The “Oppositional Gaze” and the Italian Cinema: Joy Nwosu’s Cinema e Africa nera (1968)

Italian national cinema developed quickly between the last decade of the 19th century and the outbreak of World War I (particularly in Turin and also in Rome), and it won a sizeable share of film audiences around the world for, in particular, its epic films set in classical settings. The outbreak of the war virtually destroyed the industry, but with the coming of sound and the advent of the Fascist government, support for the industry grew before World War II broke out, with the building of the film studio complex at Cinecittà (“Cinema City”), the establishment of Luce (the government agency charged with producing documentaries and newsreels), and the opening of an important national film school in Rome, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Unlike its counterparts in totalitarian Russia or Germany, the Italian industry was not completely dominated by government propaganda, and in fact some of the major Fascist figures in the industry wanted to imitate the entertainment of Hollywood rather than support a completely ideological cinema. Major directors emerged during this period, such as Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, and Vittorio De Sica (all of whom continued to work after the end of the war), and the cinema during the Fascist period trained a great many people involved in basic film production who were to play a vital role in the dramatic rebirth of Italian cinema after 1945. With the end of the war, Italian neorealism burst on the international scene. Such figures as Roberto Rossellini, De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Giuseppe De Santis won international acclaim for their “realistic” portrayal of contemporary Italian social and economic problems. During the 1950s, many young directors (Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Pietro Germi among them) sought to move beyond the kind of programmatic social realism Marxist critics in Italy and France championed, and in the 1960s a second generation of even younger figures (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Francesco Rosi) looked both backward to their Italian neorealist heritage and abroad to French cinema for inspiration. During the same time, but less beloved by film scholars and critics, Italian cinema began to produce an enormous number of highly profitable works that might be described as genre films or, to use the Hollywood term, B films. First, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the peplum or “sword and sandal” epic film starring foreign bodybuilders became immensely popular and was quickly exported. This genre was followed closely by the spaghetti western, an incredibly successful genre that produced almost five hundred films in a very short time and revolutionized the face of a classic Hollywood genre almost overnight. Subsequently, in the 1970s and 1980s, the thriller (known as a giallo in Italy) and the spaghetti horror film (with its zombie and cannibal variants) were also extremely popular. Perhaps the most popular genre of all, one that continued to thrive during the entire postwar period, was the so-called commedia all’italiana or “comedy, Italian style,” a form of comic film indebted not only to the traditional commedia dell’arte but also to a collection of brilliant actors and scriptwriter-directors who combined humor with a biting and often cynical vision of Italian culture, providing a type of social criticism that Italy’s politicians often avoided. The period between 1945 and around 1975 thus witnessed an Italian cinema that managed to combine popular entertainment in a variety of film genres with art films, box office power with critical acclaim at film festivals and among auteur-oriented critics and film historians. Nevertheless, directors and technicians of genius continued to work, and in the last decade some new faces have added luster and box office appeal to the national cinema’s treatment of new themes (racial and gender identity in a multiethnic and multicultural Italy, terrorism, crime, and the Mafia), themes that have evolved in Italian cinema’s reflection of everyday reality in the peninsula. Italian film scholarship has evolved dramatically in the recent past, moving from a focus on postwar neorealism and the art film toward a broader definition of film history that encompasses an interest in multicultural themes, more film theory imported from abroad (especially from the United Kingdom and the United States), and more interest in two periods (the silent era and the Fascist period) that have long been neglected in comparison with postwar Italy.

Reckoning Day:Race, Representation, and Redress in Women's Literature and Film William B. Covey (bio) Hilary Neroni . The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. New York: State U of New York P, 2005. xiv + 203 pp. Judylyn S. Ryan . Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. xi + 193 pp. In "Revolutionary Attitude," esteemed feminist and cultural critic bell hooks self-consciously admits, "Even those of us righteously committed to black liberation struggle, who feel we have decolonized our minds, often find it hard to 'speak' our experience" (2). Judylyn S. Ryan and Hilary Neroni confront this struggle in their new books as each speaks out about underrepresented areas of inquiry in literature and film studies. For example, Ryan reexamines liberation theology as represented in contemporary black women's literature and film, and Neroni focuses upon the field of psychoanalysis but through a lens of the violent and tough woman characters of current neo-noir and action films. Both critics employ their own versions of hooks's [End Page 705] "oppositional gaze" concept in order "to develop critical spectatorship" ("Oppositional Gaze" 117) toward each topic. Together, their books reaffirm the importance of female agency in women's art. From the opening dedication to her grandmother, her statement that "the purpose of life is to make more life possible" (v), her focus on black female agency, and her invitation to live an examined, spiritual life, Judylyn Ryan's Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature delivers kind-hearted and well-intentioned humanism to its readers. Besides the arguably more well-known left liberation philosophies of bell hooks and Cornel West, little recent work focuses on the importance of spirituality to women's cultural texts. Because of her interest in this marginalized field of study, Ryan is a trailblazer even if her book is concise at a length of six chapters. Ryan's introduction to the book sets up the parameters of her study. Invoking a non-denominational, broad-based theory of spirituality as a "life force" (2), Ryan promises to examine specific characters and auteur's visions from a selection of black women's texts in literature and film. While largely on her own in this subject area, Ryan has precursors and is especially indebted to the cultural work of Toni Morrison and the critical work of Barbara Christian whose bedrock ideas underlie her expanded analyses. Ryan's introduction sets up a dual argument: "that spirituality functions as a life-affirming ideology in Black women's art, and that, in the choices informing narrative construction and characterization, Black women filmmakers and writers embrace the role and responsibility of the priestess, bearing and distributing life-force to sustain the community of viewers and readers" (5). To the author, this priestess role is ideological and thus separates Ryan's views of ideology from left-leaning critics like Cornel West. West, for example, employs postmodern theory, specifically Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy, to define how the hegemonic power of white supremacist beliefs negatively impacts black life. To West then the "genealogical approach subscribes to a conception of power that is neither simply based on individual subjects . . . nor on collective subjects . . . but rather a history made by the praxis of human subjects which often results in complex structures of discourses" (49). Whereas West aligns black experience with forces of slave history and hegemony, Ryan chooses an optimistic framework based on the role of spirituality. Thus, West's agenda defines society through postmodern theory while Ryan relies upon humanistic self-redemption. As such, Ryan defines spirituality differently than West from the first chapter entitled, "Interpreting Spirituality" where she recognizes black agency and labels her approach as a "paradigm of growth [that] derives from and reflects specific principles of traditional African religious [End Page 706] cosmology" (15). Ryan sees the individual as in charge of producing their own culture and thus her "paradigm of growth supplants the paradigm of resistance that has prevailed in most theoretical approaches to African diaspora cultural studies" (16). Ryan believes in Romantic "self-perpetuation" (17) because she argues that, "even individuals whose presence is temporally...

The success of films like the Oscar-winning La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino), the family-friendly comedy Sole a catinelle (Buckets of Sunshine, Gennaro Nunziante) and the poetic documentary Sacro GRA (Sacred GRA, Gianfranco Rosi), all released in 2013, confirms the continued and perhaps surprising vitality and variety of Italian cinema. This variety tended to be ignored in what might be called the Standard Model of Italian cinema history, which emphasized the realist and auteurist traditions in Italian cinema. In this article I range across contemporary, classic and lesser-known Italian cinema by analyzing the means and priorities that have been employed when studying it in the Anglophone academy. My title, “What is Italian cinema?,” intentionally recalls Bazin (and I refer also to Deleuze and “world cinephilia”), but an additional clause might read, “and how do we think we know?”. The second half of the article considers the contents of three edited companions to Italian cinema (one recently published and two forthcoming) in order to grasp the current concerns of Italian cinema studies and so to signpost the state of knowledge about Italian cinema, at least as it exists in English. I suggest throughout some methods and approaches for better grasping the variety of Italian cinema over its history, but I finish by noting that the Pantheon of World Cinema has also distilled Italian cinema to neorealism and the “golden age” auteurs and so has obscured both the range and the particularity of Italian cinema.

I have now recorded full-length commentaries for four ‘classic’ Italian films: Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Il deserto rosso (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964), and Il conformista (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). Although these credentials hardly make me an expert on the subject, I have learned some lessons about audio commentaries that I think are worth sharing. First lesson: do not risk going into a studio to record a commentary without a script of some kind. It is true that many audio commentaries — usually those done by the film’s director — are unscripted and perhaps even recorded in a single take. Occasionally these are good, but more often they have long sections where the director cannot think of anything interesting to say or just tells background anecdotes. However, this is the person who made the film, so even if they have nothing much to say about it we forgive them for it. Film scholars cannot crave the same indulgence from listeners. I can think of only one case of a really good scholarly commentary on an Italian film that is not closely scripted, and that is Robert Gordon’s on the Arrow Films dual-format edition (2011) of Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948). I, however, have increasingly come to use more and more detailed scripts for my commentaries, timed right down to the second. I may want to draw attention to a shot that is on screen for just one or two seconds and it comes in right at the beginning of a scene. I have to find a way of commenting on it either just before it appears, or while it is on screen, or just after, but I cannot place my remarks too much on either side, otherwise listeners may not understand which shot I am talking about. For me, therefore, repeated rehearsal and exact timing — in other words, a pre-written script — are essential if I want to be sure I cover a certain number of points about a film. The first time I did a commentary I had not anticipated these problems. It was the commentary on Ossessione, which I did together with Lesley Caldwell, whose first time it also was. Lesley and I had several meetings beforehand, going through the film sequence by sequence, deciding what we would say and which of us would say it. It was an enjoyable process and we thought that was all there was to it. But The Italianist, 33. 2, 183–189, June 2013

There is something wishful, aspirational if you will, in the title of this roundtable. I find its temporality especially intriguing. The past has been significantly elided: is it because we are supposed to know it already? Or is it because we are being encouraged to break with it? We are left with the present and the future. But we all know that, when faced with the choice between the two, it is always more exciting to talk about the latter, about how we want this future to be, about how it should be. I will resist this temptation, as I believe it is more important to ask what Italian Screen Studies (ISS) — the object we have been invited to discuss — is in the first place. It seems to me that in the very act of talking about ISS there is the assumption that this is a consistent and unifying discipline that brings specialists together. One could suggest that, as a discipline, ISS is concerned exclusively with the study of Italian films and that its practitioners are scholars primarily or exclusively involved in the study of Italian Cinema. Yet, I do not think that all those who write on Italian cinema can be considered to be scholars working in ISS, especially if they publish also on other national contexts or consider cinema from transnational perspectives. Interestingly, all those invited to speak at the roundtable in Eugene publish almost exclusively on Italian cinema. With the exception of the speakers from Italy, all of us included in this collaborative piece hold, partly or entirely, job appointments in departments/sections of Italian studies. Perhaps this comes as no surprise, given that we originally spoke at the 2013 AAIS. But I think that there is an underlying truth here that transcends the particular context in which we are speaking today: the home of ISS is at the moment Italian Studies, which of course raises the issue of its being a sub-discipline within a discipline. This assumed position of ISS within Italian Studies opens up possibilities but also carries some limitations: it allows the occasional productive contributions to ISS of Italianists who do not work mainly on Italian Cinema (normally with a literary background); but it also helps to perpetuate a sense of inferiority in relation to Cinema and Media Studies, for example. My modest hypothesis is that ISS is an ‘imagined’ discipline, or sub-discipline, whose existence depends on the work of Italianists and their feeling together as a collective intellectual community that engages in particular debates, and shares a set of cultural, theoretical, and methodological frameworks and references. In thinking and talking about ISS today we are actually dealing with a performative: it is precisely our being here to talk about the future of ISS that ‘makes’ ISS. It is The Italianist, 34. 2, 238–241, June 2014

