European cinema: face to face with Hollywood

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe's national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of "world cinema" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition

ABQ Free Press, September 10, 2014

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/abq_free_press/1086/thumbnail.jp

Television before TV

Television before TV rethinks the history of interwar television by exploring the medium’s numerous demonstrations organized at national fairs and international exhibitions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Building upon extensive archival research in Britain, Germany, and the United States, Anne-Katrin Weber analyses the sites where the new medium met its first audiences. She argues that public displays were central to television’s social construction; for the historian, the exhibitions therefore constitute crucial events to understand not only the medium’s pre-war emergence, but also its subsequent domestication in the post-war years. Designed as a transnational study, her book highlights the multiple circulations of artefacts and ideas across borders of democratic and totalitarian regimes alike. Richly illustrated with 100 photographs, Weber finally emphasizes that even without regular programmes, interwar television was widely seen

Towards the creation of 'quality' Greek national cinema in the 1960s

In the field of Greek film studies, the 1960's are widely seen as the heyday of the 'Old Greek Cinema' (PEK), while the binary model 'Old/mainstream' versus 'New/artistic' still dominates historical, theoretical and critical discourse on Greek film. The contribution of this thesis is that, on the one hand, it considers the 1960s under the light of the rise of 'New Greek Cinema' (NEK) and, on the other, complicates the relationship of PEK and NEK by focusing on the culture surrounding Greek cinema of the time and by exploring the continuities and interrelations between the 'Old' and the 'New'. Particular emphasis is given to the debates about 'quality' national cinema, including issues of realism, Greekness' and 'popular authenticity', the crucial contribution of state policies and institutions such as the 'Week of the Greek Cinema' in Thessaloniki and cine clubs, the establishment of international art film in the domestic market, and the emergence of a young generation of film critics and cinephiles who promoted the idea of an indigenous art-house film culture. This thesis highlights also the 'Old Greek Cinema's' attempts to raise the cultural status of commercial film and address international audiences and its subsequent openness to formal, thematic and artistic experimentation normally associated with NEK. The rise of history as a thematic concern of Greek cinema of the 1960s is another main focus of this thesis, which attempts to reveal how the Civil-War trauma, and oppositional historical perspectives (typically associated with NEK) found way in disguised forms in the narratives of mainstream films. Finally, through a close examination of the thematic and stylistic concerns of short films made in the 1960s (which include the early works of some of the major NEK figures) it demonstrates the continuity between the cinematic developments of the 1960s and the 1970s

Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling encounters with ethical event films

Unbecoming Cinema constitutes a welcome addition to texts that provide a film-philosophical perspective on films that otherwise take on and involve difficult subject matter, including in this case suicide, autistic worldviews, hallucinatory aesthetics and vomit-gore. The book in effect argues successfully and intelligently that even though hard to watch, many of these films can provide for viewers an opportunity to come to a renewed understanding of self and world. As a result, the author takes on difficult topics, but brings them to life in an exciting, philosophical fashion that also asks readers to rethink what it is that constitutes cinema

The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002

What makes political cinema political? It used to be that the category of political cinema was understood to designate a body of work with a very determinate political orientation. When Comolli and Narboni wrote about political cinema in the late 1960s, they were writing about a cinematic practice defined by its opposition to the capitalist status quo and aiming at the transformation of the social world. But as Marxism has suffered a crisis over the last decades, so has the concept of a political cinema, which has since lost its specificity. I claim that since the late sixties there has been a shift in ideas and practices concerning political cinema: a class-oriented, anti-capitalist conception of politics has given way to a conception of politics that is primarily, though not exclusively, identity-oriented. I call this shift the ethnic turn in political cinema. The ethnic turn has not received much critical scrutiny from film scholars. It tends to be taken for granted as an advance in our thinking about society and a triumph in the fight against racism and Eurocentrism. The aim of my dissertation is to challenge this complacency by asking how ethnicity is constructed—by whom, to the exclusion of what, for what purpose, and why now.Using case studies from Brazil and the United States, I examine the uses of racial and ethnic representation in explicitly political film over the last half century. Both nation-states have inherited a comparable history of African slavery, indigenous genocide, and formidable European immigration. But so far, there has been little comparative work examining the ways in which explicitly political films in these two countries have tried to make sense of racial oppression, how these representations have changed over time, and what those changes indicate about the shifting terms of both national and global debates over increasing social inequality. My dissertation addresses this lacuna

Becoming Mixed: Intercultural Engagement with Japan in Contemporary Australian Literature, Cinema, and Theatre

This thesis examines intercultural engagement between Australians and Japanese in a total of nine examples of contemporary Australian literature, cinema, and theatre. Given the recent political rhetoric surrounding Australia’s role in the ‘Asian century’ and its need to ‘engage’ Asia, this study considers how intercultural exchanges might lead to productive forms of cultural mixture in Australia. I use mixed racial and cultural experiences – such as my own – as a framework to think about the benefits of mixed cultural identification. I argue that cross-cultural engagement can lead individuals and societies to possessing multiple forms of cultural, national, and even racial identification. Individual moments of ‘becoming mixed’ offer ways of thinking about transnational formations of Australian cultural life and identity. This exploration takes up Ghassan Hage’s call to consider the potential of intercultural relations, given the failures of Australian multiculturalism. In addition, by taking own mixed race position into account, this project examines the limitations of the restrictive ‘identity politics’ of many postcolonial or critical race approaches to ethnic and racial identity. I employ Kuan-Hsing Chen’s notion of ‘becoming others’ and place it in conversation with Deleuzian becoming and a version of the subject that draws on Freudian melancholia. Becoming others, or becoming mixed, allows us to consider the new possibilities of cross-cultural identifications that are not bound by rigid ethnic, racial, or national identities. The first section of this thesis examines three road movies centring on interracial desire – Sue Brooks’s Japanese Story (2003), Rachel Lucas’s Bondi Tsunami (2004), and Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967 (2000). The second section analyses three theatre-themed texts (one novel and two plays) that explore ghostly possession and the embodiment of difference – Paddy O’Reilly’s The Factory (2005), Allan Marett’s Oppenheimer Noh (2015), and Mayu Kanamori’s Yasukichi Murakami: Through a Different Lens (2014). The final section examines three novels that centre on wartime reconciliation – Gail Jones’s Dreams of Speaking (2006) Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), and Christine Piper’s After Darkness (2014)

Unbecoming Cinema

Unbecoming Cinema constitutes a welcome addition to texts that provide a film-philosophical perspective on films that otherwise take on and involve difficult subject matter, including in this case suicide, autistic worldviews, hallucinatory aesthetics and vomit-gore. The book in effect argues successfully and intelligently that even though hard to watch, many of these films can provide for viewers an opportunity to come to a renewed understanding of self and world. As a result, the author takes on difficult topics, but brings them to life in an exciting, philosophical fashion that also asks readers to rethink what it is that constitutes cinema