Cinematic Depictions Research Articles

Sympathy for the Other: Female Solidarity and Postcolonial Subjectivity in Francophone Cinema

In this article we explore how female sympathy and solidarity can be forged between transnational subjects and spectators. In particular, we place cinematic depictions of minority female suffering in the contexts of current feminist and postcolonial praxes. The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which world cinema can produce a transnational feminist solidarity through forms and narratives that reflect the experiences of women as gendered postcolonial subjects. Amongst the female and feminist theorists drawn upon, central to our understanding of a transnational feminist solidarity is Sandra Lee Bartky's ‘mitgefühl’ (feeling-with). From this understanding we suggest bonds of sympathetic solidarity between audiences and diegetic female subjects that bridge their ontological separation, without conflating the two, in relation to Rachida ( Yamina Bachir Chouikh, 2002 ) and Frontière(s) ( Xavier Gens, 2007 ). In combining film-philosophy, cinematic affect and feminist theory we formulate a radically new way of understanding and envisioning the construction of female suffering onscreen: as a means of producing transnational forms of spectator solidarity.

Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe

Reviewed by: Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe Nancy P. Nenno (bio) Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema. By Steve Choe. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. vii+274. Cloth £80.00. ISBN 978-1441175380. Steve Choe’s Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema is a philosophical meditation on the function of cinema in a time of crisis. Drawing on a selection of art films from the early years of the Weimar Republic, Choe juxtaposes their representations of life and death in the aftermath of World War I [End Page 398] and the devastating Treaty of Versailles with philosophical and popular discourses to illuminate the ways in which the cinematic medium not only embodies the idea of mortality itself, but can catalyze a spectatorial positionality that encourages reflection and model an ethics of spectatorship. This dialogue between literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historically grounded analysis and close readings of the films is the book’s strong point, as it reflects on the ways in which cinema itself constitutes a self-reflexive medium that is intimately tied to specific historical contexts. As such, his readings also interact with the Kinodebatte, the debate about film’s potential to become an artistic medium. The two pillars of Choe’s analyses are Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the analytic and intuitive attitudes toward time and change and Walter Benjamin’s understanding of allegory. Along the way, he brings an impressive array of other voices into dialogue through his discussions of cinematic depictions of death, loss, mourning, and revenge. Film critics from the period such as Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balász, philosophers Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Georg Simmel, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke all contribute to his understanding of his primary themes: the experience of the animation of the inanimate as represented by film, and the struggle to understand life and death following World War I, ultimately culminating in what Choe terms the “ethics of survival” (10). Afterlives opens with a beautifully nuanced close reading of a scene from Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which he argues that the somnambulist Cesare functions as an allegory of the cinema itself insofar as he is “reawakened” or reanimated from the dead. These moments of self-reflexivity appear in most of the films Choe analyzes, from the origins of cinema in the traveling fair depicted in Caligari to the play of shadows in Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923). There is a distinct narrative in the study which progresses from initial reactions to the war experience to those of mourning and loss to the projection of the future through the remembrance of the past. Chapter 1 focuses on two possible reactions to having survived the war. Here, Choe contrasts the two male figures in Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919) to demonstrate how they enact diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with postwar trauma. Chapter 2 undertakes a complementary reading of Murnau’s films The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922) in order to understand the ways in which the topos of haunting functioned in the immediate postwar period. Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) is the focus of the third chapter, which underscores the relationship between the duration of the film experience and the experience of lived human life. The fourth chapter focuses on Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) and its explicit allegory of cinema as the animation of the inanimate as a means to posit the possibility of an ethical relationship to the other. In the final chapter, which deals with Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), Choe demonstrates how the theme [End Page 399] of revenge can lead either to a sense of life as predetermined or as open ended and potentially utopian. While the stated focus of Afterlives is early Weimar cinema, it is not entirely clear what the historical parameters of “early” Weimar cinema are, nor how he has chosen these films rather than others. Although there are references to Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), it seems odd...

