Kinds Of Films Research Articles

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein Daniel H. Magilow Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany. By Valerie Weinstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Pp. 296 + 20 b/w illustrations. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0253040701. While lay audiences associate the cinema of Nazi Germany with its most overtly nationalistic and antisemitic films—think of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew (1940)—scholars of this dark chapter of German mass culture have long recognized that a more complete understanding means looking past the most tendentious productions of Goebbels's propaganda ministry. Pioneering scholarship by Eric Rentschler, Linda Schulte-Sasse, Sabine Hake, and others has demonstrated that relatively few films made in Nazi Germany wore their Jew hatred on their proverbial sleeves. Most that did tended to flop at the box office anyway. (Veit Harlan's Jew Süss [1940] was a notable exception). Because overt antisemitism characterizes only a few of the film comedies that comprised 48 percent of the 1,094 films produced in Germany between 1933 and 1945, many have maintained reputations as politically innocuous. Some have even become cult hits. Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944) inspires audience participation rituals akin to those at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room. Münchhausen (1943) inspired Terry Gilliam's 1988 remake and is periodically screened on Turner Classic Movies. But as Valerie Weinstein convincingly argues in Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, comedies may not have expressed antisemitism as conspicuously as other kinds of films, but they were still instrumental in normalizing and legitimizing it. Weinstein's work productively erodes the barriers between reified categories like "propaganda" and "entertainment" and the naive and dangerous commonplace that Nazi Germany's lighter fare is apolitical. Her theoretical framework for reading these comedies attends to what she terms their "inferential antisemitism." Unlike the [End Page 420] conspicuous anti-Jewish vitriol in The Eternal Jew, Jew Süss, and The Rothschilds, inferential antisemitism "operates below the level of articulation" as an "insidious mode of representing Jewish difference" (14). In Weinstein's paraphrase of historian Lisa Silverman, Jewish difference is a conceptual model for understanding how the coding of certain discourses as Jewish creates a context whereby "both Jews and non-Jews shape ideals of the 'Jewish' and 'non-Jewish'" (13). In Nazi film comedies, inferential antisemitism manifested itself in "innuendos, gaps, and displacements," such as the rejection of irony, fast-paced repartee, and other "Jewish" strategies termed "wit," as opposed to genuine German "humor." Inferential antisemitism made film comedies into weapons of mass ideological destruction. They were predicated on ideas about Jewishness and Germanness that were offered as axiomatic and beyond critique, thereby reinforcing them as common sense. In the pre-televisual media environment of Nazi Germany, film's role in such subliminal ideological conditioning was wide-reaching. Comedies contributed substantially to the project of using film to form a unified people's racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) out of the filmgoers who accounted for over a billion visits to the cinema in 1943. After an introduction that effectively lays out the book's main argument, Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany first turns to Nazi theoretical works on Jews, humor, and the film industry, particularly writings that claimed Jews had contaminated and commercialized German film. This discussion then analyzes how the film trade press translated these ideas in their "reviews" of films—to the extent genuine film reviewing even existed. Implicitly and explicitly, the film trade press "regularly maligned common comic strategies coded as Jewish, including wit, irony, intellectualism, exaggerated physicality, rapid rhythm, and superficial, rote comicalness" (45). The next six chronologically arranged chapters offer close readings of the strategies of film comedies, beginning with the overt antisemitism of early films such as Die Blume von Hawaii (1933) and Nur nicht weich werden, Susanne! (1935). Additional chapters unpack underexamined works like Wenn wir alle Engel wären (1936), while the films April! April! (1935) and Donogoo Tonka (1936) offer a "case study in how stock characters and disciplinary humor can result in inferential antisemitism" (155). A chapter on the Verwechslungskomödie (mistaken-identity comedy) Robert...

Controllable preparation of graphene-based film deposited on cemented carbides by chemical vapor deposition

The aim was to study the controllable preparation of graphene-based films on the cemented carbide with different cobalt content. The graphene-based film was deposited on the surface of cemented carbide by homemade chemical vapor deposition. Every film’s composition was analyzed by the Raman spectrum, and the influence of the cobalt content and methane flow rate on all kinds of film’s formation was studied, and the formation mechanism of the graphene-based film on cemented carbide surface was summarized. Multilayer graphene film or graphene and amorphous carbon mixed film could be generated by regulating the methane flow when the cobalt content of the cemented carbide is 8–20 wt%. The composition, content, and thickness of the graphene-based film are restricted by the methane flow rate and the cobalt’s content. Direct growth is the main cause of the formation of graphene coating; the infiltration and precipitation of carbon are the secondary cause.

