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- Volume 21, Issue 1, 2023
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2023
Volume 21, Issue 1, 2023
- Articles
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Hard yards, vulnerable bodies: Tenderness in two recent prison films from Argentina and Chile
By Ben BolligPrison literature from Latin America has been a topic of growing interest for literary scholars of and from the region in recent years. This reflects wider attention in cultural studies dedicated to ‘heterotopias’ or ‘other spaces’, while building on the work of sociologists who have studied prisons and prison reform in countries there. Less has been written, however, about films set in penitentiaries. Building on recent work (Podalksy) that examines the depiction of feelings and emotions in cinema, as well as writing on depictions of the Latin American jail on page and screen (Whitfield, Aguilar) this article addresses the cinematic portrayal of a perhaps unlikely feeling, tenderness, in two prison films from the Southern Cone, one fictional, El Príncipe (Sebastián Muñoz, Chile, 2019), and one documentary, Rancho (Pedro Speroni, Argentina, 2021). In both films, feelings traverse the body–mind divide and cross between people, while portrayed with what we shall argue is a form of filmic tenderness.
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Second-order observation of art in two films about Colombian violence: Carne de tu carne and Memoria
By David JuradoUsing dialogism and second-order observation, I interrogate how art is mobilized through the lenses of specific film codes and how this encounter frames the interpretation of past violence in two films: Carne de tu carne (Mayolo 1983) and Memoria (Weerasethakul 2020). At the same time, I examine how this encounter disrupts the systemic identity of the two medias, exposed to a complex exchange of meanings. I conclude that both films interrogate the communication of violence through an appropriation of art references. But, while Carne de tu carne develops a political horror genre marked by tremendismo, Memoria explores slow cinema and an imperceptible indexicality language relied to the context of a Global South memorial discourse.
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Cinema of dissimulation: Deleuzian powers of the false and Benjaminian Erfahrung in Iranian modern cinema
More LessIranian culture has a long history of dissimulation and falsehood, and their incorporation into Iranian modern cinema performs the function that Benjamin has identified for a certain modality of experience, namely Erfahrung. This article argues that in Iranian modern cinema epitomized by Jafar Panahi’s cinema of dissimulation, the filmmaker becomes the forger who benefits from the Deleuzian power of the false to produce a modern cinema of time-image that corresponds with traditional dissimulation practices and other modes of indirect communication that are prevalent in Iranian society.
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Seeing the xenomorph, Giger’s alien in the context of machinic modernism
By Michael EdenThis article contextualizes H. R. Giger’s influential alien designs and the extended Alien mythos, represented by the popular films, with what has been called machinic modernism. That twentieth-century aesthetic is examined here in fine artworks and related literature by artists with distinct relations to so-called desired dehumanization, including Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and Michael Ayrton. The research outlines the ways in which particular social forces cohere to influence common aesthetic decisions evidenced in the art practices discussed. The analysis indicates that an anti-humanist position is incubated in the alien designs and in the extended mythos, and how this is politicized in relation to ideas of heroism, leadership and social organization as proto-fascistic. The designation ‘proto-fascist’ in this article is not intended to defame the creatives involved in the creation of the Alien mythos, or the audiences that have enjoyed and engaged with it – of which the author is a part – rather, it is used to describe a common world-view, and a type of fantasy operational in many nationalistic narratives and aesthetics, and widely consumed by the public. It is an aim of the research, in exploring the problematic but compelling aspects of the Alien mythos, that what is later described as fealty to primitive and atavistic patterns in popular culture can be resisted in the name of a reflexive and complex subjectivity.
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- Introduction
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Pathaan and its politics
Authors: Megha Anwer and Anupama AroraReleased on 25 January 2023, the Bollywood blockbuster film Pathaan, an action-spy thriller featuring India’s beloved superstar Shah Rukh Khan (SRK or King Khan to his fans), shattered box-office records. Pathaan’s spectacular success is the starting point for this Special Section. Scholars of Indian cinema offer their reflections on the larger political-cultural conversations within which the film is embedded and that it has ignited, not least the enmeshment between nation, religion and masculinity, and the film’s special place in SRK’s stardom and filmography. The six essays in this section extend the ways in which Pathaan has been read so far and offer interventions into thinking about star text and fandom, masculinity, nationalism, neoliberalism, and precarity in Bollywood.
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- Articles
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Caramel connections: A memory box, the box office and Pathaan
More LessWhile the film Pathaan, at the time of its release in 2023, was read in terms of its overt political messaging and against the backdrop of a majoritarian political culture, this article sees Pathaan’s political work as more subterranean. Pathaan functions as a kind of memory box connecting viewers through a web of sensed memories, which I call caramel connections, of cinema and their unspoken connections and implications of heterogeneity. The film’s self-aware engagement is with both the history and the memory of an older Bollywood cinema: its earnestness, its disinterest in aesthetics and politics of realism claims the space of popular culture as political outside the binaries of left and right. Shah Rukh Khan is a star who has functioned as an emotive vehicle for transitional moments in India. What kind of transitional moment do Pathaan and Khan see themselves as travelling through?
