Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000) as a transnational and transcultural adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge

In this article, we will be focusing on issues of transnational and transcultural film adaptation using as a case study a particular screen adaptation of the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy entitled The Claim (Michael Winterbottom 2000). The article aims to analyse the film in relation to these issues, taking into account notions of transcultural adaptation and transnational film productions, as well as mobility and migration in the context of a nineteenth-century film text. It is not only a text that relocates Hardy’s narrative into a new geographical/cultural dimension, but also it is itself a transnational production. Moreover, in the case of The Claim, there seems to be a clear understanding of processes of intercultural community construction that are particularly productive to look at. The article establishes a link between the particular transcultural perspective raised in this film and Michael Winterbottom’s oeuvre, taking also into account other adaptations of Hardy’s novels by the same director and the Western genre that underlies this film production.

Wolf Totem by Jean-Jacques Annaud

Contributor Caroline Eades focuses on Annaud’s adaptational dialogue with Jiang Rong’s (2004) novel by the same name to show the ways in which the famed director turns a deeply local story into a transnational film. Eades contends that Annaud achieves a more general perspective than a local story could by refusing to make any claims to historical accuracy or documentary objectivity. Eades demonstrates the ways that this transformation matches Annaud’s larger oeuvre, which often permits audiences to follow Annaud as he confronts realities from an independent, informed, and critical position. As it relates to Rong’s novel, Eades argues that Annaud sets aside his own political agenda to celebrate cinema’s independence from any political or material constraint. The story Annaud tells subsumes every element in the film. The result is an experience that dedicates itself to exposing the shortcomings of any representation of an unknown culture that depends on stereotypes and prejudice.

Transnational Chinese Cinemas

The term “transnational Chinese cinemas” first appeared in 1997 in the anthology Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. It was coined, theorized, and introduced in the book by editor Sheldon Lu. That was also the first time the phrase “transnational cinema” was used as a book title in world film studies. The immediate occasion for the rise of this concept had to do with the cultural landscape of Greater China and of the world in general in the post-Cold War period. Film coproduction across national and regional borders became a possibility again and was done more frequently. In the case of the Greater Chinese region of the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, filmmakers began to cooperate across the Taiwan Straits to make joint productions; they secured funding and established channels of circulation beyond their immediate territories. Simply put, transnational cinema is a cinema of border crossing, and transnational film studies transcends the unit of the nation state in film analysis. It can be understood as a model of film studies, a critical paradigm, a description of the film industry, and a type of film. The full methodological, historical, and critical implications of transnational Chinese film studies are first outlined in the introduction to the book Transnational Chinese Cinemas. Transnationalism is grasped at the following levels: First, the split of China into the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in modern history and consequently the coexistence of three competing national and local Chinese cinemas; second, the globalization of the production, circulation, and consumption of Chinese film in the age of transnational capitalism since the 1990s; third, the representation and questioning of “China” and “Chineseness” in filmic discourse itself—namely, the cross-examination of the national, cultural, political, ethnic, and gender identity of individuals and communities in the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora; fourth, a re-viewing of and revisiting the history of Chinese ‘national cinema’ as if to read the ‘prehistory’ of transnational filmic discourse backwards in order to discover the ‘political unconscious’ of filmic discourse—the transnational roots and condition of cinema. Transnational film studies have become a major paradigm in Chinese film studies, along with the models of Chinese national cinema, Chinese-language cinema, and Sinophone cinema. It shares certain assumptions with the other three paradigms but also has its own characteristics and differences. Transnational Chinese film studies have also evolved into a broader study of “transnational visuality.” Transnational visual culture includes feature film, documentary, video, digital media, and visual arts. This situation is especially relevant in the so-called ‘postcinema’ stage when the film medium, the platform of film circulation, and the venue of viewing have changed tremendously. There are also various forms of transnational films. For instance, there exist the commercial-global blockbuster, independent art-house film, and exilic transnational cinema. Transnational cinema emerges and flourishes in the age and condition of globalization and transnational capitalism. However, this does not mean that transnational cinema necessarily serves the interests of transnational capitalism. Such a cinema can be liberating and counterhegemonic as well, depending on the particular situation.

On Impossibility: Finding Vietnam in a Jordanian-Soviet Film Archive

In 2014, an abandoned collection of over 900 16mm and 35mm film canisters was uncovered in a storage locker in Amman, Jordan. Initial findings show that the films were likely exported from Russia to Jordan between the late 1960s and early 1990s as part of a Soviet cultural exchange program, and among them are are a number of propaganda films made to highlight relations between Vietnam, Russia, and concurrent political struggles in the Arab Middle East. Work on the archive continues despite recent restrictions on researcher access levied by state custodians. This essay positions the entire archive as an aggregate object of transnational film history, rather than as a collection of individual works, in order to illuminate its function in the late 1960s as a cohesive geopolitical idea; a method that is both structurally mandated by present conditions of limited accessibility, and theoretically supported by historical context and affiliated projects initiated by artists and scholars working in Amman since 2014. I argue that the archive was conceptually formed in the political shadow of the Vietnam-American War and its local relationship to Palestinian liberation. As an ‘idea,’ the archive was shaped principally by Vietnam, its imaginative hold on concurrent Third World solidarity movements, and its centrality in the conceptual geography of the transnational 1960s-70s.

Dziga Vertov — Boris Kaufman — Jean Vigo

The article is an attempt to discuss Dziga Vertov’s influence on French filmmakers, in particular on Jean Vigo. This influence may have resulted from Vertov’s younger brother, Boris Kaufman, who worked in France in the 1920s — 1930s and was the cinematographer for all of Vigo’s films. This brother-brother relationship contributed to an important circulation of avant-garde ideas, cutting-edge cinematic techniques, and material objects across Europe. The brothers were in touch primarily by correspondence. According to Boris Kaufman, during his early career in France, he received instructions from his more experienced brothers, Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman, who remained in the Soviet Union. In addition, Vertov intended to make his younger brother become a French kinok. Also, À propos de Nice, Vigo’s and Kaufman’s first and most “vertovian” film, was shot with the movable hand camera Kinamo sent by Vertov to his brother. As a result, this French “symphony of a Metropolis” as well as other films by Vigo may contain references to Dziga Vertov’s and Mikhail Kaufman’s The Man with a Movie Camera based on framing and editing. In this perspective, the research deals with transnational film circulations appealing to the example of the impact of Russian avant-garde cinema on Jean Vigo’s films.