Modified Film Form in Reference to Contextual 3-D Filmmaking: Challenging the Monopoly of Film Form and Dissemination of Knowledge in Indonesia

The variety of films distributed in Indonesia are homogenous, which profoundly impacts the dissemination of knowledge generated by the movie. Since the information exposed to the public derived from one single source, it is highly potential to politicize the distribution of society’s collective knowledge — for instance, the arrangement on film circulation. Indonesian Censorship Institute does not only authorized the quantity of the film circulated in the country but also regulates the quality of the movie itself. Films that contain any ideological deviation, moral standards digression, and disobedience to the State will surely be banned. Inevitably, the flow of capital for filmmaking shall follow the State’s standard of circulation. The flourishment of the Indonesian community-based independent film screenings network simultaneously provides an alternative source of information to society. Such knowledge—regarded by the State as the Other—is vital since the enormous scope of knowledge is inaccessible as a result of the State’s limitation. The film communities dedicate alternative screenings as a space for the audience to explore various kinds of films with different knowledge. The researcher experimented with combining the situation of the society constrained by the State with the adaptation of 3-D filmmaking. The adjustment is manifested in the utilization of layered-narrative as an effort to illustrate the role of information obtained from various sources. The experiment is expected to encourage the audience to gain knowledge as if they were putting the pieces of the film scenes into a puzzle.

Dewetting behavior of self-assembled films of polystyrene-b-poly(methyl methacrylate) induced by solvent vapor annealing

We once studied the dewetting behaviors of spin-coated and Langmuir−Blodgett (LB) films of polystyrene-b-poly(methyl methacrylate) (PS-b-PMMA) induced by solvent vapor annealing (SVA), and revealed the different contact degrees between hydrophilic PMMA blocks and the substrate in the above two kinds of films. In this work, the dewetting behavior of self-assembled films of PS-b-PMMA induced by SVA was studied for the first time. Effects of copolymer composition, solution concentration, and SVA time were systematically considered. With the increase of SVA time, continuous flat self-assembled films undergo complicated progresses including the formation of bicontinuous or holed structures, the formation of droplets, and the periodic increase and decrease of droplet sizes. The periodic evolutions of droplet sizes in the self-assembled films are similar to those in our previous LB films but different from their single evolutions in the spin-coated films. It indicates that the former two kinds of films have good contact degrees between PMMA blocks and the substrate. Furthermore, the contact degrees in the self-assembled films are better than those in the LB films. In our current minds, the contact degrees are mainly related to the length of hydrophilic blocks and their parallel/vertical segment ratio to the substrate.

‘A New Kind of Film’: Performing Aboriginality in James Cant’s Wirritt Wirritt (1957)

Wirritt Wirritt (1957) is a hitherto-unexamined short film by the Australian modernist artist James Cant (1911–82) in collaboration with the filmmaker Malcolm Otton (b. 1917) and the poet, writer, ...

Second-harmonic generation from supported carbon nanotube films grown by chemical vapor deposition on fused silica

Surface second-harmonic generation (SHG) is shown to be observable for carbon nanotube (CNT) films grown by CVD on fused silica. The SHG intensity ratio for incident radiation polarized perpendicular and parallel to the plane of incidence at the fundamental radiation (1064 nm) is observed to have typical values for the two kinds of grown film: a film with aligned CNTs and a film with randomly oriented CNTs lying on a substrate sheet. SHG is discussed to originate not from the CNT bulk but from the film surface. The polarization ratio obtained for the two kinds of film was consistent with that calculated for a composite film of spheroidal particles with varying diameters employed to approximate the actual CNT films. The present findings may be applied to in situ evaluation of the initial stage in the CVD growth process of CNTs.

Effects of graphene oxide-filled sol-gel sealing on the corrosion resistance and paint adhesion of anodized aluminum

Anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) film was sealed by graphene oxide-filled sol-gel (GO/sol-gel) and effects of sealing on corrosion resistance and paint adhesion of the film were studied. Samples sealed by boiling water and sol-gel were used for comparison. Cross-sectional analysis of samples was conducted by glow discharge optical emission spectrometry (GDOES) and energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS). Paint adhesion measurement was examined by pull-off test and corrosion resistance property was tested by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and salt spray test. For four kinds of films, unsealed AAO film exhibited a porous structure with poorest corrosion resistance. After the film was sealed by GO/sol-gel, the pores were not only filled, but also a thin and uniform GO/sol-gel film about 1 μm was formed on the surface of the samples. And GO/sol-gel sealed samples presented better corrosion resistance, which had the least pitting sites after 720 h of salt spray. While sol-gel sealed samples possessed better paint adhesion strength values which were up to 18.4 MPa.

