Venice Film Festival Research Articles

Events Reports

Abstract 70th Venice International Film Festival: Italian Cinema Expanded, Venice, 28 August–7 September 2013 A report of the Historicanti performance Contadini si nasce, briganti si muore, ma i poveri restano in viaggio/You can be born a peasant, die as a robber, but the poor remain on the road

Translation as Adaptation for Language Pedagogy

Abstract This paper explores, within an ecological perspective on language learning (cf. van Lier 2004), the valuable role that translation as adaptation can play in mediating and making sense of cross-cultural experiences in the multilingual language classroom. The aim is to develop a multilingual pedagogy that includes translation as adaptation as an integral part of the language curriculum in order to foster translingual and transcultural competence, this being the goal of foreign language education in the 21st century (cf. MLA 2007:2). The first part of the paper introduces the theoretical framework that conceptualises translation as being closely related to adaptation. It then analyses salient scenes from Gianni Amelio’s bilingual drama La stella che non c'è/The Missing Star/L'Étoile Imaginaire (2006) filmed in Italy and China and screened in competition as part of the 2006 Venice Film Festival. Moving on from research to pedagogic practice, the final part of the paper outlines a teaching unit that is based on the film and is aimed at undergraduate L1 Chinese learners of Italian and L1 Italian learners of Chinese. The objective of the pedagogic unit is to raise awareness of the transformative power enshrined in linguistic and cultural exchanges mediated by audio-visual translation as an eminent example of adaptation.

가치사슬 구조로 본 저예산 디지털 영화제작 시스템의 안정을 위한 연구

한국영화산업에서 디지털 기술의 도입은 저예산 디지털 영화제작을 활발하게 하는 요소가 되었고, 그 결과 국내 영화감독들이 해외 영화제에서 각종 수상과 함께 작품성을 인정받으며 마침내, 2012년 김기덕 감독은 <피에타>로 세계 3대 영화제 중 하나인 베니스 영화제에서 최고상인 '황금사자상'을 수상하는 쾌거를 이루기도 하였다. 하지만 저예산 디지털 영화들이 양적 증가에 비해 질적 성장을 비례적으로 완성하지 못한 이유들이 드러나면서 제작 단계와 시스템 측면에서 몇 가지 한계점을 안고 있다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 문제점들의 해결방식의 하나로서, 2000년부터 현재까지 제작 시스템을 통해 영화산업의 가치사슬 구조가 일반형에서 수직 수평통합형으로 변화되고 있음을 살펴보았다. 또한, 2000년대 중 후반 부에 제작된 저예산 디지털 영화들을 중심으로 (홍대)인디밴드 음악시장의 성공사례, 제작비의 정책적인 지원, 저예산 영화제작 투자사에 대한 세제혜택, 그리고 해외 영화제에 대한 지원책 등을 제시하였고, 상업적으로 성공을 거둔 저예산 디지털 영화의 제작과정을 분석하여 그에 따른 방안을 모색하였다. The phase in digital technology expedited low-budget digital film productions in the Korean film industry; hence the international film festivals circuit became the launching pad for Korean directors as they built their reputation and careers around the critical acclaim. Pieta (Kim Ki-Duk)'s Claim on Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2012 would be one of the splendid achievements - the festival is considered to be one of the top the international film festival. However, the increased volume of the low-budget digital film productions are not necessarily proportional to the growth in the quality of the productions. The drawbacks to the production system appeared to be the underlying cause. In attempt to approach the issue, this article explores the production system from 2000 until now. It is illustrated that the value chain model has been transformed from general ones into vertical & horizontal integrated ones. A notable example of successful indie bands-around Hongik university area-, as well the analysis on the low-budget hit productions, especially from the mid-2000's, are introduced as the case studies. The strategies that led the success, such as subsidies policy, the tax benefits on investment firms and production companies, and the aid in international film festival submissions on low-budget digital film productions, are thus examined with further suggestions.

Len Lye: The Vital Body of Cinema

OCTOBER 144, Spring 2013, pp. 73–91. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In late 1936, a year after it had been awarded a Medal of Honor in the specially created category of “fantasy film” at the International Cinema Festival in Brussels, Len Lye’s first hand-painted film, A Colour Box (1935), was screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it met with a less than rapturous response. Consisting of little more than quivering fields of dots, eccentrically pinwheeling triangles, and trembling vertical lines, all jumping to the jaunty rhythms of a Creole jazz soundtrack, the film’s dancing sheets of color instantly aroused the ire of Nazi spectators present in the audience. As the German daily Film-Kurier would later report: “The English color short A Colour Box, which attempts the kind of abstract film composition of Fischinger but with inadequate artistic means, was met with such loud condemnatory stomping that the screening had to be stopped before the film was over.”1 So degenerate was the film, it seems, that despite being only three minutes in length it could not be screened in its entirety. In retrospect, of course, there is nothing startling about this turn of events. By virtue of its complete abstraction and its recourse to a “negroid” musical accompaniment, it would have been difficult in 1936 to find a film more strikingly at odds with even the most liberal canons of Nazi cinema—as the FilmKurier’s rather startling invocation of Oskar Fischinger as a yardstick of comparative acceptability in this context suggests.2 Moreover, when Lye’s motives for drawing on the combined resources of abstraction, jazz, and animation in his hand-painted films are taken into account, the severity of this judgment can only be compounded. For at the heart of Lye’s filmmaking practice lay an urge

아네스 바르다의 &gt;방랑자&lt;와 형식적 실험

아네스 바르다는 자신만의 영화세계를 구축해 온 프랑스의 대표적인 여성 영화감독이다. 특히 주관성과 객관성을 혼합하는 실험적인 방식은 가장 돋보이는 특성이다. 이를 뒷받침하는 방식은 고전적 영화 방식과 상이한 영화적 형식에 대한 탐구에서 비롯한다. 이러한 접근은 현대영화의 형식을 치밀하게 분석하여 구조를 발견하는 노엘 버치의 방법론과 같다. 그래서 아네스 바르다의 대표작 중 하나이면서 1985년 베니스영화제에서 황금사자상을 수상한 바 있는 <방랑자>를 대상으로 주제와 형식의 유기적 결합을 통한 현대영화의 구조 산출이라는 형식미학적 분석하고자 한다. 인간 사이의 관계성과 접촉의 회복을 표류하는 삶의 비극적 죽음을 통해 전달하고자 한 영화의 주제는 영화의 형식적 실험을 통해 새로운 영화적 구조를 낳았다. 그 형식적 실험은 영화의 도입부의 보이스오버와 파편적이고 반복적인 구성으로서 인물과 상황 제시 방식, 서사적 양식과 비서사적 양식의 배합, 그리고 영화적 물리적 질료성을 폭로하는 방식으로서 카메라의 움직임과 편집, 그리고 플래쉬백과 사운드의 독특한 사용으로 이루어져있다. Agn<TEX>$\grave{e}$</TEX>s Varda is a French representative female film director. In particular, the method combining subjectivity and objectivity is the most outstanding characteristics. However, it can be said that the method to support this is not only theme of the film but also creation of structure including the exploration for the filmic form different from classical film form. Such an approach accords with No<TEX>$\ddot{e}$</TEX>l Burch's refined analysis of filmic form. Therefore, This study aims to aesthetical analysis of the form of producing the structure in modern movies through <Vagabond> which is one of the representative work by Agn<TEX>$\grave{e}$</TEX>sVarda and won the Golden Lion award in 1985 Venice Film Festival. The theme of the film, the recovery of relationships among people and contacts through the tragic death of drifting life, created a new filmic structure by formative experiment of the film. The formative experiment is the fragmented and repetitive construction with the introductory voice-over, and consists of movement and editing of camera and specific use of flashback and sound through the representation of figures and situations, mixture of narrative and non-narrative style.