Dream West: Politics and Religion in Cowboy MoviesDouglasBrode. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

Dream West: Politics and Religion in Cowboy Movies Douglas Brode. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.The Western genre has almost disappeared from the silver screen, but, in Dream West, Douglas Brode, a novelist, screenwriter, journalist, and professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, argues that the genre continues to cast a giant shadow over American politics. Employing the current media tendency to characterize states as blue, liberal, and Democratic, or red, conservative, and Republican, he suggests that contemporary politicians tend to misinterpret the historical West as well as the imagined Flollywood West in an effort to justify ideological positions. Challenging the conventional wisdom of the film as embracing conservative values, Brode maintains that a close reading of the Western genre suggests a more liberal interpretation of Hollywood's Western film.To support this argument, Brode demonstrates an impressive grasp of Hollywood Westerns from the silent era into the twenty-first century. For example, in cinematic depictions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral between the Earp and Clanton clans, Brode points out that one of the background reasons for the conflict was the attempt of the Earps, representing the legal establishment, to disarm the rebellious cowboys. Thus, films such as John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), which tells the story from the perspective of the Earps, actually end up supporting more liberal policies such as gun control.Expanding upon his thesis, Brode also looks at BWesterns from the 1930s starring Gene Autry and often featuring greedy capitalists as villains threatening the Western environment. These films are not anticapitalist per se but are critical of business interests which are focused only upon profits and display no concern for the larger community. By and large, in these Autry films, the federal government is perceived as a benevolent force bringing civilization, order, and scientific progress to the West.Violence is, of course, a key theme in the Western genre, but Brode observes that, unlike the war-happy cowboy diplomacy with which liberals characterized the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, the Hollywood Western usually fails to embrace the idea of regeneration through violence. Thus, in more epic Westerns such as Duel in the Sun (1947) and Sea of Grass (1947), patriarchs who employ violence to resist federal policies are depicted as reactionaries. And when violence is necessary to tame evil, in such films as Shane (1953) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), the protagonist who has employed violence to save the community is tainted with blood and, in a feminization of the West, is unable to enjoy the benefits of civilization. Violence is also often associated with vengeance, and Brode argues that the Hollywood Western suggests that heroes must follow the legal order rather than personal vengeance. For example, in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930), the hero must first honor his commitment to the community and wagon train before pursuing those who murdered his family.Religion is also often associated with the red state values of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. But again, Brode cautions against reading the Hollywood Western as being unconditionally supportive of American expansionism and subduing the environment. He insists that romanticism exerts considerable influence upon the Western genre, encouraging an appreciation for nature and indigenous people who live in greater harmony with the earth. …

Fictional Depictions of Youth in School in Films made in China and United States

This study discussed the differences between Chinese youth film and American teen film through the perspective on cultural foundation. The authors argue that Confucianism was an alternative that greatly affects the depiction of young characters and the causal relationship of morality and fate of the characters in films. The objective of such a comparison was not to advocate for either Chinese or American youth cinema in portraying young people, but to promote a better understanding of the strengths and impacts of youth cinema and youth genre. In addition, this study examined cinematic depictions of young characters portrayed in Chinese youth films and American teen films. It was argued that Chinese youth films and American youth films differ in depictions of school settings and even their purposes.

