Art-house Cinema Research Articles

The Hundred-Year-Old Question: Can American Cinema Be Saved?

The Art House Convergence conference annually brings together hundreds of independent theater owners and supporters of arthouse cinema during the days preceding the Sundance Film Festival. When the organizers invited James Schamus to deliver the keynote address at their 2016 gathering, it was a commission he did not relish. The expected argument of such speeches is pretty much set in stone these days: cinema, understood primarily as feature films meant initially for theatrical exhibition, is under attack, and the keynote speaker's task is to rally the troops in its defense, soliciting applause for recent victories on the battlefield, and railing against the encroachments of the enemies of film, in particular the digital streaming services whose assaults on the sanctity of the theatrical viewing experience, and thus on the aesthetic object known as the theatrical film, grow ever more ferocious with each passing year. Schamus took on the task of delivering that speech, and then transforming it into this article for FQ. He concludes with a rousing plea to all regarding what he terms, “This vicious spiral of longer movies, higher costs and higher ticket prices,” that can only spell disaster for the supporter of truly independent American cinema. Schamus urges readers to stand with him (and all who love the genuine American film experience), to advocate for vibrant, varied, open-ended, hybrid, serial and ongoing open storytelling and entertainment.

Queer encounters: film festivals and the sensual circuits of European cinema in India

This paper offers a sensual history of queer spectatorship in India by bringing together the circulation of European art cinema in India, prior to the 1990s, and the space of queer film festivals that emerges in the last two decades in India. Through a synthesis of ethnographic accounts that reconstruct film viewing experiences and historical investigations of film festival archives I demonstrate that in the long history of mainstream film festivals in India ‘world cinema,’ mediated by European art-house cinema, has functioned as a repository of queer sexuality. This paper juxtaposes the embodied histories of cinematic encounters in India and more recent accounts of curating queer film festivals to disrupt the conception of cinema as a tool to consolidate sexual identities. It explores the non-cohesive subjectivities engendered through practices of film viewing to argue that queer film festivals have a generative power when they disturb, play with and shake the sensorium of the spectator. Thus, the paper draws on encounters between world cinema and its many publics and between the embodied spectator and the screen to open up the very conception of queer cinema as remaking rather than consolidating identities. This paper is one of the first attempts to explore the transnational cultural circuits that embed queer film festivals in South Asia.

Queer African Cinema, Queer World Cinema

Queer African Cinema, Queer World Cinema Lindsey Green-Simms (bio) In their wonderfully ambitious and carefully argued book Queer Cinema in the World, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt discuss the difficulties of defining precisely what queer world cinema is. Citing the limitations of narrow definitions that reduce queer world cinema to productions by or explicitly for queer people, the authors prefer a model that is more capacious and that is free from Western cultural presumptions about what a gay director or gay audience might look like. They argue for an approach that does not "determine in advance what kinds of films, modes of production, and reception might qualify as queer or do queer work in the world" (Schoonover and Galt 2016, 14) and they set out to answer an equally capacious question: given that queer world cinema is such an open-ended category, "where in the world is queer cinema?" (14). Their response takes them to queer film festivals in New York, India and Botswana, and to video stores, bit torrent sites, underground DVD markets in Iran and Egypt and, of course, to sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. Such an itinerary allows them to leave open the definition of cinema, claiming that it is "a space that is never quite resolved or decided" (3), and to side-step the tangled debates about how one defines world cinema. Rather, they opt for a discussion of a queer cinema that "enables different ways of being in the world" and "that creates [End Page 652] different worlds" (5). But to what extent do these claims apply to queer African cinema? Is queer African cinema simply a subset of queer world cinema? Or is it a category that requires new modes of inquiry? Because the categories of "queer" and "cinema" can encompass so many different forms, it does make sense to follow Schoonover and Galt in keeping the definition of the terms as capacious as possible. Moreover, one must always keep in mind that "the invention of Africa" by colonialists, as V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) puts it, means that "Africa" as an epistemological object of knowledge is also always a bit unresolved. But, nevertheless, I contend that it is also productive and generative to step away from some of the expansiveness, open-endedness, and "worlding" of Schoonover and Galt's project to think more particularly and regionally about queer African cinema and the politics of place. In other words, while Schoonover and Galt write about the difficulties of defining queer world cinema, a different set of questions arises when trying to define queer African cinema, especially considering the paucity of queer-identified filmmakers, the absence of any coherent queer film movement, and the role of state censorship boards in trying to limit or prohibit films with queer African characters. What I argue is that in order to understand the world of queer African cinema, one must pay attention not only to the porousness of categories, but also to the various material and political constraints faced by African audiences and African filmmakers in a global world. Any account of queer African cinema must address the multiplicity of worlds and possibilities, as well as borders, censors, budgets, and geographical and financial limits. Whereas Schoonover and Galt are concerned with locating queer cinema in the world or with locating queer worlds in cinema, I ask two more situated questions: "Where in Africa is queer African cinema?" and "Where in queer world cinema is Africa?" Here are my provisional answers. Where in Africa is queer African cinema? Questions of spectatorship have long been important to African cinema studies. Before the rise of the Nigerian and Ghanaian popular video film industries in the 1990s, a constant lament among African filmmakers was the absence of their films from screens on the African continent. African movie theaters tended to exhibit Hollywood or Bollywood films or Kung Fu movies, but the films made by Africans were mostly shown at film festivals (only a handful of which were located on the continent), embassies, or art house cinemas abroad. And though the situation [End Page 653] has improved, African celluloid films are still typically more accessible outside of Africa. When one is talking...

