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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2005
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2005
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2005
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New-ness, Sequelization, and Dogme logic in Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive
By Carolyn JessThis article discusses the workings of aesthetic death and rebirth in one of the most recent manifesto-movements, Dogme 95. Founded on what appears to be an insistent opposition to the sequel phenomenon in recent cinema culture, Dogme’s uniform methods of film production exit from the throng of cinematic ‘likenesses’ to create and champion ‘new-ness’. The Dogme ‘phenomenon’ is argued in this light to invoke many of the patterns that it claims to oppose. The sequel is further regarded in this article as a vehicle for the interrogation and reassessment of the concept of ‘original’ in order to establish a set of differences, to query the ‘authority’ of an auteur, and to impose a new set of (seemingly relevant) methodologies upon a production previously prescribed to the popular consciousness. By pronouncing both the sequel phenomenon and the auteur as irrevocably ‘dead’, the film offers Dogme’s manifesto as a replacement by which ‘new-ness’ and collaborative production can lay the foundations for a ‘new’ cinematic aesthetic in the manner of its new wave predecessors.
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The motif of escape in recent Polish films
More LessThis article discusses the motif of physical and spiritual escape in some recent Polish films, arguing that they pertain to the widespread disappointment with the social reality and express the difficulty of overcoming the problems embedded in living in a post-communist society. It focuses on three films by directors who made their debut in the first decade of the new millennium: Edi (2002), directed by Piotr Trzaskalski, Zmruż oczy/Squint Your Eyes (2003), directed by Andrzej Jakimowski, and Moje pieczone kurczaki/My Roasted Chickens (2002), directed by Iwona Siekierzyńska. They were chosen because they exemplify a certain tendency in new Polish cinema and were critically and commercially successful, gaining awards in national and international festivals and enjoying good figures at the box office, particularly amongst younger audiences.
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Memory and mediation in Los rubios: a contemporary perspective on the Argentine dictatorship
By Joanna PageThis article analyses the particular contribution made to post-dictatorship memory by one of the most innovative films to have emerged in Argentina in recent years, Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003). It examines ways in which the film’s reflexivity and its subversion of cinematic conventions become essential to its reworking of the themes of memory, absence and identity. The film comments explicitly on the difficulty of its own production, and indeed the debates surrounding the funding and distribution of Los rubios reveal with unusual clarity the complexity of relationships between aesthetic, political and economic interests in contemporary Argentine film-making.
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Giordana’s I cento passi: renegotiating the Mafia codes
More LessThe ‘codes’ to which the title of this article refers are the narrative and visual codes of a particular genre model, the Mafia film. The article traces the tradition of Mafia film-making with the purpose of establishing how it gives meaning to Marco Tullio Giordana’s film I cento passi, which is shown to be one of a crop of contemporary Italian films that addresses the Mafia question from a new perspective - through humour (Roberto Benigni, Robert Torre) or through emphasis on a little-known protagonist (Scimeca, Giordana). Giordana’s film is shown to renegotiate, through intertextual citation, the cinematic codes of Hollywood (Coppola’s The Godfather) and of the European tradition (the films of Francesco Rosi). The article concludes by demonstrating that the impetus behind the current films is found in the climate of anti-Mafia opinion that predominated in Sicily, following the Mafia murders of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
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‘You want to torture Zora?’ Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover as critique
More LessDemonlover represents Olivier Assayas’s attempt to find the appropriate filmic structure and themes to depict the complexity of the present intensive form of global consumer capitalism. He uses a structure which plays with genre expectations and borders on incoherence in order to capture a sense of the social totality and its psycho-sexual investments. Themes of violence, humiliation, torture and sexual fantasy are used to register the complicity of the viewer, while providing the means for an immanent critique of the disturbing world the film depicts.
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Volumes & issues
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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)