High-performance room-temperature NO2 sensors based on CH3NH3PbBr3 semiconducting films: Effect of surface capping by alkyl chain on sensor performance

High-performance CH3NH3PbBr3 (MAPbBr3) room-temperature NO2 sensors have been developed for the first time based on MAPbBr3 films prepared directly from perovskite precursor solutions (PSFs) and from surface-capped MAPbBr3 nanoparticles (NPFs). AFM images of these films revealed that the grain size of MAPbBr3 crystal in PSFs decreases with the increasing on the concentration of precursor solution, and XRD patterns demonstrate MAPbBr3 in PSFs packed along with (00l) crystal orientation. However, MAPbBr3 NPFs have no preferential crystal orientation despite the good crystallinity of MAPbBr3 NPs. I-V curves revealed different hysteresis loops for these two kinds of films. Sensors with PSF or NPF as semiconducting layer exhibited remarkable and reversible change when they are exposed to NO2 gas. Interestingly, NPF sensors show better sensing performance with a lower detection limit (0.1 ppm) and a larger sensitivity. Experiments also revealed that the selectivity of NPF is better than that of PSF sensors. More importantly, NPF sensors are much more stable than PSF sensors due to the protected surface of perovskite NPs. This study opens a new promising application for organometallic halide perovskite materials, especially for the protected perovskite NPs.

Optical Conduction Resonance in Self-Assembled Metal Nanoparticle Array-Dielectric Thin Films

Optical conduction resonance- (OCR-) enhanced third-order optical nonlinearity of two dimensional (2D) periodic gold nanoparticle array-dielectric thin films has been investigated. The third-order optical susceptibility of periodic gold nanoparticle array embedded in silica thin film shows ~104 enhancement comparing to gold nanoparticle colloids. The 2D gold nanoparticle arrays were synthesized by using the electrostatic self-assembly (ESA) technique. During the fabrication process, the positively or negatively functionalized gold nanoparticles are automatically self-aligned to establish a 2D array with a very small interparticle spacing due to the polymer shell on the metal particles. Then, a monolayer of silica can be coated on the top of the 2D metal nanoparticle array. This type of 2D gold nanoparticle array-dielectric thin films has high volume fraction of gold nanoparticles. According to the extended Maxwell-Garnett theory, this kind of films can exhibit OCR. The OCR frequency can be tuned from visible to mid-infrared by controlling the gold nanoparticle volume fraction. During OCR, the real part of the composite dielectric constant is zero to make the induced electromagnetic waves in gold nanoparticles to couple effectively within the film. The open-aperture z-scan technique is used to measure the nonlinear optical properties of the ESA films.

Structural evolution and thermal property of carbon films prepared with polyimide and polyacrylonitrile

A series of carbon-graphite films was prepared via gradient heating based on polyimide (PI) and polyacrylonitrile (PAN) films under N2 atmosphere. It was observed that the segment fracture and thermal cross-linking reaction occur first during the low temperature pyrolysis process of PI and PAN films, meanwhile, the thermal cross-linking reaction changes the structure of PI and PAN. When it reaches a certain temperature, the crystal structure is further improved, and the films can be transformed into polycrystalline graphite structure. With the increase of temperature, the carbon content of films gradually increases and the thermal conductivity gets better. But these two kinds of films have different carbonization processes. The carbon graphite layer prepared by PI as precursor has a relatively smaller interplanar spacing and less flaws. The thermal conductivity of the films prepared by PI is 3.9 times of the films prepared by PAN.

Effect of Local Alkaline Microenvironment on the Behaviors of Bacteria and Osteogenic Cells.

The interactions between material surfaces and bacteria/cells have been widely investigated, based on which biomaterials with antibacterial and osteogenic abilities can be designed to conquer implant failures. The pH of environments is known to affect bacterial growth and bone formation/resorption, and it is possible that the antibacterial and osteogenic abilities of biomaterials can be simultaneously improved by regulating their surface alkalinity. Herein, we fabricated many kinds of films with various alkalinity levels on titanium surface to explore the effect of local alkaline microenvironments around material surfaces on the behaviors of bacteria and osteogenic cells. Both Gram-positive and -negative bacteria were cultured on sample surfaces to investigate their antibacterial effects. Cell adhesion, proliferation, and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activities were investigated by culturing both bone mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and osteoblast cells on sample surfaces. The results show that an appropriate local alkaline environment can effectively inhibit the growth of both Gram-positive and -negative bacteria through inactivating ATP synthesis and inducing oxidative stress. Meanwhile, it can promote the osteogenic differentiation of bone MSCs and enhance the proliferation and ALP activities of osteoblast cells. In conclusion, material surfaces endowed with appropriate alkalinity can possess antibacterial and osteogenic properties, which provide a novel strategy to design multifunctional biomaterials for bone generation.

