Introduction

Reviewed by: Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema by Barbara Mennel Marco Abel Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. By Barbara Mennel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 243. Paper $27.95. ISBN 978-0252083952. Barbara Mennel's new book could be considered an implicit response to a crucial observation made by Christian Petzold. With reference to his late mentor, Harun Farocki, and around the time he made Yella (2007), Petzold frequently pointed out that we do not yet have any new images of neoliberal capitalism. He meant to call attention to the fact that too many contemporary films depict processes of labor as if the mode of capitalist production had not undergone significant changes from the Fordism that Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) depicts to an economic regime—call it finance, communicative, or just-in-time capitalism—that increasingly extracts profit from immaterial or affective labor, including care and human attention. While Mennel does not discuss Petzold's films—perhaps a surprising omission given both the sheer quantity of contemporary films from fifteen European countries that she analyzes and the fact that Petzold's films are populated by working female protagonists—her central argument nevertheless is characterized by the desire not only to shed light on the sheer variety of work depicted in European films between 2001 and 2016 but also to foreground the crucial roles women are given in them. Even beyond her intervention in the more local debates within feminism that provide the overall theoretical context, Mennel's central accomplishment is to conclusively demonstrate that any cinematic effort to find new images of, and for, capitalism in the age of neoliberalism must take seriously women's work—whether work done by women born within the European borders or that performed by those having migrated to Europe, whether work in which well-educated middle- or upper-class women engage or labor offered by women from less privileged economic backgrounds that frequently enable the better-off (white) women to leave the home. Translated into the practice of film criticism, this also means that any critical conversation about contemporary labor (in Europe) cannot afford to ignore the crucial role women's work assumes in a neoliberal regime of power that increasingly derives its profits from the kind of skills often associated with femininity, namely "flexibility and adaptability" (5). Important to Mennel's argument is, furthermore, the need to embrace intersectionality as both a methodological tool and a political value, not least since the dialectical relationship between contemporary white women's ability to leave the home and become professionals (and thus potentially icons of feminist liberation) and women of color willing to accept low pay for the very work on which their more privileged sisters have been able to turn their backs, thanks to the (successful) interventions of second-wave feminism. Mennel invites readers on a journey across Europe, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, from Great Britain to Bosnia, Macedonia, and Greece, covering [End Page 215] both cinemas of "small nations" and those of European powerhouses. Moreover, Mennel's critical eye does not limit itself merely to one kind of film such as, for example, independent or art cinema, which is often alleged to be more politically conscious than mainstream productions or exercises in genre cinema. While the cost of such a transnational methodology applied to a wide range of film forms is, at times, a lack of depth regarding the analysis of any given country and its cinema's representation of women at work, its benefit—which clearly outweighs the cost—is the ability to counteract a facile privileging of one specific instantiation of neoliberal capitalism: that of Europe's core economic powers. In other words, too often claims about labor in the neoliberal age posit the economically "most developed" countries such as Germany, France, and the UK as the norm; in turn, such analyses both diagnose contemporary capitalism as if it were a monolithic phenomenon and imagine possibilities of resistance based on such normative assumptions. Mennel, in contrast, turns to Ernst Bloch's concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit (nonsimultaneity or nonsynchronism), and especially his idea of "the simultaneity of nonsynchronism" (6...

New York City has played a vital role in the history of American cinema. This bibliography draws together divergent strands of scholarship that approach the topic of New York City and cinema from multiple perspectives. The iconic cityscapes and distinctive cultural milieux of New York have provided both setting and subject matter for countless movies, whether filmed on location or recreated in Hollywood studios. There is a significant body of work that addresses New York onscreen, analyzing urban narratives and Genres and the use of locations, architecture, and specific areas of the city. This work has explored how cinema has engaged with the changing nature of New York over time, and investigated the representation of the city’s neighborhoods and ethnic groups. An important subsection of this scholarship pursues New York’s special relationship with particular film genres, such as The City Symphony, Musicals, Film Noir, and the Romantic Comedy. In the critical literature, New York has frequently been associated with the work of specific directors, including Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee, as well as key figures in experimental film such as Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and Andy Warhol. New York has also been an important site for film production and exhibition. Although the American film industry has been predominantly based in Southern California since the 1910s, New York has always been Hollywood’s second city. In the studio era, it was home to the studios’ corporate headquarters and a string of highly profitable first-run theatres. Although filming in the city has waxed and waned, New York has always played an influential role as a regional production hub, a source of talent, and a center for film criticism. The city can claim a pivotal role in the development of early cinema, and it therefore holds a privileged place in histories of early film production and exhibition. New York has also operated in multiple ways as a counterpoint to Hollywood and a crucible for independent or alternative film culture. Experimental filmmaking has flourished in New York, especially in the mid-20th century, and the city has long operated as a vital hub for independent distribution as well as fostering a network of underground and nontheatrical exhibition spaces. This is addressed in intersecting bodies of work on experimental and independent film, and on New York Film Culture. There is now an extensive critical literature on the wider relationship between cinema and the city (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies article The City in Film by Pamela Robertson Wojcik for a more general cinema-city bibliography). This bibliography only includes sources that focus (in whole or in part) on New York City in particular.

Reviewed by: Fértil provincia y señalada: Raúl Ruiz y el campo del cine chileno ed. by Verónica Cortínez Andreea Marinescu Cortínez, Verónica, ed. Fértil provincia y señalada: Raúl Ruiz y el campo del cine chileno. Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2018. 265 pp. This edited collection seeks to bring Raúl Ruiz's filmic work into conversation with the field of Chilean cinema. Ruiz (1941–2011), exiled to France since 1973 after Pinochet's military coup, is a towering presence in the field of global cinema, his importance attested by numerous scholarly works dedicated to his prolific and multifaceted artistic production, as well as by captivating cinephiles and inspiring independent filmmakers around the world. In fact, the Prologue to the collection states that the critical attention received by Ruiz threatens to eclipse other Chilean independent films. Indeed, it is a worthwhile effort to both consider Ruiz's work in the context of Chilean independent film production and to pay attention to other independent films produced in the past decades. The book is divided into two parts: "Raúl Ruiz: un chileno en el mundo" is comprised of four chapters on Ruiz while "Fértil provincia: el mundo chileno en el cine" features another four chapters on several Chilean-made independent films. The first chapter, "El cine chileno en el contexto mundial: Raúl Ruiz en Locarno," by Manfred Engelbert, offers a necessary corrective to the dominant claim that European cinema shaped Latin American cinema, and seeks to demonstrate how Ruiz's original films were an integral part of a world phenomenon of new filmmaking and provided an important reference for the development of European cinema. The second essay, "Las funciones del plano según Raúl Ruiz," by Cortínez, discusses Ruiz's work as a film theorist, tracing the trajectory of his ideas on the relative autonomy of the shot through several books, interviews, and films. Ruiz's practice anticipates its theorization; it is a way to conceptualize his own filmic praxis. In the third essay, "Cuatro guiños para Ruiz," Roberto Castillo Sandoval develops the theme of death—or, more accurately, the constant interaction among the living and the dead—as a constant feature throughout Ruiz's work, as a means to express a certain way of being in the world, allowing him to move with facility from the experimental realm to the popular culture realm. The last piece in this section, "La amistad es un misterio insondable," is provided by filmmaker Miguel Littín, who recounts memories from his longstanding friendship with Ruiz, defined by early activism and a shared iconoclastic filmic style during the New Latin American Cinema, exile, and ultimately death. This first part offers a variety of texts developing specific aspects of Ruiz's work; however, the overreliance on Tres tristes tigres (1968) in the first two essays undercuts the more expansive claims and this first section as a whole does not cohere into a unified thesis. Unfortunately, the second part suffers from similar problems as well as new issues. Providing an abrupt departure from Ruiz, it is dedicated to a number of independent Chilean films made several decades apart from each other. The loose theme that unites them is an implied sense of "Chileanness," mainly based on the evocation of the countryside and rural popular culture. Two scholarly essays in the second part provide valuable analyses of two intriguing documentaries. The first, "Mimbre: Sergio Bravo y Violeta Parra" by Claudio Guerrero y Alekos Vuskovic, highlights the 1957 legendary collaboration [End Page 298] of Bravo and Parra, two foundational figures of the Nuevo Cine Chileno and the Nueva Canción Chilena. The 10-minute documentary is an ethnographic and aesthetic study of Manzanito, a wicker-weaving master representative of a newly found appreciation for popular art by urban intellectuals and artists at the time. Even though the problematic potential of this fascination with popular art is not examined, the essay analyzes and highlights the impressive merits of this early experiment in filmic montage and musical improvisation. Hernán Delgado's piece, "Luchando por el derecho de un suelo para vivir: Cine documental regional y memoria hist...

