Minor Cinema Research Articles

Towards an Ecology of Practices in Academic Filmmaking

This video-essay proposes to depart from the experimental cinema made by Latin American women in order to highlight the tendencies of this minor cinema in which we can find ecological and formal concerns that cross our geopolitical and imaginary territories. Thus, we aim to identify an ecology of practices within the work of three contemporary filmmakers that despite their distinct styles and approaches, share commonalities and divergences that offer insight into the rich diversity in the same ecosystem. This was done through a montage of material from three short films: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) by Ana Vaz, Erial (2021) by Javiera Cisterna and Celaje (2020) by Sofia Gallisá Muriente. Through this video essay, we aim to interweave ideas, images, and methodologies towards a cohesive understanding of an ecology of practices in both film and academia. Our aspiration is to foster reflection on academic film practice as a possibility to reveal other means for political, epistemological and aesthetic inquiry.

A Women’s Nation: Feminism, Class, and National Identity in Margarita Ledo Andión’s Nación (2020)

Through her films, the Galician filmmaker Margarita Ledo Andión builds a singular benchmark on the margins of a peripheral cinema per se: the Novo Cinema Galego. Her performative and experimental narratives, in line with avant-garde films of other small European cinemas, her nationalist and feminist (political) discourse, and her condition as a woman filmmaker situate her filmography on the intersection of multiple peripheries. This paper analyzes her most recent film, Nación (2020), from the perspective of cinema made by women as minor cinema and an example of “fourth cinema” as an instrument to make visible the role of women in the class struggle and the construction of Galician national identity.

The Film Ghosts and Becoming-Woman in Minor Cinema

Gilles Deleuze ve Felix Guattari’nin felsefi yaklaşımlarında ürettikleri kavramlarla bağlantılı olan minör, Spinozacı ve Nietzscheci oluşu içeren yaşam felsefeleri ile tutarlıdır. Minör, molar yapılardan kaçış hattı çizerek farklılığı, oluşu ve yaşamı olumlar. Deleuze ve Guattari’nin edebiyat incelemeleri, minör olanın ve minör dilin nasıl olacağına odaklanmış görünse de minör fikrinin aslında yaşama içkin olduğu anlaşılmaktadır. Bu felsefenin sinemaya yansıması ise zaman-imge (genetik göstergeler) olarak nitelendirilen filmlerde, henüz olmayan bir halka seslenmek, yersizyurtsuzlaşma, kolektif sözcelem, politik olana bağlanmak gibi özelliklerle kendini göstermektedir. Çalışmada, sınırlandırılmış bir uzamda, Deleuze’ün sinema yaklaşımı ve felsefede ürettiği kavramlarla birlikte minör sinemada kadın-oluş tartışılmıştır. Bu kapsamda geniş bir analize imkân tanıyan ve mikropolitikayı merkeze alan Hayaletler (Azra Deniz Okyay, 2020) filmi incelenmiştir. Çalışmanın amacı, Deleuze’ün minör edebiyat ile bağlantı kurduğu modern siyasal sinema üzerine düşüncelerini analiz etmek ve seçilen örnek film özelinde Türk sinemasında minör bileşenlerin olduğunu göstermektir. Zaman-imge sinemasının siyasal işlevi olarak görülen minörden hareket eden çalışmada, Deleuze’ün şizoanalizine uygun yatay ve sarmal bir yöntem uygulanmıştır. Türk sinemasında minör bir sinema örneği olarak ele alınan filmde, kadın-oluş, öteki-oluş, yoksulluk, sınıf farkı ve majör tahakküm gibi konulara yer verildiği görülmüştür. Bu bağlamda, filmde bireysel hikâyelerden yola çıkan anlatının politikaya içkin olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Yönetmenin, klişelerden uzak yeni bir anlayışla ortaya koyduğu filmde, ideal dünyaların terk edildiği ve bireysel kaçış çizgilerinin öne çıktığı görülmektedir. Minör sinema yersizyurtsuz, temsil edilemeyen karakterleri ve sinema araçlarının kekeletilmesini sağlayan biçimsel özellikleriyle farklı bir sinema anlayışı ortaya koymaktadır.

