VOL 55.1
spring 2014
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
Andreea Marinescu
The Dream of Memory in Raúl Ruiz’s Memories of Appearances: Life Is a Dream
Adriana Margareta Dancus
Ghosts Haunting the Norwegian House: Racialization in Norway and The Kautokeino Rebellion
Jane Mills
Sojourner Cinema: Seeking and Researching a New Cinematic Category
DOSSIER
Marking Political Cinema
Ewa Mazierska, Guest Editor
Introduction
Alan Sennett
Film Propaganda: Triumph of the Will as a Case Study
Ridvan Peshkopia, Skerdi Zahaj, Greta Hysi
The Myth of Enver Hoxha in the Albanian Cinema of Socialist Realism: An Inquiry into the Psychoanalytical Features of the Myth
Amit Thakkar
Who Is Cuba?: Dispersed Protagonism and Heteroglossia in Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba
Ewa Mazierska
Framing a Terrorist: The Politics of Representation in Ici et ailleurs (1970–1974), Four Lions (2010), and Essential Killing (2010)
EDITORIAL
Point of view. Can a perspective be claimed? Or nationalized? Or politicized? These are some of today’s hottest questions as the backgrounds of migration, colonialism and even adoption are radically foregrounding “how a story is told.” The world’s future morphs around the younger generations’ solidarity and their new concept of what “heritage” means.
This issue scopes out some of these ideas. Each writer looks at definitions of “political” cinema and “global” cinema. Andreea Marinescu, in her “The Dream of Memory in Raúl Ruiz’s Memories of Appearances: Life Is a Dream,” discusses the prolific and brilliantly inventive work of the Chilean director, whose films are not widely known, in part, Marinescu argues, because Ruiz was so politically driven. Ewa Mazierska’s guest-edited dossier, Marking Political Cinema, raises valuable questions about the nature of film and politics, something still loosely defined, and studies the staunch term “political cinema.” Her dossier undoes some of the expectations that have clustered around films as diverse as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will/ Triumph des Willens (DE, 1935) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing (PL/NO/IE/HU/FR, 2010). Adriana Margareta Dancus’s “Ghosts Haunting the Norwegian House: Racialization in Norway and The Kautokeino Rebellion” examines how racism, immigration, and nationalism in Norway manifests on screen. In “Sojourner Cinema: Seeking and Researching a New Cinematic Category,” Jane Mills argues the need to create a new vocabulary in approaches to “global cinema,” especially in the work of filmmakers whose origins and lives begin in one nation and continue in another. Are these hybrids easily categorized? Mills argues that they aren’t.
-Drake Stutesman
fall 2014
VOL 55.2
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
Allyson Nadia Field
To Journey Imperfectly: Black Cinema Aesthetics and the Filmic
Language of Sankofa
Noa Steimatsky
Pass/Fail: The Antonioni Screen Test
Stephen Charbonneau
Exporting Fogo: Participatory Filmmaking, War on Poverty, and
the Politics of Visibility
Jon Gartenberg
NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films
EDITORIAL
This issue looks at representation and questions not only if representation is possible but, out of the blurred concept of “representing,” examines what is formed. Four essays explore, in entirely different subjects, ideas around how far and how much further a given representation can take a given subject.
Allyson Nadia Field, in “To Journey Imperfectly: Black Cinema Aesthetics and the Filmic Language of Sankofa,” discusses Haile Gerima’s means of subverting cinema practices and storytelling in his 1993 film Sankofa. Noa Steimatsky, in “Pass/Fail: The Antonioni Screen Test,” discusses Michelangelo Antonioni’s exposure or suppression of a “self ” in “Il provino/The Screen Test,” his little known, little studied film in Dino De Laurentiis’s three part, I tre volti/ Three Faces of a Woman (IT, 1965). Stephen Charbonneau’s “Exporting Fogo: Participatory Filmmaking, War on Poverty, and the Politics of Visibility” gives a detailed account of the late sixties’ collaborative Canadian and American film project to document lives of a farming community. Jon Gartenberg celebrates the ornate history of how the “city symphony” genre rendered New York from early twentieth-century actualitiés to late century avant-garde in his “NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films.”
-Drake Stutesman