Promoting and Curating US Experimental Cinema in Europe:"The Western American Experimental Film" Tour in 1963 and the New American Cinema Miguel Fernández Labayen (bio) and John Sundholm (bio) Introduction This article is born out of the finding of the program poster of "The Western American Experimental Film" tours in Stockholm (Fig. 1). We found the poster in the archive of Moderna Museet, Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art, when researching the New American Cinema screenings in Europe. Not having ever heard of this program before, we began to trace its origins and history. Somehow, we were confronted by an object, an event, and a past, which had not been written about and had left no trace in the narratives about the presence of US experimental cinema in Europe in the 1960s. Later on, when trying to revisit the program for "'The Gatekeepers exist to be overthrown.' Amos Vogel—Reprisen und Repliken (II)," a film series devoted to Amos Vogel that ran from November 8 to 15, 2021, at Arsenal in Berlin, it turned out to be very difficult and, in some cases, impossible to get hold of the prints. It looked as if the films had also disappeared. The aim of this article is two-fold: on the one hand, we map "The Western American Experimental Film" tour of 1963 in Europe; on the other, we question why some films and filmmakers have vanished from the circulation and the reproduction of American experimental film culture. Hence, even if not being completely omitted from history (or otherwise the remains of the tour would not exist), many of the films and filmmakers within the tour have hardly left any traces in a history, that of the New American Cinema, that we think we know. As such, we approach the Western Experimental Film tour as one of the deviations of the history of the circulation of the New American Cinema in Europe, [End Page 183] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The poster of "The Western American Experimental Film" at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Courtesy of Moderna Museet. [End Page 184] a deviation that opens the historiography constructed around the so-called New American Cinema Expositions of 1963–64 and 1967–68 both spatially and temporally, and brings into the fore what have become invisible objects overshadowed by the tours organized by Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. In order to address the question of why certain films seem to have disappeared from circulation and thus have also been omitted from history, we will look in particular at "The Western American Experimental Film" tour in 1963 as an example of the branding and dissemination of US experimental film culture in the making in Europe in the 1960s. Through a look at promotion, programming, curating, and reception, we will explore the creation of discourses and ways of conceptualizing a set of films. This strategy would become the basis for the New American Cinema apparatus and its aspirations to control the interpretation of the films, which culminated in the 1967–68 film exposition and the publication of P. Adams Sitney's highly influential book Visionary Film in 1974, based on Sitney's experience of travelling with and curating the second grand tour.1 In this way we will also challenge the transcendental historiography of Visionary Film by establishing different histories, written from the perspective of each specific place and its own time-space configuration. That is, contrary to a vision that creates a common denominator for a set of films—establishing an object and following it through time and space—we ground the films in the specific venues where they were/are being screened. These places have their own specific history of screenings, and they are connected by personal and professional affinities to other localities (which do not necessarily have to be situated within the same national boundaries). The organization of the tour The first chronological trace that we have found about the organization of "The Western American Experimental Film" takes us back to the spring of 1963. In March of that year, Bruce Baillie contacted the cine club at Stockholm's Moderna Museet.2 In the letter, Baillie announced that...

With the decline of Chinese independent cinema, art cinema has grown at a fast pace since the mid-2010s in China. There has been a convergence as well as a divergence of independent cinema and art cinema facilitated by institutional reforms of the Chinese film industry. This article examines how small- to medium-sized film production companies work as market actors as well as intermediaries between independent filmmakers, the state and the market to co-opt independent cinema into an officially approved art cinema and activate the market potential of art cinema through engaging with the cultural economy. This officially approved art cinema is not construed as an alternative to, and a form of resistance to, the mainstream but as a booster for the industry. This article offers new insights into the interrelation of artistic, commercial and political interests and demonstrates how these interests shape meanings and modes of ‘independence’ and ‘art’ in contemporary global film industries.

