New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2014

This article examines Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, which focuses on the contemporary music scene in the city. It argues that through its narrative structure and narrator’s voice, the documentary latently reproduces Orientalizing assumptions and frameworks and ends up undermining the understanding of hybridity that it purportedly promotes as a boundary-blurring process of cross-fertilization. Strikingly, the documentary’s liberal-pluralist interpretation of the bridge in Istanbul as a metaphor for harmonious amalgamation and/or transculturation also collapses halfway through the film. The bridge, instead, transforms into a boundary-marking device which, as it renders Turkey Europe’s periphery, at the same time promises the European subject an imaginary voyage over space and time that enables his access to an ‘authenticity’ untouched by modernity. The article concludes with an analysis of the accounts of two particular participants in the documentary which reveal the limits of both the liberal-pluralist and nationalist appropriations of the bridge as a metaphor for Turkish identity and culture.

Limited-time film-making and 48-Hour Film Competitions give people with a range of film-making experience a forum where their film can be made and screened in a short time under highly specific conditions and constraints. Their low budget and hasty construction means they operate in similar contexts to traditional amateur film-making, yet the conditions and constraints put in place by the competition means they are formed from a process more akin to a sporting event. The New Zealand version of the ‘the 48’ has screened hundreds of short films. This article describes the experiences of 26 New Zealand competition participants, explores the convergence of sport and film-making practice in their experience, and analyses some 48-Hour films. Certain conditions of ‘constraint’ produce adherence to the game-like challenges, but others permit and foster unrestraint from competitors, and this unrestraint differentiates 48-Hour films from industry-produced and other amateur film.

Contemporary British social realism has rapidly gained critical adherents in mainstream film critique, with the 2009 film Fish Tank hailed as a triumphant demonstration of British political cinema. The 2013 film The Selfish Giant followed this trend, and both have been aggrandized as a concrete critique of social inequality and, in a similar vein to the films of Ken Loach, offer an insight into the destabilizing effects of living with marginalized social categories. However, this article contends that the representation of working-class characters in Fish Tank and The Selfish Giant can also be interpreted as a depoliticized form of British social realism that fails to effectively depict the scope of social inequality or critique current policies and problems. This article interrogates the critical responses that annex Fish Tank and the Selfish Giant with Loach’s body of films and suggests that the texts form part of a broader trend of decontextualization in contemporary British social realism.

This article juxtaposes cinema and moving image installation to question the ways cinema studies has understood embodied spectatorship. Through a close study of Amar Kanwar’s moving image installation, The Sovereign Forest, exhibited at ‘documenta 13’, the article draws on an intermedial approach to explore emerging transformations in the phenomenological dynamics of the moving image. The article explores how the concrete, multisensory experience of Kanwar’s installation trains the sensorium of the viewer, opening new possibilities for the moving image. This concrete physicality serves as a point of reference to refocus and sharpen the understanding of the more complex kinaesthetic dimensions of cinema spectatorship.

Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, Lisa Purse (2013) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ix, 174 pp., ISBN: 9780748646906, h/bk; ISBN: 97807486890, p/bk, £19.99

spanish Cinema 1973–2010: Auteurism, Politics, Landscape and Memory, Maria M. Delgado and Robin Fiddian (eds) (2013) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 262 pp., ISBN: 9780719087110, h/back, £65.00

Reading ‘Bollywood’: The Young Audience and Hindi Films, Shakuntala Banaji (2012) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 232 pp., ISBN: 9780230001725, p/bk, £18.99

Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom, Sabrina Qiong Yu (2012) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 224 pp., ISBN: 9780748645473, h/bk, £60.00

Directors: From Stage to Screen and Back Again, Susan Beth Lehman (2013) Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 177 pp., ISBN: 9781841504902, p/back, £20