The topic of this roundtable prompts me to reflect with some optimism on the contrast between the uncertain status of Italian film studies when I began teaching and researching in the field over twenty years ago, and the flourishing profile it enjoys today as a sub-discipline of Italian studies in the Anglophone academy. It also obliges me to acknowledge that the institutional inclusion of Italian screen studies (ISS; now encompassing both film and television) within italianistica has meant that it exists in relative isolation from some of the theoretical discourses and methodological trends developing in the broader field of film and media studies, more specifically transnational film criticism. My own introduction to the study of cinema occurred in the context of a film studies department in the 1980s, at a time when the discipline was marked by the conjunction of semiotics, psychoanalytic film theory, and feminism. This theoretical background did not necessarily provide the most compelling preparation for a teaching career in a department of Modern Languages and Literatures, where the focus of my research was expected to match the field in which I was hired to teach, that is, Italian studies — then, as now, dominated by literary history and analysis. Nonetheless, it enabled me to bring theoretical discourse to bear on my investigation of Italian cinema and Italian cultural production more generally. It also trained me to approach all films as texts that offer rich potential for deconstructive inquiry, rather than as aesthetic objects to be cherished or cast aside according to predetermined hierarchies of value. My decision to focus my research on contemporary Italian cinema met with some incomprehension at the outset, particularly among italianisti. This resistance has not yet entirely disappeared. ‘Ma il cinema italiano non esiste piu’ is the dismissive comment I still hear, more often in Italy than elsewhere, from a number of colleagues who assert that the films produced in Italy over the past twenty or thirty years are rarely worth viewing, much less worth studying. Rather than reflecting a reasoned assessment of Italian cinema at present, such claims are symptomatic of a refusal to move beyond out-dated evaluative criteria and canonical hierarchies, such as the embalmment of neorealism as the gold standard of Italian filmmaking, the privileging of a discourse of autori, and so on — taken-for-granted values that were astutely challenged in a landmark article by Catherine O’Rawe about five years ago, and further elaborated in a more recent study by Alan O’Leary in collaboration with O’Rawe. The Italianist, 34. 2, 268–271, June 2014

This article contributes to an understudied topic in Italian film studies: representations of older people in contemporary comedies. After contextualising Italian cinema’s enduring tendency to employ laughter to cope with tragedy, I cast a spotlight on three of the few Italian film comedies that address the topics of old age and ageing in sustained, purposeful, and original ways. Beginning with an analysis of Fantozzi va in pensione (Neri Parenti, 1988) as a kind of precursor to more recent features, I examine the interconnected themes of work, retirement, intergenerational conflict, and death. Close readings of Metti la nonna in freezer (Giancarlo Fontana and Giuseppe Stasi, 2018) and Buoni a nulla (Gianni Di Gregorio, 2014) follow. These comedies recycle tropes addressed in Fantozzi va in pensione. Yet, when interpreted in the context of contemporary Italy, the latter two films are also innovative in their grotesque depiction of older persons as ‘human capital’.

The 2014 annual AAIS Conference, organized by the American Association for Italian Studies, took place over three days from 26–28 May 2014 at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, for the first time in a location situated outside North America or Italy. Partially because of this geographical collocation, the conference drew an exceptional number of participants: over seven hundred members convened from more than twenty-four countries, which makes this conference, according to AAIS president Carol Lazzaro-Weis, the ‘largest . . . in the history of the organization’. In this report, I will briefly present and discuss the panels and papers on cinema and television presented in Zurich; I will highlight the general trends that emerged in the three-day conference and explore specific topics that seem to be of particular interest in the field of Italian screen studies. The Zurich conference saw, at least quantitatively, a positive influx of different approaches anddisciplines, suchasphotography, politics, gender (inpart due to thework of theQueer caucus), postcolonial issues,Marxism,andcritical theory, tonamebuta few. This surely reflects the on-going evolution ofAnglo-American-Australian Italian Studies, but it is possibly also due to the presence of scholars who work in European universities who were able to attend the conference en masse. The keynote speaker, Rosi Braidotti, exemplifies this trend: an Italian-Australian scholar who has lived in different countries and is now based in the Netherlands, Braidotti works mainly on social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory, and ethnicity studies, from a standpoint of continentalphilosophy.Her lecture, ‘PosthumanistParadoxes’,was followedbya long and warm round of applause, together with a standing ovation. In general, it could be said that the evaluation of the situation of Italian screen studies that emerge from Zurich is mixed: on the one hand, many of these panels had a great turnout, and a number of members came to the conference to discuss these topics. As a result, a stable but ever-evolving community of scholars from different countries has its recurrent appointment at theAAIS conferences andmuchacademic research is generated from these encounters. But, on the other hand, it is fair to say that cinema and television (let alone Internet, videogames, etc.) are still far from being fully considered a matter of serious academic research and inquiry in the large community of Italian studies. The interaction of Italian history and politicswith cinema andmediawas surely one of the main trends discussed at the conference. We can single out a few of panels and

