Accented Cinema Research Articles

The accented Japanese screenplay: Transnational currents in contemporary Japanese cinema

Japanese cinema in the early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Japanese-language films written by non-Japanese screenwriters. The arrival of these screenwriters and screenplays complicates existing discourses on ‘nation’ and the transnational in Japanese cinema. In particular, it adds to the tensions around East–West binaries that often permeate considerations of non-Japanese contact with cinematic representations of Japan and requires industry practitioners and researchers to re-consider notions of ‘Japan’ and cultural contact in cinema from Japan. Drawing on the concept of ‘accented cinema’, this article positions Japanese screenplays by non-Japanese screenwriters as accented Japanese screenplays. Two such screen texts are critiqued to suggest the dialogic inevitability of polyvocal interpretations of accented Japanese screenplays with regard to issues of privilege and marginalization, as well as the national and the transnational.

"Interstitial Spaces and Sites of Struggle": Displacement, Identity, and Belonging in Contemporary French Accented Cinema

This essay focuses on three “accented cinema” films that creatively blend the autobiographical, performative, fictional, and documentary to interpret how identities are created at the intersection of displacement and belonging and are shaped by selective and multiple affinities to colonial cultures, ancestral cultures, and adopted host cultures. The films represent historical “moments” and follow a historical chronology, highlighting the permanency of being displaced and displacement in France, the said Republic of Equality. Watani: un monde sans mal (Watani: A World Without Evil, 1998) by Med Hondo depicts several racist incidents in Paris, including the Sans-Papiers Affair of 1996; La Marche (The Marchers, 2013) by Nabil Ben Yadir recreates the 1983 Marseilles to Paris “Marche Pour l’Egalité et Contre le Racisme”; and Paris Stalingrad (2019) by Hind Meddeb and Thim Naccachechronicles refugees struggling to make a home for themselves in street camps in the Stalingrad district of Paris.

Her resistance is many: the accented filmmaking practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan

ABSTRACT This paper aims to understand the “accented” documentary practice of Mizgin Müjde Arslan, a contemporary Kurdish female filmmaker who was born in Turkey but lives in diaspora. I will discuss her filmmaking through the features of accented cinema, developed by Hamid Naficy and furthered by Asuman Suner. These features are multi-perspectivity, liminality, being the subject and the storyteller simultaneously, deconstructing the borders, replacing the history with a new memory, and cyclicity. As Naficy’s model lacks the gender dimension in its imagery of nation, identity and belonging, I will discuss his model from a broader perspective by adapting Suner’s approach, adding the gender dimension into my discussions. For this purpose, I will use the principles of “accented feminism”, a term I develop within the paper and draw the concept of “accented feminist cinema” from.

The unspoken languages of Alain Gomis’s cinema: space, sound, and the body

This article examines the body, space, and sound in three of Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis’s feature films, Andalucia (2007), Tey (2012), and Félicité (2017). These narrative and aesthetic strategies situate Gomis’s work within Hamid Naficy’s concept of accented cinema and Laura Marks’s category of intercultural cinema. The multisensoriality of Gomis’s films, notably evoking the aural and tactile senses, expand my discussion beyond the visual and align his approach with current areas of inquiry in film studies. I argue that these unspoken languages offer new possibilities for considering the decentering project of cinéma-monde as they transcend geographical borders, linguistic boundaries, and historically defined binaries.

