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Inaugurating discussions of an oral cinema: Placing the translation-to-screen of Scottish community oral storytelling traditions within a wider frame of global filmmaking practice
- Source: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Volume 19, Issue 1-2, Jul 2021, p. 3 - 21
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- 01 Mar 2022
- 13 Sep 2022
- 13 Feb 2023
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Abstract
This article seeks to inaugurate the global frame of an oral cinema: a cinema that, to a significant extent, is defined by its relationship to community oral cultures. Whilst the case studies featured are largely those arising from Scotland – in particular Simon Miller’s Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (2007), Timothy Neat’s Play Me Something (1989) and the author’s own film Mysterious Object (currently in post-production) – discussion deliberately reaches outwards to a global, comparative frame drawing upon the more sophisticated treatments of orality in the West African cinemas of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene and the Inuit cinema of Zacharius Kunuk. Whilst alive to the dangers of homogenization and destructive, western-led universalisms, this article ultimately attempts to establish a space for utopian montage (Chambers and Higbee 2021a), wherein divergent yet mutually resonant traditions within world cinema may be co-positioned in order to explore aspects of shared practice and solidarity.