Film Canon Research Articles

Stylistic and narrative innovations in Norman McLaren’s works

This article is an attempt to theoretically comprehend the legacy of the famous canadian animator Norman McLaren, who worked in the field of abstract animation for many years, from his student days in the 1930s to the late 1970s. Apart from a brief creative sketch, this article includes two main sections devoted to the genesis of image and plot in McLaren's works – both animation and «photographic» ones. McLaren wanted to create entirely new film canon, based equally on abstract and realistic basics. Summarized, McLaren works are pivotal in the context of the evolution of avant-garde animation, both in the construction of imagery and in the rehabilitation of narrative, previously almost entirely excluded from the realm of absolute film. McLaren's many years of creative activity are evaluated as a unified ethical and aesthetic doctrine. Along the whole article various critical approaches to his work being observed and analyzed.

Canons of Polish Cinema and the Place of Polish Films in Global Film Canons

The aim of this article is to examine the canons of Polish cinema as created for local consumption and for the promotion of Polish cinema internationally, as well as the place of Polish cinema in supra-national canons. It also presents briefly the history of Polish cinema and its main authors as well as the criteria of canonisation used in this essay. It argues that Polish experts tend to single out films with distinct visual style, while ordinary Polish viewers favour comedies. It also discusses the cases of Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, because the former is a director most canonised by the Polish viewers, the second is the most canonised director globally to originate from the Polish soil, although he is not always treated as a Polish director. It also looks at the case of Wojciech Has, whose film The Saragossa Manuscript tops many polls for the best Polish films, despite his career being largely neglected by Polish film historians.

Film(i) Culture after Film: Lip-sync Media and the Expanded Archive of Hindi Cinema

This article considers the remediation of Hindi cinema’s filmi culture in the citational practices of digital media. Foregrounding a case study of the lip-sync video on platforms such as Dubsmash and TikTok, it traces the formation of an expanded archive of Hindi cinema, one which reveals this cinema as less a canon of films than a repertoire of gestures, expressions and style offered up for use to a non-traditional cinephiliac public. The article argues, however, that such an archival view of a historical filmi culture is possible only because of the recession of a filmi culture organised around the sign of cinema to one organised around the sociality of platforms. Among other things, it attributes this shift to the passing of the masala film. The article then pays particular attention to this form as an assemblage of detachable parts primed for circulation. It finally addresses the emergence of a new industrial reflexivity in response to the currency of filmi style in an age of platforms.

Bigil Adicha Massu Da: Self-reflexivity and Masculinity in Bigil (2019)

Contemporary Tamil films are largely dependent on viewers having prior knowledge of film canon, celebrities, industry happenings and social issues in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Taking the form of complicated chains of intertextuality, self-reflexive moments are fundamental to the ways in which Tamil film narratives, particularly the narratives of mass hero films, are constructed. The 2019 blockbuster film Bigil ( Whistle), a sports film about a male coach leading an all-women soccer team, highlights the extent to which Tamil mass hero films rely on self-reflexive techniques to uphold the portrayal of specific gendered identities. This article examines the ways in which Bigil constructs contemporary Tamil masculinity through both the narrative representation of the central character Michael and the use of cinematic techniques, which privilege and celebrate the star’s (Vijay) relationship with his fans. This article conducts a close textual analysis of key sequences in the film, including song sequences, and interactions between Michael and the women soccer players. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which the hypermasculinity of the male protagonist fundamentally diminishes the film’s supposedly empowering storyline and the ways in which contemporary Tamil films seek to capitalise on the marketability of such narratives.

A History of Forgetting

A History of Forgetting Elizabeth Wijaya (bio) REMAPPING THE SINOPHONE: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHINESE-LANGUAGE CINEMA IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA BEFORE AND DURING THE COLD WAR BY WAI SIAM HEE Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019 REMAPPING THE SINOPHONE: THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHINESE-LANGUAGE CINEMA IN SINGAPORE AND MALAYA BEFORE AND DURING THE COLD WAR BY WAI SIAM HEE Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019 What does it mean to remember an absence? Many of the films analyzed and listed in the filmographies of Hee Wai Siam's Remapping the Sinophone are doubly lost: both materially absent and barely present in film canons and popular memory. Even some of the films that have survived or have recently resurfaced and have been restored, such as Blood and Tears of the Overseas Chinese (Cai Wenjin, 1946) and Spirit of the Overseas Chinese (Wan Hoi-Ling, 1946), having already been once-forgotten, currently still have limited visibility as they can only be accessed at film archives or during special screenings. In Hee's Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War, the status of whether a film is extant or nonextant is not always marked because Hee's concern is less with listing the material disappearances of the films than with tracing the causes and effects of the disappearances from the cultural histories of Chinese-language cinema. Through foregrounding lost but important films or rediscovered films and the debates surrounding their production, the ambition of Remapping the Sinophone extends to reclaiming the history of early Chinese-language cinema in Singapore and Malaya and positing the importance of this history for Sinophone and Cold War cinema studies. Remapping the Sinophone presents an indictment of forgetting and a call to remember that which has been obscured by historical and [End Page 197] geopolitical forces. The author argues that Mandarin and Chinesetopolect cinemas from Singapore and Malaya (1927 to 1965) have been neglected within academic discourse, cultural memory, as well as contemporary debates on inclusion and exclusion in cultural productions framed as Sinophone/Chinese-language. Hee is concerned that early Chinese-language cinema has been overlooked not only in Singapore and Malaysian cinema history but also in histories of Chinese-language cinema. This forgetting encompasses the films themselves as well as the debates on the term "Chinese-language cinema" in Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s. Hee's project of "remapping" the terrain of the Sinophone occurs alongside a recovery of the Singapore and Malayan roots of the "Sinophone" and "Chinese-language" debate as well as the Cold War context of the making and forgetting of this oeuvre that is further marginalized within the already marginalized cinemas of Singapore and Malaysia. In terms of the timeline covered in the book, 1927 was the release year for New Friend, the first locally produced film in Singapore, while 1965 was the year of Singapore's independence after separation from Malaysia and the last year in which the director Yi Shui made a film. In Hee's telling, 1965 was a crucial year of beginnings and endings, when Singapore's independence coincided with the end of Yi Shui's dream of the acceptance of the hybridized "Malayanised Chinese-language" cinema. The first chapter of the book begins with a debate over two non-extant films: New Friend (1927) directed by Guo Chuwen, and Leila Majnun (1934) directed by Balden Singh Rajhans. Hee argues that unlike what Latent Images by Uhde and Uhde claimed, New Friend (1927), rather than Leila Majnun (1934), was the first locally produced film in Singapore. Both films, though materially lost, remain significant in the entangled memory and legacy of Singapore and Malaysian cinema. The chapter continues with characteristically detailed research on the historical evidence pertaining to the production and release of New Friend. Hee ties the fate of New Friend to that of Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia, arguing that the neglect of New Friend reveals the "double rejections" of "Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia" by "national ideologies in their homeland and by postcolonial concerns in a new country" (45). For Hee, this double rejection is not...

Film as Sound Art: Embracing Love through Extra-diegetic Sound in Nadine Labaki’s Caramel

Teaching film often involves un-learning previously taught histories of cinema to find instead ‘herstories’ (Dovey, 2018) and theirstories of cinema. This video essay constitutes an illustrative example of this practice, showing how Lebanese woman-led film Caramel (2007) is taught at SOAS, University of London to emphasise the crucial role of sound in narrative while rethinking the film canon and encouraging critical reflection on the gaze. By creatively compiling encounters between two characters in the film, the video essay shows two women gazing at each other in ways that evoke a romantic relationship, even if their contact stays in the hair salon. While there is barely any dialogue, the extra-diegetic music forges an intimate atmosphere. The decoding of these moments is shaped by the context of censorship in Lebanon, where explicit representations of same-sex relationships could be punished by law. In this video essay, I suggest that sound helps represent a queer gaze between the two characters, subverting both heteronormativity and patriarchal society, and in so doing, it also queers the audience’s gaze. Caramel thus serves as an excellent case study of the possibilities of sound in film, and of film as sound art.

Rodzima klasyka filmowa w świadomości zbiorowej polskich widzów. Opinie Polaków o polskich filmach i ich postawy wobec polskiej produkcji filmowej


 
 
 The text discusses the social understanding of the film canon. The analyses is based on the results of the social research “Poles about Polish films. Opinions of Poles on Polish cinema and their attitudes towards Polish film production” conducted in 2019. The research findings show how Polish audiences think about the Polish film canon and how they define it, referring to their own film experiences, attitudes towards Polish productions and to beliefs about the influence of Polish cinema on culture.
 
 

Re-Viewing "Shakespeare on Film"

Abstract: This piece considers the pedagogy of "Shakespeare on Film" at a juncture when the scholarship and canon of Shakespeare films have dovetailed with institutional processes of globalization. Drawing on the experience of teaching "Shakespeare on Film" in the United States, Lebanon, and Turkey, I offer a backstage pedagogy that foregrounds four problems in the very design of such a course: the problem of beginnings, the problem of Shakespeare's conflation with prestige, the problem of the ostensible ubiquity of Shakespeare films, and the problem of colonial legacies' inextricability from "Shakespeare on Film"'s contemporary global iterations.

