Western Film Research Articles

The Question of Translation in Taiwanese Colonial Cinematic Space

This essay studies the practice of cultural translation in colonial Taiwanese cinematic space. Just as the Japanese translation of Western cinema brings into play traces of Japanese otherness, the Taiwanese translation of the Japanese translation disrupts the Japanese monopoly on the meaning of cinematic experience in colonial Taiwan. A key figure in this complex cultural translation was the benshi, a translator who performed alongside the screen to interpret the film for the audience. This study argues that an overemphasis on the interventional power of the benshi's word does not do justice to the complex role of the benshi as a translator. In spite of its inscription of the cultural specific in the cinematic space, the presence of the benshi is also a reminder of an unfulfilled desire: the desire for the (foreign) image and the desire for the other. Insofar as the act of translation is a critical engagement with the challenges posed by the other, a simplistic celebration of local resistance does not help us fully address the complexity of cultural translation that defines the mediascape of the modern age.

Between Utopia and Event: Beyond the Banality of Local Politics in Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein’s 110th anniversary celebrated in 2008 calls for a re-assessment of his overall heritage, which until now has been customarily perceived in Western film scholarship as - in Annette Michelson’s words - ’indissolubly linked to the project of construction of socialism’ - a view shared from Marie Seton to Jacques Aumont, from Kristin Thompson to Ian Christie and from David Bordwell to Anna Bohn. Not only did Eisenstein’s output magnificently and persuasively outlive this project, but from our vantage point at the beginning of the twenty- first century we can see its position within the complex tapestry of the cultural, philosophical, political and aesthetic developments of the twentieth century from a different angle. Drawing on the recently published in Russia Eisenstein’s magnum opus Method and the author’s research on still unpublished Eisenstein’s writings of the same period, including his diaries, the present paper positions the discussion of Eisenstein’s theory-and-practice between two diametrically opposed philosophical poles - utopia and event. I argue that while Eisenstein’s theoretical writings were encompassed by a number of utopian ideas, which were, nevertheless quite different from the utopian projects of bolshevism, it is his cinematography, which now - in the context of an on-going discussion in continental philosophy - can be defined as ’cinema of event’ that demonstrates the biggest and radical discrepancy between Eisenstein’s work and both ideology and art of socialism - the world of ‘realized utopia.’

Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics (review)

Reviewed by: Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics Juliana Luna Freire Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2008. Edited by Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart. A single project such as Vídeos na Aldeia in Brazil has provided training for more than 70 Indigenous film productions since the 1980s. New distribution channels have appeared for such products, such as the First Nations\First Features event, besides the strong presence of Indigenous productions in established film festivals, such as the Sundance Festival. Moreover, multiple projects on radio stations and in magazines, for example, exist around the globe. In terms of new media, there was much discussion in 2008 about the deal between Google Earth and the Suruí Indigenous in Brazil for carbon counting and forest protection. As Indigenous media evolves and becomes more diversified, [End Page 209] how do we understand the increasing popularity and market for such products? How do they affect the lives of Indigenous groups? Within the academic community, such questions and others are coming under increasing scrutiny, and Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics addresses the need to better understand the phenomenon, analyzing the impact of media communication in the lives of those groups. Its contributors are activists and scholars from different fields looking at recent developments in Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil), Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., Canada, Russia, Wales, Finland, and Burma. The dialogue that developed into this volume started at a round-table for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in the U.S. in 2003 and 2004, and thus the majority of the contributors are accordingly U.S. and Canadian-based scholars, despite the variety of global case studies analyzed. For the non-specialist, the essays cover a panorama of media projects from distinct geographical locations, providing historical context. The introduction describes the creation of the market niche for global Indigenous media, along with structures of funding and distribution (involving NGO’s, governmental support, and even private initiatives). Many of the essays also address the issue of self-representation within the larger process of self-determination. The essays are divided into four sections. Section I deals with poetics to politics: Francisco Salazar and Amalia Córdoba cover aesthetic issues of Indigenous movies, complemented by Jennifer Gauthier’s analysis of authorship, who argues for the possibility of a new cinematic experience, as in a “Fourth Cinema.” Furthermore, the Cache Collective examines video making among the Igloolik in Canada as a storage method based on communitarian knowledge that mixes genres and styles and negotiates a cinematic experience different from Western cinema. Additionally, Joanna Hearne discusses animations for children in the U.S. and Canada as “alternative Indigenous modernities for youth” (91). Section II looks at Indigenous media as a tool for activism, as in Lisa Brooten’s analysis of media in Burma as a tool for self-determination, cultural survival, education, and rights. Kathleen Buddle addresses the development of new roles in the political sphere by Native women involved in media. Mario Murillo analyzes community radio stations in Colombia as models for creating a public sphere, dealing with themes such as state interference and market requirements. Alexandra Halkin, the founder and former director of the Chiapas Media Project/Promedios, analyzes the bi-national partnership that created a U.S.-based nonprofit NGO aimed at teaching video making to the Indigenous of Chiapas, including the logistics of funding and workshops. Her article aims at showing the “important role for ‘outsiders’ to play as collaborators with Indigenous communities/organizations in fostering media initiatives” (177). Section III deals with cultural identity and preservation. Laurel Smith examines local and outside interactions in attempts to promote ethnicity in communication technologies, examining videos and pointing to how local issues of identity are further exacerbated in representational politics. Sari Pietikäinen examines Sámi media in Finland as a reinforcer of transnational identity and sense of nationhood. Galina Diatchkova analyzes the use of television and media networks as a resource for fighting for the rights of Indigenous peoples in Russia. Ruth McElroy, points to preservation of the Welsh language and “construction and maintenance of a national community” (233) through television. The last section covers...

