Film Canon Research Articles

The appeal of hybrid documentary forms in West Africa

Once political independence was achieved at the beginning of the 1960s, sub-Saharan African documentary filmmakers became guardians of colonial memory, preserving the past and transmitting its cultural heritage. They also documented the new historical path of their countries, working with the rudimentary means at their disposal, outside a developed film industry. The stakes were high and the obstacles real: the onus was on this first generation of African documentary filmmakers to visually articulate their cultures but with little or no trained personnel nor equipment. Cultural denigration had been one of the principal components of the policy of assimilation implemented by the French imperial regime in Afrique Occidentale Francaise. Whilst cultural nationalism reigned supreme upon the transfer of power, the statesmen at the helm of these fledgling independent states soon fell prey to using documentary cinema to propagate overly flattering images of their feats. An atmosphere of auto-congratulation quickly prevailed and this genre was condemned to being the chosen means to propagate state ideology. One may note that has often been considered the most appropriate form to express the vision of several filmmakers at key moments of African cinema. For example, Afrique sur Seine (1955), Borom Sarett (1963) and Lettre paysanne (1975), all docu-fictions, represent respectively the first film made by an African filmmaker (albeit shot in France), the first African short film, and the first feature length film directed by an African woman. What is it about this form that answers the formal and aesthetic needs of the filmmaker at a particular moment in time? The purpose of this article is to answer this very question by first exploring the different constituents of as their manipulation and modulation were determined by the role accorded to documentary as catalyser of change, engagement or education. I will then proceed to examine the previously mentioned Afrique sur Seine and demonstrate why was used to depict the trials and tribulations of immigrant life in Paris in 1955. Particular attention will be paid to the elaboration of a highly original and multi-faceted voice-over. Given the importance of ethnographic film in forging a Western gaze on Africa, I think it is worthwhile to explore another hybrid form: ethno-fiction. The latter results from the crossing of ethnographic, real and imaginary discourses, and I will study their application to the rural setting of Safi Faye's Lettre Paysanne. I will then evaluate the extent to which ethno-fiction confronts the ample Western ethnographic film canon whilst articulating a practical discourse destined primarily for the participants in the film through the scale of camera shots and their duration. The film Nationalite: immigre (1975) by the Mauritanian Sidi Sokhona will constitute the final ease study of this article. This lesser known documentary represents an audacious formal adventure that analyses the economic and political reasons that incite African immigrants to leave their countries to find themselves subsequently in precarious conditions in France. The interplay of different narrative devices, fictional and real, to denounce immigrant exploitation will be the focus of our analysis of this film. Before giving a brief history of documentary practice in Francophone West Africa, let us define the term docu-fiction, as mutations of the nomenclature are as numerous as its hybrid cinematic components. Docu-fiction is the generic term used to describe the various sub-categories of the cinematic flux between the imaginary and the real (docu-drama, mockumentary, etc.). Various combinations of the four basic components of docu-fiction determine its end appearance. These components are documentary form (voice-over, interviews, talking heads, etc.), documentary content (real people, places and events), fictional form (plot and the elaboration of characters) and fictional content (made-up characters, places and events). …

The FilmSon of Man: An Artistic Revelation of Jesus the Christ

The 2006 film, Son of Man, a significant contribution to the Jesus film canon, presents a Christ contextualized in a contemporary African setting. The artistry of this film, the author argues, is best appreciated through the genre of Neo-HooDoo which privileges the local, the spontaneous, and the democratic over the universal, the classical, and the official. This film through its artistry re-inscribes understandings of Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection, and Revelation. Son of Man is a unique artistic contemporary vehicle for theological education.