Blown Film of m-LLDPE Using a Novel Eccentric Rotor Extruder

Metallocene linear low-density polyethylene (m-LLDPE) has superior physical and mechanical properties. While, the film blowing processability of m-LLDPE was very poor when processed under shear flow. To overcome this drawback, a novel device based on elongational flow was self-developed to process m-LLDPE. In order to investigate the effect of elongational flow on the processability improvement of m-LLDPE, five types PE were studied in this paper. All kinds of PE were prepared using this novel device and traditional single-screw extruder with molecular weight and its distribution, mechanical properties and WAXD characterization. Gel Pemeation Chromotographer (GPC) data shows that molecular weight of each resin prepared using this novel eccentric rotor extruder (ERE) is higher than that processed by traditional single screw extruder (SSE). Mechanical properties showed that tensile properties of all kinds of films blowing from ERE is better than the one from SSE. However, tear properties of m-LLDPE films made from ERE differ from LDPE or LLDPE. And had a relative low value than the one made from SSE. In addition, Wide-angle X-ray Diffraction (WAXD) results indicate that films blowing from ERE exist a partially ordered component in addition to the usual crystalline and amorphous components which can’t be achieved from SSE.

Ultrathin, highly anticorrosive and hydrophobic film for metal protection based on a composite organosilicon structure

Thin protective films have been widely used for metal anticorrosion application. However, previous films either negatively influence the photoelectric property of metal surfaces or exhibit poor corrosion resistance. In this paper, an ultrathin adsorption film is built up through the effective use of linear/stereoscopic organosilicon. This kind of film is formed by the good 3-D shielding structure of a silicon resin and a linear oxosilane. Small molecule corrosion inhibitors fill the interstitial sites, leading to a compact composite structure. This film has little effect on the photoelectric property of the metal surface. Copper covered with this film achieves a contact angle of 118°and a protective efficiency of 99.34%, both of which are much higher than the previously reported for protective thin films. Moreover, such films could be adapted for various metal materials.

Effect of microstructure on 3He migration in TiT1.9 films

Two kinds of films were prepared to study the effect of microstructure on helium migration in Ti tritides. Both films showed different release behaviors and helium bubble distributions. In the film consisting of columnar grains, a two-layered structure was observed. Inclusions with a strip feature were found at the grain boundary, and no helium bubbles were distributed in these inclusions. However, helium preferred to migrate to the boundaries of these inclusions. Bubble linkage as a ribbon-like feature developed parallel to the film surface in the film consisting of columnar grains. More cracks were developed at the grain boundaries of the film consisting of columnar grains, although the helium content in the film consisting of columnar grains was less than that in the film consisting of equiaxed grains. A surface region with a small number of bubbles, or “depleted zone”, was observed near the surface. The cracks extending to the film surface were the pathways of the critical helium released from the film. The helium migration was strongly influenced by the grain microstructure.

Corrosion resistance and self-cleaning behaviour of Ni/a-C:H superhydrophobic films

ABSTRACTSuperhydrophobic nickel-incorporated carbon-based (Ni/a-C:H) nanocomposite films were prepared successfully on Si substrate via the one-step electrochemical deposition method using methanol as the carbon source and nickel (II) acetylacetonate as the dopant under high voltage, atmospheric pressure and low temperature. Surprisingly, this one-step electrochemical deposited Ni/a-C:H nanocomposite films could achieve superhydrophobic surface. Results showed that without any further modifications by low surface energy materials, the water contact angle of 154.21° and sliding angle of 7.96° were obtained, which attribute to the irregular petaloid structures. In addition, the corrosion resistance tests demonstrated the Ni/a-C:H films deposited at a Ni content of 0.08 mg/ml had excellent corrosion resistance. And the self-cleaning test revealed that the Ni/a-C:H films surface had excellent self-cleaning properties, which indicated this kind of film might have a promising application in the field of drag reduction and self-cleaning.