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‘Pathaan … Zinda hai’: Masculinity, ageing and the militarized masala action film
More LessThis short article examines the ways in which Pathaan, with its glorious invocation of the star-text in the title, explores the shifting relationship between masculinity, the imperial-militaristic Hollywood action genre and the idea of nation. This article argues that the filmic narrative, its paratexts and Pathaan/Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), working within the conventions of a Hollywood-inflected masala action genre, reconfigure an ageing, kintsugi action-hero masculinity. While the agentic, aestheticized, muscular, male body anchors the film, its emphasis on brokenness – emotional, psychological and physical – drives the film’s deliberate reshaping of current Hindutva narratives of the nation to a secular neo-liberal mode.
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The Bollywood audience we were waiting for? Pathaan’s dancing-fans
More LessThis article examines the celebratory reception of the many videos of Pathaan’s ‘dancing-fans’ that circulated on social media during the film’s release. It argues that an un-nuanced celebration of this vocal fan obscures the inaccessibility of the cinema theatre as a public space of leisure in neo-liberal India. Shot on mobile phone cameras inside cinemas, these videos were heralded as evidence of the ‘return’ of the Hindi film audience. The celebratory discourse around this new dancing-fan is in sharp contrast to the anxieties that such vocal fandom has historically generated in cinema discourses in India, being associated instead with the ‘rowdy’ lower-class fan, pejoratively termed the ‘frontbencher’. The article suggests that the desirability of the contemporary dancing-fan reflects a professionalization of Hindi film fandom. It reads this as a new stage in what Tejaswini Ganti identifies as a process of gentrification that began with the emergence of Bollywood in post-liberalization India.
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Pathaan’s touch: Cinematic contact, SRK and spectatorship
More LessThis article explores the affective haptics created between star and spectators via the body of Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) in Pathaan. The screen reverberates with the cinematic materiality of his body and constructs a closeness with the viewers to revel in its spectacularity. Pathaan’s intertextuality with SRK’s stardom and the surrounding paratexts before, during and after the film’s release further deepen this spectatorial experience. The screen fairly sizzles with anti-ideological fervour via this body, resulting in an embodied and affective film experience that, rather than its diegesis, becomes the vehicle for the film’s politics.
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If you know, you know: Imperso-nation and mimicry in Pathaan
By Anjali RamPathaan embodies the essential Bollywood as being everywhere and everything in both form and content. Oscillating between the mythical and the farcical, combining allegory, nostalgia and inside jokes, Pathaan is action, comedy, romance and drama all at once. This reflection draws upon Sumita Chakravarty’s conceptualization of the ‘imperso-nation’ and Homi Bhabha’s idea of mimicry to discuss how Pathaan engages with nationalism, transnationalism and imperialism. In Pathaan, identities are, as Chakravarty puts it, ‘piled up’ and reassembled to allow the male action hero to impersonate as the patriotic son, the mobile cosmopolitan, the ‘new man’ lover and the secular unifier. Masquerade and imitation in Pathaan emerge not just in content but also in form. The reflection concludes by discussing Pathaan as colonial mimicry, where imitation, while flattering to dominant power, is also subversive as it slips into mockery to disrupt Hollywood superiority and Western surveillance.
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Pathaan, precarity and the Muslim question in neoliberal India
Authors: Megha Anwer and Anupama AroraIn India’s current censorial political climate, Pathaan’s subtle jabs against authoritarianism, jingoistic nationalism and communal ideologies make it an unusual and innovative cinematic-political intervention despite its clichéd genre-elements. Yet we argue that the film’s diagnosis of what needs intervention is inadequate and its interventionist apparatus is counterproductive. The film uses all the accoutrements of a neo-liberal image-economy (globe-trotting mobility, jet-setting lifestyles, glitzy hotels, sexy bodies, monster automobiles) and the neocolonial ‘big brother’ rationality of a hyper-militarized, surveillance-driven, paranoid security-state to make an argument about religious tolerance and a nationalism grounded in compassion. We invite an analysis of the film that is not caught between a wide-eyed celebration of the film or an angry dismissal of its betrayals, though perhaps Pathaan deserves both. Instead, in reading the film as an example of ‘cinema of precarity’, we identify its structures of resistance and explore why they amount to so little. The film thus also allows us to register the limits of neo-liberal stardom as an adequate foil to religious authoritarianism.
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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)