Mainstream Genre Research Articles

Processes in the literature of 1990s-2000s Turkiye

This study focuses on the situation in Türkiye's literature during the 1990s and 2000s. It was marked by a dramatic paradigm shift in the attitudes of creators, the desacralization of writing, the loss of cognitive and educational functions by literature, and its conversion into a job, a business, and a game. The paper argues that Turkish literature's focus on consumption alone allows for a " vertical" classification – i.e., separation based on the intellectual capacity of the readers: high art/elite literature, designed for a narrow circle of connoisseurs and requiring considerable effort and a large cultural outlook for the adequate perception of the text (Orhan Pamuk, Ayfer Tunç, Sema Kaygusuz, Hakan Günday, etc.) and the mass literature to be read, say, in public transport or at home after a hard day's work (Alp Aras, Gülse Birsel, Nermin Bezmen, Funda Özlem Şeran, Kudret Alkan, Gündüz Öğüt, etc.). The study devoted a special place to the middle-ground literature (Ömer Zülfü Livaneli, Ayşe Kulin, Buket Uzuner, Ahmet Ümit, Canan Tan, İskender Pala, Tuna Kiremitçi, Seray Şahiner, etc.), usually called "belles-lettres" in Russian and international literary studies. The term failed to take root in Turkish literary studies. The middle-ground belles-lettres is closely related to both the "upper" and the "lower" strata of literature. Only time can determine whether a certain text belongs to belles-lettres, "high art" or "mass" prose. As part of this vertical gradation, the author reviews the mainstream genre in Turkish mass literature: fiction (subgenres, authors, publishers specializing in the genre, etc.). The study highlights that research into Turkish fiction is complicated by the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to classify it as a purely literary phenomenon. Fiction books compete with Turkish Hollywood – Yeşilçam – as well as comic books and video games. As a result, the author concluded that researching modern Turkish fiction only through the lens of literary studies is hardly feasible. Studying this phenomenon requires involving specialists from other humanities – cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, and psychology – necessitating the development of new interdisciplinary methods.

The Application of Artificial Intelligence Technology in Art Teaching Taking Architectural Painting as an Example.

In the current era of technology, artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in such a way that it has established its presence in all fields. The purpose of artificial intelligence is to reduce human intervention and complete tasks with an enhanced result. In this research, we are going to study the application of artificial intelligence technology in art teaching, taking architectural painting as an example. Architectural painting is a type of painting that focuses only on architecture, including indoor and outdoor views of the buildings. In earlier stages, architecture was shown only in the background of paintings that had different objects as the main subject. Later, architecture itself became a mainstream genre in the field of painting. As has been shown by other researchers, the latest technologies such as Internet technology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and artificial intelligence like deep learning technologies are deployed in art teaching. Artificial intelligence has made teaching easier. This proposed system makes use of Internet technology, WSNs, artificial intelligence, and lightweight deep learning models in the field of art teaching. The teaching method is enhanced by adapting to this new technology. For performing the analysis of the proposed system, the Limited Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (L-BFGS) art algorithm is implemented. This L-BFGS algorithm focuses on finding the local minima in any given application. In this art teaching of architectural painting, the proposed algorithm will aid in explaining the minute works to be noted while doing the artwork. The proposed algorithm is then compared with the traditional Gradient Descent, Adam, and Adadelta algorithms. From the results, it can be observed that the proposed algorithm has achieved accuracy of 97% and 98% in the training and testing phases, respectively.

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

Television as the arena of shaping a music genre: The Hong Kong TV broadcasting culture and the rise of Cantopop, 1970–85

The term Cantopop is used by scholars to describe Cantonese popular songs developed in Hong Kong during the early 1970s. The rise and development of the genre was not cultivated by music programmes or variety shows but by Cantonese TV drama culture and the competition between different channels in the 1970s. Footage of early 1970s shows indicates that cover versions of English popular songs were initially more prominent than Cantopop in these programmes. Producers and music directors introduced the genre to television by tailor-making Cantonese theme songs based on the characters and stories of TV dramas. By doing so, Cantopop emerged as an effective tool for promoting TV dramas. In this way, and benefitting from the success of Cantonese TV dramas, Cantopop gradually became accepted as one of the mainstream genres in TV culture.