Enhanced Corrosion Resistance of Anodic Films Containing Alumina Nanoparticles on as-rolled AZ31 alloy

In this work, the samples of magnesium alloy AZ31 were anodized in two kinds of electrolytes, each with and without alumina nanoparticles. The structure, morphology and composition of four kinds of films were characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersal spectroscopy (EDS), respectively. The corrosion behaviors of films were studied using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentidynamic polarization curves. The wear behaviors were evaluated using a ball-on-disc rotating wear test. The results showed that the alumina nanoparticles tended to gather in cracks and pores leading to increased film density and lower corrosion rates. The wear rates of films were decreased by adding nanoparticles.

The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist and Zulu by Brian Neve (review)

Reviewed by: The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist and Zulu by Brian Neve Bernard F. Dick The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist and Zulu Brian Neve Wisconsin Film Studies, Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 277 pages One would have to be a scholar of the blacklist to speak authoritatively about Cy Endfield. Although Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote appreciatively about him in "Pages from the Endfield File" (Film Comment, November-December 1993), Endfield is largely unknown except to B movie buffs. He never experienced the notoriety of the Hollywood Ten or was granted the privilege accorded to Carl Foreman, whom HUAC allowed to testify about himself without naming names, which in 1956 was unprecedented. When Enfield decided to purge himself in 1960, he was not that fortunate. To those who have written about HUAC's witnesses, friendly and otherwise, Endfield is just a name. Thanks to Neve, a name has been given a life, and a shadow has taken on substance in this compelling narrative of a Scranton, Pennsylvania native who attended Yale without completing a degree, joined the Young Communist League and the John Reed Club, became involved in radical theatre without being a radical himself (compared to Fascism, he found Communism "least bad" [22]), wrote for radio and then film, directed shorts at MGM, and finally graduated to features, beginning on Poverty Row with Gentleman Joe Palooka (Monogram, 1946). The Many Lives of Cy Endfield reads like a Bildungsroman. As a Scranton native myself, I found Neve's reconstruction of Endfield's boyhood and adolescence quite accurate. The city, where King Coal reigned and railroad tracks were a line of social demarcation, would spur anyone with ambition to leave. To Endfield, Scranton was "a contradiction to everything that I have made himself and am making myself" (25). It was at Yale where the self-made Endfield acquired a political conscience and found a kindred spirit in Israel Shapiro, later known as screenwriter Paul Jarrico, who was more committed to the Party than was Endfield himself. Like many young intellectuals, Endfield joined the Party because he was disturbed by the economic disparity between the classes in the early 1930s. But his career took precedence over his politics, which he managed to work into his films, starting with The Argyle Secrets (1948), which revealed the existence of war profiteers who did business with the Nazis during World War II. He went further in A Sound of Fury (1950), a study in mob violence that culminated in an off-screen lynching. That same year saw the release of The Underground Story, revered by film noir aficionados and left-wingers. For the rest, it was a hardboiled melodrama about a black maid falsely accused of murder. Interestingly, a white actress, Mary Anderson, played the maid but was photographed in such a way that she appeared to be of mixed race. Even so, the film exposed the workings of a corrupt system that would allow a false allegation to be lodged against someone who would not be believed because she was a person of color. Those were Endfield's kind of films. And those would have been the kinds the Hollywood Left would have continued to produce had the blacklist not intervened. When it did, rather than deal with the inevitable subpoena, Endfield became an expat, working in London where he made several films, none under his own name. In 1960, Endfield decided to return to the States and appear before HUAC, and even though this was the year Otto Preminger announced that he had hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's Exodus and Howard Fast's Spartacus, these were not easy times for him. The blacklist may have ended for Trumbo, but not for Endfield, who spoke openly to the committee about his Communist past and the comrades he had known. It was a sobering testimony, neither groveling nor arrogant, but that of a man eager to work at his trade. [End Page 89] Neve includes Endfield's Zulu (1964) in his subtitle and is clearly a fan of the movie, narrated by Richard Burton, which is a good indication that it is...