&lt;em&gt;Teza&lt;/em&gt;: A Review

Close-Up:Teza: A Review Nubia Kai (bio) Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima is internationally renowned as one of the most innovative and radical writers/directors of African and African Diaspora films. His corpus of films dating back to his first film Hour Glass (1971), the highly successful Sankofa (1993), to his last documentary film, Adwa (1999), all display a continuity of sociopolitical relevance, collective memory, history, psychological introspection, and a relentless commitment to liberate the human spirit. Haile Gerima's most recent film Teza / Morning Dew, which was fifteen years in the making, is a cinematic masterpiece that has won over twenty international awards, including the coveted Etalon de Yennenga Grand Prize Award at FESPACO (2009), the Carthage African Festival Grand Prize (2008), and the Venice International Film Festival Special Jury Award (2008). Exploring a constellation of human behavior and ideas—civil war, imperialism, communism, nationalism, class struggle, racism, emigration, male-female relationships, generational ruptures, ideological conflicts, sibling rivalry, cultural practice—the inner and outer workings of a virtual universe are ingeniously compressed into 140 minutes of film. Tackling such a diverse range of topics is a formidable task, yet Gerima manages to make it work with his complex cinematic approach to filmmaking in which the cinematic technique itself is integrated into the text. Like impressionist painters whose free flowing strokes form part of the image, or Ethiopian muralists who fill every inch of space with a seamless, symbolic narrative, Gerima employs a semiotic filmic style that amplifies the meaning and beauty of the narrative by using the camera like a paintbrush to capture the mood, rhythm, color, iconic content, and deep emotion expressed in the pensive, transparent gaze of the protagonist, Anberber. A subjective camera mimics Anberber's eyes, the mirror of the soul, follows his wary footsteps across a contemplative landscape marred by civil war, conscription, murder, chaos. [End Page 134] Set in an Ethiopian village, Addis Ababa, and Cologne, West Germany, during the peak of the "Dergue" era, Anberber returns to his native land from Cologne where he has spent years studying medicine, world revolutionary movements, and Marxist-Leninist thought with a community of African intellectual expatriates. His dreams of a new socialist government and a medical career to help rid the country of diseases are soon shattered when the contradictions between theory and practice are shockingly exposed. The communist oriented social order under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam had replaced the three-thousand-year-old Solomonic monarchy with a system more brutal, corrupt, and dogmatic than their predecessors. Anberber's shattered idealistic world is reflected in the cross-cutting and jump-cut editing creating the illusion of dislocation, disruption, fragments of exploded reveries of an idyllic childhood. Haunted by hallucinations, nightmares, pastiches of memory, he envisions himself as a boy who fades into the backdrop of his village. There he embraces a monument on Mussolini Mountain where his father, a war hero who fought valiantly against the Italian invaders before he was killed by poison gas, is commemorated. Mussolini Mountain, an obvious symbol of European conquest and colonization of Africa that would forever change the political economy of the continent is, nevertheless, surmounted by the names of the freedom fighters who resisted, and this metaphorical mise-en-scène intimates the final meaning and outcome of the film. Anberber is a legitimate heir of this heroic legacy, but he has lost memory of his childhood, his youth, the college years in Germany; and neither his mother or the elders in his village understand his alienation and inner turmoil. Teza is about the recovery of memory, both historic and personal memory which in African epistemology is inextricable. While Anberber recovers from a near fatal beating, he is simultaneously reconstituting his memory, claiming and interpreting his past so he can recover and redefine his future. The entire film subverts linear chronology as Gerima constructs the narrative through the process of involuted montage, a series of repeated short shots and flashbacks strategically arranged in order to convey a great deal of meaning in a short span of time, and at the same time, probe the depths of the protagonist's psyche in an expressionistic exegesis. Anberber's stoic...

The Orator/O Le Tulafale (review)