More Human Than Human: The Exile in Blade Runner

More Human Than Human: The Exile in <i>Blade Runner</i>

Twenty Queers of Madame Satã

FQ contributing editor Bruno Guaraná reviews the significance of the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s groundbreaking Madame Satã on the occasion of the film’s 20th anniversary. Guaraná argues that Madame Satã was a film ahead of its time. While in dialogue with queer theory and queer cinema contemporaneous to it—placing it squarely within a global queer film canon—it also anticipated now-current notions of transgressive representations of nonbinary identities in Brazilian cinema. To think about Madame Satã in its original context thus means also recognizing the quantitative and qualitative leaps in media representation of queerness and blackness since its release.

El fotógrafo de Mauthausen/The Photographer of Mauthausen (Targarona 2018): Francesc Boix’s legacy from page to screen

El fotógrafo de Mauthausen/The Photographer of Mauthausen () is the first feature film on Spaniards deported to Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War and represents a watershed moment for the country’s collective memory. The film focuses on Francesc Boix, a young Catalan photojournalist who spearheaded a clandestine operation to save photographic evidence of the Nazi’s crimes while a prisoner in Mauthausen. Despite its visual acuity, Targarona’s entry is a complicated addition to the canon of recent concentration camp films, given the director’s positioning of Boix as a macho hero and her counterfactual depictions of Mauthausen. By juxtaposing archival photography with stills from the film, this article traces the recreation of Boix’s experience, as well as how his story has had an enduring impact on the memory of all the Spanish and Catalan survivors of Mauthausen in Spain’s collective imagination.

Introduction: The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and its Afterlife

Introduction: The New American Cinema Group in Europe:The 1960s Grand Tour and its Afterlife Ronald Gregg (bio) From May 12 to 22, 1967, the Unione Culturale, a leftist cultural organization in Torino, Italy, hosted a festival of experimental film screenings from the New American Cinema Group. The festival was organized by Italian drama critic and vice-president of the Unione Culturale Edoardo Fadini, curated by filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas, and funded in large part by filmmaker and philanthropist Jerome Hill, the leading patron of the New York experimental film scene in the 1960s. The ten-day program featured 63 films, including work by Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Hill, Mekas, and many other important filmmakers in the New York City underground. Along with the screenings, there was a final round table discussion including Mekas, Hill, filmmaker and underground actor Taylor Mead, and Italian filmmakers, critics, and scholars. Versions of the 1967 festival traveled to other Italian and European cities and were attended by filmmakers and critics across Europe. For instance, for the Pesaro screening (May 26–June 5, 1967) Mekas "supervised" four programs and reported that, along with the Italian audience, there were "large delegations from Eastern countries … Czechs and Yugoslavs in particular expressed a great excitement about our work."1 The 2022 conference "The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and Its Afterlife" (held in Torino from May 24 to 26) with screenings and presentations focused on the history and impact of the 1967 Torino festival, the travel of selected films to other European cities, and the archiving and preservation of key influential work. In addition, the conference discussed earlier European screenings of American experimental and [End Page 133] independent film, including the screening of New American Cinema films at the "Festival of Two Worlds" in Spoleto, Italy, in 1961; the traveling exhibition of American experimental film screened in Europe in 1963–64, which was accompanied by critic P. Adams Sitney; and "The Western American Experimental Film" program, which was screened in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna, and Berlin in 1963. The essays included in this dossier by the conference participants offer a wide-ranging study of the 1967 screenings and their impact, including the individuals involved in programming and funding the screenings, American and European filmmakers who revolutionized experimental film, the introduction of new structural and stylistic approaches to experimental film, and the legacy of the festival in the areas of video art, archiving, and preservation, particularly around the work of Stan Brakhage, considered the most influential of those screened at the Torino festival. Some of the essays discuss earlier festivals and screenings of experimental film, expanding upon our knowledge of the travel of experimental film to Europe throughout the 1960s, while challenging the hegemony of an experimental film canon that emerged at the time. Finally, the papers introduce us to various important European and American archives that document the festival and its influence, including archives for Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, the Cultural Union of Turin under the artistic leadership of Edoardo Fadini, and other European organizations that screened American experimental films from both the east and west coasts. This dossier of essays discusses these individuals, the European screenings, and the films, along with historicizing the place of experimental film in Europe in the 1960s and analyzing its impact. Faye Corthésy's (Université de Lausanne, Swiss) essay "Beyond the United States: Three Propositions Toward a History of New American Cinema's Multiplicity of Sites in the 1960s" introduces and explores three key New American Cinema travelling exhibitions in the 1960s. She discusses the possible outcomes of a transnational reappraisal of New American Cinema's multiplicity of sites and the formation of a canon through the selection and circulation of these films. Ronald Gregg's (Columbia, USA) essay "'Without Jerome': The Patronage of Jerome Hill and the Curating of 1960s American Experimental Work in Europe" explores Hill's importance as a patron for the emerging American experimental cinema and his interest in developing the connections between the American and European avantgarde communities in the 1960s. In his essay "Underground Films in Factory Town: The New American Cinema Group Travels to Turin, Italy in...

