Contemporary Filmmakers Research Articles

“Taking This from This and That from That”: Examining RZA and Quentin Tarantino’s Use of Pastiche

“Taking This from This and That from That”: Examining RZA and Quentin Tarantino’s Use of Pastiche

Ecce Homo Novus: snapshots, the ‘new man’, and iconic montage in the work of Santiago Alvarez

This essay explores Santiago Alvarez's iconic, montage-style filmmaking as it prefigured Modernity's accelerated crisis as produced by transnational capitalism and theorized years later by poststructuralists and postmodernists. Alvarez, one of the fathers of New Latin American Cinema, stands as an ever more relevant mentor for many contemporary young filmmakers in terms of his lessons about audience cultivation and politicized, immediate, innovative image-making in a context of what he termed ‘accelerated underdevelopment’. His aesthetic of limited resources and limited time and his early emphasis on the tactless camera eye has become a veritable weapon for change for many filmmakers in Latin America's latest decade, which saw successive economic crises, the failure of neoliberal policies, and a rise in left wing governments.

On Rivers, Flowers, Fruits, and More

Short reviews of nine movies from the 2013 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital sample contemporary filmmakers' explorations of the complex links among people and their environments.

Sacred Places and Arlit: Deuxième Paris: Reterritorialization in African Documentary Films

Contemporary African filmmakers are transforming African cinema as they move beyond the social realist aesthetic directives of independence times to explore the struggles and triumphs of Africans living in globalized contexts. In particular, documentary filmmaking stresses the interrelationship between multiple histories (colonial, national, and personal) as they collide with social, political, and economic imperatives. Starting with Édouard Glissant’s concept of relational poetics, this article explores reterritorialization and deterritorialization in Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s Arlit: Deuxième Paris (2004, Niger/France) and Jean-Marie Teno’s Sacred Places (2009, Cameroon/France). In particular, the article considers how the films reterritorialize documentary aesthetics through the use of landscape and testimony as metaphors for Africa’s post-colonial struggles. In doing so, the documentaries create an inner space for spectators to consider the social and political costs of global exploitation from an African perspective.

Superflies into Superkillers: Black Masculinity in Film from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism

N THE 1971 FILM SHAFT, ITS PROTAGONIST BEMOANS THAT HE “HAS two problems.” He was “born black and I was born poor.” Nearly 20 years later, the narrative of John Singleton’s film Boyz in the Hood seemed to be the period on Shaft’s complaint by proclaiming that “One out of every 21 Black American males will be murdered” in the poor streets of South Central Los Angeles. Obviously, there is a link between these movies created decades apart that goes beyond having black protagonists. What is this link and how do we understand its relevance for the study of the history of film and cultural resistance? How did the 1970s’ characterization of superflies become the 1990s’ superkillers? Film theorist Noel Carroll first coined the term “allusionism” to explain how contemporary filmmakers use old cinematic conventions in their films. He also explored why they use old conventions in their films. He argues that because filmmakers in the 1990s were the first generation to have grown up with intense film watching, they possessed a more solid knowledge of what had come before them. Therefore, they were able to comment on iconographic symbols in the past films, knowing that their audience would also recognize these icons. Carroll states that:

Art and culture in contemporary South Africa

This article focuses on the complex ways in which artistic innovation and creativity have been fostered by the experience of living in late apartheid and post-apartheid society. It argues that contemporary South African artists, film-makers and performers have developed highly inventive formal and conceptual vocabularies in their effort to negotiate the ever-changing landscape of contradictory and sometimes irreconcilable realities they encounter on a daily basis, often attaining major international acclaim in the process. Blurring the boundaries between long-established artistic genres, and challenging racial, sexual and other stereotypes, they have refused to abandon the hope of achieving the ideals of a renewal and respacialization of the current socio-cultural landscape. Many of them have done so against the odds of vociferous opprobrium from state officials and legal challenges by the ANC, which in recent years has questioned the right to freedom of expression of a number of artists.

The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema

During their adolescence in the 1950s, the contemporary filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas drew their inspiration from popular science fiction B-films of the era. Classic science fiction and horror films such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) are the subject of Blair Davis's fascinating study of post–World War II cinema. Defining the B-film as low-budget popular entertainment alternatives to mainstream studio productions, Davis provides a financial and production history rather than cultural narrative. Thus, Davis, an assistant professor in the College of Communications at DePaul University, asserts, The Battle for the Bs is an attempt to steer discussions of the B-movie away from taste-based cultural assessments of its seemingly questionable aesthetics and move toward a fiscally oriented understanding of how and why these aesthetics were formed. (p. 15) Davis argues that in the 1930s, B-films were the second films in the studio double-feature programming of the depression period. The industry changed with the 1948 Supreme Court decision that banned studios from requiring exhibitors to accept block booking of films (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.). The major film studios responded to this decision and the challenge of television by curtailing production and focusing on big-budget A-films with new technological innovations such as Cinemascope unavailable on the small screen. However, with the expansion of venues such as drive-in theaters, exhibitors, especially in smaller markets, faced a shortage of films, and B-features were produced to fill the void.

Activism Rooted in Tradition

As a rapidly developing Asian country, Turkey suffers from a lack of education about environmental issues and the absence of a widespread environmentalist movement that might exert pressure on the government to conserve its diminishing natural resources. Artists and cultural producers are trying to fill this gap by making works that speak to the issues threatening Turkey's environmental health. Rather than limiting environmental awareness to the country's educated urban elites, effective change can only be achieved at a mass level by involving the country's rural populations and recent urban immigrants, and by recognizing them as active agents in environmentalist struggles. An appeal to more far-reaching historical perspectives, traditional modes of knowledge and indigenous modes of subsistence may be required to build a coalition that can bridge ethnic, class and geographic divides. This article looks at the works of some Turkish contemporary artists and film-makers, including the xurban_collective, Halil Altındere, Rüya Koksal, Osman Sisman and Özlem Sarıyıldız, whose works engage such strategies.

Kolkata turning

This article tries to explore the shifts in contemporary urban Bengali cinema and map and historicize the main trends in relation to changes in the political fortunes of the city. In this context, the article tentatively wishes to accomplish two things: one, to show the main trends in urban Bengali film-making, post-1990s; and two, to read closely two recent Bengali films, in a search for ways of mapping this newness. The article first identifies three new possibilities in Bengali cinema: first, the inward-looking, often apolitical sketches that celebrate liberal development and psychosomatic indulgences, second, the sentimental, community-based films that sometimes take political changes on board as well, and attempt to bridge the rural-urban divide; third, cult-ish films of a newer pedigree that show impatience with old Left and progressive values, and are also technically experimental and avant-garde. The second objective of the article is to discuss specifically two contemporary filmmakers – Moinak Biswas and Suman Mukhopadhay – and place their films within this ferment.

Unwinding the Anthropological Machine: Animality, Film and Arnaud des Pallières

This article explores what cinema can contribute to recent philosophical engagements with animality and what the work of contemporary French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in particular can bring to debates around the zoomorphic or ‘creaturely’ dimensions of film. Examining two works by des Pallières — the documentary Is Dead (Incomplete Portrait of Gertrude Stein) (1999) and the feature-length film Adieu (2003) — and drawing principally on the work of Jacques Derrida, the article attends to cinematic, historically-framed configurations of a shared vulnerability between the human and the animal. Such instances of commonality are shown here to unravel hierarchical taxonomies of being, in a rethinking of the ethics and politics of responsibility. These nonanthropocentric modes of cinematic inquiry also engage with issues of minerality and technicity, animating correspondences between forms of life and nonlife, philosophically broadening a consideration of relations between the human and the nonhuman.

From Homofraternity to Hospitality: Deconstructing the Political with Derrida and the Dardennes

This article stages an encounter between the work of contemporary Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and the thinking of the political elaborated by Jacques Derrida. In La Promesse (1996) and Le Fils (2002) the Dardennes explore issues of responsibility, justice, hospitality, and forgiveness, tracing fragile modes of relationality formed on the ruins of the paternal-filial bond. The article argues that Derrida's interrogation of the homofraternal logic underpinning democracy, and his attendant recasting of the political in terms of the promise, the incalculable, the spectral, and the democratie a venir , offers a fertile framework for reading the deconstruction of the political in these two films and for thinking through the moves made here by cinema beyond the present, beyond ontology, and beyond identification.

Urban Spaces of American Indians in the Exiles

.Released in 1961, The Exiles is a low‐budget docudrama that chronicles the lives of three American Indians over a period of twelve hours in a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood in the late 1950s. Contemporary neorealist filmmaking appears to have influenced the film, whereas itsg narrative is ethnographic in form. An examination of the film and its dialogue reveals the ways in which American Indians who recently migrated from their reservation to the city have socially constructed the urban spaces within the framework of the physical setting provided to them. The nature of the engagements of the male and female protagonists with the sites and with other American Indians in this small urban sphere provides substantive clues to the nature and level of their respective transitions into the realm of the white‐dominated society of Los Angeles and beyond.

The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema

The essay discusses contemporary Italian filmmakers’ sustained interest in the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony. Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodramas, Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto Saviano and Salvatore Settis.

La rencontre des langues dans le cinéma francophone: Québec, Afrique subsaharienne, France-Maghreb by John Kristian Sanaker

syntax of many passages. In most instances, the terms validation/invalidation, nécessaire , possible, probable, douteux, souhaitable, regrettable, obligatoire, redouté might have served the author’s purposes equally well. San Diego State University (CA) Thomas J. Cox SANAKER, JOHN KRISTIAN. La rencontre des langues dans le cinéma francophone: Québec, Afrique subsaharienne, France-Maghreb. Québec: PU de Laval, 2010. ISBN 978-27637 -9048-0. Pp. 175. $24,95 Can. The study of contact between French and other modern languages, as well as between “standardized” French and regional or national “versions,” has long been at the forefront of diverse scholarship in many disciplines. Despite the broad treatment of these topics in a variety of critical methodologies and from many theoretical perspectives, the question of the textualization of linguistic encounters in French-language cinemas has received little academic attention. Sanaker’s book seeks to fill that void. With a background in French literature and linguistics, Sanaker sets out in this interdisciplinary work to explore “la mixité langagière” (backcover) in contemporary filmmaking from Quebec, Sub-Saharan Africa (notably Senegal and Burkina Faso), and the Maghreb (mostly Algeria). As the series director of the collection Cinéma et Société, Yves Laberge prefaces the book by questioning whether la francophonie is implicitly bilingual and discussing the link between multilingualism and the world of film. Laberge also provides important preparation for Sanaker’s coinage and treatment of hétérolinguisme, which is to say “le fait de recourir à plusieurs langues dans un même contexte narratif” (xx). Sanaker’s book and its preface highlight productive and unique relationships among the fields of linguistics, film, and Francophone studies. Sanaker begins with a concise overview of the history and theory concerning the studies of l’autre langue and linguistic encounters found in literature and cinema . It provides a clear lens through which Sanaker analyzes each “national” cinema and its mise en langue in subsequent chapters. Film scholars without a strong background in linguistics might find some of the terminology and concepts difficult to grasp. Sanaker is to be applauded, however, for striking an effective balance between discipline-specific vocabulary and non-specialized terms through employing a clear treatment of content matter that should appeal to and satisfy both specialists and novices alike. In the three major chapters of the book, he explores themes found in various Francophone cinemas. To begin, he analyzes the topic of hétérolinguisme in Québécois cinema through a discussion of a half dozen contemporary films that juxtapose the uses of French and English. He then studies hétérolinguisme in relation to cinema from Africa “dite francophone” (104) through a brief discussion of Souleymane Cissé’s, Idrissa Ouedraogo’s, and Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s work (among others) and a more complete treatment of Ousmane Sembène’s corpus. Finally, he explores connections between hétérolinguisme and history with regard to the conflicted historical relationship between France and Algeria, as represented linguistically in six well-known war genre films. In his conclusion, Sanaker highlights the main arguments of the preceding chapters and situates them within the context of “l’altérité [linguistique] au cinéma” (159). While the book is an excellent contribution to the question and study of linguistic encounters in French-language cinemas, Sanaker’s study of each “national” 608 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 cinema is somewhat unbalanced. His treatment of Québécois cinema is the most complete and is approximately twice the length of the other two studies. One might wonder how Sanaker’s research could also inform and be impacted by the study of Maghrebian films (and/or films made in France by émigré filmmakers and French filmmakers of North African heritage) that are not limited to the subject matter of the French-Algerian war or situated in a colonial context. In addition , the book would benefit from the inclusion of an index, which would enhance its practical use for research and classroom purposes. Despite these limitations, Sanaker presents his arguments clearly and convincingly, while developing solid analyses and providing stimulating original reflection. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in French and Francophone studies as well as to...