Sofra Sırları'nda Kadın Oluş

Bu çalışma; Gilles Deleuze ve Felix Guattari’nin kadın-oluş kavramıyla Türk sinemasının önemli yönetmenlerinden biri olan Ümit Ünal’ın Sofra Sırları adlı filmini ele almayı amaçlamaktadır. Çalışma, Sofra Sırları filminin moleküler kadın-oluşlar barındırdığı varsayımına dayanmaktadır. Dolayısıyla film, amaçsal örneklem yöntemiyle seçilmiştir. Çalışmanın amacı doğrultusunda öncelikle Deleuze ve Guattari’nin minör edebiyat kavramı ve oradan hareketle Deleuze’ün geliştirdiği minör sinema kavramına yer verilmekte ardından oluş ve kadın oluş kavramları irdelenmektedir. Ardından Sofra Sırları filmi “kaçış çizgileri ve yersizyurdsuzlaşma”, “özel alan-kamusal alan bulanıklığı” ve “kimliklerin çoğullaşması” başlıklarında çözümlenmektedir. Her türlü düzenlemenin yersizyurdsuzlaştırılma uçları anlamına gelen kaçış çizgileri filmde özellikle Neslihan üzerinde yoğunlaşır. Film, Neslihan’ın; kendisini kocasının hizmetine adamış, itaatkar, sessiz bir ev kadını hali ile planlı cinayetler işleyen, kendi istekleri doğrultusunda yaşayan hali arasında gidip gelmelerine dayanır. Neslihan’ın bazı tetikleyicilerle doğrusal bir dönüşüme girip sonunda bambaşka biri olma hikayesi değil de; terkedilmesi ve aldatıldığını öğrenmesiyle bir dönüşüme girmesi ama orada da kalamayıp tekrar eski haline dönmesi ve sonra tekrar cinayet işlemesinden oluşan bir döngünün sürekli kendisini tekrarlaması söz konusudur. Sonuç olarak Sofra Sırları filminde anlatıdaki hemen hemen bütün kadınların başlangıçta klişe bir kategori olarak kuruldukları ancak film boyunca moleküler ya da rizomatik bir kadın-oluş sürecine girdikleri söylenebilir.

Theorizing East Asian Minor Cinema

Theorizing East Asian Minor Cinema Woosung Kang (bio) Why East Asia? Ever since Karl Marx referred to the Asiatic mode of production, the whole continent has often been characterized as the origin of modern capitalist social formation. As is well known, Marx once distinguished Asiatic landforms from all other precapitalist social formations. He specifically had in mind "oriental despotism and the propertylessness" in ancient Asia, "this clan or communal property system" that was "created mostly by a combination of manufactures and agriculture within the small commune" (Marx 1973, 473). Regardless of the historical evidence of such a primitive form of production, the main purpose of Marx's Asian reference appears to have been to emphasize the transitory nature of modern bourgeois society, thereby showcasing that capitalist modernity is not a natural phenomenon but a historically specific form that has to "give place to the next higher (and final) stage in the systematic historical process of the economic formation of society" (Lubasz 1984, 457). For Marx, the Asiatic mode of production constitutes, if anything, both the norm and the exception to his systematic theory of human history. It demonstrates the embryonic stage from which nineteenth-century European bourgeois society derived, but it is also to be understood as the deviant form of social formation that is not fully developed into capitalist economy. Asia has simultaneously been conceived of as prehistorical and premodern. Although Marx's polemical argument emphasizes the former intent, it becomes inevitable that the latter has been appropriated by the later theorists of Orientalism to justify the European intervention of modernity into premodern Asian territories. Since the seventeenth century, modernity in Asia has predominantly been compared with European modernity, and as a result, Asian communities have had to suffer various forms of colonialism. Indeed, Asian colonial modernity is frequently defined as the obverse of European modernity, lagging behind—or lacking entirely, for that matter—the universal narrative of civilizational development. In particular, East Asian communities, or what is often called "Sinophone culture" or "trans-Chinese tributary system," are usually described to be [End Page 205] the epitome of premodern feudalism tightly yoked to the familial system of economy (Hamashita 2008, 12). The violent disintegration of the Qing empire in the nineteenth century by European national imperialism was the case in point. Since then, modernity in East Asia means the Westernization by colonialism according to European standards, thereby modernizing the premodern system of Asiatic feudalism. The exception in this process was Japan, which, because it was situated at the fringe of trans-Chinese tribute system and quick to open to European modernity, voluntarily turned its society into a European one earlier than other East Asian societies (Hamashita 2001, 84). The upshot of the colonization of Chinese empire by European national imperialism and later by modernized Japan was the conundrum in which every community in East Asia constantly strives to catch up with European modernity and, at the same time, fiercely resist the very process of colonial modernization. As a result, East Asian countries find themselves faced with the often contradictory task of at once rapidly modernizing their premodern societies and seeking national independence against Western national imperialisms, including the regional superpower of Japan. Just at the moment when European nationalism in the form of colonial imperialism was clearly in decline, colonized East Asian countries strengthened their nationalism for the purpose of rapid modernization. Ironically, this rise of "belated" nationalisms has defined East Asian communities at least since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Indeed, colonial modernity in East Asia has less to do with the direct occupation of Western imperialism than with the intraregional intervention of Japanese empire. That's why the dominant form of East Asian nationalism and colonial modernity is more anti-Japanese than anti-Western. In fact, the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere or Pan-Asianism by Japanese regional empire was the double-edged sword that partly helped sponsor the nationalism of colonized societies in East Asia and partly compelled the subjugation of national interests to the geopolitical identity of East Asia against Western imperialism. The desire behind the slogan of Co-Prosperity Sphere is clear: Japan, as a new regional empire...

A Deleuzean Look on Tony Gatlif’s Accented Cinema

This study aims to discuss Tony Gatlif's "accented cinema", which deals with the lives of minorities and nomads and the reflexivity brought by these lives in many of his films, in terms of philosophical expansions. The original style which the director build by using cinema’s means about being a Gypsy or from an ethnic minority, while opening the majorities to questioning, it transforms the film watching experience to a specific intellectual adventure. In Gatlif's approach, which includes elements that coincide with Hamid Naficy's definition of "accented cinema", nomadism emerges as a minor element and, nomadic Gypsy communities, inside all the inhabitants of the world, display a minor existence. This philosophical reflexivity in Gatlif’s films, which is similar to Kafka in terms of masterfully presenting words of a minor community, is examined by focusing on, Latcho Drom (1992), Gadjo Dilo (1997), Exils (2004), Transylvania (2006) and Korkoro (2009) films. Questions like revealing reflexivities in terms of director’s accented images and what these elements mean on account of difference and minor cinema debates, form the film analyses’ basic questioning fields and the obtained findings are discussed by taking reference of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts who see cinema as a philosophical perception and thinking activity. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of difference and minor cinema approach are the intellectual background of this study to be made on Gatlif cinema.

Framing and Staging Madness in the Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm: How Witold Gombrowicz's Operetka Expresses Nicolas Philibert's La moindre des choses

Nicolas Philibert's 1997 documentary, La moindre des choses, depicts the daily lives of residents and staff at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, and their production of Witold Gombrowicz's play Operetka. This paper will analyse the aesthetic and ethical implications of La Borde's production of Gombrowicz's play by mapping the documentary, text and production's collective expressions. The film's capacities to reconfigure audience subjectivities through a filmic and intensive entanglement will be explored at length by framing the documentary's cinematography in Félix Guattari's theories of the ethico-aesthetic paradigm and minor cinema.

Silence as Elective Mutism in Minor Cinema

This article advances mutism as a creative mode and conceptual tool to treat silence in cinema. Whereas mutism can be a productive concept for the study of auditory and visual absence in a broader theoretical framework, my focus here is on the silence of film characters. Drawing on correspondences between the critical and the clinical in Gilles Deleuze’s writing, I argue that adopting mutism as a tool of film-philosophy permits us to supersede traditional film analysis and examine silence not as an interpretive condition at the level of the plot but as a critical-clinical mode of experimentation related to the symptomatology of life. After presenting a brief clinical history of “elective” and “selective” mutism, I then draw on the suppressed understanding of “elective mutism”. I demonstrate that “elective mutism”, which might appear to be a negative and powerless disorder in its clinical presentation, transforms itself into an affirmative and empowering (dis)order that inspires creative experimentation in cinema. In postwar films with mute protagonists, such as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1960), “elective mutism” engenders a negative mode of existence in its symptomatology, which can be analysed according to the tenets of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy of negativity. By contrast, Deleuze’s philosophy of affirmativity and the concept of minor cinema allow for a renewed positive examination of “elective mutism” in more recent films with silent characters, such as Elia Suleiman’s Palestinian quartet (1996; 2002; 2009; 2019). Approaching minor cinema as both a cinema of experimentation and minoritarian cinema, I contend that in films made by minorities mutism becomes more pronouncedly “elective” in an affirmative sense. As a mode of protest and resistance, “elective mutism” is not only a rejection of the present status quo but also an expression of futurity. Finally, I maintain that the concept of “elective mutism” can relate to and stimulate the discussion of many contemporary sociopolitical phenomena.

