New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 19, Issue 1-2, 2021

Yasujiro Ozu develops the narrative of his films around transitory rites in the lives of the characters. For Ozu, the family is the core of sustenance of the home and it is its stability that is called into question. The present article intends to relate, due to the proximity to the everyday and community life of Ozu’s characters, the threats to the stability of the family home with the rites of passage identified by the French ethnologist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep defines rites of passage as the ceremonies that accompany an individual’s life crises. And also, especially in the films around the daughters’ marriages, to the state of liminality or margin developed by the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner. In these, the main conflict is centred on the character’s struggle to change, because of a ritual that is not accomplished or that will, in the face of society and the values of an epoch, be belatedly fulfilled. It is the tension between modernity and tradition that places the characters in a liminal state, giving rise to a sense of slow separation, of non-status and of late. In these films (Late Spring, Early Summer, Late Autumn, An Autumn Afternoon) Ozu illustrates an avowed desire to portray the cycle of life or mutability rather than the action itself.

Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s forgotten masterpiece Beed-o Baad (Willow and Wind) (1999) is an Iranian children film written by Abbas Kiarostami, that pays tribute to the children of the post-war generation. As in other children’s films of the period, the young hero has a mission, which he stubbornly pursues. Set in a village in Northern Iran, the story follows the boy’s efforts to repair a broken glass during very stormy weather. This article will examine the visual motives of Willow and Wind (a boy climbing a hill, single trees, wind, rain) paying particular attention to the interaction with nature. The tree and the wind alluded to in the title underline the struggle and determination of Iranian children. In line with the children’s films produced by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA, aka Kanoon), it applauds the willpower of a generation with enormous responsibilities, while placing his protagonist as a role model for audiences of all ages. However, by rejecting the happy ending, the film opposes the predominant narrative model of Iranian educational films of the 1980s and 1990s while criticizing adults’ treatment of boys in post-revolutionary Iran. In this moral tale, Talebi stresses the dignity and resourcefulness of rural Iran but condemns the solitude of children, and the distance between the worlds of adults and children setting a precedent for future Iranian children’s films.

This article explores how ambiguous-unreliable narration occurs in cinema as a distinct mode of unreliability. In defining ambiguous narration, we build on Semir Zeki’s neurobiological notion of ambiguity, from which we understand ambiguous narration as a mode that presents a series of questions consistently answered in mutually contradictory ways. We pay specific attention to Robert Vogt’s definition of ambiguous-unreliable narration in order to get a grip on the possible storyworlds presented by Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 feature film Burning. The film cues viewers to consider multiple interpretations of diegetic truth, each interpretation tapping into another possible world of events by positing questions with multiple non-hierarchable answers. As such, it becomes clear how Burning plays upon different concepts of ‘truth’. Drawing on the work of Vittorio Bufacchi and Kevin Reuter and Georg Brun, we can see how Burning ambiguates the line between correspondentist and coherentist readings of truth, thereby revealing something significant about truth-assigning strategies. We argue that Burning mimetically evokes post-truth phenomena, a periodizing concept in which the differentiation between fact-based truths, opinions and lies is blurry, creating an ambiguous information environment characterized by an uncertainty of what one can consider (un)trustworthy or (un)reliable. By proposing a cognitive narratological approach, we demonstrate how film storytelling can mimetically evoke this experience of uncertainty. In light of these findings, this research addresses the educative value of ambiguous-unreliable narration within fiction, especially within curricular programmes that incorporate media literacy training.

Review of: Charlotte Gainsbourg: Transnational and Transmedia Stardom, Felicity Chaplin (2020)

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 204 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-52614-297-9, h/bk, £85.00

Review of: The Cinema of the Precariat: The Exploited, Underemployed, and Temp Workers of the World, Tom Zaniello (2020)

New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 204 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-50134-920-1, h/bk, £85.00

ISBN 978-1-50138-584-1, p/bk, £28.99

ISBN 978-1-50134-921-8, e-book, £26.09

Review of: The German Cinema Book, 2nd ed., Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, Deniz Göktürk and Claudia Sandberg (Eds) (2020)

London: BFI, 604 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-84457-530-5, p/bk, £36.99

Review of: Jafar Panahi, Interviews, Drew Todd (ed.) and Ehsan Khoshbakht (asst. ed.) (2019)

Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 160 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-49682-320-5, p/bk, $25.00