Politics and Culture In Indonesian Cinema

This study deals with Indonesian cinema. The political and cultural perspectives were used to provide an understanding of the development of Indonesian cinema from the early period untill recent times. This study argues that principally Indonesian cinema can be associated significantly with politics, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s when Indonesian cinema started to grow. In the period of the New Order regime, Indonesian cinema became a manifestation of kitsch pursuing for capital gain. Yet after the fall of the regime significant shifts occur namely no longer have Indonesian cinemas strongly related to politics in their content of messages but the cinemas promote much moore various discoursive contents. Keywords: cinema, politics, culture, discoursive content, indie film

The reception of Hungarian cinema in Polish film criticism 1945–1989

In the years 1945–1989, a reader interested in Hungarian cinema could learn a lot about it from the Polish press, not only film-specific, although the number of publications devoted to this subject differed across time. The most prolific period was the sixties and seventies, mainly due to the contemporary achievements of the Hungarian cinema, as well as Polish critics’ enthusiasm for it. It is not difficult to notice certain recurrent phrases and motifs etc. Hungarian cinema gained acclaim several years ago, but how is it thought of today? Historical and political themes, as well as comparisons between Hungarian and Polish cinema have been noted.This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)”

The Third Reich’s Pean of Praise for the November Uprising’s Glory: Karl Hartl’s Ritt in Die Freiheit (1936)

This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)”

War film as a political problem in Polish press 1945–1949

This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)”

Film screenings in the “Polish territories” in 1896 and their international context

This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)

The Place of Polish Films on German market between 1920s and 1930s, with special emphasis on Borderlands

This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship