New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2009

Up to the early 2000s, Pedro Almodvar's and Gregg Araki's films, for all their colourful queerness, could be read as symptomatic of a quasi de rigueur trend in art-house cinema towards the gleeful deconstruction of the love story. But more recent work by the two auteurs suggests that each is increasingly interested in more demanding visions of how humans might achieve something like loving relations, visions based neither on cinema's return to traditional narratives of romance nor on its brittle championing of post-modern desire, but rather on its dreaming of a shared survival of and identification with something like unrepresentable suffering. This article argues that the shift by Almodvar and Araki into new cinematic representations of non-realist and unthinkable forms of love, beyond either singularizing romance or multiplicitous desire, is both ethically and politically crucial in an era of the increasingly easy leftfield posture of post-ideological disillusionment.

The implementation of martial law in 1981 is regarded as one of the most important events in Polish post-war history. Martial law is also an event that attracted significant interest from foreign artists and historians, not least because it was one of the last attempts by a communist government in Eastern Europe to assert its authority, as well as a sign that the political power of communism in this region was crumbling. This essay discusses three films on this subject, made outside Poland: Moonlighting (1982) and Success is the Best Revenge (1984) by Jerzy Skolimowski and Passion (1982) by Jean-Luc Godard. I treat the films as testimonies, however partial, to the ways this event was perceived outside Poland, both by Polish emigrants and foreigners. Simultaneously, I regard the films as attempts to engage in wider discourses, such as the changing role of the working class, the difference between socialism and capitalism, the role of an migr artist/intellectual in the situation of a political crisis affecting his country and even the possibility to represent political crisis from outside. I argue that martial law successfully activated these discourses, yet without providing any definite answers to the questions they posed.

In this article I argue that theories of fictional film realism are epistemologically and methodologically flawed because they reason in the abstract about empirically investigable phenomena, particularly spectatorship. Through the investigation of so-called realist, commercial Tamil film, the article explores what a theory of realism would look like if approached through work with viewers, filmmakers and film form.

This article probes contemporary Polish cinema, examining it through the sociological theory of cultural trauma. The majority of post-1989 Polish films correlate with national tragic narratives that emphasize the negative social effects of the fairly recent systemic transformation. The author chooses to analyse two films (The Wedding (2004) and The Debt (1999)) as her case studies. Both productions received many awards in the home country. To Polish critics, the two films demonstrated a significant achievement of the country's film industry that should be capable of exporting and promoting Polish culture in the international arena. Yet, the worldwide success proved to be beyond the reach of the directors and with only a few honourable mentions and special jury awards, they won no major trophies outside Poland. Going straight to DVD, The Debt has never been widely released in the cinemas either in the United Kingdom or in the United States, while The Wedding opened with a three-year delay in the United Kingdom in a few cinemas only, but there has not been an international DVD release as yet.

Made at crucial moments for the political and social history of the country, both films depict ethically dislocated and confused post-traumatic characters and both reverberate the post-1989 collective Polish experience. For the domestic audience the two films cumulate and amplify post-traumatic syndromes, emblematizing a larger thematic tendency of the Polish contemporary cinema. This new inclination distinguishes current developments in the Polish cinematic culture from the country's past productions. The author argues that the thematic reliance on the post-traumatic becomes the main facet of the national Polish film production, which by adhering to its own social reality celebrates its cultural otherness and thus limits its appeal to domestic audiences and a handful of international experts who specialize in the subject of Eastern European cinema.

All about Almodvar: a passion for cinema, Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (eds.), (2009) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 496 pp., ISBN 978-0-8166-4961-7 (pbk), $24.95

Lee, Vivian P.Y. (2009) Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan