Cinema, educação e africanidades: contendas na representação da personagem negra no filme “Xica da Silva” (1976) de Cacá Diegues

This thesis analyses western criticism, labelling practices and the politics of European international film festivals. In particular, this thesis focuses on the impact of western criticism on East Asian films as they attempt to travel to the west and when they travel back to their home countries. This thesis draws on the critical arguments by Edward Said's Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) and self-Orientalism, as articulated by Rey Chow, which is developed upon Mary Louise Pratt's conceptual tools such as 'contact zone' and 'autoethnography'. This thesis deals with three East Asian directors: Kitano Takeshi (Japanese director), Zhang Yimou (Chinese director) and Im Kwon-Taek (Korean director). Dealing with Japanese, Chinese and Korean cinema is designed to show different historical and cultural configurations in which each cinema draws western attention. This thesis also illuminates different ways each cinema is appropriated and articulated in the west. This thesis scrutinises how three directors from the region have responded to this Orientalist discourse and investigates the unequal power relationship that controls the international circulation of films. Each director's response largely depends on the particular national and historical contexts of each country and each national cinema. The processes that characterise films' travelling are interrelated: the western conception of Japanese, Chinese or Korean cinema draws upon western Orientalism, but is at the same time corroborated by directors' responses. Through self-Orientalism, these directors, as 'Orientals', participate in forming and confirming the premises of western Orientalism. This thesis thus brings out how 'Orientals' participate in the formation and maintenance of Orientalism via selfOrientalism or self-Orientalising strategies. As Edward Said (1978; 1985) remarks, 'Orientals' adopt the terms and premises of Orientalism and use them in exactly the same way, or reverse them. Vis-a-vis this point, this thesis shows that self-Orientalism, as a response to Orientalism, is mediated by its relationship with the national and historical contexts of a particular society. Western Orientalism does not fully determine how 'Orientals' define their own culture and respond to Oriental ism. This thesis shows that a national film industry can more easily break into the international film market if internationally recognised auteur directors from the particular country have been recognised at international film festivals. This thesis elucidates the practice of labelling foreign films categorised as 'national cinema' and 'art cinema'. While Hollywood films are assumed to possess 'universality', the international art-house circuit and film festival circuits label films from other countries by their specific nationality or national culture, which is assumed to be reflected in high/traditional art. In this circuit, the names of 'auteur' directors from each country act as brand names, moulding audiences' expectations of films from a specific country. Film festivals, meanwhile, seek to become sites for 'discovering' supposedly unknown auteur directors and national cmemas.

This paper aims to analyze the documentary Caixa d’água: qui-lombo é esse?, by Everlane Moraes (2013), in order to investigateBlacknessbased onthe themesof history and memory. Thus, the construction of the documentary was analyzed as a place of memory that records the history that seeks to physically, functionally and materially demarcate a people’strajectory, their belongings and identities. The text starts withthe hypothesis that cinema –as an educational tool –collaborates to reflect upon the history and memory of African peoples and their descendantsin the formation of the Brazilian population,established in Law 10.639/2003 as a compulsory subject in regular education. Based on a film content analysis with thematic decomposition, description and recomposition, we understand that the documentary questions historical content disseminated in Brazilian education as a representation of truths about black people.Thus, it isnot only a simple way of making and/or thinking cinema, but a commitment to the resignification of black existence.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

This article looks at South African photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi’s ongoing project Somnyama Ngonyama and argues that it continues Muholi’s lifework of decolonizing the canon of representations of Black bodies, especially Black female bodies. In this series of self-portraits, Muholi challenges conventional representations of Black bodies as they appear in Western art history, in ethnographic photography or in the conventional mass media. Repurposing familiar objects, the pictures also encode sophisticated puzzles that express a sense of stifling under the pressure of racist misrepresentations. However, they also counter this epistemic violence by performing ambiguous gestures of appearing or disappearing, challenging the racist norms that would confine black bodies in certain spaces while barring them from others.

