World Cinema Research Articles

Review: Contemporary Political Cinema, by Matthew Holtmeier

Review: <i>Contemporary Political Cinema</i>, by Matthew Holtmeier

Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, by David Martin-Jones

True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the other’s shoes, but an encounter with empathy’s own limits, the impossibility of access to the other’s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspective on world history and the lost pasts of the Global South. By analysing films where “cinematic depictions of the past are aesthetically structured like ethical encounters with others” (2), Martin-Jones diagnoses and exposes a trend in world cinema (what he calls a “world of cinemas”) to decentre Eurocentric and colonialist historical narratives through forcing an encounter with histories that do not fit the singular narrative decreed by colonial modernity. This is framed by Martin-Jones through the Orwellian notion of doublethink as the spinning of a political narrative of the past at odds with the facts.

The world of Assamese celluloid: ‘yesterday and today’

The study explores the entire journey of the Assamese cinema, which means a journey that will narrate many stories from its past and present, furthermore also will try to analyze its future potential. This paper deals with the trends emerging in genres, technical advancement, and visual representation along with a cult that emphasized the commercial success of cinema by toeing the style of Bollywood and world cinema. It explores the new journey of Assamese cinema, which deals with small budgets, realistic approaches, and portraying stories from the native lanes. It also touches upon the phase of ‘freeze’ that the Assamese cinema industry was undergoing due to global pandemic Covid-19.

Inaugurating discussions of an oral cinema: Placing the translation-to-screen of Scottish community oral storytelling traditions within a wider frame of global filmmaking practice

This article seeks to inaugurate the global frame of an oral cinema: a cinema that, to a significant extent, is defined by its relationship to community oral cultures. Whilst the case studies featured are largely those arising from Scotland – in particular Simon Miller’sSeachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle(), Timothy Neat’sPlay Me Something() and the author’s own filmMysterious Object(currently in post-production) – discussion deliberately reaches outwards to a global, comparative frame drawing upon the more sophisticated treatments of orality in the West African cinemas of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene and the Inuit cinema of Zacharius Kunuk. Whilst alive to the dangers of homogenization and destructive, western-led universalisms, this article ultimately attempts to establish a space for utopian montage (), wherein divergent yet mutually resonant traditions within world cinema may be co-positioned in order to explore aspects of shared practice and solidarity.

Performing Exoticism and the Transnational Reception of World Cinema

Abstract This article examines why exoticism is central to thinking about the global dynamics of world cinema and its transnational reception. Offering a theoretical discussion of exoticism, alongside the closely related concepts of autoethnography and cultural translation, it proposes that the exotic gaze is a particular mode of aesthetic perception that is simultaneously anchored in the filmic text and elicited in the spectator in the process of transnational reception. Like world cinema, exoticism is a travelling concept that depends on mobility and the crossing of cultural boundaries to come into existence. The visual pleasure afforded by exotic cinema’s sumptuous style is arguably the chief vehicle that allows world cinema to travel and be understood, or misunderstood, as the case may be, by transnational audiences who are potentially disadvantaged by a hermeneutic deficit of culturally specific knowledge when trying to understand films from outside their own cultural sphere.

Possessing the Voice: Ventriloquism and Agency in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015)

As a prominent figure in independent world cinema and, increasingly, contemporary art, Apitchapong Weerasethakul’s practice is situated at the interstices of film, photography, video and installation. His work has been compellingly analysed in terms of its queer politics, its exploration of animist ontologies, and its references to the cultural and political histories of Thailand’s northeastern and northern provinces (where he grew up and presently resides).1 Apichatpong’s treatment of these themes has been described as ‘realist’, a characterisation that is evoked by the sensorial intensity of his moving image works and his use of non-professional actors.2 This approach, when combined with his unconventional treatment of narrative structures and inclusion of characters whose existence represents the porosity of human and nonhuman realms, produces films that exist as a ‘layering of diegetic worlds in which material immaterialities are perceived as real’.3 In Apichatpong’s 2015 film, Cemetery of Splendour/Rak Thi Khon Kaen, representations of ventriloquism and possession contribute to and complicate this process of layering by reconfiguring assumed relationships between vision, voice, space, and political subjectivity.

The Geographies of the East Asian Cinematography: The Taiwan Convergence

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

National Turbulence and the Turbos of the World Cinema System

Abstract From the outset cinema was metropolitan. Producers needed access to financing, pools of talent, specialized equipment, and laboratories that one could only find in urban centers. In certain cinema-cities (Berlin, Paris, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Taipei, etc.) reside ambitious writers, producers, and filmmakers who were driven to outdo, or modify, or simply copy what they saw, employing their own culture’s raw material. Thus, the Jameson-Moretti law applies: local content, pertinent to each nation, was poured into forms that were adopted, with strategic alterations, from Hollywood. Where are today’s hotspots? Where does cinema seem crucial and talked about? Let’s abandon the map (where necessarily one region stands front and center), and instead let’s spin the globe. As it whirls, our eye intermittently catches glimpses of the shapes of the most sizeable nations. Today China and Nigeria stand out prominently alongside India and Russia. So dense are they with film activity that the globe is distended and wobbles out of true. Only sixty years ago China and Nigeria were places that had no place in World Cinema; they gained recognition only when a few promising art films found their way to the European festivals that served as image exchange centers. Today that promise has been fulfilled beyond, indeed against, expectations. Recapitulating Hollywood in its heyday Nollywood and China (Beijing/Shanghai/Qingdao) have become thoroughly corporate and market-savvy, turning out standardized and predictable products. If fresh images are to renew World Cinema, it will hardly be from the urban image-centers. On our globalized globe, novelty should be sought on the periphery of these former peripheral nations. And indeed, exciting new work has been bubbling beyond the dense cultural centers of these nations. Independent art films and documentaries have emerged from dark corners of both places thanks to the network of festivals around the globe, but increasingly and paradoxically thanks to the rival medium of the internet, with its networks of informal distribution and what used to be called “word of mouth.”

World Cinema in a Global Frame

Abstract The “world” in film studies has been the “other” of the world’s empire, with Hollywood taking American exceptionalism. It unfolds as the stage of identity politics representing all the rest of the world as postcolonial, peripheral, or merely different than Hollywood. However, this “political” model becomes challengeable as the world’s ongoing homogenization blurs old boundaries while causing “ethical” deadlocks such as the vicious interlocking between (neo)liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalist terrorism. The notions of subjectivity and society also undergo new crises and changes permeating the entire world beyond the established national or transnational frames of the world. Against this backdrop, world cinema can be reframed not for a world tour of territorialized national cinemas or transnational deterritorialization but a critical remapping of many contemporary films reflecting global phenomena even in localized narrative space. Locality functions here less as the basis of identity, referring to a unique reality that both resists and requires the center’s endorsement, than as a contingent springboard for addressing the concrete universality of the world system, including the center. This approach brings a global frame of world cinema.

The everyman cinema, hampstead: film, art and community in the 1930s

This article examines the role of one of the first arthouse cinemas in London, the Everyman in Hampstead. A detailed local study, it also explores the wider context of cinema in Britain in the 1930s when an art film culture was being formed and developed. It argues that the Everyman, albeit one small cinema, was a significant agent in the creation of this new culture. It argues that the particularities of place contributed to the distinctive identity of the cinema. Hampstead in the 1930s, with the influx of modernist and avant-garde artists, many of them exiles from Fascist Europe, became the centre of a vibrant artistic community. And the Everyman, with its programme of independent and foreign language films, along with art exhibitions, was an integral part of this community. A detailed analysis of the enterprising programming strategies of the Everyman will explore differences and similarities with other art cinemas and will examine how its repertory programming, which included revivals and seasons from a broad range of world cinema, contributed to its success.

Situating Ingmar Bergman and world cinema

ABSTRACT Introducing four essays and a stage play that make up the “Bergman World” special issue of Popular Communication, the authors argue for an expanded understanding of world cinema, one that attends to critical and scholarly voices beyond the hegemon of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western continental Europe, one that, indeed, attends to “their” (the non-West’s) perspective on “us” (Western filmmakers, film scholars, and films) as much as what “we” think of “them.” More specifically, the article asserts the profound global impact of the work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman outside North America and Western Europe.

The critique of anti-communist state violence in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-awarded Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) has ostensibly been embraced by both critics and scholars alike as international art cinema and for being constitutive of a canon of world cinema from the vantage of Southeast Asia. This article, however, takes a detour to focus particularly on the film’s engagement with Thai politics and its complex intertwinement with Buddhism during the period of anti-communism. I specifically look at how the film replicates religious beliefs and indigenous practices, such as the structure of kamma and reincarnation as redemption, that were used by the right-wing military government to justify a series of anti-communist pogroms. I argue that by hijacking such religious narratives and translating them into cinematic form, the film manages to eschew the risk of being suppressed by censorship, or, at worst, of reproducing the state-imposed narrative on the appropriation and accomplishment of such violence in the name of the nation. This article aims to shed light on how the film criticizes not only the past – what historically happened – but also the way we come to understand the history of such atrocious event and relate to it as our national history.

