New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2007

This article centres on the cloned bodies of Hari in Copuc/Solaris (Tarkovsky 1972) and Elena in It's All about Love (Vinterberg 2003), exploring how the films negotiate what it means to be human and post-human. It draws on recent work in human geography, which calls for an ethics of relationality that thinks through the body and extends the social beyond the human, and on post-humanist critical theory, which offers insights into the allegedly techno-organic hybrid nature of the contemporary human condition and the dispersal of subjectivity and memory into technologies of information. Both films emphazise the intercorporeal connectedness of the human with organic life and technology, and approach the problem of unknowability and unrepresentability in human art of non-human forms of life. They do this by alluding to the representational inadequacy and illusionary quality of film, and by gesturing to the communicative power of affective perception and sense memory.

The cinema of directors classified as transnational has been increasingly associated with exceptional cultural configurations: The filmmakers' fluid geo-national position has been seen as a guarantee against rigid, stereotypical systems of thought and cognition. This approach has defined critical assessments of Turkish-Italian director Ferzan zpetek, and has informed the reception of his first feature film, Hamam (1997). This paper focuses on Hamam's representation of Turkey, discussing the extent to which zpetek may or may not offer a new point of view, and arguing that transnational directors should be freed from the burden of re-representation. Specifically, the paper argues that Hamam's construction of Turkishness is embedded in an essentially Orientalist discourse; however, rather than the expression of a bigoted cultural position, zpetek's use of an Orientalist code relates dynamically to the experience of dislocation, serving the director's mnemonic strategy by framing and conserving a specific national image.

It has become increasingly popular, within film and cinema studies, to challenge the framework of national cinema with that of transnational cinema. Transnationalism in cinema can be understood as modes of production and consumption, as well as ideology, genre and aesthetics. It can be argued, however, that transnationalism, while purporting to transcend the national, does not so much displace the nation as reinstate it within a larger, pan-national framework. This essay aims to interrogate the notion of trans- and ask to what extent the prefix trans transcends existing boundaries, whether in relation to the nation or to gender. Mobilising the concept of passing in transgender practice, it argues that the ethnic passing that is increasingly common in popular culture (such as three ethnically-Chinese actresses playing Japanese geishas in the film Memoirs of a Geisha) raises questions about ethnicity, transnational capital, transcultural flows and globalisation at the start of the twenty-first century.

Can hype, used by Thomas Austin, Mark Jancovich and Barbara Klinger to describe Hollywood marketing strategies, also help us understand the promotional activities of independent British film distributors who have been promoting mainly Japanese and South Korean genre films under a variety of Extreme Asia brands since 2001? This article will examine how these distributors and the print/broadcast media are involved in the process of discursively segmenting a variety of audience taste formations, and then recruiting these niche demographics to build an aggregate audience by generating multiple promises and invitations-to-view, or hype, around a film text. I will examine the various discourses used to constitute these niches, including those of cult subcultural identity, auteurism and other notions of authorship, textual alienation effects and Orientalist cultural essentialism. I will focus on those exceptional texts in which this multiplying process has been particularly successful, in particular Miike Takashi's Audition (1999).

Bhutan until the last decade drastically restricted its contact with the outside world, and recent media interest has focussed only on Bhutan's late reception of global satellite TV and the Internet. To date there has been no scholarly account of its indigenous DV film industry; one that has produced nearly a hundred featurelength films, none of which have yet been screened outside Bhutan. The author of this report has had unique access to the country and, as a screenwriter and director herself, has by working in collaboration with Bhutanese colleagues gained added insights into the creative and practical dilemmas faced by film-makers there. She also highlights areas of concern to film theorists with regard to questions of spectatorship, as well as narrative strategies around the notion of the dream.

Who would expect that during these three days, from the small, picturesque town of St. Andrews in Scotland, one would be able to travel, with the power of words and moving images, to such places as Iran, Japan, New Zealand, the Middle East, Canada, Denmark and so on, to all these places that might be considered to be at the periphery of the world? But what is the periphery? And what is the centre? This question was frequently raised throughout the discussions although no definite, clear answer was reached. The centre assumes we already know it, as John Caughie put it, the periphery always explains itself to the centre. The borders are always shifting and this division tends to be only a schema; a dangerous schema as Bill Marshall maintains, but one that has sparked some heated debates.