Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Becoming Citizen:Spatial and Expressive Acts when Strangers Move In

This article examines the conditions and expressions of how refugees in Denmark become citizens. Through visual and collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, which took place during 2017, the case study follows the everyday life of an Eritrean community living in a former retirement home in the town of Hørsholm. The article investigates how becoming citizen can be understood as mediatised, spatial and expressive negotiations between the refugees and the local society. We look at the conditions of becoming citizen through the local framing of the Eritrean community—understood as political, social, cultural and material framing conditions. We draw on Engin Isin’s concept of performative citizenship (Isin, 2017), and we suggest how everyday life and becoming potentially hold the capacity to re-formulate and add to the understanding of citizenship. We suggest that becoming citizen is not merely about obtaining Danish citizenship and civic rights nor tantamount with settling down. On the contrary, the analysis shows that becoming citizen is a process of expressed and performed desires connected to global becomings beyond the sedentary citizenship, and therefore holds capacity for transforming and diversifying the notion of citizenship

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Spiritual Flavours: Reflections on using creative practice to explore food and religion in a multi-faith suburb

This practice-related doctoral research comparatively investigates the relationship between food and religious material practices of several faith communities in Ealing, a suburb in West London. These include a Synagogue, a Sri Lankan Hindu Temple, a mosque, a Sikh Gurdwara, an Anglican church, a multicultural Roman Catholic church and an ethnically diverse Pentecostal church. The research is centred around the development of an arts project, Spiritual Flavours, which comprises a photographic series, a twenty-eight-minute film and a recipe photobook. Whilst the photographic series uses a formal approach to explore the spatial arrangements of commensality within religious buildings, the photobook and the film focus on personal narratives, bringing together a diverse range of intimate experiences of food and spirituality across both domestic and worship spaces. The film also produces a rhythmic and multi-sensory experience by creating visual and sonic synchronies and asynchronies across the three main protagonists through the use of the split-screen technique and the creative mixing of sounds of cooking and prayer. With a very interdisciplinary approach, drawing from visual cultures, cultural studies, and social sciences, the thesis analyses the kinds of knowledge that each of these visual elements produce individually and combined. Here, it specifically draws on literatures on material religion, on food, memory and the senses, and on performativity, to explore the centrality of food in everyday religious practices in ways that are inseparable from the material practices involved in the creative process itself. This forms the basis for further analysis of the way the project produces ‘multifaith’ understandings of culinary religious practices as sensory, affective and embodied (spiritual) practices; as well how these intersect with other personal and socio-cultural dimensions, such as experiences of migration, identity, home and community. This research also develops an original exploration of the opportunities and challenges of visual practice as research practice. It contributes to understandings of participatory creative methodologies in how its outputs produce new multi-faith relationships and disseminate research knowledge that is accountable and meaningful to the participants and communities involved, as well as wider audience

Visual Methodology in Migration Studies

This open access book explores the use of visual methods in migration studies through a combination of theoretical analyses and empirical studies. The first section looks at how various visual methods, including photography, film, and mental maps, may be used to analyse the spatial presence of migrants. The second section addresses the processual building of narratives around migration, thereby using formats such as film and visual essay, and reflecting upon the ways they become carriers and mediators of both story and theory within the subject of migration. Section three focuses on vulnerable communities and discusses how visual methods can empower these communities, thereby also focusing on the theoretical and ethical implications of migration. The fourth section addresses the issue of migrant representation in visual discourses. The fifth and concluding section comprises of a single methodological chapter which systematizes the use of visual methods in migration studies across disciplines, with regard to their empirical, theoretical, and ethical implications. Multidisciplinary in character, this book is an interesting read for students and migration scholars who engage with visual methods, as well as practitioners, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, curators of exhibitions who engage with a topic of migration visually.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Aesthetic Citizenship: Popular Culture, Migrant Youth, and the Making of \u27World Class\u27 Delhi

Delhi has nearly doubled in population since the early 1990s due to in-migration (censusindia.gov, 2011). These migrants, like migrants around the world, strive to adapt to their new surroundings by producing themselves in ways which make them socially, economically, and politically viable. My project examines how recent international and intranational immigrant youth who have come to Delhi to partake in its economic possibilities and, in some cases, to escape political uncertainty, are utilizing globally circulating popular cultural forms to make themselves visible in a moment when the city strives to recast its image as a world class destination for roaming capital (Roy, 2011). I focus on two super diverse settlement communities in South Delhi to explore the citizenship making claims of immigrant youth who, to date, have been virtually invisible in academic and popular narratives of the city. Specifically, I follow three groups of ethnically diverse migrant youth from these two settlement communities as they engage with hip hop, a popular cultural form originating in Black American communities in the 1970s (Chang, 2006; Morgan, 2009; Rose, 1994). As hip hop\u27s music and its practices gain popularity amongst youth in Delhi from across a wide spectrum of class and ethnic positions, I trace how these migrant youth utilize its styles and globally reaching networks coupled with inexpensive digital capture technology to fashion themselves and their settlement communities as part of a world class urbanity in the making.