Showing papers in "Journal of Film and Video in 2015"

Filmed Ethnography or Ethnographic Film?: Voice and Positionality in Ethnographic, Documentary, and Feminist Film

Abstract: And tomorrow? Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable colorvideo, video editing, and instant replay ("instant feedback"). Which is to say, the time of the joint dream of Vertov and Flaherty, of a mechanical cine-eye-ear and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens. At that point, anthropologists will no longer control the monopoly on observation; their culture and they themselves will be observed and recorded. And it is in that way that ethnographic film will help us to "share" anthropology.-Rouch (46)HIN 2009 I DIRECTED AND PRODUCED, along with Alexia Prichard, Soma Girls, a twentyseven-minute documentary that explores the lives of children of sex workers in Kolkata, India. Alexia, whom I met at a start-up cable channel in New York City in 2001, told me about New Light,1 a nonprofit, community-based organization in Kolkata, a city that is my mother's ancestral home and where I had spent many summers as a child. New Light conducts community work in the Kalighat area, and Alexia, impressed with their activism, wanted to collaborate on a film about them. I politely declined her suggestion in 2001 for I had several concerns. One, I feared that Alexia had asked me to collaborate on this film because I was Indian and that my involvement would be intended simply to give the film a stamp of authenticity. Two, and more importantly, I did not want to add to what is an oversaturated body of work, especially in Western media, featuring poor, malnourished images of Indian women and children in need of saving. To my mind, trafficking in such images perpetuates the status quo, reifies Orientalist assumptions, and further alienates those whom we claim to care about. Alexia was incredibly persistent over the ensuing years, and as I got to know her better, I became more trusting of her intentions. In 2006, we decided to work on a film together about New Light's community activism. Alexia made a reconnaissance trip in early 2007 without me, and we returned together a year later, me with toddler in tow, and began work on what eventually became Soma Girls (2009).Borders and Boundaries: Anthropology and Ethnographic and Documentary FilmHaving worked as an experimental and documentary filmmaker for several years, I returned to graduate school to study anthropology in 2001. Despite slippages between the two disciplines, I discovered some reassuring overlaps between documentary filmmaking and ethnographic fieldwork. Both methodologies look to document and understand the human experience through careful research and the willing participation of subjects. Both struggle with issues of power and representation of their informants, and thoughtful anthropologists and filmmakers worry about the ethical consequences of the end product. These overlaps aside, during the shooting of Soma Girls in Kolkata, I wondered why I never described Soma Girls as an ethnographic film (as opposed to a documentary). I certainly never hesitated to call my doctoral research "ethnographic," which was considered an essential badge of honor for good anthropological training. If it was permissible, even prideful, for me to be working on a written ethnography of odissi dancers in India and the United States, why did I hesitate to call Soma Girls an ethnographic film? What were some of the key differences between documentary filmmaking and ethnographic filmmaking? Had ethnographic film become unfashionable, and if so, when and why?2 Were there differences in the approach to ethnographic cinema in the United States and other parts of the world? After all, both methodologies involve significant immersion in the community and a good level of participant observation. Although I am certainly not the first to raise such questions, I was interested in unearthing my hesitation-and this hesitation became a point of entry to examine some of the differences and similarities in what may be two approaches to filmmaking, ethnographic and documentary. …

The Unreliable Narrator in Documentary

Abstract: IN A MEDIA-SATURATED WORLD, it can be very hard to parse who and what to believe. With the lines between documentary and fiction increasingly blurred in the aesthetics of contemporary filmmaking, documentary practitioners are faced with ongoing questions about the nature of documentary "truth"-from analyzing how the conventions of documentary realism function to renegotiating the terms of documentary's truth contract with its audiences. These age-old questions are enormous in scope, inviting debates that do not necessarily lead to clear, concrete answers. But considering that documentary is often packaged as entertainment or produced to advance an agenda, reviving and reconsidering these kinds of questions is necessary not only to whet the art and craftof making documentaries, but also to enrich the dialogue that occurs among documentary viewers after they have seen a film. Unraveling the complex knot of power embedded in representations of documentary "truth" is an essential practice for filmmakers and spectators seeking to challenge systems of oppression as well as those simply seeking to become more self-aware and informed about the world. Unreliable narrators are merely one thread in that knot, but a discourse about the unreliable narrator as a construct in the documentary form is nevertheless a vital component of these larger conversations.Whether in literature, film, or theoretical essays, the unreliable narrator most often appears in the context of fictional storytelling; far fewer examples of the unreliable narrator have been theorized in nonfiction or documentary filmmaking. Perhaps this is for the obvious reason that the presence of an unreliable narrator suggests a falsification of truth that would seem to invoke a world of fiction. It could be argued that an unreliable narrator works against the very definition of documentary filmmaking; however, documentary filmmaking has always had a tenuous relationship with the ideal of truth. If one accepts the premise that both truth and misrepresentations of truth coexist in the documentary tradition, then the construct of an unreliable narrator can help draw attention to the rhetorical nature of documentary "truth."To explore these issues, this analysis will begin by drawing upon the work of Wayne Booth to establish a working definition of an "unreliable narrator." Revisiting a well-known example of the unreliable narrator in the film Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa (1950) and applying theory developed by Seymour Chatman will help elucidate this definition and make an important distinction between how the unreliable narrator is constructed in written texts versus films. Since documentaries function within a different rhetorical dimension than fictional films, the analysis will proceed by exploring how the concept of the unreliable narrator in documentary has different effects and consequences than in the world of fiction. Close readings of two contemporary documentaries, Laura Poitras's The Oath (2010) and Banksy's Exit Through the GiftShop (2010), will serve as the central focus of these arguments. These two documentaries-one about the war on terrorism, the other about the commercialization of art-are similar in the manner that they suggest the unreliability of their protagonists, but differ greatly in their presentation as reliable documents. Additional scrutiny of Atomic Cafe (1982), directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty, and Luis Bunuel's Land Without Bread (1932) will provide points of comparison to further delineate the significance of precise narrational positioning for framing unreliability in the documentary form. These case studies will illustrate variations in how unreliable narrators are constructed and in how the unreliable narrator functions relative to the perceived intentions of the implied author in each film. Ultimately, this analysis will interrogate how the use of an unreliable narrator in documentary can be a powerful tool to help spectators engage actively with documentaries, invite constructive questioning and critical thinking about the authorial power of filmic narration, and open up more profound layers of meaning for viewers in interpreting films. …