Re-Hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity: Women’s Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia by Stacey Weber-Fève

pouvoir en place sans néanmoins être la dupe de l’arbitraire qui régit la société. Ils sont parfaitement conscients que l’alternative—le chaos—ne serait guère meilleure . Tricoche-Rauline clarifie également le paradoxe de nos auteurs qui en découvrant la finalité de la vie humaine arrivent toutefois à éviter le désespoir pour s’inscrire dans l’épicurisme. Bien construit (comme en témoignent la table des matières et le choix judicieux des titres et des sous-titres), cet ouvrage est riche en citations et en notes, et il propose plusieurs mises en contextes littéraires intéressantes. Malheureusement, assez rapidement, plusieurs problèmes apparaissent: le choix du corpus, motivé “sur le plan strictement linguistique, par la présence dominante d’un ‘je’, dont l’auteur fait comprendre, le plus souvent dans les passages liminaires des œuvres, qu’il ne doit pas être compris comme une instance fictionnelle” (33), permet certes de mettre en évidence les points communs, mais il reste artificiel et ne rend pas compte du courant libertin en son entier. Du reste, le texte de Tricoche-Rauline reste trop descriptif, parfois même répétitif, et le lecteur déplore tout autant le manque d’analyse que les conclusions bien trop courtes accompagnées de maintes contradictions laissées en suspens. Comme bien des entreprises de comparaison, ce texte laisse le sentiment d’une analyse parfois forcée, faite à coup de citations sorties de leur contexte: on peut voir un exemple de cela dans le traitement de la position libertine sur la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. D’autre part, le portrait dressé des libertins manque parfois d’objectivité (exception faite peut- être du traitement de la flatterie), et Tricoche-Rauline tente trop de systématiser, de créer une philosophie libertine qui, si elle existe vraiment, semble ignorée des auteurs eux-mêmes qui souvent se trouvent pris au piège de leurs propres inconsistances . Au final, le lecteur se sent quelque peu déçu, car l’identité plurielle libertine a laissé place avec Tricoche-Rauline à une identité libertine qui nous paraît quelque peu surfaite, dû au fait que le corpus lui-même comporte des points de vue contradictoires, ce qui empêche une rencontre réelle dans une identité commune. Il convient néanmoins de préciser que le livre de Tricoche-Rauline a eu le mérite de s’attaquer à un projet ambitieux, peu étudié, et qu’il ouvre certainement la voie à des études plus approfondies. Rider University (NJ) Stéphane Natan WEBER-FÈVE, STACEY. Re-Hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity: Women’s Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7391-3451-1. Pp. iii + 239. $80. In her epistolary exchange with Nancy Huston, Lettres parisiennes, Leïla Sebbar identifies herself as “la croisée” (158). Born to a French mother and an Algerian father in colonial Algeria, Sebbar creates a community from the voices of those around her throughout her many fictional and autobiographical texts. Nonetheless, Sebbar’s position is singular and exile is her source. Sebbar is among several women authors and filmmakers studied by Weber-Fève. Using an approach she labels “methodological cubism” to elaborate her theory of 2/3 Space or “a space or spaces in-between the second space and the third space” (xii), Weber-Fève provides a model for interpreting the problematic location of home and feminization of domestic space in postcolonial women’s art. Her work contends that the artists studied demonstrate the “possibility of discourses from and 764 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 the textualization of a re-hybridized transnational subject speaking from a 2/3 Space of intermedial expression” (158). Weber-Fève’s study will be of interest to those in postcolonial, Francophone, film, and feminist studies. Her ability to neatly draw feminist and postcolonial approaches together and her clear writing style make this text a useful resource on much researched authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux, and Leïla Sebbar, but also on filmmakers Assia Djebar, Yamina Benguigui, Coline Serreau and especially Raja Amari who is less well-known...

An unstable body: The cinema of Antonietta De Lillo

ABSTRACTThis article examines the work of contemporary Neapolitan film-maker Antonietta De Lillo. After an overview of the director's career and her technical and stylistic approaches to film-making, I will closely analyse two of her short works: the documentary I promessi sposi/The Betrothed (1993) and the fictional Maruzzella—one of the five episodes in the collective I vesuviani/The Vesuvians (1997). I argue that bodies and gender in De Lillo's cinema ‘depart’ from the self, the (gendered) gaze of the camera and the look of the spectator. My analysis aims to highlight the technical, stylistic and narrative components of the two films as well as to provide an interpretative reading of De Lillo's works. Feminist theories will constitute the main guidelines for my interpretation. I have chosen to examine these two shorts because they not only show a superb use of the cinematic apparatus, but also present themes of transsexual and transgender identities not commonly represented in Italian cinema. Although they were made over a decade ago, their topics and cinematic signifiers have not aged and still today they can offer fresh insights into women's film-making.

The road movies of the New Romanian Cinema

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the New Romanian Cinema phenomenon beyond the so-called formal canon. The intention is to capture the spirit of the nation, twenty years after the fall of communism, from the perspective of the road theme within the feature films of Romanian contemporary film-makers. The conceptual starting point is the journey seen either as sidereal or as radical, the two semantically opposite forms defined by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume.

