Political Filmmaking Research Articles

Transition Cinema. Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968. By Jessica StitesMor. Pittsburg: U of Pittsburg P, 2012, p. 262, $ 24.95.

Transition Cinema. Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968. By Jessica StitesMor. Pittsburg: U of Pittsburg P, 2012, p. 262, $ 24.95.

Jessica Stites Mor, Transition Cinema. Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968

Jessica Stites Mor, Transition Cinema. Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968

Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968. By Jessica Stites Mor. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 280. $24.95 paper.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968. By Jessica Stites Mor. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 280. $24.95 paper.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Contesting the optic of (under)development: Tire dié and the emergence of independent documentary cinema in Argentina, ca. 1958

This paper explores the relations between the film that ushered a new era of political documentary filmmaking in Argentina – Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary School's Tire dié [Throw me a dime] (1960) – and development theories, which sought to produce ‘underdevelopment’ as an object of knowledge within the geopolitical context of the late 1950s. Tire dié draws its title from a sequence showing dozens of shantytown children shouting this phrase while running alongside a train. Instead of situating the conditions for the making of Tire dié strictly within the trajectory of Argentine cinema's political radicalization, this article links them to development theories originating in the US and in supranational institutions. Although focused on development, these theories also defined underdevelopment by elaborating a series of premises, equivalencies and symbols. When adopted and modified by Argentine political discourse, these theories came to constitute a new prism through which to examine and show social and economic marginality, equating it with underdevelopment. This article demonstrates that Tire dié deploys a documentary gaze on social and economic marginality that, while taking up characteristic categories of development discourse, both subverts its original connotations and critiques the false promise embodied in capitalist development.

The revolution was (over)televised: reconstructing the Venezuelan media coup of 11 April 2002

This article considers a series of documentaries revisiting the Venezuelan coup of 11 April 2002. These documentaries have attempted to reconstruct the event, relying on witness testimony, television coverage and on-the-ground reportage and home movies. The documentaries’ appropriation of televised footage allows us to reassess the so-called ‘media coup’ and to discuss the theoretical implications of re-using televisual footage to re-articulate historical traumatic events. The events of April 2002 provide a rich site to examine: first, the evolving national mediascape and the contestation of public and private spaces; secondly, the changing paradigms of political filmmaking in the Latin American context, suggesting how uses of television and new media help us expand the theater of the political documentary; and, thirdly, the medium-specific challenges of revolutionary cinema where political testimony becomes (re)mediated in a political space that conflates physical and virtual political space.

Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left Since 1968

Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left Since 1968

‘You don't exist’: I Am Love as political melodrama

ABSTRACTThe political melodrama has been considered dormant in western cinema of recent years. Luca Guadagnino's 2009 Io sono l'amore/I Am Love is a bold attempt at reviving the genre by combining a sociopolitical critique of contemporary Italian society with the use of a romantic plot line and neo-baroque formalism that are the hallmarks of the classic melodrama. This article examines how Guadagnino utilizes the genre to explore issues of sexuality, art, love and global capitalism in a psychoanalytic and Marxist framework, confirming the political melodrama's preoccupation with deconstructing the bourgeois family order. In its evocation of cinematic masters Douglas Sirk and Luchino Visconti, the film also recalls an era of melodramatic film-making in which themes are elaborated in an aesthetic form that is at once hyperbolic and austere. While its results may at times be confusing or undeveloped, I Am Love suggests that the melodramatic mode still offers possibilities for political film-makers to depict the conflicts and contradictions of private life in the twenty-first century.

Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog by Eric Ames

Reviewed by: Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog by Eric Ames Roger Hillman Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog. By Eric Ames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. x + 334 pages + 50 b/w photos. $25.00. This title appears as Volume 27 of "Visible Evidence," edited by three prominent scholars of documentary film. The great achievement of Eric Ames is that his book does full justice to that series, as well as assuring lively debates across two further significant contexts—Herzog and the New German Cinema, viewed 30 years after the death of Fassbinder, and Herzog's documentaries as a key facet of his work-in-progress oeuvre. While it would have been arresting to find this director among early volumes in the series (in the late 1990s), the documentary has since achieved an altogether different genre status, and Herzog's ongoingly idiosyncratic place in it should be assured. Proceeding in a broad arc, from issues of embodiment to questions of subjectivity, the study focuses on a couple of films in each chapter. Exemplary is the very close reading of Fata Morgana in Chapter Two (Moving Landscapes), followed by a great analysis of the parodic tone of La Soufrière. Alongside the texts of Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, central to secondary literature on the documentary, Ames frequently draws fruitfully on Schechner's notion of "performance." "If documentary film can be understood as performance, how does this affect its relation to the archive?" (262) Performance, not least via an exploration of theatricality, becomes perhaps the ultimate key to understanding documentary as conceived by Herzog. (Even "theatricality" becomes problematic with the prominent role of Herzog's voice-overs, given the plausibility and unflappability of his vocal timbre.) For Ames, discussion of "reenactment [ . . . ] in documentary theory [ . . . ] has too often been framed in narrow and mostly ahistorical terms" (181). Such pronouncements express a clear view of implications beyond this project and are always backed up: "The practice of reenactment comes from a history of performance, to which the documentary film is indebted, even though this history tends to go unnoticed by film-specific accounts" (184). Herzog's films continually refuse to be bound by Nichols's description elsewhere of documentary as a "fiction (un)like any other." The interrelationship between "fact" and fiction, across genre borders, needs re-assessment with each new film of Herzog. Thematically and stylistically, Ames keeps returning to Fitzcarraldo as a kind of Ur-film, but otherwise the feature films are (quite properly) largely elided, while rarely constituting an altogether different category. In Chapter Six (Reenactments), Rescue Dawn and Little Dieter Needs to Fly are explored as feature film vis-à-vis documentary; further investigation along these lines is needed within individual films (e.g. documentary aspects of Aguirre). Key concepts used by Ames challenge contexts beyond their norm; "baroque" and "allegory"—the latter particularly fertile— are not staples of documentary studies. His original insights—e.g., Herzog as "a different kind of political filmmaker" (152), or Land of Silence and Darkness as haptic cinema (21)—have far-reaching ramifications for Herzog as auteur, and for documentary more generally. The haptic opens up a broader approach to Herzog and the senses than was long adopted by a scholarship sharing the director's quest for images that had never been seen before. One of the most welcome features of Ames's book is its pursuit of [End Page 362] music and sound, especially as integral to the title of Chapter Three (Ecstatic Journeys). Yet this is also where, like Herzog's Jonathan Harker, we still have much to do. "The believer's interaction with the unseen image" in Bells from the Deep is deemed to be "the actual subject of the film" (94). Yet surely the acoustic mirage of the sunken city of Kitezh is what transmits to the pilgrims on the ice, and by the end of the film (with a differently framed ringing of bells), to us as viewers. Wings of Hope combines many of the categories generated by Ames's study, with music as the catalyst. Over footage of the jungle in the final frames, the sound of Wagner's Rheingold Prelude signals the filmmaker...

Transition cinema: political filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968

In May of 1976, documentary filmmaker and proclaimed socialist Raymundo Gleyzer mysteriously disappeared in Buenos Aires. Like many political activists, Gleyzer was the target of a brutalizing military junta that had recently assumed power. Amazingly, within a few decades, leftist filmmakers would be celebrated as intellectual vanguards in this same city. In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina s volatile transition to democracy. She shows how, during different regimes, the state moved to either inhibit or facilitate film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies the film industry employed to comply with, or circumvent these regulations. Stites Mor divides the transition period into three distinct generations, each defined by a major political event and the reactions to these events in film. The first generation began with the failed civil uprising in Cordoba in 1969, and ended with the 1976 military takeover. During military rule, repressive censorship spurred underground exhibitions, and allied filmmakers with the Peronist left and radical activists. The second generation arose after the return of civilian rule in 1983. Buenos Aires became the center for state-level cultural programs that included filmmakers in debates over human rights and collective memory campaigns. In 1989, a third generation of filmmaking emerged, with new genres such as cine piquetero (picketer cinema) that portrayed a variety of social movements and brought them into the public eye. By the new millennium, Argentine filmmakers had gained the attention and financial support of international humanitarian and film industry organizations. In this captivating study, Stites Mor examines how populist movements, political actors, filmmakers, government, and industry institutions all became deeply enmeshed in the project of Argentina s transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.