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance: Tracing a Path of Community Survival

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance:Tracing a Path of Community Survival Alejandra Calleja Toxqui (bio), Roxana Hernández Martínez (bio), Ana Gabriela Hernández Rodríguez (bio), Rosa María Licea Garibay (bio), Enrique Moreno Ceballos (bio), Julio Cesar Quiterio Morales (bio), Ana Belén Recoder López (bio), Cecilia Ramírez Morales (bio), Lluvia Soto Rodríguez (bio), and Laetitia Vigneron (bio) Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México/FIC Silente or Mexico Silent Film Festival was born out of a collective necessity to celebrate, study, and promote silent cinema within the city of Puebla and beyond. At the time of our creation, in 2016, a great number of heritage film festivals were already in the picture, from the legendaries such as Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato and Pordenone Silent Film Festival/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, to the closer (but equally legendary) San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Though we share the same raison d'être with these other festivals, there remain significant differences between us: their priorities have focused on North American and European film archives and materials, and our programming emphasizes Latin American filmmaking and exhibition contexts. Located in Puebla, one of the largest cities in Mexico, we strive for a balance in our programming that both speaks to local audiences and exposes them to silent cinema, since an initiative like ours was entirely new in the region. That was our starting point as a team, which mostly includes women and workers in [End Page 263] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. FIC Silente México opens the gates of time and invites audiences to appreciate the complexities and richness of silent films in their own cultural right. Courtesy of Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México. the cultural sector. Our labor is volunteer-driven, independently financed, and requires us to work other jobs to sustain our livelihood. Pueblan Film Culture and the Emergence of FIC Silente At the time of our first edition, Puebla was already a city of thriving film festivals, cinema schools, and cine-clubs. Yet local familiarity with silent cinema was limited to a canonical, patriarchal, and western universe of "great male masters." That is why we insisted on going back to the earliest years: to topple the canon by rediscovering its wild and unruly formations. We all encountered early cinema together as an overflowing river. That abundance further provoked us to confront the absence of cross-cultural dialogue about silent cinema that substantively includes Latin America. Doing so became an impetus for creation and emancipation in the face of established formulas, rigid conventions, and hegemonic screen markets. Simultaneously, and with this nonlinear notion of time and space in mind, we played with the idea of opening the festival to contemporary silent cinema as another aspect of our programming. We decided to expand the corpus of silent films to the twenty-first century, highlighting new works that are marked by the past but made for the present. We curated them through various genre and geographical categories, ranging from French [End Page 264] feminist farce to Bolivian docu-drama. But any technology or aesthetic strategy is fair game, as long as there is no audio dialogue. These films vary quite a bit in terms of budget, production values, and access to resources. To help level the playing field, we do not demand a registration fee from the creators, especially since we receive their materials through open-access digital platforms such as FilmFreeway and Festhome. This is how we programmed our Contemporary Official Selections and also how they became interspersed with the aesthetic practices of films from the early twentieth century. Our aim is to surprise and attract audiences of all ages, persuading and revealing to them that silent cinema is more alive than ever; it is a current multicultural social practice rather than a passing trend or obscure fetish. Along with these screenings and live cinema concerts, we established an educational program that includes courses and workshops, even for children, all designed to encourage people to question their concept of cinema, which has been predominantly shaped by the capitalist culture industry and by Hollywood-sanctioned film canons...

Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre across Six Decades

Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre across Six Decades

The Added Value of Oscars and Festival Awards

This article discusses the value of the Academy Awards and awards received by filmmakers at film festivals, as well as other advantages of participating in them. It does so by taking into consideration several aspects of film awards: their effect on the monetary profit made by the winning films, their effect on the construction of the film canon and the ‘cinematic map’ of the world. It also examines factors conducive to receiving awards, such as successful marketing campaigns and tackling certain topics, as well as considers the argument that film awards have lost some of their value in recent years. The article is based on secondary research about Oscars and film festivals, a large part of which is based on journalistic sources, reflecting the Ewa Mazierska fact that much of the data is new and hence has not yet been properly digested by the academic community.

