TRANS/NATIONAL
What do the terms “international”, “transnational” and “global” have in common?
All terms aim to transcend the nation-state as a key unit of analysis. All of them, and projects associated with them, are shaped by the forces of globalization.
Name one way that Japanese Media Theory puts "pressure" on the object of cinema.
Moves us away from a "fixed" cinematic model (i.e gives us a discourse to discuss relocation of cinema to television, iphone etc).
What position does black feminist scholar bell hooks take on film theory in her essay "The Oppositional Gaze"?
She sees it as a 'critical turf' in the US that reflects white racial domination. She argues that the feminist turn did not make FT more inclusive because that feminism was informed by racist practices, and adds that those interested in black spectatorship were not interested in black female spectatorship.
If we attempt to place the filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako and his film Bamako geographically, what kind of a contact zone would it suggest?
Sissako: Born in Mauritania, grew up in Mali, educated in Moscow, based in France.
Bamako and African Cinema: blending traditions of First, Second, and Third cinema; political and art cinema, documentary and fiction, various film formats; multiplicity of discourses; blending of African traditions with Francophone influences; formal and bodily/everyday. The "contact zones" of the film involve: private rooms; the courtyard/court; the perimeter/fence; neoimperial governmental spaces (e.g. World Bank, IMF), Africa the zone immediately outside the fence; the nightclub; the city of Bamako and its peripheries; schoolrooms; Timbuktu; the desert; Mali, Senegal, Mauritania; the American West; Los Angeles; Italy; Palestine; Spain, Niger, Algeria, Morocco; the places mediated by radio/tv.
What are the problems and possibilities of the concept of AUTEURSHIP within the context of festivals? Discuss in relation to Patricia White, Lindiwe Dovey, and Lucrecia Martel.
Festivals, including CANNES & FESPACO, can perpetuate and elevate a European model of auteurship over other forms of filmmaking, but this is balanced out by the other things that are taking place within the festival, including greater representation of women and filmmakers of the global south, the creation of a contact zone for filmmakers, and the gathering of people to create diverse community through the arts festival atmosphere. Although Martel is considered to be a highly-regarded auteur and a darling of film festivals, her films weave kinship structures are not patrilineal in which multiple POVs are represented through sound and image. Martel has used the platform of the festival to challenge the exclusions of cinema's patriarchal and heteronormative infrastructure, as with the celebration of Pedro Almodóvar at the Venice Film Festival that we watched.
What is implied by the concept of “international” film, and what are its advantages/disadvantages?
Borrowed from international relations and law, "international" cinema is a collection of national cinemas, each as an independent unit with its own history and trajectory. Problem: national cinemas are studies in isolation, rather than as part of the larger world system, with little exchange and interaction between the elements. Currency: It retains relevance in the history of political cinema and its connections to internationalist movements.
What are some of the ways in which Cultural Studies scholars such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy expanded the academy / academic debates, thus opening new pathways of thought for cinema and media studies? (Rahaman presentation and Stuart Hall reading)
-Foregrounded the importance of Caribbean culture and "the New World" in academic studies, adding a "third term" between Africa and Europe.
-Posited identity as always "in process" and explored the tension between the "imaginary coherence" and sense of identity among diasporic subjects, and the many differences within diasporic communities. ("Hybridity"--a term also important to Homi Bhabha)
-Examined the unstated presuppositions of the humanities tradition, humanism, national culture, and the education system.
-Introduced Black Music as "multi-sited sound"; a "politics from below" or a "lower-frequency politics," a "counter-culture with its own lower frequency."
-Made cinema, television, and music inextricably linked to the act of theorization, involving a constant preoccupation with resistance, refusal, liveliness in the face of ongoing colonial violence.
-Explored how an oppressive politics of decency and respectability could be opposed or undermined.
-Explored the relationship between high-low; tight-slack; familiar/strange; national/foreign, mainland/islanders.
Who coins the term "Speaking Nearby," what is its significance, and how might you think about it in the context of What About China? ?
Trinh T. Minh-ha presents this term as an alternative to the ethnographic idea of "Speaking About." It recognizes limits to what we can know about another person as well as proximity alongside difference. In WAC? this term might resonate with: Minh-ha's filming of people without translating into English or subtitling their words; with her use of questions rather than answers; with her juxtaposition of a variety of differently-positioned voice-over speakers, perhaps with the effect of diluting or disrupting narrative authority. And more!!