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Glenn Reynolds is currently completing his PhD dissertation at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He teaches at New School University in New York and Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. Notes Yekutiel Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans (New York, 1997), p. 5. Jonathan Haynes, Nigerian cinema: structural adjustments, in Jonathan Haynes & Onookome Okome (eds) Cinema and Social Change in West Africa (Plateau State, 1997), p. 8. South Africa and the Rhodesias are notable examples. An exception to the norm was the Belgian Congo's early embrace of a stabilization policy for the Katanga region. Apparently fearful of the power of the image to undermine colonial authority, however, viewing opportunities for the Congolese were highly circumscribed prior to World War II. For a rare exception in the historical record, see Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa (New York, 1962), p. 261, where a woman on the Copperbelt announces that ‘I like the cowboy films best because I like to see how to throw good blows, so that I can kick anybody who interferes with my business; for example, if my husband interferes.’ James Burns, Flickering Shadows (Athens, 2002), p. 157. Bell hooks, The oppositional gaze: black female spectators, in John Belton (ed.) Movies and Mass Culture (New Brunswick, 1996), pp. 247–264. Manthia Diawara, Black spectatorship: problems of identification and resistance, Screen 29(4) (Autumn 1988), pp. 66–76. Homi Bhabha, Of mimicry and man, in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1995), p. 86. In a 1922 article for a popular French cinema fanzine, French film critic Rene Jeanne claimed that white Americans held ‘Redskins’ in higher regard than African-Americans, but because the latter were ‘dying out’, the genre would soon flounder as well. Cited in David Henry Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths (Baltimore, 2001), p. 76. Yale University, International Missionary Council archives (hereafter IMC), 26.31.30, W.E. Tabb to John Merle Davis, 1 September 1935. Godfrey and Monica Wilson, The Analysis of Social Change (London, 1945), p. 38. Cited in Neil Smith, In the Beginning … , Cinema 4(4) (Winter 1964), 33. See also Thelma Gutsche, How the cinema came to South Africa, University of Cape Town archives (hereafter UCT), Gutsche papers, BC703, C28, unpublished mss, n.d. [1945?]. For the emergence of a white South African market for cinema exhibition, see Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895–1940 (Cape Town, 1972), especially Chapters I–VIII. See also Thelma Gutsche, How the cinema came to South Africa. Although few studies have charted the rise of mass black spectatorship in southern Africa, even fewer have looked at the expansion of white film-viewing opportunities. For a limited study with a decidedly settler bias, see C.T.C. Taylor, The History of Rhodesian Entertainment, 1890–1930 (Salisbury, 1968). Motion pictures commonly went by the name ‘bioscope’ in South and Central Africa up until roughly 1970. Absalom Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations (Pietermaritzburg, 1965), p. 76. See also Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (Cape Town, 2000), pp. 48–49. Ibid. Es’kia Mphalele, Down Second Avenue (Berlin, 1962), p. 95. Paul Landau, Introduction: an amazing distance: pictures and people in Africa, in Paul S. Landau & Deborah D. Kaspin (eds) Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley, 2002), p. 24. James Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and its Legacy (New York, 2002), p. 186. Motion picture venues were, most importantly, a new arena for social congregation in the public sphere: Richard Abel, The perils of Pathe, or the Americanization of early American cinema, in Leo Charney & Vanessa Schwartz (eds) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, 1984). Hence, much of the dialogue by vice crusaders, religious leaders and Progressives concerning cinema's place in modern society dealt with the triangulated spacial dynamics between the Church, Saloon and Cinema. See Les & Barbara Keyser, Hollywood and the Catholic Church (Chicago, 1984). Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle Class Reform (London, 1978), especially Chapter 12. Bridgman, for example, argued that the city ‘registers a novel mental environment’ for the Bantu as they crowded from the ‘free, open country to the cramped and sordid quarters of the town.’ Frederick Bridgman, Social conditions in Johannesburg, International Review of Missions 15 (1926), pp. 569–570. News from Filmland, The (Johannesburg) Star, 12 July 1922. See also Ray Phillips, The Bantu Are Coming: Phases of South Africa's Race Problem (London, 1930), pp. 141–152. Ray Phillips, The Bantu in the City: A Study of Cultural Adjustment on the Witwatersrand (South Africa, n.d. [1938]), pp. 315–327. Eventually the program expanded to include leper houses, reformatories, jails, police barracks, hospitals, orphanages, and the like. Films were transported via rail to Natal to be shown in African Reserves and sugar mills. Mark Beittel, ‘Mapantsula’: cinema, crime and politics on the Witwatersrand, Journal of Southern African Studies 16(4) (December 1990), 754. Phillips went on sabbatical at this time to finish his PhD dissertation, published as The Bantu in the City. Phillips, The Bantu in the City, p. 424. The popularity of cowboy films throughout the African diaspora has itself been made the subject of cinematic narratives. In more than one film, African director Aiaisone includes scenes of young migrant workers returning to their villages and sharing with friends the experiences of watching westerns. See Elyseo Taylor, Film and social change in Africa south of the Sahara, American Behavioral Scientist 17(3) (January–February 1974), 437. Also, in The Harder They Come, Perry Henzell's 1971 film starring reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, there are scenes of Jamaican ghetto youth attending Wild West films and cheering the white protagonist. Archie Crawford, Riding Into the African Sunset with Lo-Jack, TEBA Times 5(3) (1985), p. 4. Zambian National Archives (hereafter ZNA), RC85, #14, Hamilton (N. Rhodesian Police) to Honourable Acting Secretary in Livingstone, 3 May 1927. See also Charles van Onselen, Chibaro (London, 1976), pp. 192–193, who attributes the initiation of film showings solely to the social control aspirations of the mining industry. This argument, while failing to explain fully the proliferation of film, must be given due consideration given the fact that in Southern Rhodesia, as in South Africa, officials reported that weekend showings during peak drinking hours tended to reduce Monday morning hangovers among mining employees. In South Africa, Randlords were concerned enough about African consumption that a blanket prohibition was put into place by the British administration between 1902 and 1907. Keyan Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid (New York, 1988), p. 54. Chamber of Mines archives (hereafter CM), Box 224: American Board of Missions, Folder: American Board of Missions, J.D. Morton, Secretary, to the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines, Bulawayo, 17 September 1935. The exact chronology of the introduction of film into Central Africa as regular fare for black viewers is difficult to trace with precision. The basis for my dating here is the 3 May 1927 letter from Hamilton to Livingstone's Acting Chief Secretary (ZNA), which states that the Mines’ circuit films had been imported ‘four years earlier’. By 1932, 85% of all workers had been with Wankie for more than three years of continuous service, and 30% for more than 10 years. See John Merle Davis, Modern Industry and the African (London, 1933), p. 72. For Broken Hill, see Richard Hall, Zambia (New York, 1967), p. 252. Davis, Modern Industry and the African, p. 72. David Kerr, The best of both worlds? Colonial film policy and practice in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Critical Arts 7(1–2) (1993). Rosaleen Smyth, The development of government propaganda in Northern Rhodesia, PhD dissertation, University of London, 1983. See also Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 255. F. Spearpoint, The African native and the Rhodesian copper mines, Supplement to the Journal of the Royal African Society XXXVI (No. CXLIV) (July 1937), 42–43. Cited in Burns, Flickering Shadows, p. 158. Ray Phillips, A survey of the situation on the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand archives (hereafter Wits), South African Institute of Race Relations papers (hereafter SAIRR), Part I, Box B56, 1–7, Folder: Military Affairs & Others, 56.4.2, n.d. CM, Box 224: American Board of Missions; Folder: American Board of Missions, Phillips to Gemmill, 22 September 1935. Colin Beale, The commercial entertainment film and its effect on colonial peoples, in The Film in Colonial Development: A Report of a Conference (London, 1948), p. 17. This perspective had other adherents. One reporter declared that, for the African cinema-goer, ‘the hero is the answer to is own daydreams and the picture a world which causes the realities around him to dissolve for a while. The films, in other words, are his release from the frustrations of a trying day.’ Woody S. Manqupu, Non-Europeans are flocking to cinemas, The (Johannesburg) Star, 23 March 1962. Wits, J.D. Rheinnalt-Jones papers, J.D. Rheinnalt-Jones, A study of leisure-time activities for native mine workers, G2/16, Box G1-G2, ‘Printed Items’, p. 12. Ibid, p. 17. Harry Franklin, The Central African screen, Colonial Cinema (December 1950), p. 85. The cinema in Northern Rhodesia, Colonial Cinema (June 1944), p. 22. Spearpoint, The African native and the Rhodesian copper mines, p. 42. Franklin, The Central African screen, p. 85. Examples include Gold (1932, as Jack Tarrant), A Six Shootin’ Romance (1926, as ‘Lightning’ Jack), Bustin’ Thru (1925, as Jack Savage): <http://us.imdb.com/Name?Hoxie,+Jack> Charles Ambler, Popular films and colonial audiences: the movies in Northern Rhodesia, American Historical Review 106(1) (February 2001), p. 96. I would like to thank Professor Charles Ambler for his assistance with the research for this paper. Richard Slotkin, Buffalo Bill's ‘Wild West’ and the mythologization of the American Empire, in Amy Kaplan & Donald Pease (eds) Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, 1993), pp. 164–181. Will Wright, The Wild West (London, 2001), especially The Popular Cowboy, pp. 8–11. