New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2009

This article looks at male migration to Italy from Eastern Europe in a range of recent films through the prism of Queer Theory. The men who feature in these films are not gay, but their representation constructs a non-normative heterosexual subject whose presence in Italy depends on his productive role in the workplace, and excludes any kind of reproductive function. The central narrative device of these films is the unsuccessful romance between a migrant man and an Italian woman. These catastrophic plots introduce the spectator to a pedagogy of the non-national body by queering the heterosexual romance narrative. Italy itself is queered by the insinuation of the foreign worker into a medium that has been seen as the privileged cultural vehicle for the construction of Italian national identity. Yet the queering is only temporary as these films envisage the eradication of the foreign body from the national landscape.

Reading From the Edge of the City and Head On as world examples of New Queer Cinema, this article shows how the role they assign to sexuality crucially inflects their perspectives on diaspora and Greekness. From the Edge of the City undermines the conventional narrative of successful Greek repatriations by presenting a group of Russian-Greek young men negotiating both their position within Greek society and their framing by a new queer (cinematic) gaze. Head On screens queer desire as a strategy which finally unsettles the traditional space (and the accepted narratives) of Greek-Australia and disrupts the heteronormative temporality of Greek emigrations. Both films thus present us with new understandings of movement and ethnic belonging they suggest genderfuck and nationfuck as positions which dismantle the traditional framing of national and gender identities and propose a new queer(ed) Greece as a fluid space-off for the radical rethinking of identity.

This article charts the shift in focus from orientalist to postcolonial porn production in the French context. We set contemporary digital video production by local studio Citbeur against old-school racial fetish porn made famous by Jean-Daniel Cadinot (Harem, 1984) and later by Jean-Nol Ren Clair in the Studio Beurs series. Unlike the blatant sexual tourism of the colonialist porn produced by Cadinot and JNRC, we argue here that Citbeur marks a break with the exploitative gaze of white pornographers intent on hunting out niche markets for the expanding sector of ethnic pornography. In short, there is a radical shift in focus from the neo-colonial sex and class tourism in Cadinot and JNRC to the multi-ethnic independent production of studio Citbeur, in which the gay beur subculture attempts to mark both a visual distance from stereotypical imagery of Arab masculinity as savage and a political distance from institutional gay culture.

This article explores the treatment of the issues of disability and healing in the films of Hong Kong's independent filmmaker, Fruit Chan, between the years 1997 and 2004. These films include: Made in Hong Kong, Little Cheung, Longest Summer, Hollywood Hong-Kong, Durian Durian, Public Toilet and Dumplings. Distinguished by his efforts to forefront subaltern subjects in the city, Chan's films highlight the complexities of the relationship between social marginality and disability, as well as the medical market and healing cultures. By contrasting diverse forms of healing in his highly hybridized and transnational vernacular medical marketplace, Chan's films are instrumental in displaying the underlying tensions of bio-politics on screen.