In recent years a number of new British filmmakers have emerged with feature length works that overtly reject the style and story-telling methods seen in mainstream British and Hollywood cinema, but instead demonstrate high levels of artistic sophistication and ambition. These filmmakers, their films, and the cultural and industrial spheres that have helped produce and sustain them, we would like to call ‘post-millennial British art cinema’. The articles in this special issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television engage with some rich examples of post-millennial British art cinema, but they all show that the work of contemporary artists working with film in Britain does not always sit comfortably within most extant histories of British national cinema or film genre, including art cinema. Indeed, at the outset, we would like to point out that post-millennial British art cinema is not easily definable or classifiable, but is instead characterised by industrial and formal fluidity, and, often, by an ambivalence towards borders, be they generic, formal, aesthetic, cultural, industrial, technological, or, indeed, national. While we acknowledge the difficulties inherent in producing catchall terms for groups of films produced during specific historical periods and in often similar circumstances, a number of films and filmmakers have nevertheless emerged that deserve our critical attention, and it makes sense to look at these films and filmmakers within the contexts of British cinema history and within the remits of the broad concept of art cinema.

Reviewed by: Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema by Barbara Mennel Mary Hennessy Barbara Mennel. Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. U of Illinois P, 2019. 258 pp. Paper, $27.95. The female characters who populate the films Barbara Mennel examines in Women at Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema—more than thirty from twelve different countries in the European Union— are more likely to live and work in solitude than to engage in the politics of solidarity, and they seem to have little truck with the pioneers of second-wave (film) feminism. Nonetheless (and this is one of Mennel’s central claims), these films share a feminist-materialist investment in contemporary economies of labor— as does Mennel, who argues “that diverse feminist cinemas exist” in contemporary Europe, if only we know where and how to look (18). By zooming out to include multiple countries and contexts and by zooming in on individual films about women workers, Mennel makes a strong case that European cinema has something important to say about gender and the economy. Mennel’s choice of films is eclectic, spanning genre, form, and style. What unites them, she argues, is their depiction of gendered experiences of work in the wake of waning welfare states, rising neoliberalism, and European integration. Chapter topics range from unpaid labor and the specter of second-wave feminism to weird cinema in the wake of financial crisis; from nostalgic heritage films from both the former Eastern Bloc and Western Europe; to reproductive labor and genre cinema. Mennel’s medium-specific analysis— which often, but not exclusively, focuses on narrative— underscores “the ability of filmic aesthetics to contribute to the discourse on women’s labor” (16). While Mennel’s focus is broadly European, the book’s second chapter, “Precarious Work in Feminist Film,” should be of special interest to [End Page 121] German film studies scholars for the way it places a spate of recent films by German directors Tatjana Turanskyj, Maren Ade, and Austrian director Barbara Albert within a larger European framework. The chapter’s focus on precarity and neoliberal economies of labor aligns well with recent directions in feminist German film studies scholarship. Drawing on German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit (nonsynchronicity) to account for the “multiple capitalisms, multiple neoliberalisms, and multiple feminisms” (6) that characterize contemporary Europe, Mennel skims the surface of cultural specificity to take a more panoramic view. I would wager that this book will introduce readers— even those who watch twenty-first-century European cinema with interest— to films they might otherwise never encounter. The book will thus serve as a useful tool for teaching not only European film from the last two decades but also social theory, feminist theory, and film analysis. In chapter 4, which examines films about women who migrate for work and focuses on the voice as a site for mediating female agency, I was fascinated to learn, for example, of Martina Preissner’s 2010 documentary film Wir sitzen im Süden (2010; We are based down south) about Istanbul call centers run by German companies. Mennel cites as the impetus for her study the dearth of film scholarship on work, on the one hand, and the close historical relationship between film and work, on the other. For the latter she attends to the prevalence of early-twentieth-century industrial films that aestheticized work. Given Mennel’s focus on the depiction of female characters in mostly narrative cinema, it seems to me that a discussion of the history of the depiction of women workers on-screen, from the Lumiére brothers to DEFA and across nonfictional and fictional films, would have been most helpful for historicizing and framing her own interest in contemporary cinema, gender, and labor. Do the cheerful typists in Germany’s late Weimar Bürofilme (office films) have a corollary in other European countries? I tend to see such a question not necessarily as a marker of what Mennel left out but rather as a sign that she has opened the door for further questions for feminist scholars to pursue, both in historical and contemporary frameworks and in a variety of...