Reviewed by: The Orator/O Le Tulafale Emelihter Kihleng and Teresia K. Teaiwa The Orator/O Le Tulafale. Feature film, 110 minutes, color, 2011. Written and directed by Tusi Tamasese; produced by Catherine Fitzgerald; distributed by Transmission Films Ltd (in Australasia) and the New Zealand Film Commission (global). Samoan with English subtitles. Release information available at http://theoratorfilm.co.nz/ The Orator/O Le Tulafale has been touted as the first full-length feature film to be written and directed by a Samoan and filmed in Sāmoa and in the Samoan language. Given that the screenwriter and director, Tusi Tamasese, is a University of Waikato film school graduate and earned a master's in screenwriting from the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), and that the film was largely funded by the New Zealand Film Commission, produced by a New Zealander, and features some of New Zealand's most respected visual and sound technicians, The Orator is also being enthusiastically claimed as a New Zealand film. For a directorial debut, it is remarkable that the film has received critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, is scheduled for the 2012 Sundance Festival, and was nominated by New Zealand for [End Page 434] an Academy Award in the category of foreign language films. The central characters of The Orator are a farmer and a weaver. Sa'ili and his wife Va'aiga each have painful histories of being excluded or diminished by others—Sa'ili for being not only an untitled adult male in a village and society that privileges chiefs, but a little person to boot, and Va'aiga for shaming her family by having a child out of wedlock. Sa'ili has raised Va'aiga's teenage daughter Litia as his own, although Litia is ambivalent about having him as a father. The film centers on Sa'ili and Va'aiga's struggles to confront their own fears and demons—Sa'ili through acquiring a talking chief title, and Va'aiga by weaving a fine mat ('ie tōga) of atonement. Their quests are set amid scenes of majestic mountain ridges, lush taro plantations, tranquil bathing pools, and meticulously manicured rural villages. Ironically, given that the film title might lead one to expect an abundance of verbiage (a tulāfale is a talking chief), one of the distinguishing features of the film is its economy of dialogue. The silence simultaneously tills and weaves the possibilities for multiple layers of understanding through the film. Like Sa'ili the farmer and Va'aiga the weaver, The Orator is able to present gifts to those who would receive them. Through this review, we attempt, as non-Samoan Pacific Islanders—Micronesians—to reciprocate. We both saw the film, for the first time, in the early days of its screening in Wellington, New Zealand, in October 2011. Our review features our individual "takes" on the film, with Emelihter responding to The Orator's representations of place and culture, and Teresia approaching the film as a teacher in Pacific studies. As creative writers and active participants in arts communities across the region, both of us have a keen sense of a shared genealogy when it comes to an "Oceanic imaginary" (Subramani, "The Oceanic Imaginary," 2001). We close our review with reflections on what it means now to have The Orator situated in that genealogy. Reaction shot (Emelihter): "I wanted Sāmoa to be a character in the film," said Tusi Tamasese during a cast and crew Q&A held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) in Wellington on 29 October 2011. This character is the one we see first: Sāmoa—fecund, quiet, dark, and thirsty. Audiences are made to listen to the whisper that comes just before the downpour, and it was then that I knew this was going to be an honest Pacific (Samoan) film. Already, I wanted to cry, and very few movies make me cry. Because I'm from Pohnpei in Micronesia, an island with rainfall of more than 300 inches a year, rain is a central part of my Pohnpeian/ Pacific understanding. Rain on a tin roof represents home to those of us...

The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis (review)

Reviewed by: The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis Ronald Wilson S.A. Thornton The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis McFarland & Company Inc., 2008; 253 pages [End Page 21] Much like the importance of the year 1868 as a historical marker for the opening of Western influence to Japan, the year 1951 is important for the opening of Japanese film culture to the West. It was that year that Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon won first prize at the Venice Film Festival and introduced Western audiences to the Japanese period film and Japanese culture. According to Donald Ritchie, the consequent popularity of the film surprised the Japanese who believed that a “historical film” would be unacceptable in the West. Part of that concern could be attributed to the content and form of the historical narratives that were steeped in Japanese history and narrative traditions. For the Japanese the period film, whose history extended well before Kurosawa’s film, was a means of examining the present through the past. By so doing it employed motifs and historical characters and events that the Japanese felt were not accessible to Western audiences. S.A. Thornton’s book provides a historical analysis of the Japanese period film through its narrative conventions and major motifs. The author contends that the period film was established in Japan between 1923 and 1939 when the economic and political situation in Japan “created a specific need for a period piece in film” (38). Thornton argues throughout the book that the period film was part of a narrative tradition that used the past to inform the present. The author’s aim was to provide a “short manual on how to read the narrative of Japanese period films” (6). The book expands on that notion by detailing how cultural institutions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Kabuki and Noh theatre, and contemporary literature contributed to the rich narrative tradition of the Japanese period film. Central to Thornton’s thesis is the development of the period piece in both storytelling and theatre as a means of commenting on the present in terms of the past. The Ako Ronin incident (“47 Ronin”) provides one example. Shortly after the mass suicides of the forty-seven vassals in 1703, a staging of the event in Edo was closed after only three performances. Subsequent Kabuki productions displaced the incident to an earlier historical period and were successfully staged without occurrence. As the period film developed it was able to inherit these narrative traditions of setting a contemporary issue in the historical past. The Japanese Period Film is organized into three major sections: The Narrative Set in the Past; Realism in the Narrative; and The Scene in Japanese Narrative. In each section the author provides insightful discussion of key films, their historical basis, and their narrative progenitors in Japanese literature and drama. The majority of the book is devoted to pre-1970 films and follows a basic chronological order. In the first section, after providing some basic iconographic elements of the period film, Thornton discusses the characteristics of the Japanese hero within this narrative tradition. The Japanese hero has three fundamental characteristics: he is a real, historical character; he is connected with a political center such as Edo, Kyoto, or Kamakura; and he is foremost a tragic hero. These characteristics, the author notes, make the Japanese hero “particularly suitable as the subject of the [End Page 22] period film, whose function is criticism of society” (51). Thornton designates three basic types of protagonists in the Japanese period film: the tragic or noble hero, the anti-hero or nihilist, and the social or benevolent hero. The narratives connected with these heroes relate how the confrontation between Buddhism and Confucianism formed the basis for Japanese tragedy. Confucian doctrine based on the humanity of communal and social relationships is brought into conflict with the Buddhist doctrine of a humanity that is characterized by suffering. Thornton relates this through the concept of the angry spirit and how it is depicted within each of these heroes: through madness, suffering, and paternalism. This religious aspect of the Japanese period film is one of its central characteristics. The last chapter of this section is devoted to...