SOCIALIST AND EUGENIC: CZECH FAIRY-TALE FILMS AND THE NATION’S HEALTH

The article embeds the three most popular fairy-tale films by Vaclav Vořlíček (Girl on a Broomstick, 1971; Three Wishes for Cinderella, 1973; How to Drown Dr. Mraček or the End of Water Spirits in Bohemia, 1975) in the socialist campaigns orchestrated by the Czechoslovak government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose goal was to introduce women to new practices directly relating to reproductive behavior. I explore this cohort of “crazy” comedies stemming from the story of domestication of women as a historical continuity in the development of the comic female Bildungsroman, one of the mainstream genres interrogating nation-building and popular culture in the Czech lands from the second third of the nineteenth century until today. The core frame of the Czech female Bildungsroman, namely the binary opposition of “us/them” related to the Czech-German relationship, ascribing to women the risk of Otherness, and the call for their Czechinization through intercourse with Czech men, are deconstructed through infiltration by eugenic motives disseminated in the public discourse concerning the nation’s health between the 1960s and 1970s.

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

‘Everyone Has Secrets’: Revealing the Whistleblower in Hollwood Film in the Examples of <em>Snowden</em> and <em>The Fifth Estate</em>

Monitoring Simulated Worlds in Indigenous Strategy Games

Though all video games require the player to observe the game state, the strategy genre relies on an experience of managing rule-based simulations that model real-world material systems. Designing for this experience produces a mode of interactive vision that structures gameplay as management: gamic monitoring. This article aims to develop a theory of gamic monitoring and explore its features through settler and Indigenous strategy, simulation, and resource management games. Games scholarship has yet to fully account for recent developments in Indigenous video games or how they relate to mainstream genres. Four comparative examples demonstrate how Indigenous games speak to settler-style gameplay, particularly its dynamics of monitoring and managing populations and resources. Due to their divergent frameworks for action, Indigenous strategy games intervene in mainstream genre conventions by shifting informatic play toward relational procedures of observation and decision-making. They express a paradigm of reciprocal interaction through how they mediate and critique codified game systems. Because Indigenous strategy games reconfigure resources and political engagement according to distinct models of managing the game state, they remain useful for further research in developing alternate models of strategy gameplay.

The Shining by K.J. Donnelly (review)

Reviewed by: The Shining by K.J. Donnelly Michael D. Gibson K.J. Donnelly, The Shining. Cultographies. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. Paper, vii+128pp, $15.00 ISBN 9780231851251 Stanley Kubrick is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers in American cinematic history. His oeuvre as a writer-producer-director consists of no less than ten heralded masterpieces and many of his films consistently rank as among the highest in industry- and critic-based polls. Current filmmakers continue to cite his work as a paramount influence on their own artistic endeavors. No less celebrated a filmmaker than Martin Scorsese has noted that one Kubrick film was equal to the entire output of almost any other filmmaker. Within Kubrick’s body of work, The Shining (1980) is perhaps his most enigmatic but also most popular film; it is by far the most scrutinized and theorized of his films, even being the subject of a fascinating recent documentary film, Room 237 (2012), that dedicates nearly two hours to dissecting the numerous interpretations of Kubrick’s film, from the academic to the conspiratorial. As with many of Kubrick’s films, its critical reception has undergone a significant reorientation, perhaps more extreme than any other: upon its initial release in 1980, The Shining received some of the most negative critical reviews of Kubrick’s career up to that time; in the intervening decades, however, its reception has been revised to the point where it is now widely regarded as one of the most technically astute horror films ever made and an exemplary piece of genre filmmaking. Into this space of critical reassessment and lionization enters K.J. Donnelly’s recent volume on Kubrick’s film. Donnelly’s title is an installation in the Cultographies series published by the Wallflower Press imprint of Columbia University Press. Each title in the series focuses on an individual classic or recent cult film and aims to offer a brief and accessible overview of its history, reception, and critical interpretations. While aimed at popular audiences, the volumes are not bereft of scholarly sophistication and provide an important orientation to cinematic genealogy and theory; the format — 4x7, nearly pocketsized — makes these technical matters less of an obstacle to leisurely reading. Taking up Kubrick’s heralded film, Donnelly’s volume achieves the objectives of the series quite handily. It is at once an insightful, informative, engrossing, and even at times humorous investigation of a landmark piece of cinema. While crisp and compact — one can reasonably manage a cover-to-cover reading of the work within the 146-minute running time of the film itself — the volume posits a cogent and compelling thesis about this masterwork from a master director: Donnelly argues that with The Shining Kubrick achieved the rare feat of creating a crowd-pleasing mainstream genre film that is also an intricate, elliptical, and technically sophisticated art-house cult film (3–6). The Shining was a certified box-office success for Kubrick despite its initial negative critical reviews, and, as with many of his films, it is replete with ambiguities and complexities such that it rewards repeated viewing (97–99). Donnelly demonstrates his thesis with aplomb over the course of the book, tracing these elements from the origins of the production to the most recent critical reappraisals. The structure of the book falls largely into two main sections: the first deals with the development and production history of the film, and the second takes up critical reception and interpretation; although more space is given to the latter (about two-thirds of the book), the first third of the book is pivotal to locating The Shining in Kubrick’s filmography and as a piece of horror genre filmmaking (15–33). Donnelly’s account of Kubrick’s preproduction collaboration with Diane Johnson on the adaptation of Stephen King’s novel to script and the subsequent production process of designing, shooting, and editing the film is fascinating, if breezily presented. While this section does not break significantly new ground through access to the materials available at the Stanley Kubrick archive (which could yield valuable new detail and insight), it [End Page 86] does provide a serviceable and engaging overview of...

Hip-hop Identity in the Music Video <This Is America>

힙합(Hip-hop)은 전 세계 대중음악의 주류 장르로 확산하고 있다. 특히 미디어를 통해 오락적인 요소로 표면에 비치는 도식화된 힙합의 이미지와 이름으로 청소년들 사이에 랩을 유행시켰다. 10대를 중심으로 한 팬덤은 음악가의 음악에도 영향을 미치며, 주제의 특성을 변질시켰다. 힙합은 음악 이전에 흑인으로부터 발생한 미국의 하위문화 형태다. 이를 통해 문화의 정체성을 확립하였으며, 사회 비판과 저항의 특성을 지니고 있다. 본고에서는 2018년 발표, 대중적인 성공을 거둔 <This is America>의 뮤직비디오를 분석함으로 힙합의 정체성 확인을 하고자 한다. 뮤직비디오의 의미작용은 기호학자 롤랑 바르트의 신화론과 그레마스의 사각이론을 통해 분석하였다. 시간 간격으로 구성된 뮤직비디오의 서사 구조를 3가지 분류 기준으로 나누어 각각의 장면에 내재한 의미를 밝혀내는 것으로 힙합의 정체성이 현시대 힙합 음악에도 나타나는 것을 증명한다. 이를 통해 주류의 문화로만 인식되는 힙합의 방향적인 경계를 갖출 수 있으며, 하위문화라는 특성을 통해 이를 재현할 수 있음을 확인하고자 하는 논문이다.Hip-hop is gaining popularity as a mainstream genre of popular music around the world. In particular, rap has become popular among teenagers and the image and topic of hip-hop are reflected as elements of entertainment through media. The teen-centered fandom also influences the music of musicians and alters the characteristics of the theme. Hip-hop is a form of American subculture that originated in early black folk music. Through this, the identity of culture was established and the characteristics of social criticism and resistance were developed. In this article, I will confirm the identity of hip-hop by analyzing the music video <This is America>, which was released in 2018 and became a popular success. The semantic action of the music video was analyzed through theories of semiotics, Such as that of Roland Barthes, and Greimas’ square theory. By dividing the narrative structure of the music video composed of time intervals into three classification criteria, the meaning inherent in each scene can be revealed. Through this, it is possible to obtain have a directional boundary of hip-hop, which is recognized only as mainstream culture, and reconstruct it through the characteristics of subculture.

