art by the artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl. The examined artworks were made in the period between the beginning of 21st century, when the documentary turn was reflected intensively, and the present time. The selection of examples was strongly influenced by the local study of Israeli art in The Video Archive of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Motives of conflict, violence and trauma resonating in studied videos and films influenced further selection and analysis of the authors’ documentary methods from a different context. In the selected works I can see particularly various forms of alienation effects and self-reflexive approaches. Using these procedures the artists highlight the constructedness of the audiovisual work and the way it was produced. Recurring formal principles have been stated. Reenactment of real events, revealing the way the work was produced or the artist’s position in the production process; these strategies indicate the uncertain relationship between the documentary work and reality. In the frame of these tendencies also reevaluation of the observational documentary strategies as something seemingly opposite to self-reflexive strategies is reviewed. Theoretical outcomes are continuously accompanied by author’s own art projects concentrated around the form of documentary portrait and its (de)construction. They experiment with the formal principles analyzed on a theoretical level.

El objeto de esta tesis es profundizar en los cambios y transformaciones acontecidas en el seno de las artes visuales en la década de los sesenta y setenta y, para ello, hemos partido de un caso concreto que nos ha permitido vehicular esta expansión de unas prácticas que no responden ya a la especificidad de los medios convencionales sino a una amalgama de técnicas e imágenes que incluyen el cine, la fotografía, objetos y una infinidad de nuevos soportes que obligan a una redefinición de conceptos, valores y funciones que el arte ha asumido. No obstante, el objeto de estudio no trata de abarcar la totalidad común del arte de este periodo sino simplemente las características más generales del mismo o de un fragmento del mismo. Por tanto, el caso concreto de Michael Snow, que adquiere una presencia destacada en estas páginas, se debe a que sus trabajos se sitúan es ese espacio indefinido y de transformación en el que la relación del arte para con la técnica y las nuevas tecnologías, es expresión de un nuevo sentimiento y de una nueva manera de aprehender el mundo.
The objective of this thesis is to go deeper into the changes and transformations within the core of visual arts in the decades of the sixties and seventies. We have begun from a specific case which has enabled us to explore the expansion of practices which don’t respond now to the specifications of more conventional means but to a melting-pot of techniques and images including the cinema, photography and an infinite numbers of tools which compel us to redefine concepts, values and functions which art has assumed. Nevertheless, the objective of the study isn’t meant to cover the common totality of art of this period but only the most general features of it or of one fragment of it. So the specific case of Michael Snow, which acquires a relevant presence in these pages, is due to the fact that his works are located in that space between indefinition and transformation in which the relation between art and new technological techniques is an expression of a new feeling – a new way of comprehending the world.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2012.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Since John Grierson first coined the term “documentary film” in the 1920s, there has been a debate about the objectivity or subjectivity of the filmmaker. Some theoreticians believe that a documentary filmmaker may not interact subjectively with her subject. Contemporary perspectives lean towards acknowledging the subjectivity of the filmmaker, and accept that subjectivity is intrinsic to the making of a documentary film. Some would even argue that it is precisely the subjectivity of the filmmaker – the meeting of an individual, subjective perspective with the pro-filmic world – that makes a particular film unique. Brecht believed that the structure of a theatre piece could be used to counter the audience's uncritical emotional engagement and identification with the content of the work. This Verfremdungseffekt enables the audience to engage intellectually with the work. The audience does not get lost in the content of the piece, but rather views it from a critical distance. Brecht believed that this distantiation does not exclude entertainment, but that the audience would be able to enjoy the production while viewing it from a critical, intellectual distance. The