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- Volume 5, Issue 3, 2007
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 5, Issue 3, 2007
Volume 5, Issue 3, 2007
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Concrete universality: Tower blocks, architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema
By Andrew BurkeThis article examines the representation of tower blocks in Last Resort (Pawlikowski 2000) and Red Road (Arnold 2006). Commonly associated in the popular imagination as the site of major social problems (crime, poverty, antisocial behaviour), the concrete high-rise has become the symbol of the decline of contemporary Britain. Both films recognise the structural decay that characterises many post-war housing developments and acknowledge the social problems that plague them, yet they seek to understand this deterioration as a consequence of larger social and political decisions and developments. Last Resort records the transformation of tower blocks into holding cells for asylum seekers. Red Road turns the proliferation of CCTV cameras on a Glaswegian housing estate into a metaphor for a society fearful of those people and places incongruent with a modern, affluent Britain. In each case, dramatisation enhances documentation rather than compromises it, and the tower block becomes the setting for what iek terms concrete universality, the process whereby fiction explodes documentary from within (iek 2006: 31). In this way, these films constitute a revitalised realism in which the truth of the antagonisms that divide society can best be shown in the guise of fiction.
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Fractured families united countries? Family, nostalgia and nation-building in Das Wunder von Bern and Goodbye Lenin!
More LessThis article compares the role and construction of nostalgia in two of the most successful German films released in 2003, Das Wunder von Bern and Goodbye Lenin! While both films portray a close connection between male adolescence, incomplete families and nostalgia for a simpler past, Goodbye Lenin! exposes this view of East Germany as an artificial and largely fictional construction, whereas Das Wunder von Bern attempts to create a sense of authenticity for its nostalgic recreation of 1950s West Germany. Despite this significant difference, both films are shown to pursue a common ideological project: their narratives are focused on a nostalgic farewell to the past in order to develop a positive attitude to the future of a re-unified Germany. To this purpose, both films' central characters and their families are presented as representative, allegorical embodiments of German culture whose development in the course of the narrative functions as a model for the audience.
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Amores perros and racialised masculinities in contemporary Mexico
By Hector AmayaThis article explores the textualisation of masculinity and race in the Mexican film Amores perros. The central argument is that the film displays Mexican masculinities in both a transgressive and conventional fashion. Transgression is articulated with narratives about life in Mexico City that challenge traditional Mexican masculinities, particularly as these relate to brown masculinities. These traditional masculinities are proven obsolete and futureless. Masculinities that are more progressive are textualised through reference to symbolic elements of manliness codified through whiteness and wealth. These are deemed promising, capable of development and oriented toward the future. However, in representing brownness as obsolete and whiteness as progressive, the film reproduces conventional ideas about masculinities, which are often given value through class and race. The film lays bare race, class and gender tensions in the modern Mexican state, exposing the ways in which ideas of progress and modernity can too easily reconstitute racial and class disenfranchisement.
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Nationalism and postcolonialism in Indian science fiction: Bollywood's Koi Mil Gaya (2003)
Authors: Dominic Alessio and Jessica LangerKoi Mil Gaya (2003), a Hindi-language Bollywood musical set in the near future and concerning a scientist who contacts extraterrestrials, is Hindi cinema's first big-budget attempt at science fiction. It is worthy of note for several reasons. The film, which is filled with references to Hindu gods and mythologies, aligns itself with, borrows from, and reshapes the traditions of science fiction (Batty and Markley 2002), using strategies associated with postcolonial cultural production. It also subverts many of the conventions of Hollywood science fiction cinema, using similar aspects of film form for different purposes. However, Koi Mil Gaya occupies a contested postcolonial space, as its alignment with the recent rise of Hindu nationalism in India creates a kind of colonial order in itself; one which in the end re-inscribes the hierarchical systems of oppression that are associated with colonialism.
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Good intentions, high hopes and low budgets: Contemporary social realist film-making in Britain
By Samantha LayWhile not an unbroken tradition (Hill), there has been an enduring relationship between British film culture and social realism as a mode of expression. This enduring relationship can be evidenced across a diverse range of texts from the documentary movement of the thirties, to the social problem films of the fifties and the kitchen sink social realism of the 1960s, through to the socially purposeful art cinema of the 1980s and the so-called Brit-Grit of the 1990s. But how is British social realism doing in the first years of the twenty-first century? Writing in The Observer in 2005, Vanessa Thorpe announced the death of social realist miserabalism. This report seeks to provide evidence that British social realist film-making is not dead. Indeed, it is still an important part of British film culture. The report also explores the status of these films in the British film industry, their conditions of production and exhibition and their contemporary thematic concerns.
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Review
By Yves LabergeScreening Qubec: Qubcois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere, Scott MacKenzie, (2004) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, xii + 224 pp., ISBN 0-7190-6396-5 (hbk), 45.00
Le dictionnaire du cinma qubcois, Michel Coulombe and Marcel Jean (eds.), 4th updated edition, (2006) Montreal: Boral, xxii + 821 pp., ISBN 2-7646-0427-0 (pbk), CAN 44.95/ 37,50 Euros
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2021)
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Volume 18 (2020)
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Volume 17 (2020)
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Volume 16 (2018)
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Volume 15 (2017)
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Volume 14 (2016)
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Volume 13 (2015)
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Volume 12 (2014)
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Volume 11 (2013)
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Volume 10 (2012)
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Volume 9 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 8 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 7 (2009)
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Volume 6 (2008 - 2009)
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Volume 5 (2007)
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Volume 4 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 3 (2005)
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Volume 2 (2004)
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Volume 1 (2002 - 2003)