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- Volume 6, Issue 2, 2008
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2008
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2008
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French cinema in exile: trans-national cultural representation in Tony Gatlif's Gadjo Dilo
More LessThis article explores the notion of cultural authenticity that is a key element of both the narrative and the meta-narrative of Tony Gatlif's 1998 film Gadjo Dilo. The film's young French protagonist seeks to sample Romani (Gypsy) culture by means of a high-quality DAT recording of the singer Nora Luca, only to discover by the film's end that such an endeavour is a futile exercise in Western orientalist fantasy. With a focus on Western European and American critical responses to the film, as well as on the marketing of the film in those regions, the article argues that Gatlif's claims to cultural authenticity as an indigenous gypsy filmmaker function in much the same way as the delusions of his protagonist. Presented by Gatlif as a sample of the truth of Romani cultural identity, the film becomes the kind of problematic cultural artefact that the director seeks to expose within the narrative of his film.
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Identities and oppressions: Jean-Claude Lauzon's Lolo (1992)
More LessThis article approaches the fragmentation of identities characteristic of contemporary Western societies through the 1992 film Lolo by Jean-Claude Lauzon. Although it does explore linguistic, social, religious and ethnic divisions, this major piece of the Quebec repertoire recasts the sociolinguistic conflict between vernacular and formal practices (Labov 1972; Blanche-Benveniste 2002), raising questions of status and choice. This conflict is subsumed by the dialectics between primary and secondary culture. The cultural and linguistic opposition finds a primary metaphor in the film's central motif of the duality of dream and reality. No more than the cultural and linguistic can this opposition find a synthesis. This impossible reconciliation defines the constitutive rupture of the human psyche itself.
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De-essentializing the Banlieues, reframing the nation: documentary cinema in France in the late 1990s
More LessThis article considers the part played by recent documentary cinema in France in constructing an integrated rather than a fragmented image of the French nation. Suggesting that this may be part of an international trend in documentary-making, it starts from the observation that dominant media discourse in France, along with the critically acclaimed fiction film movement of the cinma de banlieue, has perpetuated an image of these cits peripheral to many French cities as threatening spaces adrift of the national community and emblematic of France's postmodern crisis of identity. Focusing on three documentaries about La Courneuve, a typically pilloried cit to the northeast of Paris, it argues that the ordinariness of the lives they convey, along with the documentarists' emphasis on the continuing penetration of cit space by State institutions and processes, and their insertion of supposedly alien spaces into a continuous narrative of memory and culture, effectively treats geography, history and culture in a way that calls into question the externalizing dominant discourse. Although limited by their lack of appeal to a mass audience that prefers the violence and spectacle of narrative cinema complicit with dominant representations of the banlieues as violent, dangerous spaces, these documentaries and French documentary cinema of the late 1990s in general offer images that de-essentialize the banlieue myth and challenge the image of a French nation in continuous crisis.
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Cinematic perspectives on the war on terror: The Road to Guantnamo (2006) and activist cinema
More LessStarting from the premise that Michael Winterbottom's films exemplify a certain model of transnational cinema, because they are made with international crews and casts, shot on location around the world, financed by transnational capital, and concerned with questions of borders, immigration, imperialism and identity, this article offers a close analysis of The Road to Guantnamo (2006) in order to set out the kind of political practice it claims Winterbottom's cinema enacts. The Road to Guantnamo appears to have been conceived as a very precise and partial intervention in the mediated public sphere: it was released simultaneously in cinemas, on broadcast television, on DVD and over the internet for streaming and downloading. By addressing multiple and overlapping publics in this particularly direct way, the film was revealing its partial and contestatory status, a status deriving as much from the multiple media of its transmission as from its content. Offering a close analysis of the heterogeneous composition of The Road to Guantnamo and the striking coolness and neutrality of its style of docudrama (also characteristic of Winterbottom's other films), the article concludes that the film may refrain from political affect because of its concern with political effects, and addresses specific and informed publics in a new type of political practice made possible by transnational media and a recently transnationalized public sphere.
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Traumatized masculinity and American national identity in Hollywood's Gulf War
By Mark StrawThe main question of this article is how traumatic male subjectivity and American national identity are rendered explicitly in contemporary Hollywood war films, the latter through encounter with the enemy, who is inevitably figured as other. I deal with this question by referring to an emergent critical discourse surrounding the aesthetics and technologies (and politics/economics) involved in constructing millennial or 1990s American cinema; what Jon Lewis has described as the end of cinema. This form of cinema contains persistent themes of trauma, memory, nostalgia, endings, terminations, death and apocalyptic images. I use this and contemporary theorizations of masculinity and film in order to look at Hollywood Gulf War films such as Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick 1996) and The Jacket (John Maybury 2005). I argue that encounters with the usually abstract and obscured enemy appear to present a challenge to American dominance and paternalism, a challenge which has to be worked through and rebuffed if the film is to be successful in achieving what Marita Sturken has dubbed making way for the next war. Contemporary Hollywood cinema is crucial in this regard, since the conservative ideology of making way for the next war in order to reinforce and fortify US foreign policy, becomes fraught with ambiguities. I also argue that contemporary war films which engage with recent US foreign policy exhibit many slippages and imbrications regarding identity and memory, and hence national identity is formulated in an inter-subjective and inter-relational manner. The value of this exploration is that it shows how recent US foreign policy is worked through in the context of contemporary cinema, and how American national identity is founded upon mythical constructions of victimhood, perceived emasculation and the centralization of male crisis in representation.
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Reviews
Authors: Abigail Loxham, Paul Melo e Castro and William BrownProjecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice, Alan Grossman and Aine O'Brien (eds.) (2007) London: Wallflower Press, 224 pp., ISBN 978-1-905674-04-6 (pbk + DVD-ROM), 29.95.
Brazilian National Cinema, Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison (2007) London and New York: Routledge, 223 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-33816-5 (pbk), 17.99
European Cinemas in the Television Age, Dorota Ostrowska and Graham Roberts (2007) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 191 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-2309-9, 16.99
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 20 (2022)
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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)