The Geographies of the East Asian Cinematography: The Taiwan Convergence

When the decline of Taiwan New Cinema (1982-1987) appeared a reality after 1990s, the idea of the national cinema gets strengthened with the globalization of the domestic film market. The brief but intense flowering of Taiwan New Cinema could not be followed by subsequent domestic waves, only to give way its creative momentum to other national cinemas in East Asia. As the nodal point of converging the continental Sinophone cinematic circuit of the Shanghai-Hong Kong axis and the maritime Hollywood-Japan cinematic circuit, however, Taiwan New Cinema combined three strata —postcoloniality, ideological politics, cultural hybridity—of East Asian cinematic infrastructure. Its influence continues in the Fifth and Sixth Generation films in China during the 1990s, fin-de-siècle Hong Kong cinemas, and the South Korean cinema renaissance after the new millennium. My intention is to theoretically frame the geographical mutation of the “East Asian cinematic plane” from the 1930s to the present. Historically, there have been two divergent cinematic axes in modern East Asian cultural geography: the continental curve and the maritime link. The former could roughly be defined by the devotion to the epic, dramatic, and dynamic cinema of spectacle; the latter belongs to relatively static, speculative, and observant aesthetics of realism. After the Cold War and the decline of studio system, the cultural vitality of the East Asian cinema moved to Taiwan and Hong Kong. During the 1980s, Taiwan became the modernist convergence point of two regional axes (“peripheral modernism”) with Hong Kong as its East Asian outpost coping with postmodern cultural capitalism (“hybrid postmodernity”). While Taiwan struggles with the two residual strata of peripheral modernity, that is, postcoloniality and political antagonism, Hong Kong is engaged with the third stratum of hybrid postmodernity by creating a new genre pastiche of East Asian action films, combining wuxia, martial-arts, kung fu, samurai, chandra, ninja, gangster noir, and cop thrillers. In this geographical mutation of East Asian cinematic plane, Taiwan New Wave constitutes the moment of the emergence of postcolonial “minor cinema,” with which East Asian cinema contributes to the making of World Cinema. I would like to adumbrate how the two different cinematic orientations of Hou Hsiao-Hsien (侯孝賢) and Edward Yang (楊德昌) helped to promote respectively the East Asian cinematic emergence.

Potentialities of Post-Media: Networks of Resistance and Subjugation in Félix Guattari's A Love of UIQ

Félix Guattari's theoretical and practical interests in cinema culminated in the film project A Love of UIQ. While critics have concentrated on the sci-fi screenplay's elements of minor cinema, its themes of mass media, emerging computer technologies and informatic-communication networks particularly express Guattari's concept of post-media. The screenplay is an aesthetic meditation on the potentialities of post-media, a concept that anticipates the practical and theoretical issues surrounding the age of the Internet. A Love of UIQ voices Guattari's ambivalence towards the liberatory possibilities of network technologies that are at constant risk of capitalist recapture.

Pautas y restricciones en el cine de no ficción contemporáneo.

The present research address contemporary non-fiction films based on rules, restrictions or very specific devices. Radical video pieces in the form and its approach to “the real” that challenge the conventions of documentary film and are linked to other contemporary art practices. Our research focuses on those non-fiction works made in the last twenty years, a minor cinema with a minimalist vocation, linked to the avant-garde documentary, video art and video amateur, based on very precise patterns, not as a anecdotal fact, but as a basic element that determines the construction of them. The selection of the films will be made analysing the qualities they have to allow us to establish typologies of study and to define the basis of theoretical models of analysis. According to the technique or mechanism used, the qualities of the films we analyse can be constructed based on the seriality of their elements, the restriction of space-time, the technical-mechanical device used or the use of techniques or self-imposed patterns that serve to organise and give sense to the images of these films far from the narrative resources of conventional documentary. However, our purpose is not so much to carry out a classification exercise as to analyse and understand these innovative formulas that open up new ways in the film of the real.

