Postwar Cinema Research Articles

American Gender Politics and ‘Re-Education’ Abroad and at Home in Postwar Film

American Gender Politics and ‘Re-Education’ Abroad and at Home in Postwar Film

ДЕКОЛОНИЗАЦИЯ И ОБРАЗ АФРИКИ В БРИТАНСКОМ КИНЕМАТОГРАФЕ 1945–1960 гг.

Movies are created in specific historical conditions, influenced by the surrounding reality and dominant values, processed and projected them onto the screen. Thus, pre-war British cinema, having absorbed the ideology of the late 19th century, told about the “white man’s burden” in the far corners of the empire, for example, in Africa. It reflected British ideas about the “dark continent” as a dangerous place inhabited by cruel savages, and other stereotypes. However, the Second World War and the rise of the national liberation movement in the colonies dealt a tangible blow to the old imperial ideology, forcing British politicians to develop and promote new concepts of intraimperial relations. The article has the following tasks: to find out how the process of decolonization that began in 1945–1960 influenced the ideological content of British movies about the Empire, how approaches to the visual representation of the colonized “other” changed in this regard, and how the audience perceived these changes. Using the plots of several post-war films as an example the author shows how the new rhetoric about the Commonwealth of Nations and partnership and current events related to the liberation of the continent from British rule influenced on the depiction of Africa in feature films. It is concluded that, despite the presence of rudiments of previous ideological attitudes, attempts to soften the tone of the narrative and present Africa and Africans in a more noble light have become noticeable in British cinema.

A failure in resilience: The corrupting influence of postwar Milan in Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers

Abstract The 1960 Italian film Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco e i suoi Fratelli) is one of the greatest exemplars of Italian post-war cinema. The film depicts the disintegration and deterritorialization of an immigrant family from Lucania, a southern Italian village in Basilicata, and their relocation to Milan. The director of the film, Luchino Visconti, continuously alludes to the protagonist’s fascination with their hometown (paese). This nostalgic and wholesome image of paese contrasts the ubiquitous alienation and exploitation in the industrial North. The film is replete with signs and metaphors which explicitly and implicitly reinforce the evident tension between the immigrant family and an industrialized metropolis. Based on an interview with Mario Licari, Visconti’s assistant who accompanied him on location visits, this article offers an opportunity to revisit significant locations of the film such as Quartiere Fabio Filzi, the Alfa Romeo Factory, Milan Duomo, Ponte Della Ghisolfa, Parco Sempione, Stazione Centrale and Circolo Arci Bellezza. Underpinned by the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Gramsci and Andre Bazin this essay creates a theoretical framework that works in parallel with a detailed analysis of the scenes, original archival material, dialogues, places, and history of architecture of the locations. The article demonstrates how urban and architectural spaces not only accommodated the narrative of the film but shaped, twisted and structured the story of the masterpiece. The paper shows how Visconti succeeded in visualizing a ‘hidden’ Milan that was never appeared on the silver screen before Rocco and His Brothers.

The Twentieth Century through the History of the House at Sanatornaya Station in Vladivostok

Regional history and local history are of increasing interest to researchers due to the worldwide trend of increasing interest in the history of individual territories. The history of the mansion in the suburb of Vladivostok was not previously the subject of local historians. The article also raises the question concerning the importance of preserving the cultural and historical heritage. The author provides a literary and historical sketch about the history of the house, reflecting the history of the twentieth century with its wars and social cataclysms. The people, whose shelter was the mansion at Sanatornaya Station, were involved in many "Great Upheavals" that changed the world and Russia. They became symbols of cultural and political life in the last century. The house was built by the seaside oligarch Boris Briner and was used as a dacha. The mansion remembers the mischievous boy Yulia (Yula), grandson of the founder of the Briner dynasty who became a favorite of the postwar cinema audience, the world-famous actor Yul Brynner, the American Robin Hood from the famous western "The Magnificent Seven". In the 1930s the NKVD (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del or People's Commisariat for Internal Affairs) turned the house into a special school for training world revolutionary fighters. In 1942, a young Korean guerrilla, Kim Song-joo, mastered the subtleties of sabotage and intelligence activities in this "training institution". In 1946 he became known to the world as Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea. In the 1990s the Oriental School successfully operated in the building of the Briner's former dacha, where Russian children studied the history of the foreign Far East, ancient and mysterious cultures.

Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinematography: Problems of Remediation

The article is devoted to the representations of the Great Patriotic War in Soviet and postSoviet cinematography. The study presents the comparative analysis of the heroic narrative dating back to wartime propaganda and most clearly manifested in post-war film epics, as well as the tragic narrative, which is inextricably linked with the ‘lieutenant’ prose of the Thaw-era. The changes in the images of the Soviet cinema in the Russian war films of the 2000s are considered. It is proved that these changes, found in modern series and remakes, are critically evaluated by both academic circles and youth audience. On the basis of discussions held in ten focus groups the main critical attitudes are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the problem of remediation which consists in the predominance of visual images only outwardly copying popular Soviet films, without independent reflection on the specificity and the meaning of military experience. It is noted that the concept of remediation makes it possible to shift the focus from dissatisfaction with individual parts of films about the Great Patriotic War to the general problem of changing the media regime in modern society and to start analyzing the mechanisms of its functioning.

Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO, written by Miia Huttunen

Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO, written by Miia Huttunen

Peregrynacja dziadowska w powojennym kinie polskim. Studium postaci

The subject of the article is a study of the wandering beggar in selected pictures of Polish post-war cinema. A poor wanderer, a beggar, classified in the social structure of the former village as a „loose man” and at the very bottom of the rural hierarchy, aroused respect combined with superstitious fascination. As a non-obvious figure and characteristic of a traditional Polish village, he aroused the interest of filmmakers. The roles of rural wanderers, interesting and important for the plot, appeared in outstanding movies: Jańcio Wodnik (1993) by Jan Jakub Kolski, Konopielka (1981) by Witold Leszczyński and Znachor (1982) by Jerzy Hoffman. In the films analyzed, the beggar in episodic roles played the role of a prophet announcing fundamental changes in the life of the village, or a man who, by casting a curse, influenced the lives of the characters in the movie. In the film by Jan Jakub Kolski, he also turned out to be a witness to the metamorphosis of the main character. Importantly, the magical and moral features ascribed to itinerant beggars are also possessed by Jańcio and Stygma, the central figures of Jan Jakub Kolski’s Jańcio Wodnik. From the gallery of „beggar” characters, the most trivially treated figure was the wandering worker Rafał Wilczur, alias Antoni Kosiba in Znachor, whose metamorphosis consisted only in crossing class barriers. In conclusion, the figure of the wandering beggar turned out to be so psychologically complex that it became interesting for Polish directors.

Review: Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony, by Rochona Majumdar

Review: <i>Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony</i>, by Rochona Majumdar

The Figure of the Martyr in Iran-Iraq Postwar Movies

Abstract This article focuses on the post–Iran-Iraq War representations of the martyr figure, with a close reading of the film Safar be Chazzabeh. The author interrogates the gendered representation of martyrdom and masculinity as central to the narration of the postwar films. She shows how postwar films continue to keep Islamic nationalism in circulation through the martyr figure by conveying a fictive yet affective time of the nation where death opens space for the continuation of life. While post–Iran-Iraq War movies collapse men's emotional relations in the war zone with their heroic martyrdom for the nation-state's sake, they aesthetically mediate the possibility of men's homosociality in the precarious and affective intensity of the war zone.

The precariousness of Jewish visibility: Surviving antisemitism in Swedish cinema

The article examines Jewish ‘self-images’ in Swedish post-war film. Before World War II, antisemitic caricatures were prevalent in Swedish film and visual culture. Following the Holocaust, Jews as such were virtually erased from Swedish screens. Written by and starring Marie-Louise Ekman, Hallo Baby () was a rare exception, the first Swedish post-war film to explore Swedish-Jewish identity. The 2002 comedy Livet i 8 bitar (Bit by Bit) (Metzger) remains the last of only a handful of films to fit said description. Significantly, both films draw heavily on established antisemitic tropes in their figurations of ‘Jewishness’. Through historically contextualized readings of the two films, including their reception, the article thus shows how the tradition of antisemitic caricature that prevailed until World War II has continued to condition Jewish self-representation in the post-war era.

Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema by Donald Greig

Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema by Donald Greig

Aesthetics of Symbolism and Semiotics in Afghan Cinema

Symbols and symbols are two important semantic criteria in the aesthetics of cinema. Semiotics studies the production and presentation of meaning and concept in any work of art. By sending codes and symbols, the sign tries to express other meanings in the interpretive language other than its apparent meaning. Therefore, art that is mixed with the language of symbols and signs has very deep cultural and traditional meanings and concepts of that border and environment. To get the meaning of the image, we must have a complete and accurate knowledge of the language of symbols and signs. Symbols and symbols are widely used in movies and television all over the world. Also, in many films produced in Afghanistan, many signs and symbols have been used but not the symbols and signs that are used all over the world Rather, traditional cultural and traditional symbols have been used in Afghanistan. This was quite different in post-war films, especially in the post-Taliban era in Afghanistan. Throughout the history of Afghan cinema, Afghan cinematographers have never tried to address the origins of signs. Rather, they were content with a generalization of symbols and signs. One of the uses of symbols and signs is to create suspense in drama and storytelling. But Afghan filmmakers could not use symbols and signs to create suspense for their audience. This led to the failure of many films and filmmakers to use symbols and signs in Afghan cinema and caused to lose their internal and external audience. But in recent years, new and young filmmakers have entered the world of Afghan cinema in this field, they were able to make good use of symbols and signs and engage the minds of their audience with symbolism and semiotics. And convey the specific message of the film to them through symbols and signs.

The Enduring Influence of Female Special Operations Executive Agent Biopics on Cultural Memory and Representations in France and Great Britain

Seventy-five years have elapsed since the end of World War Two. Yet, the memory of the conflict still occupies a central place in British and French collective consciousness. Fiction and film representations of the war act as powerful ‘vectors of memory’, to borrow an expression from French historian Henry Rousso, and as such, they have deeply contributed to shaping popular and cultural memories of the war.&#x0D; This article investigates a specific aspect of World War Two representations, namely the cinematic representations of the female agents from the SOE F section, focusing on the ‘generic’ or archetypal figure of the female SOE agent as generated by the post-war cultural industry. After a brief contextualisation focusing on Churchill’s clandestine organisation, the article will analyse the contribution of Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958) to the construction of a World War Two ‘mythology’. It will then address more recent films, concentrating on Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008).&#x0D; How did the fictional construction of the female spy come to influence the social and cultural perception of the SOE agent? Are the tropes developed in such post-war films as Odette or Carve Her Name with Pride still current or have they evolved with time? The analysis of these fictional representations will reveal the permanence or evolution of certain representational patterns and also allow us to approach different perspectives on the cultural representation of World War Two on both sides of the Channel.

French military masculinities and the birth of cinéma colonial: triangulating queer desire in Jacques Feyder’s L’Atlantide (1921)

ABSTRACT Jacques Feyder’s L’Atlantide (1921) is widely considered not only cinéma colonial’s first major representative example but also one of the genre’s most emblematic narratives. However, ambiguities in the film’s portrayal of the mission civilisatrice have received comparatively little analysis. This article aims to expand on our understanding of L’Atlantide and the mirror it held up to interwar France in three main stages. First, it situates the film’s discourses of gender and colonialism within present post-colonial scholarship. Second, it analyses the aesthetic and political contexts of L’Atlantide, paying particular attention to how the film offered a remedy to France’s ailing postwar film industry and, albeit superficially, discovered a way to address a country undergoing a crisis of masculinity. Third, through a discussion of the sexually ambiguous relationships that structure the narrative’s central erotic triangle, this analysis posits that Feyder’s film registered France’s postwar trauma and the fallibility of French colonial rule. This article ultimately argues that although L’Atlantide played a foundational role in perpetuating certain monolithic stereotypes, it also established a subversive tradition in cinéma colonial which would flourish during the interwar period in films such as Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) and Jean Grémillon’s Gueule d’amour (1937).

