New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2002

This essay demonstrates the continuing influence of Carl-Theodor Dreyer on the work of the film-makers of Dogme95. It highlights the quandary that is created by this closeness, particularly in the films of Lars Von Trier, and at the same time the radical disparity of style that locates Dreyer and Dogme worlds apart. While the themes have proved more enduring than many suspect, the incompatibility of styles is predictably a wider function of a changing history. Dreyer responded in his work, much of it historical, to the role of religion in the conflicts between tradition and modernity. By contrast, Dogme95 is the product of a new hyper-modern age that stresses speed, movement and immediacy. As such it is confronted with a new cultural agenda and also perhaps the necessity of finding its own original themes. On its ability to supersede the obsessions of Dreyer and earlier Scandinavian cinema, the verdict still remains open.

This paper explores the incorporation of anthropologist Marc Aug's theory of non-place into the study of representations of travel, migration and displacement in contemporary European cinema. Taking the British film Last Resort (Pawlikowski, 2000) as its central example, the idea of home as a structuring absence is considered by exploring the spatial geographies and practices within narratives of movement. Acknowledging the sedentariness of much of the travel and migratory experience, the non-place invokes the dreamscapes and imaginary spaces of Elsewhere from the realities of a quotidian spatio-temporal present. Last Resort, and other examples from contemporary film, employ a tripartite spatial structure of zones of arrival and departure, zones of stasis and zones of transition, to delineate the literal and metaphorical processes of displacement that mark the status of the traveller and migrant. Although the non-place provides a valuable and neglected area of study in filmic representations of anthropological and spatial practice, counter constructions of being and place are no less evident in a narrative gestalt where subjectivities are drawn from social and cinematic spaces which are ostensibly heterotopic.

The end of the Soviet era opened a period of financial distress and artistic disorientation in the film industry. The transition to the free market was too abrupt; price liberalization, privatization, the collapse of the centralized system of production and distribution, the deterioration of the studios, inadequate law enforcement to guarantee copyright, rampant video piracy, and the general decline of disposable income among the population combined to push film production down to an alarming low. The films of shock capitalism do not easily fall into a trend or a movement. Many reassess the past, placing different spins on various epochs and figures according to the director's ideological orientation. Others reflect the reality of the present day, either in dramatic or grotesque form. Still others offer escapism into imaginary worlds. About 50 films are surveyed here. They vary in production values and intellectual level, but each is a document of the specific time and place in which it was produced. Each film, therefore, is relevant as a cultural product of this bizarre Russian fin de sicle.

One of the paradoxes of mainstream Soviet cinema was that it tended to make a spectacle of masculine physicality without (for the most part) drawing attention to it in any explicit sense. The male hero's body was mythologized in patriarchal structures that imposed themselves as neutral. This paper examines the different ways in which the director Kira Muratova challenges this cultural paradigm, by explicitly foregrounding the male body, and destabilizing the male perspective. In this respect Muratova's films pose a challenge to the archetypal images of masculinity (and femininity) prevalent not just in the Soviet Union, or in mainstream cinema, but in many other places besides.

This paper comes in three parts. First, a framing and focusing of Claire Denis' film Chocolat/Chocolate (1988), including a brief synopsis of the film. Second, a summary of Denis' stated purpose in making the film and what we can read from that in relation to the film itself and the construction of subjectivity. Third and finally, an investigation of the construction of masculinity as it concerns the main male protagonist, Prote the black manservant also referred to in the film as le boy.

Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media, London: British Film Institute, 2001, 322 pp.

Malcolm Le Grice, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, London: British Film Institute, 2001, 330 pp.