Jews, Nazis, and the Cinema of Hungary: The Tragedy of Success, 1929–44

No Crips Allowed:Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther Charles I. Nero (bio) Initially, it might seem odd to discuss shared racial tropes in Amistad and Black Panther. Not only were the movies created over two decades apart, the films belong to entirely different cinematic genres. Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) is a historical period drama that is based on the true story of an armed insurrection aboard a 19th century slave ship. Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) is a fantasy film that focuses on a futuristic advanced mythical kingdom in Africa that produces superheroes. Nevertheless, these films are connected by their subject matter and a recurring strategy. At their cores, both films emphasize Black resistance to the white supremacy that trans-Atlantic slavery and European imperialism necessitated. Both films deploy as strategy the hyper-abled Black male body as a tool for resisting white supremacy and colonialism. I call attention to the hyper-abled Black male body in these two films specifically to focus on the Black disability that trans-Atlantic slavery produced. I am writing along the lines of Nirmala Erevelles brilliant reading of Hortense Spillers's now-classic essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in which producing and maintaining slavery required the impairment of Black bodies. The racialization of slavery meant that Blackness was always impaired, or, as Erevelles concludes, it was "at the historical moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo to be transported to the New World that Black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become black."1 On the one hand, Amistad reflects upon the trans-Atlantic slave experience, while Black Panther showcases a Black nation that was spared this terrible ordeal; yet, both create magical worlds in which Black people are hyper-abled. Subsequently, in this essay, I examine the limits of the hyper-abled Black body as a tool of resistance; I also raise the question of whether such a dependence upon a specific gendered type--hyper-abled masculinity--reproduces a logic of white supremacy that equates Blackness with physicality, yet simultaneously denies Black intellect, therefore refuting political agency, or the rights of citizenship. [End Page 52] Amistad Prior the film's debut in 1997, Steven Spielberg and the film's producer, African American dancer and actress Debbie Allen, held blockbuster aspirations for Amistad. Both believed that Amistad could build upon the success of Schindler's List, Spielberg's historical period blockbuster from 1993. The commercial and critical success of Schindler's List had cemented Spielberg's status as a "serious filmmaker," though Spielberg was long credited with developing films that defined Hollywood filmmaking during the 1970s-1990s: namely, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Poltergeist (1982), the franchises that stemmed from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Jurassic Park (1993). Despite the success of these previous films, Amistad was not the powerhouse that Spielberg and Allen had imagined. Instead, Amistad barely recouped its investment and it failed among critics, arguably because the film confused audiences. A possible source of this confusion was because of the decision to transform a genuine story of resistance into an "interracial buddy film," a subgenre that became popular during the Civil Rights Movement and subsequently expanded to include Hollywood cop film franchises, such as Lethal Weapon (beginning in 1987), Beverly Hills Cop (beginning in 1984),48 Hours (beginning in 1982), Independence Day (1996) and Men In Black (beginning in 1997). These films celebrate the developing bonds between Black and white men who overcome their racial differences and learn to work together to solve a crime, prevent corruption, or even save the planet from alien invasion. At stake in these movies are the interracial relationships between the crime-fighting duos; certainly, the buffed bodies of the captured Africans suggested this possibility. The fitness of the Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou, who played Cinque, the leader of the insurrection, was especially notable. Previously known as a fashion model, Hounsou's first cinematic appearance was as "eye candy" in the pop star Janet Jackson's video "Love...

Examining Hong Kong cinema from its inception in 1913 to the end of the colonial era, this work explains the key areas of production, market, film products and critical traditions. Hong Kong Cinema considers the different political formations of Hong Kong's culture as seen through the cinema, and deals with the historical, political, economic and cultural relations between Hong Kong cinema and other Chinese film industries on the mainland, as well as in Taiwan and South-East Asia. Discussion covers the concept of 'national cinema' in the context of Hong Kong's status as a quasi-nation with strong links to both the 'motherland' (China) and the 'coloniser' (Britain), and also argues that Hong Kong cinema is a national cinema only in an incomplete and ambiguous sense.

ABSTRACTDespite Australia being one of the most robust and progressive film industries during the early years of moving pictures, it experienced a significant decline in film production from 1915. Whether this decline was a direct result of poor government policy is something that the Royal Commission on the motion picture industry in Australia 1926–1928. investigated. Marking a significant, yet terribly neglected moment of Australian film history, the Commission surveyed a variety of issues which had stunted the development of the national Australian cinema. By surveying the early period of the Australian cinema, in this article I will discuss how the Royal Commission's recommendations pushed for the national industry to become more active within the Hollywood world cinema model.

In Sweden, history has recently become a compulsory subject in upper secondary vocational education and training (VET). The aim of this interview study with teachers was to problematize the transition between the ideals of history education in the curriculum and the everyday practices of history teaching. It investigated how the teachers assess the objectives of the history curriculum and how they relate the curriculum to their knowledge and conceptions of their students. This study complicates the phenomenon of academic subjects in vocational education and provides an empirical example to centre a discussion of the challenges associated with a history curriculum that seeks to acknowledge different orientations of history teaching. The teachers articulated potential problems that stem from the students’ capabilities and motivation. The objectives of the disciplinary and critical orientation assume factual knowledge, which, according to the teachers, the students do not have. In the interviews, the teachers showed that they seek to transform the curriculum to allow them to teach more substantive knowledge. Continuing citizenship education for students in upper secondary VET through compulsory academic subjects, such as history, might contribute less than expected to the individual’s process of becoming a citizen.