‘The story of the reel that went for a swim’: Cinema Memory and the History of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild as Narrated through Oral History Interviews and surrounding Metadata

This article draws from existing work relating to the creative writing strand of the Major Minor Cinema project, which was inspired by the surprising discovery of project's pilot study that some cinema-goers from the period of research had been inspired to write poems or stories in response to their experience of going to the Film Guild screenings. Building on an earlier publication in the journal Participations (May 2019), which largely focused on the project's use of creative methodologies and creative writing workshops as a way of exploring cinema memory, this article will consider the way which cinema memory was narrativised in project's oral history interviews and their surrounding metadata, focusing in particular on the specificities of cinema-going in rural Scotland, and taking into consideration the significance of Scotland's oral history and storytelling traditions in relation to the arrival of cinema to the Highlands and Islands.

A experiência do fora em Bang Bang:

A nossa proposta é articular dois campos de produção de saber, quais sejam a filosofia e o cinema numa problematização da experiência do pensar. Desse modo, tendo como interlocutores o cineasta Andrea Tonacci com o filme Bang Bang (1971) e os filósofos Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari, buscaremos, em primeiro lugar, nomear um modo de pensar que compreendemos engendrado pelos movimentos erráticos fílmicos, como um pensamento experimental efetuado na ruptura com a realidade determinada; em seguida, definiremos tal procedimento fílmico por intermédio daquilo que aqui conceituaremos como um “cinema menor”. Com a explicitação destas duas questões, construiremos a argumentação explicativa das derivas fílmicas tonaccianas, de modo a mostrá-las enquanto uma força de problematização radical e construção revolucionária da realidade.

Nuridsany and Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996) as an Invitation to Become-insect

This article problematises assertions concerning the existence of a minor tradition of French wildlife documentary begun in the 1920s by Jean Painlevé and more recently contributed to through Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996). What is advanced, instead, is the importance of regarding these directors’ respective films as constituting two different minor traditions. In this regard, the impasses to which the often-surrealist features of Painlevé’s films were a response, are discussed in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature and Deleuze’s idea of modern political cinema, or minor cinema. Thereafter, focus shifts on to discussion of the different context out of which Microcosmos emerged, along with the relevance of its unique cinematography for current environmental concerns—particularly because of its capacity to precipitate what Deleuze refers to as a spiritual automaton that stands to catalyse a more ecologically-orientated people to come.

Towards A New Political Image

ABSTRACTThis article tries to address two main arguments suggesting that Kiarostami’s cinema is politically neutral and affirming of the dominant ideology. Referring to Deleuze’s notion of ‘minor cinema’, this article argues how politics is represented in Kiarostami’s cinema giving a close analysis of Nama-ye Nazdik (Close-Up, 1990). Deleuze in the discussion of minor cinema differentiates the modern approach to political cinema from classical cinema by analysing the relationship between the political and the private and the representation of people. In Nama-ye Nazdik, by revealing the hidden story of unemployment of a poor printer and the middle-class family’s sons, Kiarostami blurred the boundary between the private and the political. In addition, by portraying several people in the film they are simultaneously unified and clashed with each other. Therefore, the film testifies to a split in the unity of people, and ‘people’ in this film represent a new political meaning.

Introduction: Four Kinds of Minor Cinema (and Some Thoughts on a Fifth)