On the beautiful blue Danube: a case study of imagining Europe without Europe in the mid-1990s Slovak Cinema

ABSTRACTThe article discusses specific modes of Europeanisation in Štefan Semjan's Na krásnom modrom Dunaji/On the Beautiful Blue Danube (1994). Despite of its semi-amateur-like appearance, the Slovak film contains a complex inter-textual net that references the mutual interdependence between European, American and Slovak countercultures. This includes paraphrases and quotations from the art of Andy Warhol, the Slovak New Wave, European post-war cinema and American independent film. On the other hand, On the Beautiful Blue Danube is deeply indebted to the hesitation towards opening the borders after 1989. Also, it shares some other significant features with the auteurist oeuvre of the most influential post-socialist Slovak director, Martin Šulík. Taking all these influences into consideration, the article analyses the film's inter-textual references from the perspective of its ambivalent attitude towards Europe. At the same time, the paper discusses the film as alternative to Šulík's version of art house cinema – with special attention given to the director's own conception of a European dialogue.

World-Hating: Apocalypse and Trauma in We Need to Talk about Kevin

Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 film We Need to Talk about Kevin alternates between two narrative times, one occurring before its protagonist Eva’s son commits a terrible crime, and one after. The film invites us to read the crime as a traumatic event in Eva’s life, an event of such terrible force that it transforms Eva’s identity. This essay uses Jacob Taubes’s understanding of Gnosticism to suggest that this event does not transform who Eva is, but rather how she knows. Like a Gnostic believer, Eva comes to understanding the fundamental ontological evil of community life. Eva’s ‘trauma,’ her alienation from the world she occupies, predates Kevin’s crime, but the aftermath of that crime reveals her alienation to her. The worldview thus presented by the film casts some light on how art house films are marketed. Like many middlebrow products, art house films present marketers with the challenge of concealing the fact that the commodity they are selling is indeed a commodity. This ambivalent distrust of the marketplace is a softened repetition of the Gnostic’s anticosmism, and We Need to Talk About Kevin both performs and thematizes a displacement from the world that is primary, not contingent upon any traumatic event.

Packing the affective moment

Abstract If much contemporary German-language art-house cinema exploits film’s potential to use space and time to extend the affective moment, focusing on the gap between action and emotional resolution, The Jacket does the opposite. Instead, it creates a moment of claustrophobic intensity, that nonetheless similarly pivots on the function of affect in film.