The late British artist Donald Rodney (1961–98) developed a unique vocabulary critiquing wider representations of the black male body that extended beyond his status as a person living with sickle cell disease to the lives of others with a shared racial background. Critical yet full of wit, Rodney was, until his death in 1998 from complications related to sickle cell disease, one of the most compelling artists to come out of the Black Arts Movement of 1980s Britain. From X-rays of his cells to tiny sculptures made from his own skin, Rodney created conceptual self-portraits of his life as a young black man. This article considers illness, art, and activism while reflecting on the effects of living with sickle cell disease and the continued invisibility around this illness, both on the African continent and beyond for the very reasons Rodney’s works highlight. In focusing on the notion of illness as metaphor in art and analyzing the metaphorical tropes of illness present in Rodney’s artworks produced during the late 1980s to early 1990s, the author’s intention is to think through the entangled understandings of illness and masculinity to seek new readings of Rodney’s works. The artist’s deeply moving, conceptual, and critically engaging oeuvre not only confronts the viewer with both the presence and absence of the black male body, but also presents the spectator with the realities of the artist’s daily negotiations living with sickle cell disease. This disease affects people of African, Caribbean, Eastern Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Asian descent, and there is still no cure for it. It is a “black” disease that raises polemics of care toward black bodies and the invisibility of sufferers within the wider medical discourse. Rodney’s works form a compelling case for an artist’s dedication to making both him and his works visible while simultaneously acting as a form of resistance against marginalization and oppression on the basis of both race and gender. Rodney’s practice is considered here within wider discourses dealing with a postcolonial reading of pain, aesthetics of illness, and representations of the male body.

Reviewed by: Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame by Áine O’Healy Caterina Scarabicchi Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame. By Áine O’Healy. (New Directions in National Cinemas) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2019. x+268 pp. $32. ISBN 978–0–253–03718–3. Migrant Anxieties is a compelling, up-to-date analysis of Italian migration cinema since the 1990s in a transnational perspective, under the critical lens of race, class, [End Page 131] gender, and nationality. It aims to decipher underlying anxieties and complexities in recent Italian films dealing with migration. In the Introduction, Áine O’Healy underlines how Italian cinema has an established role of nation-building. However, this aspect has recently been complicated by cinema’s tendency to become transnational, and therefore to trespass national boundaries and become part of a globalized cultural platform. This is even more the case for migrant cinema, in itself a problematic label. The main chapters then offer the reader an accurate examination of case studies, which are discussed from their conception to their reception by the public. The first chapter focuses on immigration from the Balkans in the 1990s, analysing films that reignite the debate on Italianness and its ‘others’. From a postcolonial perspective, the southern question and the notion of whiteness are identified as key tropes, especially in relation to the colonial and Fascist years. Moreover, the author aptly remarks that migrant characters in these films are often introduced as catalysts for the Italian protagonists’ life trajectories, such as in Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) and Moretti’s Aprile (1997). The following chapter looks at how gender intersects migration films, observing that in these narratives female characters tend to be reduced to mere bodies destined to care labour or sex work, thus denouncing, but also paradoxically reinforcing, the position of abjection and vulnerability of migrant women in Italian society. Chapter 3 explores the representation of non-white bodies on screen: Placido’s Pummarò (1990) is examined as a key example in which, by trying to reverse cultural stereotypes about African immigrants, filmic narratives can result in the creation of idealized, essentialized gazes on the migrant subject, who is almost unmistakably Orientalized and/or eroticized. This feature also emerges in O’Healy’s ironic analysis of Bertolucci’s L’assedio (1998). Furthermore, O’Healy observes that the impossibility of a positive encounter between Italians and migrants is frequently and symbolically condensed in the death, disappearance, or forced removal of the latter towards the end of the film. The following chapter investigates the maturation of young men in Italian peripheries, induced by the encounter with a struggling migrant character, and the ethical questions prompted by the witnessing of exploitation and discrimination. Here, too, the author remarks that the narrative focus tends to privilege the moral evolution of the Italian protagonist rather than the migrant one, such as in the case of Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (2005) by Giordana. In the fifth chapter, the author provides new insights regarding two major migration narratives: Crialese’s Terraferma (2011) and Rosi’s Fuocoammare (2016), which deal with the characters’ witnessing of the arrival of refugees on Italy’s southern coasts. Building on the critical concept of borderscape, she also investigates the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion generated in the border area of the Mediterranean Sea, as represented in recent films. O’Healy remarks that, despite the compelling accomplishment of both films in terms of cinematography, migrants often remain in the role of voiceless, victimized figures in the background. Another danger is identified in the risk of idealizing not only black bodies, but also [End Page 132] Italy’s South. She then concludes with a brief analysis of Segre’s L’ordine delle cose (2017), observing that, unlike the other films discussed in the chapter, it offers no consolatory gestures of solidarity on the part of the Italian character portrayed. Chapter 6 reflects on multiethnic cohabitations in contemporary Italy, and on the influences of comedy and drama on Italian migration cinema. In particular, the author discusses the rise of global melodrama, which highlights the state of anxiety experienced by hosting countries burdened by an unresolved relationship with their colonial...