A Deleuzean Look on Tony Gatlif’s Accented Cinema

This study aims to discuss Tony Gatlif's "accented cinema", which deals with the lives of minorities and nomads and the reflexivity brought by these lives in many of his films, in terms of philosophical expansions. The original style which the director build by using cinema’s means about being a Gypsy or from an ethnic minority, while opening the majorities to questioning, it transforms the film watching experience to a specific intellectual adventure. In Gatlif's approach, which includes elements that coincide with Hamid Naficy's definition of "accented cinema", nomadism emerges as a minor element and, nomadic Gypsy communities, inside all the inhabitants of the world, display a minor existence. This philosophical reflexivity in Gatlif’s films, which is similar to Kafka in terms of masterfully presenting words of a minor community, is examined by focusing on, Latcho Drom (1992), Gadjo Dilo (1997), Exils (2004), Transylvania (2006) and Korkoro (2009) films. Questions like revealing reflexivities in terms of director’s accented images and what these elements mean on account of difference and minor cinema debates, form the film analyses’ basic questioning fields and the obtained findings are discussed by taking reference of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts who see cinema as a philosophical perception and thinking activity. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of difference and minor cinema approach are the intellectual background of this study to be made on Gatlif cinema.

The Complexities of Exile, the Other, and the Postcolonial Predicament in Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cáit Murphy argues that Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) expresses an “accented style,” citing Hamid Naficy’s theorization of accented cinema in his 2001 study, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Drawing on Denis’s own exilic background, Murphy analyzes the depiction of contradictory exile in Denis’s film. Working from Naficy’s criteria for accented cinema, such as epistolarity, cultural hybridity, and Bakhtinian chronotopes, Murphy argues that the film’s protagonist Galoup (Denis Lavant) and the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti are paradoxical representations of belonging and Otherness.

Subtitling into ELF. When accessibility becomes a counter information tool

This study investigates the modalities by means of which the visual arts have recently been transformed by migration, and how aesthetic transformations within the context of (sub)titling have contributed to re-shaping identities and minority groups in filmic genres. The growing interest in migratory aesthetics has brought into representation marginalised subjectivities (i.e. the lives of Italians forced to emigrate from Libya after the Gadhafi coup d’etat as the case in point in this work) in ways that depart from migrant depictions in the conventional media (e.g. the news bulletins). Against the backdrop of translation as a form of re-narration and an instrument of accessibility, and drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics as a method of survey, this study examines the (sub)titling activity in English lingua franca in what may be referred to as “accented cinema”, namely the documentary film My Home, in Libya (2018) directed by Italian filmmaker Martina Melilli. Creativity and experimentation are central to this work of art, also thanks to the use of (sub)titling procedures employed as aesthetic and linguistic devices that go beyond translation proper while covering the filmic narrative areas in terms of authorial titling and diegetic interventions. Against the normative background of subtitles in English lingua franca , (sub)titling is perceived as a practice that encourages the mediation of migrant and marginalised stories, and as a space of re-narration where screen textualities like pieces of (sub)titles give voice to characters’ inaudible thoughts.

Transnational Dimensions of Iranian Cinema: “accented films” by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf left Iran in 2005 shortly after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The artist underwent a multiphase evolution away from the supporter of Islamic regime in the early 1980s to cosmopolitan internationally acclaimed auteur. Finally, he became not only a dissident filmmaker but also a political dissident in the aftermath of 2009 presidential election. As exile wears on, Makhmalbaf became postnational filmmaker, making a variety of “accented films”. Not all the consequences of internationalization are positive – to be successful in transnational environment he has to face much larger competition and the capitalist market. Having in mind the categories of displaced Iranian directors distinguished by Hamid Naficy – exilic, diasporic, émigré, ethnic, cosmopolitan – I would like to find out which one of them applies to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s life and work. I also will focus on the following questions: To what extent the censorship of Makhmalbaf’s artistic activity was a reason for his migration? how are migratory experiences expressed in his movies? What features of “the accented cinema” his movies are manifesting? I would argue that the experience of migration and the transnationality was the characteristic feature of Makhmalbaf’s his work long before leaving the home country. It can be said that regardless this stylistic diversity, all of Makhmalbaf’s movies made abroad can be described as the example of “accented cinema” which comprises different types of cinema made by exilic and diasporic filmmakers who live and work in countries other than their country of origin.