Study on the composite dispersion model of optical constants of metal-oxide films in the range from ultraviolet to near infrared

Metal-oxide films as important high refractive index material are widely used in coating technology from ultraviolet to near infrared region. The optical constants (refractive index and extinction coefficient) and band gap properties of the films are essential for the optical multilayer design and applications. Based on the Tauc-Lorentz and Cody-Lorentz dispersion models, the composite model for the inverse calculation of optical constants from ultraviolet to near infrared region was studied. The method is proposed to link up the interband transition absorption and transparent region absorption more reasonably. Problems such as the characterization of weak absorption in transparent region and the step cutoff of the absorption near band gap, which were caused by using single physical dispersion model, were solved. Two kinds of films (HfO2 films and Ta2O5 films) were prepared by ion beam sputtering. Reflectance and transmittance spectra of the prepared films were used as the complex object for inversion calculation of the optical constants by the developed model. The performance of the fitness was compared with that of single physical dispersion model. Results show that the developed physical dispersion model of optical constants has a explicit physical meaning and versatility in the range from ultraviolet to near infrared region.

Edible protein films: Sources and behavior

Edible and biodegradable films are made of renewable resources, offer an alternative to synthetic plastics for packaging, and, unlike these, can be placed between phases in direct contact with food. Although there are different sources, such as lipids and carbohydrates, proteins are popular due to their abundance and their nutritional qualities. Protein for film elaboration can be extracted from cereals (gluten, prolamins), milk (casein, whey), muscle (myofibrillar), and the connective tissue (gelatin) of marine or terrain species. Requirements may vary depending on their future application; therefore, it cannot be said that 1 source or the other is better, because film properties will also differ due to their method of obtention. Therefore, it is necessary to know what kind of film is needed in order to choose the most suitable one.

Queer African Cinema, Queer World Cinema

Queer African Cinema, Queer World Cinema Lindsey Green-Simms (bio) In their wonderfully ambitious and carefully argued book Queer Cinema in the World, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt discuss the difficulties of defining precisely what queer world cinema is. Citing the limitations of narrow definitions that reduce queer world cinema to productions by or explicitly for queer people, the authors prefer a model that is more capacious and that is free from Western cultural presumptions about what a gay director or gay audience might look like. They argue for an approach that does not "determine in advance what kinds of films, modes of production, and reception might qualify as queer or do queer work in the world" (Schoonover and Galt 2016, 14) and they set out to answer an equally capacious question: given that queer world cinema is such an open-ended category, "where in the world is queer cinema?" (14). Their response takes them to queer film festivals in New York, India and Botswana, and to video stores, bit torrent sites, underground DVD markets in Iran and Egypt and, of course, to sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. Such an itinerary allows them to leave open the definition of cinema, claiming that it is "a space that is never quite resolved or decided" (3), and to side-step the tangled debates about how one defines world cinema. Rather, they opt for a discussion of a queer cinema that "enables different ways of being in the world" and "that creates [End Page 652] different worlds" (5). But to what extent do these claims apply to queer African cinema? Is queer African cinema simply a subset of queer world cinema? Or is it a category that requires new modes of inquiry? Because the categories of "queer" and "cinema" can encompass so many different forms, it does make sense to follow Schoonover and Galt in keeping the definition of the terms as capacious as possible. Moreover, one must always keep in mind that "the invention of Africa" by colonialists, as V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) puts it, means that "Africa" as an epistemological object of knowledge is also always a bit unresolved. But, nevertheless, I contend that it is also productive and generative to step away from some of the expansiveness, open-endedness, and "worlding" of Schoonover and Galt's project to think more particularly and regionally about queer African cinema and the politics of place. In other words, while Schoonover and Galt write about the difficulties of defining queer world cinema, a different set of questions arises when trying to define queer African cinema, especially considering the paucity of queer-identified filmmakers, the absence of any coherent queer film movement, and the role of state censorship boards in trying to limit or prohibit films with queer African characters. What I argue is that in order to understand the world of queer African cinema, one must pay attention not only to the porousness of categories, but also to the various material and political constraints faced by African audiences and African filmmakers in a global world. Any account of queer African cinema must address the multiplicity of worlds and possibilities, as well as borders, censors, budgets, and geographical and financial limits. Whereas Schoonover and Galt are concerned with locating queer cinema in the world or with locating queer worlds in cinema, I ask two more situated questions: "Where in Africa is queer African cinema?" and "Where in queer world cinema is Africa?" Here are my provisional answers. Where in Africa is queer African cinema? Questions of spectatorship have long been important to African cinema studies. Before the rise of the Nigerian and Ghanaian popular video film industries in the 1990s, a constant lament among African filmmakers was the absence of their films from screens on the African continent. African movie theaters tended to exhibit Hollywood or Bollywood films or Kung Fu movies, but the films made by Africans were mostly shown at film festivals (only a handful of which were located on the continent), embassies, or art house cinemas abroad. And though the situation [End Page 653] has improved, African celluloid films are still typically more accessible outside of Africa. When one is talking...