Global Cinema Research Articles

Schizophrenizing cinema: rhizomatics, dualisms and the infinite ‘and … and … and …’

This essay reviews Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, an essay collection edited by Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (Continuum, 2008) that explores significant issues in film schizoanalysis as it is currently emerging and seeks continuities between Gilles Deleuze's schizoanalytic writing and his books on film theory. Topics covered include the roles played by dualism in the thought of Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the shifting relationship between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, the limitations of Deleuze's auteurist approach to film studies, his Frankfurt School-like pessimism about the dire consequences of bad movies, the extension of schizoanalytic practices to new media and global cinemas, and the efforts of Deleuzian thinkers to replace traditional ‘arborescent’ theory with acentric ‘rhizomatic’ models that schizoanalysis finds more conducive to paradigm-changing ideas.

Multiplicity and multiplexing in today's cinemas: Diasporic cinema, art cinema, and mainstream cinema

ABSTRACTThis article explores the resurgence of a new mainstream cinema, a new Hollywood cinema (or Bollywood cinema for that matter), which I'm calling multiplex cinema. In the current moment of post-diasporic and post-Internet globalization, which is driven by two seemingly contradictory movements in the world intersecting with each other, I apply the context of multiplex from the site of film exhibition to film texts. Of these two movements in the world, one (the post-diasporic) involves increasing physical displacement and dispersion of people across the globe, the other (the post-digital) is the increasing consolidation and digitization of media. The presence of large, displaced and globalized populations of both spectators and the producers of these works is important to the emergence of this global cinema, as well as these works' historical debt to accented cinema.

Review: Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, by Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson

Review: <i>Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema</i>, by Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson

Central Asian Film Music as a Subcultural System

The article positions the film music of the five Central Asian countries—former Soviet republics—in global cinema. It then outlines and illustrates the film music strategies open to local directors, drawing on selected films, mainly from the 1960s and 1990s.

Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema: No Film is an Island

Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema: No Film is an Island

Far Away, So Close? Nation, Global Chinese Cinema and the Question of Identity

Far Away, So Close? Nation, Global Chinese Cinema and the Question of Identity

In praise of an ‘invisible genre’? An ambivalent look at the fictional sports feature film

The main intention of this essay is to examine the fictional sports feature film and to outline contentious points of debate in an area that might be referred to as an ‘invisible genre’. Furthermore, via my focus upon selected areas concerning the sports film, questions are raised relating to the complex matter of film genre. I begin firstly by locating historically the sports film in the USA and UK. A brief ‘track record’ of European and global national cinemas is also sketched. Secondly, I move towards a definition of the sports film, a task that still remains elusive. Thirdly, I examine a perceived reluctance for the sports film to be recognized as a ‘genre’ in its own right. I do this to fuel a discussion about whether the lack of any clear identification of the sports film, as a genre, has in some way actually clouded critical and academic appreciation and audience reception. To achieve these objectives I examine in detail two sports films, namely Coach Carter and Purely Belter. Both films effectively emphasize social and individual issues such as class, gender and nationalism as they are mediated through sport.1 In the analysis I highlight a significant ‘difference’ in approach to sports films in the USA and UK, especially in terms of the use of technology, demands put upon the actors and production values. Hence, the attention paid to the UK film, Purely Belter, appears limited when compared to that of US-made Coach Carter.

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...

Postcolonial Hong Kong cinema: utilitarianism and (trans)local

Hong Kong cinema has witnessed a drastic deterioration in the last decade, with a sharp plummet in both the number of annual productions and box office receipts. The key objective of this paper is to explore the relationship between the postcolonial Hong Kong identity as reflected and intertwined in the new filmmaking environment, which is now dominated by two main manifestations: the making of Hong Kong-mainland Chinese co-produced blockbusters, and the branding of a New Asian Cinema by smaller budget alternative films. The fervent marketing and financing experimentations taking place in the film industry can be seen as test-beds for Hong Kong's postcolonial economic/cultural reform, demonstrating the painstaking attempts of this global city to dance around China and the world. Taking seriously into account how the actual films produced are intertwined with the flow of capital they coordinate, we might find it increasingly difficult to fit Hong Kong cinema in the hitherto postcolonial model, in which the films of Hong Kong supposedly assert the identity of the Hong Kong people against a certain hegemonic other. Other than exploring Hong Kong's postcolonial identity, this paper also tries to pursue a model which can articulate more carefully how economy and culture merge and divert in global cinema, which cannot be easily comprehended by such binary thinking as hegemony and alternatives.