self-reflexive mode of representation is identified by Nichols as one of the primary ways for a filmmaker to engage with her subject. Self-reflexivity entails the inclusion of cues within the film reminding the viewer that it is, indeed, a film. The motivation for this is to make the audience aware of the constructed nature of the film, thereby acknowledging the subjectivity of the filmmaker. The most overt form of self-reflexivity in documentary films is the inclusion of the director in the film. The focus of this study is, however, more specifically on how editing devices can be used to foreground the construction of a film. Structural analysis of a selection of recent South African documentary films is undertaken as part of this study. The result of this in-depth analysis is a list of twenty-eight conspicuous, selfreflexive editing devices used in these films. To test the effect of self-reflexive editing devices, I purposely incorporated them into the construction of a documentary series, Booza TV, of which I was one of the editors. The goal of Booza TV is to change viewers' perceptions of alcohol and alcohol abuse. Both quantitative and qualitative research results pointed to the ability of the series to achieve this goal. The perception change, however, is not the focus of this study. Instead, findings specifically related to the viewer's experience of the editing of the production are analysed. These findings show that viewers do notice self-reflexive devices, that the devices can contribute to their enjoyment of the production and that self-reflexive devices are able to communicate subtext to the audience. The conclusion is drawn from the research conducted in this study that the potential of a documentary film to change viewers' perceptions is as dependent on the way the film has been constructed as it is on the content of the film.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Sedert John Grierson in die twintigerjare begin het om die term 'dokumentêre film' te gebruik, word daar gedebatteer oor die objektiwiteit al dan nie van die filmmaker. Party teoretici glo dat 'n dokumentêre filmmaker nie subjektief mag omgaan met haar onderwerp nie. Kontemporêre perspektiewe neig egter om te erken dat die dokumentêre filmmaker subjektief is, dat subjektiwiteit intrinsiek is aan die maak van 'n dokumentêre film, en boonop dat dit juis die subjektiwiteit van die filmmaker is wat 'n film uniek maak. Dit is die ontmoeting van 'n individuele, subjektiewe perspektief met die waarneembare wêreld. Brecht het geglo dat die struktuur van 'n teaterstuk of film gebruik kan word om die gehoor se verbintenis met die inhoud daarvan te verbreek. Hierdie Vervremdungseffekt lei daartoe dat die gehoor in staat is om krities om te gaan met die produksie. Dit lei verder tot 'n kritiese interaksie met die materiaal. Die gehoor raak nie verlore in die inhoud van die stuk nie, maar slaag daarin om dit intellektueel te beskou. Brecht het geglo dat hierdie vervreemding nie vermaak uitsluit nie, maar wel die gehoor toelaat om die teaterstuk of film te geniet terwyl hulle dit krities en intellektueel beskou. Die self-refleksiewe voorstellingsmodus word deur Nichols geïdentifiseer as een van die primêre maniere vir 'n filmmaker om met haar onderwerp om te gaan. Selfrefleksiwiteit behels die insluit van tekens binne 'n film dat dit 'n film is. Die motivering hiervoor is om die gehoor bewus te maak van die konstruksie van die film, om sodoende die subjektiewe perspektief van die filmmaker te erken. Die mees blatante vorm van self-refleksiwiteit in dokumentêre films, is die insluiting van die regisseur in die film. Die fokus van die studie is egter op die gebruik van redigeringstegnieke om die konstruksie van 'n film op die voorgrond te plaas. Daar word van strukturele analise gebruik gemaak in hierdie studie om 'n verskeidenheid hedendaagse Suid-Afrikaanse dokumentêre films in diepte te beskou. Die resultaat van hierdie analise is 'n lys van ag-en-twintig sigbare redigeringstegnieke wat in hierdie films gebruik is. Om die effek daarvan te toets, het ek doelbewus self-refleksiewe tegnieke gebruik in die konstruksie van 'n dokumentêre reeks genaamd Booza TV, waarvan ek een van die redigeerders was. Die doel van Booza TV is om gehore se persepsie aangaande drank en drankmisbruik te verander. Beide kwantitatiewe en kwalitatiewe navorsingsresultate het aangedui dat die reeks dié doel wel bereik. Persepsieverandering is egter nie die fokus van hierdie studie nie. In stede daarvan word daar in diepte gekyk na gehore se ervaring van die self-refleksiewe redigeringstegnieke in die produksie. Daar is gevind dat gehore self-refleksiewe redigeringstegnieke raaksien, dat die tegnieke kan bydra tot gehore se genot van die produksie, en dat die tegnieke gebruik kan word om subteks in die film te kommunikeer.