Nothing But a Man: &lt;em&gt;Filmmaker's Perspective&lt;/em&gt;

F years have passed since Mike Roemer and I made Nothing But a Man, so I attended the symposium at Indiana University dedicated to both it and The Spook Who Sat by the Door with great interest and anticipation. This was my first invitation to participate in a formal discussion about the film, and it was highly satisfying to see renewed critical attention after all this time. A most interesting and illuminating experience, the symposium demonstrated that a work no longer belongs to its creators once it’s out in the world. Of course, that is the way it should be. The discussions and comments were relevant and thoughtful and reflected the myriad of personal experiences and insights of the speakers. Nothing But a Man was first exhibited at the Venice Film Festival in the fall of 1964 (where it received two major awards) and in New York City at the New York Film Festival later that fall. Its enthusiastic reception at the festivals led to an agreement with a New York distributor and its theatrical release on Christmas Eve at the Sutton theater in New York City. It was widely reviewed and publicized, yet while most of the reviews were favorable, it had a limited theatrical release. Black audiences were not truly welcome in many theaters across the country at this time, particularly theaters in the South where the film had little distribution. At its exhibition at the Sutton, Mike Roemer and I were appalled that it was being promoted as an art film. The advertisements used the Greek masks for comedy and tragedy rather than photos of the two black actors, Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln, who were the stars of the film, but our complaints had no effect. The distribution and exhibition were completely out of our hands, and our opinions were rejected as being neither commercial nor feasible for getting a large audience. For the record, Nothing But a Man was not a financial success for the investors and its creators. The investors were friends, and most investments

Wang Bing's The Ditch: Spaces of history between documentary and fiction

ABSTRACTWang Bing's Jiabiangou/The Ditch premiered as a competition entry at the Venice Film Festival 2010 after a six-year-long production process. It is Wang Bing's first full-length feature film after he established his reputation as a leading documentary film-maker on the international film scene thanks to the worldwide acclaimed Tiexi qu/West of the Tracks (2002) and He Fengming (2007). This article provides a reading of The Ditch (2010), based on a contextual investigation of the interplay of documentary and fiction, an high-end film aesthetics, and Wang Bing's concern with the role of the film-maker vis-à-vis a sensitive historical subject, here the Anti-rightist movement (1957– 1960). Comolli's discussion of historical films and Pasolini's approach to cinema as a way to engage with the present provide relevant theoretical basis for this study. Parallels are drawn with Pedro Costa's work which also moves away from cinematic realism to challenge the boundaries of representation.

Venice Film Festival 2010: The Mad and the Bad and the Dangerous to Know

Venice Film Festival 2010: The Mad and the Bad and the Dangerous to Know

Articulations of presence: The explosions and rubble of Philippe Aractingi's Sous les Bombes

Awarded both the Human Rights Film and the Alternative Vision awards at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, Philippe Aractingi's Sous les Bombes/Under the Bombs (2007) juxtaposes bomb footage from 2006 Lebanon with scenes of actress Nada Abou Fahrat acting alongside actual victims, as her character Zeina searches for her fictional lost son. In this article, I discuss this blend of documentary and fictional modes. Through an analysis of the arrest and flows of the documentary, social and individual ways of knowing in Sous les Bombes, I read the film as a constellation of these three modes, one that allows each of them space on the screen while holding their logics in tension. As such, the material and social conditions do not function as evidence for a clearly articulated political argument, nor do they function to generalize the character Zeina's personal memory trail. Instead, the three intersect at various points and also contradict at others, but ultimately collide in the final scene where the material explosions and the metaphorically exploded social and personal experiences hold together at a standstill.