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York, 1993). Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories (New York, 1995). Graham Huggan, (Post)Colonialism, anthropology, and the magic of mimesis, Culture Critique 38 (Winter 1997–1998). Fritz Kramer, The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa (New York, 1993). Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. See also Herbert Cole, Mbari (Bloomington, 1982). See Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories, especially pp. 21–22, in which he critiques how the textual readings of discourse analysis, which favor a cognitive approach to human understanding, obscure the more primal senses of touch, smell and taste. Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories, p. 76. Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories, p. 133. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, pp. 47–48. It is worth noting here that reverse representation and the empowerment it implies for the colonized was suggested as far back as the 1930s, with the publication of Julius Lips, The Savage Hits Back (New York, 1966). Lips collected a wealth of first contact examples of ‘primitive’ art, which depicted whites, thereby inverting the direction of the colonial ‘gaze’. ZNA, Sec 5/16, vol. 1, no. 8, Allanson to Director of Department of Information, Lusaka, 27 January 1956. Allanson, it should be noted, framed this ‘insolence’ not explicitly in terms of race, but rather as another unfortunate manifestation of the deleterious effects of the mass media. This ‘sub-culture’ thesis was reiterated throughout the Atlantic world and reached it apogee in the 1950s ‘delinquency’ scares in England and America. Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations, p. 76. For a similar discussion of the way the body is imbricated within social collectivities and constellations of power, see Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago, 1985), especially pp. 6–9. Eric Gable, Bad copies: the Colonial aesthetic and the Manjaco-Portuguese encounter, in Landau & Kaspin, Images and Empires, p. 319, note 39. Huggan, (Post)Colonialism, anthropology, and the magic of mimesis, pp. 94–95. Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories, pp. 195–196, my emphasis. Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (London, 1961), p. 435. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, 1981), p. 49. The Natal Mercury, 31 October 1947, Letter to the Editor (‘Daily Forum’ column). ZNA, Sec 5/16, vol. 1, #44/1: F.S. Beyes, Welfare Officer of Luanshya; Municipal Board to Chairman of African Censorship Board, 6 November 1953. Burns, Flickering Shadows, p. 151. ZNA, Sec 2/1280, #249 A-B, Extract from African Provincial Council, Western Province, 6th Meeting at Luanshya, 9–10 July 1947. ZNA, Sec 2/1121, no. 346/1, Rex vs. John Kanda and Five Other Africans, Mufulira Monthly Police Report, 1947. The punishment meted out to the defendants was 12 lashes. Historian Charles Ambler, in Popular films and colonial audiences, p. 101, observes that this defense was, of course, a clever ploy to receive a reduced sentence. Beittel, Mapantsula, 755. Likewise, in 1955 the Senior Welfare Officer of the Livingstone Municipality, Northern Rhodesia, declared that ‘I have on a number of occasions complained to African Consolidated Films, Ltd. about the poor quality of films supplied to African audiences. I have myself received complaints from a number of Africans who feel as I do that the continual showing of ‘Westerns’ only is detrimental and that some attempt should be made, by the introduction of better-class films, to educate the African's taste in films.’ ZNA, Sec 5/16, vol. 1, 10/25/55, Senior Welfare Officer of Livingstone to the Secretary, African Censorship Board. Onookome Okome, The context of film productions in Nigeria: the Colonial heritage, in Onookome Okome & Jonathan Haynes (eds) Cinema and Social Change in West Africa, p. 39, note 3. Ibid, p. 33. Upper Volta did, however, develop a state-sponsored film industry. In 1969, Ouagadougou hosted the first biennial ‘Festival Panafrican du Cinema de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), which has been dubbed the ‘Cannes of Africa’. Elliot P. Skinner, African Urban Life: The Transformation of Ouagadougou (Princeton, 1974), pp. 285–286. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York, 1965), p. 246. For history of the Colonial Film Unit (CFU), see Rosaleen Smyth, The British Colonial Film Unit and Sub-Saharan Africa, 1939–45, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8(3) (1988), pp. 285–298. Okome, pp. 33–34. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley, 1994), p. 31. Cited in Robert Stam & Louise Spence, Colonialism, racism, and representation—an introduction, Screen 24(2) (March 1983), p. 12. Diawara, Black spectatorship, passim. For an interesting account of the power of the gaze in the formation of ethnography and European travel writing, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992). Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood (New York, 1994), p. 35. Anthony Sampson, Drum: A Venture into the New Africa (London, 1956), pp. 106–107. Sampson, Drum, p. 81. See also Mac Fenwick, ‘Tough guy, eh?’: the gangster-figure in Drum, Journal of Southern Africa Studies 22(4) (December 1996), especially pp. 621, 629. Fenwick, ‘Tough guy, eh?’, p. 629. Crawford, Riding into the African sunset with ‘Lo-Jack’, p. 5. Wits, Rheinnalt-Jones, A study of leisure time activities for native workers, p. 12. Projectionists tended to agree Rheinnalt-Jones: William Orr declared that ‘Cowboy films were always the most popular [among miners]:’ William Orr—Teba's Movie Man’, Times [Teba Quarterly] 7(1) (First quarter 1987), 5. Lewis Nkosi, cited in Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood, p. 35. See also James Burns, Flickering Shadows, p. 157. Burns mistakenly attributes the quote to Bloke Modisane. See Tehar Cheriaa, Weapons of Resistance, in June Givanni (ed.) Symbolic Narrative/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (London, 2000), p. 238: ‘[…] This war has simultaneously changed in an astonishing manner in its weapons and military tactics, and multiple strategies of weakening, subordinating and exploiting entire human societies which are methodically reduced to markets of consumption […]. It has really become a war of images.’ Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 262. Stuart Hall, Cultural identity and cinematic representation, Framework 36 (1989), 68. Elihu Katz & Tamar Liebes, Mutual aid in the decoding of Dallas: preliminary notes from a cross-cultural study, in Phillip Drummond & Richard Paterson (eds) Television in Transition: Papers from the 1st International Television Studies Conference (London, 1985), p. 189. Ibid, p. 188. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 258. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 263. Africans were overheard in conversation saying, ‘Eh, the cowboy has medicines [witchcraft] to make him invisible. His enemies have failed to see him hiding in the bush. Jack knows he is younger than Chibale (older cowboy who plays the part of a clown). So Jack has to respect him. Cowboys show respect. And Jack is also the son of a big man.’ J.A.K. Leslie, A Survey of Dar Es Salaam (London, 1963), p. 109. Tribal Dancing on the Gold Mines (Johannesburg, n.d. [1970?]), p. 13. A.L. Epstein, Politics in an Urban African Community (Manchester, 1958), p.10. ZNA, Sec 5/16, vol. 1, #52, P.G.D. Clark, Acting Chief Information Officer to Films Officer, Lusaka, 7 February 1954. ZNA, Sec 5/16, vol. 1, #77, J.G. Phillips, Acting Chief Information Officer to Provincial Commissioner, Kasama, 17 October 1955. Franklin, The Central African Screen, p. 85. The quote is paraphrased by Franklin, who claims it represents the ‘general tenor of complaints made in African Urban Councils.’ Okome, The context of film production in Nigeria: the colonial heritage, p. 27. Virginia Wright Wexman, The Family on the Land, in Daniel Bernardi (ed.) The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema (New Brunswick, 1996), pp. 129–169. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York, 1975), p. 140. One is tempted to say that this was only true only for white Americans, yet early Westerns did well in black-owned ‘race theaters’ as well. One projectionist in a black-owned cinema hall in Jackson, Mississippi stated that ‘when you go back, William S. Hart was one of the big men … All you had to do was just put his name out there.’ Cited in Pearl Bowser & Louise Spence, Micheaux's biographical legend’ in Bernardi (ed.) The Birth of Whiteness, p. 62. Cited in Louise Bourgault, Mass Media in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bloomington, 1995), p. 13. Powdermaker, Copper Town, pp. 261–262. Phillips, The Bantu in the City, p. 424. Cited in Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (New York, 2003), p. 1. Avtar Brah & Annie E. Coombs (eds) Introduction to Hybridity and its Discontents (New York, 2000), p. 1. Cited in Aletta J. Norval, Rethinking ethnicity: and in and in Africa (New York, p. Cited in Introduction to of Age in South Africa 1987), p. p. Homi Bhabha, The other in Homi Bhabha, The Location of p. Ibid, p. to the early Western film, were on the American as well. (ed.) Black Cowboys of & D. African Americans on the Western Frederick his of the in American at the Report of the American Historical for the Richard The (Chicago, p. The Star, 12 June 1922.