Poetic documentary as visual ethnography: Liwaa Yazji’s Haunted (Maskoon) (2014)

ABSTRACT Syrian documentary filmmaker, poet, playwright and translator Liwaa Yazji’s long-form documentary ‘Haunted’ (2014) follows nine individuals’ experiences of home, including a couple in Damascus that remain trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian of Palestinian descent who fled from Syria to Lebanon and a Syrian refugee family temporarily inhabiting a former prison. Similar to a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117), Yazji guides viewers through multiple digital, geographical and affective spaces. This article demonstrates Yazji’s documentary as concerned with longstanding anthropological questions about possession, kinship, remains, the everyday and the temporal and as a work of ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press) that emerges from the filmmaker’s personal experience of displacement and migration, and focuses on journeying, home-seeking, homelessness, rootedness and dislocation. It argues her film’s ethnographic way of seeing and sensing problematizes categories of poetic documentary and visual and sensory ethnography. The article explains its importance for scholars of forced migration, conflict and the after-effects of violence and for problematizing the definition of ethnographic film and its power in conveying the plurality of the world (Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press), one currently largely inaccessible to ethnographers, filmmakers and journalists.

Displacement, exile and incarceration commuted into cinematic vision

Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (Behrouz Boochani and Arash Kamali Sarvestani, 2017) is a documentary that exposes the systematic torture of refugees banished by the Australian Government to Manus Prison (in Papua New Guinea and officially called the Manus Regional Processing Centre). Shot clandestinely from a mobile phone camera by Boochani and smuggled out for codirection with Kamali Sarvestani, the film documents an important phase in the history of migration to Australia. This article analyses the film by foregrounding the experience of displacement, exile and incarceration as a unique cinematic standpoint. Boochani’s cinematic vision and socio-political critique will be interpreted in terms of embodied knowing and his existential predicament. The symbiotic relationship between the experience of seeking asylum, exile, imprisonment and the filmmaking process raises critical questions regarding the film as anti-genre, common tropes used to define refugeehood, and the criteria necessary to interpret and evaluate cultural production created from this unique position. The article draws on theories pertaining to accented cinema and incorporates ideas from social epistemology. Furthermore, it considers the author’s dialogue and collaboration with Boochani and Kamali Sarvestani and examines the significance of various contributors to the filmmaking process and cinematic vision.

So ‘foreign’ it’s good: the cultural politics of accented cult cinema

ABSTRACTWhile the canon of so-bad-it’s-good cinema has predominantly centred upon American films, it is notable that a significant number of recent entries – including Miami Connection, Troll 2, Samurai Cop, The Room and Birdemic: Shock and Terror – were directed by non-American filmmakers working in America. Building on Hamid Naficy’s use of the concept ‘accented cinema’ to describe exilic and diasporic filmmakers working in the West, this article explores the cultural politics of accented cult cinema and investigates to what extent the celebration of these low-budget exploitation films as so-bad-it’s-good relies upon a (largely disguised) perception of foreignness.

The Camorra Comedy: Naples in the (Post-)National Cinematic Gaze

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the contemporary Camorra comedy film with reference to the transition from a predominantly local to an increasingly national cinematic gaze on Naples. Focusing on Paola Randi’s Into paradiso (2010) and the Manetti Bros.’ Song ’e Napule (2013), and drawing on theoretical frameworks relating to post-national and accented cinema, as well as to the nexus between national identity and masculinity, it asks what role comedy plays in the national film industry construction of Naples and its relationship with the Camorra. I argue that Into Paradiso’s overt projection of a post-national consciousness is diluted by its recourse to problematic historical discourses and stereotypes relating to the Italian south and its blindness to subnational inflections of Italianness. In contrast, Song ’e Napule’s rehabilitation of Neapolitan popular culture on the part of the anti-Camorra struggle encourages a broad reframing of the discussion of Italian national culture in the terms of differently accented practices, discourses, and identities.