Interactive Documentaries: Navigation and Design

Abstract: the interactive documentary, still barely emergent, has attracted both enthusiasm and analysis. Despite the cautions of Lev Manovich against the inexactitude of the term "interactive" (since all art at some level is interactive), the term "interactive" has come to be generally used to designate multimedia, mostly screen-based storytelling. Sessions at film festivals and even entire conferences on interactive documentary are now standard. At the standard-setting South by Southwest (SXSW) event in Austin, Texas, a strand of interactive documentary that finds overlapping audiences between SXSW's Interactive and Film conferences has become a place where even standing room is highly prized. Tribeca, Sheffield, and IDFA (International Film Festival at Amsterdam) film festivals have interactive strands/conferences. Events such as "Future of StoryTelling," "TransVergence," and "Power to the Pixel" are among the many venues where professionals exchange stories and hints about making these new works. Entities as diverse as the US Army (Myers),1 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and US public television stations ("Localore") 2 are developing interactive projects (Stogner).TaxonomiesAt the same time, early academic work is being done on taxonomies for interactive documentary (Nash). Indeed, the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, founded in 2012, features a research forum in which this is one of the issues. One way to organize the categories is by technical approaches: Web documentary, transmedia, and interactive documentary (O'Flynn). In this taxonomy, Web documentaries, such as the series Black Folk Don't (blackfolkdont.com, since 2012), use the Web as a distribution platform for typically static material, which the viewer can select from. Transmedia projects are constructed across various platforms, as in the Exit Zero Project (exitzeroproject.org, 2013), which occurs across a book, a film, and a Web database, and Reinvention Stories (reinventionstories.org, 2013), featuring short films, a tour with audio and video stops, and a site for contributed knowledge. (Transmedia projects may also involve performances and geo-located games such as scavenger hunts.) Although some of these applications may be interactive, some transmedia projects allow only a selection of material rather than contributions. Finally, interactive documentaries have user participation built into their action and typically feature databases as integral to their actions. Just a Reflektor (justareflektor. com, 2014) is one example.Other conceptualizations are also being tried out. Sandra Gaudenzi has created taxonomies rooted in experience, describing interactive documentaries in terms of how viewers are positioned (e.g., conversational, experiential) and as semi-closed (user can choose what material to browse), semi-open (user can add material but not change structure), or open (system adapts to all inputs). These categories overlap with O'Flynn's. Maggie Burnette Stogner argues for three nonexclusive categories, based not on conceptual purity but on perceived areas of media activity, within a general trend of production that she calls "user-centric": participatory (an entirely distributed and mostly unstructured experience), collective (an experience that involves participation within a structure), and mobile (in which participation is often overlaid on the physical world and experiences within it).StoryCode designers, professionals who create transmedia works, describe the range with the graphic (Abiodun and Knowlton) shown in Figure 1.Thus, not even taxonomies are yet stable in this kind of work. The conceptual problems in imagining such work are complicated not only by the level of interactivity but also by the fact that the interactivity takes place, potentially, across so many spaces and platforms in a user's life. The environment within which such work is located now encompasses both physical and virtual space, represented wryly by Gary Hayes as shown in Figure 2. …

Documentary Animism: Material Politics and Sensory Ethics in The Act of Killing (2012)

Abstract: Ethics and the Difficulties of Documentary ActivismEARLY IN THE ACT OF KILLING, we meet Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, both in high spirits as they plan to make a film. Anwar tells Herman, "Whether this ends up on the big screen, or only on TV, it doesn't matter; . . . this is who we are, so in the future people will remember." We find variations on this sentiment in many documentaries: the participants want to tell their version of the truth. Of course, Anwar's opening affirmation is not straightforward. Anwar and Herman are two small-time gangsters living in Medan, and Anwar is complicit in Indonesia's murderous past-the horrific genocide of 1965-66. Today these killers lead comfortable lives while socializing with popular paramilitary organizations, media moguls, and high-ranking politicians. The Act of Killing documents a bizarre camaraderie of murderers and narrates their rise to fame, celebrity, and stardom as they work toward a cinematic autobiography.Following a military coup in 1965, a new Indonesian government formed under President Suharto. The military hired out paramilitary death squads to cleanse the nation of dissenting factions, targeting the world's third-largest communist party (the PKI), the intellectual community, artists, and the ethnic Chinese minority. The film titles cautiously cite the number at one million disappeared, but authority figures within the diegesis testify on a state-television talk show and boast of 2.5 million deceased under the military regime's two-year transition to democracy. The contemporary Indonesian government is a development from the cultural and political foundations laid by the massacres. The state currently allows Anwar and fellow "premans," as they are colloquially known, to live freely and without punitive measures.The word "preman" roughly translates into "gangster" and is an etymological derivative of the English phrase "free men." This libertarian freedom exists as an unchecked and approbated criminality, as the premans are softly endorsed by democratically elected politicians, often complicit in the illegal acts themselves. Benedict Anderson clarifies the half-authorized status of the premans as "a sort of half-hidden lefthand of the New Order Leviathan: uncivil servants" (281). The premans speak openly about their past crimes without fear of judicial or social consequence and show little regard for global attitudes toward genocide. In the film, they favorably compare their past deeds to those of Idi Amin and the Nazis, laugh at the tenets of the Geneva Convention, display flagrant misogyny, and brag about raping underage women.Anwar and his gang of death squad associates have origins as the "movie theater gangsters" who made their first illicit marks by selling movie tickets to popular Hollywood cinema in the early 1960s-a practice banned by the then-influential PKI. Throughout Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary, these men testify that the embargo on Western cinema infringed on their business since Hollywood films were the most popular and greatest attraction for their customers. The killers insist that the PKI boycott of Hollywood movies engendered hatred for the people they subsequently murdered. This entanglement of murder, culture, and diaspora precipitates one of the more shocking claims advanced in the film: the premans contend that Western cinematic aesthetics helped guide their hands in the contracted assassination of Indonesia's communists and many others. Anwar and company are fluent in film history and venerate Hollywood. As Anwar lightly points out, watching a "happy film like an Elvis Presley musical" would allow him to "kill in a happy way." The cinephilia of Anwar and his friends inspired Oppenheimer to adopt an unusual documentary technique that defines The Act of Killing: the killers reanimate their memories and dreams of the murders by making an autobiographical film. The result of the killers' cinema is striking and surreal in its beautiful renditions of familiar narrative genres including Westerns, film noir, musicals, melodrama, and horror. …

Performing Language, Animating Poetry: Kinetic Text in Experimental Cinema

Abstract: LANGUAGE, BOTH WRITTEN AND SPOKEN, IS so ubiquitous within the field of experimental film practice that singling out a particular thread or trajectory that would allow us to grasp, summarize, or theorize this interdisciplinary tendency at first seems like an insurmountable challenge. And this is even before we are led into the hazy definitions of either "language" or "experimental." Our concern with language in the cinema must first of all be dissociated from the language ofc inema (although the two frequently, and obviously, intersect, as my discussion of the work of Peter Rose later in this article will demonstrate). When speaking (of) the language o/xinema, we are dealing first and foremost with a system of signification, a way of reading the screen by breaking down the image into a series of semantic units. Deriving from structuralist semiotics, this association of film with language has long dominated the field of film studies, perhaps overshadowing issues of language within the cinema.1 In commercial cinema, language is, in most cases, subordinated to the image-the "of" and the "in" are thus one and the same. But in experimental, or avant-garde, practice, the dialogue between film and language manitests itself as an interdisciplinary exchange that seeks to overturn this word-image hierarchy. What I am interested in here is the way experimental cinema makes language visible, inscribing it (sometimes literally) into the formal and conceptual fabric of the film."Visible language" is visible in the sense that words are physically, materially present on the screen; "screen writings" are, in Scott MacDonald's words, a literary engagement with the screen as a surface as well as a window.2 From this perspective, "reading the screen" is not simply a process of understanding the visual language of the cinema; it can also be framed in terms of a complex oscillation between viewing (images) and reading (text). Sometimes, as in the films and videos of Peter Rose and Gary Hill, the spoken and the written word are brought together, emphasizing the concrete visual and acoustic properties of language. Often, as seen/read in the works of Michael Snow and the recent Internet artists Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the text is the image, the only visual signifier on the screen. Frequently, and in most of these cases, language is used performatively-the filmmaker "speaks" through the text or inscribes him- or herself in/onto the film through the gesture of writing. But the framework of performance also allows us to think about the role these texts play in acting out discourse, communication, and experience. Using the films of American artist Peter Rose as a case study, this article discusses the origin(ality) of kinetic texts in experimental cinema, tracing a trajectory from the screen writings of early narrative cinema through avant-garde films and theory of the 1920s to visual and concrete poetry, ending with a discussion of contemporary examples of Internet poetry. In taking this approach, I hope to draw out the historical relevance of experimental cinema in the context of word-image discourse, but also to open up the discourse itself to considerations of new artistic encounters in the realms of the digital.Early Perspectives on Screen TextsFixed camera position on a dusty tree-lined lane receding into the background: from a distance, a horse-drawn cart appears and gradually moves into the foreground, disappearing past the camera and sending a cloud of dust across its field of vision. As the dust settles, another moving object emerges from the same spot in the background, only this time it turns out to be a motorcar, visibly out of control and veering dangerously toward the camera. When the car eventually consumes the frame, the physical collision is expressed in the sudden appearance of a black screen, onto which flashes, in quick succession, a series of words written directly onto the filmstrip: "?? / !!! / Oh! / Mother / will / be / pleased. …

"We Are All Uxbal": Narrative Complexity in the Urban Borderlands in Biutiful

Abstract: HALFWAY THROUGH THE NARRATIVE OF BIUTIFUL (2010), the film's central character, Uxbal (Javier Bardem), lost in a spiral of misery, suffering, and death, walks along an overpass at sunset, speaking on his cell phone. As it follows the protagonist's progress, the frame lingers on the hustle and bustle of the urban spectacle underneath, the colorful and restless city competing for attention with the character. Oblivious to the life around him, Uxbal suddenly stops to look at a flock of migrant birds flying away over a dark blue sky, which lifts him momentarily from his wretchedness and transports him into a brief reverie. The shot immediately strikes a chord with those familiar with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's oeuvre. A similar shot of a flock of birds at dusk precedes Paul's (Sean Penn) initial ruminations about death and life at the beginning of the scrambled narrative of 21 Grams (2003). In Biutiful, this climactic scene, played to the eerie and mesmerizing mood of Sebastian Escofet's "Meditation #9," simultaneously encapsulates both the film's tight, even suffocating focus on a single protagonist and its ultimate inability to tell a conventional single-protagonist narrative. Although the scene-and the film in general- focuses on Uxbal's relentless journey toward death, the myriad lives and stories around him are presented with such vividness and poignancy that they challenge and disrupt the movie's efforts to stick to its single protagonist.This article explores the coexistence of these two divergent narrative drives in Biutiful and their implications in the construction of the film's central character. In the underbelly of the city of Barcelona, Uxbal makes a living as a middleman between undocumented Chinese immigrants, Senegalese vendors, Spanish foremen, and corrupt police officers. When he is diagnosed with an advanced prostate cancer, he feels the urge to put his affairs in order, which in his case means finding a reliable person to take care of and raise his two children. When the bipolar mother of his two children proves unfit for the job, he finds a surrogate mother and unexpected caregiver in Ige (Diaryatou Daff), a Senegalese immigrant whose husband has recently been deported. His attempt to "improve" the living conditions of the Chinese workers at the warehouse results in the death of twentyfive people, an event that precipitates Uxbal's free fall into a spiral of suffering, misery, and death. Uxbal's centrality in the various border narratives that make up the film turns him into an embodiment of the concept of the border. His character is impregnated with the stories, experiences, and suffering of those human beings-mainly undocumented immigrants- whom he comes across in his restless wanderings in the streets of Barcelona. He is both the node that joins the rest of the characters and the line that separates them. He also represents the intrinsic ambivalence of the border itself: nurturing and destructive, ripe for both transnational exchanges and ethnic violence.At first sight, Inarritu's reliance on a central character who guides spectators through the narrative in an almost strictly chronological manner constitutes a drastic difference from his three previous features: Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams, and Babel (2006). It might be argued that the most obvious reason for this change was the end of his collaboration with scriptwriter and novelist Guillermo Arriaga. Arriaga had been, along with the director, the most visible figure of a creative team that had remained stable since Amores Perros and that also included cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, production designer Brigitte Broch, and editor Stephen Mirrione. Although Arriaga had written the script of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada for director Tommy Lee Jones (2005), and both Santaolalla and, especially, Prieto had continued to work with other directors, their most significant work had been done in Inarritu's films, and the strength of these movies had clearly derived from their collaborative work. …