Snow White in 1930s Britain

The film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had its world premiere at the Carthay Circle theatre in Los Angeles on 21 December 1937. Based on a folktale collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and first published in 1812 in their collection Kinder und Hausmarchen, this was the first ever feature-length animation film. Its 84 minutes or so of running time was the fruit of several years of costly (and highprofile) planning and execution at Walt Disney’s Burbank studio.1 The production, involving hundreds of artists and other personnel, as well as innovative animation techniques and specially developed film-making equipment, cost a reported $1.5 million. This was an enormous budget for the time, and the project was regarded as a huge gamble on Disney’s part. But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs confounded the doubters and proved an immediate international hit: according to film trade figures it was the world’s best-selling film of 1938, and by 1940 it had grossed an all-time record of $8 million. The film’s early awards included the Special Biennale Art Trophy at the 1938 Venice Film Festival, the New York Film Critics’ Special Award in 1939 and, also in 1939, an Honorary Academy Award for Walt Disney. Over the following five decades, in a carefully orchestrated programme of international theatrical re-releases (in 1943, 1952, 1958, 1967, 1975 and 1983), Snow White was introduced to a series of new generations of cinemagoers. A ‘fully restored’ video version, which included a ‘Making of Snow White’ featurette, appeared in 1994, and the film is currently available as a digitally remastered DVD that comes with an additional disk containing more than three hours of supplementary material. This essay explores the circumstances surrounding Snow White’s initial release in Britain, and considers how the peculiarities of the film’s British reception context interacted with some of its

Politics in Motion

Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema By Hamid Dabashi Mage, 2007 456 pp./$60.00 (hb) Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema By Negar Mottahedeh Duke University Press, 2008 216 pp./$22.00 (sb) Iranian Cinema: A Political History By Hamid Reza Sadr I.B. Tauris, 2006 392 pp./$33.00 (sb). It is pivotal point in Iran's political and cultural history. As Hamid Dabashi puts it in recent Al Ahram article, What is happening in Iran is 'revolution,' though not in mundane politics of despair but in form, in language, in style, in decorum, in demeanour, in and performative sublimity. (1) Judging from the show of green in support of the Iranian people at the Venice Film Festival--where Hana Makhmalbaf's Green Days, which documents the 2009 elections, was added to the program at the last minute Iranian filmmakers will play an important role in the future of cinema. Three recent books address questions of politics and film Iran, and each provides useful angle of analysis, though Negar Mottahedeh's Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema puts forth more careful deployment of film theory and more illuminating readings than the sweeping overviews in Hamid Reze Sadr's Iranian Cinema: A Political History and Hamid Dabashi's Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema Dabashi's Masters & Masterpieces seems to promise auteur criticism, but is more deeply guided by Dabashi's project of historicizing Iran's encounter with colonial European modernity. Like his previous work, Iran: A People Interrupted (200), Masters & Masterpieces provides rich account of Iranian literary and intellectual history. Dabashi covers twelve directors, beginning with the poet Forough Farrokhzad and concluding with Jafar Panahi. Each of these chapters places key film in its literary and political context, often pairing filmmakers with their literary collaborators--Dariush Mehrjui with psychiatrist and author Gholam Hosayn Sa'edi, Bahman Farmanara with surrealist writer Houshang Golshiri, and Ebrahim Golestan, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Bahram Beyza'i's film careers within their own literary work. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These chapters also form two complementary ares tracing formal change along the lines of realism, and marking shifts in political and aesthetic consciousness. The first formal are follows the development of that Dabashi characterizes as poetic in Farrokhzad's The House Is Black (1963), affective in Golestan's Mud Brick and Mirror (1965), psychedelic in Mehrjui's The Cow (1969), actual in Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees (1994), and so on, down to the unself-conscious parabolic realism of Marziyeh Meshkini and the visual realism of Panahi. Imposing this formal framework seems forced at times, but it provides insights into cinema that grew out of Farrokhzad's blending of poetics of sound and editing with documentary vision. Directors who followed the lead of this metaphorical founding mother (or Eve to Golestan's Adam, as Dabashi puts it) continued to develop realist mode as it took shape through the literary experimentations of the latter half of the twentieth century. Realism, then, becomes complicated by these different literary aesthetics, until the full-fledged realism of Panahi. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This culmination of formal are in Panahi's work coincides with the end of are of political consciousness, and clears the way for liberatory unself-conscious style. Historically, Iranian filmmakers aimed consciously for a creative constitution of subject with an active historical agency, in defiance of its moral and normative colonization at the hands European modernity (31). But this self-conscious cinema of an earlier generation led to the un-self-conscious work of director like Meshkini whose aesthetics are . …

Now Wait for Last Year: A Report from the 65th Venice International Film Festival 2008

