From Empire to the World

Author(s):  
Malini Guha

Drawing upon examples from contemporary British and French cinema, this book explores the sights and sounds of “migrant” London and Paris, providing entirely new ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the cities we think we already know. The study of globalization in cinema assumes many guises, from the exploration of global cinematic cities to the burgeoning “world cinema turn” within film studies, which addresses the global nature of film production, exhibition and distribution. This book draws together these two distinctly different ways of thinking about the cinema, interrogating representations of global London and Paris as migrant cinematic cities, featuring the arrival, settlement and departure of migrant figures from the decline of imperial rule to the global present. The book also considers their world cinema status in light of their reconfiguration of established forms of filmmaking, from modernism to social realism. An illuminating analysis of London and Paris in world cinema from the vantage point of migrant mobilities, the book explores the ramifications of this historical shift towards the global, one that pertains in equal measure to cityscapes, their representation as world cinema texts, and to the rise of world cinema discourse within film studies itself.

Author(s):  
Michael Gott

The introduction discusses the political, cultural and cinematic contexts of contemporary European French-language road cinema. It also identifies defines ‘road cinema’ as used in this book and outlines and introduces the book’s three primary aims. The first is to assess the impulse to remap European space through the vantage point of French-language European cinemas. The second is to delineate the parameters of the European French-language road format and identify a number of its narrative, technical and formal particularities. The third objective is to expand the discursive parameters of ‘French’ cinema to encompass a wider realm of inter-related spaces of narrative, film production and reception that I label ‘French-language Europe’.


Author(s):  
Will Luers

Computational cinema, the digital manipulation of pixels, frames, shots and sequences, is a catch-all term for the many ways digital technology can affect cinema as a system of expression. If a movie scene calls for a snowstorm, CGI can be employed to create an idealized snowstorm. Computation in this sense is used to efficiently control contingencies (weather) and direct the intentions of “the writing” or preconceived idea. But computation can also create new contingencies that add to the camera’s already complex presentation of the world. Multimedia hypertext and interactive cinema, generative and recombinant video, datamoshing and databending all introduce forms of indeterminacy into digital cinema. As digital writing becomes even more cinematic and immersive, it is important to revisit the roots of cinema art and seek its relation both to writing and the world. The ideal of “cinema-writing,” or cinécriture in the French cinema context, is one that takes the machine seriously as a tool to bring the world into thought and thought out onto the world. Cinema and writing together, as imagined by the art’s earliest practitioners and theorists, is a way to harness the camera’s unique indexicality; to extend its spatio-temporal reach and direct its signification towards narrative, but also to benefit from its dispersed realism, its opacity and its potential to escape thought and narrative closure altogether. In this paper, I explore affiliations between cinema art and electronic literature, with a particular focus on computation as an extension of cinema-writing. Through examples of cinematic electronic literature, as well as film and video art, I will present strategies for a computational cinema that welcomes chance operations into the process of signification; that seeks an “outside” within (and beside) narrative composition and authorial intent.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Trish McTighe

In an era of public consciousness about gendered inequalities in the world of work, as well as recent revelations of sexual harassment and abuse in theatre and film production, Beckett's Catastrophe (1982) bears striking resonances. This article will suggest that, through the figure of its Assistant, the play stages the gendered nature of the labour of making art, and, in her actions, shows the kind of complicit disgust familiar to many who work in the entertainment industry, especially women. In unpacking this idea, I conceptualise the distinction between the everyday and ‘the event’, as in, between modes of quotidian labour and the attention-grabbing moment of art, between the invisible foundations of representation and the spectacle of that representation. It is my thesis that this play stages exactly this tension and that deploying a discourse of maintenance art allows the play to be read in the context of the labour of theatre-making. Highlighting the Assistant's labour becomes a way of making visible the structures of authority that are invested in maintaining gender boundaries and showing how art is too often complicit in the maintenance of social hierarchies.


Author(s):  
George E. Dutton

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.


Author(s):  
Anne Billson

These days it takes a very special vampire movie to stand out. Like Twilight, the Swedish film Let the Right One In is a love story between a human and a vampire but there the resemblance ends. Let the Right One In is not a romantic fantasy but combines the supernatural with social realism. Set on a housing estate in the suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it's the story of Oskar, a lonely, bullied child, who makes friends with Eli, the girl in the next apartment. 'Oskar, I'm not a girl,' she tells him and she's not kidding. They forge a relationship which is oddly innocent yet disturbing, two outsiders against the rest of the world. But one of these outsiders is, effectively, a serial killer. While Let the Right One In is startlingly original, it nevertheless couldn't have existed without the near century of vampire cinema that preceded it. This book looks at how it has drawn from, and wrung new twists on, such classics as Nosferatu (1922), how vampire cinema has already flirted with social realism in films like Near Dark (1987) and how vampire mythology adapts itself to the modern world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-319
Author(s):  
K. R. Harriman

While studies in Johannine ethics continue to develop through analysis of broad ethical instructions, this paper contributes to the conversation by conveying the belief of participatory victory that seems to inform the ethical instruction of the author of 1 John. That is, in the midst of the cosmic conflict in which John and his fellow believers find themselves, John speaks from the vantage point of one who participates in the victory of Jesus to other participants in that victory. Though there is no explicit statement of this notion of participating in the victory of Jesus, its influential place in the authorial framework is discernible at several points in the text, such as when John uses the terminology and imagery of victory, uses the terminology and imagery of participation, and particularly when he converges these two streams of thought.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Andrew Lapworth

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film –  Leviathan (2012)  – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rushton

Gilles Deleuze represents the most widely referenced theorist of cinema today. And yet, even the most rudimentary pillars of his thought remain mysterious to most students (and even many scholars) of film studies. From one of the foremost theorists following Deleuze in the world today, Deleuze and Lola Montès offers a detailed explication of Gilles Deleuze’s writings on film – from his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Building on this foundation, Rushton provides an interpretation of Max Ophuls’s classic film Lola Montès as an example of how Deleuzian film theory can function in the practice of film interpretation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Liston

Abstract This article utilises the methodology of Third Article Theology to explore the church’s missional role in the world. Initially arguing that ecclesiology and missiology are mutually informing doctrines, it develops a dialogical and pneumatological approach for viewing missiology from the vantage point of ecclesiology. This contrasts with and complements the more common approach where missiology is seen as determinative of ecclesiology. The final and major section of the article uses this approach to sketch out the constituent features of the church’s mission, particularly when the Spirit’s role is viewed as primary and constitutive.


1980 ◽  
Vol 162 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Greene

Informed and active engagements with works of art make new experimential openings visible as they turn attention to the concreteness of the world. The ordinary and the taken-for-granted must be bracketed out if a poem or a painting or a musical piece is to be achieved. Viewed within the brackets and from an unfamiliar vantage point, reality may become questionable, in need of interpretation, perhaps in need of repair. If learners are provided opportunities for understanding their part in realizing illusioned worlds, they may come to confront their contributions to the construction of their social realities. Teachers who create situations that permit this to happen will be opening up their classrooms, not only to a new sense of the totality, but to a consciousness of what might be, what is not yet. And this, in turn, may provide a ground for common action, for desired change.


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