The Convergence of Eco-Activism, Neoliberalism, and Reality TV in Whale Wars

Abstract: a strange convergence arose in 2007 as Animal Planet, a subsidiary of Discovery Communications, hired Marjorie Kaplan as president and general manager to rebrand the network's image and boost its ratings. Following on the heels of the popularity of Discovery's Deadliest Catch, a fishing show where crews encounter rough seas and salty personalities, Animal Planet was charged with creating highoctane, human-interest stories that could raise viewership for the station.1At the same time, Paul Watson, founder of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, was conceptualizing how his group's direct actions against illegal Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean might make good television. Watson, who has remained one of the savviest activists in mobilizing video and film around animal rights campaigns since he first worked with Greenpeace in the early 1970s, reflected, "The biggest show on Discovery at the time was about a bunch of men going into very rough waters in very remote areas and catching crabs. I said, 'Well, you know, we can go into even more remote waters, even rougher waters with worse weather conditions, and save whales'" (Goh).As a result, in November 2008 Whale Wars premiered on Animal Planet. Within a year, it became the network's most-watched show and helped raise viewership by over 15 percent (Crupi 6). Along similar lines, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society halved Japanese whaling during the series' first four seasons and forced the Japanese to temporarily stop whaling by February 2011 (Oliver). All in all, it appeared that good television and effective activism could coexist.In this article I investigate some of the ways in which Sea Shepherd and Paul Watson employ a spectacle-driven activism in order to popularize their anti-whaling message and produce fodder for a reality television series. In particular, I locate two central themes and accompanying desires that connect certain anarchist-inflected brands of direct-action activism with commercial television: (1) the reassertion of patriarchal authority and hierarchy in a seemingly "feminized" neoliberal age; and (2) the attempt to establish a nonalienated life where work, leisure, and nature seamlessly interconnect. Whale Wars provides an interesting moment where a certain strain of direct action, activist media-making, and commercial television production converge. Unlike most research that contrasts radical media against commercial productions, an analysis of the first five seasons of Whale Wars will explore how certain elements of each feed into one another and, more specifically, will demonstrate how reality television mobilizes a belief in a spectacle-based activism that simultaneously promotes and undermines such animal rights campaigns. Overall, Whale Wars demonstrates the promises and pitfalls when such activism gains access to commercial mass distribution.2Image Events and the Neoliberal Citizenry of Reality TelevisionAs Kevin DeLuca notes, groups such as Greenpeace, the Animal Liberation Front, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rely primarily on direct-action image events to sustain, popularize, and build upon their activism. In a society of the spectacle where one is awash in a constant sea of imagery, animal rights campaigns have used dramatic direct-action stunts in order to garner media coverage that challenges "the hegemonic discourse of industrialism and the received meanings of the ideographs progress, nature, humanity, reason, and technology" (DeLuca 51-52). Activism and the spectacle suddenly become coterminous. Media coverage serves not as a byproduct of such activism but as a key ingredient in organizing it, popularizing its message, and hopefully forcing those who abuse animals and/or the earth to stop under global public pressure and scrutiny.This type of image-based activism has been on the ascendency since the 1970s. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger observed back in 1970, "[t]he question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. …

Reality-Based Television Versus the Civil Right to Privacy: A Battle of Access

Abstract: the general public has come under closer scrutiny from those who seek to obtain information about them, whether they like it or not, from technologies such as hidden cameras, Internet spyware, miniature recording devices, and super-telescopic photography lenses (e.g., Elder, Johnson, and Rishwain). Society's interest in "voyeurism" or "social curiosity" (Baruh 202) appears to fuel a growing genre of television programming called reality TV. Its popularity has influenced traditional television journalistic newsgathering practices and along the way has created legal challenges regarding the public's right to privacy.In Wilson v. Layne and Berger v. Hanlon, the US Supreme Court's decisions affected newsgathering techniques that can be used by journalists while accompanying law enforcement officials during the execution of a search warrant. Shulman v. Group W Productions further altered the media's process of gathering information by clarifying access to emergency situations and access to patients where guarded personal information is exchanged between the victim and an emergency respondent.These decisions were meant to provide media outlets with clear boundaries regarding the public's right to know versus the public's right to privacy or the First Amendment versus the Fourth (Esch; Gossett; C. Calvert). The media outlets in question were print and broadcast news organizations in the Wilson and Berger decisions. The courts did not specify whether "alternative" programming provided by independent television production companies was included under the "media ridealong" decision.With the rise of reality-type information gathering, the question remains of whether or not these legal lines of privacy have been crossed (Mast). The theoretical and empirical context of this research is to explore implications of legal decisions regarding privacy rights and apply them to "justice" (Erikson) and "accident and emergency format" (Kilborn; Bondebjerg) reality-type television programming.TheoreticalOrbe suggests using diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to critical media scholarship (350). Cross-disciplinary research methods are employed during this article's exploratory study, including "genre criticism" (Butler 432) examining production techniques, critical analysis of reality television (Lunt; Hight), and critical legal studies or "empirical legal studies" (Trubek 585), where legal concepts are applied to sociological inquiry.Previous critical legal studies (CLS) are associated with empirical application of social science and research on the "behavior of legal actors" (Trubek 600). Trubek postulates that a relationship exists between "legal beliefs and practice" (604) and social order and action. "Critical empiricism" (Coombe 71) in law is applicable in film theory, the "ideological efficacy" (118) of television. Causal empirical research in CLS, proposes Tushnet, is an "interminable critique" (516) on social values. Miller posits the field of television studies borrows from CLS (3). CLS allows an opening in sociological research, with legal foundations providing a basis for critical application.This article examines the rise of the tabloid journalism type of reality television (Cavender and Fishman; B. Calvert et al.; Turner) and applies Prosser's torts on privacy to the production of nonfiction documentary-style programs, otherwise noted as reality-type television. The article focuses on one state case, Shulman v. Group W, and two federal cases, Berger v. Hanlon and Wilson v. Layne, to the application of reality television programming.Reality Television DefinedThere are many definitions of reality-based television programming. Prosise and Johnson, expanding on Cavender and Fishman, indicate a belief that reality programming "blurs the line between news and entertainment . . . fact and fiction" (Prosise and Johnson 73), where the videotaped interactions are presented to the audience as real rather than fictionalized encounters (e. …

Waltz with Bashir (2008): Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary

Abstract: A movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it.-Anthony Lane, New Yorker, 5 January 2009Ari Folman has definitively moved the frontier between fiction and documentary.-Philippe Azoury, Liberation, May 2008It's a shattering war film, full of guilt and shock, and finding a new medium for expressing and exploring familiar themes.-Jason Solomons, Observer, 18 May 2008Could easily turn out to be one of the most powerful statements of this Cannes and will leave its mark forever on the ethics of war films in general.-Dan Fainaru, Screen Daily, 15 May 2008thus ran some of the glowing reviews published following director Ari Folman's triumphant premiere of his animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008) at the Festival de Cannes, where it was greeted with a strong standing ovation. Next came a series of important film festival nominations and awards, including Best Picture at the International Documentary Association Awards, Best Animated Feature by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards, the latter of which is typically a category devoted to fiction. The contradictory status of these awards-some for fiction, some for documentary-reflected the hybrid nature of this emerging subgenre of the animated documentary and the growing acceptance within the industry of willful blurring of once-strict borders between genres and techniques. It seemed as though the international film community had embraced Folman's film for its unique blending of modes of representation, simultaneously reconfiguring the ethics of the nonfiction film and heralding an important new discourse for the animated genre. But such a lauded film deserves closer attention for how exactly it navigates these complicated politics of representation and ethics, especially in reference to the traumatic experience of war.Often billed as the first feature-length animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir actually follows an extensive history of short and feature-length nonfiction animations dating almost as far back as the invention of the motion picture camera itself. The most notable of its early predecessors is The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) by Winsor McCay, considered to be one of the earliest animated documentaries, if not the first. Functioning as a short newsreel, much like its early documentary contemporary The March of Time, the short film was intended as a way to depict an historical event-the 1915 German U-boat attack on a transatlantic passenger ship, which resulted in a huge number of American casualties-that took place without being documented photographically (DelGaudio 189). In the absence of any archival footage capturing the tragedy as it unfolded, McCay's hand-drawn images offer the most realistic, alternative depiction of the event.In his linear, step-by-step retelling of the ship's final moments prior to its sinking, McCay crafted a dramatic call to arms for the American people against this German aggression. The intention is clearly one of propaganda, with emotional moments drawn for maximum emotional impact, including the life rafts being lowered into the water just as a second torpedo strikes the ship and, most chilling of all, a woman holding her child as she sinks beneath the water's surface and drowns. "The babe that clung to his mother's breast cried out to the world-TO AVENGE the most violent cruelty that was ever perpetrated upon an unsuspecting and innocent people": this is just one of many titles interspersed between the animated sequences that drove the impassioned depiction forward. Etched in a stunning black-and-white graphic style notable for its detailed, realistic depiction of the violent events, the film has the effect of filling the viewer with the strongest visceral sense of the catastrophe without the aid of a single frame of photographically captured reality.Although Winsor McCay's focus may have been on one singular event in time-one that helped draw the United States into the war-his film is notable for how it attempts to capture the essence of a tragedy via the animated filmic image. …

No Parents, No Church, No Authorities in Our Films: Exploitation Movies, the Youth Audience, and Roger Corman's Counterculture Trilogy

Abstract: From Bikinis to Bikersin early june 1966, james h. nicholson, president of American International Pictures (AIP), the US film industry's most important "major-minor" studio and its leading producer of low-budget, independent movies for youth audiences, announced a sharp change of direction for his company. The era of saucy-butwholesome "beach and bikini" pictures that had been AIP's stock-in-trade for the past three years-ever since the success of Beach Party (1963) had birthed a lucrative cycle of movies built around the vacation frolics of scantily clad high-school hotties-was over. Henceforth, AIP would offer its customers stronger, more challenging fare in the form of what Nicholson called "a series of protest films" (qtd. in "From Sand in Bikini") designed to both reflect and exploit the turbulent, antiauthoritarian turn taken by American youth culture at mid-decade.1The first of what Box Office labeled AIP's "protest dramas" was The Wild Angels (1966), according to Variety an "almost documentary style" depiction of the transgressive lifestyles of California's outlaw motorcycle gangs most closely associated with the Hell's Angels, which were then enjoying a period of nationwide notoriety thanks to exposes in the Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, the Nation, and Time and Life magazines.2 Only a couple of years before, Nicholson had stridently defended his beachbikini pictures as "the epitome of morality," deflecting accusations of prurience by insisting that "there are no overtly sexy sequences and no sex talk among the kids"; "the stars of AIP's beach pictures," he noted, "are always talking about getting married" (qtd. in McGee 219). Now, though, his company reveled shamelessly in the shockingly antisocial content of its product. AIP's publicity notes for the press screening of The Wild Angels sensationalized the film's biker gang as "a group of fanatical rebels . . . bent on kicks" that, "guided by a morality of its own," seeks to "revenge itself harshly on society . . . for what it feels are unwarranted intrusions and frustrations" (The Wild Angels pressbook). A provocative advertising campaign poster screamed, "Their credo is violence, their god is hate!" And reviewers played their part, dwelling on the film's multiple instances of depravity and moral turpitude: "a sick, unclean, revolting spectacle," concluded the Hollywood Reporter, remarking that "even necrophilia, the most loathsome of perversions, is presented with detachment" (Powers).Trading bikinis for bikers was an unqualified success. By the end of 1966, The Wild Angels, which cost AIP only $360,000 to make, had grossed over $5 million, becoming by far the company's highest-earning film to date and ranking thirteenth in Variety's year-end box office chart. AIP embarked on a cycle of biker films, comprising a further twelve pictures over the next five years, while the company's competitors in the youth exploitation market jumped on the biker bandwagon, creating a flourishing subgenre that between 1966 and 1972 would encompass some three dozen films in total.3Even the majors took note. Easy Rider (1969), the joint project of Wild Angels star Peter Fonda and AIP alumnus Dennis Hopper, and a property on which AIP itself passed, was picked up by Columbia. When this variant of the disreputable AIP biker formula became the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1969, making over $19 million from a meager $370,000 budget (Hill 30), Hollywood was shocked into rapidly recalibrating its production practices to cater to the hitherto-derided youth audience that AIP had spent the previous fifteen years cultivating. As Paul Monaco argues, "Easy Rider convinced the industry that movie production for the future would have to be based largely on a search for formulas and aesthetics that could truly excite the core audience of moviegoers- now composed almost entirely of adolescents and young adults" (188). AIP's shift from bikinis to bikers precipitated a fundamental change in the model of American film production and transformed the industry's perception of its market. …

Monstrous Mother, Incestuous Father, and Terrorized Teen: Reading Precious as a Horror Film

