Witnessing Women: Quo Vadis, Cinema?

The essay explores how two women filmmakers, each deploying her unique vision through the perspective of a female protagonist, stage a transformative encounter with the act of bearing witness to genocide. The Diary of Diana B. (Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, 2019, Croatia) directed by Dana Budisavljević, and Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020, Bosnia-Herzegovina), directed by Jasmila Žbanić, both compel us to bear witness to mass atrocities while avoiding the pitfalls of turning suffering into a spectacle, and by sidestepping the predictable cinematic conventions of redemption and closure, both formally and narratively. In my analysis of the films as anti-spectacles through the framework of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ‘speaking nearby’, I argue for the concept of ‘women’s world cinema’, a kind of cinema that is made by women, speaks to women’s experiences, and/or addresses the spectator as female while also speaking nearby instead of about its subjects in ways that eschew conventional spectatorial alignments and co-optations of traumatic experience.

Certain Women Directors: US Independent Filmmakers in the World

This article analyzes the work of Chloé Zhao and its reception in order to explore the role of female auteurs in 21st century world cinema. By comparing Zhao to Kelly Reichardt, another US director acclaimed internationally for distinctive works of US regional realism, the essay argues that US independent women directors critique American cultural hegemony and the global dominance of Hollywood both through the subject matter and formal structures of their films and through their positioning within the discourse of world cinema auteurism. After analyzing the authorial personae of both directors as constructed in their films and press reception, the essay offers close readings of Reichardt’s Certain Women and Zhao’s The Rider, both set in the US West, with specific attention to the perspectives of central Native American characters. The readings demonstrate how the filmmakers use realism to locate a singular, gendered authorial perspective on the world.

Audience Study as Catalyst in Sustainable Nollywood Yoruba Film Industry

Nollywood is the representation of the socio-cultural apparatus of Nigeria in the world cinema. Tis paper evaluates generally, film audience’s perspective in Nollywood films, and in particular non-native actors in native films. Most often, stakeholders in the film industry do not access, or are flagrantly ignorant of viewer’s feedback on the state of their production in all media of communication. Some determine this with the profit margins. Tis paper therefore evaluates the audience’s perception of non-native actors in Nollywood Yoruba native films. The area of concentration is on the quality of audience reception on native films by non-native actors. Cluster sample method is the tool of research for this paper, in which questionnaire samples were distributed among film viewers in the Yoruba speaking area in Nigeria. This is done in order to determine the performance ratings of non-Yoruba native actor’s skill of character interpretation in cultured films. Theoretical framework is anchored on Bandura’s Social Learning theory, which concentrates on impact of artistic models on the audience’s psyche. Findings reveal that audience ratings of non-native actors in Yoruba cultured films is poor, compared with their characterization in non-native setting, and this is due to wrong casting by directors who cast them against all odds in order to improve their profit margin. Findings also reveal the importance of audience study as a necessity in pre-production considerations of film shooting.

Memories from the Darkness in the Films of Pedro Costa and Affonso Uchôa

This essay analyses realist works from contemporary world cinema wherein the representation of space-time is directly affected by the color black, referring to both night and dark shadows. It investigates exactly how darkness participates in moments when the filmed subjects remember traumatic events and confront them through their courageous retellings. My hypothesis is that the color black converts the space—realistic and concerning the characters’ present time—into a place where different temporalities coexist. Through a comparative analysis of films made by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa and the Brazilian filmmaker Affonso Uchôa in the past two decades, I show how this modulation in space-time produced through color has a political meaning, since the narrated memories are related to a social experience of class and race.

Where in the World are Chinese Women Filmmakers? Transnational China and World Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Transnational Chinese women filmmakers reflect the enormous changes happening in the global film industry as well as political, economic, technological, social, and cultural transformations taking place in the region since the beginning of the millennium. An analysis of Hong Kong writer-director Aubrey Lam’s Anna & Anna (2007) uncovers how this film explores the divided psyche of a woman torn between “two systems” that model femininity for women in Singapore and Shanghai in the 21st century. Lam’s narrative touches on issues central to the work of many women working across the Chinese-speaking world including migration, labor relations, postcolonial and postsocialist identities, commodification of female bodies in consumer culture, cross-border sexualities, female desire and domesticity.

