Cinematic Imagination Research Articles

Paul Hindemith and the Cinematic Imagination

For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. … The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. To a great extent, huge film “palaces” designed as splendid and glamorous buildings replaced the opera house during the Weimar Republic (1919–33).1 Unlike going to the opera or the theater, going to the movies was an activity that could be enjoyed by almost all social classes. Movie tickets were cheap enough that only the extremely poor were excluded, and artistic standards were such that the movies could also be attractive to the educated and wealthy. Thus, in the 1920s, cinema reached more people than any other entertainment form. Although feature films, often based on German literature, were produced in Germany in the 1910s, the German film industry made its mark internationally with a series of Expressionist films in the early 1920s. Expressionism in film was only loosely connected to the movements in painting and literature that originated shortly before the First World War, in that the films treated psychological or supernatural themes and relied on visual distortion. The plots and stories of Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, and betrayal, and psychological states were visualized by sharply exaggerated shadows, high-contrast lighting, and skewed set designs. But such topics as health, nature, culture, and history, and Bergfilme, films about mountain climbing and skiing, gained popularity. And most notably, the montage film emerged. German film directors were drawn to the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's montage technique after the release of his controversial film about a naval mutiny, Battleship Potemkin, in 1926. In contrast to the more political Russian films, however, the early German montage films were linked with contemporary photography and realistic Neue Sachlichkeit painting, patching together shots from daily life in rapid sequence. Though not to the same extent as their German counterparts, films produced in Russia, Italy, France, Denmark, and America were also shown in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Due to restrictions on the importation of international film, however, Hollywood never gained the same control of the German film market that it maintained almost everywhere else. The import ban was first lifted in 1920, and in 1925, a quota system was instituted that permitted the import of one international feature film for each domestic feature distributed in Germany. Shorts, however, were not subject to this quota. Slapstick comedy took Germany by storm, with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Fatty Arbuckle becoming household names.

Can't Stay, Can't Go: What Is History to a Cinematic Imagination?

Michael Roemer and Robert Young's fictional drama Nothing But a Man makes America's civil rights history intelligible for contemporary audiences. Young's photography relies less on wide observational, contextual angles than on close, myopic framing of the face. The political conflicts represented in the film are rendered as highly personal ones between neighbors, friends, and family members who face off in a cauldron heated by historical forces.

Lo stereotipo del Sud fra Otto e Novecento. Il caso della Sardegna

The Southern Stereotype in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Case of Sardinia Following Italian unification, the North-South dichotomy which had for centuries been part of European tradition was reformulated in Italian culture, resulting in the definition of a homogeneous concept of the South and with it what is probably the most significant and persistent stereotype in the national collective imagination. This perspective stands as a constant in every text on Sardinia, since the national debate on the Southern Question placed the island firmly among the country's other Southern regions. In the early 20th century the traditional stock of images and stereotypes characterising literary discourse became an essential reservoir of characters, situations and places for film-makers. Following the method of imagology, this paper focuses on the strategies used in representing the stereotype of the South in the cinema, specifically in the film Cainà. L’isola e il continente (Righelli 1922). The working hypothesis is that films confirmed the centrality of the North-South dichotomy as the creative engine in the Italian cinematic imagination and the identification of Sardinian society with the South perceived as a model of archaic and primitive civilisation. Depicting Sardinia in accordance with an interpretative scheme considered absolute and unchanging, the new art form followed a route already laid down in literature. In addition, in a cultural phase dominated by the need to develop and disseminate a national consciousness, it contributed to the production of images and symbols standing in open contradiction to the ideal of a united Italy, revealing the contradictions that the Risorgimento had created rather than resolve.

Fantastic voyages of the cinematic imagination: Georges Melies's Trip to the moon

Fantastic voyages of the cinematic imagination: Georges Melies's Trip to the moon

The Austen Effect: Remaking Romantic History as a Novel of Manners

2009 release of Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career. A. O. Scott of New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: I read all the letters. didn't read all the poems. Then worked out a storyline (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet Bright Star to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being pillowed on my fair love's breast as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a feminist intervention even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

Digital Neutrality: Agnès Varda, Kristan Horton and the Ecology of the Cinematic Imagination

The free-market democracy of industrial and now post-industrial culture is enabled by the ability, if not the right, to inconsequently dispose of our personal and collective undesirables. As Thorst...

Review of Jeffrey L. Staley and Richard Walsh, Jesus, The Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on DVD

Jay Twomey reviews Jeffrey L. Staley and Richard Walsh, Jesus , The Gospe ls, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on DVD (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).

Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méélièès's ““Trip to the Moon””, Matthew Solomon (ed.)

Reviewed by: Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's "Trip to the Moon." David Levy Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's "Trip to the Moon." Edited by Matthew Solomon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011). This anthology of essays devoted to Georges Méliès's 1902 motion picture sensation Le Voyage dans la Lune makes it clear how much the assessment of Méliès has changed. That may be the volume's chief value. On the other hand, the essays do not tell us all that much we did not already know about the man's work; key essays by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Thierry Lefebvre and André Gaureault are not new. Perhaps a fantastical idea in 1902, the original tale of a voyage to the moon as a "nowhere land" appears to have been True History, the work of a second-century Syrian author writing in Greek, Lucian of Samosata. In mid January 1898, The New York Journal began publication of a serialization entitled "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Was the illustrated firecracker-shaped rocket approaching the faraway red planet featured in the first installment the inspiration for the Méliès space ship? Responding to the reality of a range of prints in black and white and color tints, and of different lengths, Paolo Cherchi Usai urges that we treat each print as an entity unto itself and not seek definitiveness. And Richard Abel tells us that as a consequence of a range of dubious - though by no means unique - practices, many members of the film's large original American audience had no idea of the identity of its French creator, associating it with the Edison studio. The invitation to pronounce on the famous movie granted contributors license to revisit an older question: what did Georges Méliès have to do with the emergence of the edited narrative? The answer: little if anything. In a reversal of what had been a cliché of early cinema history, the Méliès opus is now regarded as pre-cinema. This is a point reinforced in part by the deliberately backward-looking perspective of many of the essays. The illusionism of the féerie - Méliès's evident debt to the litterateurs Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and to Jacques Offenbach's 1875 "fairy-opera" La Voyage dans la lune - are now regarded as having had virtually nothing to do with what cinema became. Victoria Duckett offers a reading of Méliès's manipulation of female presence in Voyage that draws on Laura Mulvey's appropriation of Jacques Lacan's concept of the gaze. Having lost its one-time enormous audience, the gaze the film itself now attracts is the gaze of the specialist in aesthetic and historical contemplation examining a museum piece. The essays conclude with a citation by Viva Paci of words from Georges Franju's hommage in Le Grand Méliès (1953): "... I think perhaps you understand now why without Georges Méliès this movie and many others could never have been made". But in context this is a sentiment at odds with the anthology's larger unspoken hypothesis about the severe limits of the Frenchman's influence, no longer hailed as the great inspiration of Edwin Porter and D.W. Griffith. Murray Pomerance finds in each of Voyage's scenes "a dreamlike condensation" of abstract [End Page 349] distances, which makes a point not unrelated to Tom Gunning's now familiar claim that the work of Méliès represented a pre-narrative "cinema of attractions." Seizing on the Gunning claim, André Gaudeault has proposed that we understand the Méliès moonshot as sui generis, i.e. as a species of kine-attractography rather than as a stage, however primitive, in the evolution of the edited narrative: "Our task is to convince ourselves that the fundamental point of rupture in film history was not the invention of the moving picture camera in the 1890s (the Kinetograph, the Cinematograph) but rather the constitution of the institution 'cinema' in the 1910s, an institution whose first principle was a systematic rejection of the ways and...

Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination Sharon Pillai Hogan, Patrick Colm. 2008. Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. $55.00 hc. 314 pp. Indian films have long enjoyed an international following with Asian, African and Russian moviegoers. Recent years have also witnessed a surge of interest in them among "Western" audiences, including scholars and filmmakers. Yet the spike in attention has not translated into a more heightened regard for the quality and concinnity of Indian cinema. Mainstream films from India continue to be viewed for the most part as kitschy, albeit money-spinning, extravaganzas—not only abroad, but even in India. Understanding Indian Movies is Patrick Colm Hogan's bid to confute such stereotypes and furnish a template for keener practices of film appreciation. Hogan presents his project as a combination of two main concerns. The obvious purpose is to help people "understand and respond fully to a range of Indian movies'—and not just the specific films he covers—through a primer on culture-specific "knowledge and skills that are generalizable" (2008, 3). A further aim is to alter the broader paradigm of film reception "by locating cultural particularity within cross-cultural patterns," instead of "insisting on cultural differences" after the current critical vogue (4). These twin agendas dictate not only the kinds of films Hogan selects for study, but also the types of concepts, notions, and resonances he accents within the films studied. Theoretically, the dual emphasis of Understanding Indian Movies is integrated through recourse to "principles [drawn] from cognitive neuroscience" (4). According to Hogan, "our engagement with films is bound up with a series of complex cognitive operations" that obtain cross-culturally (251). At present, he argues, "cognitive neuroscience… comprises the best complex of theories available" for analyzing all aspects of film "[f]rom narrative structure to visual construction" (7). Even so, Hogan is not interested in mere procrustean fitting of cinematic texts to neuro-cognitive frames. Rather, through the exegesis attempted, he hopes to "enhance our understanding of Indian cinema," while clarifying "the basic principles of cognitive neuroscience as they bear on the study of film[s]," and "advance the study of cognitive universals, [End Page 210] along with our understanding of the relation between universals and cultural particularity" (7). Understanding Indian Movies puts together five chapters flanked by a detailed introduction about what to expect and why, and a brief afterword that combines summary with sundry disclaimers. Each chapter is focused on a different component of filmic textuality: plot, theme, emotion, sound, and visual style. Eleven movies are discussed in all, with reference to prototypical plots of "romantic, heroic and sacrificial tragicomedy" (8); the theme of violence and "the epilogue of suffering" (10); emotions of anger, mirth, and sorrow and the empathic response they elicit; musical interludes as "extensive formalization and elaboration of narrative junctures" (162–63); and finally, "figural vision" plus questions of "light intensity, boundary definition and color" (195). Since Hogan early on rejects as specious the commonplace polarization of popular and "art" cinema in India, his choices include both types of films. They are Shyam Benegal's Nishant, Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist, Ramesh Sippy's Sholay, Ajit Chakrabarty's Ardhangini, Guru Dutt's Baaz, Raj Kapoor's Shree 420, Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan, Mehboob Khan's Mother India, Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen, Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and Deepa Mehta's Fire. Along with cognitive universals, Hogan uses culturally particular ideas—motives, models and matrices deriving from Indic philosophy, mythic accretions associated with Hindu gods and goddesses, epics such as Ramayana and Silappadikaram, precepts of Sufism, and the aesthetic theories of rasa and dhvani, among others—to interpret these productions. Given the atypical mix of cutting edge experimental knowledge and non-modern Indian traditions of thought, practice and society, Understanding Indian Movies could easily have lapsed into inscrutable acadamese. It is to Hogan's credit that his prose remains consistently jargon-free and accessible. The thesis of Understanding Indian Movies is clearly formulated; its plan systematically executed. Hogan's critical studies are always interesting and sometimes riveting. His exposition of the nature and function of the...