Million Dollar Arm by Tom McCarthy

Reviewed by: Million Dollar Arm by Tom McCarthy Ron Briley Tom McCarthy. Million Dollar Arm. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Burbank, ca: Walt Disney Pictures, 2014. 124 min. The 2014 summer-film box office was dominated by evil fairies, mutant super-heroes, and a fire-breathing prehistoric monster. Amid these loud cinematic depictions of violence and fantasy, Walt Disney Pictures released a rather modest baseball film based on a 2007 true story, Million Dollar Arm. The picture, which depicts Hollywood’s nostalgic rendering of the sport as the embodiment of the American dream, opened to mixed reviews and moderate commercial success, earning $10.5 million in its opening weekend up against the blockbuster Godzilla. The reality of the story portrayed in the film, however, raises some serious questions about the American dream that were essentially ignored by the filmmakers. Million Dollar Arm focuses on the career of sports agent J. B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm), who represented such stars as Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants and Barry Sanders of the Detroit Lions. In the film, Bernstein’s business is struggling; and he and his partner, Ash Vasudevan (Aasif Mandvi), seize on the idea of finding new baseball talent on the untapped Indian subcontinent. Bernstein assumes that with cricket being so popular in India, there must be bowlers who could throw a baseball. Securing the financial backing of an Asian sports investor named Chang (Tzi Ma), Bernstein develops a contest called Million Dollar Arm in which the winner would receive one hundred thousand dollars, with an opportunity to win a million dollars in the United States and perhaps earn a tryout with a major-league club. Bernstein is assisted in his efforts to find local talent by Amrit Rohan (Pitobash Tripathy), an Indian with a passion for baseball and a desire to coach in the game. Also joining the talent search is aging legendary baseball scout Ray Poitevint (Alan Arkin), who seems to spend most of his time sleeping. The curmudgeonly Poitevint, however, wakes when he hears a fastball pop a catcher’s mitt [End Page 196] at around ninety miles an hour. Poitevint is old-school; and with the exception of a radar gun, he eschews technology and statistical analysis. He knows talent when he sees it and is quite similar to the fictional scout Gus Lobel, portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Trouble with the Curve (2012). After considerable difficulty and some cultural misunderstanding, Bernstein and his team discover two young men with arms that might be compatible with major-league standards. The winner of the contest was the left-handed throwing Rinku Singh (Suraj Sharma), who was one of nine children and the son of an impoverished truck driver. The young man did not play cricket, but Singh was a junior national medalist with the javelin. Finishing second to Singh was the right-handed Dinesh Patel (Madhur Mittal), whose background was similar in that he threw the javelin rather than having been a cricket bowler and in that he came from a poor family in rural India. Bernstein then returns to the United States with his two pitching discoveries and with baseball enthusiast Rohan as an interpreter and chaperone. The agent assigns Singh and Patel to former major-league pitcher and coach Tom House (Bill Paxton), who, with his advanced degree in sports psychology and experience as a coach at the University of Southern California, was expected to teach the young men to play the sport of baseball. Meanwhile, Bernstein, depicted as driving a sports car and enjoying the single lifestyle with numerous attractive women, has his personal life disrupted by the young Indians struggling to deal with a new culture. Unable to leave Singh, Patel, and Rohan in a hotel, where they seem incapable of coping with such modern devices as an elevator, Bernstein is forced to take the Indians into his home, introducing them to such staples of the American diet as pizza. The young men also admire Brenda Fenwick (Lake Bell), a nurse who is renting a guesthouse from Bernstein and eventually becomes a romantic interest for the sports agent. Thus, the Disney film suggests the formation of a family to which Bernstein is initially resistant...

The Nance by Douglas Carter Beane (review)