<i>The Rocky Horror Picture Show</i> (review)

Jeffrey Weinstock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 131pp. £10.00 (pbk).Matthew TinkcomThe idea of the cult film is a tantalising one, not least to historians and critics of cinema and popular media, because it offers the sense that not all viewing practices and habits of reception are normative. The problem, though, is that it remains difficult to define what makes a cult film: is it the particular formal qualities that inhere in a given film or body of films; certain marketing strategies employed by the film industry to publicise and exhibit films in such a way as to garner new audiences; or is it the intent of audience members to embrace a film that otherwise might go unnoticed within the domain of 'mainstream' spectatorship (whatever that might be)?Over a decade ago, these problems received critical and scholarly attention in the rich and provocative work of writers such as Henry Jenkins, J. P. Telotte and Timothy Corrigan, but this attention seems more recently to have waned, perhaps an indication of how viewing habits have changed in the historical moment of home theatre and DVD release. The things that made cult films possible - the emergence of the dissent cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, the dissemination of new film canons in universities and repertory cinemas and the centrality of cinema as a lingua franca within post-World War II education - now seem a part of the historical past. When it becomes possible, as it now does, to circulate the motion picture through the technologies of the DVD, DVR and Netflix, the social activity of watching film in the cinema seems quaint, as does the practice of dressing up for the midnight screening of a film such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman UK/US 1975) as so many have done since the 1970s, myself included.Jeffrey Weinstock's monograph on The Rocky Horror Picture Show appears in the welcome series, Cultographies, which seeks to re-animate the questions of cult cinema in a way that is perhaps inadvertently poignant, if only because cult film now appears to be a historical category, firmly in the past. Be that as it may, Weinstock's book illuminates the ways in which The Rocky Horror Picture Show came to play its central role in the popular imagination as the most easily recognised 'cult film'.One of the most important features of Weinstock's historical research is his account of the film's release distribution and exhibition, and the details are worth dwelling upon: after successful runs of the stage production, The Rocky Horror Show, in London and Los Angeles, the film version was released soon after a disastrous New York production of the play was shut down. The film initially appeared in a handful of US theatres to weak box-office sales and, as an inventive manoeuvre that sought to reinvent the film as an 'underground movie', it opened nationally in the US as a 'midnight' movie (with, by the way, an astonishingly small publicity budget). The film never had a large distribution - Weinstock tells us that by 1978 it was only playing in fifty theatres on Friday and Saturday nights at midnight - but it had found a niche within the cultural economy of cinema that was consistent and based upon a devoted audience who made the film financially viable through their reliable and repeated viewings. The fact that The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released as a midnight movie - a milieu that had emerged in New York in the 1960s as part of a new economy of non-Hollywood product, such as the films of Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas - tells us that it was not simply a corporate product that cult viewers discovered and made their own, but rather was an aberrant (read: failed) product that savvy marketers placed in front of audiences who were more likely to embrace its extremes of style and topic.The discovery that The Rocky Horror Picture Show was distributed in this way is of great significance, since it corrupts one of the most cherished ideas for the film's cult viewers: that it was the audience who discovered this piece of cinematic debris and were able, like the film's central figure, Dr Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), to make a (perverse) life where there had been none. …

