Crisis Cinema Research Articles

Echoes of hysteria: Gender, affect and economic crisis in Blue Jasmine and Young Adult

This article analyses gendered representations of the 2008 financial crash in contemporary American cinema, focusing on films by Jason Reitman and Woody Allen. Scholars of the financial crisis on film have persuasively argued that the main impetus of indie global financial crisis cinema has been less to narrate the events than to make them intelligible through personification. I illustrate and modify this statement by suggesting that Reitman’s and Allen’s characters not only embody the financial crash but do so, importantly, along gender lines. What stands out the most, I propose, is the trope of female suffering. In both films, we witness female protagonists in the grip of monetary and mental crisis. I contend that this image of the distraught woman – with all the messiness and embarrassment of her feelings in full view – sheds new light on the affective pathologies of American capitalism. To make this point, I draw on cultural emblems of female hysteria, as well as on the work of political scientist Claudia Leeb on the expression of suffering and its transformative potential. Through their tormented heroines, Reitman and Allen provide a provocative view of US capitalism and its casualties after the global crash.

Primed for Suffering: Gender, Subjectivity, and Spectatorship in Spanish Crisis Cinema

Examining three fiction films (Techo y comida, Ayer no termina nunca, and Magical Girl), this essay illuminates the traces of the economic crisis in recent Spanish cinema, focusing on how it is inscribed on female-gendered bodies and subjectivities. In exploring how female pain accumulates across the boundaries of genre in these disparate films, it asks what kind of gendered subjects these films construct, and what work women's suffering is asked to perform, both for the benefit of the film's plot and the spectator's engagement. It shows how, even in cinema sympathetic to those devastated by crisis, women are cast as disposable raw material, as it were, “primed for suffering.” At the same time, it argues, these films bring to light and embody experiences that are seldom revealed, enacting an ethical gesture of potential solidarity with those devastated by multiple forms of crisis.

Elliptical life in (post)crisis cinema from Spain

ABSTRACT This essay tracks the long-term effects of the global financial crash of 2008 in two films produced during the so-called postcrisis period in Spain (2014–). Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s term elliptical life, I examine Adán Aliaga and David Valero’s El arca de Noé (2014) and Polo Menárguez’s El plan (2019), which center on the disorientations facing recently fired security guards who draw up blueprints or make plans for alternative imaginaries in the context of ongoing crisis. Elliptical life, as a liminal space for nonsovereign subjects and an aesthetic form that deploys a loose filmic language, captures what Berlant calls “flailing” as characters express their desire for a surrogate reality free from the constraints of biopower. Through form and content alike, elliptical life embraces negativity as a strategy for chipping away at entrenched hegemonies, welcoming encounters with estrangement and/or incoherence. It sets its sights on transformational structures, privileging states of incompletion over endgame scenarios and revolutionary triumph. In the end, as both films work through the vicissitudes of elliptical life in contemporary Spain, they contemplate failure as a mode for interrogating aspirational notions of self-legitimation and control in a reality structured by the logic of late capitalism.

“Men behaving badly”? Representations of masculinity in post-global financial crisis cinema

ABSTRACT Films about finance often deploy masculinity as a key locus of critique, most recently in post-global financial crisis (GFC) cinema. While feminist international political economy (IPE) can direct attention to certain heteronormative limitations in the gendered critique of finance – in other words, it can portray stereotypes of “reckless” risky men who need to be reined in by “responsible,” “prudent” women – this article discerns important nuances in the representation of masculinity in post-GFC cinema. Beyond moralizing binaries of stable, responsible husbands versus greedy, predatory bankers, we argue that post-GFC cinema has expanded the gendered critique of crisis by focusing on “multiple masculinities,” the “outsiders” and the “weirdos,” as well as the working-class “gangs” of finance in films like Inside Job, Margin Call, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short. Instead of turning to women as the naturalized redeemers of “testosterone capitalism,” these films use humor and irony to create a reflexive distance, while celebrating the potential of emotional and geeky masculinities. Gone is the “redemptive woman” of embedded liberal finance, to reveal a vision of adaptable financial man that both naturalizes complexity and constricts the scope of financial critique to a moral valorization of resilience.