The Colosseum in the film «Roman Holiday» (1953)

This article is dedicated to the Colosseum and a classic movie filmed in Rome "Roman Holiday” (1953, USA). It was the first Hollywood film to be filmed and processed entirely in Italy. The great thing about Rome is that not much changes in the historic city centre. The story is about princess Ann (played by Audrey Hepburn) who comes to Rome and slips out one evening from the Embassy, and an American journalist (Gregory Peck). Joe takes Ann around Rome for a "Grand Day Out" and we have loads of views of Rome, both the famous monuments and the streets, squares, and bridges. So when Audrey Hepburn surveys the Colosseum, she’s really surveying the Colosseum. In the film "Roman Holiday", Princess Ann holds on tight as they race through the roads past the famous Colosseum. The stars riding a Vespa made an iconic movie poster for the film, during an important era for Italian filmmaking. The authors of the article offer an innovative approach to the formation of a professionally oriented foreign language learning environment by studying the filming locations of the masterpiece of world cinema "Roman Holiday" (1953, USA), on the example of the Colosseum. It is a typical example copied throughout the empire: a highly decorative exterior, seats set over a network of barrel vaults, and underground rooms below the arena floor to hide people, animals and props until they were needed in the spectacles of the"Theatre of Death". Remembered the greatest English historian of all time Bede, Lord Byron’s poem"Child Harold's Pilgrimage", gladiators.

Locating Muslim Cinema(s)

The project of locating Muslim cinemas is an inherently open-ended endeavor that serves more as a disciplinary provocation than as a clearly defined and finite task. The four essays collected here raise a series of questions that unsettle and reconfigure some of the most persistent boundaries in studies of world cinema. In “The Idea of a ‘Muslim Cinema,’” Imed Ben Labidi highlights the potential pitfalls of such an attempted mapping, focusing on Hollywood’s essentialized and essentializing portrayal of Muslims and Arabs. Conversely, while remaining within the confines of a small national industry, in “The Poetics of Tajik Cinema,” Sharofat Arabova transcends the implicit distortions of schematic periodization, tracing evolving traditions of film poetics across the major historical transformations of the Soviet and sovereign periods. Similarly, while feminist theory has been at the core of film studies since its inception, the two final pieces complicate understandings of the construction of gender in Muslim cinemas. Sitara Thobani’s “Locating the Tawa’if Courtesan–Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation” resists the impulse to understand tawa’if solely in terms of gendered spectacle, instead exploring the less examined question of this figure’s Muslim identity. In the final piece, “Defa-e Moghadas and the Making of Social Cinema in Post-Revolutionary Islamic Iran,” Fakhri Haghani contrasts the front-line masculinist cinema of the Iranian “sacred defense” with social dramas that reveal undertheorized gender dynamics of sacrifice and justice. Each of these pieces, then, invigorates core questions within the field of religion and popular culture by positing Muslim cinema as a point of intersection at which Muslim participation in the creation and viewing of film may productively be explored, while simultaneously offering a broader, more universal alternative perspective by attending to cinema's functions in the quotidian lives of members of religious communities.

Time and Description in Sátántangó and The Melancholy of Resistance (Novel into Film)

The collaboration between László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr has resulted in one of the most celebrated recent works of world cinema. The adaptation aspect of films like Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is sometimes overlooked by adaptation studies. I will argue that the concept of fidelity criticism, disregarded by recent studies of adaptation, is still valuable for analysing the way in which literariness can travel through the transmedial modality of time and duration. These case studies suggest that a transmedial approach to the relation between world literature and world cinema is possible by putting forward a different understanding of the concept of fidelity as circulation, a concept that is common to both world cinema and world literature studies.