“I was scared to death”: storytelling, masculinity, & vulnerability in “Wet Dreamz”

ABSTRACT This essay uses J. Cole’s song “Wet Dreamz,” the artist’s boyhood tale about losing his virginity, as a case study examining how Black male hip-hop artists draw from ideas about the ordinary to position themselves vulnerably within the contours of the mainstream genre. I argue that Cole positions himself vulnerably by presenting himself as sexually insecure, making him susceptible to criticism around his masculinity and, by extension, mainstream marketability loss in a genre dominantly constructing Black men as sexually confident. Specifically, I explore how Cole discusses seemingly universal boyhood concerns about his penis size, “stroke,” and wet dreams, accentuating a sense of connectedness to his male listeners. Second, I argue that Cole rearticulates his masculinity through his heterosexual desire, which could otherwise be jeopardized by the song’s attentiveness to his sexual uncertainty. Through this case study, I demonstrate how Black male hip-hop artists can carve disruptive rhetorical space for expressing seemingly universal boyhood insecurities that commonly go unexpressed, depicting healthy sexual relationships, and representing Black boys as resilient and with sexual agency.

Ana Tijoux y el movimiento estudiantil chileno del 2011

En el artículo se realiza un análisis de canción “Shock” de la rapera y activista chilena Ana Tijoux, compuesta en el marco de las movilizaciones estudiantiles del año 2011 en Chile. Proponemos entender este trabajo musical como parte de un movimiento social que salió a las calles para decir su indignación frente al sistema educacional de corte neoliberal impuesto durante la dictadura de Pinochet y prolongado durante la transición democrática. Atenta tanto a las voces de la calle como a los saberes letrados, en esta canción Tijoux realiza una fuerte crítica a la clase política del Chile (post)dictatorial, reivindicando la alianza entre los cuerpos y la ocupación del espacio público (Butler 2017) por parte de los estudiantes y ciudadanos movilizados. Para ello elabora a una retórica de lo colectivo manifiesta en la letra y el video clip y recurre a un género musical masivo y popular como el rap.

Muzičke preferencije i kriminalno ponašanje

The aim of this research was to examine the relationship between musical (genre) preferences and moral behaviour. The study included 216 male examinees, aged 18 to 30, divided into two groups: students (115) and prisoners serving the sentence for robbery (101). Respondents completed the Music Preferences Questionnaire designed for this study. It consists of seven questions which relate to genre preferences in different situations and emotions in everyday life, as well as genres mostly listened to in adolescence. The results of canonical discriminatory analysis and the test of the significance of differences in listening to particular genres in these situations have shown that the significant differences between groups relate to listening to classical and rock music by students and Serbian country (folk) music and alternative electro genres by prisoners, first of all during the growing up, and then out of habit and satisfaction. The results confirm the findings from the literature on the change of the status of rock music (from 'rebel' into the mainstream genre), as well as the predictive value of the prevalence of early adolescent preferences for the so-called 'alternative' genres.

