Screening Islam: the representations of religion and gender in different genres of Islamic films in Malaysia

This study seeks to analyse how genres shape the way in which religion is represented in Malaysian ‘Islamic’ films. It is interesting to study how Malaysian filmmakers represent Islam, because Malaysia is a multi ethnic and religious country with a rising film industry and Islam as the official religion of the state. This thesis examines how film’s generic conventions act as meaning-making tools, contributing to different representations of Islam and gender. The thesis employs narrative analysis to analyse the structure of plots and construction of meaning in the films. A total of 13 recent Islamic films were selected, and the analyses illustrate how the films construct different representations of Islam through the genres of horror, comedy, melodrama and art house. A key narrative feature of all the films analysed is the centrality of the life quest of the main protagonist. However, this quest takes significantly different forms in the diverse genres, casting religion and gender rather differently. In the various genres, the life quest may centre around perpetual punishment for worldly or superstitious desires, ‘happy ending’ reward for abandonment of material and Western values, enduring of gendered hardships which reflecting both obedience and strength, and contradictory exposing and forgiving violence. This thesis discusses how religious and gendered subjectivities are made and remade in the intersection between Western conventions of cinematic genres and the specific cultural, religious and political context of Malaysia

Mapping Nollywood’s Imaginative Scape in Canada: Understanding Transnational Nigerian Media, Identity and Belonging.

Recent years have seen increasing scholarly recognition of transnational Nigerian cinema (“Nollywood”) as an important tool of cultural representation, and a conduit of diasporic communication. Nollywood plays a central role in shaping understandings of Nigerian culture, identity, and society in transnational spaces. Despite this growing scholarly awareness, there is a paucity of empirical research into how diasporic Nigerians spread across time and space receive and interpret Nollywood media texts. This study addresses the gap by examining the ways in which Nollywood shapes global understandings of Nigerian culture, identity and society, and the sociocultural implications. This dissertation is a qualitative analysis of the significance of Nollywood through the lens of diasporic Nigerians in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Through participant observation and one-on-one interviews, I map out the ways diasporic Nigerians utilize Nollywood film culture to negotiate and sustain ethnocultural identity and develop a sense of belonging in Canadian society. The goal is to clarify the significance of Nollywood, and thereby deepen understanding of the ways in which Nollywood can be utilized to promote dialogue on critical issues of race and representation in the Canadian and Quebecois contexts, but also within the diasporic world in general. I draw on Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model of communication (Hall 1980), within the broader framework of media uses and gratification theory (Blumer and Katz 1974) and dependency theory (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur 1976), to interrogate the way participants make meaning with Nollywood media texts in context. The conceptual framework is therefore communication and media studies, transnational cultural studies, postcolonial studies, migration and diaspora studies, and cultural anthropology. I use this research to examine the premise that Nollywood is an important phenomenon of representation and a conduit of diasporic communication in contemporary times. I argue that scholarly analyses that tend to focus more on Nollywood’s material culture and infrastructure, and less on ethical and ideological frameworks have misrepresented the media’s cultural significance. The significance of Nollywood can only be accurately understood by looking beyond its medium specificity to the cultural systems and ideologies involved

Smart cinema as trans-generic mode: a study of industrial transgression and assimilation 1990-2005

Abstract Following from Sconce’s “Irony, nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film”, describing an American school of filmmaking that “survives (and at times thrives) at the symbolic and material intersection of ‘Hollywood’, the ‘indie’ scene and the vestiges of what cinephiles used to call ‘art films’” (Sconce, 2002, 351), I seek to link industrial and textual studies in order to explore Smart cinema as a transgeneric mode. I categorise it as a grouping of films which may have different formal characteristics, but are linked by industrial origins and production contexts, and through their use of genre, as Smart cinema embeds more challenging arthouse or cult tendencies in a framework of variable generic familiarity or accessibility. Individual texts contain thematic, stylistic and structural elements which can be positioned at, and interpreted along, loci on a continuum from mainstream to independent. This is achieved through a process of “double coding” (King, 2009), which King relates to Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and distinction, but which I expand to include utilising textual attributes to create simultaneous calls to action to multiple audiences, along a continuum from ‘indie’ to ‘mainstream’, often in a manner that obscures their industrial positioning. Double coding works to simultaneously cultivate mainstream-resistant audiences, actively positioning texts as distanced from the industrial circumstances which produced them, and to accrue cultural capital for producers. Crucially, Smart attempts to combine the potentially transgressive, ‘cool’ underground appeal of cult cinema with echoes of high culture and artistic status which comes more directly from the arthouse tradition, and is therefore embedded within what James English calls ‘the economy of prestige’. (English, 2009) Rather than a generational outcropping, or intrusion of independent cinema into the mainstream, Smart cinema demonstrates product differentiation within the context of horizontal integration: studios making strategic interventions into what would previously have been seen as ‘indie cinema territory’. While encouraging framing within an auterist model, and by utilising – or fetishizing – what we might casually consider ‘indie style,’ Hollywood studios extended their reach beyond the mass market by co-opting notions such as ‘independence’, ‘cult’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘prestige’