ABSTRACT Stillwater McCarthy (2021) brings together Matt Damon, a Hollywood star with cosmopolitan credentials, and Marseille, a crucible of civilizations often described as a cosmopolitan city. Damon plays Bill Baker, an Oklahoman redneck who must travel regularly to Marseille to visit his daughter in jail. For Bill, a character from a small, quiet mid-U.S. town, Marseille is all excess and opacity, almost impossible to navigate. Large parts of the film are spoken in French, a language that the protagonist neither speaks nor understands.This article uses a cosmopolitan perspective to explore the consequences of the encounter between the Hollywood star and the European city. As will be argued, the ambivalent cosmopolitanism of both Damon’s star persona and Marseille converge in an irresistible but ultimately impossible way. This article explores the dynamics between these two drives by means of a spatial perspective that sheds some light on the multiplying facets of cosmopolitanism in contemporary cinema, including mainstream cinema, and highlights the fraught interface between cosmopolitanism as a utopian ethical aspiration and political agenda, on the one hand, and an everyday reality, on the other.

ABSTRACT Given the restricted number of foreign films which can be officially screened in Mainland China and restrictions on the portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in visual media, international queer cinema tends to be screened at non-theatrical events such as film festivals, film clubs and café screenings. Building on existing work on Chinese film festival studies, this article draws attention to the wider ecosystem of screening practices in China, which engage with international queer film culture through their choice of films and also their mediations of LGBTQ+ cultures. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how such events navigate language difference through translation, how they engage audiences through discussion or other means, and how they participate in the pink economy. The sorts of negotiation of meaning taking place demonstrate the complexity of transcultural queer cinema practices. The reception of films in translation leads to a notion of queer cinema in China as a cosmopolitan but local activity that contributes to local worldmaking practices.

ABSTRACT Hakim Belabbes’s Collapsed Walls (2022) is an innovative Moroccan film that visually retells a set of stories from the life experience of the filmmaker in the city of Bejaad (Morocco). Grounding our work in transnational cinematic approaches and in cultural studies, our reading of Collapsed Walls attempts to holistically (de)encode the filmic construction of the contextual, the formal, and the thematic narratives that suffuse the film. We shed light on how this film engages with Belabbes’s cinematic style and how the Moroccan cultural identity is reshaped through his poetic filmic narratives. The methodology is bolstered by non-participant observation at the avant-première of the film in Casablanca on 20 May 2022, as well as an interview with the film director. Belabbes was trained in Chicago, where he lives, but the transnationality of his films is blurred by his heavy focus on his hometown, as a source of inspiration and as an iconic representation of his cultural identity. The other main characteristic of the disruptive approach to transnationalism in Belabbes’ films is permeated by what we have dubbed the ‘genre’s transnomadism’, considering the liminal, dialogic and transborder use of genres in Belabbes’ work. Collapsed Walls’ transnational resonances create a disruptive version of experimentation at the heart of the real narrative of the film, creating a knot of contrasts and ambivalent discourses through the negotiation of the real and the unreal, the spiritual and the sublime, the sacred and the profane.

ABSTRACT This article examines the implications of the transnational dynamics of streaming for the Nigerian video film industry (Nollywood) considering its historical predominance of informality in cross-border circulation. Right from its emergence in 1992 as a straight-to-video film industry, Nollywood has been significantly transnational in distribution albeit through the complex web of transnational piracy and other informal networks. This mode of informal transnationalism orchestrated wide visibility for the industry, but it brought minimal revenues for producers who were desirous of much formalised distribution system to connect to transnational capital and audiences. Since 2010, streaming has become progressively integrated into Nollywood’s distribution eco-system and is introducing much formalised transnational consumption practices. Adopting the critical transnationalism approach (Higbee & Lim, 2010; Shaw, 2018), this paper draws from semi-structured interviews with 35 stakeholders in Nollywood and critical analysis of trade press. It argues that streaming has opened formal pathways to transnational capital and audiences hitherto unseen in Nollywood and is orchestrating audience fragmentations and reconfigurations of production practices in the industry. The paper extends existing debates on critical analysis of how specific forms of transnationalism impacts the quotidian practices in a media industry as well as the cultural implications.