Accented Spatial Representations in the Internal Exilic Eelam-Tamil Film Viduthalai Moochu

Studies have shown that accented filmmaking features and strategies are indeed appearing in wide-ranging films of contemporary cinemas. The main focus of this paper is to analyze Viduthalai Moochu, an internal exilic Eelam-Tamil film from Sri Lanka, using a concept derived from Hamid Naficy’s theorization of An Accented Cinema known as the “preoccupation with the place.” The concept is cinematically expressed through the open, closed, and third spacetime cinematic formations. It needs to be noted here that Naficy’s theory offers a range of accented cinematic features that express accent in the film. However, the paper will only focus on the film’s spatial representations that are configured according to the space-time formations. Space-time formations are cinematic features that are employed to produce and reproduce the “accent” through cinematic representations of spaces and places rendered in the film. The configurations of the space-time formations will be used as the basis to examine Viduthalai Moochu, a film that does not seem to demonstrate the familiar conventions of filmmaking. The film mainly grapples with themes that enunciate the Eelam-Tamil displacement and deterritorialization in the internal exilic situation. The analysis shows how a particular version of alternative filmmaking strategy exclusively uses spatial representations to render themes of displacement and deterritorialization. The findings prove that the makers of Viduthalai Moochu have indeed employed the space-time formations to highlight the displacement and the deterritorialization of the Eelam-Tamil community through cinematic spatial representations.

Latin American Cinemas Beyond Borders: A Dialogue Between Different Cultures

Latin American Cinemas Beyond Borders: A Dialogue Between Different Cultures Toloo Riazi Tierney, Dolores. New Transnationalism in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018. 224 pp. ISBN 978-0-748645-732. In New Transnationalism in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas, Dolores Tierney puts her analysis of transnationality as a crucial axis into practice studying six Latin American directors: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles, and Juan José Campanella. Some critics consider the transnational films of these directors to be highly influenced by Hollywood style. Key to Tierney’s approach is her view of transnationality as the means by which the aforementioned directors are able to benefit from resources and influences outside the geopolitical and aesthetic borders of their own national cinemas (1–5). As she observes, transnationality corresponds to both non-local and local trends. With a similar idea in mind, she tries to show both the influence from within on those Latin American directors and the particularization of each one in maintaining his own ideological traits. The text posits several approaches to tackling the intersection of national cultures and that of geographically dispersed Hollywood (9). An increase in the number of transnational productions in Latin America, Tierney argues, was a response to various factors such as withdrawing of national financial support and protectionist measures from certain directors by the state (2). It is the author’s intention to go beyond the dichotomy between the ways in which scholars see Latin American directors as advocates of Hollywood cinema versus the rest of the world. She identifies the deterritorialized directors as “interstitial authors” negotiating between different cultures. By deterritorialized films, she means movies that are produced or co-produced outside the boundaries of a director’s national cinema and usually, but not always, filmed in English. In her analysis of Latin American cinemas, the author looks for alternative boundaries that challenge mainstream assumptions based on which the six studied directors produce necessarily effaced and consequently Hollywood-influenced movies. By drawing on Naficy, Tierney argues that transnational directors produce an accented cinema that shows traces of displacement (10). Tierney includes a detailed history of Latin American cinemas by integrating relevant statistics regarding the top box office, genres, and cinematic productions in each region. As she indicates, transnationalism has [End Page 167] exercised a decisive influence on the process of filmmaking of the six mentioned directors. Such influences include popular Hollywood genres, funding sources, global marketing, and film distribution. Structurally, Tierney’s book is divided into three major parts with an introduction. The first part, which contains three chapters, focuses on Mexico. The second and third parts contain two chapters on Brazil and one chapter on Argentina, respectively. In the beginning, the author highlights the historical veins of contemporary Mexican, Brazilian, and Argentinian cinema. She rounds out her argument for transnationalism in Latin American cinemas with a brief epilogue focusing on Gravity, Birdman, The Reverent, and Crimson Peak. Each country is analyzed from a fourfold perspective: “descriptive chronologies of [national industries]; the industry and/or legislative shifts which facilitated these directors’ initial domestic successes, the industry and legislative shifts that have taken place alongside their deterritorialized successes, as well as accounts of the directors’ ongoing relationship(s) to filmmaking in their own countries” (26). The first section begins with background information on contemporary Mexican cinema, then scrutinizes four transnational films by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel, and Biutiful) in the first chapter. While the chapter touches upon some broader issues, the focus is upon Iñárritu as a director without borders (47). The author traces a line of continuity between Iñárritu’s films and shows that “rather than purely imitate Hollywood or US traditions (as some scholarship has suggested) his films embody a perspective aligned with Mexico, Latin America and more broadly the people of the Global South” (27). In the second chapter, Tierney weds a critical understanding of transnationalism to Alfonso Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja, Y tu mamá también, and Children of Men. First, the author examines the commercial genres of Cuarón’s films, such as romantic comedies and road movies...

