SIDE-BY-SIDE | UP-AND-DOWN: Comparative Videographic Approaches to Transnational Cinema Studies [#SCMS16]

SIDE-BY-SIDE | UP-AND-DOWN by Catherine Grant for #SCMS16

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Techniques of parallel comparison have always been central to literary translation studies. But what of the cinematic “translation” - the film remake?

[Screenshot from Jonathan Evan's article, "Film Remakes: The Black Sheep of Translation", Translation Studies, 7:3, 2014, 300-314]

Given that “Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures”— (Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London" Routledge, 2008): 264) how might the kinds of parallel comparison techniques emerging as a result of the use of easily available and operable video technology help us in examining questions of audiovisual transnational translatabilty? [LINK to YouTube video cited: "How to Split Screen on Final Cut Pro X" by Red Black Productions (2014)]? Let’s take a look at the work of a master to find out [LINK to ::kogonada, "What is Neorealism?", Sight and Sound, May 2013]

What is neorealism? by kogonada

I’m just a novice video editor in comparison with kogonada, but less than a year after his video was published, I think I was very much insipred by it in deciding to explore videographically the opening of a Uruguayan low budget horror film and its US remake

Single Take Horror Film Mutations by Catherine Grant

Some of kogonada and my findings about transnational cinematic differences were, funnily enough, strikingly similar. But I would argue that this has as much to do with the fact that we were both comparing film openings. [Citations in the video: Peter Bradshaw and Xan Brooks, "Get Them by the Throat", The Guardian, July 17, 2007 ; and Thierry Kuntzel, "The Film Work 2", Camera Obscura 2 (2 5), 1980].

I also used split screens to explore different parts of the films I was studying and through those comparisons I found that the differences did not turn on sequence or shot duration or expositional detail

My principal interest in reflecting on this audiovisual research in this video concerns the utility of the multiple screen comparison. I’m so fascinated by how, as I've reflected before, these techniques frame similar kinds of phenomenological possibility.

[quotations from: Catherine Grant, "Deja Viewing...", MEDIASCAPE Winter 2013: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2013_DejaViewing.html]

THERESE and CAROL and ALEC and LAURA (A Brief Encounter) by Catherine Grant

They can’t help us with every scholarly question we might have, but such sensuous methodologies seem to me to be eminently suited to the epistemology and hermeneutics of cinematic intertextuality, and are of particular interest in expanding the range of what we can look at in relation to film aesthetics — and in particular - our experience of these - transtaional cinema studies too.

CREDITS

VIDEO PRESENTATION by CATHERINE GRANT, 2016

For the SOCIETY FOR CINEMA & MEDIA STUDIES ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2016 WORKSHOP: F20: VIDEO ESSAYS IN TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA STUDIES

Chair: Tracy Cox-Stanton (Savannah College of Art and Design) Workshop Participants:
Nicolas Poppe (Middlebury College)
Michael Talbott (Castleton University)
Austin Fisher (Bournemouth University)
Catherine Grant (University of Sussex - in absentia))
Jeffrey Middents (American University)

MUSIC: APRIL by KAI ENGEL, 2016. Licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License and shared at the Free Music Archive: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel/Chapter_Two__Mild/Kai_Engel_-_Chapter_Two_-_Mild_-_05_April


THE VIDEO NARRATION ALSO CITED FROM:

• Catherine Grant, ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies’, Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media, Winter 2013. Online at: http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2013_DejaViewing.html
• Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006) 

ALSO SEE on LA CASA MUDA:

• David Martin-Jones and María Soledad Montañez, “What is the “Silent House”? Interpreting the international appeal of Tokio Films’ Uruguayan horror La casa muda/The Silent House (2010),” Forthcoming. 
• Victoria Ruetalo, “La casa muda (2010): Miedo Real en Tiempo Real” in Rosana Díaz and Patricia Tomé (eds), Horrofìlmico. Aproximaciones al cine de terror en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (2012) 

FOR STUDY PURPOSES ONLY