Showing papers in "New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film in 2020"

What is ‘antimicrobial resistance’ and why should anyone make films about it? Using ‘participatory video’ to advocate for community-led change in public health

Abstract: In this article, we discuss the role of participatory video (PV) as a tool for developing community-level solutions to ‘Antimicrobial Resistance’ (AMR) in Nepal. In recent years, PV has become an ever more popular tool in development contexts for supporting communities in low and middle income countries to raise awareness of issues that they do not feel are adequately represented in mainstream media. One area of growing interest in this regard is public health. However, PV has not, to date, been used to address AMR, currently considered to be one of the biggest public health issues we face globally. Placing our project within the wider context of ‘participatory documentary’ practice, we examine the world-view presented in the films this project generated, a dimension of such projects that is, somewhat curiously perhaps, often overlooked, with commentators tending to focus on the process of delivering PV, rather than the final products made. Here we are particularly interested in questions of power and how a close reading of the texts produced highlights the complexity of the power relationships at work in these films, which, in turn, can allow us to reflect in new ways on the processes at work in the project.

An unconventional zombie: Subcultural genres, global art cinema and bio-power in Sebastian Hofmann’s Halley (2012)

Abstract: With an unconventional living-dead protagonist and a minimalist auteur style, Halley brings to the fore how the tensions between genre movies and art cinema operate in a transnational context. Halley surprises the audience with the story of a security guard who is dead but remains alive. While his flesh decomposes, Beto goes to work and continues with his lonely life pretending that everything is fine. In this sense, the film presents an unconventional zombie: Beto is not a monster, he is harmless and he is an obedient worker, but his condition exhibits his alienation in society. This article analyses Beto’s impossible embodiment from the perspective of film categorization, taking into account the intersections between auteur cinema and subcultural genres such as zombie movies in a transnational context. To that end, I rely on Dolores Tierney’s mapping of cult cinema in Latin America as well as on Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s analysis of global art cinema in México, both of which are related to international film circuits. Secondly, this article focuses on the sociopolitical implications of Beto’s living-dead body. I trace the trope of the living-dead character and analyse its political commentary from the perspective of bio-power. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the homo sacer and bare life, this article explores how Beto’s embodiment evokes his diminished agency but also its subversive potential. With a body that transcends basic medical categorizations of life and death, Beto confronts Foucault’s idea of bio-power and resists the clinic.

Film as dialogue: Documentary theorization through practice

Abstract: A large body of documentary scholarship approves of the documentary’s effectiveness in addressing social issues beneficially. However, documentaries that have been made with the primary aim of testing such effectiveness are rare. This article presents the findings based on a documentary made specifically to test this theory. Titled Forsaken, the documentary was made and used as a test tool to assess its rhetorical ability to generate pledges for support of neglected adolescent orphans in South African communities. This article highlights the documentary’s rhetorical strategies and the extent to which such strategies led audience members to pledge support for this category of orphans. Contrary to views in the extant literature that pay little attention to the contextual limitations of the documentary’s rhetorical principles, the present article argues that a documentary’s effectiveness in addressing social issues beneficially is largely dependent on the cultural attuning of the documentary’s rhetorical principles.

Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (eds) (2016)

Abstract: Review of: Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (eds) (2016)Austin: University of Texas Press, 367 pp.,ISBN 978-1-47730-817-2, p/bk, $29.95

Ways of affection: How interactive documentaries affect the interactor’s felt experience and performance

Abstract: This article intends to explore how interactivity and new technologies promote new spectatorship performances and subsequently affect the interactor’s subjectivity. Through the analysis of three interactive documentaries, I propose and describe a taxonomy for addressing the felt experience of interacting in digital environments. Each selected documentary corresponds to a different mode of interaction and, therefore, engages the audience in a particular way: Bear 71 (hyperlink mode), Fort McMoney (conversational mode) and A Journal of Insomnia (participative mode). Throughout the analysis, I consider the interactor and the digital object as two interrelated and dependent entities that influence and shape one another. I argue the objects of interaction affect the viewers by inducing bodily felt sensations and shaping their subjectivity. As so, the sensuous encounter between the interactor and the digital documentary provides a virtual gratification for the spectator’s performance. Delving into a phenomenological and post-phenomenological investigation, I focus my attention in the microperceptions, as structures of sensory perception in the bodily dimensions of experience, translated as senses. As fragmented, multilinear and dynamic forms, interactive documentaries provide the audience with the agency of manipulating and developing the narrative, while conversely engender in the interactors what I address as ways of affection. I propose or adapt eight digitally disrupted and induced sensations, or senses of, for describing how interactive documentary affects users during the interaction performance: sense of control, sense of presence, sense of Self, sense of place, sense of belonging, sense of almightiness, sense of endlessness, sense of incompleteness.