Abstract: WHEN A mother HER THROWS A TELEVISION down a stairwell in pursuit of her daughter holding her newly born son; a father rapes his daughter while the mother voyeuristically gazes from afar; and a grandmother refers to her own granddaughter, who has Down syndrome, as an animal, we are introduced to Precious, a 2009 film based on the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire and directed by Lee Daniels that provides some of the most provocative representations of black family life witnessed on screen. These scenes, among others, are so scandalous and disturbing that they invite reading the film as an extension of the horror genre. Because the film takes on taboo subjects such as failed black motherhood, incest, pedophilia, and homosexuality, turning to horror as one way by which to read these racialized representations seems called for. My intent in this article is not to avoid critical engagement with the sociopolitical issues addressed on screen or to disregard a class analysis of the obstacles faced by the protagonist, but rather to suggest that based on the way the story unfolds, the filmmakers (writer, director, cinematographer, etc.) either consciously or unconsciously drew on the horror genre in order to portray the protagonist's struggle as synonymous with a living nightmare.Exploring the film as an extension of horror is certainly rendered plausible given that a number of reviewers and critics have associated the film with the horrific, inhuman, gothic, and animalistic.1 The film's indisputable association with horror is all the more convincing when we examine its depiction of "perverse social relations [that] breed monstrosity" (Lindsey 280); its challenge to traditional notions of family where "the eruption of violence and sexuality [enter] into the domestic sphere" (Lindsey 279); and its representation of a matriarch who wreaks havoc on her daughter because of her own sexual repression-all of which are consistent with horror.This investigation is structured around examining the following subject areas: bad mothers, phallic mothers, collusive mothers, failed mothers/motherhood, and monstrous mothers; parallels to horror films-Psycho (1960) and Carrie (1976); incestuous fathers, sexual taboo, and rape; horror and the horrific; the body as grotesque; and dreams, fantasies, and voyeurism. To introduce each section, since the film pays tribute to literary figure Zora Neale Hurston, this article extracts subtitles from Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to connect the novel and film and to demonstrate how Hurston's text provides an urtext to the protagonist Precious's (played by Gabourey Sidibe) search for subjectivity, a subjectivity that she shares with Hurston's protagonist (Janie Crawford).Bad Mothers, Phallic Mothers, Collusive Mothers, Failed Mothers/Motherhood, and Monstrous MothersIt was like seeing your sister turn into a 'gator... You keep seeing your sister in the 'gator and the 'gator in your sister, and you'd rather not.-Zora Neale Hurston (48)Bad MothersIn order to examine phallic, collusive, failed, and monstrous mothers as well as black motherhood, it is necessary to address the phenomenon of "bad" mothers. Characterization of the black mother as "bad" has to be contextualized within the larger discussion of what constitutes a bad mother and the historical and political discourse surrounding the "bad" mother. "In the past few decades, 'bad' mothers have moved noticeably toward center stage in American culture," declares Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky (2). "The stereotypes are familiar: the welfare mother, the teen mother ... But mother-blaming goes far beyond these stereotypes" (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 2). Any mothers who do not fit the kind of mother associated with the "'traditional' nuclear family," according to Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, constitute "bad" mothers and are under assault (3). This examination, however, is an attempt not to defend the "bad" mother or to further demonize the bad mother but to suggest that the filmmaker either consciously or unconsciously deployed strategies to create the bad mother image, an image that circulates in contemporary discourse. …

Visualizing St. Petersburg: Using Documentary Production in a Short Term Study Abroad Program to Enhance Oral Proficiency, Media Literacy, and Research Skills

Abstract: this study suggests that by integrating a documentary production and research project into a short-term summer abroad program, we can enhance students' international experience and improve their oral proficiency, media literacy, and research skills. Studying abroad may be one of the best tools for helping students understand our interconnectedness to a larger world by building bridges of understanding and compassion (Reynolds-Case 311). Combining this experience with inquiry-based documentary production, which teaches a full range of critical, conceptual, organizational, managerial, interpersonal, and creative skills (Edwards 9), creates a unique experiential learning opportunity for undergraduate students.Study AbroadThe College of William and Mary Program in St. Petersburg, Russia, is a short-term inquirybased summer program. According to the Institute of International Education's Open Doors Report and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US Department of State (Institute of International Education 25), in the 2011-12 academic year, 283,332 US students studied abroad for academic credit. That same study finds that participation in short-term study abroad programs-those lasting eight weeks or less-accounts for over 60 percent of US study abroad experiences. Previous research "has discussed a variety of linguistic issues in the context of long-term study abroad experience, including oral proficiency (Martinsen, 2010; Segalowitz & Freed, 2004), listening (Kinginger, 2008), reading (Dewey, 2004), writing (Freed, So, & Lazar, 2003), student motivation (Allen, 2010), pragmatic development (Bataller, 2010), and dialect and intonation acquisition (Henriksen, Geeslin, & Willis, 2010; Ringer-Hilfinger, 2012)" (Reynolds-Case 311). Additionally, Reynolds-Case notes that there has also been research that documents noticeable "gains in students' target language production and comprehension after even short-term study abroad programs" (312), which last less than eight weeks (Allen, Dristas, and Mills; Cubillos, Chieffo, and Fan).Documentary ProductionIn Fall 2010 we proposed the "Visualizing St. Petersburg" project-an initiative to incorporate documentary production in the short-term study abroad program in St. Petersburg, Russia, in order to enhance undergraduate re search as an integral part of William and Mary students' international experience. Including a media production component in our project added some very important elements. First, to produce media, students must engage outside the classroom and talk to locals. This interaction, with all of its messy mistakes, is often the most challenging yet rewarding aspect for study-abroad students. Second, whereas writing provides students a traditional mode for critical analysis, the creation of visual media requires students to negotiate meaning and acknowledge the cultural differences offered through voices beyond their usual realm of experience. And third, producing media gives students the opportunity to present their work to larger audiences. Videos are an effective tool of communication and an easy way to share not only with those within the academic community, but also with the larger invested communities from which the videos arose. Last, students gain a full range of broad knowledge and skills, including critical, conceptual, organizational, managerial, interpersonal, and creative skills. We emphasize that the process of production-the methods of research and creating their projects-is more important than the production quality of their final film. The value of a liberal arts education, the very notion that gives it its enduring value over a student's lifetime, is its focus on inquiry and methods, rather than on product.Experiential LearningIn designing our study abroad program we were inspired by the experiential learning model. Experiential education, educational philosophy rooted in and transformed by experience, has its roots in constructivist theories of teaching and cooperative learning (Kolb 41). …

Painful Embodiment in Aisling Walsh's Song for a Raggy Boy and Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education

Abstract: over the past few years, the concept of the body has been critically understood as a new archive from which to analyze human practices. As a site of culture, it is constituted as fluid, opening a new economy of power relations. In this sense, the body has allowed for the reconceptualization of the system of binary oppositions traditionally imposed by the heteronormative imperative. Taking this idea as a starting point of our analysis, this article centers on the suffering male body as conveyed in two contemporary films set in different national contexts: Ireland and Spain. The filmic texts discussed here are taken as alternatives to Hollywood's tendency to use beaten and/ or bruised male bodies to reassert male power and offer, instead, fresh instances of portraying physical abuse on screen.The widespread social definition of men as containers of power has resulted in the creation of a certain iconography around the significance of male corporeality. Thus, white, healthy, and strong male bodies have mirrored the normative definition of men. In relation to this issue, Robert W. Connell has argued that this "is translated not only into mental body images and fantasies, but into muscle tensions, posture, the feel and texture of the body. This is one of the many ways in which the power of men becomes 'naturalized'" (85). In this line of thought, Alan Petersen contends that some male bodies matter more than others, given their construction through scientific and cultural practices as the standard for measuring and evaluating others (41). He calls for methods of deconstruction to expose the ways in which power interprets the "normality" or naturalness of some male bodies and the unnaturalness of others. Similarly, within the wider fields of feminism, gender studies, men's studies, and queer theory, among other critical approaches, scholars have attempted to reconceive corporeality outside the heteronormative rule. In general terms, these theories read the body as a product of culture that performs certain conventions. The idea of the cultural performance of the body was developed by Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter, where she affirms that sex is a socially constructed category forcibly materialized through time in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative (2).Traditionally, Hollywood film has supported images of masculinity that have contributed to the construction of certain notions of male identity in Western cultures. Popular portraits of manhood have been consistently sustained by male-oriented power structures, offering narratives that objectify women and assume a heterosexual male perspective, while proposing at the same time models of ideal masculinities. A debate involving the visual representation of masculinity emerged in the early 1980s as a response to the relevant issues that Laura Mulvey exposed in her controversial article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975). Generally speaking, her analysis considered the disadvantaged position of female spectators and the biased images of women in Hollywood cinema. After its publication, feminist film theory analyzed classical cinema following Mulvey's analysis of visual pleasure, concentrating on the female body as the primary stake of cinematic representation and assuming a "masculinized" viewer. In a sense, these theories left issues such as male representations on screen and the male body as spectacle unquestioned, taking for granted the main problem that motivates that system of representation. Precisely, the study of masculinity on screen has argued for the need to revise iconic representations of manhood as constructed in film narratives.1 Hence, cinematic images of the male body have been widely analyzed from different angles. There are a considerable number of influential works dealing with different aspects of manhood and representation within the world of cinema (e.g., Silverman; Jeffords; Cohan and Hark; Krutnik; Tasker; Mitchell; Donald; MacKinnon; Edwards) that give evidence of the growing importance of masculinity as a field of investigation in film. …

Travel Gone Awry: Cosmopolitan Love and Female Ordeals in Games Women Play (2005)

Abstract: the designation of the present age as a "restless epoch" is evident in many ways across space, but it is perhaps best validated in the unique form of cosmopolitanism that African citizens exhibit particularly in their travel and quest for survival in the West. Against this backdrop, this article first reflects on the socioeconomic crisis of the 1980s and how it laid the foundation for the mass exodus of Africans to the West. It explores further how this exodus in turn today provides a false sense of cosmopolitanism to a number of Africans, as they try to cope with the treacherous and precarious situations of economic survival in the West and the constitutive elements of instability and mobility of locale. Turning to the Nigerian movie industry, the article focuses on Games Women Play (2005) and contends that Emerald's (Stella Damasus-Aboderin) ordeals in the movie should be seen not as direct consequences of the "games women play," but instead as the awry fallouts of the overwhelming but deceptive allure of migration, especially of the cosmopolitan strand. This view is underscored by the way young Africans are taken by the prospects of living fulfilled career lives in the West, without any knowledge of the migratory imagination and its contradictory realities. I argue that if the socioeconomic conditions of the homeland and its attendant dystopia are vectors for migration of Africans (male and female) to the West, the envisaged largess of utopia in the West is mostly elusive, making a pawn of African migrants from both ends of the travel spectrum. However, it is the female gender, as in the case of Emerald, that is at the worst receiving end when travel goes awry. Therefore, Emerald's plight is evident in the multiple scandals of her double marriage to two friends in Northern Ireland and the United States. The traumatic consequences of the friends' eventual knowledge of this on return to Nigeria should not be seen as an attempt to be smart, as suggested by the title of the movie, but must be conceived as a culmination of the socioeconomic ramifications of migration for the African female folk within the logic of contemporary travel and return.The global transformation brought about in screen art has meant a major push for the extension of Africa's horizon of mimetic performance in a manner that places it on an accelerated track. The evidence of the transformation is the invention and development of the nowcelebrated Nigerian movie industry, whose critical reception within a relatively infant evolution places it in the class of the big three in the world-Hollywood, Nollywood, and Bollywood.1 This Nigerian movie industry, better known as Nollywood, continues to exhibit various tendencies-ranging from generic delineation to thematic preoccupation. The tendencies, in so many instances, instantiate a form of fidelity to various African cultural worldviews. Nevertheless, a number of other such tendencies instantiate the connectivity of the movie industry to issues that continue to have ramifications for humanity, irrespective of location. In the particular case of the film under study, perhaps a convenient point of departure will be the explication from the outset that Games Women Play is easily located in the genre of love and romance. Nevertheless, for greater critical clarity, it is better understood when more specifically designated as playing out against the backdrop of cosmopolitanism.To that extent, the film touches on one of the issues that have ramifications for people all over the world, no matter where they are located; this is the contemporary understanding of cosmopolitanism. There is, moreover, a strong reason to include cosmopolitanism in the list of concepts that touch us all also because of its capacity to involve all categories of humanity, whether as willing or reluctant participants. As a phenomenon reputed for manifesting both idealism and materiality, cosmopolitanism references all endeavors of human activities and thoughts. …