According to Rossen Djagalov and Masha Salazkina, what made the Tashkent Film Festival a "contact zone"?
Djagalov and Salazkina suggest the Tashkent Film Festival brought together the "languages of cinema," which might include the "styles, topoi, camera and narrative techniques, and poetics of the various cinemas represented" and "the discourses on what cinema is or could be" (281).
Mystery question
Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim use “critical transnationalism” as a preferred critical approach to discuss transnational cinema. Describe at least two potential dangers, and two methodological advantages of the term.
Dangers: "transnational" is often used as a shorthand for any supranational mode of production; often used as an empty signifier without a real consideration of what "transnational" actually means, both in terms of production practice, narrative strategy, and aesthetics. Advantages: helps account for the mobility and well as new limitations and divisions that have to do with access (to financing, technology, networks of distribution); accounts for hybridity that goes beyond the traditional local/global binary where local=national, art cinema, global=Hollywood, commercial cinema; it is sensitive to the significance of the local/national.
Give three examples where filmmakers, organizations, or theorists have grapples with the challenge of defining the object of film/cinema. Please make sure that Jean-Marie Teno is included in your answer.
David (D.N) Rodowick; André Bazin; Society of Cinema (and Media) Studies; The Academy; FESPACO; Japanese film and media theory and its debates about film/tv
What is the problem for Homi Bhabha of abstaining from Theory as a mode of protest?
For Bhabha, the idea that Theory is imperialist and therefore oppressive to the Other leaves the idea of the European and the Other untheorized. Abstaining from theory leaves these over-generalizations in tact rather than engaging in debate.
What is the difference, according to Abé Mark Nornes, between "corrupt" and "abusive" subtitling, and in what specific context does Nornes theorize these practices?
Corrupt subtitles hide the work of translation and the "violence" of subtitling practice. Abusive subtitling embraces the moments of untranslatability, makes it visible, and turns the film watching experience into an experience of translation. Nornes is writing with specific reference to Japanese cinema.
What does FESPACO stand for and what have you learned about it? For a bonus 100 points, allow one of your team members to explain (with some accuracy) the flows of money, films, and ideas as they are depicted in Jean-Marie Teno's Sacred Places.
Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou. Founded in 1969. Takes place every other March. Now includes diaspora filmmakers, but generally features African films made on the continent. Takes place in Burkina Faso and is heavily funded by state, now with many international cosponsors + Dovey reading +discussion of the many different modes of media and formal and informal economies depicted within the film.
What are some of the layers of the local/global relationship suggested by Steve McQueen's Small Axe?
Global auteur status of Steve McQueen; global distribution platform of Amazon; global genre frameworks (social realism, courtroom drama, etc); connection between the specific geographic and historical setting of the film and contemporary context of BLM movement; British West Indian history and global diaspora; the specificity of language, accent, food, music, religion, relationships, forms of sociality, local community-based political organizing strategies; nationhood and colonial history; Caribbean cultural production as part of a colonial and postcolonial British economy and culture; development of script in dialogue with London-based Caribbean communities.
What does FESPACO stand for and what have you learned about it? For a bonus 100 points, allow one of your team members to explain (accurately) the flows of money, films, and ideas as they are depicted in Jean-Marie Teno's Sacred Places.
Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou. Founded in 1969. Takes place every March. Now includes diaspora filmmakers, but generally features African films made on the continent. Takes place in Burkina Faso and is heavily funded by state, now with many international cosponsors + Dovey reading
How does Raymond Williams distinguish among the terms "Theory," "Criticism," and "Jargon"?
Theory: linked to thea- (evoking mental contemplation, spectacle, projected idea); C17 distinguished between theory / practice; praxis (via Marxism): a theory-informed praxis. Criticism: often negative; informed ability that gives social confidence to a particular class; gives rise to 'authoritative judgment' without always questioning where authority comes from; can abstract the critical response from real situation. Jargon: can be unintelligible, but new concepts and terms often needed to bring forth different ways of thinking. Jargon tends not to be applied to the sciences because this language less frequently enters everyday use.
Why does Murray-Levine describe Bamako as a "mise-en-scène de la parole"?