Now Wait for Last Year: A Report from the 65th Venice International Film Festival 2008

Modernity and Danger: The Boy Kumasenu and the Work of the Gold Coast Film Unit

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 121 MODERNITY AND DANGER The Boy Kumasenu and the Work of the Gold Coast Film Unit1 PETER J. BLOOM KATE SKINNER Introduction At the beginning of The Boy Kumasenu (dir. Sean Graham, 1952) the teenage protagonist, Kumasenu (Nortey Engmann), is introduced and aurally shadowed by a voice-over narration that explains his predicament as an orphaned boy from an unnamed fishing village in the Gold Coast.2 We learn that Kumasenu seeks to venture beyond traditional village life towards modern educational and social institutions of national citizenship. With the support of educated and compassionate fellow citizens, Kumasenu learns to avoid the pitfalls of petty criminality in the city. His intimidating cousin and antagonist, Agboh (Frank Tamakloe), provides a foil for 1. The authors would like to thank participants at the 2010 Cadbury Workshop, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, for a discussion on orphans in popular culture. In particular, we are grateful to Justina Dugbazah for translating the name “Kumasenu,” and to Patrick Oloko, Shani Omari, Leon Tsambu, Julie Archambault, Karin Barber, and Katrien Pype for insightful and stimulating comments. Kate Skinner would also like to thank the Nuffield Foundation for financing part of the research on which this article is based. 2. According to the catalogues of the period there were two versions of The Boy Kumasenu , a six-reel short version (63 minutes), and a ten-reel long version (95 minutes). The discussion in this article is based on the 63-minute version of the film. We have not been able to locate the ten-reel 95-minute version. For additional catalogue information , please refer to the two catalogues: (i) The Gold Coast Film Unit: 1949–1953. Edited by the Gold Coast Film Unit: Gold Coast, 1953. British Film Institute Library. Pamphlet 791.4: 966.7. (ii) Films from the Gold Coast: 1954–1955. Second Catalogue and Revised Price List of Gold Coast Film Unit Productions. February 1956. Gold Coast Film Unit. British Film Institute Library. Pamphlet 791.4: 966.7. As far as we are able to tell, most recent commentary about the film has been derived from the 63-minute version, which is the version held at the British Film Institute. For this short version of the film, please see http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/332, accessed on 14 February 2011. 122 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 Kumasenu’s march towards his place as citizen-subject along the horizon of decolonization: whereas Agboh becomes a gangster, Kumasenu finds gainful employment as a member of a motorized fishing boat crew, thanks to the intervention of Dr Tamakloe (Oku Ampofo) and his wife, Grace (Rosina Oku Ampofo). In this article we explore how the film is informed by, but also reveals, contradictions within British colonial film production and the uses of film in late colonial social policy. The Boy Kumasenu was produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit and directed by Sean Graham, who also served as head of the unit. Recognized at the Venice Film Festival, and nominated for “Best Film from any Source” by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 1953, The Boy Kumasenu was not simply innovative in its mode of addressing a colonial audience. It also took on a life of its own as a popular film among Ghanaian audiences.3 According to Chris Hesse (a former director of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation), The Boy Kumasenu was a seminal film that “turned the whole of Accra upside down.” Indeed, it influenced his own decision to train as a filmmaker because “It showed us that we could make films and stars out of our own selves.”4 Instead of it merely being a colonial propaganda film organized around a coming of age story, the film was significant for the emergence of Ghanaian cinema, and 3. Tom Rice, “The Boy Kumasenu.” Tom Rice has prepared this well-documented filmography for the British Film Institute website as part of the Colonial Cinema Project. The filmography will be posted on the British Film Institute website shortly...

Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema

La terra trema was Visconti's second feature film. His first, Ossessione, was made in 1943. La terra trema was made in 1948. It was presented at the Venice Film Festival in the same year and awarde...

Hana Bi

Hana Bi (Fireworks, 1997). Japan. Dir: Takeshi Kitano. Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Hakuryu Minato-ku. After winning the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, the elegiac and violent yakuza-cop film Hana-Bi (Fireworks) by Japanese director (Beat) Takeshi Kitano drew a full crowd at its preview at the Academy Theatre on a frosty morning in Pusan last October. The full house testified to the power of a Kitano film which now commands a loyal following verging on the fanatical. In fact, his films attract far more viewers than the cult films of Quentin Tarantino such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Kitano's films are characterised by his uncanny ability to create, like in the eye of a storm, a quiet beginning which is suddenly whipped into a ferocious chain of events. However, they have none of the sadness of Hou Hsiao-hsien's landmark gangster...

Making Anti-Fascism into Fascism: The Political Transformation of Tiro al Piccione (1961)

On rare occasions a single political event can grossly alter, even subvert, a film's public reception. In 1 961 , the distortion of Giuliano Montaldo's Tiro ed Piccione Pigeon Shoot makes this film a vital historical artifact for an exploration of Italy's memory of fascism and bears the ultimate witness to the power of the political context to shape a film's meaning. Tiro is based on the 1953 semi-autobiographical novel (of the same name) by Giose Rimanelli, which recounts the author's experiences fighting for Mussolini's Italian Social Republic in the last y ears of World War II. Though he sharpened its critique of fascism, Montaldo remained largely faithful to the novel and, according to many reviewers, employed considerable artistry in his directing. So Montaldo had every reason to expect Jiro to be a hit. Even while he was completing the film, however, a small but vocal and militant neo-fascist party, the MSI (Italian Social Movement), provoked a violent clash with Leftist workers in Milan. Police repression in Milan prompted a wave of demonstrations across the country, which were violently put down by former fascist police chiefs with the authority of President Tambronni himself. resulting Tambronni Affair - the largest clash between fascists and the Left since 1945 - transformed the reception of Montaldo's film. director sat in shock as Tiro was booed at the Venice film festival.2 Most film reviewers condemned the film as dangerous, even fascist. Not surprisingly, its success in 1961 was limited, and it was almost forgotten by film historians until its recent revival in Italy. THE NOVEL Few nations have more charged memories of their past than Italy does of fascism. And that memory directly influences the content and significance of fascism 's representation in Italy. As Kriss Raveto points out, The historic events of World War II have been repeatedly read and reread in terms of contemporary politics, linking 'the event' to transtemporal questions of morality and responsibility to the past.3 Tiro presents the interesting case of a story produced in one context and debuted in another. Giose Rimanelli wrote Tiro al Piccione upon his return from the war, in 1945, a war that had torn apart Italy in the previous two years. In the summer and fall of 1943, the country had been split Its south was nominally under the authority of King Victor Emmanuel III, who had abandoned the Axis and joined the Allies, but really the southern region was controlled by the British and Americans. In the north, Hitler had installed Mussolini in a puppet state called the Italian Social Republic (RSI), known pejoratively as the Republic of Salo (the spa town that was headquarters to Mussolini's ministry of propaganda). While the British and American armies slowly fought their way up the peninsula, Italian partisans battled the Germans and Italian fascists from within the RSI. battle for Italy was not the struggle imagined by so many in America and Italy then and now. It was not a simple struggle between an Anglo-American political liberalism and a Germ an- sponsored fascism. Italy was at war with itself, fighting both for and against the Allies, both for and against the fascists. partisan war inside the RSI, moreover, was exceptionally cruel, driven by irreconcilable political differences. Most of its combatants fought with certainty that their victory or defeat would determine the political future of Italy: Left or Right. Rimanelli's novel testified to the fact that neither partisans nor Black Shirts bothered to take prisoners. stakes were huge, and Italians on both sides fought viciously. book, however, especially targets Mussolini's regime for its atrocities. Although written by a former defender of the fascist republic, Tiro is clearly and stridently anti-fascist. protagonist, Marco Laudato, is forced to enlist in the fascist Black Brigades. He knows nothing of fascist ideology, rejects his Captain's racist indoctrination, and comes to despise fascists' hypocrisy and sadism. …

Il vangelo secondo Matteo. Pasolini e il sacro: «Crist al mi clama / ma sensa lus»...

In 1964 Pasolini presented at the Venice Film Festival his Il Vangelo secondo Matteo [Gospel according to Saint Matthew]. At first, in the paper are shown some fundamentals on the making of this film, on the reasons that leaded to choose this theme, and on the reactions of the religious and political leftist establishment. Then I will made an analysis, based on declarations or written statements made by the poet himself, of the great interest shown by Pasolini to musical phenomenon, even though his confessed not so deep technical knowledge in that field. And, being this an attempt to analysing a film from a sonorous point of view, I continue with an appraisal of to what extent music and sounds are important in the case of Il Vangelo : for a first understanding of how and how much what we hear interact with the meaning of what we see and vice-versa, two sequences from the film have been chosen, a simpler and a more complex one, both characterised by a very strong link between sound-track and visual-track.