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Josef Fares’ Zozo as accented cinema
In 2005, the Lebanese-Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares, who had attained recognition in Sweden through the immigrant comedies Jalla! Jalla! (2000) and Kopps (2003), presented his third feature film and first drama, Zozo, inspired by Fares’s own migration to Sweden. Set in 1987 Beirut, Zozo portrays a ten-year boy who loses his parents during the Lebanese Civil War and who journeys to reunite with his grandparents already settled in Sweden. In Sweden, Zozo is forced to learn the host country’s language quickly and to understand the unwritten rules of his new culture. Like his grandparents, he will probably always have an accent and be recognizably the “other.” The film became Sweden’s national submission to the 78th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and its nomination not only raised questions on what Sweden and Swedishness mean in a contemporary global world, but it also reexamined the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory in a borderless Europe.
In this essay I argue that Zozo is an illustration of accented film, which means the film is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but a combination of both. Influenced by his deterritorialization from Lebanon and his current life in Sweden, the cinematographic stylistic choices of Josef Fares exhibit a “double consciousness” - multiple cultural identities at once. To further understand the Lebanese and Swedish elements in the film, I analyze how elements such as chronotopes (time-space), border crossing, epistolarity, and double consciousness are inscribed in the film. In addition, I use Laura U. Marks’ concept of fossils, radioactive recollection-objects. By employing Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema theory, I hope to explain how Josef Fares is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but an individual with multicultural identities, which reflect in the elements of the narrative and cinematographic style.Germanic Studie
Simplicial Multivalued Maps and the Witness Complex for Dynamical Analysis of Time Series
Topology based analysis of time-series data from dynamical systems is
powerful: it potentially allows for computer-based proofs of the existence of
various classes of regular and chaotic invariant sets for high-dimensional
dynamics. Standard methods are based on a cubical discretization of the
dynamics and use the time series to construct an outer approximation of the
underlying dynamical system. The resulting multivalued map can be used to
compute the Conley index of isolated invariant sets of cubes. In this paper we
introduce a discretization that uses instead a simplicial complex constructed
from a witness-landmark relationship. The goal is to obtain a natural
discretization that is more tightly connected with the invariant density of the
time series itself. The time-ordering of the data also directly leads to a map
on this simplicial complex that we call the witness map. We obtain conditions
under which this witness map gives an outer approximation of the dynamics, and
thus can be used to compute the Conley index of isolated invariant sets. The
method is illustrated by a simple example using data from the classical H\'enon
map.Comment: laTeX, 9 figures, 32 page
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