Satire, masculinity and the rhetoric of conflict resolution in War Chhod Na Yaar and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore

Unlike its western counterparts, Hindi war films constitute a rather peripheral genre, one that has understandably received scant critical attention over the last two decades. The conventional aesthetic registers and thematic templates of these films reveal an explicit engagement with questions relating to heroic masculinity, exceptional leadership and nationalist triumphalism. And yet, movies such as War Chhod Na Yaar (‘Quit the war, dude’) (Haider 2013) and Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (‘Delhi and Lahore are not so different after all’) (Raaz 2014) categorically denounce idealistic notions of armed conflicts and sensationalized portrayals of ostensibly justified violence. This article examines the rhetoric of conflict resolution that constitutes the organizing principle of these two films. It demonstrates how War Chhod Na Yaar discursively satirizes the earlier Hindi war films through a pronounced emphasis on the fanciful camaraderie that exists between the respective battalion captains of India and Pakistan. By contrast, the anti-war rhetoric of Kya Dilli Kya Lahore is not only historically situated within the larger framework of Partition narratives, but is also facilitated by an alternative configuration of masculinity that resists territorial divisions in favour of affective solidarities and shared lived experiences.

Film as dialogue: Documentary theorization through practice

A large body of documentary scholarship approves of the documentary’s effectiveness in addressing social issues beneficially. However, documentaries that have been made with the primary aim of testing such effectiveness are rare. This article presents the findings based on a documentary made specifically to test this theory. Titled Forsaken, the documentary was made and used as a test tool to assess its rhetorical ability to generate pledges for support of neglected adolescent orphans in South African communities. This article highlights the documentary’s rhetorical strategies and the extent to which such strategies led audience members to pledge support for this category of orphans. Contrary to views in the extant literature that pay little attention to the contextual limitations of the documentary’s rhetorical principles, the present article argues that a documentary’s effectiveness in addressing social issues beneficially is largely dependent on the cultural attuning of the documentary’s rhetorical principles.

Rural geographies and the New Chinese Cinemas: Imaging progressive places in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind and Jia Zhangke’s Platform

The New Chinese Cinemas were unprecedented in critiquing official narratives of progress through dramatic location-shot images of rural Taiwan and China. Much more than standing in as a picturesque backdrop, the rural was a site of complex ideological contestations. Yet, existing scholarship overlooks the richness of rural representations, reductively interpreting rural films as works of nostalgia and cultural salvage. Through a comparative analysis of representations of landscape, travel and visual perception in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986) and Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000), this article brings into focus the important but largely ignored roles that Hou and Jia have played in envisioning new frameworks for thinking about rural geographies. Drawing from Doreen Massey’s notion of the ‘progressive place’, I investigate how Jiufen and Fenyang – the films’ shooting locations – are stages upon which the directors experimented with imaging and imagining communities. Jiufen is represented in Dust as a porous interface between the urban and rural, a metonym for the film’s representation of Taiwan as a contact zone with China. Platform, by contrast, fashions an image of Fenyang as a non-place, a microcosm of China as it undergoes unchecked neo-liberal development. Significantly, these films went beyond revising rural imaginaries on-screen, to making a material impact on Jiufen and Fenyang by transforming them into landmarks of global film tourism. This work demonstrates how Hou and Jia responded to disorienting social changes not by resisting, but by tactically embracing the blurring of divides between the urban and rural, and local and global.

An unconventional zombie: Subcultural genres, global art cinema and bio-power in Sebastian Hofmann’s Halley (2012)

With an unconventional living-dead protagonist and a minimalist auteur style, Halley brings to the fore how the tensions between genre movies and art cinema operate in a transnational context. Halley surprises the audience with the story of a security guard who is dead but remains alive. While his flesh decomposes, Beto goes to work and continues with his lonely life pretending that everything is fine. In this sense, the film presents an unconventional zombie: Beto is not a monster, he is harmless and he is an obedient worker, but his condition exhibits his alienation in society. This article analyses Beto’s impossible embodiment from the perspective of film categorization, taking into account the intersections between auteur cinema and subcultural genres such as zombie movies in a transnational context. To that end, I rely on Dolores Tierney’s mapping of cult cinema in Latin America as well as on Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s analysis of global art cinema in México, both of which are related to international film circuits. Secondly, this article focuses on the sociopolitical implications of Beto’s living-dead body. I trace the trope of the living-dead character and analyse its political commentary from the perspective of bio-power. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s exploration of the homo sacer and bare life, this article explores how Beto’s embodiment evokes his diminished agency but also its subversive potential. With a body that transcends basic medical categorizations of life and death, Beto confronts Foucault’s idea of bio-power and resists the clinic.

The post-2000 Hong Kong young filmmakers: Embrace, resistance and new chances

This article is a text-based analysis of 107 Hong Kong local productions produced from 2000 to August 2018. These films are made by the current young generation of filmmakers who joined the industry in the new millennium, when it gradually entered an era marked by the domination of Hong Kong–mainland co-productions. With the aim of expanding the scholarly discussion on the emerging ‘Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema’, it identifies four themes that recurrently appear in their films: (1) a tendency to feature people with physical or mental disabilities as their protagonists; (2) the possession of a sense of nostalgia for the glorious 1980s; (3) a manifestation of larger Hong Kong–mainland relations through characters; and (4) varying degrees of politicization. The young generation of filmmakers, whose works denote the social responsibility these young people bring to their filmmaking, shows their greater engagement with civic issues, less consideration of the mainland market and capital and a stronger desire to tell local Hong Kong stories, preserve local Hong Kong culture and emphasize the Hong Kong identity it represents. These traits, as the conclusion argues, are rooted deeply in economic, cultural and political realities.

‘A very very long amount of time passes’: Slowness, cinema and Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013)

Annie Baker’s 2013 play The Flick prompted divisive reactions from its audience from the time of its original run, ones largely based on the play’s feeling extremely slow. Setting out from the intersection of the play’s temporal affect and the play’s setting ‐ a movie theatre ‐ this article builds on recent work on slow-cinema scholarship, particularly as it relates to theatrical exhibition, to explore contemporary discourse on both slowness and cinema. Going further, it sets this work against the backdrop of broader, multi-disciplinary conversations about the cultures of speed and slowness, before considering the particular slowness in The Flick as well as its evocation of the theatrical experience. Finally, the article concludes by asking what it means today to attend the cinema.

Appropriating the abject: Witchcraft in Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s Suspiria (1977) and David Kajganich and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake

This article explores representations of witchcraft in relation to Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay Powers of Horror. It begins by investigating the genesis of Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s depiction of witchcraft in their 1977 horror film Suspiria, drawing on historical studies of witchcraft by Ronald Hutton and Marion Gibson. In particular, it examines the characterization of the witches’ coven as an all-female, all-powerful death cult ‐ before proposing that Kristeva’s essay on the abject can be seen to explain this specific conceptualization, in line with Barbara Creed’s analysis of how horror film has inherited the role of ‘purifying’ the abject from religious ritual. The second half of this article then focuses on David Kajganich and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria, reflecting on how the later film can be seen to attempt to redeem the association between witchcraft and abjectness. In doing so, this article reflects on how the attempt to rescue the witch while maintaining an association with the abject is contiguous with other contemporary depictions of witchcraft. It is proposed that such efforts amount to a Foucauldian attempt at a ‘reverse discourse’ celebrating the subversive potential of an initially derogatory identity formation ‐ but that Kristeva’s writing points to the limitations of appropriating the abject in this way.

Residue: The privilege of spatiality in the puzzle film

Typical discourses around the puzzle film ‐ a genre that typically eschews classic storytelling for more complex narrative techniques, such as entangled secondary/tertiary plotlines, and characters with mental or psychological instability ‐ often privilege the manipulation of the film’s temporality and narratology. However, in this article, I perform a close textual analysis of the mise en scène of Inception by Christopher Nolan (2010) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) by Michel Gondry to demonstrate how these puzzle films privilege spatiality over time and plot to depict cognitive processes associated with mental and psychological instability, thereby bringing attention to an underrepresented attribute of the genre. I focus on the influence of surrealism on mise en scène, as surrealist art and cinema manipulate space to explore the psyche. I also draw on these films’ production history to show how the filmmakers, production crew and actors understood approaches to space as a cognitive process.

Cherokee film as Cherokee storytelling: Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001) as filmic Deer Woman story

Rather than the stereotypical nineteenth-century leathers-and-feathers warriors familiar from countless Hollywood Westerns, many Native filmmakers focus their films on contemporary Native communities. In contrast, Native filmmakers create very different representations of Native life and especially Native masculinity. Along with the foundational Smoke Signals (Eyre 1998), Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001) was one of the first Native-created films that helped initiate a cluster of Native American films that centre on masculinity and male‐male relationships. Indigenous masculinity is often a site of struggle of rejecting colonialist impositions and finding one’s own identity, and it is in part such a journey that propels Redroad’s film. The Doe Boy responds to not only Hollywood misrepresentations but also Eyre’s earlier film that established masculinity and father‐son relationships as a crucial topic. The Doe Boy focuses on Hunter (James Duval), a mixed-blood Cherokee youth, who must navigate between his White father and Cherokee grandfather and their differing practices of masculinity despite his bodily vulnerability from haemophilia, a strained and sometimes violent relationship with his father and a devastating mistake during an early deer hunt. Not only is Redroad’s film a Cherokee coming-of-age film and period piece (it is set during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s), but it can also be read as a Deer Woman story, albeit a filmic and non-traditional one. Unlike Smoke Signals, which takes the road movie as its genre, The Doe Boy has its foundations in a specific tribal culture. A crucial task in undoing to previous filmic misrepresentations of Hollywood, which lacked any specificity about Native characters, is to take Native filmmakers’ cultural context into careful consideration. Redroad’s film can be seen as a Deer Woman story that depicts Hunter’s struggles as he navigates his way to a mixed-blood manhood.

From i-doc to VR experience: New forms of user engagement in immersive digital documentaries

Audience research proves that possibilities of interaction in i-docs are often not fulfilled by the user, who is not really part of a ‘work in progress’ (as intended by the makers). With the shift and development of new digital formats (360-degree-films, nonfictional VR experiences, AR apps), the question of the possible interactive potential should be addressed once again. Since VR projects are fully immersive (mostly using head-mounted displays), there is no possible distraction from outside on the one hand. On the other hand, there is a shift from the computer game style aesthetic of early i-docs, with their pure spatial arrangement of events, to a more inclusive digital storytelling modality with the user experiencing his own world-building. This will be discussed with taking into consideration the non-fictional VR experience as a mode of actively combining immersion and storytelling for a satisfactory user experience. Afterwards two very different examples of nonfictional VR production will be presented, and their modalities will be briefly touched; the utilized approach and its user response will be discussed. A look at the future of possible developments concludes the essay.