ABSTRACT It is a common strategy to analyse Southeast Asian films from a nationalistic perspective limited to a constructed understanding of the nation’s culture and social structure. I argue that social and human movements are critical to understanding Southeast Asian and Nusantara cinematic characters because they are inextricably linked to the region’s current conceptions of national space. The distinctive regional mode of human mobility known as merantau (to sojourn) makes it possible to conceptualise Nusantara as a migration space or, to use Arjun Appadurai’s terminology, an ‘ethnoscape’. The concepts of ‘sedar/sadar’, which roughly translates to ‘self-realisation’, are used to formulate indicators that will become apparent during the examination of Sri Mersing [Beauty from Mersing] (Salleh Ghani, 1961: Malaysia/Singapore) and Tabula Rasa (Adriyanto Dewo, 2014: Indonesia). These regional narratives of migration practise a sense of personal and societal belonging, and cultural identities are critical for contemporary Nusantara nation-states’ national societal development and nation-building processes.

ABSTRACT As the beginnings of the popular Japanese crime genre coincided with the end of American occupation, this genre offers a space of historically visible transnationality. Through formal analysis, this research identifies a cultural plurality embedded within crime cinema. Examining the adoption of film noir aesthetics in Japan alongside the development of the nationalistic ninkyō eiga (chivalry film), I argue the crime genre formed as a culturally hybrid genre in tension between these conflicting identities. The crime film demonstrates a dialectical tension between local and international cultural signifiers and cinematic styles, which result in a set of hybrid symbols that repeat on-end the dialectic tension embedded in their formation.

ABSTRACT The first silent epic Italian film, Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone with the screenplay co-written by the director and the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was used as an educational tool at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1915. The film’s plot unfolds during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). The film’s narrative is pro-empire propaganda for Italy’s recent occupation of Libya (1911–1912). The visual narrative is rich in colonial rhetoric. It shows the viewers the friendship between the enslaved man Maciste, interpreted by a white man wearing blackface, and the Roman soldier and colonizer Fulvio Axilla. This essay analyses the film’s construction of racialized bodies and locates it within the larger context of cultural assimilation through visual technologies applied at the Carlisle school. This analysis focuses on the intermedial imagination of a progressive whitening process in moving pictures, photographs, and lantern slides used at the school.

ABSTRACT The article explores the role that cosmopolitan love plays in the cinematic partnership of émigré director Jules Dassin and Greek star Melina Mercouri. In defining cosmopolitan love, it employs a conceptual framework informed by Simmel’s theorisation of the ‘stranger’ and Barthes’s analysis of ‘a lover’s discourse’. It offers a detailed and historically rooted understanding of stardom, performance, and aesthetics in the films of Dassin and Mercouri tracing changes in the director’s film aesthetics and in the star’s performance style. It argues that these transformations, demonstrated through a comparison between Never on Sunday and Phaedra, are substantially the outcome of a struggle to reconcile their cosmopolitan positions with love as a cosmopolitan disposition. The article uses this specific case study to propose an agonistics of cosmopolitan love that stands in opposition to ethical approaches such as Levinas’s for whom love is a form of ‘being-for-the-other’.

Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) tells the story of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen, who, in learning that their spouses are engaged in an affair, fall in love themselves. However, in vowing to “never be like them,” Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen abandon their affections and, by the end of the film, go their separate ways. As many have suggested, In the Mood for Love is as much a melodramatic love story as it is an allegory of Hong Kong’s precarious political situation since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. But rather than understanding the failure of their relationship in the limited sense of Wong’s representation of the difficulties ahead for Hong Kong’s political reunification with China, we argue that In the Mood for Love should be read as Wong’s portrayal of an opening to a form of life and identity that resists the narrative of Chinese essentialism often purported by the CCP. We explore this potentiality by examining how Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen’s role-playing of their spouses’ affair, the film’s non-linear sense of time and the continual juxtaposition and confluence of East and West through dress, food, and music function as constructs of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal image. We further contend that the film’s repeated use of the crystal image suggests a Deleuzian reading of the potential processes of deterritorialization and, what we call, Sinophone becoming for both individuals and communities that constitute the Chinese diaspora.

ABSTRACT Raja Amari is best known for her fiction features Red Satin (2002), Buried Secrets (2009) and Foreign Body (2016), in which she dissects the mythologisation of mother and daughter relationships by underlining difficult communication and co-dependence. Her less well-known documentaries Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020) likewise explore the bonds between women of different generations and across geographical, religious and political borders. In this article, I investigate Amari’s transnational documentary strategies that foreground the multitude of women’s voices, storytelling strategies, performative identity formation, and female agency. These two documentaries focus on the body of work of extra-ordinary women, who force us into an analytical engagement with diverse voices and politics. The documentaries offer insight into the gendered, racial and generational boundaries that are constantly crossed by two young women who lived more than a century apart. This leads to the article’s central argument that transnational documentary studies offer an opportunity to realign transnational screen studies with its subject, the transnational human experience.