New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2009

This article seeks to question and revise the boundaries of Mexican National Cinema, in order to make it possible to look at films made by Mexican directors in the United States and elsewhere as part of the project of the country's national cinema. The article looks specifically at Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu's trilogy (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel) exploring not only how these films, although made in different countries and political contexts, share many of the same visual, stylistic and narrative strategies, but also what this might suggest about the possibilities of a resistant and contestatory cinema, made in the United States but still broadly adherent to the concepts of a Third Worldist, and specifically Mexican, culture and ideology.

This article will look at the way in which the thematic and aesthetic discourses of My Summer of Love imagine and problematize the notion of a British/English identity. As an allegorical story of Sapphic love and conflict between two teenage girls, working-class Mona and upper-class Tamsin, My Summer of Love explores an English identity by mapping it onto the British class system. As an outsider to British/English culture by dint of his Polish origin, Pawlikowski negotiates his perception of British/English identity by extrapolating the myths that contribute to the creation of the imagined British community (mainly the South/North divide of England) and conventions of British cinema (mainly the British social realism with its emblematic That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill). However, the prominence of authorial discourse in this phenomenological project of getting to the heart of English identity as well as realist aesthetic discourses also hint at his nomadic sensibility and the allegiance to various European New Waves.

This essay examines the nature of the shot in Bla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), asking what is achieved in Tarr's decision to stage the film as a series of sequence shots. It considers the shot as an event and argues that the distinctive quality of the Werckmeister shot rests in its being simultaneously concrete and void. It contrasts Tarr's film with the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, who is understood as a key precursor. Is there a pure form of the event? A solar eclipse, a glass of water thrown on hot coals, a walk through the town at midnight the variety of events is infinite, yet the occurrence, the happening, is that the same in every case? Can we separate the pure form of the event from what happens in a given instance? Is the happening different from what happens? Whether sunrise or dice throw, planetary movement or drunken stumble, is the occurrence always the same? Is there one event repeated in every event?

This article examines how domestic violence has been depicted in mainstream English-language cinema. I offer readings of Sleeping with the Enemy, Tina: What's Love Got to Do With It, Once Were Warriors, Nil By Mouth and Enough that examine both common and specific representational strategies. My analysis is grounded in theoretical approaches and heuristic tools more commonly found in feminist criticism than in film studies.

The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (2008), Daniel Bernardi (ed.), Abingdon: Routledge, xxvi + 390 pp., ISBN13: 978-0-415-77413-0, Paperback, 18.99