From i-doc to VR experience: New forms of user engagement in immersive digital documentaries

Abstract: Audience research proves that possibilities of interaction in i-docs are often not fulfilled by the user, who is not really part of a ‘work in progress’ (as intended by the makers). With the shift and development of new digital formats (360-degree-films, nonfictional VR experiences, AR apps), the question of the possible interactive potential should be addressed once again. Since VR projects are fully immersive (mostly using head-mounted displays), there is no possible distraction from outside on the one hand. On the other hand, there is a shift from the computer game style aesthetic of early i-docs, with their pure spatial arrangement of events, to a more inclusive digital storytelling modality with the user experiencing his own world-building. This will be discussed with taking into consideration the non-fictional VR experience as a mode of actively combining immersion and storytelling for a satisfactory user experience. Afterwards two very different examples of nonfictional VR production will be presented, and their modalities will be briefly touched; the utilized approach and its user response will be discussed. A look at the future of possible developments concludes the essay.

Satire, masculinity and the rhetoric of conflict resolution in War Chhod Na Yaar and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore

Abstract: Unlike its western counterparts, Hindi war films constitute a rather peripheral genre, one that has understandably received scant critical attention over the last two decades. The conventional aesthetic registers and thematic templates of these films reveal an explicit engagement with questions relating to heroic masculinity, exceptional leadership and nationalist triumphalism. And yet, movies such as War Chhod Na Yaar (‘Quit the war, dude’) (Haider 2013) and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (‘Delhi and Lahore are not so different after all’) (Raaz 2014) categorically denounce idealistic notions of armed conflicts and sensationalized portrayals of ostensibly justified violence. This article examines the rhetoric of conflict resolution that constitutes the organizing principle of these two films. It demonstrates how War Chhod Na Yaar discursively satirizes the earlier Hindi war films through a pronounced emphasis on the fanciful camaraderie that exists between the respective battalion captains of India and Pakistan. By contrast, the anti-war rhetoric of Kya Dilli Kya Lahore is not only historically situated within the larger framework of Partition narratives, but is also facilitated by an alternative configuration of masculinity that resists territorial divisions in favour of affective solidarities and shared lived experiences.

Navigating history: Aesthetics and appropriation and the interactive web documentary Freedom’s Ring (2013)

Abstract: The article focuses on web documentaries as a form of interactive historiography by presenting a case study on Freedom’s Ring (2013), a multi-media-based animation of Martin Luther King’s speech ‘I have a Dream’ published in Vectors. Taking both the production and the reception side into account, the article addresses the constitution of knowledge – or rather aesthetic experience – through artistic research practices. In doing so, it reflects upon the concepts of authorship, copyright and participation. Due to its numerous sources, the navigation system, the artwork, its referentiality and variability, it is made the case that Freedom’s Ring challenges history as a ‘grand narrative’ by creating a subjective point of view and putting the user in the position of an activist. Web documentaries are regarded as part of an epistemic and sociopolitical development, in which artistic and academic methods merge. KEYWORDS

Self-sacrifice in Train to Busan (2016)

Abstract: In order to recognize and calibrate the two parts to its structure, self-sacrifice in zombie cinema will be examined in terms of survival-based and emotion-based motivational frameworks. The interaction of these frameworks will be unpacked and their properties, differences and similarities will be appraised and questioned. Examinations of this kind require three different analytical methods that therefore determine the structure of this article. The first section will outline how the survival and emotional-based motivational frameworks exist within the same sequence in Train to Busan (2016). The implications of this will be addressed in relation to the organization of modern neo-liberalism and what Paul Verhaeghe coins the neoliberal meritocracy. The second section examines the temporal projections of the characters in the sequence (specifically how the sequence depicts a character’s understanding of the future and how their present situation fits into that). These projections are cross-referenced with the specific example of the neo-liberal South Korean economic climate to add credence to the proposition that the need (or fetishization) of survival is a neo-liberal symptom and a hangover from the pressures that are ceaselessly exerted to keep its hierarchies in place. The final section of this article examines abjection and identity in relation to the chosen sequence in Train to Busan. It explores the generation of identity in relation to self-sacrifice and concludes that self-sacrifice is a necessary enforcer of a specifically neo-liberal competition.