Editorial| October 20 2020 Editors’ Introduction: Habitation: Of Space and Absence Shelleen Greene, Shelleen Greene Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include Italian cinema, postcolonial studies, and feminist digital studies. Her book Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identities in the Italian Cinema (Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2012) examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in Italian cinema. Her work has also been published in the edited volume Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and in the journal California Italian Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Ellen C. Scott Ellen C. Scott Ellen C. Scott is an associate professor and head of the Cinema and Media Studies program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her research focuses on the meaning of film in African American communities and the relationship of media to the struggle for racial justice and equality. She is author of Cinema Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press, 2015). She is working on two projects, one exploring Black women film critics and another examining the history of slavery on the screen in the United States, which has received grant funding from the Academy Film Scholars program of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2020) 6 (4): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Shelleen Greene, Ellen C. Scott; Editors’ Introduction: Habitation: Of Space and Absence. Feminist Media Histories 20 October 2020; 6 (4): 1–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.4.1 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 ContentFeminist Media Histories Search If in the first installment of this special dual issue of Feminist Media Histories, we entered the hollows of Marie Jeanne’s cave, enacting an excavation of the hidden and suppressed histories of the Haitian Revolution as told in Shirley Bruno’s short film An Excavation of Us (2017), this second issue approaches habitation, or the way in which we in-habit space—marginal, sub-merged, de-centered—in order to put forth feminist counter-histories of the body and embodiment. This volume recognizes that the term “habitation” gives a sense of the “lived in,” but one that is not completely “natural,” comfortable, or given. With embodied habitation, the body becomes not only a place where selfhood becomes fleshed, but an extension of the external world’s spatial logics, which must be adapted to in order to be made livable. This process of habitation signifies adapting to both the space of the body and the spaces that surround... You do not currently have access to this content.