Esperantic Modernism: Joyce, Universal Language, and Political Gesture

Esperantic Modernism: Joyce, Universal Language, and Political Gesture Nico Israel (bio) Incubation Period In the 1965 movie Incubus, a pre-Star Trek William Shatner plays, with characteristic avidity, the role of Marc, a wounded soldier who comes to the village of Nomen Tuum in search of curative water. While there, he is seduced by a beautiful young succubus, whose appointed task is to prevent Marc’s recuperation and instead deliver his soul to hell. What transpires is a bit too complicated, or silly, to merit recounting in detail, but suffice it to say, in Hollywood-speak, that the film is an arena where Twilight meets The Twilight Zone meets Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. The director of Incubus, Leslie Stevens, creator of the recently cancelled Outer Limits television series, was seeking a way to make the low-budget black-and-white film distinctively eerie and to market it to the burgeoning art house cinema circuit. He settled on a clever strategy: Incubus’s dialogue would be in the constructed international auxiliary language, Esperanto. Asserting his newly found auteur status, Stevens would not allow the film to be dubbed into any single national language; it would thus always require subtitles. In this case, Esperanto was viewed not as a means of communicating across national borders and promoting universal brotherhood, but of preserving those boundaries, of maintaining an uncanny and succubus-like kernel of foreignness in language itself.1 Ne ĉiam estis tiel—or, to translate Esperanto into English, this was not always so. Esperanto emerged in 1887 with the publication of Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof’s Unua Libro (First [End Page 1] Book). Zamenhof, who lived from 1859 until 1917, was a Bialystok (Russian Empire)-born Lithuanian-Jewish ophthalmologist and amateur philologist, who spoke Russian, Yiddish, Polish, and German as a child and taught himself French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English in early adulthood. In Unua Libro, writing under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor One-Who-Hopes), Zamenhof created the language that would surpass its early rival Volapük to become the world’s best-known and most widely spoken constructed international tongue.2 Zamenhof’s fervent “hope” was to create an auxiliary language that would be easy to learn and could combat the parochialism of national languages that in part generated inter-ethnic and international conflict, these linguistic differences obscuring more fundamental similarities and connections between peoples.3 Almost a decade before the publication of Unua Libro, a teenaged Zamenhof and his friends “canonized” the “universal tongue” by writing and—it is claimed—enthusiastically singing a four-line anthem in proto-Esperanto, expressing the fundamental aims of the movement: Malamikete de las nacjes, Kadó, kadó, jam temp’ está! La tot’ homoze in familje Konunigare so debá. (Korzhenkov, Zamenhof, 14) (Hostile barriers between peoples, Fall, fall, it is time! The whole of humanity Must come together as one family.)4 Within a dozen years of the anthem’s creation, and a mere three years after the initial publication of Unua Libro, Zamenhof’s booklet had been translated (often by Zamenhof himself, sometimes by Esperanto aficionados) into Polish, French, German, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, and Czech. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the language’s popularity grew rapidly, especially among European intellectuals. It was spoken by Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry (1904), Physics (1906), and Peace (1911); it was also advocated by well-known politicians, including French socialist Jean Jaurès, and celebrated writers such as Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw.5 As indicated in its anthemic embrace of “the whole of humanity,” Esperanto from its inception was associated with a progressive democratic socialism and internationalism that defended such universal humanist principles as women’s suffrage, freedom of expression, and widespread literacy. Many of these principles would eventually form the political basis for the League of Nations, where there was sustained debate about making Esperanto an official language of the League.6 It is noteworthy that Zamenhof was an opthalmologist, as Unua Libro draws heavily on the rhetoric of clear vision propounded throughout Western Enlightenment discourse: if one could only see clearly the root causes of international conflict, the argument went, then one could...

Windows on the world: Memories of European cinema in 1960s Britain

During the 1960s, European cinema became increasingly available to British audiences. The expansion of university film societies and art-house cinemas meant that domestic and US productions, which made up the vast majority of films screened in this country, were now in competition with the work of directors such as Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut. Using responses from nearly a thousand participants in an investigation of cultural memory and British cinemagoing in the 1960s, this article explores how these encounters with European cinema are now remembered. While audiences tend to characterise these films as innovative, unusual and cerebral, they are also often thought of as obscure and baffling. This article argues that, however the films are now remembered, British cinema audiences sensed that they were having their eyes opened to new perspectives on the world through their exposure to films from other countries.

‘Cuts are not a viable option’: The British Board of Film Classification, Hate Crime and Censorship for Adults in the Digital Age

In March 2015 the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) refused to classify James Cullen Bressack's independent film, Hate Crime (2012). This was the Board's first explicit rejection of a film since 2011, and undermines their attempts to portray themselves as increasingly lenient, in favour of free choice for adults and open about their processes. This case is of particular interest as the film was to be distributed solely via an online video-on-demand platform. Hate Crime has the dubious honour of being the first film to be refused an eighteen certificate under revised regulations pertaining to the streamed Internet distribution of feature films in the UK. Furthermore, this case raises questions about genre boundaries, and about the definition and prioritisation of art cinema within UK institutions. This article engages with the BBFC's refusal to classify Hate Crime in the light of this particular distribution context. Focusing on media industry, genre and gender studies, the article explores whether or not the BBFC's decision can be justified and, further, what the consequences of this certification refusal might be in the current media landscape. It suggests that the BBFC's approach might be out of kilter with the digital world and in this case demonstrates a misunderstanding of genre conventions and an unequivocal bias in favour of art-house cinema.

Review: Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace

Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä (eds.) _Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace_ While the ‘Nordic noir’ and so-called ‘art house’ categories continue to dominate contemporary scholarly conversations on Nordic film and television, it is easy to forget that the region’s screen industries actually offer far more diverse genre productions than most expect. As the editors note in their introductory chapter of _Nordic Genre Film_, since the 1960s the output of genre films in the Nordic countries has always surpassed that of art house films while at the same time performing more successfully at domestic box offices every year. The early 2000s has also seen a flourishing of Nordic genre film production, enabled by shifts in national film politics across the region. Still, many outside the region tend to associate Nordic film with auteur-driven fare.

