National Cinema and Beyond


Book Description

This book comprises papers from the inaugural conference of the Irish Postgraduate Film Research Seminar which was held in Trinity College, April 2003. The purpose of the annual seminar is to provide an environment for postgraduate researchers in film to come together to exchange ideas and discuss methodological issues.




Italian Ecocinema


Book Description

Ecocriticism and film studies unite in this examination of five Italian films and the environmental questions they raise. Entangled in the hybrid fields of ecomedia studies and material ecocriticism, Elena Past examines five Italian films shot on location and ponders the complex relationships that the production crews developed with the filming locations and the nonhuman cast members. She uses these films—Red Desert (1964), The Winds Blows Round (2005), Gomorrah (2008), Le quattro volte (2010), and Return to the Aeolian Islands (2010)—as case studies to explore pressing environmental questions such as cinema’s dependence on hydrocarbons, the toxic waste crisis in the region of Campania, and our reliance on the nonhuman world. Dynamic and unexpected actors emerge as the subjects of each chapter: playful goats, erupting volcanoes, airborne dust particles, fluid petroleum, and even the sound of silence. Based on interviews with crew members and close readings of the films themselves, Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human theorizes how filmmaking practice—from sound recording to location scouting to managing a production—helps uncover cinema’s ecological footprint and its potential to open new perspectives on the nonhuman world. “[Past] uniquely and innovatively combines film studies and material ecocriticism with a focus on Italy. Such weaving of tales brings the films to life and reads them as ecological documents and Italian stories.” —Heather I. Sullivan, author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works “A timely and incisive study that interrogates a new, though growing, trend in film criticism and makes an important and rich contribution to Italian film studies, Italian cultural studies, and ecocriticism.” —Bernadette Luciano, author (with Susanna Scarparo) of Reframing Italy: New Trends in Italian Women’s Filmmaking “Part memoir, part close analysis of the films themselves, and illustrated with numerous excellent frame grabs, Past’s book casts a dreamlike spell as it contemplates the past, present, and future of the cinema and moves smoothly between environmental issues and aesthetic and practical concerns.” —Choice




Early Cinema and the "National"


Book Description

Essays on “how motion pictures in the first two decades of the 20th century constructed ‘communities of nationality’ . . . recommended.” —Choice While many studies have been written on national cinemas, Early Cinema and the “National” is the first anthology to focus on the concept of national film culture from a wide methodological spectrum of interests, including not only visual and narrative forms, but also international geopolitics, exhibition and marketing practices, and pressing linkages to national imageries. The essays in this richly illustrated landmark anthology are devoted to reconsidering the nation as a framing category for writing cinema history. Many of the 34 contributors show that concepts of a national identity played a role in establishing the parameters of cinema’s early development, from technological change to discourses of stardom, from emerging genres to intertitling practices. Yet, as others attest, national meanings could often become knotty in other contexts, when concepts of nationhood were contested in relation to colonial/imperial histories and regional configurations. Early Cinema and the “National” takes stock of a formative moment in cinema history, tracing the beginnings of the process whereby nations learned to imagine themselves through moving images.




South African National Cinema


Book Description

South African National Cinema examines how cinema in South Africa represents national identities, particularly with regard to race. This significant and unique contribution establishes interrelationships between South African cinema and key points in South Africa’s history, showing how cinema figures in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid. This study spans the twentieth century and beyond through detailed analyses of selected films, beginning with De Voortrekkers (1916) through to Mapantsula (1988) and films produced post apartheid, including Drum (2004), Tsotsi (2005) and Zulu Love Letter (2004). Jacqueline Maingard discusses how cinema reproduced and constructed a white national identity, taking readers through cinema’s role in building white Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. She then moves to examine film culture and modernity in the development of black audiences from the 1920s to the 1950s, especially in a group of films that includes Jim Comes to Joburg (1949) and Come Back, Africa (1959). Jacqueline Maingard also considers the effects of the apartheid state’s film subsidy system in the 1960s and 1970s and focuses on cinema against apartheid in the 1980s. She reflects upon shifting national cinema policies following the first democratic election in 1994 and how it became possible for the first time to imagine an inclusive national film culture. Illustrated throughout with excellent visual examples, this cinema history will be of value to film scholars and historians, as well as to practitioners in South Africa today.




Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building


Book Description

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building focuses on the processes of Puerto Rican national identity formation as seen through the historical development of cinema on the island between 1897 and 1940. Anchoring her work in archival sources in film technology, economy, and education, Naida García-Crespo argues that Puerto Rico’s position as a stateless nation allows for a fresh understanding of national cinema based on perceptions of productive cultural contributions rather than on citizenship or state structures. This book aims to contribute to recently expanding discussions of cultural networks by analyzing how Puerto Rican cinema navigates the problems arising from the connection and/or disjunction between nation and state. The author argues that Puerto Rico’s position as a stateless nation puts pressure on traditional conceptions of national cinema, which tend to rely on assumptions of state support or a bounded nation-state. She also contends that the cultural and business practices associated with early cinema reveal that transnationalism is an integral part of national identities and their development. García-Crespo shows throughout this book that the development and circulation of cinema in Puerto Rico illustrate how the “national” is built from transnational connections. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.




Cinemas, Identities and Beyond


Book Description

The book discovers new frontiers and discourses to help us better understand ourselves and our surroundings when another decade of the new millennium is about to begin.




There She Goes


Book Description

Examines the exchanges within and through feminist film culture to expand critical horizons in film scholarship. Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features--including Miranda July, Janie Geiser, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Potter, Cindy Sherman, Samira Makhmalbaf, Sadie Benning, Agnès Varda, Kim Longinotto, and Michelle Citron--There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries between artistic, industrial, political, critical, and disciplinary practices. Editors Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer have assembled scholarship that responds to women's work in the interstices between different branches of the film industry, modes of filmmaking, national or transnational contexts, exhibition media, and varieties of visual representation in order to assess the exchanges such work enables. Essays in the first three sections of There She Goes explore connections at the level of curation and exhibition, while the subsequent four consider local connections such as those between the film and the audience or between works within an oeuvre, down to those occurring on the surface of the film. Contributors reach beyond traditional screen cinema to interact with a larger field of artistic production, including still photography, music videos, installation art, digital media, performance art, and dance. Essays also pay particular attention to a variety of contextual factors that have shaped women's filmmaking, from the conditions of production and circulation to engagement with various social movements and critical traditions, including, but not limited to, feminism. By foregrounding fluidity, There She Goes presents a an exciting new appraisal of feminist film culture, as well as the intellectual and affective potential it holds for filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Scholars of film and television studies and gender studies will appreciate the fresh outlook of There She Goes.




Australian National Cinema


Book Description

Tom O'Regan's book is the first of its kind on Australian post-war cinema. It takes as its starting point Bazin's question 'What is cinema?'and asks what the construct of a 'national' cinema means. It looks at the broader concept from a different angle, taking film beyond the confines of 'art' into the broader cultural world. O'Regan's analysis situates Australian cinema in its historical and cultural perspective producing a valuable insight into the issues that have been raised by film policy, the cinema market place and public discourse on film production strategies. Since 1970 Australian film has enjoyed a revival. This book contains detailed critiques of the key films of this period and uses them to illustrate the recent theories on the international and Australian cinema industries. Its conclusions on the nature of the nation's cinema and the discourses within it are relevant within a far wider context; film as a global phenomenon.




Chinese National Cinema


Book Description

Chinese National Cinema, written for students by a leading scholar, traces the formation, negotiation and problematization of the national on the Chinese screen over ninety years.




Beyond the Subtitle


Book Description

Examining European art films of the 1950s and 1960s, Mark Betz argues that it istime for film analysis to move beyond prevailing New Wave historiography, mired in outdated notions of nationalism and dragged down by decades of auteurist criticism. Focusing on the cinemas of France and Italy, Betz reveals how the flowering of European art films in the postwar era is inseparable from the complex historical and political frameworks of the time.