Reviewed by: The Nance by Douglas Carter Beane Ray Schultz The Nance. By Douglas Carter Beane. Directed by Jack O’Brien. Lincoln Center Theatre, Lyceum Theatre, New York City. 2 July 2013. Douglas Carter Beane’s 2006 satire The Little Dog Laughed nimbly critiqued contemporary Hollywood’s hypocrisy when it comes to both its cinematic depictions of gay characters and the politics governing the sexual orientation of those celebrities deemed best suitable to “act” these roles. As the scheming agent Diane lectures her high-profile client Mitchell, whom she is perfectly willing to “out” onscreen while guarding the closet door of his private life with the ferocity of a pit bull: “If a perceived straight actor portrays a gay role in a feature film, it’s noble, it’s a stretch. It’s the pretty lady putting on a fake nose and winning an Oscar. If an actor with a ‘friend’ plays a gay role, it’s not acting, it’s bragging.” For Mitchell to get to play “gay,” he must first convincingly play “straight.” In his latest work, The Nance, Beane again examines the construct of playing gay, but from the perspective of a remote theatrical past. In its premiere production, Beane and director Jack O’Brien moved beyond presenting a mere period piece, using their subject matter both to draw contemporary parallels and evoke significant markers of gay and theatrical history. Beane’s title refers to a stock character of burlesque, the popular theatrical genre that had reached its zenith at the time of the play’s setting, the late 1930s. A nance was a flamboyantly effeminate character given to hysterical utterances like “Oh, you brutes” or risqué double entendres, such as “I love, love, love when the organ swells.” Although nances were traditionally played by heterosexual men, Beane makes his a homosexual named Chauncey Miles (Nathan Lane). Even as he expertly minces about the stage, entertaining audiences with his trademark “Hi, simply Hi!,” the sociopolitical ramifications of caricaturing his sexual orientation are not lost on Chauncey. He bitterly observes that a gay man playing a nance is “kind of like a Negro doing blackface,” and identifies with W. C. Field’s assessment of Bert Williams as “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” Throughout the play, Chauncey’s meticulous focus in perfecting his stage persona remains at odds with society’s treatment of gay representation both onstage and off. For example, Mayor LaGuardia, in his campaign to clean up New York in preparation for the world’s fair, cracks down on theatres that feature the nance and the “nance crowd” that its bawdy material attracts to its balconies; navigating the furtive environment of the automat in search of sex, Chauncey risks harassment, and even violence, from the police. And despite for the first time achieving a seemingly stable, although ultimately doomed relationship with Ned (Jonny Orsini), a younger man he initially picks up for casual sex, Chauncey exemplifies the kind of internalized homophobia reminiscent of such pre-Stonewall dramas as The Boys in the Band (1968). Furthermore, Beane compounds Chauncey’s selfloathing by making him politically conservative. Ironically, Chauncey presages the modern rhetoric of certain Log Cabin Republicans who excuse conservative displays of homophobia as necessary to appeasing the base constituents: desperate to continue performing, yet unwilling to compromise his artistic integrity, Chauncey deludes himself into thinking that “things will quiet down” after the election. The production vividly evoked the visual and performing style of the period. John Lee Beatty’s revolving set, including an automat resembling a Hopper painting, and Ann Roth’s costumes, including appropriately seedy costumes for the theatre’s strippers, established both the grit and faded elegance of its theatrical milieu. Even the choice of the Lyceum Theatre to stand in for the play’s primary location, the old Irving Place Theatre, and O’Brien’s incorporation of certain features of this historic, early-twentieth-century structure enveloped the audience in authentic period detail. However, the numerous burlesque songs and sketches featuring the nance and company are the play’s thematic core, and the production showcased them with a superb mix of expert comic timing, joyful performing...

“The Teacher's Unexpected Bath”: Plumbing the Meaning of Mayhem in the Celluloid Schoolroom

Since the late 1930s, cinematic depictions of schooling have generally affirmed the necessity of school as a social institution and underscored the importance of formalized education for children and youth. Movies ranging fromGoodbye, Mr. Chips(1939) toDead Poets Society(1989) have represented school as a place of tradition and order, and films such asThe Corn Is Green(1945);Blackboard Jungle(1955);Good Morning, Miss Dove(1955);Up the Down Staircase(1967); andStand and Deliver(1988) have portrayed teachers as heroic figures. It could seem that the film industry has always portrayed schooling in idealistic terms. But that is not the case. This essay examines the familiar cultural genre of films about schooling, but it does so by looking backward beforeBlackboard Jungle, even beforeGoodbye, Mr. Chips, to the first four decades of cinema—a period when schooling was rendered not as a necessity, but as a joke.

Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists: From Caligari to Hannibalby PackerSharon, M.D. Jefferson, N.C., McFarland, 2012, 256 pp., $45.00.

Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists: From Caligari to Hannibalby PackerSharon, M.D. Jefferson, N.C., McFarland, 2012, 256 pp., $45.00.

