THEORIZING WORLD CINEMA

THEORIZING WORLD CINEMA

WORKSHOP

Organised by

The Centre for W= orld Cinemas

School of Modern Languages and Cultures=

University of Leeds

Sponsored by

The Fund for International Research Collaboration

University of Leeds

<= /span>

22-23 June 2006

at<= span lang=3DEN-GB style=3D'font-family:Verdana;color:green'> the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI)

29-31 Clarend= on Place

University of = Leeds

Speakers

<= /span>

Dr Ivone Margulies

<= /span>

Ivone Margulies is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Studies Departmen= t at Hunter College (City University of New York), and for 2006-07 a Mellon fellow at the Center of Humanities in the Graduate Center. She is the auth= or of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Duke U. Press, 1996) and the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal = Cinema (Duke U. Press, 2003). She is completing a book on theatricality in film and has recently published “Chron= icle of a Summer (1960) as Autocritique (1959): A Transition in the French LeftR= 21;, Quarterly Review of Film and Video<= /i> 21.3 (July 2004) and “Sacha Guitry National Portraiture and the Artist’s Hand”, French Cultural Studies 16(3).

<= /span>

Professor Lúcia Nagib

<= /span>

Lúcia Nagib is Professor of World Cinemas and Director of the Centre for World Cinemas, University of Leeds= . Her major research subjects are cinematic realism, New Waves and contemporary New Cin= emas. She is the author of the books Wern= er Herzog – Film as Reality (São = Paulo: Estação Libe= rdade), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague = (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp), Born of the Ashes – The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima’s Films (S&atil= de;o Paulo: Edusp), The Brazilian Film Revival – Interviews with 90 filmmakers of the 90s (São Paulo: Editora= 34) and Brazil on Screen – Cinema Nov= o, New Cinema, Utopia (London/New York: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming). She is the editor of = The New Brazilian Cinema (London/New York: I.B. Tauris),= Ozu (São Paulo: Marco Zero) and Master Mizoguchi<= /span> (São P= aulo: Navegar).

Professor Chris Perriam

<= /span>

Chris Perriam is Professor of Hispanic Studies = at the University of Manchester. His res= earch interests are in contemporary Spanish Cinema, Latin American and Spanish poetry, and queer popular writing in Spain. His recent publications include From B= anderas to Bardem: Stars and Masculinities in Recent Sp= anish Cinema (OUP, 2003) and work on Sara Montiel, queer Spanish cinema, film versions of Carmen, Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz and (inescapably) Víctor Erice.=

<= /span>

Professor Ismail X= avier

Ismail Xavier is Profes= sor of Film at the University= of São Paulo= (Film and TV Department). He has been Visiting Professor at NYU (Cinema Stu= dies – 1995), the Univer= sity of Iowa (Dep. of Communications and Dep. of Spanish and Portuguese - 1998) and the Université de Paris III (UFR Cinéma et audiovisuel – 1999). He is the author,= among other books, of Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics = in Modern Brazilian Cinema (London & Minneapolis, University of Minnes= ota Press, 1997) and Sertão mar - Glauber Rocha e a estética da fome (São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1983). He has contributed to The New Brazilian Cinema<= /i>, edited by Lúcia Nagib (= London, I.B.Tauris, 2003) and to A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller & Robert Stam (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1999). His most recent book is O olhar e a cena: Hollywood, melodrama, Cinema Novo, Nelson Rodrigues (São Paulo, Cosac & Naify, 2003).

=

Discussants

Dr Rajinder Dudrah

Rajinder Dudrah is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester. He is author of the book Bollywood: Sociolo= gy Goes to the Movies (SAGE, 2006), and is the founder and co-editor of the international peer reviewed journal South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge). He has researched and published widely on= film, media and cultural studies in academic journals, and is also a regular film commentator for the BBC Asian Network.

<= /span>

Dr Song Hwee Lim

Song Hwee Lim is Co-director of the MA in World Cinemas programme at the School = of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds= . He is the author of a forthcoming monograph, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 20= 06), co-editor of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006) and edi= tor of a new Journal of Chinese Cinemas= to be launched in 2007.

Professor Laura Mulvey

<= /span>

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Stu= dies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has = been writing about film and film theory since the mid-1970s. Her books include Visual and Other Pleasures (London, 1980), Fetishism and Curiosity (London, 1996) and Death 24 X A Second (London, 2006). In the late 1970s and early 80s, she co-directed six films with Pete= r Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980). In 1994 she co-directed the documentary Disgraced Monuments with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.

Dr Graham Roberts

<= /span>

Graham Roberts is Senior Lecturer in Communications and, from August 2006, Directo= r of the Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds. His inter= ests include film history (and film as history), the institutions of film production, distribution, exhibition and particularly in comparing Europe a= nd Hollywood. He is = at present engaged in comparative research into the development of European ci= nema since World War II and its relationship to TV. He is the author of Forward Soviet: History and Non-fiction Film in the Soviet Union (I.B. Tauris, 1998), Man with the Movie Camera<= /a> (I.B. Tauris, 1999), Introdu= cing Film (with Heather Wallis, Arnold, 2001), Television, The Historian and Television History (Edited with Philip M. Taylor, University of Luton Press, 2001), Key Film Texts (with Heather Wallis, Arnold, 2002) and the forthcomin= g European Cinemas in the TV Age ( w= ith Dorota Ostowska, Edinburgh UP, 2006) and Martin Scorsese: an American Auteur documents America (with Heather Wallis, Edinburgh UP, 2008).=