 Reviews Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits. Ed. by L P and A G. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Featuring in-depth analyses of film production from the largest to the smallest of countries in the region, Contemporary Balkan Cinema, an eclectic volume brought together by editors Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgić, breaks new ground in scholarship on the film industries of the Balkan Peninsula. e distinct aim of the volume is to reclaim the term ‘Balkan’ from its long association in the West with violence and fragmentation (p. ), and to create a volume ‘more concerned with offering an empirically grounded account of the cinematic activity within and across the region’ (p. ). e aim is a challenging one, primarily because of the scale of its coverage, which ‘widens the geographic focus in order to provide an inclusive view of the region and disband narrow identifications of the Balkans with the former Yugoslavia’ (p. ). e volume features chapters on Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey. Although perhaps contrary to the ethos of the book, it is impossible not to mention that this is a controversial assemblage considering that there are ongoing political difficulties, acknowledged by several of the contributors, between a number of the nations included, and sometimes within countries themselves. As discussed in their respective chapters, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Cyprus still face internal divisions along ethnic lines, affecting film production, something which Dijana Jelača suggests in her chapter on Bosnia and Herzegovina even ‘calls into question the possibility of unifying Bosnian cinema under the umbrella of singular national cinema’ (p. ). Meanwhile , several of the countries included do not officially recognize another country included, Kosovo, as an independent state. is is reflected in the limited scale of Kosovo’s intra-regional transnational co-productions (co-productions are highlighted by the editors as one of the major positives in recent developments in the region’s film industries: p. ). Nonetheless, the volume does offer neutral and purposefully equalized ground to explore the various industries in the light of their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as revealing the mostly rich landscape of transnational partnerships in the region. It brings together an array of established specialists to explore the film industries covered in each chapter, some of whose scholarship is not usually available in English. Many of the chapters focus on detailing the funding, structure, and output of their national film industries, as well as describing national film festivals and awards. e chapters on Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Montenegro represent particular milestones in view of the lack of scholarship on these industries in English ; and I would add to this list the chapter on Albania, which offers a fascinating overview of the long and bumpy history of national film production. e volume further contains an appendix with tables providing overviews of national film production, feature film releases, and box office data, and a list of key institutions and major festivals for each country. Anyone who has spent any time trying to MLR, .,   establish such data from incomplete records will appreciate the service this does for film scholarship on the region. Contemporary Balkan Cinema is not all facts, however. For those seeking overviews of filmic themes and their influences in the various nations under discussion, all the chapters cover these topics in varying levels of detail and examine the historical context shaping film production. More importantly, several chapters, particularly those on Croatia and North Macedonia, offer crucial insight into the ways in which political parties influence, or try to influence, film production. While political, economic, and social difficulties are undeniably still a pervasive presence in film from the region, this volume proves that film can also be a conduit for success and growth in these nations. U  N L T ...