Quilombo and Utopia: The Aesthetic of Labor in Linduarte Noronha's Aruanda (1960)

This essay focuses on one of the privileged spaces of the Cinema Novo filmscape: the quilombo, or maroon settlement. Though largely neglected by film scholars, the quilombo is an abiding theme for Brazilian political filmmakers. It is the symbolic crossroads where a utopian strain of political thinking converges with a central preoccupation of Brazilian national identity – the question of Brazil's racial character. This essay examines the classic short documentary that introduced the quilombo to Brazilian Cinema. Aruanda (Linduarte Noronha, 1960) is about a rural community of descendants of escaped slaves. The film represents an anti-culturalist approach to the quilombo that was soon superseded by the culturalist appropriation of the quilombo by the Brazilian black movement, by filmmakers like Carlos Diegues, and later, by the Brazilian state. Aruanda locates the utopian element of the quilombo, not in a peculiarly African or Afro-Brazilian culture, but in the unalienated life-activity of its members.

No Way Out: Set Design in Mafia Films

This article considers Mafia filmmaking across Hollywood and Italian models. It presents an analysis of the set design of two recent Italian films, Le conseguenze dell'amore (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004) and Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008) that focuses on the inter-relationship between narrative and set design, and on the cinematic strategies used to present and give meaning to the sets. It shows that both films conform to the category of what the Affrons term a 'closely circumscribed set', where the spatial dimensions of the set are read in the first instance in literal terms, but beyond this as relevant to an implicit social and political agenda. It is however notable that the films actively exclude an explicit political dimension to their discourse, a factor that strongly modifies the earlier tradition of political filmmaking but retains significance for the production and reception of the contemporary genre form.

Bridges between New German Cinema and Today’s Generation of Political Filmmakers: An Interview with Michael Verhoeven

Research Article| April 01 2010 Bridges between New German Cinema and Today’s Generation of Political Filmmakers: An Interview with Michael Verhoeven HANS-BERNHARD MOELLER HANS-BERNHARD MOELLER HANS-BERNHARD moeller teaches German studies with an emphasis on film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous articles on cinema; the coauthor, with George Lellis, of Volker Schlöndorff ’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the “Movie-Appropriate”; and the editor of Latin America and the Literature of Exile: A Comparative View of the Twentieth-Century Refugee Writers in the New World. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Film and Video (2010) 62 (1-2): 3–12. https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.62.1-2.0003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation HANS-BERNHARD MOELLER; Bridges between New German Cinema and Today’s Generation of Political Filmmakers: An Interview with Michael Verhoeven. Journal of Film and Video 1 January 2010; 62 (1-2): 3–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.62.1-2.0003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Film and Video Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bridges between New German Cinema and Today’s Generation of Political Filmmakers: An Interview with Michael Verhoeven