THEORIZING WORLD CINEMA

WORKSHOP

Organised by

The Centre for W= orld Cinemas

School of Modern Languages and Cultures=

University of Leeds

Sponsored by

The Fund for International Research Collaboration

University of Leeds

<= /span>

22-23 June 2006

at<= span lang=3DEN-GB style=3D'font-family:Verdana;color:green'> the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (LHRI)

29-31 Clarend= on Place

University of = Leeds

Abstracts

Ivone Margulies

“Reenactment and Serial Monologue: ‘Working Through’ World Cinema”

This paper proposes to theorise two film genres – ree= nactment and the serial monologue – which have proven essential for the vitali= ty of world cinema. I will discuss two instances of psycho-dramatic reenactment: Jean Rouch’s<= /span> La Pyramide Humaine,1959, and Sons, 1996, and two example= s of the serial monologue form: Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten and Ma= noel de Oliveira’s The Talking Pic= ture. I will propose that the performance of past and present problems constitute= s, in reenactment films, an essential feature in l= inking a country’s history to its cultural and emotional expression. Cinema = is the perfect instrument for this form of communication. I will suggest that serial monologue films constitute a form of engaged cinema, articulating in= a dialogic manner, crucial questions of a given culture or moment.

L&uac= ute;cia Nagib
”World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism”

Realism in cinema is usually associated either with the property of = the film medium to adhere to the surface of objective reality, or with a genre, i.e. the characteristics of the 19^th century realist novel which supposedly provide film with the ability to produce an “impression of reality”. I will draw mainly on the properties of the film medium to formulate an “ethics of realism”, a mode of expression through which film cr= eators expose their minds and in some cases their bodies as a way of experiencing reality and sharing these experiences with the viewer. As an example, I will look at Nagisa Oshima’s The Realm of the Senses. Oshima and his contemporaries applied themselves to r= ecovering some Japanese traditions, such as the cult of the body and physical environment, and combining them with modern cinematic experiences. The resu= lt was a particular kind of aesthetics, which I term “corporeal realism” and is based on agnosticism, or the absence of metaphysics a= nd a supernatural, punishing god as conceived by monotheist religions. The Realm of the Senses offers the= body as a guarantor of the index, while effacing the limits between subject and object, public and private spheres,= radically inciting visual as well as carnal pleasures. By addressing the question of realism through a polycentric approach I hope to confer a more mobile and inclusive perspective to some key-concepts in film theory. I will look, for example, at Brecht as s= omeone who developed his groundbreaking theory of the Verfrem= dugseffekt on the basis of Mei Lanfan= g’s theatre, and this, in turn, will help explain why in many Asian cinematic experiences the revelation of the apparatus does not entail alienation of t= he spectator, but, on the contrary, a heightened, corporeal kind of identification. The Realm of the Se= nses draws heavily on Japanese shunga, or erotic prints, w= hose practical use for onanistic and other erotic activities proves the indissoluble continuity between intellect and instinc= t, pleasure and reality principles. The connection between both terms is preci= sely the participative voyeur identified with the self-reflexive artist himself.=

Chris Perriam

“The Actor a= s Deterritorialising Body”<= /p>

This paper brings together two established but powerful conceptualisations of the idea of motion: movement away as a paradoxical consolidator of cultural expression (in an anthropological sense of deterritori= alisation) and motion as the transport and pull of emotion (in a = psychogeographical sense as elaborated by Bruno 2002). It relates them to a further more or le= ss standard coupling, acting and embodiment, in order to ask or re-ask the que= stions: what if a screen actor’s meaning is in major part a believable affect= ive embodiment of their home culture’s or first language’s core configuration of desires? and what if they take = that embodiment elsewhere? is it still present? can an actor on screen translate desire? I shall be exploring the resonance of these questions for an un-mapping of “world cinema” by taking three Spanish homely cases Victoria Abril, Penélope Cruz and Eduardo Noriega briefl= y to consider some salient features of their performances of desire in French, Italian, North American, Argentine and multi-national contexts. =

<= /span>

Ismail Xavier

“= Allegory as National Monument in World Cinema̶= 1;

I will begin by outlining an “ideal developm= ent” of my work in progress, “Allegory as National Monument in World Cinem= a”. First, I will look at national allegories in silent films made in Europe an= d the USA in a period of heightened nationalism and an intense competition among the most powerful Nation-States (including the Soviet Union). This involves a comparative study of films made between the 1910s and 30s, by D.W.Griffith, Giovanne Pastrone, Fritz Lang, Abel Gance= , Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, Leni Riefenstahl, John= Ford, Victor Fleming and Jean Renoir among others. Second, I will look at nationa= l allegories after World War II (at the Cold War time), focusing on the distinction betw= een the American Politics of Empire, European critical (and at times not so critica= l) self-consciousness and Third World ideology of national liberation (embedded in both the milit= ant-epic drama and in more complex representations of history). And, third, I will l= ook at national allegories in the past twenty years, during the crisis of the Nation-States in the new configuration of capitalism, seen from different geopolitical perspectives.

This introduction will be followed by film analysi= s to illustrate my approach. This will be a re-reading of Lang’s Metropolis, with an emphasis on th= e ways in which the film’s structure and overt allegories deny the ongoing national competition that lends meaning to its monumental aesthetics. The analysis will focus on the key-sequence of Maria’s account of the mythème Babel and its reverberation throughout the film.