The Fairest Cape of Them All? Cape Town in Cinematic Imagination

AbstractWork on film and the city is still in its infancy for Africa. To my knowledge, there is little research on the way that film has contributed to promoting the image of African cities. This article aims to help fill this gap. In doing so, it draws on Giuliana Bruno's observations on the close relationship between cinema and mass tourism. The article reviews existing literature on cinema and urban Africa. It then explores ways in which Cape Town was represented on film before the ending of apartheid in 1994 and the subsequent rapid rise of the city as a mass tourist destination, international film location and centre of a local film industry. A number of films about the city have since been made for tourists and sold as DVDs or aired on the likes of the Travel Channel. They predictably construct Cape Town as a desirably ‘unique’ and exotic, yet sufficiently safe and ‘vibrant’, city of the imagination. Through close analysis of a typical local travelogue, this article analyses how film language is deployed to this end in the context of Cape Town's apartheid past, the reality of extensive poverty, disease and violence in the present, and dystopian imagery in a growing number of locally made films.Résumé Les travaux sur le cinéma et la ville ne font que débuter à propos de l'Afrique. Rares sont, semble‐t‐il, les études sur la manière dont la production de films a aidéà promouvoir l'image des villes africaines. Cherchant à combler cette lacune, l'article part des observations de Giuliana Bruno sur le rapport étroit entre cinéma et tourisme de masse. Il revient d'abord sur la littérature consacrée au cinéma et à l'Afrique urbaine. Il explore ensuite les représentations filmiques du Cap avant la fin de l'apartheid en 1994, donc avant l'avènement rapide de la ville en tant que destination touristique courue, site de tournage international et centre d'une industrie cinématographique locale. Depuis, plusieurs films touristiques ont été tournés sur la ville et vendus en DVD ou diffusés sur des chaînes comme Travel Channel. Bien entendu, Le Cap y est présenté comme une ville rêvée, alliant un intérêt ‘unique’ et exotique à un degré suffisant de sécurité et d' ‘effervescence’. En analysant de près un documentaire de voyage typique de la production locale, l'article étudie comment le langage filmique est utiliséà cette fin dans le cadre du passé d'apartheid du Cap, de sa réalité actuelle de grave pauvreté, maladie et violence, et d'une imagerie dystopique dans un nombre croissant de films réalisés sur place.

After the Race: Accelerator and the Cinematic Imagination of Urban Ireland

After the Race:Accelerator and the Cinematic Imagination of Urban Ireland Nicholas Miller (bio) Slouching toward Innisfree The one hundredth anniversary of the opening of Dublin's early movie theater, the Cinematograph Volta, founded by James Joyce in 1909, seems an appropriate occasion on which to consider, or reconsider, the relationship between urban Ireland and the history of Irish cinema. The idea for the Volta was put into Joyce's head by his sister, Eva, who thought it strange that Trieste, where Joyce and Nora Barnacle were living at the time, should have several movie theaters while Dublin, a larger city, had none. Joyce loved the movies, but it was his pressing need for cash rather than any devotion to cinematic art that prompted his return to Dublin, where, with four Triestine businessmen as his partners, he opened the Volta on 20 December 1909. From Joyce's standpoint the project was a failure. Having presided over the cinema's opening, he returned to Trieste, leaving the project under the management of his partner, Francesco Novak. Despite positive early notices in the Dublin press, the Volta soon began to lose money and Novak sold it within the year. From the perspective of Irish film history, however, Joyce's abortive venture into the cinema business was a signal moment, insofar as it marks a point at or near the beginning of cinema culture in Ireland.1 [End Page 12] While Irish cinema has had something of an embattled history over the past one hundred years, the cinema's role as part of the social and economic fabric of Irish cities has grown steadily and significantly in that time. The original Volta, which, in spite of being sold several times, remained in operation into the late 1940s, stood at the beginning of an exponential expansion of movie houses in Irish cities. Kevin Rockett reports that by 1916 there were some 149 theaters showing films in Ireland, a number that had grown to 265 by the end of the silent era in 1930.2 Today Ireland has one of the highest rates of cinema admissions in Europe, and film culture is thriving. Major film festivals are an annual occurrence in Galway, Cork, Dublin, and Belfast, and the opening of the Irish Film Centre (now Irish Film Institute) in Dublin in 1992 has created a major center for film research, education, preservation, and exhibition.3 What is striking is that although film has been and continues to be an important cultural presence in Irish cities, the image of urban space has itself played a decidedly minor role in Irish cinema over the last century. From the beginning, the most prominent films in Irish cinema history tended to emphasize the country's rural identity as primary. From The Lad from Old Ireland (Sidney Olcott, 1910) to Knocknagow (James Sullivan, 1918), Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934), The Dawn (Tom Cooper, 1936), The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952), Ryan's Daughter (David Lean, 1970), The Field (Jim Sheridan, 1990), and The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, 1994), the image of rural Ireland has persisted as cinema's chief means of contextualizing Irish stories and representing Irish experience in general.4 [End Page 13] Exceptions to this rule of course exist, although in works like The Commitments (Alan Parker, 1991), Michael Collins (Neil Jordan, 1996), and The General (John Boorman, 1998), for example, urban space figures prominently as a narrative setting without, however, ever becoming the primary focus of the narrative itself. The fact remains that after a century of cinema it is difficult to name a single Irish film that takes the urban as its central object of attention, that treats the city as a primary locus of Ireland's political, social, cultural, and economic self-definition, or that uses film language in new ways to explore and reveal the forms and images of urban Ireland. Furthermore, in view of the fact that Joyce played such a prominent role in introducing urban Ireland to the movies, it seems somewhat ironic that the cinema should not have proved a more influential tool for the development of the country's urban imagination. After all, it was Joyce who...

Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination. By Patrick Colm Hogan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 293 pp. $55.00 (cloth).

Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination. By Patrick Colm Hogan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 293 pp. $55.00 (cloth).

Understanding Indian Movies: Culture, Cognition, and Cinematic Imagination

Review of Patrick Colm Hogan, UNDERSTANDING INDIAN MOVIES: CULTURE, COGNITION, AND CINEMATIC IMAGINATION

Henry James's Memento

This essay is part of a larger project that considers James's cinematic imagination and its resonances across modern and postmodern film. While it may seem odd to compare Henry James's story, "The Beast in the Jungle," with Christopher Nolan's film, Memento , both works consider the relation of memory to temporality and mortality in the construction of identity. The short-term memory loss portrayed in Memento is analogous to Marcher's "forgetting" of May as the embodiment of fate until it is too late, where she can only be recalled in retrospect, at the foot of her grave.

Review of Jeffrey L. Staley and Richard Walsh,Jesus,The Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination:A Handbook to Jesus on DVD

Review of Jeffrey L. Staley and Richard Walsh,<i>Jesus</i>,<i>The Gospe</i><i>ls, and Cinematic Imagination:</i><i>A Handbook to Jesus on DVD</i>

Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination – By Jeffrey L. Staley and Richard Walsh

Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination – By Jeffrey L. Staley and Richard Walsh

It's So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture

The bold white letters of Hollywood are so emblazoned on our collective cinematic imagination that it takes a degree of reflection before considering that Hollywood was neither the birthplace of cinema nor wholly dominant even during its post-war golden age when the export of American films covered Europe like a cultural imprint of Marshall Aid. Vanessa Schwartz's book, dotted with technicolor film stills, paparazzi images of film stars and coated in primary coloured pages, pans out from such a sharp focus on the Sunshine State and attacks the simplistic conception of the Americanization of mass culture through a presentation of the internationalization of the film industry during the 1950s. Divided into four chapters that can be read as independent studies within themselves, It's So French! tracks the development of cinema and filmmaking from its national, studio-based focus prior to the Second World War to a multinational and cooperative enterprise epitomized by the Cannes Film Festival and Around the World in 80 Days. Her central argument, and one which is clearly inspired by the likes of Kristen Ross’ Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, is that the rise of mass culture and consumerism did not automatically denote Americanization (a term which, unfortunately, she does not unpick) and that, in actual fact, it was not something to which French culture was particularly averse. Her first chapter is a study of what she terms ‘Frenchness films’, that is usually American films, shot in American studios but which bought into the extravagant, musical and creative nostalgia of the Belle Epoque era in France. With scenes taken straight from Toulouse-Lautrec paintings (the photographs and stills included here show the uncanny resemblances) and frequent doses of the infamous can-can, many Hollywood films of the era paid homage to fin-de-siècle Paris as both the home of art and of popular culture. While many of these films, tracked from An American in Paris to Gigi, are particularly clichéd in their portrayal of France (or more specifically, Paris), others, such as Moulin Rouge, were praised by their contemporaries for their portrayal of Impressionism and their own visual artistry. Schwartz argues that this theme of Frenchness within Hollywood films of the 1950s was representative of a circular cultural exchange between France and the United States.