MICHAEL VERHOEVEN WAS A MEMBER OF the first wave of the New German known as the Young German Cinema that emerged during the second half of the 1960s. Born in 1938 in Berlin, into a theater and film director/actor family, he was involved, as an actor, in stage and screen projects even as a teenager. He made his debut as a stage director in 1962, and in 1966 he married actress Senta Berger, who has played the lead in a number of his films; together they founded the Sentana Film Production that year. In 1967 Verhoeven directed his first feature film, Paarungen [Making It], based on Strindberg's Dance of Death. Parallel to his artistic development, Verhoeven also completed medical studies, earning an MD degree in 1969. In 1970 his experimental Brechtlan antiwar picture o.k. caused a controversy that prematurely closed down the Berlin Film Festival; nevertheless, it won the German national film award for best screenplay in the following year. This film, as well as Die Weisse Rose [The White Rose] (1982), Mutters Courage [My Mother's Courage] (1996), and his 2006 documentary Der unbekannte Soldat [The Unknown Soldler], propelled him into the ranks of today's most prominent political German filmmakers. This status was only reinforced by his 2008 documentary Menschliches Versagen [Human Error], in which his research revealed not only the methodical deprivation of the Jewish minority during the Third Reich but also the role German citizens played to profit from it. A further politically oriented film with marked comic elements is his Das schreckliche Madchen [The Nasty Girl], which was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category in 1991 and which also won the 1992 BAFTA award. He lives in Munich (Gruenwald) and Berlin (and is not related to Dutch blockbuster filmmaker Paul Verhoeven). This interview was conducted on 13 September 2007, at the University of Texas, Austin. hans-bernhard moeller: Let me begin with the documentary. Prior to The Unknown Soldier1 you have had experience with this form, for Instance with the documentary about Anja Rosmus, the real-life model foryour/Vosfy Girl. I remember hearing at some point about a similar companion documentary to go with The White Rose.2 But when I checked on that last fall, I could not find anything except your 2001 Die kleine Schwester. Die Weise Roseein Vermachtnis [The Sister. The White Rose- a Legacy]. This documentary does not appear In the Internet Movie Database (imdb. com). Could you tell us something about the Little Sister and any other documentaries you might have made earlier? Michael verhoeven: Actually, when !showed the film The White Rose in schools, I liked to have the younger sister of Willy Graf with me. She was one of the students of the White Rose and in later years a teacher. I thought she would be able to explain how it was, how she saw it then, [and] how she sees it today, and she knows how to talk to young people. She was committed more or less to the life of her brother, which was very short. She wanted to fulfill what the brother couldn't do, because the Nazis killed him. He was executed like the other students of the White Rose and their professor, [Kurt] Huber. I accompanied her, when she was traveling in other countries, to talk to school children and to tell about what the White Rose was, what her brother had in mind, why they resisted, how they resisted against the Third Reich, and how it Influenced her all of her life. We did this quite often, so I had the feeling it would be nice to make a portrait forTV of this marvelous old woman, elderly woman I should say, because in schools there is always just a very small audience. Not many people can see this TV film. It is not on DVD, and this might be the reason why it is not in certain handbooks or collections like the IMDb. It is a TV film, coproduced with WDR in Cologne and only forty-five minutes long. It is not a real documentary, though it is a documentation. …

Confronting the 'Dirty War' in Argentine Cinema, 1983-1993: Memory and Gender in Historical Representations

Over the last three decades the political cinema of Latin America has been extensively documented in English-language criticism, raising the question of why we need to return to this theme in a text on Argentina's ‘Dirty War’ cinema. We might also question the return to a particularly national context when transnationalism and border-crossing have become the more popular trends in recent scholarship. What is immediately apparent is that this book-length study on just one decade in Argentina's cinematic history allows for an attention to detail that is often overlooked in other approaches to Latin American cinema. At times this means that new snippets of information emerge, such as the revelation that famed political filmmaker Fernando Solanas began his career composing jingles and directing commercials (p. 46) or that the Argentine press followed La historia official (Luis Puenzo, 1985) from its preproduction stages through to its exhibition (p. 123). The scope of the text also makes it possible for the introduction to offer an in-depth account of the specific Argentine sociohistorical–political processes that defined both the Dirty War and the move to democracy. Highlighting these factors is a useful move considering that the numerous military crises, and their effect on the cinema of twentieth-century Latin America, are often easily conflated.

Berlinale 2009

BERLINALE (2009) Festival PoliticsAsked whether the Berlinale has fostered an image as a "political" film festival, Christoph Schlingensief, the German jury member at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival (5-15 February 2009), blurted out: "A competition entry here scarcely stands a chance otherwise." Schlingensief, a highly motivated political filmmaker in his own right, hit the nail right on the head. You only have to look back at the past Golden Bear winners. In 2007, the Grand Prix went to Wang Quan'an's fiction-documentary Tu ya de hun shi (Tuya's Marriage, China). Set in rural Mongolia, Tuya's Marriage mirrored the plight of nomadic shepherds whose way of life is threatened by the government's misguided plans to move them to urban shelters. In 2008, it was awarded to José Padilha's Tropa de elite (The Elite Squad, Brazil). Set in 1997, when the Pope announced his visit to Brazil, that news triggered...

