New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2010

While nuanced and sensitive non-essentialist theorizations of Chicano identity have been put forward by key critics working in the field, these same critics still struggle, on occasion, to disentangle themselves from having recourse to essentialist arguments in their own work. The case that I examine here constitutes a prime example of this problem within Chicano critical discourse. It concerns the debates, in Chicano intellectual circles, over definitions of Chicano cinema, focalized via an examination of a film that has provoked a quite particular polemic in this respect: non-Chicana director Allison Anders's Mi vida loca/My Crazy Life (1994). My discussion of Anders's film will centre on its reception with a range of professional film critics, mostly Chicana/os, as well as reports on the reaction of a sample group of the film's subjects Chicana gang members to their representation on screen. It will examine the factors at play in the way it has been received and expose evidence of recursive essentialism in such arguments where apparent.

Awarded both the Human Rights Film and the Alternative Vision awards at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, Philippe Aractingi's Sous les Bombes/Under the Bombs (2007) juxtaposes bomb footage from 2006 Lebanon with scenes of actress Nada Abou Fahrat acting alongside actual victims, as her character Zeina searches for her fictional lost son. In this article, I discuss this blend of documentary and fictional modes. Through an analysis of the arrest and flows of the documentary, social and individual ways of knowing in Sous les Bombes, I read the film as a constellation of these three modes, one that allows each of them space on the screen while holding their logics in tension. As such, the material and social conditions do not function as evidence for a clearly articulated political argument, nor do they function to generalize the character Zeina's personal memory trail. Instead, the three intersect at various points and also contradict at others, but ultimately collide in the final scene where the material explosions and the metaphorically exploded social and personal experiences hold together at a standstill.

Home on the Range (Will Finn and John Sanford, 2004) concluded what had been, for Disney, a stylistically progressive sequence of theatrically released features defined in this article as the Neo-Disney period that broke with the hyperrealist conventions most commonly associated with the studio's output. It is this critically neglected sequence of films, comprising Fantasia 2000 (James Algar et al., 1999), The Emperor's New Groove (Mark Dindal, 2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 2001), Lilo and Stitch (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2002), Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2002), Brother Bear (Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, 2003) and Home on the Range, which provide the focus of this article. By analysing the artistic and narratological composition of these films, this article seeks to demonstrate that the studio's feature animation is more heterogeneous and progressive than received notions of Disney allow for.

Since colonial times, the figuration of the Latin(o) male homosexual has been highly exoticized and troped in western media accounts (Shohat and Stam 1994; Ramirez Berg 2002), as they are depicted as hypermasculine figures whose raw sexuality functions as an unquestionable sign of their inner primal machismo. This view on male (homo)sexuality has been further reinforced through the kind of images of Latin(o) men that have been presented in male gay pornography. Such stereotyped representations of male (homo)sexuality have permeated into a global, socio-sexual imaginary that persists in placing such men within a sexual and erotic order in which their bodies convey an extreme form of primal sexuality. As a result, the emergence of national gay pornographic industry(ies) in Mexico has resulted in a re-evaluation of the social and sexual notions commonly associated with male (homo)sexuality. The mestizo (mixed race) gay man is both deconstructed from his positions of sexual subordination (differently from submission) to a white subject (even when such coloured individuals take the active role during sex) and reconstructed in a new space of libidinal economy. This article offers an analysis of the role that national gay pornography has played in shaping Mexican gay men's perception of their own sexuality taking as a point of departure their own national and ethnic background. The research will focus on a number of films made by Mecos Films and Eros Digital in Mexico, and demonstrate that such films have challenged notions of gender and sexual universalism, and instead offer new alternatives for the production and execution of desire amongst coloured men.

Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010) New York, London: Routledge, ISBN: 0-415-80101-X, 223p (pbk), 16.99