Músicos e orquestras do primeiro cinema em greve: de Chicago ao Rio de Janeiro (1903-1914)

O presente artigo propõe uma história social do primeiro cinema de modo a analisar um fenômeno que chacoalhou os primeiros anos do cinema mundial: as greves de músicos e orquestras de cinematógrafos nas cidades de Chicago, Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo. A particularidade comum das greves foi provocar o alvoroço por parte de patrões, polícia, jornalistas e autoridades públicas, deixando rastros, sobretudo, em jornais e revistas especializadas de cinema e cultura. Jornalistas investigativos, críticos de arte e a imprensa de modo geral repercutiram os conflitos, as estratégias e os acordos entre os sujeitos implicados nas greves, além de deixar as impressões dos coetâneos que assistiam ao fenômeno como observadores. Buscamos perscrutar os contextos dos cinematógrafos para conhecer o mundo dos músicos nas cidades; a função mediadora das associações de proteção e regulação do trabalho musical; e as razões para as greves nas três cidades investigadas. Foi possível depurar uma dinâmica global na qual a organização coletiva de músicos e orquestras foi uma estratégia utilizada amplamente no intervalo de uma década contra patrões e companhias de cinema que aceleravam a precarização das condições de trabalho, expressa sobretudo nos baixos salários recebidos.

Датские эксперименты Томаса Винтерберга

The article is devoted to the work of the Danish film director T. Winterberg. The aim of the article is to study the plot originality of the stories told by T. Winterberg by methods of cinema, to understand the genre specificity of his films, highlighting the experiment as the most significant component of their artistic and mental originality. Descriptive, hermeneutic, diachronic, historical-genetic, comparative, analytical and biographical methods, used in a complex manner, allow one to come to certain conclusions. These conclusions are that T. Winterberg's cinematography relies on experiment as a way of plotting, which determines the genre character of the director's films. This is confirmed by the luck that accompanied exactly those films of T. Winterberg, which are built on Danish material, and the much less success of films created on plots that are associated with other toposes (Soviet, American, British). T. Winterberg became world famous after the release of the film "Family Celebration", made within the framework of such originally Danish phenomenon as «Dogma-95». Collation of the author's manner of T. Winterberg with the master of Danish (and world) cinema and originator of «Dogma» L. von Trier allows us to compare the ways of organizing the narrative of two famous film directors: if L. von Trier's films are based on provocation, then T. Winterberg – exactly on experiment. Being rooted on national soil, this experiment transcends ethnic narrow-mindedness itself, acquiring a universal, between-national character.

Life Suspension: Representation of Marital Infidelity in the Films of the 1380s and 1390s of Iranian Cinema

IntroductionCinema as one of the main arts of our world has reflected on many social issues in recent decades. Infidelity as a social phenomenon includes behaviours outside the marital relations by married couples. Infidelity is a sensitive phenomenon for a person and society and can lead to several problems for couples and family members. Consequently, social actors and thinkers have reflected on this in different ways. One way to look at a social issue such as infidelity is to investigate cultural products such as novels and movies. Cinema is one of the most important visual arts which can have a great impact on the viewer and be a suitable platform for understanding social issues. Many movies address the causes and consequences of infidelity. Infidelity is among the issues addressed in cinema in recent decades and many narratives of it have been represented in the Iranian and world cinema. We studied how this notion is represented in the last two decades. The aim of this qualitative research was to investigate how marital infidelity is represented in cinema films. The research question is: How are the contexts, consequences, and couple reactions about infidelity narrated? Materials and MethodsThis research has been conducted with a qualitative approach and its implementation method is close to narrative analysis among various qualitative research methods. The data were gathered through watching the selected films and especially the dialogues. Accordingly, the data collection method was observation-documentary. After reviewing more than 50 films related to the issue, 14 films were selected by the purposeful sampling method with a focus on the films focusing on infidelity produced from 2001 to 2020 in the Iranian cinema. The selected films were: Yalda Night, Santouri, Chaharshanbeh Soori, Saadat Abad, Private Life, Wooden Bridge, I am his Wife, Mr. Mahmoudi and Banoo cohabitation, Snow on the Pines, Love Period, Ice Age, Anger and Commotion, We are Not Used to, and Smoky under the Roof. For data analysis, the thematic analysis method was used in order to code and represent the data.. The goal of thematic analysis was to report on the content and meaning of patterns in the data. Discussion of Results and ConclusionsThe main constructed themes from the films included sexual and emotional infidelity, marital dissatisfaction, social context, personal anomy, infidelity as vengeance, imperative acceptance, self-disorganization, and disruption of family relations. The final theme showed infidelity as life suspension implying infidelity as a result and cause of this suspension. It became clear that marital infidelity represents a kind of suspension in life. According to the findings, infidelity is represented in Iranian cinema as a suspension. All the dialogues and scenes show a suspended and undecided life. The narrative of this uncertainty is not common to all films, but they have major commonalities.The most important reason for marital infidelity reflected by the movies is marital dissatisfaction. It is the main factor that directly causes marital infidelity and has negative relationship outcomes. In this way, the greater the satisfaction of married life is, the less the possibility of committing infidelity will be. We examined the reasons for infidelity at three levels of societal, personal, and interpersonal harm. Finally, we came to the conclusion that social and personal harms affect marital dissatisfaction as well as infidelity. Moving away from traditional and patriarchal thinking, addiction, rethinking sexual and emotional issues, fluidity in relationships, irresponsibility and secrecy, dissatisfaction in married life are among factors contributing to marital infidelity.