This paper provides a survey of Italian critical studies on Russian Symbolism and its reception in Italy over the last thirty years (1994-2022). The paper reconstructs the evolution of this tradition through the analysis of three main streams: 1. works on literary theory and philosophy 2. the study of the ‘Italian’ text on the basis mainly of archival documents and biographical texts, and 3. the study, based on comparisons and parallels with other literary movements, of Russian Symbolism as a supracultural and supranational movement. In the final part, the paper proposes an overview of current research perspectives on the topic.

This article examines the impact of journalistic censorship and the ensuing experience of “shame” on the development of Mark Twain’s critical humanistic writings, with particular emphasis on the Morning Call censorship episode. This analytical approach draws upon foundational theories developed by modern critical humanists, particularly Sartre’s existentialist reconceptualization of human agency, Foucault’s archeology of power systems, bell hooks’ concept of “oppositional gaze” and insights from contemporary critical racial theory regarding racial supremacy. The aim is to elucidate the conditions under which an exclusive self identity or a subject of power might engage in critical introspection of its own identity, thereby revealing how individuals maintain agency within de-individualized and institutionalized power structures. This article argues that the internalized gaze, instantiated through the mechanism of censorship, operates as a potentiate of power that engenders a profound sense of “shame” which serves as a critical juncture for Twain, prompting a thorough reassessment of the dialectical interplay between the self and the other. Twain’s meditations on the deleterious impacts of othering practices and exclusionary ideologies within humanistic discourse have given rise to a recurring motif of the “oppositional gaze” in his literary oeuvre, as particularly evidenced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and 3000 Years among the Microbes (1905). The case of Twain’s censorship incident and its aftermath demonstrate that the dual nature of power subjects, as both wielders and subjects of power, can enable internal self-criticism and reflection within humanistic and other ideological discourses.