This chapter presents two interviews of Hal Hartley. The first, conducted by Justin Wyatt, was originally published in the fall 1998 issue of Film Quarterly. The second, conducted by Robert Avila in 2007, originally appeared on SF360.org, the San Francisco Film Society's online magazine. Topics covered in these interviews include the darker tone of the film Henry Fool; Hartley's views about the label “independent” after being heralded as one of the most important voices in American independent cinema; whether the conflicted attitude toward technology and the corporate world seen in his films reflect his own ambivalence in these areas; whether he is concerned that his films may be straying too far to the side of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity; whether he sees a of Hollywood movies; and whether there are times when he finds writing difficult.

This chapter surveys the various self-reflexive tropes with which the backstudio picture authenticates its view of filmmaking and Hollywood by referring to its own existence as a backstudio. Films mentioned briefly or discussed for a page or more range from throughout the history of the genre. The chapter covers many types of examples, such as quotation of the industry’s own discourse, press books and trailers, films within films or inserted clips, cameos, inclusion of real Hollywood people interacting with fictional characters, and DVD supplements. The chapter concludes with two case studies of sustained self-reflexivity: Singin’ in the Rain and Tropic Thunder.

The backstudio picture, or movie about filmmaking, is a genre as old and as recent as commercial filmmaking itself. This genre’s longevity is due to its function in branding filmmaking with the mystique of Hollywood. As the backstudio picture depicts it, Hollywood is simultaneously (1) an actual locale in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, (2) a business dedicated to the standardized production of motion pictures, and (3) an enduring cultural fantasy about fame, leisure, consuming, sexuality, artistry, and modernity. This overlapping of the literal (the locale) onto the material (the business) and the symbolic (the fantasy) has registered the impact of the film industry’s transformations as an institution even when the genre mystifies these changes in story terms. It is also the means by which the genre authenticates while glamorizing the industry’s representation of labor. Although Hollywood by Hollywood roughly follows the four major cycles of the genre’s development from the 1920s through the present day, it also loops back and forth in this chronology. Individual chapters discuss the genre’s self-reflexivity, its representations of Hollywood as a geographically specific yet imaginary place, narratives about movie-struck girls, narratives about has-been female stars, the masculinization of Hollywood through the focus on white male filmmakers, the genre’s recounting of the industry’s history in stories set in 1929, 1951, and 1962, and, finally, how Hollywood’s filmmaking practices have been moved offscreen, whether to break the fourth wall of the virtual world of film or to supply a cover for covert governmental actions.

This chapter casts a critical eye on various classifications of reflexivity that have been proposed by film and media scholars over a number of decades. These center on the reflexive content of films, their self-referential communicative structures and functions, and intended effects of reflexiveness on spectators. In this context it differentiates between (self-)reflexivity and related terms/concepts—metafiction; metacinema, mise en abîme, allusion and intertextuality, self-conscious style and narration—from a twenty-first century standpoint; and outlines an alternative classification of reflexive forms in celluloid and digital cinema. The latter are distinct from specific reflexive devices (e.g., the film within the film, direct address, display of the cinematographic “apparatus”) and general modes (e.g., political, formal, ludic). As illustrated through concrete examples, the five transmedial forms posited—environmental; trans-art and intermedial; generic; creator-centered; performance-based—typically occur in complex combinations. Their identification, and the new conception of cinematic reflexivity this typology represents, aids in the analysis and interpretation of reflexive and metacinematic films and styles.

Following discussion of the particularities of the Panahi case and the cultural specificity of the film, I engage with This is Not a Film in the context of what Rancière describes as ‘suitable political art’ (2004: 63), making the case that Panahi’s non-film – his, as he describes it, “effort” – constitutes a form of political subjectification. I explore what I refer to as an ‘aesthetic of effort’, tracing the lineage of domesticity, self-reflexivity and the long-take in relation to discourses of political filmmaking.

Postmodernism is interpreted with an opposed thought about modernism which affects all of the art fields. Cinema art is affected from the discourse created by postmodernism. As a result of the changes of narrative strategies in film narratives by postmodernism, existing conventions in classical narration cinema have been differentiated. In this chapter, Onur Ünlü's, who has given artworks in New Era Turkish Cinema, Güneşin Oğlu and Celal Tan ve Ailesinin Aşırı Acıklı Hikayesi films are analyzed according to postmodern narrative strategies with postmodern genre film criticism. Arguments, which are used by Onur Ünlü in the plot of his two films, are discussed together with narrative strategies. How the postmodern narrative strategies such as intertextuality, collage, parody, pastiche, self-reflexivity are used in both of the films are analyzed with plot, characters, time, and space. In collaboration with basic elements of narrative, narrative strategy is mentioned with regard to New Era Turkish Cinema's progressing.

