New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2014

The award-winning film, El secreto de sus ojos (2009), by Campanella, has been studied as a film dealing with the impunity of the most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983). In this article, I consider El secreto as a melodrama in which male characters are ruled by their feelings. I focus on the leading actor, Ricardo Darín who, in his role as Benjamín Espósito, can be characterized as a fallen man, as he suffers from a trauma that impinges on his emotions, inner circle and ability to perform in the public sphere.

This article intends to explore the intersections of personal and cultural memory as expressed and mediated by the Brazilian film Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo/I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes (2009). Crossing the generic boundaries of the road movie, the essay film and observational documentary, I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You stitches together images shot on Super-8, 35mm, 16mm, mini-DVs and even still photographs, all of which testifies to the directors’ own personal memories. The film further appropriates literary and filmic references that together situate it within the vast terrain of cultural memory associated with the backlands (the sertão) in the Brazilian imaginary. This article aims to excavate this kaleidoscope of personal and collective memories, and argues that their reflection provokes meditations on history, culture and the passing of time.

This article sets forth that Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) exhibits a ‘complex transformation’ of an American film genre by foregrounding features associated with art cinema and, more specifically, European and auteur film-making. We argue that the film’s appeal derives precisely from an intelligent and cine-literate deployment of the tensions in this dichotomy of European/American film-making. As such, Drive is a film that foregrounds or reveals its own construction in a number of ways, but its appeal lies in the fact that it does not prevent intense emotional engagement on the part of the viewer. It is neither a cold exercise in mere style nor a simple copy of an earlier formula, but rather a film that manages to marry a number of narrative and stylistic features in such a way that the film itself, arguably, is not easy to categorize.

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S. (2007) is a meticulously faithful American remake of his European horror film of the same name, Funny Games (1997), which depicts the plight of a bourgeois family terrorized by two young men at their lakeside property. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it demonstrates how the film’s aesthetics of terror produces affective responses that undermine the characteristic emphasis on cathartic violence of the horror genre. Second, it addresses how the remake’s fidelity to the original prompts us to consider the transnational properties of representational violence. Retracing the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the ‘family in peril’ sub-genre of horror cinema, I first argue that Funny Games U.S. unsettles the viewer’s expectations by simultaneously exploiting and subverting generic conventions. Rather than resorting to spectacles of blood and gore, the film utilizes the affective potentialities of duration and self-reflexivity to rattle the audience and critique the viewing pleasure associated with representational violence. Next, I examine cinematic remakes as indicators of cultural variation, arguing that the minute differences of setting and characters between the original and the remake only aim to reinforce their similarities. In thus rendering the viewing experience almost identical, as mirroring and serial works, the films recast our understanding of the cultural specificity of spectatorship.

This article discusses the German romantic comedy What a Man (Schweighöfer, 2011) as a continuation of the Comedy Wave of 1990s German film. Eric Rentschler dismissed these ‘New German Comedies’ for being conservative and pedestrian in form and content, considering them the epitome of the ‘cinema of consensus’. It is argued that What a Man, while highly similar to the 1990s ‘relationship comedies’ in its narrative structure and content, is indicative of a shift in dominant ideas and values relating to romantic relationships between the 1990s and 2010s, moving away from a display of male chauvinism and sexism and replacing it with gender images that reflect both the ongoing female emancipation and a crisis of masculinity. What a Man is analysed in relation to two current sub-genres of the romantic comedy, the German ‘postromance’ and the American ‘geek-centred comedy’, in order to place the film within discernible production trends that explore changing gender roles in western societies. The article also situates What a Man in the context of German film production by exploring how its generic affiliation, choice of location and use of public funding ensure its success as a mainstream, popular film.

This article argues that the films Ishqiya/Romance (Chaubey, 2010) and Dedh Ishqiya/Romance 1.5 (Chaubey, 2014) by Abhishek Chaubey, represent a new genre of films, namely the ‘desi feminist noir’, which is characterized by all the elements of film noir, such as the murky distinction between good and evil, the lawlessness of the streets and the femme fatale. However, in these films the figure of the femme fatale is used to forward explicitly feminist trajectories of love, romance and sex. I give a brief history of romantic coupling in Hindi cinema, and analyse the films’ departure from these articulations of romance. Next, I focus on a song sequence from each of the films to explicate the desi feminist femme fatale’s subversion of the romantic conventions of the Hindi film song and her inauguration of a new aesthetic of romance. In conclusion, I consider the implications of this new genre for Bollywood cinema.

This article introduces the reincarnation film as an (unacknowledged) Indian film genre. After a brief historical overview of the reincarnation film, the genre’s conventions are explored through an analysis of select films – particularly Neel Kamal (1968) by Ram Maheshwari and Om Shanti Om (2007) by Farah Khan. Rather than applying a psychoanalytical approach (which would suggests that these films are primarily concerned with sexual trauma and surfacing repressed desires), I observe how reincarnation philosophy informs the style and form of these texts to address Hindu anxieties about rebirth. Reincarnation narratives are not simply a by-product of the western Gothic, but informed by and best understood in relation to ancient Indic cultural practices. Furthermore, Hindu cultural consciousness conflicts with key psychoanalytical concepts of death and the past. This research addresses the cultural specificity of film genre. It demonstrates how religious philosophy can be used to investigate film aesthetics as an alternative to the common-practice application of western psychoanalysis.

This article examines the new cinemas, film cultures and discourses emerging from three of the film-producing nations most adversely affected by the Eurozone crisis. Through case studies arising from Portugal, Greece and Spain, the article explores the enhanced visibility of independent film-making at a time in which the role and the very survival of the state-subsidized film industries in recession Europe has been crucially thrown into question. This comparative analysis suggests, conversely, the cyclical nature of the discourse of crisis and explores the creative responses mobilized by European cinema.

Report on the 27th Leeds International Film Festival, 6–21 November 2013

World Film Locations: Mumbai, Helio San Miguel (ed.) (2012), Bristol: Intellect Books, 128 pp., ISBN: 9781841506326, p/bk, £14.99

Placeres ocultos: Gays y lesbianas en el cine español de la transición/‘Gays and Lesbians in Spanish Cinema during the Transition’, Alejandro Melero Salvador (2010), Madrid: Notorious Ediciones, 278 pp., ISBN: 9788493714888, €18.95

The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne (ed.) (2012), Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 566 pp., ISBN: 9780415771306, h/bk, $130; ISBN: 9780415771313, p/bk, $45.95

The New Neapolitan Cinema, Alex Marlow-Mann (2011), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9780748668779, p/bk, £22.99; ISBN: 9780748640669, h/bk, £65.00