Comics and Graphic Novels:

Adapting either comic stories or graphic novels for the big screen with their spate of sequels has proved lucrative for the film industry. A myriad of images have sprung out of this current surge in comic or graphic characters and stories associated with popular demands for an alternative source of entertainment – one that has hitherto been undermined by the mainstream genres. This attraction towards comics and graphic novels has skyrocketed as a recent phenomenon, thanks to Hollywood’s commercialism. Paradoxically, too, the strength of burgeoning fandom is what boosts this industry to generate more profit while the industry itself remains morally equivocal in the way it responds to the committed viewers. But what panders to the endless promotion of entertainment has already been damaging to the core principles of this medium. In capitalist economy movies created based on comics or graphic novels become cultural products. Before reaching the consumers these are intercepted by the intermediary groups, namely the studio conglomerates. Thus the artists’/creators’ rights are violated and talents frequently go unacknowledged. What matters in the process of being so is the devaluation of comics or graphic novels as works of art or aesthetic creations. The premise of this paper is to investigate the nature of graphic novels and how they retain the transcendence of art as the primary function. The secondary role of the graphic novels is not to be ignored, given that numerous examples are available to validate their insightful probing of ideas. The paper will also seek to determine the factors that transform art into mere commodities.

Personalizing the Apocalypse: Frontier Mythology and Genre Hybridity in „Maggie”

An independent U.S.-Swiss co-production released by Lionsgate Films and Roadside Attractions, Maggie 2015 is marketed as apost-apocalyptic Horror drama and appears most obviously as azombie-apocalypse film. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Maggie differs markedly from other, more traditional zombie-apocalypse films. It blends recognizable elements from several mainstream genres and, though largely conforming to the well-known conventions of so-called classical realism, echoes some of the alternative narrative strategies traditionally associated with independent American and European cinemas. Although Maggie is rich with interpretive possibilities, this article shall touch on a less overt, some might even say fringe aspect of its narrative; namely, its engagement with a number of aspects of America’s frontier mythology. This might seem astrange connection to make at first since the frontier myth as apopular cultural referent is most often associated with the Hollywood Western, and the Western is clearly not Maggie’s most recognizable narrative schema. However, the myth’s association with the Western, while historically dominant, is far from exclusive and it would also be amistake to deny the myth’s links to other film genres through the related connections that exist between categories of films that, on the surface, seem to have little to do with one another. This is especially so in afilm as “genre confused” as Maggie.To be clear, this article does not claim Maggie to be a Western, at least not in any traditional sense that we might understand it. Rather, it interprets Maggie as apart of amore general trend in contemporary cinema typified by the hybridization of the codes and conventions