Produced in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan on the 11^th of March 2011, Toshi Fujiwara’s film No Man’s Zone(Mujin Chitai, 2012) is a portrait of a country coming to terms with the nuclear fallout in Fukushima. Interviews are interlaced with long takes of the post-apocalyptic landscape and subtle observations that point to the suffering and trauma by the people living in, or uprooted from, the area near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The film also questions the role of images of the disaster and indeed the role of the filmmaker creating these very images. Marco Bohr highlights how the philosophical debate about the role of images produced in a disaster zone is primarily facilitated through the aesthetic, formal and structural device of the essay film.Its self-reflexivity is deployed here as a strategy to provoke the viewer in seeing representations of the disaster in a new light.

The fifth chapter explores Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan as an example of a film in which Hollywood’s historical treatment of classical ballet is referenced to provide a self-reflexive and critical commentary on the role of the melancholic white woman in artistic representation. The film provides a horrific take on the ethereal and melancholic Russian ballet Swan Lake, deploying a variety of genre tropes associated with melodrama, horror and film noir in order to convey the protagonist’s increasing levels of paranoia as she loses control of her disciplined ballerina body. In doing so, Black Swan critiques the culture of competitive individualism and bodily discipline associated with neoliberal postfeminism and works to collapse the distinction between mental illness and the romanticised cultural discourse of melancholia. The film’s politics, however, are frustrated by the insistence on framing gendered pathologies in terms of white burden and by its strategic self-reflexivity in relation to Hollywood image construction.

The six Paranormal Activity movies (2007–15) explore a variety of methods for creating ‘found-footage’ horror. Produced on extremely low budgets, they devise a number of ways to generate scares and thrills without resorting to complicated, high-end special effects. They make use of sound, of temporal delay, and of the limitations and affordances of consumer video products that are both used to create the films, and actually used within the films. This self-reflexivity points up the ways that our actual world is permeated with recording and surveillance devices. The Paranormal Activity films eschew most formal principles of commercial filmmaking; their low-budget, unconventional technologies present us with a new sort of post-cinematic – and post-phenomenological – media apparatus. The last film in the series, in particular, uses glitches and breakdowns of the image in order to convey how the demonic realm it is ostensibly concerned with corresponds with new technical devices that extend outside the actual human sensorium

This chapter assesses the various modes of self-reflexivity evident in John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1995), and how they are used to create meaning and subvert audience expectations. In the Mouth of Madness is many things. It is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft and an homage to Stephen King. It is a critique of religious fanaticism and a comment on the fragility of human existence. But, perhaps more than anything, In the Mouth of Madness is a film about horror. A loving tribute to one of cinema's most consistently misunderstood and vilified modes of artistic expression, the film scrutinises and questions the very nature of fear and how it affects its audience, demanding the genre be both celebrated and given the respect it deserves. In doing so, it positions John Carpenter himself at the very centre, self-reflexively pondering his role as artist and creator of horrific images.

This chapter recounts the release of Scream 2 in American theatres less than a year after the counter-programming Christmas unleashing of Wes Craven's Scream. It discusses how Scream 2 took the self-reflexivity to the logical next level by commentating on the first film's success. It also analyses Craven's parody for his own Scream prologue that amounts to a renowned, proficient horror filmmaker masquerading as a trashy one for the purpose of a gag. The chapter illustrates the scenes from the film Stab that represents a typical 'bad' horror film, with crude shock effects, gratuitous shower scenes, hammy acting, and character behaviour that would have prompted derision from the real Scream audience had it been the first film's opening scene instead.

The collection then concludes with Steffen Hantke's illuminating analysis of Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow from a variety of critical perspectives: discussing elements of self-reflexivity, star persona, the film's distinctly ludological central narrative conceit (on this point he offers an analysis of how this narrative strategy functions as a commentary on the idea of "getting it right the next time") to the melange of 'War on Terror' and 'greatest generation' themes presented throughout the film. Hantke makes the case that while it proved commercially underwhelming on original release, Edge of Tomorrow is worthy of critical reappraisal and analysis.