Women as film directors in Turkish cinema

Representations of women, or more exactly of gender, and the presence and works of women filmmakers constitute an important area of analysis for gender studies and feminist film theories. In Turkey the presence and the participation of women in the public sphere have been one of the important objectives of the Kemalist modernization project since the founding of the modern nation-state in 1923. However, despite the modernizing efforts to empower women in different spheres of life there was no woman director in Turkish commercial feature cinema until the beginning of the 1950s. Since the beginning of the 2000s the number of women directors has increased significantly, reaching a number well above that of the entire period before. This article investigates the reasons behind this increase based on quantitative data gathered from secondary sources and in-depth interviews with women producers and directors. It also questions whether and to what extent the increase in the number of women film directors contributed to the production of ‘women’s films’, based on a qualitative analysis of films produced by women directors between the years 2004 and 2013. The results show that in addition to technological and aesthetic changes in the industry, the increase in the availability of international and national public funding for low-budget independent film productions and the enlargement of the women’s movement allowed more women directors to enter the film industry. While half of the films made by women directors in the 2000s could be qualified as ‘women films’, the other half remained, largely due to market forces, within the conventions of popular or art house cinema.

Corporeal violence in art-house cinema: Cannes 2009

Taking 2009 Cannes Film Festival as a case study this article explores the narrative limits and possibilities of a global movement in art-house cinema: the portrayal of extreme corporeal violence – a movement that ranges from new French extreme to Asian extreme cinema. Cannes 2009 housed a collection of films that display extreme bodily violence, showing acts ranging from brutal rape and dismembering of the body to graphic scenes of torture, genital mutilation and murders. The analysis of a selection of festival films provides an opportunity to track a transnational movement in which graphic scenes of violence become not only a convenient tool to further audience affect, but also a means to reinforce the reality effect. This study, on the one hand, explores how films that display extreme bodily violence as an eruptive force seek memorability in the competitive art-house film market. On the other hand, it suggests that on the eve of the 2009 global financial crisis, showing corporeal affect alludes to the disposability of bodies under a neoliberal economy obsessed with efficiency and adaptability. Hence, the ethical impulse that seeks the production of sympathetic bodies in the audience often goes hand in hand with the marketing of sensationalism.

The Cinema of India

With what outlook should one construct, analyze or dissect film theory? Should one view cinema as a medium of mass communication? Propaganda? Entertainment? Art? Or should cinema be considered a concoction of them all? In trying to formulate a film theory, dealing with all these elementary characteristics of cinema poses a serious problem. Gaston Roberge notes that – A theory of movies would tell us what a movie is, what it is made for, how it is created in images and sounds, and for whom it is made1. The questions respectively deal with the content of a movie, the validity of the content in terms of the prevailing socio-political circumstances, the form of the movie and the target audience of the movie. Now, obviously, it is required for Indian cinema to be able to provide at least a level of generalization in answering the aforementioned questions to be considered to have a theory of its own. The purpose of this article would be to investigate whether or not such a generalization (subsequently, a film theory) is possible for Indian cinema, and then to delve further to find out how much of that theory is rooted in our original outlook toward audio-visual art. Now obviously the span of one article does not allow analysis of every type of cinema produced in as cinema-crazy a country as ours, where almost every state has its own regional cinema, independent cinema, art-house cinema and recently, underground cinema. For the purpose of the present article, therefore, we would restrict ourselves to the popular Indian cinema, namely Bollywood productions that some critics coin as commercial or entertainment cinema

Framing the "Weird Body" in Contemporary Greek Cinema: Dogtooth (2009), Attenberg (2010), Alps(2011)

New filmmaking practices within European art cinema are responding to current socio-political realities of the European crisis with new cinematic images of the human body. Particularly since 2009, a group of young directors from Greece has produced a number of independent films that feature grotesque characters embedded within plots of comic absurdity. Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009), Attenberg (Tsangaris, 2010) and Alps (Lanthimos, 2011) are by now the core of what has been coined outside Greece The New Weird Cinema.This thesis offers an aesthetic analysis of the films Dogtooth, Attenberg and Alps in the conceptualization of the weird body as a new image of the human body in contemporary arthouse cinema. It aims at introducing the weird body as a cinematic trope with which to address lived experience in the shadow of a contemporary societal crisis. In order to sustain its political and aesthetic power, this study will bring Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the body in dialogue with the phenomenological approaches of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks.