Youth culture in global cinema

* Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction: Culture Shock (Timothy Shary) * Part I. Rebellion and Resistance * Chapter 1. American Juvenile Delinquency Movies and the European Censors: The Cross-Cultural Reception and Censorship of The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause (Daniel Biltereyst) * Chapter 2. The Imported Rebellion: Criminal Guys and Consumerist Girls in Postwar Germany and Austria (Alexandra Seibel) * Chapter 3. Rebels with a Cause: Children versus the Military Industrial Complex (Mick Broderick) * Part II. Politics and Style * Chapter 4. Chinese Youth Problem Films in the 1980s: The Apolitics of Rebellion (Xuelin Zhou) * Chapter 5. The Age of Transition: Angels and Blockers in Recent Eastern and Central European Films (Aniko Imre) * Chapter 6. The Sound of the South Bronx: Culture, Genre, and Performance in Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style (Kimberley Bercov Monteyne) * Part III. and Inner-National Conflict * Chapter 7. Out of Depth: The Politics of Disaffected and Contemporary Latin American Cinema (Laura Podalsky) * Chapter 8. Birds That Cannot Fly: Childhood and in City of God (Sonia Cristina Lino) * Chapter 9. Portraying Muslim in Egypt and India: Worship None but Allah and Be Dutiful and Good to Parents (Claudia Preckel) * Chapter 10. Projecting a Bridge for Youth: Islamic Enlightenment versus Westernization in Turkish Cinema (Savas Arslan) * Part IV. Narrating Gender and Difference * Chapter 11. Narrating the Feminine Nation: The Coming-of-Age Girl in Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (Mary M. Wiles) * Chapter 12. Gender, Race, Feminism, and the International Girl Hero: The Unremarkable U.S. Popular Press Reception of Bend It Like Beckham and Whale Rider (Sarah Projansky) * Chapter 13. Pachyderm's Progress (Murray Pomerance) * Chapter 14. Boys Will Be Men: Teen Masculinities in Recent Spanish Cinema (Santiago Fouz-Hernandez) * Part V. Coming-of-Age Queer * Chapter 15. Girls Looking at Girls Looking for Girls: The Visual Pleasures and Social Empowerment of Queer Teen Romance Flicks (Susan Driver) * Chapter 16. Youth, Sexuality, and the Nation: Beautiful Thing and Show Me Love (Scott Henderson) * Chapter 17. Different from the Other(s): German and the Threat of Homosexual Seduction (Stephen Tropiano) * Appendix A: Filmography of Global Films by Nation * Appendix B: Filmography of Global Films by Theme * Bibliography * Contributors * Index

The Geography of cinema - a cinematic world

This e-book addresses questions surrounding the constructions of space, culture, society, identity and representation. The geography of cinema extends beyond the screen, director and audience, to include the wider industrial and political complex of the cultural economy. In this sense, culture can be viewed as an economic commodity set within the broader frame of globalization and postmodernism. A cinematic world occupies a territory between our city’s streets, the Cineplex, the TV set, and our geographical imagination and identity. These contexts invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of film as well as global cinema, hapticalities of viewing, critical political economies, and cinematic ethno­graphies. This collection provides unique and eclectic insights into the exciting and emerging subfield of film geography.

Review: Representing Scotland

The frontispiece of Alan Riach's Representing Scotland is startling: it shows the cover of a 1998 comic book (or 'graphic novel') entitled Batman: the Scottish Connection. The Caped Crusader is battling with a claymorewielding, and equally masked, tartan-clad bad guy. This startling interpolation is indicative of Riach's intentions, for Representing Scotland boldly expands the domain of Scottish literary studies: Riach draws in such areas as African literature, global cinema, British television, and comic books. His aim is to show 'the ways some of the icons and characteristic aspects of Scotland [...] have been deployed, developed, and transformed'; and to do so he will consider 'works of Scottish literature and Scottish cultural production both in their own right and in their inter-action with non-Scottish works' (p.xviii).

Sound and the Nation: Rethinking the History of Early Greek Film Production

The worldwide debut of mechanically reproduced film sound in the late 1920s changed the technological prerequisites for participating in cinema's ongoing discourse about modernity and had a dramatic impact on national cinemas around the world. In Greece, it initiated an ethological turn in the cinema industry and prompted the nationalization of film content. The ethological turn of Greek cinema reached its resolution with the 1932 release of The Lover of the Shepherdess (O agaphtik�w thw boskopo�law), the first Greek film to use sound-on-film technology. Through its visual and sonic strategies for representing cinematic space, this film provides insight into the possibilities and problems of the project of national cinema in Greece in the early 1930s. The film's soundtrack, in conjunction with the montage and mise en sc�ne, places Greek cinema's ethological turn within a broader historical context and lends critical perspective to Greece's encounter with a global cinema industry that was changing dramatically as a result of the advent of film sound.

"Baraka": World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry

Honey, They Shrunk Planet. Ever since Marshall McLuhan's celebrated proclamation that communications technology had electrically contracted to dimensions of a village, it would seem, earth has been shrinking: satellite TV, frequent flyer miles, and, of course, The Web are making a smaller place. Thirty years after Understanding Media, village has become a commonplace, with McLuhan himself hailed as a visionary prophet of a in which distance no longer matters. ATT IBM commercials show African tribesmen happily using laptop computers. This article considers impact of these developments in domain of film. On one hand, history of has been entangled from outset with processes, from colonialism to its postcolonial aftermath. today, most would agree, has become a cultural form, however different its local manifestations. At same time, McLuhan's trope of village both reflects and has lent further momentum to emergence of an imaginary idea of the world, and this imaginary, we will see, has assumed increasing prominence in contemporary cinema. In turn, film today plays a significant role in articulating and perpetuating what might be called mythologies: ideological discourses about and humanity's relationship to it. The growing attention to what is variously called World Cinema or global cinema in recent years might seem curious, given that film production, distribution, and consumption have long been a affair. Studies of non-Western film industries abound, and World Cinema has long been approached much as world

Hong Kong and Singapore 1997

THE PRESTIGIOUS 21st HONG KONG International Film Festival, which concluded on 9 April 1997, presented its largest and perhaps the greatest collection of global cinema with some 280 films and video works. This year, this non-competitive festival attracted more than three hundred festival guests and major critics from all over the world with more than half of them coming from Japan and East Asia. Its humbler counterpart, the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) is now in its 10th year. Some 220 films were shown there (including a number of fringe films and videos presented at the Goethe Institute, and a retrospective of François Truffaut's films screened at the Alliance Française). Film critics and festival directors flew over to the Republic to view the sensitive selection of Asian cinema by the festival programmer Philip Cheah. In its competitive section for Asian films, the SIFF honours the winners with its Silver...