The Time-Image from Pasolini to Ciprì and Maresco

PASOLINI and Cipri and Maresco are fierce critics of post-modern society. All bear witness to the colonization of the imagination attributable in part to the omnipresence of mass communications and the globalization of neo-capitalist values. Their works, scatological in the literal but especially in the metaphorical and etiological sense, denounce social institutions and practices thought to be at the root of injustice, inequality and criminality. Pasolini strives throughout his career to empower and ennoble the sub-proletariat, as in Accattone (1961) and Mamma Rosa (1962), and sees Marxism as the best political alternative to this end. He also condemns the prevalent bourgeois profane existence and the loss of the sacred; his mythical films such as Edipo re (1967) or Medea (1969) seek to bring awe back to modern life by means of foundational myths; the Friulian's call for the abolition of television and mandatory education (Pasolini 59) remain (infamous. Cipri and Maresco, on the other hand, although equally disturbed by the omnipresence of television, decide to use the piccolo schermo's powers to depict, through the lens of scatology, the irredeemability of Western culture in general and Sicilian society in particular. The duo's TV programs (Cinico TV, Blob, Intervalli, or Schegge, for example) and subsequently their movies, strive to be everything that television is not: instead of filling each and every second with sound and movement, their cameras film silence and inactivity; instead of velline, they offer a freak show; rather than telling a story, they string together sequences that defy our sensori-motor expectations. Their films are populated by low-lifes in a world where nothing really happens. So, whereas Pasolini's ideological engagement often seems contradictory, any historicized impegno has become obsolete for Cipri and Maresco. In fact, the Sicilians' metacinematic tendency often signifies that their films refer to little more than themselves. The main point of comparison between Pasolini and Cipri and Maresco to be discussed here is their use of the time image to reflect the difficulty or the impossibility of human agency in contemporary society. According to Gilles Deleuze, prevalence of the time-image is an important aspect of Western cinema starting in the post WWII years (Cinema I 206). In the classical cinema prior to this period, the movement-image prevails (as in action movies or westerns), constructing a (chrono)logical narrative in which characters act and react to events and circumstances within specific spatiotemporal parameters. What happens on screen provides an indirect image of consecutive intervals. In a time-image, on the other hand, time becomes more important than action and movement; time is fore-grounded and its sheer duration is felt. The characters inhabit any-space-whatevers (1) because they are wanderers in a universe in which meaningful connections as the precursors to action are difficult if not impossible to construct. Although not a call to action, the time-image is nonetheless an appeal to thought. (2) Since our pragmatic sensori-motor expectations are stymied, we seek to create links with dimensions other than movement, with the non-chronological, non-teleological dimension of time. Scenes of prolonged duration, unusual framings and/or juxtapositions, and apparently aimless movement or illogical sequences of events constitute time-images. How then is time experienced, presented and not simply represented in Pasolini's cinema? How do his time-images bypass representation and the intellect, making something unseen more important than the seen? In his first film as a director, Accattone (1961), Pasolini recounts the story of a young man's failed efforts to renounce petty thievery and procuring in favor of an honest livelihood. In one particularly significant sequence, the hapless Vittorio attempts to reconcile with his wife. A wrestling match ensues when her protective brother attacks him and the result of the indecisive fight augurs poorly for the anti-hero's chances to escape vagrancy. …

Bryan Forbes and Jack Clayton: Underestimated Spaces (British Cinema of the late 1950s-early 1960s)

The article covers a number of trends of the British cinema of the late 1950s-early 1960s and individual films made by the directors which have never been closely analyzed by Russian and sometimes by western film scholars. In contrast to the dominant tendencies of the time ("Angry young men"), the filmmakers in question did not deal with sharp social issues but concentrated on more "private" discoveries in the sphere of the plastic treatment of the film.

African Films in the Classroom

Abstract:A wealth of excellent films from Africa is readily available for classroom use, even if much of Anglophone Africa remains poorly represented. African films can serve to challenge students' assumptions and to foster a critical examination of Western films set in Africa. Extending the scope of conventional “African” courses to North Africa adds a substantial body of notable productions, some of which address current concerns such as Islamic fundamentalism. African films have to be contextualized; even when they are examined as works of art and as examples of world cinema, full appreciation requires that they be considered in their historical and cultural contexts. When films are used to introduce students to Africa, critical examination is imperative—audiences that have little factual information about Africa all too readily assume that fiction and fact coincide.

"They'd Kill Us if They Knew": Transgression and the Western

"They'd Kill Us if They Knew":Transgression and the Western1 Sue Brower (bio) A film that touched audiences with its epic tale set in the West, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) tells the story of hidden homosexual love, beginning in 1963 in the Wyoming wilderness and spanning the next twenty years. The film's use of the Western genre in its setting and iconography intensifies the lovers' transgression by juxtaposing the mythic roots of our country and the masculine archetype of the cowboy with a taboo love affair—a combination, as critics have noted, resulting in a film closer to melodrama than Western (Kitses "All That"; Osterweil). A smaller film released in 1993, The Ballad of Little Jo, written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, is a tale set in the West (the old West) that also features social and sexual transgressions, including at least two taboo love stories. Both films also illuminate the lives of marginalized people. My intention is to explore the filmmakers' use of the Western genre in telling these stories and to consider how in each case they blend the Western with other genres. I hope to show The Ballad of Little Jo deserves as much recognition as Brokeback has garnered, or more, for the former's critique of gender and racial stereotypes, its examination of gender-based assumptions on which the Western is largely based, and its generic response to the theme of transgression that results in blending the Western not with melodrama but with comedy. Problematic Heroes (or, Who're You Callin' a Cowboy?) Despite an increasingly cynical, media-wise audience that can spot and often dismiss established generic icons, the Western archetype of the cowboy still possesses power as a symbol of American courage, strength, capability, and masculinity. The Western figure continues to inhabit popular culture, from the Marlboro man to President George W. Bush's references to Western mythology (e.g., "we're gonna smoke 'em out") to the recent flurry of Western films, including Appaloosa (2008) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007). The Western protagonist's identification with masculinity, in contrast to Eastern femininity, goes unchallenged unless that challenge becomes the point of characterization. James Stewart in Destry Rides Again (1939), for example, is initially presented as less than a "real man" by his entry into town carrying a birdcage and a parasol. As Dennis Bingham points out, what is seen as "'sissified' to the townspeople" proves to be an act of "chivalry" to a young woman he is assisting (47). In My Darling Clementine (1946), Wyatt is challenged by Doc Holliday to "draw," and Wyatt mildly declines ("Can't—not wearing a gun") without sacrificing masculine pride because of the well-established reputation of Wyatt Earp, within both the film and American culture. The subtlety and irony of these characterizations are cast aside by the extreme violence of Clint Eastwood's Western protagonists in Leone's films of the 1960s and many of Eastwood's subsequent films made with Don Siegel or under his own [End Page 47] direction. Eastwood's (perhaps) final Western, Unforgiven (1992), offers a stark comment on the hideous obligations of an individual assuming the role of masculine protector/avenger. These characters are Western heroes or antiheroes, but they are not cowboys. In films since the 1960s, there has been a self-conscious use of the term; indeed, "cowboy" has taken on a theatrical, artificial, camp, and/or homosexual connotation. Ara Osterweil identifies both Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) as precursors to Brokeback Mountain (39–40).2 "Cowboy" has become a signifier of an ironic twentieth-century (and now twenty-first-century) perspective on the genre's tradition as it has been commercialized, such as The Electric Horseman's (1979) has-been rodeo champion, repeatedly called a "cowboy," cornered into selling breakfast cereal, or the term is trivialized, as with John Travolta's turn on a mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy (1980). In Midnight Cowboy the term is literally prostituted. In their allusions to the Western genre, Brokeback Mountain and Ballad of Little Jo offer a host of mythic associations and cultural references to the Western...