Objectives. To analyze the dynamics of health status among children in Ukraine based on preventive examination data over the past decade, with a focus on the prevalence of postural disorders, scoliosis, and visual and hearing impairments, as well as to identify challenges in teaching the discipline Physical Education among schoolchildren and students. Materials and Methods. The study relied on official statistical data from the Center for Medical Statistics of the Central Medical Education Center of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine for 2013–2023. Bibliographic, epidemiological, medical-statistical, and analytical methods were applied. Results. Although most health indicators of the child population showed predominantly positive dynamics between 2013 and 2023, deterioration was observed in 2023 compared to the pre-war year 2021. In preschoolers, the prevalence of decreased visual acuity during the war rose by 24.1%, while the incidence of scoliosis increased 1.28-fold. Analysis across age groups (preschoolers, middle, and high school students) revealed a rise in pathology with age: postural disorders increased sixfold and decreased visual acuity 4.1-fold, indicating the negative impact of educational workload. The study highlights the role of physical activity, physical education, and sports in strengthening overall health and preventing or correcting posture and vision disorders. Conclusion. Given that regular physical education classes are not mandatory in higher education, greater emphasis should be placed on physical education in schools, with lessons made more engaging and diverse. Parents should also be informed about the value of regular physical activity for their children. Furthermore, physical education should be reinstated as a compulsory subject in higher education, with special attention to preparing boys physically for potential future service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Reviewed by: LOOKING FOR LEROY: Illegible Black Masculinity by Mark Anthony Neal Thabiti Lewis LOOKING FOR LEROY: Illegible Black Masculinity. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press. 2013. What is black masculinity? How is it imprinted in contemporary popular culture? Many recall the photo of Lebron James on the cover of a popular women’s magazine posing like King Kong, or the attempts by the Ferguson, MO Police Department to demonize Mike Brown after he was shot and killed, and even then-Senator Barack Obama was briefly demonized for his affiliation with his minister, Jeremiah Wright. Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities pokes and prods at the way black men are bound or scripted into bodies that are “legible” only as pimps, petty criminals and “hip hop thugs” (3). The use of Hank Willis Thomas’s 2011 Strange Fruit photo of a young black male hanging by the arm from a noose with a ball in his hand wearing only basketball shorts immediately signals the “illegible” masculinity Neal is about to explore. Neal questions and challenges media representations of black bodies; he challenges the “tried and tested” construction of “legible” black male bodies that situates them as “props” to justify historical and contemporary lynching of black male bodies (5). He calls for a queering of black masculinity in the popular psyche that not only embraces “queering sexualities but also queerness as a radical rescripting of accepted performances of a heteronormative black masculinity” (3–4). In a landscape filled with a focus on black males, Neal’s book reminds us to discard “legible” black male bodies through the vector of Gene Anthony Ray, Avery Brooks, Jay-Z, Idris Elba, R. Kelly, and Luther Vandross—“illegible” figures of black masculinity in popular culture. Thus there is no surprise that the book opens with a discussion of how the most “legible” black male body is often thought to be a criminal body and/or a body in need of policing and containment—incarceration (5). Neal challenges the public attitude/perception of black males that he says “plays out in every institutional arena from public education, the labor force, and health care to the criminal justice system” [End Page 145] (5). Similar to Haki Madhubuti’s project of black masculinity (Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous: African American Families in Transition, 1991), Neal adroitly challenges prevailing images and meanings of black masculinity that vastly differs from the popular consumption of “legible” images and notions. The first chapter “A Man Called Hawk” is quite effective. Here he examines the career of actor Avery Brooks as an alternative to the performance of blackness that at the time that was either “cutting-edge cool or the paragon of black respectability” (8). He credits Brooks with slipping this dichotomy and displaying the full capacity of black expressive culture. The second and third chapters continue to invoke Neal’s legibility/illegibility discourse through the rapper Jay-Z and the hit HBO series The Wire. In the chapter “My Passport Says Shawn” he adeptly argues that Carter and his rapper persona Jay-Z represent “fertile textual sites to extrapolate a cosmopolitan hip-hop masculinity that deftly challenges the prevailing tropes of (black) masculinity…in mainstream hip-hop culture”(9). In fact, the chapter begins by asking: “Can a nigga be cosmopolitan?” to evoke his argument for a “cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the concept of the ‘Katrina generation,’ those black bodies deemed little more than ‘refugees’ by corporate media, reinforcing presumed inhumanity and foreignness of this population” (36). Neal analyzes Jay-Z’s lyrics to arc the argument forward that in cosmopolitanism are possibilities for hip-hop to create multiple, shifting identities and lifestyles that can be sampled, discarded, and reformulated (37). Looking closely at Carter’s lyrics, Neal suggests that he represents both a local and global notion of cosmopolitanism; he is a man with “subaltern sensibilities” (85). But while he wonderfully critiques hip-hop artists for remaining “wedded to concepts of realness or authenticity that are decidedly local”(37), I was hoping Neal would place more emphasis on the fact that these artists do not truly control their art—globally or locally...

Le documentaire occupait une place aussi importante que la fiction dans la production de l’African Film Productions Ltd., le premier studio Sud-africain. Financés par plusieurs départements de la nouvelle fédération de l’Union Sud-africaine, les documentaires de l’AFP jouèrent un rôle crucial dans le développement d’une nouvelle conception de l’Afrique du Sud entre 1910 et 1940. Ce rôle devient évident quand on place les documentaires de l’AFP dans le contexte de la politique législative de l’Afrique du Sud de l’époque.