Passionately Documenting: Taiwan's Latest Cinematic Revival

Abstract: in his opening talk for the 2011 Conference on Literature, Cinema, and Landscape, Taiwanese writer and film critic Lee Yuan (also known as Xiao Ye) remarked on the decentering disposition of Taiwan's latest cinematic revival.1 He notes that these films in similar ways forgo Taiwan's national and metropolitan center, Taipei, in favor of other localities. Lee's observation on decentering also opens up more complex discussions regarding the popular success of recent Taiwanese small-budget blockbusters' combination of feature-film qualities with documentary-style realism. This article offers a case study on recent Taiwanese film productions that not only decenter Taiwanese cinema's internationally renowned image as primarily producing auteur films portraying postcolonial and postmodern ethos, but that also hybridize Taiwan's diasporic Chinese image with Taiwan's local dialect, culture, and landscape. Debuting films featuring passionate road trips around the beautiful island of Taiwan, such as Chen Huai-En's Island Etude (2007) and Fung Kai's Din Tao: Leader of the Parade (2012), stimulated public interest in local Taiwanese landscapes and cultures. Personally inspired memorial stories by young directors, such as Lin Yu-Hsien's Jump Ashin! (2011), also became box office hits. During these past few years, Taiwanese cinema has gradually overcome its late-twentieth-century "city of sadness" image created by Hou Hsio-Hsian's A City of Sadness (1989), which has greatly influenced Taiwanese cinema's national and international representation.2 This article argues that these new-millennium films reconstruct and activate a sense of Taiwanese nationalism through the fluid intermix of documentary style with entertainment qualities as well as local with global appeal. Their highlighting of passion rather than pathos proposes a new turn and possibility for the revival of Taiwanese cinema and nationalism in the age of transcultural globalization.Different from the canonized Taiwanese films that put Taiwanese cinema on the international map over two decades ago, the new-millennium films discussed in this article approach Taiwanese culture and nationalism by experimenting with possibilities of flexible creativity. In Sentimental Fabulations, Rey Chow raises the importance of cinematic identification by opening with the question "Where is the movie about me?" (1). Chow's question points to the contemporary Chinese-speaking subject's simultaneous need and desire for individual uniqueness and collective belonging. Her concern also relates to Taiwanese people, who face problems such as recovering from Japanese colonialism, reinterpreting "Chineseness" through peripheral conditions, reincorporating local cultural diversity, and distinguishing themselves from Western standards. Recent films such as Island Etude, Din Tao, and Jump Ashin! continue to tackle these questions; however, they do so in a more lighthearted and aspiring manner.In a country with a history of negotiating with international and domestic challenges to na- tional identity determinants, the development of Taiwanese cinema reflects continuous efforts at national reconstruction. With the end of Japanese rule in 1945 and the official establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in mainland China in 1949, Taiwanese cinema turned to localism during the 1950s. Having a status different from Hong Kong's as the inheritor of Shanghai's cinema, and hence in the position of having a better-developed film industry environment that represented the legacy of "authentic" Chinese cinema as opposed to the communist mainland, Taiwan's film productions at the time were mostly localized, low-budget taiyu pian (Taiwanese dialect films) affairs.3 Apart from propaganda films of healthy realism and social realism supported by the KMT nationalist government, melodramas and martial arts films became the ruling genres along with productions of Taiwan xiangtu dianying (native-soil films) during the 1960s and early 1970s. …

Of Machines and Routines: Mundane Rhythms and Sounds in Whisky (2004) and Blue Eyelids (2007)

Abstract: It is the flattest and dullest moments that have in the end the most life.Robert Bresson (qtd. in Butler 163)The everyday escapes.Maurice Blanchot (14)the recent latin american films Whisky and Blue Eyelids (Parpados azules) examine the fine grain of everyday life. Made in Uruguay in 2004, Whisky was directed by Pablo Stoll and the late Juan Pablo Rebella, and Blue Eyelids was directed by Ernesto Contreras in Mexico in 2007. The films are strikingly similar in tone and theme: both are offbeat comedies in which minute gestures speak more eloquently than words and which share something of the visual austerity of Jim Jarmusch and the dour absurdity of Aki Kaurismaki. In their unrelenting focus on the mundane and dull, the films examine the overlooked and unnoticed surfaces of everyday life, a realm that George Perec has famously described as "background noise" (21) and the "infraordinary" (50). Indeed, the films' characters spend their days commuting, working, waiting, and generally being bored, vividly bearing out Franco Moretti's claim that "the great novelty of urban life . . . does not consist in having thrown people into the street, but in having them raked up and shut them into offices and houses" (127). Marked by formal patterns of habit, routine, and repetition, Whisky and Blue Eyelids illuminate the ways in which everyday life is, above all, a temporal medium. These patterns endow the films with a particular rhythmic shape, which is most clearly orchestrated through their distinctive use of sound design and mise-en-scene. And it is their rhythm, both sonic and visual, that I wish to explore further in this article. Rhythm illuminates the mundane musicality of everyday life: it throws into relief the place and sound of its taken-for-granted objects and the rituals and routines of its laboring bodies. If, as Rita Felski has written, the concept of everyday life is as elusive as it is taken for granted, and it "resists our understanding and escapes our grasp" (15), an exploration of rhythm can cast light on its manifold mysteries and expose its overlooked contours and textures. As this article ultimately shows, rhythm in film can expose the complex relationship between sound and image, the body and society, and the material and the human. In doing so, it demonstrates that rhythm can be a crucial, but most often neglected, interpretative framework for teasing out the meanings of film.The Sonic Stuff of Everyday LifeWhisky and Blue Eyelids, set in the densely populated cities of Montevideo and Mexico City, respectively, were met with great critical acclaim on their release, and both films enjoyed widespread international distribution. Much of their narratives take place within the arena of unskilled work. In Whisky, the pro- tagonists Jacobo (Andres Pazos) and his assistant Marta (Mirella Pascual) silently work in a down-at-the-heels sock factory; in Blue Eyelids, Marina (Cecilia Suarez) and Victor (Enrique Arreola) work in a uniform factory and the back office of a faceless insurance company. A palpable sense of loneliness pervades both films, and much of their delicate sadness and dark humor reside in the characters' inability to communicate their feelings to one another. In Blue Eyelids, described by Contreras in a DVD-extra interview as an "anti-romantic comedy," Marina wins a romantic holiday for two to Playa Salamandra but has no one to take with her. When she is approached by her old classmate Victor in a bar, she fails to recall who he is; nevertheless, she pretends to remember him soon after and invites him to share the holiday tickets with her. After the death of his mother, Whisky's Jacobo receives an unexpected visit from his wealthy brother, Herman (Jorge Bolani), who now lives in Brazil. Embarrassed of his bachelor status, Jacobo asks his ever-faithful assistant Marta to pretend to be his wife. Herman invites them on a trip to the seaside resort of Piriapolis, where the facade begins to crumble as Marta begins to fall for Herman. …