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- Volume 20, Issue 1, 2022
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2022
Volume 20, Issue 1, 2022
- Articles
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Reconfiguring cinema: Linn da Quebrada and the queer creative act in Tranny Fag
Authors: Daniel Oliveira and Ana Catarina PereiraThinking of a queer cinema means reflecting on how film, using its aesthetic-narrative strategies, can contribute to the antinormativity, disruption and destabilization of rigid standards of gender and sexuality. Based on the notion that a series of contemporary movies fulfils this goal by focusing on a queer creative act, this article intends to identify this act in Brazilian contemporary cinema, specifically in the aesthetic-political-corporal performance of the singer and multi-artist Linn da Quebrada in the documentary Tranny Fag (Claudia Priscilla and Kiko Goifman 2018). Combining an exercise of film analysis with the methodology proposed by the Filmmakers’ Theory, the investigation aims to examine how the gesture of self-fabulation performed by Linn in the movie – in her speeches, her body and, especially, in the gaze she directs at the camera – in/subverts not only the historical subject–object relationship in documentary production, but also the very tradition of objectification of the trans and black bodies by cinema. Through her words and her performance, she creates a co-authorship dialogue with the filmmaking duo, which establishes the trans body, as well as the inner-city neighbourhoods historically marginalized by audio-visual production, as subjects of the narrative. As a result, the movie walks away from the outdated notion of documentary as a genre in which reality simply happens and is captured by the genius gaze of the director, underlining the mise en scène and the filmmaking aspects inherent to the film – and how Linn is an integral part of their creation.
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‘Where is here?’: Place and rurality through the cinematic child
By Andrés BuesaThis article explores the ways in which Alice Rohrwacher’s Le maraviglie, as exemplary of a growing tendency within contemporary cinema, negotiates ideas of place and belonging through the trope of the rural child. It contends that the cinematic child in the film articulates a dynamic and open – rather than static, localized and fixed – understanding of place. Against the Romantic tendency to associate childhood and nature as a way of grounding essentialist ideas of place, the film draws on children’s heightened openness to the others in order to embody what Doreen Massey calls a global sense of place (1991): a sense of place built upon the social relations created in the encounter with the other. By bringing together film analysis, childhood studies and theorizations of place, this article builds an interdisciplinary approach to look into this shifting use of the child figure. It first explores two different reactions to the threats of the global presented in the film – the family’s mode of living and the reality TV show contest – as reterritorializing attempts to ground a sense of place in the local. It then argues that, in the way in which the child protagonist bonds with a newcomer to the farm, she rejects both these notions and opens herself up to alternative understandings of place. In a gradual recovery of her childhood that culminates in the last scene of the film, she comes to embody a progressive sense of place that emphasizes the hybrid nature of global places.
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An alternative storyboarding approach for designing films with immersive 3-D sound
By René IdrovoInspired by Alfonso Cuarón’s audio-visual aesthetics and practical filmmaking strategies, this article proposes an original storyboarding approach for incorporating immersive sound into the early creative decisions of any film’s pre-production stage. The aim is to present a set of guidelines that can help filmmakers effectively leverage surround audio tools like Dolby Atmos. The author demonstrates the implementation of this film planning framework through the creation of an original screenplay and its accompanying 3-D storyboard, both of which illustrate how the pre-production strategies outlined in this article can enhance the creation of films with 3-D sound.
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Boxed within the frame: Tibetan masculinities in transformation in Pema Tseden’s Jinpa
More LessThe Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel, the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article, I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature Jinpa (2018) marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters, the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history, culture and tradition haunt the men in the film, Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of carriers of culture, he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.
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- Book Reviews
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Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics, Dimitris Papanikolaou (2021)
More LessReview of: Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics, Dimitris Papanikolaou (2021)
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 224 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-47443-632-8, p/bk, £19.99
ISBN 978-1-47443-631-1, h/bk, £90
ISBN 978-1-47443-634-2, e-book, £90
ISBN 978-1-47443-633-5, e-book, £90
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The Battle of Algiers, Alan O’leary (2019)
More LessReview of: The Battle of Algiers, Alan O’Leary (2019)
Milan: Mimesis International, 127 pp.,
ISBN 978-8-86977-079-1, p/bk, $18
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The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution, Larson Powell (2020)
By Ben MorganReview of: The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution, Larson Powell (2020)
Rochester, NY: Camden House, 320 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-64014-072-1, h/bk, $99.00
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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)