Uspostavljanje modela filmske edukacije u srednjoj školi

In view of the historical co-implication of popular genres and the Hollywood film industry, it might be expected that the latter should be at the vanguard of women’s genre filmmaking. Yet women directors who draw on genre cinema might, in fact, be proportionally more numerous in American independent cinema. One such director who builds in various ways on popular genres (in particular, the Western and the road movie) is Kelly Reichardt. This chapter asks, thus, what it means for a woman to use a popular genre in an independent filmmaking context. It shows how Reichardt’s authorship and biographical legend are constructed in close relation to the processes of legitimisation of independent cinema, conceptualised discursively in opposition to Hollywood (and genre). The second part of the chapter focuses specifically on Meek’s Cutoff (2010) – a Western film which was incorporated into the auteurist discourse of resistance towards genre and exceptional individual achievement. It will be argued that, while Meek’s Cutoff seems to be diametrically opposed to genre cinema, since it offers a radical revision of the Western genre conventions, it also draws on the productive potential of generic logic based on variation within reiteration (Neale 1980).

Beginnings. Griffith and His Contemporaries 1908-1920. American Cinema in the 1920s. European Cinema in the 1920s. The Hollywood Studio System. American Cinema in the 1930s. European Cinema in the 1930s. American Cinema in the 1940s. European Cinema in the 1940s. American Cinema in the 1950s. International Cinema in the 1950s. American Cinema in the 1960s. International Cinema in the 1960s. American Cinema in the 1970s. International Cinema in the 1970s. American Cinema in the 1980s. International Cinema in the 1980's. Global Cinema Since 1990 - the American Age.

Book Review| March 01 2023 Review: Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess,” by Christopher Sieving Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess,” by Christopher Sieving Hayley O’Malley Hayley O’Malley HAYLEY O’MALLEY is an assistant professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on African American film, literature, and visual culture, and her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Black Camera, James Baldwin Review, ASAP/J, Feminist Media Histories, and The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature, among other venues. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Christopher Sieving, Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. $85.00 hardcover; $35.00 paper. 302 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (3): 107–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.3.107 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hayley O’Malley; Review: Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess,” by Christopher Sieving. Film Quarterly 1 March 2023; 76 (3): 107–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.3.107 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Christopher Sieving, Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. $85.00 hardcover; $35.00 paper. 302 pages. In a 1989 Village Voice obituary for the writer, actor, and filmmaker Bill Gunn, the cultural critic Greg Tate both marked the importance of Gunn’s 1973 film Ganja & Hess and speculated about the potential of the films that Gunn never had the chance to make. “Imagine,” Tate wrote, “a world where Miles Davis was disallowed from recording after Kind of Blue or where Toni Morrison was only known as the author of The Bluest Eye. I don’t think, I know, that if Gunn had been making a film a year after Ganja and Hess our cinema would have been transformed as Miles and Morrison have transformed our music and literature” (5). Building on Tate’s tribute, Christopher Sieving’s fascinating and deeply researched new book, Pleading... You do not currently have access to this content.

They were often grainy, sometimes monochrome; they tended to be talky rather than full of movement or action, and they frequently betrayed their low‐budget origins. But they were also marked as “new,” fresh, and inspiring to others. There had always been independent features, of one kind or another, as long as there had been a Hollywood or any other establishment against which such distinctions could be made. During the 1980s and into the early 1990s, however, the notion of American independent cinema gained a new currency. Rather than being a catch‐all term, taken more or less literally to describe a range of very different types of nonstudio filmmaking, ranging from the avant‐garde to exploitation‐oriented genre cinema (including, at one extreme, pornography), “independent” came primarily to signify a particular type of lower‐budget feature production. This was something akin to an American “art” cinema in certain respects: Although blended in many cases with more popular generic components, often characterized as “quirky” or “off‐beat,” it became widely celebrated as an accessible alternative to the Hollywood mainstream. It also gained a new label of its own: “indie,” not just “independent,” which suggested something of the particular territory that was involved (a term that brought resonances from some similar developments in the same period in the field of popular music), as opposed to wider and less specific connotations of independence. Work of this type had its own earlier history in American cinema, not least in the films of John Cassavetes in the preceding two decades. What marked the period from the 1980s onward as different and gave it a more established identity was a gathering momentum. Rather than being perceived as occasional one‐off occurrences, or the persistent work of isolated individuals such as Cassavetes, independent films began to gain a sustained presence that had the appearance of a distinct movement in both the cinematic and the wider cultural discourses of the time.

