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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2002
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2002
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2002
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The Zoom in Popular Cinema: A Question of Performance
More LessThe author argues that the use of the zoom can be seen as a signifier of the film narrator's performance and proposes to read zooms as a style-figure recalling the oral performances of public storytellers. As such, the zoom is one of the ways in which a cinematic narrator signals what is at stake in the modernisation of storytelling with the advent of the industrialisation of culture.
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Reconfiguring the Past: The Return of History in Recent Russian Film
More LessRussian cinema has often returned to its traditions in order to explore ways forward, and nowhere is this truer than in the historical film. Originally seen as a means of legitimizing the (Soviet) present, the cinematic investigation of history has tended in recent years not only to debunk past ideologies, but also to create new myths as pointers to the future. Directors whose recent work is included in this study are Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovskii, Pavel Chukhrai, Alexander Sokurov and Gleb Panfilov.
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Telling the Stories of Heim and Heimat, Home and Exile: Recent Palestinian Films and the Iconic Parable of the Invisible Palestine
More LessThis article deals with the appearance of an independent stream of Palestinian documentary cinema, during the 1990's, and its specific characteristics. This it does through concentrating on three films: A Chronicle of Disappearance (Suleiman, 1996) Ustura (Hassan, 1998) and 1948 (Bakri, 1998). The argument is supported by a number of theoretical anchorages examination of early cinema as a Lacanian mirror of self and other, the use of Ethnotopia, a concept used by Nichols and Russell, and the Freudian use of mourning and melancholia in order to deal with personal, social and national loss, as well as an examination of narrative methods and narrativity in the three films. In all three films one element appears to rise and focus our interest story, storytelling, and narration the narrative processes appear crucial to films which work within the documentary tradition, but also hover over the boundary with narrative cinema. This central characteristic, separating them distinctly from the mainstream of documentary film in Israel, also connects them with other strains of documentary, and specifically with Third World cinema and Arab cinema. On this basis, the article locates the role of storytelling as a structure of identity, evidence and memory, after a long period during which this memory was repressed by the Israeli occupation and its atrocities. It seems that this memory produced in the films is capable of displacing and neutralizing some of the power of the processes of melancholia which typify the loss referred to, and may herald a new form of cinema, as well as a new form of discourse within the Israeli and Palestinian arenas.
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From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee (197374)
More LessThe cinema made in the Third World shows a great diversity depending on the region or country in question. But towards the late 1960s, there was a gradual consolidation of a cinematic-political project whose main principles were very similar to the Third Cinema proposed by Solanas and Getino, or to Garca Espinosa's imperfect cinema, but also included claims in other Asian or African manifestos. Particularly bold and ambitious was the creation of a Third World Cinema Committee intending to gather film-makers from the three continents. Two successive meetings, in Algiers (December 1973) and Buenos Aires (May 1974), gave rise to this organisational structure and established its goals. But whereas the Algiers meeting is a reference point in historiography on Third World Cinema, the Buenos Aires gathering remains almost unknown. This article reconstructs both events, the links that made them possible, and views the third-worldism of that period as a gap-bridging imaginary to the consolidation of Third World Cinema in the geopolitics of international cinema.
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Resurrecting the Alien Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Hollywood
More LessThis paper examines the critical reception of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien Resurrection in the popular Anglo-American press, where the film was often discussed in terms that highlighted the director's status as an outsider. The anxiety that the film elicits among critics, it is argued, is a function of the very abjection that is depicted graphically within the film: a fear of the unclassifiable and of the crossing of boundaries.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Carrie Tarr and Jane ChackalFrance on Film: Reflections on popular French cinema, edited by Lucy Mazdon, Wallflower Press 2001, 180 pp., 13.99 .
Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, Cairo, The American University in Cairo Press, 1998, 255 pp., 19.95.
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 20 (2022)
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Volume 19 (2021)
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Volume 18 (2020)
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Volume 17 (2020)
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Volume 16 (2018)
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Volume 15 (2017)
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Volume 14 (2016)
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Volume 13 (2015)
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Volume 12 (2014)
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Volume 11 (2013)
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Volume 10 (2012)
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Volume 9 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 8 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 7 (2009)
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Volume 6 (2008 - 2009)
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Volume 5 (2007)
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Volume 4 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 3 (2005)
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Volume 2 (2004)
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Volume 1 (2002 - 2003)