Accented Style: On Namewee’s Sinophone Malaysian Film and Rap Songs

Focusing on Namewee’s rap songs and his film, this essay uses Sinophone theory and accented cinema theory to explore how sound and image are used to perform Sinophone identity through journeys of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The essay demonstrates that Namewee’s works are neither a national allegory nor an exilic/diasporic allegory, and therefore that neither the perspective of national discourse nor diaspora discourse can adequately frame his works. Sinophone Malaysian accented cinema is an appropriate one from which to approach Namewee’s films. In the theoretical framework of accented cinema, Namewee is a postcolonial ethnic and identity filmmaker; in the Malaysian context he is “not quite” equal to Malays, and neither is he accepted or trusted as a full citizen. The accented style of Namewee’s works is intimately linked to localization, diaspora and against-diaspora experiences, and Chinese–Malay relations. He has successfully updated the understanding that accented style can only be produced from exile/diaspora experience, demonstrating that against-diaspora experience and localization can also create an accented style. This essay analyzes the re-presentation of Sino-Malay relations in Namewee’s works and discovers that they refuse to rely on the standard ethnic framework. Rather, the accented style of these works gives play to the multiply mediated, multidirectional critical agency of Sinophone theory: the Sinification discourse of “authenticity” is criticized, while at the same time a performance of national identities is used to resist the presence of racism and expose the essentialized Malay mythologization of indigeneity.

The Camera in House Arrest. Tactics of Non-Cinema in Jafar Panahi’s Films

Abstract In close intratextual connection with earlier pieces of Jafar Panahi’s oeuvre, pre-eminently The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Offside (2006), his recent films made in illegality, including This Is Not a Film (In film nist, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardeh, Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi, 2013) and Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015), reformulate the relationship between cinema and the “real,” defying the limitations of filmmaking in astounding ways. The paper addresses the issue of non-cinema, pertaining to those instances of cinematic “impurity” in which “the medium disregards its own limits in order to politically interfere with the other arts and life itself” (Nagib 2016, 132). Panahi’s overtly confrontational (non-)cinematic discourse is an eminent example of “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001). His artisanal and secret use of the camera in deterritorialized conditions and extreme limitations as regards profilmic space – house arrest, fake taxi interior – gives way for multilayered reflexivity, incorporating non-actorial presence, performative self-filming and theatricality as subversive gestures, with a special emphasis on the off-screen and remediated video-orality performed in front of, or directly addressed to the camera. The paper explores the ways in which the filmmaker’s tactics become powerful gestures of “politicized immediacy” (Naficy 2001, 6) that call for the (inter)medial as an also indispensably political act ((Schröter 2010).

Multilingual Strategies in Rachid Bouchareb's Hors la loi

ABSTRACTThis essay focuses on the complex entanglement of the French and Arabic languages and notes the unfortunate absence of Berber languages in Bouchareb's 2010 Algerian war feature film Hors la loi. Starting from Hamid Naficy's insights about “accented cinema,” the essay analyzes the main characters’ accents in both French and Arabic, various levels of phonological and morphological integration of French loan words into Spoken Algerian Arabic (darija) in the film, as well as the presence of Arabic words in French, demonstrating that colonial contact and migration have created a situation in which both languages and cultures have influenced each other over time. The essay also analyzes the use of specific darija words and the role of code-switching in developing a double-voiced critique of both French and Algerian cultural politics. Finally, the essay explains how Bouchareb's multilingual strategies contribute to making the film relevant at the national, transnational, and regional levels.