Cinematic Philosophy: Experiential Affirmation in Memento

This article demonstrates that Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) meets both conditions of Paisley Livingston's bold thesis of cinema as philosophy. I delineate my argument in terms of Aaron Smuts's clarifications of Livingston's conditions. The results condition, which is concerned with the nature of the philosophical content, is developed in relation to Berys Gaut's conception of narrational confirmation, which I designate ‘experiential affirmation.’ Because experiential affirmation is a function of cinematic depiction, it meets Livingston's means condition, which is concerned with the capacities of the medium or art form. I address two objections to my argument and conclude with a brief commentary on the implications for the broader relationship between film and philosophy.

The Irish in American Cinema 1910 – 1930: Recurring Narratives and Characters

This paper will consider cinematic depictions of the Irish between 1910 and 1930. American cinema during these years, like those that preceded them, contained a range of stereotypical Irish characters. However, as cinema began to move away from short sketches and produce longer films, more complex plots and refined Irish characters began to appear. The onscreen Irish became vehicles for recurring themes, the majority of which had uplifting narratives. This paper will discuss common character types, such as the Irish cop and domestic servant, and subjects such as the migration narrative, the social reform narrative and the inter-ethnic comedy. It will also briefly consider how Irish depictions in the 1910s and 1920s compared to earlier representations. While the emphasis will be on films viewed at archives, including the University of California, Los Angeles Film and Television Archive, or acquired through private and commercial sellers, the paper will also reflect on some films that are currently considered lost.

The Cinematic Depiction of Conflict Resolution in the Immigrant Chinese Family: The Wedding Banquet and Saving Face

Both emphasising dilemmas that have been confronted by the Chinese-American family, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) highlight the image of homosexuality as incompatible with traditional Chinese family values. Through detailed narrative analyses of these two films with a focus on the structure of the plot, the key characters, and camera work, this article aims to answer the questions of how traditional Chinese culture continues to play into and conflict with the experiences of modern Chinese American families and how each film presents and resolves the tensions arising from a culture in transition. The article argues that the importance of studying the ways in which the protagonists try to come to terms with incompatible value systems, lies in the capacity of film to reveal the complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, as well as the socio-cultural specificity of the conceptions of modernity.

Class, Ethnicity, and Immigration in Sweden: Two Films, Two Strategies

Against a background of growing inequality, “class” as a subject has made its comeback in Swedish arts and public debate generally. This has resulted in some very strong cinematic depictions of the upper social classes. But when it comes to the working class, films have tended to demonize or mock, to focus on criminality and drug abuse, and to equate the working class either with the immigrant population or with ethnically Swedish “rednecks” isolated from urban “civilization.” Recently, however, two films have stood out by avoiding such “othering” stereotypes: Sebbe (2010) and Eat Sleep Die (2012). Both films were written and directed by filmmakers with an immigrant background: Iranian‐born Babak Najafi and Gabriella Pichler, whose Bosnian mother and Austrian father both arrived as migrant workers in the 1970s. Interestingly, the directors have chosen radically different approaches to the issue of the class–ethnicity relationship. Najafi focuses entirely on ethnically Swedish protagonists in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg, while Pichler situated her film among the ethnically mixed working class of a small industrial countryside town, giving her main protagonist a background similar to her own. This essay will comparatively analyze the two films against a background of contemporary Swedish history, while also highlighting how the immigrant and class experiences of the directors have beneficially influenced their work.