Female warrior imagery in the North Korean film A Partisan Maiden (1954) and the Soviet film Zoya (1944)

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the creation of the female partisan mythos during and after WWII and the Korean War through a discussion of the Soviet film Zoya (dir. Lev Arnshtam, 1944), which is set against the backdrop of the German-Russian conflict on the Eastern Front, and the North Korean film A Partisan Maiden (Ppalchisan cheonyeo, dir. Yun Yong-gyu, 1954), which tells the story of heroic women who battle against barbaric American troops during the Korean War. The films Zoya and A Partisan Maiden dramatize the life and death of two historic female partisans whose images were resurrected to serve as propaganda for the authoritarian regimes under which they lived. The popularization of Zoya’s story in the Soviet Union became a reference point for North Korean filmmakers and storytellers, who borrowed strategies from the Soviet example when constructing images of North Korean partisan Jo Ok-hui. By analyzing these historical contingencies, this paper explores how the mythos of the female partisan was formed and propagated in post-war Soviet and North Korean cinema.

Childhood and nature in the Iranian post-war film Willow and Wind (Talebi 1999)

Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s forgotten masterpiece Beed-o Baad (Willow and Wind) () is an Iranian children film written by Abbas Kiarostami, that pays tribute to the children of the post-war generation. As in other children’s films of the period, the young hero has a mission, which he stubbornly pursues. Set in a village in Northern Iran, the story follows the boy’s efforts to repair a broken glass during very stormy weather. This article will examine the visual motives of Willow and Wind (a boy climbing a hill, single trees, wind, rain) paying particular attention to the interaction with nature. The tree and the wind alluded to in the title underline the struggle and determination of Iranian children. In line with the children’s films produced by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA, aka Kanoon), it applauds the willpower of a generation with enormous responsibilities, while placing his protagonist as a role model for audiences of all ages. However, by rejecting the happy ending, the film opposes the predominant narrative model of Iranian educational films of the 1980s and 1990s while criticizing adults’ treatment of boys in post-revolutionary Iran. In this moral tale, Talebi stresses the dignity and resourcefulness of rural Iran but condemns the solitude of children, and the distance between the worlds of adults and children setting a precedent for future Iranian children’s films.

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.

Modernist Embodiment

This article embarks from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s embodied understanding of metaphor in linguistic contexts and proceeds beyond merely an extended notion of “visual” metaphor toward an operational understanding of the term “allegory” in the cinematic context. Specifically, a pattern of Sisyphean landscape allegory in a global array of postwar narrative cinema is identified and explored, in which a psychologically conflicted protagonist struggles against a resistant natural landscape, connoting varying degrees of existential “futility.” The recurrent experiential configuration of this modernist allegory on screen, especially in terms of its haptic dimensions, is explored for its ability to “invoke” social critique—as felt, visceral content.

Amnesia, aphasia and amnesty: the articulations of Italian colonial memory in postwar films (1946–1960)

This article aims to expose the political and cultural processes that contributed to the eradication of problematic memories of the Italian colonial period during the national reconstruction following the Second World War. It offers a systematic examination of newsreels and documentaries about the Italian former colonies that were produced between 1946 and 1960, a film corpus that has largely been neglected by previous scholarship. The article first dissects the ambiguous political scenario that characterised the production of this footage through the study of original archival findings. The footage configured a particular form of self-exculpatory memory, which obstructed a thorough critique of the colonial period while articulating a new discourse about the future presence of Italy in the former colonies. This seems to be a case of aphasia rather than amnesia, insofar as the films addressed not an absence, but an inability to comprehend and articulate a critical discourse about the past. This aphasic configuration of colonial memories will be tackled through a close reading of the voice-over and commentary. In so doing, this work suggests that the footage actively contributed to spread un-problematised narratives and memories about the colonial period, whose results still infiltrate Italian contemporary society, politics and culture.

Gatunek na usługach doktryny. Ideologia w polsko-enerdowskiej koprodukcji Milcząca gwiazda

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The East German-Polish co-production The Silent Star (1960, Kurt Maetzig) belongs to the group of early postwar Eastern European science fiction films which still remain barely examined by film and genre historians. The article summarizes the existing research on the film and investigates not only the specific formal character of Maetzig’s unprecedented project, but also the numerous ideological and political motivations which stood behind it.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;