Global Cinema Networks

278 Pages·2018·3.172 MB·English

by  Elena Gorfinkel, Tami Williams (eds.)

GLOBAL CINEMA NETWORKS
Media Matters
Media Matters focuses on film, television, and media within a transnational
and interdisciplinary frame: environmental media, media industries, media and
democracy, information media, and global media. It features the work of schol-
ars who explore ever- expanding forms of media in art, everyday, and entertain-
ment practices. Under the codirection of Patrice Petro and Cristina Venegas, the
series is sponsored by the Carsey- Wolf Center at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. The center seeks to foster innovative and collaborative research
that probes the aesthetic, political, economic, artistic, and social processes of
media in the past and in our own time.
Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, eds., Global Cinema Networks
GLO B A L CI N E M A
N ET WO RKS
Edited by
Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gorfinkel, Elena editor. | Williams, Tami, 1970– editor.
Title: Global cinema networks / edited by Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams.
Description: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Series: Media
matters | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055375 | ISBN 9780813592732 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780813592725 (softcover) | ISBN 9780813592749 (epub) | ISBN 9780813592763
(web pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures— History— 21st century. | BISAC: Performing
Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism. | Art / Film & Video. | Social Science /
Media Studies.
Classification: LCC PN1995 .G5435 2018 | DDC 791.4309/05— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055375
A British Cataloging-i n- Publication record for this book is available from the British
Library.
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks 1
Elena Gorfinkel
Part I: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics
1 Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema 23
Dudley Andrew
2 Frame 37
Adrian Martin
3 Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons
from Antonioni’s Trip to China 53
John David Rhodes
4 The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology,
Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary 77
James Tweedie
Part II: Global Ideality, History, Representation
5 Toward an Archaeology of Global Rhythms:
Melodie der Welt and Its Reception in France 97
Laurent Guido
6 When Cinema Was Humanism 117
Karl Schoonover
7 African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding
Frames of Representation 141
N. Frank Ukadike
8 Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema 159
Patricia White
v
vi Contents
Part III: Kinships, Identifications, Genres
9 Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive
Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema 181
Luisela Alvaray
10 Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother
in Park Chan- wook’s Lady Vengeance 199
Peter Y. Paik
11 The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández 214
Gilberto M. Blasini
12 The Gangster Film as World Cinema 228
Jian Xu
Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and
Future of Global Cinema 244
Tami Williams
Acknowledgments 251
Notes on Contributors 253
Index 257
GLOBAL CINEMA NETWORKS

INTRODUCTION
Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks
Elena Gorfinkel
The last two decades have seen both a reconsideration of the geo-
politics of cinema as global art form, commodity, and industry and a sense of
a world unmoored and rewritten by processes of globalization and technologi-
zation. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, Iranian filmmaker Samira
Makhmalbaf optimistically characterized emergent digital technologies and the
global reconfiguration they offered for film in an affirmative, liberatory light:
The digital revolution will surpass that imbalance. The First World will thus lose
its centrality of vision as the dominant view of the world. The globality of our
situation will no longer leave any credibility for the assumptions of a centre and a
periphery to the world. We are now beyond the point of thinking that we received
the technique from the West and then added to it our own substance. As a film-
maker, I will no longer be just an Iranian attending a film festival. I am a citizen of
the world. Because from now on the global citizenship is no longer defined by the
brick and mortar of houses or the printed words of the press, but by the collective
force of an expansive visual vocabulary.1
Makhmalbaf’s enthusiasm for the onset of digital cinemas was grounded in
a hope that more filmmakers, working in non- Western nations and outside of
hegemonic, capital- intensive industries, would gain access to film technolo-
gies. The potentials of democratized access could, in her estimation, rewrite
the codes of cultural citizenship— eschewing material, spatial, national, and
linguistic boundaries—a nd point to a truly global aesthetic unbounded by
location and pervasive hierarchies between center and periphery. Although
1
2 Elena Gorfinkel
the utopian possibilities Makhmalbaf envisioned have not necessarily come to
pass, the rhetorical force of her assertions— and the cinematic imaginary they
construct— provide a useful point of departure for considering the status of
world cinema and the discourses that have attended it almost two decades on.
The notion of world cinema itself seems to have emerged as a concept, dis-
cursively, as Michael Chanan has suggested, in the context of both said digital
transformation and a slightly older paradigm shift— namely, the fall of the Soviet
Union and the Berlin Wall in 1989– 1991 and the onward march of neoliberalism
after.2 To take account of these technological, aesthetic, and sociopolitical trans-
formations, Global Cinema Networks brings together international film schol-
ars to discuss the aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and
social figurations of global cinema in the twenty- first century. It thus engages in
a conversation about the shifting sites of global cinema in an era of digital repro-
duction and amid new modes of filmic circulation and aesthetic convergence,
taking analytic aim particularly at recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin
America, Asia, and the Middle East. Alongside this investigation of contem-
porary forms, the volume likewise looks back at instances in film history that
present points of contact between historical discourses of globalization and the
“worldliness” of cinema and the bleeding edge of contemporary film practices.
Cinema’s Place
The turn-of-the-twenty-first-century anxiety regarding the waning of the analog
film medium has coincided with the slow attrition of a physical location for gath-
ering, a place for cinema to collectively take place. Makhmalbaf’s speech itself
alludes to the reduced primacy of the spatial as a determinative feature of the
digital. The medium’s fundamental dispositif in theatrical exhibition has shifted
and continues to move toward varied personalized and particularized modes
of delivery and nodes of ever- more- granular contact with screens.3 Perhaps the
narratives of celluloid cinema’s loss and decline partake too much in a nostal-
gic alliance and affinity for the material, starkly opposed to the immaterial. Yet
film theory has continually reminded us of cinema’s originating virtuality and
its material immateriality.4 It is hard to dispute that in the context of the digital
era, the pragmatic coordinates of making films and watching films have reshaped
the film medium— its formal features and modes of circulation, exhibition, and
reception in this new century.
The spatial and temporal coordinates of contemporary life in postindustrial
modernity have continually expanded and contracted as the presence and drive
of instantaneity, a ceaselessly networked now- ness, organizes life and labor across
scales, distances, and time zones. The “flexibility” of digital forms of watching mov-
ing images— or in less fortunate phrasing, instantly “accessing content”— makes