New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012

This article takes as its main focus Marcelo Gomes’s 2005 Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and examines the extent to which, through Gomes’ work, we can identify the emergence of a new, ‘post-national’ cinema in Brazil. Such post-national film-making represents a move beyond concerns for the need to represent in an authentic fashion the nation on screen and discussions of national identity, more broadly speaking, that have marked Brazilian cinema for decades, and particularly in relation to the representation of the sertão or Brazilian backlands as a site of ‘cultural purity’. Instead, it opens up the possibility of reading Brazilian films in a much wider framework such as that of World Cinema.

This article examines the documentary video essay Sudeuropa (2005–2007) by Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio, which focuses on undocumented migration in Southern Europe, in particular the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. Since the late 1990s, the touristic island of Lampedusa has become a major crossroad in transnational migratory routes across the Mediterranean, where the material effects of border securitization and militarization are heavily felt. Sudeuropa underscores the interdependency of seemingly unrelated mobilities: undocumented migration, tourism and journalism. It reveals the significant role of migrant labour in the development and maintenance of tourism by focusing on migrant workers involved in the hospitality industry. In this article, Sudeuropa is analysed in relation to theories of essay film. The genre of essay film, which has been recognized as a distinct form of film-making since the 1960s, provides a highly productive and politically revealing understanding of the dynamic between migrancy and visuality. Essay film has been described as a genre in between documentary and fiction, suggesting the fluidity and indeterminacy of its aesthetic and political qualities. Sudeuropa calls for a reconsideration of the genre, because it plays with fact and fiction, poses problems without answers and is profoundly self-reflexive.

This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste: Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (1999), Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materialist models, the article situates the ethical import of these very different films in relation to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist ethos of Varda’s and Walker’s films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash Humpers’ feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.

Adaptations of epics such as Beowulf or the Odyssey generally treat their source material as narrative, relating plot and character at the expense of poetics. José Hernández’s gaucho epic poem ‘Martín Fierro’/‘La vuelta de Martín Fierro’ can now lay claim to half a dozen versions in film and animation. Hernández’s work has proved remarkably adaptable to a range of political and artistic interpretations; the poem has been read as a nostalgic celebration of a rural culture quickly disappearing, as a conservative reaction to modernizing national projects, and as a model of artistic-cultural integration for a new, modern nation. Cinematic versions have offered equally varied approaches to its politics. This article uses the fictional adaptation of Fierro proposed in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow as a starting point for an examination of the poetics of filmic adaptation. What of the poem’s specific prosodic features – the use of a traditional verse form, its rhythm, rhyme and distinctive lexis – are adopted and/or adapted by filmic versions, and what relationship, if any, can be detected between the implicit political standpoints of different versions and the aesthetic approach to the source text? If Pynchon’s fictional adaptation formed part of an anarchist plot, what political plotting can be detected in real-life film adaptations of the poem?

Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Schiorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti and Anthony Julian Tamburri (eds) (2010) New York: Calandra Institute, 299 pp., ISBN: 978-0-9703-4036-8, p/bk, $28.00

The Films of Elías Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes, Tom Whittaker (2011) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 176 pp., ISBN 978-0-7083-2438-7, pbk, £35

World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, Lúcia Nagib (2011) New York and London: Continuum, 293 pp., ISBN:-13: 978-1-4411-6583-1, pbk, £16.99

New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (eds) (2011) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 274 pp., ISBN: 978-1-8415-0375-2, p/bk, £24.95