of numerous genres and subgenres; especially, but not exclusively, those that bring an international perspective to bear on traditional genre categories. In the case of Maggie, this works to undermine audience expectations through aprocess of inversion and deconstruction that reconfigures the erstwhile familiarity of the zombie-apocalypse’s popular-cultural terrain. For, in referencing the Western and its related frontier mythology in the way that it does, Maggie demonstrates the adaptability and continued relevance of both in relation to the complex dynamics of contemporary global film genres. It is within this context that Maggie references the Western and, in so doing, highlights the continuing influence of frontier mythology in contemporary popular culture. PERSONALIZACJA APOKALIPSY — MITOLOGIA POGRANICZA I GATUNKOWA HYBRYDOWOŚĆ W FILMIE MAGGIE HENRY’EGO HOBSONANiezależna amerykańsko-szwajcarska produkcja zrealizowana przez Lionsgate Films i Roadside At­tractions — Maggie 2015 — jest reklamowana jako postapokaliptyczny horror, a jawi się w sposób najoczywistszy jako zombie-apokaliptyczny film. Wkrótce stanie się jednak oczywiste, że obraz ten różni się znacząco od innych, bardziej tradycyjnych zombie-apokaliptycznych obrazów. Łączy w so­bie rozpoznawalne elementy z wielu gatunków głównego nurtu kina i mimo że przeważnie opiera się na znanych konwencjach tak zwanego klasycznego realizmu, przywołuje pewne alternatywne strate­gie narracyjne, tradycyjnie identyfikowane z niezależnym amerykańskim i europejskim kinem. Mag­gie obfituje w liczne możliwości interpretacyjne, jednak niniejszy artykuł koncentruje się na mniej widocznym, można by nawet rzec marginalnym, aspekcie jego struktury. Mianowicie na obecności w nim kilku aspektów mitologii amerykańskiego Pogranicza. Na pierwszy rzut oka może się to wydać dziwnym odniesieniem, ponieważ mit pograniczny jako odwołanie w kulturze popularnej jest najczę­ściej kojarzony z hollywoodzkim westernem, a sam western nie jest też najbardziej rozpoznawalnym narracyjnym schematem filmu Hobsona. Jednakże skojarzenie mitu z westernem, historycznie domi­nujące, nie jest przecież wyłączne i byłoby również błędem odmawianie związków zmitem innym filmowym gatunkom przez ich pokrewieństwa, istniejące między kategoriami filmów, które na pozór wydają się mieć niewiele wspólnego. Jest tak szczególnie w przypadku utworu tak „gatunkowo mie­szanego” jak Maggie. Dla jasności — w artykule film ten nie jest definiowany jako western, przynajmniej nie w tradycyjny sposób rozumienia gatunku. Jest raczej interpretowany jako część bardziej ogólnego trendu we współczesnym kinie, naznaczonego hybrydyzacją kodów i konwencji wielu gatunków i podgatunków; zwłaszcza, choć nie wyłącznie, tych, które przynoszą międzynarodową perspektywę na podstawie tra­dycyjnych gatunkowych parametrów. W przypadku Maggie działa to tak, aby podważyć oczekiwania publiczności przez proces inwersji i dekonstrukcji, który przeformułowuje dotychczasową swojskość popkulturowego zombie-apokaliptycznego obszaru. Dlatego że odwołując się do westernu i ide­ologii Pogranicza w sposób, w jaki czyni to Maggie, film ten demonstruje zdolność adaptowa­nia się i trwającą ważność obu tych fenomenów w relacji do złożonej dynamiki współczesnych glo­balnych gatunków filmowych. To właśnie w tym kontekście Maggie przywołuje western i — czyniąc to — rzuca światło na trwający wpływ ideologii Pogranicza na współczesną popularną kulturę. Przeł. Kordian Bobowski