The Historical Roots and Cultural Core of the Chinese Film School

Abstract Chinese cinema has its own unique features, created through nationally distinct methods. Once revealed, these methods make possible the construction of a unique “Chinese film school.” This article explores the historical development of Chinese film arts in order to uncover general trends along its winding path. While being open to the world, the Chinese film school ultimately returns to traditions in Chinese art as a method to construct a unique theory of Chinese film. This methodology has enabled Chinese films to reflect wider developments in world cinema, while also maintaining distinctive Chinese cultural characteristics.

Contributors

Contributors

Realist Cinema as World Cinema

Realist Cinema as World Cinema

International students at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome: 1935–2020: A history to be written

The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), founded in Rome in 1935, has come to signify Italian cinema education in acting, directing, photography, set design, costume design, screenwriting, sound production, editing, production and film animation (since 1983). The CSC has historically admitted a significant number of international students (more than 13 per cent) in the past 85 years. This collaborative article introduces the first comprehensive list of international students in three CSC disciplines: directing, photography and set design. It begins with historical and artistic perspectives addressing the ideal of diversity, the internationalization of culture and the sociopolitical context of studying cinema in Rome. This article also includes graphs and statistics that give a clear sense of the broad geographical representation of foreigners who studied at the CSC. A comprehensive list of their names, nationalities, specializations and year of their degrees is organized in two formats: one by geography and one by chronology. The aim of this article is also to set new research goals so as to broaden our understanding of whether and how the CSC’s Italian cinematic education impacted world cinema.

Worlding Cinema

Abstract Against the narrowly commercial and homogenising term ‘world cinema’ that lumps together a diversity of ‘foreign’ films as a category, the notion of ‘the local’ relativizes the idea of the ‘national’ as a singular entity. It suggests the pivoting around each other of ‘there’ and ‘here,’ thereby avoiding precisely fixed locations and calling on the dynamism of their relationship. The local, captures not only particular geo-political locations but historical relationships, which, interacting with changing conditions, produce the shifting frameworks of thinking, feeling, experience, and aesthetic perception that shape local practices, traditions, and cultural forms. However, this specificity is often called on to endorse an authenticity uncontaminated by metropolitan sophistication or global uniformity, enabling local products to travel to an elsewhere beyond national boundaries. The value of ‘world’ over ‘global’ lies in its call on the space shared by many different nationals, whereas ‘global’ suggests the homogenisation enforced by multi-national corporate and neo-colonial Western powers. As an alternative concept, ‘trans-national’ applied to cinema has the virtue of acknowledging the existence of nationally defined geo-historical and cultural differences as well as the reality of cross-border migration of personnel, technologies, and films, along with the complexity of international co-production. However, if the term keeps the idea of the ‘national’ in place, the boundaries it marks are neither natural nor fixed. If local film genres and narrative forms function as public sites in which aesthetic histories, cultural frames of reference and social experiences feed and negotiate with each other, the question arises how far the trans-national intensification of this activity now produces a new space for an emergent ‘world imaginary’: the idea of a shared ‘world’.