A Place to Finally Rest: Reading National Shame in Spanish Crisis Cinema

ABSTRACT This article argues that economic crisis and austerity ruptured how many young Spaniards understand their place in the world by disrupting their sense of what makes home home. It analyses two Spanish films in the emergent subgenre of crisis cinema, Techo y comida (2015) and Hermosa juventud (2014) and argues that crisis cinema not only viscerally depicts the Spanish economic crisis as a failure of late capitalism, but it also challenges us to think about what Spanish pop star Marta Sanchez called “a place to finally rest” may mean during times of economic crisis. The article argues that both films articulate narratives of shame that can be read on a national and individual level, suggesting that the emotional resonance of shame is a potent emotion that weakens the individual connection with the nation-state during times of economic crisis.

Spanish Cinema of the 2010s: Back to Punk and Other Lessons from the Crisis

This article focuses on how Spanish cinema production has echoed the neoliberal Eurozone crisis of 2008 in mainstream (large- and medium-size productions), and in its ‘opposite’ the independent sector, and how the effects of the crisis can be glimpsed (within the independent sector) on music (mostly Punk) documentaries which are not ostensibly about the economy, current politics or even the present. I suggest a course through the different ways in which Spanish cinema has been touched by the crisis: through the films of ‘crisis cinema’ to those that focus on the 1980s and early 1990s and its youth-led and Punk-inspired musical revolutions, via films whose strategy is to address the 2008–17 period in an indirect manner, or to retreat to the pre-2008 past. My ultimate aim is to prove that this seismic change to Spain’s society has forced a re-engagement with the present and the past.

Cinema of Crisis and the Documentary Impulse: The UPF Masters in Creative Documentary

In this article, I analyse the relationship between contemporary Spanish documentary and the two crises that have deeply affected the country’s film industry in the last years: the financial crisis and the crisis of legitimacy of Spanish cinema amongst spectators and critical discourse. Specifically, I look at how the Masters in Creative Documentary of the UPF (Universidad Pompeu Fabra) has fostered an alternative documentary culture aimed at reconciling cinema’s role as a critical observer of neoliberal development in Spain. I focus on the university institution itself as a state-funded space of resistance to the ‘unthinking’ dynamics of the Spanish commercial film industry, especially in terms of its relation to actuality. To examine such issues in detail, I look at a paradigmatic case study from the UPF context: the film La plaga (Neus Ballús, 2013), which depicts the struggles of people in the periphery of Barcelona as globalised capitalism remaps and redefines their lives. Although humble and modest, the ‘UPF model’ is perhaps the seed for a future Spanish cinema that can speak both to the public’s reality and against the neoliberal conquest of every realm of society.

A Somatic Poetics of Crisis Cinema: The Gesture of Self-Harm in Three Spanish films

This article looks at three fiction films released between 2012 and 2014 that, while not directly addressing the recessionary context, figure the female body as the visual site of crisis. La herida, Stockholm, and especially Magical Girl construe a vocabulary of embodied gestures. One in particular recurs time and again: a woman wilfully wounding her body. In films otherwise fraught with narrative gaps and ambiguities, gashes and wounds stubbornly remain visible evidence in search of a cause. Furthering ongoing critical conversation about cinema in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, this paper connects performative gestures with states of diminished agency and the stagnation of the narrative of social change underpinning the Spanish cinema of the democracy. I look in particular at the acting styles on display in these films, and the ways that they bring to the fore the alienation that estranges subjects from their bodies. Eschewing allegorical readings of the wounded female body as a symptom of the national body in crisis, a somatic poetics is deployed to capture the de-nationalized filmic construction of affective states that speak of broken social links contaminated by the dynamics of neo-liberal debt.