From Louis Feuillade to Johnny To:Olivier Assayas on the future of French Cinema Louise Shea Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996) centres on an aging French director's remake of Louis Feuillade's crime serial Les Vampires (1915). Matters are complicated, however, when the director, René Vidal (Jean Pierre Léaud), decides to cast a Hong Kong actress, Maggie Cheung, in the role of France's great silent star, Musidora. What began as a fairly straightforward project, the revival of a silent-era classic, turns into a complex reflection on the origins of French cinema and its future in an increasingly globalized world. Two questions demand attention: Why Feuillade? and, Why Hong Kong? In a film about the status of France's national cinema in the 1990s, why make Feuillade's crime serial stand for the quintessential French film of the silent era? And why look to Hong Kong to renew French cinema? Critics have by and large overlooked the first question, and responded to the second by focusing on the figure of Maggie Cheung, analyzing her as the fetishised, oriental other or as a symbol of France's failed encounter with the world. I hope to complicate the question by asking not, "Why Maggie Cheung?" but, "Why Hong Kong cinema?" and more specifically, "Which Hong Kong cinema?" I show that although Irma Vep explicitly associates Hong Kong cinema with Johnny To's 1993 cult action film, Tong fond sam hop/The Heroic Trio, it wilfully misreads Johnny To's fantasy film by filtering it through the lens of the more classical wu xia pian (swordplay) films of King Hu, thereby transforming the popular Heroic Trio into an art film. I argue that by cross-breeding Feuillade with Johnny To/ King Hu, Assayas creates an alternative to Hollywood's own attempt to cross Hong Kong and European cinema, a hybrid represented in Irma Vep by the action film Hard Target (1993), Hong Kong director John Woo's first Hollywood film, starring Jean Claude Van Damme. [End Page 121] Why Feuillade? The filming of Irma Vep coincided with the centennial celebration of the birth of cinema, and in such a context, one can readily see how Feuillade might stand for the (distinctly French) splendor of early filmmaking. Grace An identifies his work with "the glorious past of French cinema," (An 2000, 299) while Dale Hudson associates the remake with "a larger project of reasserting national patrimony" (Hudson 2006, 220). Yet the choice of Feuillade as the representative of French cinema strikes me as more than a little odd. Feuillade enjoyed a brief moment of glory under the Surrealists, but his vast cinematic production (over 800 films) had been largely forgotten by the early 1930s. It was not until the 1950s, when Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque française restored a number of his prints and promoted his legacy, that he once again gained the attention of spectators and critics alike.1 In other words, Feuillade, as we shall see, is not so much an icon of early French cinema as a complex and disputed sign, whose status within the canon of French film was neither immediate nor uncontested. Given this history, wouldn't the Lumière brothers or Méliès have provided a more apt subject for a celebration of the Frenchness of cinema? Why Feuillade? There are, I would argue, two related answers to this question. Both concern the disputed history of Feuillade's integration into the canon of great French directors, and revolve around two debates that lay at the heart of France's early attempts at defining a national cinema, debates that find deep resonance in Assayas' work. The first concerns the respective merits of popular and art house cinema; the second the relationship between French cinema and its global competition. Keen to elevate cinema above its status as a fairground entertainment and crown it as the septième art, early French film critics took it upon themselves to demarcate the films of Feuillade, which they considered popular forms of entertainment, from what one might call the art films of the day. They took Feuillade to task for pandering to the tastes of the masses...