Virtually Witness Augmentation Now: Video Games and the Future of Human Enhancement

Virtually Witness Augmentation Now: Video Games and the Future of Human Enhancement

Cinematic Cities: A ‘Film and History’ Overview for South Africa's Major Metropolises from the 1890s to the 1950s*

This article provides a thematic and chronological overview of ideas about South African cities, parts of cities or urbanity in general contained in films from the 1890s to the 1950s. These ideas – whether in feature films, travelogues, newsreels, documentaries or docudramas – reflected the attitudes not only of the film makers, but often also of many others in the places and periods in which they were made. City films could also transmit ideas, and thereby convey or help maintain attitudes towards the urban. Yet there is still a paucity of studies on cinematic portrayals of African cities. The article is drawn from a larger project that looks at the perceptions and experiences of South African cities from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, and the consequences of those perceptions and experiences. Hence it is an exercise in both film as historical evidence and the role of film in history. The article argues that depictions of South African urbanity on film contained both utopian and dystopian imagery, as was usual with cinematic depictions of cities in many other parts of the world. For South Africa, depictions of cities in film during the 1920s and 1930s were largely utopian, the product in part of the rise of place-selling initiatives. But after the Second World War the likes of Cry, the Beloved Country and Civilization on Trial in South Africa provided decidedly dystopian visions of South African ‘slums’. The article explains how and why this happened, and why such representations were part of more general post-war domestic and international debate on the nature of South African urban problems and possibilities, not least over the conditions and experiences of urban Africans. It also suggests ways in which this debate, and therefore visual and literary depictions of cities, evolved in the course of the 1950s, resulting in more complex cinematic representations that argued that even South African ‘slums’ were places of creativity as well as hardship.

Romancing ‘kung fu master’ – from ‘yellow peril’ to ‘yellow prowess’

Present study critically investigates the cinematic depiction of leading Chinese masculine figures in Hollywood film productions, with a specific focus on how the positioning of white female characters romantically involved with Chinese martial arts fighters serves to construct Chinese masculinity. In noted films such as The Tuxedo (2002), Kiss of the Dragon (2001), and Dragon: Bruce Lee Story (1993), Chinese martial arts fighters not only managed to fight off white antagonists but also succeeded in winning the ‘heart’ of white heroines. Drawing on Gestner's theoretical assertion that white women's falling for a man of color signifies the invasive movement of a new masculine discourse into the space traditionally bounded by the ideal of white masculinity, and grounded on Hall's conception of articulation, my critical examination of these three film texts revealed how the privileged cultural and racial position of whiteness was reformulated and rejustified via the strategic dramatic construction of romantic encounters between Chinese martial artists and their white partners. More importantly, the current study sheds light on an emerging form of cultural politics that transformed conventional mediated construction of interracial romance and yet perpetuated the racial hierarchy sustained through racist assumption and ideology.

The Lure of the Mob: Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of Skinhead Authenticity

The Lure of the Mob: Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of Skinhead Authenticity

Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian independent cinema: Essays, documents, interviews. Edited by Tilman Baumgärtel. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 273, Notes, Bibliography, Index. - Southeast Asia. Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia. Edited by May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 239, Illustrations, Bibliography.

