FILM, COMMUNICATION AND FILM CULTURE RESEARCH TEAM

The research tasks of the team focus on the cultural, aesthetic, anthropological, and social dimensions of film texts in their various ontological forms. The analyses cover all aspects of the existence and functioning of the film medium in the contemporary cultural landscape: technological, new-media, communication-related, aesthetic, ideological, genre-related, textual, social, and psychological.
Head: Prof. Bogusław Skowronek, PhD, DLitt

Collaborators: Dr Patrycja Włodek, Dr Tomasz Sikora, Grzegorz Wójcik, MA, and persons appointed to carry out specific tasks.

The key research issues addressed by the team include the following areas:

• Film and its ontology in relation to new media. Film, film-like phenomena, and visual events. Definitional issues.
• Film in convergence culture. The film medium in the context of contemporary reception practices.
• The “expanded audience”, individualising and socialising functions of film reception.
• Film and network culture. Film productions on the Internet.
• Remix culture, recycling culture, and contemporary film phenomena.
• Research on contemporary cinema in the context of popular culture. Between cinematic retro and retromania. Returns, quotations, pastiches, sequels, franchises, remix, recycling, and participation.
• Film in serial culture. New-generation television series.
• Contemporary film aesthetics. The cinema of “design”, the cinema of “attractions”, expanded visibility, and 3D cinema.
  Remediations, transmedia narratives, and film culture.
• The film industry and unauthorised distribution channels.
• Film within intermedial and intertextual practices.
• Research on television texts functioning at the intersection of film studies and film conventions, media studies, and so-called quality television, combined with the “liberation” of the series from the medium.
• Film genre and genre studies. Research on the evolution of the concept of film genre and the changing ways in which it functions in broadcasting practices and authorial strategies. Redefinitions and revaluations. Functions of genre. Progressive and regressive genres.
• The psychology of film reception. Categories of visual violence and images of violence.
• Transformations in film narration: research on classical and non-classical models of film narration, including “new narration”, puzzle films, slow cinema, and related phenomena.
• The history of cinema and the New Cinema History.
• Film studies, media studies, and cultural studies: intersections, interactions, and influences.
  Critical analysis of film texts and the anthropological model of interpretation.