From documentary networks to documentary worknets: Strategies of participation and co-creation in emerging practices of factual storytelling

Abstract: Starting from the premises that documentary assemblages are networks in the sense that they are not given but need to be established and are in constant flux leads us to the assessment that any interactive documentary environment is a collaboratory but also precarious endeavour. In this context, bringing into dialogue network theories, namely ANT ‘and after’, the concept of ‘assemblage’ and discourses around participation and co-creation can lead to fresh perspectives on different strategies and tactics of participation in collaborative factual storytelling. Still, two aspects need to be revisited: the symmetric approach to networks and the notion of distributed agency. These concepts will be discussed in terms of their value to derive strategies and tactics of (shared) authorship, the striving for a documentary argument and documentary authority on the one hand and participation, interaction and plurivocality on the other hand. In this regard, ANT makes certainly inspiring points but also has its shortcomings. One solution can consist in relating the axiom of ANT as an analytic tool to actual documentary long-term strategies as well as to stand-up tactics as, e.g. interventionist media-making, open space documentary and context-provision. Thinking of emerging documentary configurations not only in terms of hybrid transdisciplinary, transprofessional networks but pragmatic worknets can lead to a better understanding of how to balance different agents within these networks|worknets ‐ always keeping in mind that we are dealing with an approach that calls for constant self-reflection as it presents a case of what Law describes as ‘uncertain method’. All theoretical reflections are accompanied by an analysis of a paradigmatic documentary networks|worknet, The Quipu Project (2015).

The post-2000 Hong Kong young filmmakers: Embrace, resistance and new chances

Abstract: This article is a text-based analysis of 107 Hong Kong local productions produced from 2000 to August 2018. These films are made by the current young generation of filmmakers who joined the industry in the new millennium, when it gradually entered an era marked by the domination of Hong Kong–mainland co-productions. With the aim of expanding the scholarly discussion on the emerging ‘Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema’, it identifies four themes that recurrently appear in their films: (1) a tendency to feature people with physical or mental disabilities as their protagonists; (2) the possession of a sense of nostalgia for the glorious 1980s; (3) a manifestation of larger Hong Kong–mainland relations through characters; and (4) varying degrees of politicization. The young generation of filmmakers, whose works denote the social responsibility these young people bring to their filmmaking, shows their greater engagement with civic issues, less consideration of the mainland market and capital and a stronger desire to tell local Hong Kong stories, preserve local Hong Kong culture and emphasize the Hong Kong identity it represents. These traits, as the conclusion argues, are rooted deeply in economic, cultural and political realities.

Rural geographies and the New Chinese Cinemas: Imaging progressive places in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind and Jia Zhangke’s Platform

Abstract: The New Chinese Cinemas were unprecedented in critiquing official narratives of progress through dramatic location-shot images of rural Taiwan and China. Much more than standing in as a picturesque backdrop, the rural was a site of complex ideological contestations. Yet, existing scholarship overlooks the richness of rural representations, reductively interpreting rural films as works of nostalgia and cultural salvage. Through a comparative analysis of representations of landscape, travel and visual perception in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986) and Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000), this article brings into focus the important but largely ignored roles that Hou and Jia have played in envisioning new frameworks for thinking about rural geographies. Drawing from Doreen Massey’s notion of the ‘progressive place’, I investigate how Jiufen and Fenyang – the films’ shooting locations – are stages upon which the directors experimented with imaging and imagining communities. Jiufen is represented in Dust as a porous interface between the urban and rural, a metonym for the film’s representation of Taiwan as a contact zone with China. Platform, by contrast, fashions an image of Fenyang as a non-place, a microcosm of China as it undergoes unchecked neo-liberal development. Significantly, these films went beyond revising rural imaginaries on-screen, to making a material impact on Jiufen and Fenyang by transforming them into landmarks of global film tourism. This work demonstrates how Hou and Jia responded to disorienting social changes not by resisting, but by tactically embracing the blurring of divides between the urban and rural, and local and global.