Introduction:Four Kinds of Minor Cinema (and Some Thoughts on a Fifth) Jerry White The term "minor cinema" is widely used among Film Studies practitioners, and not always with the greatest amount of precision. The situation with this term is very close to what Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie have argued is true of small nations: "Small nationhood figures mostly as a general intuition, rather than a clearly defined analytical tool, in the work of film scholars" (3). That is, of course, quite consistent with the way that the term "minor" is deployed in Cultural Studies writ large; in other words, with a sense that it means, in a vaguely deleuzo-guattarian way, "small and somehow kind of insurgent." I refer here to the pair's celebrated treatise Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, first published in 1975 and translated into English by film scholar Dana Polan in 1986. That theoretical conception of "minor" as "small and somehow insurgent" can be seen in recent film scholarship as varied in topics as Adam Szymanski's 2012 analysis of Thomas Vinterberg's It's All About Love or Wisam Abdul-Jabbar's 2015 article on Yousef Chahine's Alexandria Why? There is nothing necessarily wrong with the concept of "minor cinema" literally encompassing everything from Hollywood to Denmark to Egypt, but the fact that this sweep that can be evoked by only two recent articles does give some sense of the way in which the term could be seen as something of an inexact designator. What I want to do here, then, is offer suggestions as to what a definition of "minor cinema" might look like, and how different kinds of minor cinema might connect with each other. In doing so, I am avoiding Deleuze and Guattari deliberately, in part because their sense of the term "minor" is explicitly linked to the literary. Kafka is minor for them precisely because of the way that he uses the German language, and how this connects, or more importantly, fails to connect, to a broader literary project of Euro-Modernism. That literary-linguistic sense of "minor" can be applied to cinema only by making significant conceptual stretches: not impossible, but not [End Page 357] necessarily desirable. I think it is more useful to try to approach the matter of "minor cinema" through the lens of world cinema. One part of my strategy for this definition of "minor cinema" might seem eccentrically anachronistic: its privileging of relatively discrete national or cultural formations. I do not doubt that globalization, and the cultural movement and mixing that are so central to it, has rendered such distinctions more problematic than before. I am equally sympathetic to the idea that the populist-fuelled rise of exclusionary nationalism is one of the real crises of global politics. Just as I recognize, and indeed, very strongly identify with, some forms of populism such as the prairie-centred socialism of the CCF and later NDP that is such an important part of Canada's political heritage, I am not willing to throw out the cultural baby with the backward-looking chauvinistic bathwater. In what follows I draw upon many different forms of cultural belonging. Some of these are embedded in other forms, such as speakers of Irish Gaelic, the UK's Black population, or the residents of Telangana, and some are defined by an inherent heterogeneity, such as the coexistence of the Castilian and Catalan languages in Catalonia, or of Armenian and ethnic Georgian (Kartvelian) communities in Georgia, or of Indigenous nationalities that cross nation-state borders, as do the Inuit, the Mohawk, or the Métis. In short, I take a diversity-led view of what constitutes a cultural formation, and the majority of formations that I present here are not traditional nation-states. Nevertheless, nation-states are present, as are formations that, while diverse, can be named and identified with some confidence in their specificity. What I am trying to emphasize is that it does not follow from the kinds of diversity that I have evoked above that all cultures, like all nations, are infinitely mixed and thus infinitely variable and thus meaningless. "Irish-speakers," like "Catalans" or "Georgians," are definitely...

Neither Day Nor Night : Peggy Ahwesh’s Palestinian Essays

Neither Day Nor Night: Peggy Ahwesh’s Palestinian Essays Jenelle Troxell (bio) and Peggy Ahwesh (bio) Peggy Ahwesh generously offered to meet somewhere halfway between us, and on Sunday, May 7, 2017, we found ourselves at a mutual friend’s house in the Catskills, settling into a conversation. I taught in the same program at Al-Quds Bard College in the West Bank the year before she did, and I was eager to talk with her about her work made during her time there. During our exchange, Ahwesh underscored the importance of theory for her work and noted that writer Maggie Nelson taught an entire class on her—each week pairing a piece by Ahwesh with theoretical readings, addressing topics of contemporary relevance. Nelson’s syllabus, “The Lens of Peggy Ahwesh,” inserted after the interview, is an instantiation of the critical exchange within the classroom, as well as the collaboration between Ahwesh and Nelson, and speaks to the complex intertextuality of Ahwesh’s work. I write in part so that the dead would not be withheld the right of return. —Jalal Toufic, (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film Producing moving-image art since the 1970s, Peggy Ahwesh is one of the most influential experimental filmmakers of her generation. Designated by Tom Gunning as a leading practitioner of “minor cinema”—a term derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”—Ahwesh has worked across genres, styles, and media, producing a large and heterogenous body of work.1 Over the span of her four-decade career, she has worked in a variety of formats including Super 8, 16mm, VHS, digital video, and PixelVision. Ahwesh’s work defies neat [End Page 227] classification, appropriating and reshaping such diverse genres as horror, ethnography, melodrama, science fiction, and pornography. Nonetheless, her commitment to challenging patriarchal, institutional, and colonial authority provides a palpable throughline in her work. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari, so aptly put it, “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor.” And minor cinema, like minor literature, “hates” the “languages of masters.”2 Ahwesh’s Palestinian work, shot while she was teaching at the Al-Quds Bard College in Abu Dis and living in Ramallah, resists easy assimilation into heroic national narratives. Through her focus on the quotidian, and her associative, elliptical rendering, Ahwesh presents a fragmentary image of Palestine, which stands against invisibility and media stereotypes. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Neither Day Nor Night (2015) Jenelle Troxell: I thought we might talk today about your Palestinian videos, situating them within the broader context of your work. Your Palestinian trilogy—if I can call it that—does not, however, comprise your only work shot, or found, in the Middle East. Is there anything in particular that draws you to the region? Peggy Ahwesh: I travelled in various countries in the Middle East a lot over the years. My father was Syrian, so we visited relatives in Damascus and Homs. Palestine is not really my immediate home turf, but the opportunity became available to go there through Bard, so I went. I’d been there a couple times—once during the first intifada, when I shot video—but living in Ramallah was my first sustained time there. And I feel like it was something I’d waited for, for a long time. I was able [End Page 228] to really sink my teeth into it and got to meet a whole lot of college-age people quickly, because I was teaching. I totally took to it and would love to go back. One of my activities there was to wander around with various people, a student, a friend, or sometimes by myself, and just meander and shoot stuff and learn about the place that way. Of course, there’s a unique psycho- and political geography there, so wandering around Palestine is unlike wandering around almost any place else. You learn in a very deep and direct way about the limitations of movement, how private property works, how stolen property works, about the military presence, who you should be aware of when you’re out, things to avoid, things to go around, things to...

The minor Cronenberg

Cronenberg’s minor films – those that defy, exceed, or otherwise work outside the director’s famous themes and spectacles – emphasize a signature detachment or dispassion, one that is also operant in his most popular films. This detachment invites one to read his films as what Deleuze and Guattari would call minor cinema, a sociopolitical hermeneutic alternative to auteurism. Deleuze and Guattari explain that ‘a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’, including that which an English Canadian filmmaker constructs in the shadow of the Hollywood tradition. Minor cinema is always political, even and especially when it addresses the individual and the personal, and it is collective, in that its films ‘express another possible community and forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’. Focusing on the staid cinematography and impassive protagonists of two of Cronenberg’s less studied works – Fast Company (1979) and Cosmopolis (2012) – I argue that the revolutionary potential of minor cinema unites his otherwise heterogeneous oeuvre.

A foreigner in one’s own tongue: Jonas Mekas, minor cinema and the philosophy of autobiographical documentary

Abstract This article explores how philosophical ideas, a literary and filmic practice and the biographical predicament of being a migrant intersect to create a form of cinema that could be best described as ‘minor’. It uses thereby Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ in regard to Jonas Mekas’s classical 1960s’ and 1970s’ diary films Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) – films that can now be regarded as important predecessors to autobiographical documentary film practices today. The article proceeds by first outlining philosophy’s difficult relation to autobiography, before situating the emergence of autobiographical documentary practices within the transnational cine-writing culture of the 1960s as well as within a genuinely American ‘culture of the self’ that stems from Romanticism and Transcendentalism. With figures like Mekas, not only a practice, but a whole ‘philosophy of autobiographical documentary’ emerges in the 1960s in America, one in which documentary filmmakers explore themes like accented or embodied authorship, the relation between images and words or autobiographical approaches to memory and perception. Taking all of this into account, the article explores, towards the end, Mekas’s oeuvre as an exemplary case of minor cinema.

The cultural practice of minor cinema archiving: The case of immigrant filmmakers in Sweden

Abstract The aim of this article is to present the archival practice behind two extensive research projects that we have worked on during the last decade: the Stockholm Film Workshop and minor immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. Archive has become a general catchword in today’s academia that encompasses several practices of collecting, storing, distributing and displaying. We will stress in particular – partly against the idealism of digital activism – that the archive is a locus of power. The struggle for archival acknowledgement is a question of how to establish an archival artefact, an object that may be stored and repeated, and thus to affirm it as something that cannot be disregarded. This is a practice in the way that theory also constitutes a practice: a way of intervening that is case sensitive and that constantly cuts across those four principles that Giovanna Fossati famously coined as ‘film as original’, ‘film as art’, ‘film as dispositif’ and ‘film as state of the art’.