Cinephilia as War Machine

Cinephilia, as we all know, is the love of cinema. But what a banal definition! What fan, of any kind or level, doesn't regard themselves as loving cinema? French critic Serge Daney's militant sense of his own cinephilia was directed precisely against this widespread, sickeningly populist vibe, as captured in an advertising slogan of the '70s that also elicited the ire of Guy Debord: People who love life go to the cinema!1 So, everybody loves the cinema. As N. Paul Todd would reply on the greatest television reality show of the decade, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss (Fox, US, 2004-5): Why, so what, and who cares? The cinephile, however, wants to be identified as someone different from the mere fan or nerd who, in their dreary, uninspired ways, love the cinema. Cinephiles are a band of outsiders, a band apart-or they are nothing. And that is what is galling in the contemporary climate, when every second website is calling itself cinephilethis and cinephile-that, when the books and conferences on cinephilia as a scholarly topic are multiplying: when, in short, the institutionalization, and thus the taming, of cinephilia, looms. Cinephilia has become a kind of brand name or mark, a sexy surplus value that livens up the academy and the Ain't It Cool News Internet empire alike. This empty cinephilemania reaches its height in the out-of-control best film lists swamping the Internet. And to suggest that the cinephile passion can now be conveniently placed as a pre- TV variant of fandom does not improve this situation. The agenda of cinephilia is not always terribly clear or explicit. Paul Willemen described it as something murky, a smokescreen for some other psychic complex to which we cannot quite put a name.2 Thomas Elsaesser emphasizes that cinephilia is always a drama of displaced time, of deferral: the cinema that is lost, the lost object; the cinema associated with some exotic elsewhere; the cinema of a previous generation, but the kind your parents never watched and could never have understood.3 Alain Bergala, in his fascinating The Cinema Hypothesis, gives a positive, even a feverish spin to this generational game: for him, the cinephile objects par excellence are those films-from Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (US, 1955) and Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (US, 1986) to Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home? (IR, 1987)-that mirror the tender, secretive transmission of knowledge, of aesthetic passion, from teacher to student, parent to child.4 But there is no characterization of cinephilia, such as have been offered in the burgeoning literature on this subject, that I can accept as definitive. I do not believe, for instance, that cinephilia is essentially a solitary activity, a melancholic activity, a Christian activity, or a surrealist activity. I don't believe that it necessarily equates with either left or right politics, or a total lack of politics either. I don't believe cinephilia proceeds in tidy generational waves. I don't believe there is a discernible canon of cinephile films. I don't believe that cinephilia is dependent on any particular type of technology, whether the old-fashioned movie theater or the new-fangled DVD player. I don't believe that cinephiles only truly care about fragments (or Benjaminian ruins) of films in a modernist or postmodernist flux. I don't believe that cinephilia is essentially a matter of nutty, obsessive viewing rituals (however much fun these might be), or what Noel King calls discursive regularities in the way that cinephiles write or speak or teach about what they love.5 For there is no such regularity. I propose a way out of this deadlock, with reference to the premise of Antoine de Baecque's canny historical account, the title of which translates as Cinephilia: The Invention of a Gaze, the History of a Culture 1944-68.6 According to de Baecque, cinephilia may start with a kind of unutterable ecstasy or brute desire (you as the big cinephile baby before the vast cinema screen) but, straight away, that desiring engagement leads to acts-particularly of writing, speaking, programming, or curating (and also, of course, filmmaking, but that's another story)-acts that happen in public, that are broadcast, directed at the world, and that involve the forming of a community, even if that community is only a gang of friends, an editorial collective, a classroom of students, or an Internet chat group. …

The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas

The Romance of Transgression constitutes a major contribution to the study of queer and Canadian cinemas. Its author Thomas Waugh has written several award-winning books and articles on film history in the areas of social and political documentary film,1 Canadian cinema, the representation of lesbian and gay sexuality in film2 and pre-Stonewall homoerotic photography and drawings.3 His extensive work within academia is matched by his long-term commitment to progressive social and political causes, including censorship battles, queer scene politics and challenges to funding categories. He has taught film studies since the 1970s at Concordia University in Montreal, where he founded the Minor Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality – the first in Canada, and he has recently undertaken interdisciplinary research and teaching on the AIDS pandemic. The book is in good company among the recent surge of publications on queer cinemas and offers its own take on the negotiation of nation, national film canon and sexual representation. Apart from the general anthologies on queer cinema,4 there are several publications with related themes5and Waugh contributes to these studies, each of which attempts to negotiate ‘queer’ in relation to such categories as nation or region, through his own approach to the specificities of queer film in Canada. In particular, he addresses the linguistic and cultural divide between the predominantly French-speaking Quebec cinema and English-speaking film from the rest of Canada (ROC), and Canada's significant interventionist cultural policies and public funding. The Romance of Transgression is the fifth book that Waugh has published in the last six years and marks an impressive summa of his extended study in the area. The book is organized into two parts – the first comprising ten episodes or chapters and the second constituting an encyclopedia of short biographies of film- and videomakers along with assessments of associated cultural institutions. It also includes notes, a bibliography and a useful combined index of titles, persons and concepts.