Reviewed by: New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map Irina Stakhanova New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map, Rosalind Galt . New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 296 pp. New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map can be seen as a learned and judicious analysis of the impact of the disintegration of the national frontiers and the formation of the European Union and the national cinema in Germany, Italy, and former Yugoslavia. Operating within the realms of post-structuralist and postmodernist theories of Eurocentric cultural space, the book assesses dominant "master narratives" of new European cinema and addresses the shift from etic to emic (as linguists would call it), analyzing the connection between regional, national, and European history, popular memory, and spectacle. Galt's approach, in general, reflects the growing interest within the area of social and cultural studies in R. G. Collingwood's idea of history as a reenactment of past experience and the validity of personal memory as an accountable representation of the past. Referring to the ongoing discussion about national political and cultural identity, the author extends the views of spatial and temporal constituents of the cinematic image and visual narrative that represent popular memory into a persuasive discussion of genre, political and gendered landscape, cognitive and textual mapping, and themes of loss, nostalgia, and [End Page 63] melancholia in the modern European spectacle. Chapter 2 provides an insightful textual analysis of landscape as an ideological subject and extends the views of landscape as la belle image with a discussion of historic authenticity and genre of heritage films and melodrama, with takes on a phenomenon of Italian melodrama of the 1990s (Cinema Paradiso [1988], Mediterraneo [1991], and Il Postino [1994]). After discussing the politics of landscape and the notion of displacement with detail and comparisons, the author moves to analyze the role of hypercathexis and "libidinal attachment"(49) while describing the use of mourning and disengagement in creating the melodramatic effect. In addition, by applying the methodology of feminist film theory to deconstruct landscape spectacle as a fetish, the author makes a persuasive argument about the necessity of addressing the binary essence of image as spectacle (visibility and pleasure) and as narrative (historicity and ideology). What is almost inevitably more difficult, however, is connecting the postmodern notion of cognitive space and mapping to cinematic representation and drawing conclusions about cultural and subjective re-mapping and its textualization in new European cinema. By contravening the habitual focus on theories of politics of national space, the author successfully identifies the quest for the rhetoric of broader definition of post-Wall and post-Communist space and gives an eloquent description of the future films produced in Germany and former Yugoslavia. Chapters 4 and 5 keep a proper perspective on complexity of representation relative to the general motions of cinematic discourse in Europe and attempt to define the practices of cinematic identifications within history, territory, and the notion of "belonging" by providing the comprehensive overview of cinematic discourses, which are predetermined by symbiotic processes of national identification within the different post-Wall (Germany) and post-Communist contexts (former Yugoslavia). Acknowledging that reinterpretation of the past and reinvention of postwar historic narrative became a common theme in European cinema of the 1990s, Galt convincingly suggests that whereas berlin.killer.doc (1999) and Zentropa (1991) represent the transitional character of national memory and space in relation to otherness, Underground (1999) creates the notion of the "vicious circle" (174) and the impossibility of mapping the modern national space. Furthermore, the author makes a compelling case in identifying the difference between the broken marginality of the "dematerialized and denationalized"(193) cinematic German space in transition outward and the use of the nostalgic "doubled relation" inward gaze to the past presented in Balkan cinema. The final chapter summarizes the basic approaches to the theory of European space by incorporating Walter Benjamin's notion of aestheticization of politics and underlying the concept of constellation of discourses that "allows us to read history alongside the present" (231). The author stresses the importance of reevaluating traditions in film analysis to align them with newly emerging geopolitical realities, theories of spectacle, and practices of interpretation. She points out the necessity of expanding borders of...

Presents the proceedings of a conference on the topic of 'Soviet and East European Film Makers Working in the West' held at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, in March 1989, as well as an edited summary of the discussions that took place after each session. The result is a volume that studies both the contribution of particular individuals to Western European and North American film industries over the past two decades and raises questions of considerable importance as to the future development of cinema as a whole. The sessions covered Soviet, Polish, Yugoslav, Czech and Hungarian cinema, with particular emphasis on the films made by Anrei Tarkovsky, Dusan Makaveyev, Milos Forman and Jerzy Skolimowski, both in their native countries and in Western Europe and North America. Topics discussed include: the viability of small national cinemas in an age of increasing standardization and homogenization on the lines of the dominant Hollywood model; the survival of the very concept of 'art cinema' in these circumstances and the relationship between art and commerce in a Hollywood context; and the changing circumstances in the Soviet Union and elsewhere that may see the development of a more market-oriented and commercial film industry in countries that had previously shunned this art.