La cartografía en el cine: mapas y planos en las producciones cinematográficas occidentales.

The present work aims at studying the relationship between cartography and film, analyzing the presence of maps and city plans in western film productions. This has seen fit to show, first, the mapping connections with other arts such as painting and literature that can be considered as a background of that relationship. After, considering the scientific contributions made on this issue from different disciplines, focuses on the analysis of maps that are exhibited in the films produced in Europe and North America. In response to an orderly presentation of the results have been considering the various objectives in this relationship, including not only those descriptive but other underlying type.

Maori Cowboys, Maori Indians

Reflecting on a short story in which two young Maori boys comment after watching a western film that "neither of us wanted to be an Indian," this article explores the layers of complexity inherent to comparative Indigenous studies. Maori engagement with the visual cultures of Cowboys and Indians suggests that Indigenous-Indigenous connection can itself be articulated as disjuncture or dis-identification. We expect Maori to identify with Indians, but how do we think about the moments in which Maori do not? Ultimately, recognizing differences between Indigenous people and centering the various effects of colonialism can produce the conditions for remaining committed to – rather than the reasons to depart from – the pursuit of ethical, grounded, careful comparative Indigenous work.

Lost and Found: Memory Loss and the Resilient Caregiver Portrayed in Japanese Films

Alzheimer's disease is often described as loss: loss of memory, loss of self. Four Japanese films over the last 30 years probe the depths of this loss, both to the individual and the caregiver. They dramatically represent changing images in Japan of elderly with dementia as well as the enduring values of family and caregiving. Kokotsu no Hito (“The Twilight Years,” 1973), Oriume (“Broken Plum Branch,” 2002), Ashita no Kioku (“Memories of Tomorrow,” 2006), and Mogari no Mori (“The Mourning Forest,” 2007) illuminate the challenges and loss as well as the creativity, resilience and meaning found in the process. Comparisons will be made with four recent Western films portraying Alzheimer's disease.

In Anticipation of Esthetic Revolution: Western Fiction and Documentary Film of 1940-1945

The article reveals the processes in Western cinema during World War II and tells about the creation of educational and propaganda films which were made by famous directors for quite pragmatic purposes but in the end led to the appearance of new forms and new esthetics.

Law and the Foucauldian Wild West in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate

Classic western films often conceive of the west as existing in a legal void, where the central conflict is a binary one between lawlessness and legalization. The law is a monolith, and the legalization process is linear — a narrative of the west’s inexorable evolution toward a modern state governed by the rule of law. Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate presents a more postmodernist, pluralist conception. There is no grand narrative of legalization; the film envisages a discourse of justice emerging from the interaction of a variety of discourses, and which appears to be a unity only from the vantage point of history.