ABSTRACTTosca (1941) is a curious and intriguing case in film history. It was originally begun by French director Jean Renoir, but finished by his German screenwriter-turned-director Carl Koch. Koch’s wife Lotte Reiniger and the young Luchino Visconti contributed to the film, while its producer was the grand old man of Italian silent film, Arturo Ambrosio. While Visconti was always open about his French experience with Renoir as his aesthetic, moral and political revelation, he always denigrated Tosca afterwards. However, visual analysis of the film reveals striking similarities with his films, particularly Ossessione (1943). Moreover, reception research shows Tosca had a critical but not entirely unfavourable reception in Italy and in Germany, too easily overlooked in Italian and German post-1945 historiography. Additional sources from the Lotte Reiniger archive and the Federico Patellani photo archive deepen the research.

Reviewed by: The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage ed. by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William Maria Stehle The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage. Edited by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2021. Pp. 232. Cloth $99.00. E-book $24.99. ISBN 9781640140745. The Tender Gaze is an ambitious scholarly and political project. By developing the tender gaze as a theoretical and analytical approach, the coeditors set the stage for a collection of essays that explore applications of the concept in German film and literature. The tender gaze, "an empathetic encounter with others" (3), is a tool to uncover the ways in which narrative, power, and politics are intertwined, within films, performances, and texts and in the process of reception. It further, as Muriel Cormican states, "acknowledges representation as always already implicated in power structures [End Page 392] while simultaneously using representation to question those power structures" (39). This definition connects the tender gaze with theorizing representation as always also political, as a process, and as intricately connected to power, and points to one of the crucial interventions the authors make with this book: in broad terms, they engage affect studies to rethink the political in literature. Cormican's introduction of the tender gaze focuses on examples in contemporary film, including a very perceptive discussion of Maren Ade's Toni Erdman (2016). She defines the concept in opposition to Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" and Ann Kaplan's "imperial gaze," and in conjunction with bell hook's Black feminist perspective, theorized as the "oppositional gaze" (17-20). The tender gaze, Cormican shows, draws attention to the structures of inequality that scholars have pointed out in media reception and attends to a new kind of political sensitivity toward these structures. Increasingly, people have become aware of bias and stereotypes in media representation. The tender gaze "resists objectification," "decenters the gaze," and opens up space for compassionate and tender ways of looking, understanding, and acting (see 20). Cormican argues that the tender gaze is set in motion by narrative and aesthetic form and that it operates regardless of whether consumers are aware of it or not. It, however subtle and relationally, shifts norms and opens up new political perspectives. Turning from cinema to live performance, Jennifer M. William offers close readings of contemporary theater productions that elicit the tender gaze. William evokes Brecht's political theater but against the assertion that in order for theater to "work" politically it needs to disengage emotionally, William shows that politics are deeply intertwined with affect. Disentangling the two might not only be impossible but it is theoretically flawed. In addition to Brecht's idea that political theater should aim to spur people into action, William presents case studies of contemporary German stage productions to explore "the potential of theater . . . to foster empathy and compassion . . . even in nonconventional, nonidentificatory performances" (45). These first two chapters, written by the coeditors of the volume, set the tone for the following essays; they also set the bar high. Both convincingly show how the tender gaze not only offers new analytical insights, but they also express the hope that it might "motivate us as a society to continue co-creating performance and embodying politics together, so that the urgency of addressing our shared social dilemma is kept foremost in mind" (44). These aims summarize the explicitly political and deeply theoretical project that the book sets out to undertake. The following ten essays offer examples of reading the tender gaze in film, theater, and literature. The topics range from contemporary anti-racist documentary films (see Nancy Nenno's essay on Mo Asumang) and discussions of films from the last few decades (Nikhil Sathe, Erika Nelson Mukherjee, Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien, John Blair, and Gary Schmidt) to analyses of nineteenth-century literature and poetry (Lorna Martens, Anna-Rebecca Nowicki, and Joseph D. Rockelmann). The book concludes with an essay on a contemporary literary example (Christina Weiler's essay on Birgit [End Page 393] Vanderbeke). Among these chapters, the essays on films offer the most convincing application of the analytical framework; the tender gaze, however, also...

In 1975, Laura Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, introducing the "Male Gaze" theory to analyze film/TV media, arguing female characters are objectified as targets of male gaze. Inheriting Freud's scopophilia concept, the theory highlights women's passive position and loss of gaze rights due to gender in modern media. During the 1990s feminist second wave, black feminists critiqued its implicit racial bias. Bell hooks (born Gloria Watkins) redefined feminism in Black Looks: Race and Representation, integrating popular culture critique with feminist media analysis and proposing the "Oppositional Gaze." She challenged Mulvey's focus on white heterosexual male gaze, emphasizing its neglect of race-class-gender intersectionality. Bell posited gaze as a resistance tool for marginalized groups to actively interpret visual culture and subvert dominant power structures. Her theory prioritizes individual subjective agency, advocates diverse group perspectives, and opposes monolithic gazing to foster visual culture inclusivity. As Chinese female fans' RPS (Real Person Slash) practices align with the Oppositional Gaze theory, this paper analyzes how marginalized audiences employ gaze as resistance in contemporary cultural contexts.