Beyond the crisis: the “chaotic formula” of Hong Kong cinema

Hong Kong's film industry has been living through and beyond the 1997 handover to China. Along a complicated socio-economic and cultural heritage, the city's “crisis cinema” successfully milked takeover fears for an anarchic display of showmanship. Local filmmaking conditions, popular narratives and aesthetics from that time can be identified as ingredients in a “chaotic formula” that instigated Hong Kong cinema's “Golden Age.” Unlike other film industries, which point to their disaster centres in a search or celebration of national identity, Hong Kong survived at a fragile historic juncture largely by sailing around the cliffs of political affront and resorting to metaphorical speech instead. Yet, following the handover, the film industry has retired its previous attitudes about itself and the future; it has integrated a new “China factor” and riddled cinema with contradictory statements about the “condition” of Hong Kong. System failure, madness and identity theft in crime stories appear alongside celebratory historicism, cultural allegiance and escapist spectacle, especially in Hong Kong-China co-productions. This paper follows the evolution of the crime genre along general dynamics and transformations of the formula from the 1980s, past the turbulent 1990s and into recent postcolonial Hong Kong, in which the inability to formulate a new crisis, or the resolution of the previous one, has put cinema itself into crisis.

Neoliberal Forms

This paper examines the co-implications of CGI filmmaking, US hegemony, and neoliberal financialization as manifested in Korea’s “IMF crisis cinema.” These films are populated by what I term neoliberal forms that epitomize the effort in this cinema to reflect on the innate proximity of popular filmmaking to finance, and specifically on the proximity between its own material apparatus and the economic apparatus that the IMF crisis inserted into the center of Korean public discourse.

Prime risks: the politics of pain and suffering in Spanish crisis cinema

This essay analyzes recent Spanish cinema that addresses the economic crisis, taking particular note of the ways that physical vulnerability is utilized as a metaphor for political and social precarity. I focus on three films in particular in order to highlight the metaphors of contemporary vulnerability to the Crisis: Chispa de la vida (2012), 5 metros cuadrados (2012) and Los últimos días (2012). By repeatedly exposing their protagonists to lasting physical damage, debility and death, these films underscore the metaphor that is already at work and present in the signification of political vulnerability. Tracing these ties, this essay seeks to locate the impulse behind the metaphors of physical vulnerability produced within recent “crisis cinema” in Spain and to understand what happens to the fantasy of collective vulnerability and community when facing the duress of contemporary precarity.

The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (review)