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

Girl Power: Back to the Future of Feminist Science Fiction with Into the Forest and Arrival

Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) memed before it even hit the cinema screen. One image from the trailer was shared widely online: Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) making first linguistic contact with the aliens who have appeared in low Earth orbit by holding up a whiteboard saying HUMAN. This single shot appeared to sum up both Arrival's premise of communication above all and its promise to correct all that has gone wrong with mainstream genre cinema of late: a female protagonist—a scientist, no less—making lo-tech peace, rather than CGI war, with alien visitors. The trailer, like the film, boasts a female voice-over (still a rarity), and shows that Dr. Banks is not only a professional, but a working mother. Like Ryan (Sandra Bullock) in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013), Louise is defined by maternity and the loss of a child as much as by her scientific and communications ability as a professor of languages. The film consistently wants to have it both ways: it backs, at different moments, both the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that linguistic difference changes you and Noam Chomsky's claim that language has a universal grammar, even cosmically so. Similarly, it claims to be changing the genre landscape—through the difference of a (solo, isolated) female lead bent on making peace (and babies)—while actually keeping it much the same. It vaunts technology (and limited female competence therewith), particularly the screenality of the military-industrial complex, but also romanticizes and domesticates the embodied and haptic.

Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements by Suzanne Gauch

Gauch, Suzanne. Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-19-026258-7. Pp. 234. Highlighting themes of cinematic transnationalism, this study analyzes works by nine directors from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The essays are organized according to formal and critical considerations and will be useful to scholars working on Mohamed Chouikh, Lyès Salem, and Tariq Teguia (Algeria); Nabil Ayouch, Farida Benlyazid, and Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco); and Nejib Belkadhi, Nadia El Fani, and Nacer Khemir (Tunisia). Because the book brings together a wide variety of films (1988 to 2008) available to spectators in North America, it also provides rich material for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.As in her Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2006), Gauch engages with various theoretical, disciplinary, and area studies models. She dialogues, notably, withViola Shafik—whose now-classic Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (1998, 2007) established the historial importance of popular cinema as a post-independence vehicle of critique— as well as with key voices in comparatist, postcolonial, and film studies (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam).A central focus of Maghrebs in Motion is to explore how Maghrebi filmmakers have eschewed the traditional “didacticism and romanticism” (7) of popular cinema in favor of more nuanced and critically generative approaches. While the filmmakers in part 1 reformulate “the popular” by drawing innovatively upon“precinematic”regional and transnational texts (Beynlayzid, Chouikh, Khemir), those in part 2 critique history through the adaptation and hybridization of mainstream genres (Ayouch, Salem, El Fani). A third grouping of filmmakers pushes further in stylistic terms, offering autoreflexive and satirical meditations on the past and future of regional cinema (Teguia,Bensaïdi,Belkadhi).Contrasting with and complementing recent works by scholars such as Roy Armes, Guy Austin, Sandra Carter, Florence Martin, and Valerie Orlando, Gauch’s close readings explore the films’ aesthetic and figural dimensions in order to address broad sociological and historical questions. As she explains, while each film discussed is “distinct in [its] thematic, generic, narrative, and aesthetic approach,” each attempts to “dismiss the regional rivalries, easy dualisms, and fetishized signs that were colonialism’s deepest legacies” (6). The curatorial texture of Gauch’s work echoes her initial discussion of the “vexed” category of “Maghrebi cinema” (6) and reveals the irony of her opening evocation of the Orientalism-tinged“wonder,”“astonishment,”and“admiring inquisitiveness ” (2) with which the Northern gaze has tended to perceive the Maghrebi cultural and historical landscape.Countering the blinkering effect of major historical-spectatorial events such as The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966) or media representations of the “Arab Spring” (2011–), Gauch convincingly underscores the myriad powerful ways in which Maghrebi cinema continues to reveal and bypass the limits of “statesponsored [...] and civilizational discourses” (115). University of North Carolina, Wilmington Greta Bliss 206 FRENCH REVIEW 91.2 ...

Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens ed. by Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel (review)