Toward a New Canon: The Vietnam Conflict Through Vietnamese Lenses

What is Vietnam? We know that before it was an adjective it was a proper noun, signifying not a war but a country. However.. .for Americans there has long been no country there but the war.1 One of the most serious problems with works addressing films about the Vietnam is that, to some degree, they will always participate in the reduction of Viet Nam the country to Vietnam (or in especially derogatory cases 'Nam) the war. Where Vietnam is spoken of, it is always in the context of America, as half of an uneasy but seemingly indissoluble historical couple. To reduce Viet Nam to the war between that country and America (a war that is significantly referred to as the War in Viet Nam), or to any war for that matter, is obviously problematic. Nevertheless, films about war have a unique ability to reveal important historical and cultural aspects of a people as a result of the necessary intersections of nationalism, art, and history that they contain.2 Because Viet Nam has endured many wars throughout its long history, not the least of which was the American conflict, studying Vietnamese films that treat issues of war might be seen as especially instructive. This paper focuses on films about the Vietnam/American as a way into the problems of cross-cultural communication between the United States and Viet Nam with the hope that the incorporation of Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic films into the international canon of films about the war might be seen as a first step in recognizing the existence of Vietnamese national and diasporic identities in cinema. These filmmakers bring to bear their own histories and future aspirations which differ from, intersect with, and translate those of America and Viet Nam independently. My project attempts to expand the familiar canon of films about the Vietnam to include not only films made in Viet Nam but also Vietnamese American interventions into the established formulas of both countries' portrayals of war. and Humanity on the Home Front: Vietnamese Voices and Visions When the average American thinks of films about the Vietnam they no doubt recall canonized classics such as The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978), Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987), and Platoon (Stone, 1986). However, the recognized corpus of American films about the conflict fails to offer a complete and balanced picture of the war, even in the rare instances where these films feature Vietnamese characters. While American fiction films about the war have been duly criticized in recent years for their often blatantly stereotypical or derogatory treatment of the Vietnamese, such criticism does not adequately redress the striking absence of Vietnamese subjectivity in these films. One of the problems with the American conception of Vietnam films is that films about the war from Viet Nam have not been largely available. It is most likely not until 1989, when a group of films made in Viet Nam toured the United States under the aegis of the Vietnam Film Project, that Americans were able to see Vietnamese films about the war with English subtitles.3 Three of these films: Nguyen Xuan Son's Fairytale for Seventeen-Year Olds (1986), Dang Nhat Minh's When the Tenth Month Comes (1984), and Nguyen Hong Sen's The Abandoned Field - Free Fire Zone (1979), which are available on site at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, will be discussed here. However, it is disheartening to note that today, fifteen years after the Vietnam Film Project sought to make Americans aware of Vietnamese history, culture, and subjectivity, none of these films are readily available on video or DVD in the United States. Both Nguyen Xuan Son and Dang Nhat Minh's films are similar in that they provide an altogether different definition of the war film from what we are accustomed to in the United States. These films scrap the battle-centric, individual quest narratives of Hollywood Vietnam films for narratives which center on families who, despite their distance from the battlefield, feel the effects of the war every bit as acutely. …

Text and Context: the Passion of the Christ and Other Jesus Films

This article approaches the immense popularity of Mel Gibson's 2004 film, The Passion of the Christas a significant artifact in the contemporary public, cultural curriculum, and a unique opportunity for religious educators to build on its notoriety. Five interrelated contexts are identified and explored to assist religious educators more deeply understand and better interpret the significance of this film and all Jesus films. These five contexts are: (1) narrative theology, (2) scripture, (3) midrash, (4) the early film industry, and (5) the Jesus film canon.

