Cinema, colonialism, and contact zone: the movie theater and city governance in early-twentieth-century Shanghai

Author(s):  
Qiliang He ◽  
Jie Tan

Abstract Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 08-16
Author(s):  
Huseyin Metin Felekoglu

Centres, which are spaces of interaction in urban area where social, political and economic relations condensed, have importance with their publicity characteristic beyond being social. In the modernisation of cities, functional and structural elements supporting the publicity of space have been evaluated as a dimension of development. Especially throughout the twentieth century, movie and movie theatres became the important components of the urban centres with their publicity characteristic. The relation with the urban centre or structural–spatial properties of movie theatres are realised in the context of growth and development processes of urban. It is possible to read this synchronisation through the relationship between formation of urban centre and movie theatres in certain periods in Ankara, an Ottoman small town by beginning of the century, and then, had become the space of modernisation politics after 1923. Beyond the morphological, this positioning reflects the pressure of infrastructure factors that affect its formation.   Keywords: Modernisation, publicity, urban centre, movie theatres, Ankara.  


Author(s):  
Sabine Sanio

With the general goal of describing “how music understands itself socially and politically,” Sabine Sanio starts out by focusing on the musical neo-avant-garde, and especially on John Cage, and continues by discussing aspects of the musical idea of space. Although her chapter draws on several threads reaching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the central topics of the chapter are current issues dealing with musical explorations of the sound itself, modern data technologies, and public spaces. Using a number of examples, Sanio discusses how the relationship between composers and audiences is both socially and aesthetically challenged by redefinitions of the concept of space and character of the musical live event—or live-like event.


Author(s):  
Richard Coyne

The widespread use of mobile telephony prompts a reevaluation of the role of the aural sense in spatial understanding. There are clear correlations between voice and space. The attributes of the voice constitute important variables in the way people position themselves in public spaces: to speak, to hear, or to get away from the voice. The voice can connote intimacy, communality, and welcome, but also has the potential for disquiet and disruption, particularly as an unseen acousmêtre, (a term developed in film studies). Spatial design can benefit from an exaggerated consideration of voice, to counteract the primacy already given to the visual field. This chapter examines the relationship between the voice and space in public spaces, and the technologies and practices involved.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


Author(s):  
Lital Levy

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.


Author(s):  
Bella Oktavianita ◽  
Sarwititi Sarwoprasodjo

Iklim komunikasi organisasi merupakan persepsi pegawai mengenai peristiwa yang terjadi di lingkungannya. Kantor Desa Cibalung, Kecamatan Cijeruk, Kabupaten Bogor merupakan salah satu kantor desa yang memiliki berbagai prestasi. Prestasi yang sudah diraih tentu saja tidak lepas dari peran kinerja aparatur pemerintahan desa dan masyarakat yang terlibat dalam menciptakan lingkungan kerja yang produktif dan kepuasaan kerja yang dirasakan. Maka dari itu, penelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat hubungan iklim komunikasi organisasi dengan kepuasan kerja dan hubungan kepuasan kerja dengan kinerja aparatur pemerintahan desa. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif melalui metode survei dengan kuesioner yang didukung oleh data kualitatif melalui teknik wawancara mendalam dan studi literatur dengan responden sebanyak 36 orang. Hasil penelitian yang diperoleh menunjukkan bahwa terdapat hubungan nyata antara iklim komunikasi organisasi dengan kepuasan kerja dan hubungan sangat nyata antara kepuasan kerja dengan kinerja aparatur pemerintahan desa.Kata Kunci: iklim komunikasi, kepuasan kerja, kinerja, komunikasi organisasi=====ABSTRACTOrganizational communication climate was the employee's perception of events that occurred in their environment. The Cibalung Village Office, Cijeruk Subdistrict, Bogor District was one of the village offices that had various achievements. The achievements that have been achieved certainly could not be separated from the role of the performance of the village government apparatus and the community involved in creating a productive work environment and perceived job satisfaction. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the relationship of organizational communication climate with job satisfaction and the relationship of job satisfaction with the performance of village government officials. This study used a quantitative approach through a survey method with a questionnaire supported by qualitative data through in-depth interview techniques and literature studies with 36 respondents. The results obtained indicated that there was a real relationship between organizational communication with job satisfaction and the very obvious relationship between job satisfaction by the performance of the village government apparatus.Keywords: communication climate, job satisfaction, performance, organizational communication


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.


Author(s):  
Alison James

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.


Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.


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