Reviewed by: Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens ed. by Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel Barbara Kosta Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens. Edited by Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Pp. 251. ISBN: 978-0857457684. What is striking in the title Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens is the deliberate omission of the hyphen that has been commonplace when marking (and marketing) Turkish German cultural productions in the context of German Studies. Reconsidering the relationship between these historically loaded markers of identity is in keeping with the volume’s overall goal, which, as the editors Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel state, is “to move beyond the traditional focus of representation and signification to approach German Turkish cinema as part of a long history of film professionals in German and European cinema with a migration background” (10). Indeed, the fifteen essays contained in [End Page 463] this volume, each provocative in its own approach and intervention, represent the rich prismatic approaches to a relationship that, on the one hand, continues to vex notions of identity, integration, and complex definitions of belonging, and on the other hand, strives to resist the more essentialist, binary definitions of ethnic and affective affiliations. The thematic shifts evidenced in Turkish German filmmaking since the 1970s are mapped onto a changing historical context that, as the editors show, has called for various epistemological and methodological approaches. The editors also provide an overview of the diverse theoretical discourses that scholars have used to unpack visual representations of ethnicized subjects and transnational sensibilities and spaces in Turkish German films. A sampling of the impressive range of topics explored here are: mainstream genre cinema, popular culture, experimental media, issues of production, reception and spectatorship, and the tension between transnational and local identifications. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section, “Configurations of Stereotypes and Identities: New Methodologies,” looks at “the objects of study that have haunted [Turkish German cinema’s] theorization from the outset: ethnic stereotypes” (13). Daniela Berghahn persuasively charts the trajectory of wedding films ending with the marital “ethnic romantic comedy” that allows for the domestication and benign celebration of difference. David Gramling eloquently reveals the myth-making structures that Feo Aladağ’s film Die Fremde sets in motion only to perpetuate an essentializing myth of gender and violence. Marco Abel unhinges Thomas Arslan’s films from prescriptive narratives of bifurcated identities to look at the labor of image production. All three essays skillfully reveal the strategies of meaning production as it engages, reinforces, and resists ethnic stereotypes. The second section, “Multiple Screens and Platforms: From Documentary and Television to Installation Art,” offers a look at various media and shows the immense range of Turkish German contributions to cultural production from documentary filmmaking to television to installations. Exploring notions of bicultural subjectivities, Angelica Fenner turns to Fatih Akın’s autobiographical documentary We Forgot to Go Back, which negotiates between his private and public persona and dwells on spaces, infused with nostalgia, that express “the desire for belonging [that] powerfully informs both Akın’s approach to his project, and the testimonials of his wider circle of relatives” (71). Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey explores Buket Alakuş’s and Aysun Bademsoy’s female soccer films as a vehicle to promote women’s presence in the public sphere. Nilgün Bayraktar looks at performance, spectatorship, and migration in Kutluğ Ataman’s video installation Küba. Brent Peterson’s essay on the television sitcom Turkish for Beginners and Brad Prager’s essay on Züli Aladağ’s film for television Rage conclude this section with a focus on representations of ethnicity and gender that neatly tie in with the first section on stereotypes, though without offering less in the way of new approaches. [End Page 464] In section three, “Institutional Contexts: Stars, Theaters and Reception,” the primary focus is on “how institutional contexts and practices shape German Turkish cinema” (14). The spectrum of topics includes the analysis of movie theater programming, of Turkish German stars, of the German reception and marketing of Akın, and the reception of Turkish German...

A Few (Skeptical) Notes on the Theoretical Ramifications of Genres in the Contemporary Public Space

AbstractThis paper is a tentative attempt to identify some basic-level conceptual and theoretical problems underlying the mainstream genre theory, which adversely affect the analysis of rapidly evolving, complex and hybrid genres in the modern communicative space. Having discussed these problems, I go on to I argue that the space of contemporary public communication should be viewed as not only an “analytic problem”, but also/rather a domain whose explorations could potentially revise the existing principles of genre theory. In particular, I suggest such explorations should focus on the conception of (public communication) genres as (i) abstractions, (ii) activators and realizers of context, (iii) flexible macrostructures, (iv) social field entities, (v) assigners of interpersonal roles. Notwithstanding a possible advancement of genre theory resulting from this approach, I conclude that it is only a first and admittedly uncertain step in trying to establish a sound theoretical framework for communicative genres in the modern discourse space.

‘The weekend has landed!’ Carnivalesque youth rebellion in the Ecstasy film Human Traffic (Justin Kerrigan 1999 UK)

The article discusses Human Traffic, the first British film to focus exclusively on the youth dance club culture in the UK, a movement associated with recreational drug use which has now reached global dimensions. It explores in which ways the film engages with public discourses about deviant youth’s drug use, tapping into the debates at both ends of the spectrum, i.e. the demands for normalisation vs. prohibition. The film embeds the illicit activity in a narrative that draws from popular mainstream genres, such as the teen rebellion film and the romantic comedy – thus suggesting that these drugs are indeed a normal consumer choice for the youth dance subculture. The article shows how the carnivalesque elements in its visual style and narrative structure contribute to the film’s energetic, life-affirming tone while at the same time celebrating the defiant nature of the youngsters’ clubbing weekend, and offering a polemical rejection of the anti-Ecstasy ‘master discourse.’