Evidence of Atrocities or Atrocious Use of Evidence: The Controversial Use of Atrocity Film at Nuremberg

This article focuses upon the utilisation of film evidence in criminal proceedings. It describes and evaluates the historical deployment of this type of material at War Crimes Trials, with particular emphasis upon the International Military Tribunal established at Nuremberg, in 1945, in the wake of the Second World War. During this Trial, the prosecution placed reliance upon the film, Nazi Concentration Camps, depicting with graphic realism the horrific barbarism of the Nazi regime. However, this was only made possible by the implementation of innovatory evidential procedures, effectively circumventing the hearsay rule. A comparison is drawn between this, and the current position in England and Wales, following the recent relaxation of the traditional embargo upon hearsay evidence. However, film evidence of the type adduced at Nuremberg may be more prejudicial than probative and should such circumstances arise, the interests of justice may not truly be served. Susan Twist is Senior Lecturer in Law at the Lancashire Law School, University of Central Lancashire. smtwist@uclan.ac.uk. The author was assisted in research for this article by the dissertation of Kellie Goggins.     

越南百年电影事业回顾(19世纪末—21世纪初)

越南电影事业已走过一个多世纪的历程。它于19世纪末在法属殖民地背景下发端,在抗法抗美战争中艰难成长,此间纪录片和故事片成就突出,获得了较高的国际影响。进入革新建设时期,文化环境宽松,越南电影秉持鲜明的民族特色向市场化、多元化、国际化迈进。21世纪前后,一批海外越裔导演的崛起为越南电影赢得了空前的国际声誉。     

禁播电影国内传播的版权问题研究——兼论网络服务商的法律责任

禁播电影,即我国实行电影审查制度下不具备公映资格的电影,不能够在我国境内发行、放映、进口、出口.我国法律实践中仅仅规定了非法传播的刑事责任与行政责任,而没有有关版权人版权的民事责任规定.根据版权相关的国际公约,由于其形式上构成作品而应当享有版权,因此在我国被非法传播的禁播电影版权应该得到确认.禁播电影版权的国内保护具有特殊性,首先它不能够积极地行使版权,但是在非法传播的情况下可以依据电影版权而获得民事赔偿.网络服务商对禁播电影的网络传播承担间接侵权责任,而网络版权侵害中的替代责任的确立更成为了必要.     

从“大陆三部曲”看日本对华文化政策

"大陆三部曲"是"满洲映画协会"(以下简称"满映")与日本东宝电影公司合作拍摄的电影作品,是中日学者研究"满映"不可缺少的重要参考资料."大陆三部曲"内容极其反动,是典型的殖民化电影.日本当局利用最具宣传性、鼓动性的电影,对东北沦陷区民众推行文化专制政策,"满映"在"国策"宣传和推行日本文化政策上起到了重要作用.     

关于伪满洲国的文化监管法规

伪满洲国成立后,日本在中国东北推行奴化政策,不允许生产和传播任何威胁伪满"立国基础"的文化产品。这种文化控制是通过《出版法》与《电影片取缔规则》等一系列法规实施的。本文分析了这些法规制定的目的、实施的效果,特别是《出版法》的溯及既往条款、印刷所地点条款和《电影片取缔规则》的儿童保护条款,最终揭示了殖民主义政权的本质。     

Passport examination by a confocal-type laser profile microscope

The author proposes a nondestructive and highly precise method of measuring the thickness of a film pasted on a passport using a confocal-type laser profile microscope. The effectiveness of this method in passport examination is demonstrated. A confocal-type laser profile microscope is used to create profiles of the film surface and film–paper interface; these profiles are used to calculate the film thickness by employing an algorithm developed by the author. The film thicknesses of the passport samples—35 genuine and 80 counterfeit Japanese passports—are measured nondestructively. The intra-sample standard deviation of the film thicknesses of the genuine and counterfeit Japanese passports was of the order of 1 μm The intersample standard deviations of the film thicknesses of passports forged using the same tools and techniques are expected to be of the order of 1 μm. The thickness values of the films on the machine-readable genuine passports ranged between 31.95 μm and 36.95 μm. The likelihood ratio of this method in the authentication of machine-readable Japanese genuine passports is 11.7. Therefore, this method is effective for the authentification of genuine passports. Since the distribution of the film thickness of all forged passports was considerably larger than the accuracy of this method, this method is considered effective also for revealing the relation among the forged passports and acquiring proof of the crime.     

Constructing a Feminist Cinematic Genealogy: The Gothic Woman's Film beyond Psychoanalysis

The Gothic woman's film, as a particular 1940s phenomenon, responded to the social changes caused by the upheavals of the Second World War. It featured female protagonists, expressed anxieties about marriage and complicated the classic realist premises of narrative and heterosexual closures. As the Gothic narrative trajectory revolved around the heroine's pursuit of marital happiness, these films are often theorized in the sexually differentiated terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. As a result, they are interpreted as cinematic manifestations of paranoia, primal scenes, passive female desires and the impossibility of female subjectivity. Tay considers how the Gothic woman's film may resist such psychoanalytic codifications by considering critiques of psychoanalysis and investigating the ways in which Gilles Deleuze's cinematic topography may apply to the genre. This engagement with Deleuze reveals how 1940s Gothic films--such as Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941), Gaslight (Cukor, 1944), and Sleep, My Love (Sirk, 1948)--breach the narrative normativity of classic realist love stories like Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942). Culminating in a detailed analysis of Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) as a film that sustains female transgression in its textual operation, Tay posits possibilities for furthering a feminist cinematic discourse beyond psychoanalytic codifications.     

The International Labour Organisation and film

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to discussion of continuity and change in the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) history, asking how the organisation and worker activities have been depicted in film. Since the 1920s, the films in which the organisation portrays itself have placed less emphasis on its European base, the largely male culture that once dominated it and the precise nature of its role in the world. In more recent years, the ILO’s cinematic output has made an effort to emphasise work, workers and their collective activity. Their short films have also come to overtly advocate ‘partnership’ trade unionism within a wider international and perspective while paying much more attention to matters of racial and gender diversity. These changes have been framed within the organisation’s constant assertion of continuity in its values and explicit use of its own history. Film has therefore contributed to consistency and continuity in its self-projection, providing parameters within which change has occurred.     

Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification

This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg, Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative. By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian social goals.

FILM REVIEW ESSAY

This work analyzes three so‐called anti‐racist films of the 1990s; American History X, A Time to Kill, and Higher Learning. Although each film discusses why racial hatred is problematic, a variety of underlying themes contradict the message of racial tolerance. Racial hatred is depicted as largely a group phenomenon perpetrated by individuals who elect or learn to hate. Each film portrays white characters as the heroes in the struggle for racial equality, while showing black characters in stereotypical fashion. Additionally, white supremacists are allowed verbally to present their position much more frequently and more passionately than are those who are already racially tolerant. This research analyzes these and other examples of white supremacist hegemony in these three films, and discusses implications for viewers.