Research / Research programs /

Individual Research Project. Virginás Andrea: The Role of Generic Panels in European Small Cinemas

This postdoctoral individual research project is financed by the Resurse Umane PN II programme of the CNCS - UEFISCDI / Romanian Ministry of Education, between 1st of May 2013 - 31st of October 2015. Project number: PN-II-RU-PD-2012-3-0199.

Members of the project: Andrea Virginás (postdoctoral researcher), Ágnes Pethő (mentor).

The abstract of the project: If generic panels are fundamental to global mainstream cinema's definition, the question of how regional and small cinemas incorporate or redefine specific genres may be posed. In this research relatively recent detection/crime narratives, science-fiction movies and melodramas that may be related to "small" corpuses (Romanian, Hungarian, Scandinavian film) are examined from the perspective of the type of "authentic" and/or "rewritten" generic features that are emerging in these films. A new perspective on possibilities of relating regional cinema canons and film genre developments is hopefully presented, based on the analyses of concrete films as representatives of small cinemas. Furthermore, new phenomena in small cinemas and generic developments are understood and shown as being fundamentally determined by the major technological and cultural change we have been witnessing since the 1980s in film and media production alike: namely the analog paradigm being replaced by the digital one.

Dragoş Bucur (screenshot from the film Poliţist, adjectiv (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)

General objectives of the project: an acceptable argumentation of the hypothesis that genre elements have an important role in European small cinemas as well, in the era of digital interconnectivity. The project is developed through five international conference presentations, five scientific articles and the manuscript of a monograph submitted for peer-review at the end of the project.

Results

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS (ppt-s, for the period May 2013 - October 2015):

Spatial Confinement and Emotional Entrapment in "Global" and ("Postcommunist") "Small" Melodramas. Media Politics, Political Media NECS Annual Conference, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, 20-22 June 2013;
First Films and Generic Allegories: on the Role of Complex Narrative Designs in Films by Natali, Aronofsky, Tykwer. 2013 International Conference on Narrative, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, 27-29 June 2013;
Analogue and Digital, Immediate and Hypermediate: Examples from Contemporary Detection (and Science-fiction). Rethinking Intermediality in the Digital Age. Conference of the International Society for Intermedial Studies, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca/RO, 24-26 October 2013;
Generic Panels and Small Cinemas: Scandinavian and Eastern European Examples. European Film Cultures. ECREA Film Studies Section Interim Conference, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden, 8-9 November 2013;
On the Medial Coding of Traces: "Immediate" and "Hypermediate" Detection. Crime and Detection in the Age of Electronic Reproduction. Traditions, Expectations, Genres and Codes. Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic, 22-24 November 2013;
The "Burden of the Real" in Eastern European and Scandinavian Genre Films: Dancing Bodies, Endoscopy and Knitwear. Thinking Reality and Time through Film: International Conference on Philosophy and Film, Lisbon University, Portugal, 6-10 May, 2014;
Female stars, men's films? Romanian films from the 2000s. Bodies In Between - Coporeality and Visuality from Historical Avant-garde to Social Media. Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, 29-31 May, 2014;
Generic Panels in European Small Cinemas: a Recipe for Creative Outcomes? Creative Energies, Creative Industries: The NECS 2014 Conference, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, 19-21 June 2014.
Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of East European Cinemas. "Interior Cinematic Spaces, Social Identification, and Coping with Trauma in Recent Hungarian and Romanian Films". 12th ESSE conference. Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia, 29 August-2 September 2014.
Casetti's "Unreal Objective Shot" and Intermedial Moments. The XV. Film and Media Studies Conference in Transylvania: Figurations of Intermediality in Film. Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca/RO, 24-26 October 2014.
Experiencing Foreign Spaces: Memories Lingering between Afilmic, Profilmic, and Diegetic Realities. Screen Memories: Depictions of State Socialism and 1989 in Screen Media. ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary, 24-26 November 2014.
Experiencing Foreign Spaces: Memories Lingering between Afilmic, Profilmic, and Diegetic Realities. Play, Perform, Participate. The 2nd Conference of the International Society for Intermedial Studies. Utrecht University, The Netherlands, 16-18 April 2015.
Constructing "Crisis Heterotopias" in Mainstream and Small Melodramas in the 2000s. Scandal, Shock and Sexuality in Contemporary Cinema and Visual Culture. Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca/RO, 28-29 May 2015.
A ‘Kind of Hollywood' in Post-1989 Popular Hungarian Film Production: Translating Mainstream into Small. Archives of/for the Future. The NECS 2015 Conference, Lodz University, Poland, 18-20 June 2015.
From the Analogue to the Digital, between ‘Real' and ‘Intermedial': Film Genres in Small National or Peripheral Contexts. The XVI. Film and Media Studies Conference in Transylvania, Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca/RO, 23-24 October 2015.