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture James Deutsch Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture. By John G. Cawelti. (Madison: University of Wisconsin/Popular Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 410, acknowledgments, works cited, index.) John G. Cawelti, professor emeritus of English and humanities at the University of Kentucky, is no folklorist, but his pioneering work on genre and formula in popular culture should be of great interest to anyone who has ever looked for tale types or narrative motifs in folk literature. For instance, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), Cawelti's structural and psychological study of the Western film and novel, was one of the first scholarly studies to analyze the popularity of this vital genre. Similarly, his book Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1976) is one of the best for understanding and interpreting the universal story types that are commonly found in popular film and fiction. Cawelti's latest contribution, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture, is a collection of twenty-five of his essays written between 1968 and 2003—most of them previously published in journals and anthologies. The volume is divided into four sections: "Evolving Views of Popular Culture," "The Role of Violence in Popular Culture," "Multiculturalism and Popular Culture," and "The Mystery of Mystery." The result is a very handy introduction—almost a "best of " Cawelti—that covers the author's wide-ranging scholarship on fiction, film, music, and television. Like other members of his generation, Cawelti (born in 1930) came to the study of popular culture and genres indirectly. His 1960 dissertation, "The Ideal of the Self-Made Man in Nineteenth Century America" (University of Iowa), included an analysis of Henry James; when a colleague at the University of Chicago suggested the application of Bakhtin to a particular text, Cawelti was perplexed. "Since the only Bactine I had ever heard of at that time was an over-the-counter antiseptic it struck me that this was a very strange comment, indeed" (p. 378). Fortunately, Cawelti quickly assimilated some of the new critical theories into his own work, most notably in The Six-Gun Mystique. One of the highlights of this volume for me is Cawelti's essay "Formulas and Genre Reconsidered Once Again," published here for the first time. Seeking to expand upon his previous work, particularly "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature" (Journal of Popular Culture 3:381–90, 1969), Cawelti cooks up an intriguing analogy for the interrelationship of formula, convention, genre, and experience. He bases the analogy on the logic of recipes, ingredients, and culinary styles. Equally rewarding is Cawelti's essay "Generic Transformation in Recent American Films" (1979), in which the inversion of traditional genres in many 1970s films—such as Chinatown and Young Frankenstein—is explained by his idea of "a life cycle of genres" (p. 208). According to Cawelti, popular genres often "move from an initial period of articulation and discovery, through a phase of conscious self-awareness on the part of both creators and audiences, to a time when the generic patterns have become so well-known that people become tired of their predictability" (p. 208). Whether folk genres ever encounter this same process of "generic exhaustion" is a topic that might be profitably explored (p. 208), particularly with regard to some of the cycles of narrative jokes and riddle jokes collected by folklore scholars over the past half-century. Cawelti observes that formulas are important in popular culture because "they can serve as a [End Page 235] sort of shorthand for speeding up the communication between writer and reader" (p. 134). Similarly, folklorists who study epics, ballads, sermons, and other narrative texts may benefit from Cawelti's ideas in understanding how the formulaic helps to facilitate the artistic and dynamic process of communication among members of small groups. James Deutsch Smithsonian Institution Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Anxious Latitudes: Heterotopias, Subduction Zones, and the Historico-Spatial Configurations within Dead Man

This article uses the film Dead Man to explore Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia through two particular historico-spatial configurations that are created by the western film genre and the myths that support it. In so doing we come to understand that the predicted shift from the heterotopia of crisis to the heterotopia of deviation results in both anxiety and exteriority. I label the position between these two heterotopic spaces the subduction zone and note that this can be a space of critical inquiry.