Essential cinema: on the necessity of film canons

In his astute and deeply informed film reviews and essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum regularly provides new and brilliant insights into the cinema as art, entertainment, and commerce. Guided by a personal canon of great films, Rosenbaum sees, in the ongoing hostility toward the idea of a canon shared by many within the field of film studies, a missed opportunity both to shape the discussion about cinema and to help inform and guide casual and serious filmgoers alike. In Essential Cinema, Rosenbaum forcefully argues that canons of great films are more necessary than ever, given that film culture today is dominated by advertising executives, sixty-second film reviewers, and other players in the Hollywood publicity machine who champion mediocre films at the expense of genuinely imaginative and challenging works. He proposes specific definitions of excellence in film art through the creation a personal canon of both well-known and obscure movies from around the world and suggests ways in which other canons might be similarly constructed. Essential Cinema offers in-depth assessments of an astonishing range of films: established classics such as Rear Window, M, and Greed; ambitious but flawed works like The Thin Red Line and Breaking the Waves; eccentric masterpieces from around the world, including Irma Vep and Archangel; and recent films that have bitterly divided critics and viewers, among them Eyes Wide Shut and A.I. He also explores the careers of such diverse filmmakers as Robert Altman, Raul Ruiz, Frank Tashlin, Elaine May, Sam Fuller, Terrence Davies, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Orson Welles. In conclusion, Rosenbaum offers his own film canon of 1,000 key works from the beginning of cinema to the present day. A cogent and provocative argument about the art of film, Essential Cinema is also a fiercely independent reference book of must-see movies for film lovers everywhere.

The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989 (review)

Reviewed by: The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 Larson Powell (bio) Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvi + 331 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The place of East German cinema within the international film canon is anything but assured. Relative to the moral witness of Polish film, the freshness of Czech New Wave, the rhetoric of classical Soviet cinema or the poetry of Tarkovsky, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) has seemed all too provincial, conservative, and conformist. Matters are not helped by the waning of international GDR (German Democratic Republic) studies, evident, for instance, in the end of the long series of New Hampshire Symposia on GDR Culture and Society two years ago, and of the GDR Bulletin published by Washington University. It is as though there were a sudden amnesia both official and popular regarding the GDR and its culture outside its former boundaries. Wolf Biermann, whose concerts and readings were once monumental political and public events, seems to have vanished without a trace from most music stores. In this climate, Joshua Feinstein's new book, based on extensive archival research and taped interviews with a number of important figures from GDR film history, is a welcome contribution. Feinstein's work is a synoptic overview of DEFA from its foundation to its end. It does not, however, claim to be exhaustive, concentrating instead on a selection of films chosen to demonstrate the author's thesis that, contrary to the ruling Socialist Unity Party's utopian demand for "films that affirmed the GDR as a bold new social order rapidly advancing toward the future," DEFA pictures increasingly "tended to achieve the exact opposite," since "they presented East Germany as an essentially ordinary place" (217). Working with André Bazin's neorealist poetics of the everyday, an aesthetic DEFA film borrowed in the 1950s from Italian postwar film, Feinstein argues that this "triumph of the ordinary" constituted both an indirect form of resistance to statist intervention and also a means to achieve an alternative form of GDR self-definition. DEFA directors could thus, in Feinstein's reading, have their cake and eat it too, being both obliquely resistant to officialdom and yet also performing their proper social function as architects of a "civic imaginary" (7), albeit in different ways than those of socialist realism. The ambiguous case of DEFA, as that of the GDR as a whole, indeed asks for nuanced readings: it is not as easy to separate the sheep from the goats as many Catonic judges after 1989 would claim. Yet Feinstein is still taking DEFA directors too much at their own word. His claim that "for better or for worse, DEFA pictures participated in the making of East Germany" (228) is simply tautological, and begs the crucial interpretative question of the films' ultimate aesthetic quality or lack thereof. For all the careful work Feinstein has done, his reading is occasionally hampered by organizational problems (some of the early chapters lack shape, and return continually to the same questions), and also by weakly defined ideas borrowed from cultural studies (such as the omnipresent [End Page 85] and not very helpful "identity," or some blurry use of terms like "symbolic" and "imaginary" in the introduction). One wishes, too, that his editors had pruned out irritating recurrent jargon words such as "contested" or "negotiate." In general, Feinstein tends to be stronger on the historical and social contexts of DEFA film than on close readings of the films themselves. His argument could have been helped by more attention to DEFA's continued difficulty with finding successful genre formulae, or to the peculiar form of star system developed in the GDR, or a more careful look at the relation of film to television. In the epilogue, he notes correctly that DEFA's "technical facilities" were "hopelessly out of date," and also that the studio's overall structure was cumbersome relative to the outsourcing practiced increasingly in the West since 1945 (234). Yet the book fails to address the question of precisely when the...

