The aim of this article is to reveal the ongoing currency of Third Cinema’s politics in view of the Anthropocene through a close reading of Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost (2021). The introductory part of the article addresses the continuing relevance of Third Cinema’s politics and connects it with research interested in decolonising the Anthropocene. In the main corpus, I proceed to analyse Neptune Frost through a Third cinematic lens. I argue that the study of the film can participate in recent debates on the importance of problematising the “we” of human responsibility for the Anthropocene. 1

This article argues that Palestinian cinema can collectively be understood as adopting a crip aesthetic that gives expression to how, after Jasbir K. Puar (2017) , Palestinians are routinely and systematically rendered disabled, or debilitated, by the Israel Occupation Forces. It is through the twin lenses of disability theory and critical race theory that I propose the concept of cinephilistinism, a term that attempts two things: firstly, to express an essayistic opposition to both a cinematic settler-colonial occupation and the support, be that tacit or explicit, lent to that occupation by various purportedly cinephilic institutions; and, secondly, to function as a means for currying what Steven Salaita might term, apropos of Indigenous and Palestinian relations (but here applied to Palestinian solidarity networks more generally), “inter/nationalism” or “solidarity, transnationalism, intersectionality, kinship, or intercommunalism” with Palestine at this moment of intensified Israeli state brutality. What is more, the article will latterly pitch cinephilistinism against a western theological Zionist myth regarding the (Second) Coming, which has Palestine as its focus, such that the battle for Palestinian freedom becomes the battle for the future of humanity, with cinema playing a key role in this struggle.

Like any theoretical term, the phrase “culturally specific”, together with its conceptual affiliates such as cultural difference, the local, native and indigenous, invites different approaches of exploration, but in the context of Hong Kong culture, including film and literature, the question that seems unavoidable is how the culturally specific as such has become or persisted as a question worth asking. In a world that is often described as global, simultaneous and instantaneous, on the one hand, and as subject to systemic racialization and racism, on the other, can cultural specificity be understood in terms of a temporal lag and a pause against that incessant stream of simultaneity and instantaneity, and in terms of an affective cluster distinct from the hegemonically mandated, academic notions of “race”?

This article discusses Göran Olsson’s 2014 documentary film, Concerning Violence: Nine Chapters of the Anti-Imperialistic Defense. The film’s handling of a continental archive has gone relatively unexamined and has indeed been neglected, given how ambitious Olsson’s documentary is in terms of the breadth of its coverage of African resistance struggles across the continent. This article examines whether and how Olsson’s documentary, in its piecing together of found footage of or pertaining to 1960s and 1970s anticolonial movements, expresses an instance of the cinema becoming yet another apparatus for the reinstantiation of the absences and distortions of the archive. Though the aesthetic strategies the film deploys experiment with and expand upon a conventional documentary realist approach, the racially gendered images of the colonized that unfold from the documentary footage that comprises Concerning Violence are images which unsettle, exceed, and interrogate even the most radically reflexive tendencies of the film’s documentary realism. Ultimately, what we find in Concerning Violence are irruptions, in and through the film’s stylistic composition of image and sound, that are exorbitant to the documentary enterprise that seeks to capture them.

Artificial people, far from embodying the false promise of a post-racial future, come to be inscribed with signifiers of race across science fiction film and television. However, like Western philosophy’s theorisation of technology, on-screen imaginations of artificial people are overwhelmingly white. With the help of critical race theory and critical philosophies of race, this article explores what it means for an artificial person to be Black. It brings a comprehensive account of the racialisation of technology, both off- and on-screen, into conversation with the work of Afrofuturist musician Janelle Monáe. Together, these complementary frameworks form the basis from which to consider Monáe’s performance as a Black android in the television series Electric Dreams (2017–18) episode “Autofac” (2018), adapted from the work of Philip K. Dick. Reading “Autofac” through Monáe’s crossover stardom enables negotiated cultural tensions of race and technology to emerge from a text that opts out of explicitly addressing the issue of race. In doing so, this article elucidates how film and television draw upon, contribute to and actively shape the inextricability of technology and race.

This article explores the unraveling of subjectivity under conditions of imperial and genocidal trauma. It does so by staging encounters between critical race theory, psychoanalytic and post/colonial approaches through a transnational Asian consideration of Cambodian and Palestinian documentary films made by Rithy Panh, Raed Andoni and Kamal Aljafari. In particular I consider the psychical-philosophical dimensions of picturing the unspeakable effects of war and genocide, both in terms of Global South filmmakers and participants, as well as theoretical audiences, especially via the notion of unraveling as it relates to Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the quilting point”, wherein signification is forged. Representations of trauma, particularly genocide, do not suture the spectator to an imaginary world, as per traditional psychoanalytic film theory; rather, they unquilt at its site/sight, leaving the spectator in a psychotic limbo. Finally, this article reworks Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by analyzing the political and phantasmatic structures sustaining the west’s silence about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.

This article argues that Lisa Jackson’s Savage (2009), Elle -Máijá Tailfeathers’ Bloodland (2009) and A Red Girl’s Reasoning (2012), and Danis Goulet’s Night Raiders (2021) exemplify an Indigenous feminist cinema that has rapidly gained traction by innovatively mobilizing genre to frame specific historical injustices and their residual challenges in the present. These filmmakers’ considerable successes attest to the visibility of a transnational collective of Indigenous women filmmakers currently supporting each other to take advantage of unprecedented industrial opportunities. Their films are distinctly feminist in that they draw attention to Indigenous women’s experiences in heteropatriarchal and colonial social systems. Moreover, Jackson, Tailfeathers and Goulet harness recognizable conventions of genre, in particular horror, to express Indigenous feminist concerns in a visual and narrative language legible to a wide range of viewers. Analysis reveals the overhaul of well-worn storytelling devices to restore pride of place in decolonial authorial maneuvers that the article links to a network of concepts that Indigenous film scholars and practitioners have developed to assert and defend narrative sovereignty, which has evolved considerably from its “nothing by us without us” origins. Provocative examples of the new terrain of Fourth Cinema, Savage, Bloodland, A Red Girl’s Reasoning and Night Raiders demonstrate the vitality and diversity of Indigenous feminist genre cinema’s strong claim to narrative sovereignty.