‘WE WILL INVENT OURSELVES, THE AGE OF THE NEW IMAGE IS AT HAND’

We became very evangelistic trying to tell as many women as possible about this thing that we had discovered, and in those circumstances we began making a film to use for propaganda purposes. (Anon...

Media in a Capitalist Culture

In her article, Media in a Capitalist Culture, Barbara Trent looks at the negative effects that capitalism has on the media and how those effects may be overcome. Trent intertwines personal experience with socio-historical context to give the reader a genuine feel for political filmmaking in a Hollywood dominated world. She describes how her Academy Award winning film The Panama Deception was removed from a Cineplex, even after out-grossing all of the other films there, because Warner Brothers wanted the screen. After an examination of the impact a dominant Hollywood has on local culture around the world, Trent offers three case studies based on three of her documentaries, Destination Nicaragua, Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair, and The Panama Deception as a prescription, or a road map, for negotiating the pitfalls of capitalist culture. Her personal experience as an Academy Award winning director who has faced enormous difficulty working outside major media circuits offers a unique perspective on how the mass media resists alternative views of society. Barbara Trent, Media in a Capitalist page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2007): Thematic Issue, Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello

The roots of Alexander Korda: myths of identity and the international film

Walker examines the life and career of the filmmaker Alexander Korda, from his early days in Hungary to the late 1930s. He examines Korda’s Jewish roots, and the impact and influence of Jewish culture on his early career. Arguing for closer attention to the Jewish milieu in which he lived and worked, he examines the various attempts to elide or obfuscate Korda’s Jewishness in contemporary accounts and more recent studies, and offers suggestions about the impact of antisemitism and cultural prejudices on his thinking and self-presentation. Walker argues that Korda was a more consistently and seriously engaged political filmmaker than is usually assumed, and briefly examines some of the abiding interests in his early life and the films he produced and/or directed in the period 1933–42 (The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Things to Come, That Hamilton Woman): principally, anti-fascism, British rearmament, the need to end US isolationism and the plight of the refugee. Finally, Walker looks at the ways in which issues of national and cultural roots, assimilation, belonging, and the special perspective of the ‘outsider’ made an impact on his ideas. He argues for a close correlation between Korda’s own experience as a Hungarian Jew and an émigré and his ideas about filmmaking and the ‘international film’: the almost mythical idea of a film rooted in British national culture and identity that would be marketable throughout the world.

Romain Goupil: bearing the torch for French political cinema

Romain Goupil, a key figure in the May 1968 student manifestations, remains one of France's most prolific political film-makers. His apprenticeships under Jean-Luc Godard, Roman Polanski and Chantal Ackerman marked his subsequent work with political consciousness and a proclivity for ceaseless questioning. During three decades of political engagement he has been drawn to the war zones of Sarajevo and Israel, to Berlin before and during the destruction of the Wall, and to the neighbourhoods of France's unwelcome immigrants. Goupil's corpus reflects his refusal to affect impartiality in the face of political engagement; he concedes that the act of political film-making assumes a basic moral perspective whereby the subject chosen will either be condemned as an injustice or celebrated in some way. But instead of treating political problems as equations to be worked out and displayed with values assigned to all variables, Goupil claims his only major ambition is to use film to communicate the sorts of basic existential questions he has always asked himself. This questioning, more than an individual point or message of each film, provides the impetus for Goupil's cinema and political engagement. In this interview, conducted by Sarah Forbey in Goupil's Paris production office, Les Films du Losange, Goupil discussed the political issues surrounding the origins of the film Une Pure Coincidence (2002), as well as the history of his political engagement and his intentions as a film-maker.