New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - Volume 9, Issue 2-3, 2012

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) has been criticized for its lack of authenticity, plausibility and realism. Another frequently appearing critique of numerous re/viewers revolved around the issue of ‘poorism’; the film’s alleged deployment of an orientalist Western gaze in depicting the dirty underbelly of a megacity in the developing world. Instead of asking whether Slumdog Millionaire‘represents’ Mumbai and its urban poor in a realistic or non-realistic (orientalist) way, this article tries to inquire whether and how the film engages its spectators into a visceral, sensual viewing experience. The article presents an analysis of the film’s deployment of participatory narrative strategies, kinaesthetic cinematography and notions of embodiment, in order to inquire the filmmaker’s overall ambition to immerse viewers into the experience of living in contemporary Mumbai.

This article examines two films, Pasolini: un delitto italiano/Who Killed Pasolini? (1995) by Marco Tullio Giordana and La prima linea/The Front Line (2009) by Renato De Maria, in relation to their revisiting of traumatic and unresolved events of the 1970s in Italy. Giordana’s film investigates the 1975 murder of intellectual and director Pier Paolo Pasolini using a variety of media sources, while La prima linea is a fictional reconstruction of particular moments of the terrorist campaign of the group Prima Linea. The article places the films in the context of contemporary Italian cinema’s obsession with the return to the 1970s, and examines the use of archive footage as part of a strategy by the filmmakers to negotiate the problematic memories of the period. Finally, it considers the consequences of this return to the archive for thinking about historical memory, postmemory, and the difficult and sometimes tortured dynamic between the present and the past in relation to the 1970s in Italy, and elsewhere

This article explores Manoel de Oliveira’s travelogue film Um Filme Falado/A Talking Picture, released in 2003, the year in which Portugal joined the US-led coalition in the Iraq War. Here I discuss the ways in which the film recycles and subverts Portugal’s fifteenth-century maritime expansionist narrative and Sebastianist mythologies of the Crusade, as a means of exposing and criticizing Portugal’s late twentieth-century global alignment with post-9/11 anti-Islamicism. The result of this is a subtle remapping of the conventional West-to-East voyage of discovery in terms that actually underscore the origins of what the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms the ‘abyssal lines’ delineating a globalizing North against a globalized South.

This article analyses two feature films, Garage Olimpo (1999) and Figli/Hijos/Children (2001), by Italian film-maker Marco Bechis. The films are conceived as a diptych revolving around the 1976–1983 Argentine dictatorship and its traumatic legacy in the following decades. Through a close reading of Bechis’s films, this article aims to highlight how the director has forged a form of cinema that is subtly political not only in the subjects represented but also in the (filmic) language that expresses these themes. Scholars who have examined Bechis’s works have read the two films, and in particular Garage Olimpo, within the context of Argentine cinema. In addition to this Hispano-centric viewpoint, my analysis will consider a wealth of writings and interviews that have been released in Italian. The understanding of Bechis’s point of view that one gains through this material allows for a deeper, more nuanced interpretation of his films than the exclusively Argento-centric reading.

This article considers formal negotiations of terrorism in the collaborative film work of one director (Paul Greengrass) and one actor (Matt Damon). In particular, it explores the coupling of stylistic dynamics and sociocultural concerns in the Greengrass/Damon films: The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Green Zone (2010). Placing emphasis on the earlier works, and especially The Bourne Ultimatum, the piece argues that the implicit political orchestrations of the Bourne films achieve more complex expressions of terrorism than their more declamatory sibling Green Zone. Both Bourne films are ferocious examples of what David Bordwell calls the ‘intensified continuity’ of modern American cinema: a hyper-charged spectacular and affective style of film-making adhering to formal paradigms of classical Hollywood narration, yet playing out at a more intense rhythm and register. Whilst in accordance with Bordwell’s claim, the article applies the principles of expressive criticism to see more at stake in the pace and surge of these two works. The films use their amplified formal strategies to get close to their thematic and socio-political concerns, creating a stylistic ‘state of exception’ to tap into contemporary anxieties of terrorism. The use of the term ‘state of exception’ indicates the article’s interest in the works of Giorgio Agamben. It extends the impact of this theoretical voice to advance thoughts on the marriage of style and content in the Greengrass/Damon projects as mainstream narrative films interested in kindred ideas, such as the liminal qualities of exception, and the effects of accelerated or compressed elements of time and space on the individual’s identity. Greengrass’ kinetic compositions and the physicality of Damon’s performances combine to create a sophisticated aesthetic of anxiety in the post 9/11 world order.

This article examines the reconfiguration of masculinity in contemporary Mexican cinema, arguing that recent films are less interested in equating man and nation than in exploring male subjectivities. The article focuses on directors such as Carlos Bolado, Carlos Reygadas, Fernando Eimbcke and Julián Hernández, whose films feature male protagonists in liminal periods of their lives on the cusp of transformative possibilities. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the analysis suggests how the films chart the becomings of male subjects through the exploration of rural and urban landscapes. Through formal experimentations with spatial and temporal markers, the films rewire the relationship between the viewer and pro-filmic events and, in the process, position the film-makers themselves as auteurs on the global art scene. While exploring such engagements with global trends, the article also insists on the films’ connections to larger socio-economic transformations that are reshaping the role of men in Mexican society.

FRENCH MINORITY CINEMA, CRISTINA JOHNSTON (2010) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 206 pp., ISBN: 978-9042031104, p/bk, £36REFRAMING BOLLYWOOD: THEORIES OF POPULAR HINDI CINEMA, AJAY GEHLAWAT (2010) London: Sage, 165 pp., ISBN: 978-81-321-0472-8, h/bk, £29.99Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering, Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (eds) (2010) Rochester, NY: Camden House, ix+304 pp., ISBN: 978-1-57113-437-0, h/bk, £50JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE, JOSEPH MAI (2010) Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 156 pp., ISBN: 978-0-252-07711-1, p/bk, £12.99