Youth Culture in Global Cinema (review)

Youth Culture in Global Cinema Andrew Scahill (bio) Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel. Youth Culture in Global Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. 363 pp. $24.95. In Childhood and Society (1950), Erik Erikson's classic study of psychosocial stages of development, Erikson identified adolescence as a stage of "moratorium"—a moment of delay, prior to adulthood, when a youth may explore and evaluate social roles and self-conceptions. This moribund stage, characterized by the psychological crisis of "identity vs. role confusion," is no less decisive in the literary and cinematic imagination, where the symbolic death of the child and the (re)birth of the adult finds articulation in the coming of age narrative. In their state of not-yet-becoming, youth straddle the boundary between a private familial identity and a public independent self. Indeed, teenagers are semiotically potent in their liminality. Thus "youth culture"—be it revolutionary, endangered, delinquent, or misunderstood—is easily mobilized to fulfill the representational needs of adult culture. This is where Youth Culture in Global Cinema arrives: more interested in youth representation than consumption, it explores what it means to look at young people and what cultural baggage their bodies have been asked to carry. As a study of representation, Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel's collection is a welcome expansion of a few groundbreaking studies in youth and cinema, including David Constantine's The Cinema of Adolescence (1985), Thomas Doherty's Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (1988), and co-editor Shary's own Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (2002). Still, as Shary says in his introduction, based on the dearth of critical attention to youth representation in cinema, "[o]ne could easily draw the conclusion that, despite the cultural concerns for how young people may use media, the image of youth on screen is of little interest to adults" (3). As a corrective to this critical neglect, the book is essentially the first collection on youth in cinema to have a global perspective. As such, the essays contained within are both focused in their cultural specificity and revealing in the thematic consistency that draws the essays together. The collection is divided into five sections, and the editors chose to group the essays thematically rather than by region. This approach works, though I would have enjoyed an introduction for each section from the editors that drew out the connections between the essays. As such, the editors missed an opportunity to provide more concreteness to the collection as a whole. "Rebellion and Resistance," the first section, offers selections centered around the figure of the youthful rebel in cinema and thankfully offers a range of perspectives. The most interesting piece, Daniel Biltereyst's "American Juvenile Delinquency Movies and the European Censors," examines the European critical reception of The Wild One (1953), Blackboard Jungle (1955), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the manner in which the films were viewed as emblematic of U.S. cultural and economic encroachment. This early essay cleverly articulates what becomes a consistent theme in this collection: the adolescent body serving as a battleground over national identity and futurity. In this, the young person's choice between tradition and modernity becomes more than simply a matter of personal [End Page 69] identity and role confusion but a question of identitarian politics and national legacy. Section 2, "Politics and Style," uses heavily formalist-informed analysis to examine how traditional cinematic forms are overturned or translated by youth culture. Of the pieces, Kimberly Bercov Monteyne's "The Sound of the South Bronx: Youth Culture, Genre, and Performance in Keith Ahern's Wild Style" is the most innovative: Monteyne offers a fresh critical perspective on Jane Feuer's and Rick Altman's classic studies of the American film musical and legitimates the 1980s hip-hop musical as a utopist reordering of urban space. "Youth and Inner-National Conflict," Youth Culture and Global Cinema's third section, contains the collection's strongest pieces. Concerned with the lives of young people within a matrix of national and religious forces, the essays demonstrate the impact of global geopolitics on the lives of youth. As Shary notes...

From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”

From British “Pride” to Indian “Bride”

Edogawa Rampo and His Cinematic Imagination

Edogawa Rampo and His Cinematic Imagination