José Mojica Marins and the cultural politics of marginality in third world film criticism1

This article seeks to revise and question the cultural politics through which Third World film criticism has historically constructed Latin American continental and national film canons. To this end it reassesses the highly politicized notion of an imperfect, marginal or alternative cinema promoted in the 1960s by filmmakers like the Brazilian Glauber Rocha and the Cuban Julio Garca Espinosa by looking at the contemporaneous exploitation cinema of Brazils Jos Mojica Marins. The article suggests that what makes Mojicas work significant is the fact that it challenges the elitist, high cultural standards on which Brazils Cinema Novo is judged the representative of Brazilian cinema of 1960s by subverting the idea of what a an imperfect/marginal/alternative cinema is.

Religions of Star Trek

Is there a God? What evil lurks beyond the stars? Can science save one's soul? Profound questions like these have consumed human thought over the ages; they also inspired the original creators of the Star Trek canon of TV series and films. Religions of Star Trek tackles these challenging questions head-on in a remarkable look at one of sci-fi's great success stories.Analyzing more than three decades of screen adventure, the authors depict a Star Trek transformed, corresponding to the resurgence of religion in American public discourse. The authors identify the many religious characters in Star Trek, tracing the roots of scientific humanism to more contemporary aspects of religion and spirituality. Through it all, the creators' visionary outlook remains constant: a humanistic faith in free will and the salvific nature of dispassionate scientific inquiry.This book was not prepared, licensed, approved, or endorsed by any entity involved in creating or producing the Star Trek television series or films.

Retelling Psycho

Retelling Psycho

Transforming text: Iago's infection In Welles' Othello

Iago is a thief and an artist; he steals the show of Othello and creates scenes in which the characters become his players. A malicious Prospera, he devilishly engenders the action of the play, unfolding the drama from his pointed words and phrases. He is infectious, seeping into every corner of Othello's mind. This infection, so much the center of the dramatic action, has immense visual potential which has always been recognized in the theatre community. Critics still refer to Quin's performance of Othello and the famous 'spodighted peeling of a very white glove from a very black hand.1 This scene portrays, through a sheerly visual medium, Othello's contagion by Iago's blackness. Perhaps because of its visual propensity, Othello has been incorporated into the film canon, with Orson Welles' 1952 production being the most famous and critically acclaimed rendition. Welles cinematically displays lago's manipulative and damaging influence as he steals over Othello's personality. Iago encloses Othello in the web of his persuasion, restricting Othello's moral judgment until he is entrapped in the tomb of his own misperceptions. A master of the silver screen, Welles does not just present this central dramatic conflict, he displays it, forging visual effects with Shakespeare's words. He reimagines and reconstructs Shakespeare's text in the language of the cinema, creating a new textual artifact.

"What About the Audience? What About Them?" : Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure

What about the Audience?AVhat About Them? : Spectatorship and Cinematic Pleasure Tamara Harvey Poststructuralist analyses of subjectivity tend to focus constitution of the Subject through the process of desire Subject's perceptions of on the and the an Other. These theories have broken ground in their critique of the unified Cartesian subject (the subject of empire) and of metaphysically guaranteed truth. But I want to explore pleasure, not desire. If desire is an experience of difference subtly informed by lack, pleasure is an experience of multiple differences often figured In particular, I (I believe improperly) in terms of excess. am interested in a kind of cinematic pleasure evident in genre film spectacles involving many bodies and mov- ing outside an individual's jouissance. Specifically, I discuss cinematic pleasure and the Kool Thing dance number from Hal Hartley's 1992 film Simple Men. Though movie is not a genre film, I use recent genre film theories because they say something useful about pleasure and because this specific scene works as a number like those found in genre films. I chose Simple Men because it gives me pleasure, and be- cause, though I don't have time to develop these ideas today, how we understand this scene reflects on our understanding of postmodernism analyzing this film in terms of pleasure and spectacle provides an alternative to readings which emphasize market excesses and ironic citationality. Genre films have been traditionally excluded from the canon of serious and aesthetically-redeemable films largely because they are concerned with pleasure rather than desire. Successful narrative is frequently connected to notions of desire narrative is driven by a lack whose fulfillment is the carrot which leads both characters and readers alike toward the denouement. When genre Hartley's films are characterized as a string of numbers loosely held together by a weak plot, the pleasure of these films is still being defined in terms of desire. Their weak plots suggest that satisfaction comes model, pleasure is simply the fulfillment of desire. The problem, I would argue, is that this this too soon and too crudely; by

The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, "Vertigo", and the Film Canon

The recent rise of Hitchcock's film to canonical status signifies class interests at work in the tastes of film scholars.

The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, "Vertigo", and the Film Canon

The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, "Vertigo", and the Film Canon

Gerald Mast Replies to Janet Staiger's "The Politics of Film Canons" ("Cinema Journal," Spring 1985)

Gerald Mast Replies to Janet Staiger's "The Politics of Film Canons" ("Cinema Journal," Spring 1985)

Of Canons and Quietism: Dudley Andrew Responds to Janet Staiger's "The Politics of Film Canons" ("Cinema Journal," Spring 1985)

Of Canons and Quietism: Dudley Andrew Responds to Janet Staiger's "The Politics of Film Canons" ("Cinema Journal," Spring 1985)

Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise

Ethnographic films cannot be said to constitute a genre, nor is ethnographic film-making a discipline with unified origins and an established methodol­ ogy. Since the first conference on ethnographic film was held at the Musee de l'Homme 30 years ago, the term has served a largely emblematic func­ tion, giving a semblance of unity to extremely diverse efforts in the cinema and social sciences. A canon of ethnographic films has gradually emerged, and in the past dozen years a movement has grown up nourished by founda­ tion grants, further international conferences, theoretical publications, and training programs. Faced with defining ethnographic film, some writers (7, 14) have con­ cluded that one can only say some films are more ethnographic than others, or that films become ethnographic by virtue of their use (37, 38). Since all films are cultural artifacts, many can tell us as much about the societies that produced them as about those they purport to describe. Films can thus serve as a source of data for social science in the manner of myths, rock paintings, and government papers. From World War II onwards, fiction as well as documentary films have been studied sporadically for their ethnographic content (2, 5, 16, 35). In practice, most discussions of ethnographic film set aside films useful to anthropologists as naive cultural documents and narrow the field to those made with some discernible intention of recording and revealing cultural patterns. Some writers, induding Rouch (27) and de Heusch (8), have refused to pursue further distinctions, arguing that to do so is to inhibit the cross-fertilization of varied approaches. Others (1, 12, 14, 18-20, 25, 31)

Våldets estetik. Estetisk praxis, social distinktion och filmbytande unga män

Bourdieu, filmswappers and the æsthetics of video nasties The article discusses different ways of arguing cultural value among Swedish Film Swappers. Against a background of theories on caste as a structuring principle for social status, the author discusses on the one hand a countercultural aesthetic strategy aimed at legitimating otherwise illegitimate cultural artifacts such as video nasties (videofilms with graphically explicit depictions of phy- sical violence) by either incorporating them into the legitimate film canon, or by replacing the legitimate canon with a new canon based on such films, and on the other hand a subcultural strategy that refuses to discuss the films in terms of art and legitimacy at all.