Reviewed by: The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity Jay McRoy (bio) The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser. Cambridge University Press 2008. $100.00 hardcover; $36.99 paper. 348 pages As many film scholars well know, writing and teaching about “Chinese cinema” presents a set of distinct challenges, especially given the multiplicity of nationalist and sociocultural specificities that render such a project both historically complex and aesthetically expansive. Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all have their own rich and multifaceted traditions of motion picture production, the convoluted developments of which can be evidenced by the wealth of scholarship in English that has been generated over the last few decades. Scholarly engagements of Hong Kong cinema alone have ranged from popular overviews (Stephen Teo, David Bordwell, and Esther Yau on Hong Kong cinema), to monographs dedicated exclusively to the films of specific directors (Kenneth E. Hall’s John Woo: The Films, Peter Brunette’s Wong Kar-wai, and Lisa Martin’s The Cinema of Tsui Hark), to critical anthologies containing key essays on Hong Kong cinema (Poshek Fu’s edited collection on the Shaw Brothers, and Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai’s recent edited volume on East Asian cinemas).1 While the aforementioned works represent important contributions to the study of Hong Kong cinema, there is still plenty of ground to cover when discussing such a dynamic and vast film culture. [End Page 175] To this fertile dialogue The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Poshek Fu and David Desser, contributes a variety of perspectives by established and emerging voices in cinema studies. As the book’s subtitle suggests, the contributors write at the intersection of the political and the aesthetic. Indeed, it is in its extensive range of critical inquiries that the collection distinguishes itself from other critical anthologies on Hong Kong cinema. As Fu and Desser observe in their introduction, scholars and fans of Hong Kong cinema have been challenged by, first, a lack of “access to the cinematic past,” a situation that has only been partially addressed by the admittedly meager availability of titles on DVD and celluloid, and, second, by the intensive cross-fertilization that defines “the very place, the very situation, of Hong Kong itself.”2 Such obstacles are indeed profound, and it is a credit to this volume and its knowledgeable contributors that better-known aspects of Hong Kong cinema—like the martial arts extravaganzas of the 1970s—while certainly not overlooked, by no means dominate the book’s content. Consequently, The Cinema of Hong Kong allows for extensive investigations of the rise and fall of various Mandarin-and Cantonese-language traditions in Hong Kong film, a topic addressed in greatest detail by Stephen Teo in his contribution, “The 1970s: Movement and Transition.” Such an approach also provides for considerations of heretofore rarely considered auteurs such as King Hu, Ann Hui, and Michael Hui in excellent chapters by David Bordwell, Patricia Brett Erens, and Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, respectively. Assembling an anthology both strongly researched and diverse in its focus is no easy task, which makes what Fu and Desser have accomplished all the more remarkable. No collection of essays on the features of a national or regional cinema can provide an exhaustive overview. What this book provides, though, are several valuable additions to the existing scholarship. One such essay is Tony Williams’s “Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo.” Through a careful consideration of the oeuvre of one of the most iconic directors of the Hong Kong new wave of the 1980s, Williams posits that in seminal works like A Better Tomorrow (Ying hung boon sik; 1986), The Killer (Dip huet seung hung; 1989), and Bullet in the Head (Die xue jie tou; 1990), Woo dissects a culture rapidly approaching a defining historical moment. Consequently, Woo’s trademark “stop-motion visual images of heroes transcending the normal temporal boundaries of time and space” provide “tentative possibilities” for a heterogeneous society “struggling to survive a problematic future”3 that is marked not only by the loss of a stable cultural identity, but also by a potential...

The Cinema of Hong Kong: history, arts, identity

List of contributors Acknowledgements Poshek Fu and David Desser Introduction Poshek Fu and David Desser Chronology of Hong Kong cinema David Desser and Poshek Fu Part I. History: 1. The Kung Fu craze: Hong Kong cinema's first American reception David Desser 2. The American connection in early Hong Kong cinema Law Kar 3. The 1960s: modernity, youth culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese cinema Poshek Fu 4. The 1970s: movement and transition Stephen Teo Part II. Arts: 5. Richness through imperfection: King Hu and the glimpse David Bordwell 6. Space, place, and spectacle: the crisis cinema of John Woo Tony Williams 7. Besides fists and blood: Michael Hui and Cantonese comedy Jenny Lau 8. The film work of Ann Hui Patricia Erens Part III. Identity: 9. Between Nationalism and Colonialism: mainland emigres, marginal culture, Hong Kong cinema 1937-1941 Poshek Fu 10. Urban cinema and cultural identity of Hong Kong Leung Ping-Kwan 11. Rewriting history: Hong Kong nostalgia cinema and its social practice Natalia Chan Sui Hung 12. Filming diaspora and identity: Hong Kong and 1997 Sheldon Lu 13. Buying American, consuming Hong Kong: cultural commerce, fantasies of identity, and the cinema Gina Marchetti 14. Hong Kong electric shadows: a selected bibliography of studies in English H. C. Li Index.

Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo

Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo

Review: Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film by Christopher Sharrett

Review: Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film by Christopher Sharrett

Crisis cinema: the apocalyptic idea in postmodern narrative film

Crisis cinema: the apocalyptic idea in postmodern narrative film