New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2004

The ‘new’ in New Cinemas hopes to point to an unashamedly utopian direction, providing a platform not only for the study of new forms of cinematic practices and a new focus on cinemas hitherto neglected in Western scholarship, but also for new ways of configuring identities and issues of self and otherness through the cinematic apparatus, and a new, heightened consciousness of the constant need to break down the boundary and distinction between self and other even as one problematises them.

This article looks at the works of three experimental video and film artists in Cairo and how they break existing moulds of artistic practice in their use of the medium. They are respectively Sherief El-Azma, a documentary and fiction filmand video-maker; Hassan Khan, an experimental and documentary video-maker and installation artist; and Wael Shawky, an installation artist. Hamid Naficy’s term ‘accented cinema’ applies to the works of these artists who stand outside the local film industry and yet who benefit from the contradictions and anomalies of this positioning. By the force of their work, they transform the margins by which they are distinguished in relation to dominant modes of production and reception, into an imaginary centre.

Beto Brant’s film The Trespasser (2002) was considered by many critics as revelatory of Brazil’s moral decadence. This article asks: what does The Trespasser actually reveal about Brazil? How far can a fiction film be taken as evidence of the ethical condition of a real place? And is the country in the film really Brazil? Through an analysis of the film’s fictitious and documentary aspects, this article suggests that its revelatory quality is of an aesthetic kind: the representation of the supposedly protected universe of the ruling classes permeated by the misery that surrounds it. It argues that such an aesthetic contamination passes for an ethical diagnosis of Brazil as a whole thanks to the skill with which genre elements are articulated with the document. It concludes that The Trespasser updates the crime thriller by introducing music-video language as a privileged space for the representation of contemporary alienation in a global context.

In the context of both contemporary Japanese society and cinema, there seems to be a growing preoccupation with national as well as personal identity in the era of so-called ‘multiculturalism’. By drawing on Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s concept of ‘cosmetic multiculturalism’ as well as anthropologist Mary Douglas’s account of ‘body as society’, this article attempts to examine how ‘body-metaphors’ structure the films of Miike Takashi and how the presence of non-Japanese characters are related to such a body politic of his films. Finally I argue that by the repeated use of metaphors of the breakdown of bodily boundaries and fragmentation, Miike’s films may allegorize the break-up of the mythical national body of Japan as a racially homogeneous organic unity and non-Japanese characters are mobilized as an active factor in a narrative strategy to dramatize this.

This article offers a critical overview of the development and deployment of film in scientific endeavours of social and cultural scientists. It addresses some of the key issues involved in the use of a rich medium such as film to document, analyse and communicate about society and culture. In the past, social and cultural scientists have taken different approaches when trying to bring into play or, as the case may be, restrain the varied means of expression that are available within this medium. While the extent to which these means should be applied is still a matter of concern, it is gradually recognized that a more expressive approach is not only unavoidable but also much more fertile if it goes hand in hand with a clear and duly communicated sense of purpose. A peculiarity of film as a tool in human behaviour research is that it can provide an opportunity for the field to ‘talk back’ (i.e. to respond in a very literal sense) and to become actively involved in producing and assessing visual data in various ways. The fact that film creates this opportunity is increasingly recognized and indeed it is increasingly explored in practice, as this approach often yields unique and richer data. Researchers/film-makers, in their role as humans who are studying other humans of different cultures, need to be extremely wary of and explicit about their being ‘positioned subjects’ that operate within a necessarily limiting ‘scopic regime’ and that apply culturally moulded technologies. The growing awareness among scientific film-makers of the far-reaching consequences of these kinds of influences on their visual products is today commonly referred to as ‘reflexivity’.

A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, Mark Allinson (2001) London: I. B. Tauris, ISBN 1860645070, £14.99.

Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen, Yosefa Loshitzky (2001)Austin: University of Texas Press, 22 b/w photos, xvii + 226 pp., ISBN 0-292-74723-3 (hbk), £37.95; ISBN 0-292-74724-1 (pbk), £13.96.

Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95, Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds.) (2003) London: BFI, 237 pp., ISBN 0851709524, £15.99.

Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, Jeffrey M. Pilcher (2001) Wilmington, DE: SR Books, xxvi + 247 pp., ISBN 0842027696 (hbk), $55; ISBN 0842027718 (pbk), $19.95.