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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013
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Between colony and nation: Decolonial visions in Hong Kong independent cinema
More LessAbstractDeepening integration of Hong Kong’s commercial film production with Mainland China and the apparently inevitable marginalization of local-content films in the last ten years or so call for closer attention to the role and significance of independent films. As a critical art form, independent cinema in Hong Kong constitutes an alternative cultural space where artistic experimentation and sociopolitical critique generally avoided in mainstream productions are still actively pursued. Drawing upon recent writings on the Hong Kong independent film scene, this article explores the way in which independent films critically engage with the double hegemony of the national and the colonial in the postcolonial present. It argues that coloniality in Hong Kong is the result of the dual processes of British colonialism and decolonization in the name of ‘one country, two systems’, which effectively brings together the utilitarian aspirations and institutional excesses of colonial capitalism and socialist capitalism. Against this background, selected works by film-makers at different stages of their creative careers will be examined to shed light on the way in which decolonial visual thinking operates in the film text to intervene in the colonial/national discourse of history and identity in the post-handover era.
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Being Spike Jonze: Intertextuality and convergence in film, music video and advertising
More LessAbstractFor many, the films of Spike Jonze are metafictional works that rearticulate established postmodernist debates about ontology and identity. This article rejects these views and suggests that Jonze’s interest in metaphysical play is better explained as an engagement with the blurred boundaries of an increasingly convergent culture. Considering his advertisements and music videos alongside Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999) and Adaptation (Jonze, 2002) and reflecting upon the thematic and stylistic continuities that link them all together, the suggestion is that for Jonze these different practices can be read as parts of a creative whole. Made in a common production context, using a shared genepool of production staff and talent, and financed by media companies that are themselves continually merging and hybridizing, Jonze’s stories about celebrity and cinema do not just open ‘a metaphysical can of worms’, but speak more broadly about an environment in which the distinctions between the film business and other parts of the media are increasingly meaningless. The implication is that in narratives preoccupied with the ways in which supposedly different terrains bleed into each other, Jonze’s films, music videos and commercials offer a self-conscious vision of the intertextuality of the contemporary mediascape.
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The tactical improvisation of space in the contemporary Hollywood action sequence
By Nick JonesAbstractThis article applies the insights of Michel de Certeau’s influential text of sociological analysis The Practice of Everyday Life to the action sequences of contemporary Hollywood cinema. In so doing it demonstrates the extent to which these sequences can be read as spectacular displays of the spatial appropriation that de Certeau suggests characterize everyday life. For de Certeau, the everyday is controlled by bureaucratic and out-of-reach structures, their strategies of control dependent on the production of restrictive spaces; the individual, however, is able to gain agency through self-directed movement within these structures. In this way, simple acts such as walking and cooking become expressions of personal freedom within capitalist society. This article will illustrate the affinity between de Certeau’s ‘pedestrian tactics’ and the more outlandish feats of the action protagonists of a variety of Hollywood blockbusters. These protagonists temporarily appropriate space from monolithic controlling entities in a similar manner, Die Hard 4.0 (Wiseman, 2007), the Bourne trilogy (Liman, 2002; Greengrass, 2004, 2007) and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Bird, 2011) being representative examples of this process. Across these films independent individuals use ingenuity and improvisation to outmanoeuvre agents of systemic control, liberating themselves from spatial restrictions. In presenting such spectacular occupations the action genre and action sequence relate potentially alienating architectural spaces to the bodily coordinates of viewers, who can consequently take pleasure from the display of successful tactical actions within highly regulated environments. However, and in line with close readings of de Certeau, the article will conclude by investigating how tactics might be seen as inevitably and unavoidably subsumed within rigid strategic frameworks in the contexts of both everyday life and the action film.
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And then as farce: Globalization and ambivalence in Jo Nesbø and Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters (2011)
By Neil ArcherAbstractThis article will consider the aesthetic strategies of genre dialogue and parody in Morten Tyldum’s 2011 film Hodejegerne/Headhunters, based on the novel by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø. Situating the film within trans-national practices of production and distribution, the article argues that Tyldum and Nesbø’s film establishes a critical dialogue with its genre, its cinematic intertexts and the aesthetics of contemporary popular film. This dialogue in turn reflects and works through an ambivalence towards its own film-making contexts, and the socio-economic contexts of the global financial crisis within which both novel and film were produced. The article contends that such close study of the film’s ambivalent form provides a clearer picture of the practical issues confronting commercial cinema practices, in their efforts to negotiate national cinematic identity within a trans-national marketplace; as well as arguing for a more nuanced view of the way we read recent trends in the wider reception and discussion of popular world cinemas.
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Reviews
Authors: Thomas Wide, Zuzanna Olszewska, Anna Backman Rogers, Erato Basea and Jonathan WrootAbstractAfghanistan in the Cinema, Mark Graham (2010) Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: Illinois University Press, 196 pp., ISBN: 9780252077128, p/bk, £14.99
‘Afghanistan, Good Governance and the Media’, seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 8 July 2011
Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Elena Del Río (2012) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 240 pp., ISBN-13: 9780748649419, p/bk, £22.99
Deleuze and World Cinema, David Martin-Jones (2011) London: Continuum, 270 pp., ISBN-13: 9780826436429, p/bk, £19.99
Deleuze and Film, David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds) (2012) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 236 pp., ISBN-13: 9780748641208, p/bk, £21.99
Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema, Todd Mcgowan (2011) Minneapolis, London: University of Minneapolis Press, ix+285pp., ISBN: 9780816669967, p/bk, $25.00
Framing Film: Cinema and The Visual Arts, Steven Allen And Laura Hubner (eds) (2012) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 273 pp., ISBN: 9781841505077, p/bk, £19.95
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 21 (2023)
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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)