Narcissism, Masochism and the Reconstituted Male—Masculine Performances in Fight Club and The Wrestler

The article reads David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Darren Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler (2008) as films that deploy masochistic spectacles of heroically suffering white men. Both Fincher and Aronofsky are well known for their dark and sometimes surreal films that frequently take up violence as a theme (Mayshark, 2007). They are also prominent auteurial voices, nominated for and winning multiple prominent film awards. Both Fincher and Aronofsky are, the article argues, representatives of a class of American directors who, starting in the early 1990s, made independent art house films and won accolades at various film festivals, making anti-mainstream, if not subversive cinema. These filmmakers of the 1990s sustained the spirit of enquiry that was the hallmark of the auteurs of the New Hollywood age. Our contention is that Fincher’s Fight Club and Aronofsky’s The Wrestler can be accommodated on this list as films made by subversive filmmakers and that they share common features owing to their commitment to explore constructions of masculinity and performances of the same. The question that the article seeks to address is—does David Savran’s framework offered in Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (1998) predict the distinct male posturing of masochistically suffering white men visible in Fight Club and The Wrestler? The article will primarily use the theoretical framework offered by David Savran to examine where Fight Club and The Wrestler are situated with respect to the mainstream Hollywood fare featuring hyper-masculine heroes.

Passing and policing: controlling compassion, bodies and boundaries in Boys Don’t Cry and Unveiled/Fremde Haut

This article examines the cinematic representation of passing men, focusing on the underlying theme of cis male fear and the resulting policing of borders: bodily, geographical and social, employing queer theory (Butler; Halberstam) alongside the work of Foucault, to consider how power is articulated and policing is conducted in relation to the body and relationships. It commences with a reading trans tropes, before homing in on identity in relation to medium specificity to consider sight – the filmic gaze – alongside the sense of touch, then reading these aspects with the political reality of socio-economic position, queerness, crime and location. It then pulls back to consider representation, appropriation and arthouse film and culture to offer an interjection that reflects not only on fantasy and the cinematic screen, but also political reality.

Stylistic Features Of Russian Arthouse

The article analyzes stylistic features of Russian arthouse films of the last decade. Contrary to mainstream these movies are designed for narrow, aesthetically advanced audience. It is commonly known, that the style of any film is primarily determined by interpretation of screen space, formed first of all through visual images. Every fresh artistic cinema current differs from others by the method of interpretation of artistic space. Proven practices show that most of the art films of the last decade have one thing in common. This is the mode of interpretation of the art space, characterized by realistic, but in the same time conventional environment, in which the characters act. Interpretation of spatial and temporal space in Russian arthouse is close to conventional theatrical style. This phenomenon is explained by the dominance of parabolic plots with abundance of symbols and allegories. Russian art films are also marked with negative perception of reality. Their action mostly takes place in the middle of nowhere with the minimum civilizational and cultural properties. The choice of location, conventional environment, slow-paced action, unambiguous characters are the dominant features defining the style of majority of art films.

Women's cinema, world cinema: projecting contemporary feminisms

In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema , Patricia White explores the dynamic intersection of feminism and film in the twenty-first century by highlighting the work of a new generation of women directors from around the world: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Nadine Labaki, Zero Chou, Jasmila Zbanic, and Claudia Llosa, among others. The emergence of a globalized network of film festivals has enabled these young directors to make and circulate films that are changing the aesthetics and politics of art house cinema and challenging feminist genealogies. Extending formal analysis to the production and reception contexts of a variety of feature films, White explores how women filmmakers are both implicated in and critique gendered concepts of authorship, taste, genre, national identity, and human rights. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema revitalizes feminist film studies as it argues for an alternative vision of global media culture.

Transgressing Boundaries despite the Barriers: Arab Women in Four Recent Films

Transgressing Boundaries despite the Barriers: Arab Women in Four Recent Films

The Disintegration of Spanish Cinema

A subjective consideration and objective analysis of the multiple ways in which the subject, form and academic discipline of Spanish cinema may, for better and worse, be understood to have undergone disintegration in recent years. Beginning with the dissolution of Spanish cinema as a national cinema and progressing to a fragmentation of Spanish identity into regional and community cinemas that is partly spurred by academic methodologies and frameworks, this article then turns to the effects of the digital revolution and finds that the process and format of filmmaking have been transformed too. A concluding examination of the disintegration of viewing practices in Spain, the surge in online production and distribution, and the decline of the art-house cinema leads to the case study of contemporary Basque cinema and a demonstration of how this disintegration is not necessarily a negative development for regional cinemas, aspiring filmmakers and academics who aim to close the gap between academic research and actual filmmaking.