scholarly journals The Pleasures of Polyglossia in Emirati Cinema: Focus on ‘From A to B’ and ‘Abdullah’

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doris Hambuch
Keyword(s):  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Accented Cinema ◽  
Post War ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Related Category

<p>Polyglot films highlight the coexistence of multiple languages at the level of dialogue and narration. Even the notoriously monolingual Hollywood film industry has recently seen an increase in polyglot productions. Much of Europe’s polyglot cinema reflects on post-war migration. Hamid Naficy has coined the phrase “accented cinema” to define diasporic filmmaking, a closely related category. The present essay considers polyglot Emirati films as part of an increasingly popular global genre. It argues that the lack of a monolingual mandate is conducive to experiments with language choices, and that the polyglot genre serves best to emphasize efforts made to accommodate the diversity of cultures interacting in urban centers in the United Arab Emirates. Case studies of Ali F. Mostafa’s <em>From A to B</em> (2014) and Humaid Alsuwaidi’s <em>Abdullah</em> (2015) demonstrate the considerable contributions Emirati filmmakers have already made to a genre, which offers a powerful potential for cinema in the UAE. A comparative analysis identifies the extent to which each of the two films reveals elements inherent in three of the five sub-categories outlined by Chris Wahl.</p><p><em>Keywords</em>: Ali Mostafa; Emirati cinema; film analysis; Humaid Alsuwaidi; multilingualism; polyglot cinema </p>

Convivial linguistic practices: lived togetherness through language in the United Arab Emirates

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Robert Amilan Cook
Keyword(s):  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Small Story ◽  
Small Stories ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
The City

Abstract This paper takes up conviviality as an analytical tool to investigate everyday language choices made by foreign residents living in Ras Al Khaimah, a small city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It draws on recent work in human geography and cultural studies to understand conviviality in terms of practices rather than outcomes. Specifically, it investigates some of the linguistic dimensions of conviviality deployed by residents of the city in everyday situations of linguistic contact and negotiation of difference. The paper focuses on participants’ “small story” narratives (Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2015. Small stories research: Methods – analysis – outreach. In Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis, 255–272. Malden: John Wiley & Sons) that exemplify everyday language choices in the face of a highly ethnolinguistically diverse as well as racially and economically stratified society. Considering the multitude of ethnolinguistic and socioeconomic divisions in the city and the country as a whole, the paper unpacks how such cross-border contact is negotiated through everyday language practices. The paper identifies four types of convivial linguistic practices described by my participants: language sharing, benevolent interpretation, language checks and respectful language choices. In the process, I also probe the limits of what studying conviviality can tell us about everyday linguistic togetherness in highly segregated societies marked by stark inequalities.

Soviet Film

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Film Treatment ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The Masses

Dos Passos’s adaptation of cinematic methods to literary style beginning in the mid-1920s emerged further in his work after he visited Russia in 1928. Tepid public and critical response to New Playwrights dramas motivated Dos Passos to explore how the revolutionary state-supported Russian theater and film productions had engaged the masses, united them politically, and produced groundbreaking artists. In dramatist Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater, Constructivist industrial sets and “biomechanical” acting techniques created successful dramas about and for workers. Dos Passos observed that cinematic innovations emerged from the Soviet-controlled studios despite the state’s use of film as its primary tool of mass ideological education. Though Lenin, then Stalin increasingly controlled film productions and artists, Soviet filmmakers nonetheless evolved theories of montage that became foundational in filmmaking and informed Dos Passos’s modernist novels and his 1936 independent film treatment “Dreamfactory,” with its meta-filmic exposé of the Hollywood film industry. In particular, these works registered the formal and conceptual innovations of two directors: Eisenstein, whose films combined fiction and history to effect political action through art; and Vertov, whose films acknowledged the artist’s vision as controlling the camera “eye” and who embedded in one short film an auto-critique of movie-making.

Of War and Beyond

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-166
Author(s):  
J. P. Telotte
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Story Content ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

Abstract: As a conclusion, this chapter considers how the impact of that popular cinematic imagination changed during the war and immediate post-war years, that is, in the lead-up to SF’s coming of age in the 1950s, a coming of age that would be accompanied by film’s own explosion of SF narratives. The chapter argues that film had, during this period, become much more of a cultural “given,” a fact of life, and one that no longer evoked the same sort of SF-like “wonder” that it had during the pre-war era. While still visible in the rhetoric of SF and to a lesser extent in story content, film and the film industry would increasingly move in a different direction in this time, with SF literature, in both its pulp and hardcover forms, finding a new significance and respectability, while that burgeoning SF cinema would struggle to achieve a similarly respectable status.

scholarly journals Translating Interviews, Translating Lives: Ethical Considerations in Cross-Language Narrative Inquiry

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Li
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
Multiple Languages

Through two narrative inquiries, in this article I explore the challenges for qualitative researchers in working with multiple languages in capturing, translating, analyzing, and representing narratives. I discuss the effect on research when we engage in these processes considering what was happening as we translated both texts and experience from one language into another. Woven into this discussion is attention to the effect that choosing one language or another might have on our research: the participants, the processes, and the findings. I consider how to remain awake to the ethical and relational issues regarding language choices that we make at every step of the research process.

scholarly journals The development of small settlements in the industrial plant - city model - based on the examples of Nowa Dęba and Nowa Sarzyna

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 00079 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Sikora
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Plant ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Small Cities ◽  
Industrial Facilities ◽  
Industrial Plants ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
City Model ◽  
Post War ◽  
Time Specific ◽  
Over Time

Double-purpose industrial plant-settlement complexes (city) are fairly popular urban combinations; especially so during the inter-war and post-war industrial periods, when through a decision by the central authorities, industrial facilities were located in specific areas which were then developed over time. Specific cases of such complexes are two small cities built from scratch around growing industrial plants. The article presents certain functional and spatial changes in two urban centers: Nowa Dęba and Nowa Sarzyna, which are located in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship.

Roads Not Taken in Hollywood’s Comic Book Movie Industry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Hassler-Forest
Keyword(s):  
Comic Books ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Dynamic Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
Movie Industry ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Archaeological Approach ◽  
Formal Features

Chapter 23 approaches the phenomenon of the comic book movie as a complex and dynamic adaptation process. While superhero movies and other comics-inspired franchises now dominate the global box office, it is rare that they adapt comic books’ formal features in a meaningful way. By foregrounding three comic book movies that have largely been considered failures, the essay discusses innovative ways of adapting comics to film through a media-archaeological approach to the genre. The films Popeye (1980), Dick Tracy (1990), and Hulk (2002) can be read, each in its own way, as provocative “roads not taken” by the Hollywood film industry.

Nobody Knows Anything

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Ian Turner
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Final Outcome ◽  
Success Rates ◽  
Hollywood Film

The wild unpredictability of success rates in the Hollywood film industry is in fact a model of the unpredictability of success in many other areas of business. Is there any one factor that creates success? What impact do efforts towards success have on the final outcome of any business or product?

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document