Film International - Volume 22, Issue 3-4, 2024

Although Alfred Jarry and Georges Méliès are often cited as progenitors of the Parisian avant-garde in theatre and film respectively, eventually influencing André Breton’s Surrealism, a debt is also owed to Alice Guy, for she, too, developed many of the themes and aesthetics of avant-gardism, the most notable of which is her questioning of societal norms through gender. Her status as a feminist icon was established in the 1970s by Nicole-Lise Bernheim, Claire Clouzot and the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF); but what is left unsaid when categorizing Guy as a woman filmmaker? This article interrogates the standard timeline of French film history and the presumption that the contributions to the new medium of film were made by the male contributors who so often receive the credit. This both reinforces previous scholarship that has already demonstrated the false narrative of assuming that Alice Guy did not contribute anything new to cinema (McMahan, Simon, Slide and others), and puts Guy in dialogue both with André Breton’s Surrealism and with her obvious artistic inheritor, Germaine Dulac. The gendered nature of Guy’s innovation: women-centred storytelling and gender non-conformity; in conjunction with her penchant for absurdism, demonstrate her innovative take on the burgeoning cinematic media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recognizing not only Guy’s contribution to early cinema but also her influence on the Parisian avant-garde allows for both a reinterpretation of the genesis of avant-gardism in the twentieth century and a re-evaluation of Guy’s filmography that aligns it more closely with the work of Georges Méliès.

In Ishirō Honda’s Gojira (1954), the titular monster is a creature out-of-step with the world of twentieth-century Japan. It does not seek violence, but cannot exist without causing it. The monster is too old, too vast and too different from humankind. This article extrapolates this thought, applying it to theories of the post-imperial, in which similarly out-of-time ways of thought collide catastrophically with the present. This is done with a particular emphasis on the character Dr Serizawa. Serizawa is a disabled war veteran who is read against both the monster Gojira and the writer Yukio Mishima’s ([1956] 1994) contemporaneous depictions of disability in his novel Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The monster is also considered as a sort of vector: standing in for the Americans, the old Japanese empire and the natural world all at once. Each of these readings is supported by reference to the release(s) of the film, or concurrent political events such as the Lucky Dragon No. 5 fishing incident. Thought too is given to the film’s style: the visual effects are read as thematically consistent with my various readings of the narrative. As such, the article asserts that Gojira is a film of multiplicities: its enduring appeal lies in its mercurial, shifting nature.

Among Iranian films that address the struggles of youth, Deep Breath (Shahbazi 2003) is widely regarded by critics as one of the most authentic cinematic depictions of Iranian youth in the early 2000s. A particularly notable aspect of the film is the evolving dramatic function of the car as a metaphorical home – shaped by the unique cultural, social and political dimensions of Iranian society. This article examines the car as a mobile, modern and unconventional dwelling in Deep Breath, one that replaces the traditional notion of home. It investigates how the car, serving as an alternative domestic space, allows characters to construct their own emotional geography and provides them with a means of resisting prevailing social norms and state-imposed regulations in Iran.

In the context of world cinema studies, realism has recently been reassessed as an aesthetics based on the status granted to objectivity and the ideal of non-anthropomorphic perspective. In an attempt to broaden that critical view, the article explores how that notion is affected by the cinema whose main goal is to offer viewers the personal vision of its creative personnel (actors, directors, cinematographers, etc.) while adhering to a production mode akin to the collaborative representation of non-fiction film. The article argues that the deployment of subjectivity in Chloé Zhao’s The Rider (2017) inflects it with constructions of authenticity that provide an alternative to conceptualizations of realism. The film mobilizes the aesthetic and social dimensions of authenticity, channelling them through an audio-visual style that blends subjectivity with the language of objectivity. The Rider reveals that when cinema exhibits personal vision this blend is articulated through an authenticity that consists of objectivity tinged with subjective emotion. From a cultural point of view, this cinema is characterized by ideological ambivalence: on the one hand, it creates an idealized spectator, while on the other, it prompts viewers to discover and value the real behind fiction.

Since the 1980s, South Indian cinema has frequently focused on the female body, and post-1990s Malayalam films have shown notable changes in the depiction of sexuality and gender. Contemporary films increasingly prioritize pleasure, fantasy and the interplay between aesthetics and gender identity, challenging Laura Mulvey’s concept of the masculine gaze by engaging with the mysterious female body. Drawing on Patricia MacCormack’s idea of ‘cinesexuality’ and feminist film theory, this study explores how women are framed as objects of cinesexual desire within the specific context of item song sequences in Malayalam cinema. Understanding the interaction among gender, desire and visual culture requires revisiting traditional spectatorship theories, such as Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, in light of the changing cultural norms. Item songs in post-1990s Malayalam cinema serve as arenas where the female body is depicted as an object of cinesexual desire, simultaneously upholding patriarchal viewing norms while also creating potential avenues for resistance. The primary inquiry guiding this study is: in what manner do item songs in post-1990s Malayalam films portray the female body as an object of cinesexual desire, and to what extent do these depictions adhere to or contest patriarchal paradigms of cinematic spectatorship? This study employs qualitative textual and discourse analysis of selected films, examined through the lenses of feminist film theory and cinesexuality.

Review of: Secret Violences: The Political Cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni 1960–1975, Slawomir Masłoń (2024)

New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 185 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-50139-823-0, h/bk, USD 108.00

ISBN 978-1-50139-827-8, p/bk, USD 35.95

ISBN 978-1-50139-824-7, e-book, USD 28.56

Review of: Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe, Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi (eds) (2022)

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 334 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-46298-299-4, h/bk, EUR 146

Review of: Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet, Dale Hudson and Alia Yunis (eds) (2024)

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 350 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25306-757-9, p/bk, USD 45

Review of: Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia, Esha Niyogi De (2024)

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 302 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-25208-828-5, p/bk, USD 32