Southeast Asian independent cinema: Essays, documents, interviews Edited by TILMAN BAUMGARTEL Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 273, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia Edited by MAY ADADOL INGAWANIJ and BENJAMIN MCKAY Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 239, Illustrations, Bibliography. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000131 Given the heterogeneous geographies and disjunctive histories of Southeast Asia, any attempt at discussing the region's cinema must always err on the side of the plural. In turn, discourses on its independent cinema must attend to contesting notions of independence. Through what forms of relationality can cinema become independent? And independent of what? Such questions are posed by both Southeast Asian independent cinema and Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia, the first two published collections of literature devoted exclusively to the study of the field. The appearance of the two titles within the same year marks a milestone not only for the region's independent cinema, but also its screen culture as a whole, considering that previous discussions of Southeast Asian films were mostly framed within the larger context of Asian cinema. Comparing the two collections to earlier titles such as Being & becoming: The cinemas of Asia (ed. Aruna Vasudev, Latika Padgaonkar and Rashmi Doraiswamy, Macmillan India, 2002) and Contemporary Asian cinema: Popular culture in a global frame (ed. Anne Tereska Ciecko, Berg, 2006) also reveals the shifts in approach, for their chapters are titled not after countries but issues and ideas--a reflection of the post-national paradigm in which Southeast Asian independent cinema operates today. Southeast Asian independent cinema is divided into three sections: 'Essays', 'Documents' and 'Interviews'. The first two essays by John A. Lent and editor Tilman Baumgartel give a broad overview of the region, foregrounding the affinities shared by the independent filmmaking practices of its different countries. Lent's 'Southeast Asian independent cinema: Independent of what?' identifies three forms of independence: of government control, of the studio system and of traditional film aesthetics. While his arguments are mostly cogent, the attempt at designating aesthetic independence as a category in itself is questionable, for it obscures the social realities and economy of means from which 'independent' aesthetics often emerge. Meanwhile, Baumgartel's 'Imagined communities, imagined worlds: Independent film from Southeast Asia in the global mediascape' takes as its key theoretical reference Arjun Appadurai's concept of 'imagined worlds'. Theorised by Appadurai as transnational relational fields through which people, media, technologies, finances and ideas circulate, these 'imagined worlds' are insightfully posited by Baumgartel as 'zones of territorial and cultural disjuncture' (p. 31) in which independent films in the region are made, challenging the Andersonian 'imagined communities' formed through mainstream, state-sanctioned cinema. Another notable essay is Alfian bin Sa'at's 'Hinterland, heartland, home: Affective topography in Singapore films'. Analysing films such as 12 Storeys (1997), Eating Air (1999) and Singapore Dreaming (2006), Alfian puts forth a compelling thesis on how the heartland, referring to the neighbourhoods of high-rise public flats where most Singaporeans live, operates as an imperfect hinterland for a country with none to call its own. Less convincing is the added claim that such images of the Singaporean heartland bear the traces of the kampungs as depicted in Malay films of the sixties, which smacks of romanticism and retroactive rationalisation. Intan Paramaditha's 'Cinema, sexuality and censorship in post-Soeharto Indonesia' also offers keen insights. Through a historical examination of the uneasy relationship between cinema and public morality in Indonesia, Paramaditha illustrates how the shift towards a post-Soeharto institutional environment did not ease censorship laws concerning cinematic depictions of gender and sexuality, but merely transferred the power to oppress from a paternalistic regime to a social climate governed by revived Islamic values. …

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic inMy Brother Tom

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

The Cinematic Depiction of Conflict Resolution in the Immigrant Chinese Family

Both emphasising dilemmas that have been confronted by the Chinese- American family, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) highlight the image of homosexuality as incompatible with traditional Chinese family values. Through detailed narrative analyses of these two films with a focus on the structure of the plot, the key characters, and camera work, this article aims to answer the questions of how traditional Chinese culture continues to play into and conflict with the experiences of modern Chinese American families and how each film presents and resolves the tensions arising from a culture in transition. The article argues that the importance of studying the ways in which the protagonists try to come to terms with incompatible value systems, lies in the capacity of film to reveal the complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, as well as the socio-cultural specificity of the conceptions of modernity.

Towards a spatial historiography of the Holocaust: Resistance, film, and the prisoner uprising at Sobibor death camp

This paper aims to develop a historiography of the Holocaust based around the spatialities of organised resistance, through a geographical reading of two cinematic depictions of the 1943 prisoner uprising at Sobibor death camp: Escape From Sobibor (1987) and Sobibor, octobre 14 1943, 1600 heures (2001). These case studies are privileged in my reading on account of the capacity of filmmaking practices to provoke new directions in historical and geographical research. Specifically, I argue that in order to tell their stories of resistance, these films are forced to depict several aspects of camp spatiality – including spatial routines, disciplined mobility, heterogeneous social space, the mental maps of prisoners and perpetrators, work sites and networks of institutions – that are easily overlooked in narratives focussing solely on domination and killing in the camps. The filmmaking practices of these films therefore testify to a relation between organised resistance and camp spatiality that can be productive for ongoing efforts to write the geographies of the Holocaust. The paper also seeks to make a methodological intervention by demonstrating the value of moving Holocaust film criticism beyond its prevalent preoccupation with standards of verisimilitude.