Digital as the New Popular in African Cinema? Case Studies from the Continent

This paper considers different forms of contemporary filmmaking on the African continent in order to show how Africa has embraced digital technology as a crucial factor toward more, and increasingly varied, forms of popular cinema. The case studies are chosen to show a variety of production, exhibition, and distribution methods utilizing digital technology. The focus of the paper is on popular cinema as a form of popular culture, as theorized by Karin Barber. We review Barber’s pioneering work on African popular culture and subsequent work by her and other scholars to determine and argue how the new forms of digital cinema discussed in this paper can be considered part of African popular culture.

<em>Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico</em> February 25–26, 2011, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson

Reviewed by: Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico Amanda D. Howard (bio) Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico; FEBRUARY 25-26, 2011, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson Background If asked to consider the American Southwest and Mexico in terms of film production, some may cite the heyday of Arizona's Old Tucson Studios or New Mexico's current, hugely successful film production tax incentive program. However, the area has long been home to diverse and largely unknown amateur, nontheatrical, and non-Hollywood productions. The region's stunning, largely untouched landscape, along with its mild weather and preponderance of sunny days, drew nature lovers, anthropologists, and educational filmmakers early on and, as Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico's program proved, often produced superlative work in the medium. Hidden Cinema of the Southwest and Mexico was conceived as a film-based symposium concentrating on work produced in those regions. The event was sponsored by Northern Arizona University's (NAU) School of Communication in Flagstaff and the University of Arizona's Department of English in Tucson and was hosted by the Center for Creative Photography (CCP). Both institutions promote nontheatrical film preservation and study within their respective universities. Organized by Janna Jones and Mark Neumann of NAU and Jennifer Jenkins of the University of Arizona, the two-day symposium's inaugural session included an apposite program of contemporary, independent documentary screenings and scholarly presentations that highlighted a rich array of archival film materials and topics. The symposium's presentations were grouped by media and content into three categories: "Hidden Cinema," "Hidden Vistas," and "Hidden Talents." Hidden Talents The landscape, its people, and its cultures still inspire contemporary filmmakers in their cinematic inquiries, and Hidden Cinema's opening night of films, screened at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center, gave a taste of the myriad topics and techniques filmmakers have undertaken in the region. The evening also set the tone for the themes that would continue to inform the symposium's discussions. Introductions for the symposium's films were provided by special guest Liz Coffey, conservator at the Harvard Film Archive. As a nonnative of the Southwest, Coffey lent a striking perspective to films steeped in the issues and milieu of the region. A Line in the Sand: Arivaca (2009), directed by Bryce Goodman, James Johenning, and Joel Smith, explores the complex perceptions of community and place that occur in an American border town. Located just eleven miles from the Mexican border, Arivaca, Arizona, is a site of both contention and contentment. A Line in the Sand presents the town as a microcosm of the individualist ideals of the American West and illuminates the impact of controversial, largely ineffective border policies on those same ideals. Reflecting the sensitivity and even-handedness that characterized the rest of the film, the filmmakers deal delicately— via a textual afterword—with a violent home invasion and double murder that occurred in Arivaca after filming wrapped. The filmmakers and one of the film's subjects were on hand to offer a sensitive and very human dialogue on a highly sensationalized, polarized, and polarizing topic. Roderick Coover and Lance Newman's Canyonlands: Edward Abbey and the Great American Desert (2010) used Edward Abbey's writing and environmental activism as a springboard for examining the incursion of civilization on the natural landscape and the destruction that accompanied the American tourism boom of the 1950s. Arizona's Glen Canyon Dam as it is now is featured prominently in the film, as are other sites that informed Edward Abbey's work and activism and that played a role in his life as a champion of the unmolested southwestern landscape. The filmmakers' gorgeous images, accompanied by readings of Abbey's sharp, uncompromising prose, offer a keen portrait of how much was lost with the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and the ultimate pointlessness of the entire endeavor. Through the film, Abbey's once strong, idiosyncratic rhetoric is [End Page 166] vindicated as a voice of reason on the matter, and Coover and Newman are proven to be worthy heirs to the writer's legacy of activism through art. Hidden Cinema Reflecting the rich multiculturalism of...

La 'X' marca el lugar. La condición transnacional del documental en el siglo XXI

This article focuses on the transnational quality of contemporary documentary filmmaking. After the arrival of digital technology, documentary has proven very sensitive to record and face changes in the global age. The transforming capacity of new technologies has challenged the classical notions of objectivity, domestication and exoticism of documentary film.