Other Cinemas

Other Cinemas
Author: Sue Clayton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2017-06-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1786732041

The 1970s was an enormously creative period for experimental film. Its innovations and debates have had far-reaching and long-lasting influence, with a resurgence of interest in the decade revealed by new gallery events, film screenings and social networks that recognise its achievements. Professor Laura Mulvey, and writer/director Sue Clayton, bring together journalists and scholars at the cutting edge of research into 1970s radical cinema for this collection. Chapters are at once historically grounded yet fused with the current analysis of today's generation of cine-philes, to rediscover a unique moment for extraordinary film production. Other Cinemas establishes the factors that helped to shape alternative film: world cinema and internationalism, the politics of cultural policy and arts funding, new accessible technologies, avant-garde theories, and the development of a dynamic and interactive relationship between film and its audiences. Exploring and celebrating the work of The Other Cinema, the London Film-makers' Co-op and other cornerstones of today's film culture, as well as the impact of creatives such as William Raban and Stephen Dwoskin - and Mulvey and Clayton themselves - this important book takes account of a wave of socially aware film practice without which today's activist, queer, minority and feminist voices would have struggled to gather such volume.

Cinemas of the Other

Cinemas of the Other
Author: Gönül Dönmez-Colin
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Motion picture industry
ISBN: 9781841505497

Updated collections of recent interviews with filmmakers whose works represent trends in the film industries of Central Asia and the Middle East, these two new geospecific editions expand upon the earlier volume Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia. Following an introduction delineating the histories of the film industries of the countries that make up the Middle East and Central Asia - including Iran, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - both books contain interviews stretching over a decade, which position the filmmakers and their creative concerns within the social or political context of their respective countries. The striking variety of approaches toward each interview creates a rich diversity of tone and opens the door to a better understanding of images of 'otherness' in film. In addition to transcripts of the interviews, each chapter also includes stills from important films discussed, biographical information about the filmmakers and filmographies of their works. Gönül Dönmez-Colin offers in these expanded editions a carefully researched and richly detailed firsthand account of the developments and trends in these regional film industries that is sure to be appreciated by film scholars and researchers of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas

Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas
Author: Michelle E. Bloom
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824857453

Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.

The Lost Cinema of Mexico

The Lost Cinema of Mexico
Author: Olivia Cosentino
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1683403398

The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation’s earlier Golden Age. This pivotal collection examines the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films. This largely unexamined era of film reveals shifts in Mexican culture, economics, and societal norms as state-sponsored revolutionary nationalism faltered. During this time, movies were widely embraced by the public as a way to make sense of the rapidly changing realities and values connected to Mexico’s modernization. These essays shine a light on many genres that thrived in these decades: rock churros, campy luchador movies, countercultural superocheros, Black melodramas, family films, and Chili Westerns. Redefining a time usually seen as a cinematic “crisis,” this volume offers a new model of the film auteur shaped by productive tension between highbrow aesthetics, industry shortages, and national audiences. It also traces connections from these Mexican films to Latinx, Latin American, and Hollywood cinema at large. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Contributors: Brian Price | Carolyn Fornoff | David S. Dalton | Christopher B. Conway | Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou | Ignacio Sánchez Prado | Dolores Tierney | Dr. Olivia Cosentino Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Cinema's Doppelgängers

Cinema's Doppelgängers
Author: Doug Dibbern
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2021-06-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1953035620

Cinema's Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema - or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it's a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time - a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn't become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood. The book attempts, on the one hand, to explore and expand upon the intrinsically creative nature of all historical writing; like all works of fiction, its ultimate goal is to be a work of art in and of itself. But it also aims, on the other hand, to be a legitimate examination of the relationship between the economic and political organization of nations and film industries and the resulting aesthetics of film and thus of the dominant ideas and values of film scholarship and criticism. Doug Dibbern's first book, Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film, won the 2016 Peter Rollins Prize. He has published scholarly essays on classical Hollywood filmmakers, film criticism for The Notebook at Mubi.com, and literary essays for journals like Chicago Quarterly Review and Hotel Amerika. He has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University, where he teaches now in the Expository Writing Program.

Cinema of the Other Europe

Cinema of the Other Europe
Author: Dina Iordanova
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2003
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781903364611

Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film is a comprehensive study of the cinematic traditions of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia from 1945 to the present day, exploring the major schools of filmmaking and the main stages of development across the region during the period of state socialism up until the end of the Cold War, as well as more recent transformations post-1989. In encouraging a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of European cinema, much needed for the new unified Europe `enlarged' towards its Eastern periphery, this book maps out the interactions, key concerns, thematic spheres and stylistic particularities that make the cinema of East Central Europe a vital part of European film tradition. Cinema of the Other Europe is thus a timely appraisal of Film Studies debates ranging from the representation of history and memory, the reassessment of political content, ethics and society, the rehabilitation of popular cinema, and the rethinking of national and regional cinemas in the context of globalisation.

Making Images Move

Making Images Move
Author: Gregory Zinman
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2020-01-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520302729

Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.

Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas

Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas
Author: Hsiu-Chuang Deppman
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-10-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0824885805

Two of the most stylized shots in cinema—the close-up and the long shot—embody distinct attractions. The iconicity of the close-up magnifies the affective power of faces and elevates film to the discourse of art. The depth of the long shot, in contrast, indexes the facts of life and reinforces our faith in reality. Each configures the relation between image and distance that expands the viewer’s power to see, feel, and conceive. To understand why a director prefers one type of shot over the other then is to explore more than aesthetics: It uncovers significant assumptions about film as an art of intervention or organic representation. Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas is the first book to compare these two shots within the cultural, historical, and cinematic traditions that produced them. In particular, the global revival of Confucian studies and the transnational appeal of feminism in the 1980s marked a new turn in the composite cultural education of Chinese directors whose shot selections can be seen as not only stylistic expressions, but ethical choices responding to established norms about self-restraint, ritualism, propriety, and female agency. Each of the films discussed—Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew, and Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7— represents a watershed in Chinese cinemas that redefines the evolving relations among film, politics, and ethics. Together these works provide a comprehensive picture of how directors contextualize close-ups and long shots in ways that make them interpretable across many films as bellwethers of social change.

Women's Cinema

Women's Cinema
Author: Alison Butler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231851359

Women's Cinema provides an introduction to critical debates around women's filmmaking and relates those debates to a variety of cinematic practices. Taking her cue from the groundbreaking theories of Claire Johnston, Alison Butler argues that women's cinema is a minor cinema that exists inside other cinemas, inflecting and contesting the codes and systems of the major cinematic traditions from within. Using canonical directors and less established names, ranging from Chantal Akerman to Moufida Tlatli, as examples, Butler argues that women's cinema is unified in spite of its diversity by the ways in which it reworks cinematic conventions.