Léolo’s fantasized Italy: Family romance and accented cinema in Quebec

Abstract Although directed by a Francophone Québécois film-maker, Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992) presents a cinematic treatment of Italy that foregrounds exile as theorized by Hamid Naficy’s concept of ‘accented cinema’. Léolo also recasts the family romance trope, which Heinz Weinmann highlights as central to Quebec cinema. Meanwhile, commentators have stressed the deeply political dimensions of Léolo despite Lauzon’s disavowal of any nationalist intent. This film consequently provides insights into the ambivalent role of Italians in Quebec’s struggle to confront the challenges posed by immigration and by its own colonial history. The current article therefore explores Léolo through a framework combining accented cinema and the family romance, and juxtaposes this text with Caffè Italia Montréal, a film which epitomizes accentedness in the context of Quebec’s Italian community. This analysis thus reveals how, in Léolo, a cinematically unasserted Indigenous influence intertwines with overtly fantasized Italianness to complicate Lauzon’s position on national identity. In so doing, this article comes to affirm the centrality of Indigenous concerns for grasping intercultural relationships whether formed through colonialism or contemporary immigration.

Accented cinema and beyond: Latin American minor cinemas in Sweden, 1970–1990

Abstract The aim of this article is to map and present professional and non-professional Latin American film-making that took place in Sweden from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Most of the films from this period have been excluded from the established, canonical film history, both nationally and internationally. Another aim of the article is to argue for the importance of the concept of ‘minor cinemas’. This concept has the benefit of overcoming generalizing and reductive models of analysis and the historiography of Latin American film-making beyond that continent. Owing to an extensive focus on political documentary, third cinema, or the aesthetics of accented cinemas, the diversity of Latin American film-making in countries like Sweden has been neglected. Thus, this article calls for a transnational historiography that also encompasses minor histories and presents a critique of Hamid Naficy’s seminal theory of an accented cinema. In terms of theory, the article argues for a return to the theoretical interventions of the concept of minor cinemas made by David E. James and for a reactualization of Zuzana M. Pick’s early study on exilic Chilean cinema.

Irish Intercultural Cinema: Memory, Identity and Subjectivity

Irish intercultural cinema looks at the development of a cinematic genre which focuses on issues of Irish migrancy but is produced outside of Ireland. This paper has as its focus the cultural landscape of Irish-Australia. The essay uses methodologies of ethnographic and documentary theory plus textual analysis of film and written texts to establish a throughline of Irish intercultural film. The essay begins by contextualising the place of the Irish diaspora within the creation of Irish identity globally. The discussion around migrancy is widened to consider the place of memory and intergenerational tensions within not just the Irish migrant population, but also within the diverse cultures which comprise the contemporary Australian landscape. The historical development of intercultural cinema is then explored internationally within a context of colonial, gender and class struggles in the 1970s and1980s. The term intercultural cinema has its origins in the Third Cinema of Argentinians Solanas and Getino in the 1970s and covers those films which deal with issues involving two countries or cultures. The term was refined by Laura Marks in 2000 and further developed by Hamid Naficy in 2001 in his discussion of accented cinema which narrows its definition to include the politics of production. The paper then traces the development of Irish intercultural cinema from its beginnings in England in the 1970s with Thaddeus O'Sullivan through to Nicola Bruce and others including Enda Murray in the present day. The essay concludes by bringing these various strands together to see where intercultural film might have a place in today's globalised cultural landscape. Common traits within intercultural film such as the notion of place, autobiographical film and personal identity are explored using examples of intercultural filmmaking from around the globe. These commonalities point to a way forward for the future of a sustainable multicultural film culture.