Murray-Levine underscores the oral performance in the film. Possible answers might include: 1. It is structured like a trial. 2. The audience is drawn to moments of silence or untranslatability, eg. Zegué Bamba's speech/song is not subtitled. Samba Diakité cannot speak. 3. The griot/West African oral tradition. 4. Theatricality of court arguments, Melé's dressing, Maître Rappaport's sunglasses. 5. Broadcast of the trial; 6. Melé's singing.
What are some of the critiques of the AUTEUR concept?
Turns directors into God-like figures (Gore Vidal); Overshadows collaborative nature of filmmaking process; Works within a model of "film genius" that is presumptively white and male (Patricia White); European model of creativity--great artist, great philosopher--that excludes people considered not capable of greatness (Lidiwe Dovey/ Linda Nochlin).
What, for Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten, are some of the arguments in favor of studying "Media Theory in Japan," and what are some of the challenges of doing so?
-Japan's rich media history and theory is often ignored in "the West"
-disrupts universal pose of Western theories
-Japanese media theory's longstanding pluralistic attention to a range of media objects helpful for the contemporary media ecology
-Japanese media theorists have been ignored as a result of Anglo-European biases, but Japan is also a colonial power, so this discourses complicates discussions of theory's "Others"
-Japan a strong context for thinking about "rooted" or "vernacular" theory rather than "high theory"
-Requires multidirectional structures of thought / transmission and does not necessarily involve Anglo-European-North American theorists.
-Chisels away at the divide between history/culture and theory
Challenge: What counts as "media"? What does it mean to be "in Japan"? Language gaps.
Who authored "Towards a Third Cinema" and when? What is 1st, 2nd, and 3rd cinema? Name some of the critiques of Third Cinema.
Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1969. 1st Cinema: mainstream movies, reality as conceived by ruling classes; 2nd cinema: European art cinema: "trapped inside the fortress"; 3rd cinema: films that the System cannot assimilate and that work toward revolution. Collective work important; film as open text; equipment and knowledge democratized; form of film not standardized; often militant in formulation. Critiques: does not take hybridity of nation into account; didactic, violent, and masculinist; ignores things that film accomplishes other than political action; against pleasure; ignores successful popular cinemas on the continents it claims to represent; can posit audiences as dupes. But importantly, to criticize a text does not mean to dismiss it, and Third Cinema, and this essay, remain important and lively spheres of activity today, and in fact is cited repeatedly in our readings.
How does Homi Bhabha distinguish between "cultural diversity" and "cultural difference"? For a bonus 100 points, illustrate your answer with examples from the films we have watched in class.
Cultural diversity: an epistemological object (an object to be known, grasped) with "pre-given cultural contents and customs". Such an approach is often ahistorical and depoliticized, trading in imprecise fantasies of "multiculturalism" and the "culture of humanity." Cultural difference: a space of uncertainty, the unsolvable; a place of negotiation, debate, translation that is informed by history, politics, and inequities.
What scholar speaks about translatio, and what does she imply by it? Describe at least two examples of translatio.
Nataša Durovićova. Extending beyond semantics, translatio includes the social and political ground-rules of text transfer from one to another set of cultural circumstances. It is attentive to the non-identity, asymmetry, or unevenness of power relationships in which all translation is inevitably implicated. Examples: 1) until the 1960s, most international film festivals avoided subtitles, embracing language difference as a mark of unique national identity; 2) dubbing as a protectionist gesture in some European countries (Italy, Spain) in the 1930s, to retain linguistic integrity of native soil and block out foreign sound.
What are some of the ways in which Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga might be understood to engage with the realm of the political, and how does her approach differ from a cinematic approach more aligned with the idea of, for example, the camera as a weapon?
-Intervenes in hierarchies of the senses by shifting from the dominant sense of the visual to the realm of sound
-Collecting sounds of animals and environments as well as people
-Pays attention to the Salta region, a region with a strong Indigenous presence
-Introduces attention to environmental damage, space, anticolonialism, gender, sexuality, desire, inertia, kinship structures, Indigneity, nationality, and borders into her work against a backdrop of neoliberalism
-Disrupts the attitude that everything is or should be "for us" (the spectator, humans) by cultivating a cinema of strangeness, confusion, discomfort, uncertainty, but also beauty, humor and pleasure
*Thank you Astrid for your great presentation :) *