Experiential Learning and Health Eduaction through Identification with a Fictional Character

Today's US and Western Europe TV series and film features are getting increasingly crammed with health-driven sub-plots and narratives. A number of studies indicate that some TV series' attention is almost equally divided between describing fictional heroes' lives and their medical experience, the latter being a clear educational vehicle. In our contribution we are going to discuss the case study of one of the most appreciated examples of such an approach, the popular TV show Grey's Anatomy that - when usually attributed as a romantic/medical drama with small and specific comedy inserts - became a popular culture phenomenon and a regular prime-time broadcast since its 2005 premiere. This media product can be considered a striking example of spontaneous social and emotional learning right in the front of a TV-screen and the series is even more interesting because of the simple fact that it favours the visualization of professional physicians' experience instead of focusing on more traditional patients' sub-plots.

ORAL HISTORY AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE: Posse and Once Upon a Time in Mexico

In the introduction to his The Western Reader Jim Kitses observes that the Western film, a genre long-heralded as the “cornerstone of American identity,” (16) is itself not exempt from an undertaking of racial and cultural revisionism. He points to a resurgence of films from the 1990’s that, in an era of multi-culturalism, hybridity, and counter-strategies, have functioned to redefine the codes of the traditional Western, bringing to life the postmodern Western. The subversive politics of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), and Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), are two such examples.

Oriental Imagination in Western Films -With Emphasis on the Harry Potter Series-

Oriental Imagination in Western Films -With Emphasis on the Harry Potter Series-

Oriental Imagination in Western Films -With Emphasis on the Harry Potter Series-

Oriental Imagination in Western Films -With Emphasis on the Harry Potter Series-

Illusionary Spoils: Soviet Attitudes toward American Cinema during the Early Cold War

At any stage of the Cold War, Soviet film culture was inevitably influenced by the political and ideological content of the conflict and by fluctuations in its course. Soviet films represented confrontation with the West with various degrees of directness, dealing with such issues as ideological struggle, espionage, the fear of global hostilities (influenced by traumatic memories of the past world war), and ostentatious or genuine attempts at rapprochement with the other side. Soviet ideologues and commentators from different cultural fields were mobilized to defend Soviet filmmakers and film audiences from possible contamination. Western cinema was condemned as a source and emblem of bourgeois decadence and regarded as a tool of enemy propaganda. Films produced in the United States were the main targets of this condemnation: in stark contrast to the general friendliness which had characterized Soviet attitudes toward American filmmaking during World War II, with the advent of the Cold War they were commonly described as a filthy torrent of slander against humanity produced by Hollywood's conveyor-belts. (1) Against considerable odds, however, during the Cold War American cinema remained an important presence within Soviet culture and generated a significant effect on its Soviet counterpart even during the conflict's most difficult periods, when most American cultural products were rejected as unfit for Soviet consumption. (2) Even in the conditions of growing ideological repression and thorough filtration of anything that was perceived as a product of American capitalism and a tool of imperialist subversion, American films reached the Soviet intelligentsia, as well as common Soviet viewers. The new xenophobic atmosphere (fueled by anti-cosmopolitan witch hunts and courts of honor) did not prevent Soviet filmmakers, who since the earliest days of Soviet cinema had demonstrated enthusiastic interest in American representations of dynamic modernity and American film techniques, from being perceptive observers and processors of America's cinematic achievements. (3) Moreover, in spite of the declared intent to fence out contaminating Western influences, Soviet ideologues paid close attention to the developments in American cinema, sanctioning the use--for very different ideological aims--of stylistic and narrative patterns commonly associated with Hollywood. (4) This article examines certain channels and mechanisms of American cinema's penetration of the Soviet realm at the Cold War's initial and, arguably, most acute stage, the parameters of which were shaped in the last years of Stalin's rule by the most violent official rejection of Western culture. It explores two interrelated issues: patterns of Soviet bureaucratic, intellectual, and popular reception of American films; and U.S. efforts to secure a position in the Soviet film market. The first issue opens another perspective on the two superpowers' ideological and cultural rivalry; the second specifies the problem of cultural influences in a situation when the influencer has to circumvent powerful mechanisms of defense. By demonstrating and explaining diverse responses of Soviet audiences, authorities, and filmmakers to one of the most popular and accomplished products of American culture and one of the most powerful instruments of U.S. cultural policy, I aim to give a more nuanced picture of a period traditionally regarded as one of the lowest points in the relationship between the USSR and the United States. American Films in the USSR during World War II The history of Soviet attitudes toward American cinema in the early course of the Cold War would be incomplete without a look at its reception in the Soviet Union during World War II. (5) First, positive attitudes toward American cinema prevalent at that time provide a dramatic contrast to the mood of the subsequent Cold War. Second, the wartime access to allied countries' films, and the fact that large numbers of foreign movies were obtained as war trophies, profoundly influenced postwar Soviet filmmaking and the general cultural situation in the USSR. …

Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (review)

Reviewed by: Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility Jie Li Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility, Rey Chow . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 304 pp. After the influential Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema established Rey Chow as one of the most original scholars in cinema studies, her second book on Chinese films, Sentimental Fabulations, provides us with a collection of no less ingenious readings of popular and iconoclastic works by such diverse Chinese directors as Zhang Yimou, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Mingliang, and Ang Lee. Bringing them together under a discursive umbrella by the name of "the sentimental," Chow examines their culturally specific fantasy structures as well as their engagements with the complexities of globalization. Although often equated in common usage with affective excess, the sentimental, translated into Chinese as wenqing zhuyi or "warm-sentiment-ism," is redefined by Chow as a mood of endurance and accommodation, "a disposition of making compromises [with] that which is oppressive and unbearable" (18). The Chinese films that dramatize such heart-wrenching situations as poverty, familial conflicts, exile, illness, death, and loneliness, however, tend to affirm and perpetuate "an indomitable collective will" embodied by the patriarchal family, clan, village, or nation. Thus, Chow finds filiality, the "age-old moral apparatus" of subjectivization, to be "at the heart of Chinese sentimentalism" (22). In her own dense and sophisticated introduction, Chow not only offers a novel explication of the title, but also sheds light on the various ways her book fits into and contributes to the larger discipline of cinema studies that is increasingly entangled with the study of group cultures. The succinct summary of Western film theory, from the hopeful futurism of Walter Benjamin to the feminist critique of Laura Mulvey, eventually focalizes on the paradigm shift from the ontology of the filmic image (Bazin) and cinematic modes of signification (Metz) to the study of narrativity and ideology. Following Mulvey's "repressive hypothesis"—the notion that the cinematic image has repressed something existing beyond it—critics since the 1980s have "complicated the differential between gaze and image" in terms of group cultural identities (9). The resulting "fetishization of identity," however, can still be broken down into two camps: those who equate artificial images with the lives and histories of "real" cultural groups and those, like Chow, who do not insist on such "anthropomorphic realism." In the case of East Asian cinema, Chow proposes to see Asianness itself as a "commodified and reproducible value," sustained by and contributing to the flows of capital, rather than to go on an "iconophobic" search for some authentic, continuous Asianness beyond the cinematic images. "Part of my goal in this study is to argue that Chinese cinema since the 1980s is an inherent part of a contemporary global problematic of becoming visible" (13), defined as "a matter of participating in a discursive politics of (re)configuring the relation between center and margins" (11). In a sense, Chow's study attempts to put the study of Chinese films (back) in dialogue in—or rather, in the middle of—Western cinema studies, in order to stall the trend of its ghettoization in the history of Chinese culture. Scattered here and there in the book are critiques of what she calls "geographical and chronological compartmentalization exercises" that aim at no greater goals than "information retrieval and canonization" (15, 150). Hence in her readings of two Hong Kong films made around 1997 (Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together and Peter Chan's Comrades, Almost a Love Story), Chow deliberately steers free of linking the films to Hong Kong's return to the PRC. The organization of the book is similarly free of geopolitical [End Page 59] determinates. The nine chapters—each a close analysis of one or two individual films that can be read independently from the rest—are grouped by theme into three parts: remembrance of things past, experiences of migrancy (especially by women), and films about disenfranchised populations. I shall discuss selected chapters that I have found particularly insightful or provocative. By way of continuing her tenacious defense of Fifth Generation directors against criticisms of...