Browsing by Author "Aras, Zeynep"

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Open Access
Les filles de Méliès: l’exception culturelle, analogue aesthetics and women filmmakers of le cinéma-monde
(Routledge, 2024-10-11) Aras, Zeynep; Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen
This article examines transnational francophone films from writer-directors Marjane Satrapi and Chloé Mazlo, filmmakers who show how the politics of l’exception culturelle [the cultural exception] have made French cinema a multiply exceptional force in world cinema. The analogue effects in Poulet aux prunes/Chicken with Plums (2011) and Sous le ciel d’Alice/Skies of Lebanon (2020) mark an aesthetic resistance to the homogenising force of digital photorealism while also reflecting an approach to filmmaking pioneered by Georges Méliès, particularly his ground-breaking work in set design and cinematography. As women filmmakers, their reliance on practical aesthetics to present stories set outside l’Hexagone (mainland France) represent the French commitment to the diversity of cinéma-monde. This article argues that these filmmakers and their films have benefitted from policies rooted in l’exception culturelle while expanding the sense of ‘exception’ in a French context to mean films directed by women, films featuring analogue effects and films that reflect transnational identities and cross-cultural collaboration. Both Poulet aux prunes and Sous le ciel d’Alice frame an expanded logic for l’exception culturelle that has shaped more than three decades of contemporary French cinema.
Open Access
Practical effects in the age of post-digital cinema
(2023-05) Aras, Zeynep
This thesis examines the aesthetic implications of using practical effects in post-digital cinema. Digital effects have become more perceptually realistic than the practical effects of the analog era and thus turned into central tools in fulfilling Hollywood’s obsession with photorealism. This study argues that digital effects’ success in imitating a photorealist style has pushed the practical effects to leave aside their obsession with realism and search for their own aesthetic, which I call “anti-realist.” Firstly, the study approaches this aesthetic difference between practical and digital effects from an ontological standpoint. By adopting Rodowick’s (2007) arguments informed by Bazinian realism regarding the digital image’s lack of indexicality, it conducts a close reading on Wes Anderson’s anti-realist practical effects. Then, through the lens of Marks’ (2000) concept of “haptic visuality,” it explores how the foregrounded materiality of these effects can engage with an embodied experience of spectatorship. Moreover, by adopting a feminist approach to film studies, it proposes the use of practical effects as a feminist tool in the French context to defy Hollywood’s standardized effects in the films of Marjane Satrapi and Chloé Mazlo. Finally, it conducts an auteur study on the French director Michel Gondry’s filmography to question the place of his analog techniques in constructing his transnational authorship. Overall, this thesis aims to uncover the meaning and significance of leaving aside the CG techniques that have revolutionized contemporary filmmaking in favor of so-called outdated cinematic techniques.