Decolonizing processes in film education

This paper considers what decolonizing film education might mean through a series of research initiatives undertaken across different cultures which explore social media platforms for creating moving image sequences. The paper attends to three factors in the current climate of education: the accessibility of the medium, its immediacy in dissemination, and the democratizing effect that these conditions have had on the medium of film. Working with these three conditions in contemporary film education, the case studies described include workshops that aimed to shift the curriculum from film canons to proposing the introduction of concepts. Furthermore, elided histories are explored through site-specific projects that show how decolonial processes allow these histories to be reclaimed in film practice, and for marginal subjectivities to be made visible. Finally, the proposal of decolonial processes seeks to work with creating opportunities for social and historical visibilities. The proposition is to work with film(ed) evidence as material connected to broader social justice issues that are expressed through aesthetic forms closely associated with decolonial processes and described as decolonial aesthesis.

Decolonizing Visual Anthropology: Locating Transnational Diasporic Queers‐of‐Color Voices in Ethnographic Cinema

ABSTRACTThe American ethnographic film canon remains dominated by straight white men. As anthropology takes on the task of confronting the riddle of white supremacy, this might be a good time to consider who remains missing from popular taxonomies of anthropological cinema and to bring them into the canon. Unsurprisingly, the voices of immigrant diasporic queers of color are absent. By revisiting the ethnographic cinema of four such filmmakers—Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón‐Muntaner, and Richard Fung—I call for an expansion of existing histories and a renewed focus on queers‐of‐color erasure. Their films challenges orthodox definitions of visual anthropology. Making films around the same time that some of the most canonical ethnographic films were released, these filmmakers anticipated current discussions of affect and autoethnography. Their work offers unique and productive insights into our understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and power relations. Questioning the limits of what counts as “documentary,” these filmmakers rethink colonial frameworks of ethnography itself. Confronting the patriarchal white supremacy of anthropology demands attention to these important works. [ethnographic film, visual anthropology, transnational, diaspora, queers of color]

An East German Chile in Bulgaria: notions of longing and displacement

The long-lasting relationship of the East German production company DEFA with Eastern European cinemas is documented by the great number of co-productions undertaken over the years of its existence. In a canon of DEFA films shot on location in Bulgaria, the ‘Chile films’ appear as interesting example of cultural hybridity and transnational filmmaking, which have yet to receive scholarly attention. The features Der Übergang/The Passage (1978), Die Spur des Vermißten/Trace of the Disappeared (1980) and Blonder Tango/Blond Tango (1985), presenting East German views about human rights violations that occurred in Chile during the Pinochet regime, were made with Bulgarian, German and Chilean casts and crews. This paper examines the Eastern European physiognomies in these films and their meaning as conflation between East and South in the Cold War dynamics of the late 1970s to mid-1980s. While the films propagate notions of Third World solidarity and fascist denunciation in narrative terms, Eastern European natural and urban landscapes produce feelings of displacement and yearning for an intact place remote from East German reality.

Rethinking the canon: the role of film festivals in shaping film history

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections of festivals and film canons to vindicate the active role of the festival site in shaping film history. The recent growth of film festival studies has demonstrated the importance of curatorial practices and alternative patterns of film circulation for the visibility to cinemas from non-hegemonic geo-political regions, to independent productions, as well as to minor genres (such as documentary or short film). In this article, I propose revisiting film canons that conform classic film histories, through analysis of programming and awarding practices of key film festivals such as Venice or Cannes. I examine the influence that these events had on (1) (re)defining film genres– such as documentary–, (2) bolstering film movements and (3) discovering cinemas and filmmakers from peripheral regions. Finally, I argue that world cinema history can be better framed if we call for geolocated history(ies) of cinema, as a way to counterbalance the classic approaches to film history produced in hegemonic centres of academic production. In this context, film festivals are key players whose agency in the articulation of world cinema canons shouldn’t be underestimated.

Cineando

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt chronicles an unprecedented and growing canon of narrative films from throughout Latin America that examine how twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of modernity impact the lives and languages of the indigenous characters placed front and center in these films. While nonfiction filmmaking has a long history of documenting indigeneity on-screen, including by indigenous filmmakers, in the world of narrative features, those who are framing and directing indigenous stories are still largely outsiders. Betancourt explores these issues of language and representation with regard to three recent films: Retablo (Álvaro Delgado Aparicio, 2019), Sueño en otro idioma (I Dream in Another Language, Ernesto Contreras, 2017) and Wiñaypacha (Eternity, Óscar Catacora, 2018).