Indigenous Feature Film: A Pathway for Indigenous Religion?

This paper explores the religion-making potential of a particular secular institution, namely the Walt Disney Studios. Focusing on the animation film Frozen II that was launched in November 2019, the current article enters into debates about the manner in which indigenous religion is part of the commodity presented—how religion is produced, packaged, and staged. In the article I argue that contemporary media-scapes can be seen as agents of religion-making, of religious circulation, and renewal. As such, religion, as it is expressed in Frozen II, is outlined and produced by a particular media-form and shaped as a popular cultural formation. Further discussions about cultural appropriation are highlighted, focusing on how Disney’s reach out for cooperation with the Sámi community can generate new cultural policies and practices.

Download Full-text

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474429443.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alistair Fox

Keyword(s):

Indigenous People ◽

Coming Of Age ◽

Natural World ◽

Feature Film ◽

Indigenous Woman ◽

Spiritual Dimension ◽

The World ◽

Life Force ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

Download Full-text

Early Cinema in Scotland

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420341.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Keyword(s):

Social History ◽

Small Towns ◽

Early Cinema ◽

Popular Song ◽

Feature Film ◽

Local Newspapers ◽

The Social ◽

Production History ◽

History Of ◽

International Audience

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.

Download Full-text

Duration, Compression, Extension and Distortion of Time in Contemporary Transgender Cinema

Somatechnics ◽

10.3366/soma.2019.0265 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 58-83

Author(s):

Akkadia Ford

Keyword(s):

Life Experiences ◽

Private Life ◽

First Century ◽

Short Film ◽

New Wave ◽

Privileged Access ◽

Feature Film ◽

Theoretical Issues ◽

Over Time ◽

Film Change

Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.

Download Full-text

AFRICAN LITERATURE AND INDIGENOUS RELIGION: A STUDY OF WOLE SOYINKAâ€™S DEATH AND THE KINGâ€™S HORSEMAN AND D.O. FAGUNWAâ€™S ADIITU OLODUMARE

Imbizo ◽

10.25159/2078-9785/1854 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 4-20

Author(s):

Femi Abodunrin

Keyword(s):

21St Century ◽

African Literature ◽

Knowledge System ◽

Religious Knowledge ◽

Indigenous Religion ◽

Vast Array ◽

Production Of Knowledge ◽

World Today ◽

Metaphysical Presupposition ◽

Performance Poetry

Religious bigotry pervades our world today. As the 21st century oscillates between what Ramin Jahanbegloo (2015) has described as the politicisation of religion and its accompanying ideologisation, this study examines the vast array of literary creativity and indigenous religion/knowledge from an ecocritical viewpoint. By indigenous, it is meant those systems of knowledge and production of knowledge that are sometimes perceived as antithetical to the Western empirical systems. Encapsulated in myths and mythical wisdom, these indigenous values have at the centre of their philosophical presuppositions a symbiotic strategy that seeks to integrate man with nature. The study examines Wole Soyinkaâ€™s Death and the Kingâ€™s Horseman and D.O. Fagunwaâ€™s Adiitu Olodumare [The Mysteries of God, Olu Obafemi (trans)], in particular, and the indigenous religious/knowledge system that they reiterate, in general, as distinct from the Western monotheistic system in ontological and metaphysical terms. Also, largely because the metaphysical presupposition of Yoruba religion is essentially performance poetry in motion, a carnivalesque perspective is employed to account for the folkloric and other elements of carnival often described as â€˜the feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewalâ€™.

Download Full-text