Pub Date : 2023-05-16DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2210909
R. Letteri, Zac Huang
Abstract Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) tells the story of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen, who, in learning that their spouses are engaged in an affair, fall in love themselves. However, in vowing to “never be like them,” Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen abandon their affections and, by the end of the film, go their separate ways. As many have suggested, In the Mood for Love is as much a melodramatic love story as it is an allegory of Hong Kong’s precarious political situation since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. But rather than understanding the failure of their relationship in the limited sense of Wong’s representation of the difficulties ahead for Hong Kong’s political reunification with China, we argue that In the Mood for Love should be read as Wong’s portrayal of an opening to a form of life and identity that resists the narrative of Chinese essentialism often purported by the CCP. We explore this potentiality by examining how Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen’s role-playing of their spouses’ affair, the film’s non-linear sense of time and the continual juxtaposition and confluence of East and West through dress, food, and music function as constructs of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal image. We further contend that the film’s repeated use of the crystal image suggests a Deleuzian reading of the potential processes of deterritorialization and, what we call, Sinophone becoming for both individuals and communities that constitute the Chinese diaspora.
{"title":"Sinophone becoming in Wong Kar-wai’s in the mood for love (2000)","authors":"R. Letteri, Zac Huang","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2210909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2210909","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) tells the story of Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen, who, in learning that their spouses are engaged in an affair, fall in love themselves. However, in vowing to “never be like them,” Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen abandon their affections and, by the end of the film, go their separate ways. As many have suggested, In the Mood for Love is as much a melodramatic love story as it is an allegory of Hong Kong’s precarious political situation since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. But rather than understanding the failure of their relationship in the limited sense of Wong’s representation of the difficulties ahead for Hong Kong’s political reunification with China, we argue that In the Mood for Love should be read as Wong’s portrayal of an opening to a form of life and identity that resists the narrative of Chinese essentialism often purported by the CCP. We explore this potentiality by examining how Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chen’s role-playing of their spouses’ affair, the film’s non-linear sense of time and the continual juxtaposition and confluence of East and West through dress, food, and music function as constructs of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal image. We further contend that the film’s repeated use of the crystal image suggests a Deleuzian reading of the potential processes of deterritorialization and, what we call, Sinophone becoming for both individuals and communities that constitute the Chinese diaspora.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"135 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79527737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2231780
Stefanie Van de Peer
ABSTRACT Raja Amari is best known for her fiction features Red Satin (2002), Buried Secrets (2009) and Foreign Body (2016), in which she dissects the mythologisation of mother and daughter relationships by underlining difficult communication and co-dependence. Her less well-known documentaries Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020) likewise explore the bonds between women of different generations and across geographical, religious and political borders. In this article, I investigate Amari’s transnational documentary strategies that foreground the multitude of women’s voices, storytelling strategies, performative identity formation, and female agency. These two documentaries focus on the body of work of extra-ordinary women, who force us into an analytical engagement with diverse voices and politics. The documentaries offer insight into the gendered, racial and generational boundaries that are constantly crossed by two young women who lived more than a century apart. This leads to the article’s central argument that transnational documentary studies offer an opportunity to realign transnational screen studies with its subject, the transnational human experience.
{"title":"Of bodies and politics: towards a body of work in the documentaries of Raja Amari","authors":"Stefanie Van de Peer","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2231780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2231780","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Raja Amari is best known for her fiction features Red Satin (2002), Buried Secrets (2009) and Foreign Body (2016), in which she dissects the mythologisation of mother and daughter relationships by underlining difficult communication and co-dependence. Her less well-known documentaries Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020) likewise explore the bonds between women of different generations and across geographical, religious and political borders. In this article, I investigate Amari’s transnational documentary strategies that foreground the multitude of women’s voices, storytelling strategies, performative identity formation, and female agency. These two documentaries focus on the body of work of extra-ordinary women, who force us into an analytical engagement with diverse voices and politics. The documentaries offer insight into the gendered, racial and generational boundaries that are constantly crossed by two young women who lived more than a century apart. This leads to the article’s central argument that transnational documentary studies offer an opportunity to realign transnational screen studies with its subject, the transnational human experience.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"40 1","pages":"145 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72531732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2231778
Florence Martin
ABSTRACT Given the various migrations across the Mediterranean in this postcolonial age, transnational women feminist filmmakers from the Maghreb have sometimes displaced the foci of their filmic narratives outside the borders of Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia. Rather than denouncing the weight of heteropatriarchy on the condition of women at home, they turn their attention to globalization and its ills and film new stories, aesthetics, politics, and diverse protagonists – including men – from realities outside the Maghreb. One such film is Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021), about a Syrian man migrating to Belgium. The analysis this fecund case-study at the intersection of migration, art installation, cinema, and exploitation in the age of late capitalism, examines possible directions for future transnational filmmaking, possible shifts in cinema audience(s) and screening venues, especially in a post-Covid 19 era. Ben Hania’s unique feminist perspective also translates cinematographically in a novel way of filming transnationality.
在这个后殖民时代，考虑到跨越地中海的各种移民，来自马格里布的跨国女性女权主义电影人有时会将其电影叙事的焦点转移到阿尔及利亚，摩洛哥或突尼斯的边界之外。他们没有谴责异性父权制对女性在国内处境的影响，而是将注意力转向全球化及其弊病，并从马格里布以外的现实中拍摄新的故事、美学、政治和不同的主角——包括男性。考瑟·本·哈尼亚(Kaouther Ben Hania)的《卖皮人》(The Man Who Sold His Skin, 2021)就是这样一部电影，讲述了一名叙利亚男子移民到比利时的故事。该分析是对晚期资本主义时代移民、艺术装置、电影和剥削的交叉点的丰富案例研究，探讨了未来跨国电影制作的可能方向，电影观众和放映场所的可能转变，特别是在后covid - 19时代。本·哈尼亚独特的女权主义视角也以一种新颖的拍摄跨国电影的方式在摄影上得到了体现。
{"title":"Arab women’s transnational cinema’s ‘flips’: The Man Who Sold His Skin (Ben Hania, 2021)","authors":"Florence Martin","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2231778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2231778","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Given the various migrations across the Mediterranean in this postcolonial age, transnational women feminist filmmakers from the Maghreb have sometimes displaced the foci of their filmic narratives outside the borders of Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia. Rather than denouncing the weight of heteropatriarchy on the condition of women at home, they turn their attention to globalization and its ills and film new stories, aesthetics, politics, and diverse protagonists – including men – from realities outside the Maghreb. One such film is Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021), about a Syrian man migrating to Belgium. The analysis this fecund case-study at the intersection of migration, art installation, cinema, and exploitation in the age of late capitalism, examines possible directions for future transnational filmmaking, possible shifts in cinema audience(s) and screening venues, especially in a post-Covid 19 era. Ben Hania’s unique feminist perspective also translates cinematographically in a novel way of filming transnationality.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"95 1","pages":"117 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76507594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2231776
Z. Khosroshahi
ABSTRACT Women’s bodies have often been used as metonymic, standing for the nation and its ideologies. In exploring both narrative and documentary style filmmaking, I turn to two films: Gilaneh (2006) by Rakhshan Banietemad and A Moon for my Father (2019) co-directed by Mania Akbari and Douglas White. In Gilaneh, Banietemad codifies the maternal to symbolise the nation, but only to subvert and critique the state’s neglect of the forgotten mother. By imagining war beyond the borders of Iran, Banietemad also imagines the mother figure across the nation, giving her international significance. In A Moon for my Father Akbari features her own body and battle with breast cancer. Even in the film’s most intimate moments, Akabri reflects on and connects herself to the women’s movement in Iran. In their conceptualisation of women’s bodies, I argue that both Banietemad and Akbari extend the singular body beyond its national boundaries, calling for and insisting upon an intersectional and collective feminism.
{"title":"‘I am them and they are me’: the transnational body as collective in Iranian women’s cinema","authors":"Z. Khosroshahi","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2231776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2231776","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Women’s bodies have often been used as metonymic, standing for the nation and its ideologies. In exploring both narrative and documentary style filmmaking, I turn to two films: Gilaneh (2006) by Rakhshan Banietemad and A Moon for my Father (2019) co-directed by Mania Akbari and Douglas White. In Gilaneh, Banietemad codifies the maternal to symbolise the nation, but only to subvert and critique the state’s neglect of the forgotten mother. By imagining war beyond the borders of Iran, Banietemad also imagines the mother figure across the nation, giving her international significance. In A Moon for my Father Akbari features her own body and battle with breast cancer. Even in the film’s most intimate moments, Akabri reflects on and connects herself to the women’s movement in Iran. In their conceptualisation of women’s bodies, I argue that both Banietemad and Akbari extend the singular body beyond its national boundaries, calling for and insisting upon an intersectional and collective feminism.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"854 1","pages":"89 - 102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87350534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2231779
Sara Saljoughi
ABSTRACT Mothers in horror films have been theorized as monsters through concepts such as the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) and the monstrous-maternal. In this paper, I examine how this figuration of the maternal is taken up in the British-Iranian horror film Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari, 2016). The film hybridizes the ‘maternal horror film’ with the genre of the Iran-Iraq war film, which also bears a complex relation to the figure of the mother. Drawing on the concept of maternal ambivalence, I argue that Under the Shadow posits in the mother protagonist and the feminine jinn (spirit) that haunts her a tension that unsettles the longstanding dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in horror films. The film’s ambivalent position on mothers is expressive of a general cultural ambivalence toward mothers in post-revolutionary Iranian cultural politics.
{"title":"A woman should be scared: maternal ambivalence in Under the Shadow","authors":"Sara Saljoughi","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2231779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2231779","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Mothers in horror films have been theorized as monsters through concepts such as the monstrous-feminine (Creed, 1993) and the monstrous-maternal. In this paper, I examine how this figuration of the maternal is taken up in the British-Iranian horror film Under the Shadow (dir. Babak Anvari, 2016). The film hybridizes the ‘maternal horror film’ with the genre of the Iran-Iraq war film, which also bears a complex relation to the figure of the mother. Drawing on the concept of maternal ambivalence, I argue that Under the Shadow posits in the mother protagonist and the feminine jinn (spirit) that haunts her a tension that unsettles the longstanding dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers in horror films. The film’s ambivalent position on mothers is expressive of a general cultural ambivalence toward mothers in post-revolutionary Iranian cultural politics.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"39 1","pages":"132 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72486567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2231777
May Telmissany
ABSTRACT In this essay, I draw on the concepts of accented/transnational cinemas to discuss four feature films directed by Canadian Syrian filmmaker and TV director Ruba Nadda. Through Sabah (2005); Cairo Time (2009); Inescapable (2012); and October Gale (2014), the viewers witness the reconstruction of the West as home from the standpoint of a Canadian-born Toronto-based woman filmmaker of Arab descent. Despite Nadda’s constant yearning to her Arab origins, one can claim that borders between Arab and non-Arab are not always blurred in her films. Instead, cultural bridges are built across borders to transcend the traditional poetics of exile/immigration and to overcome politics of cultural despair triggered by binaries such as East and West, homeland and hostland, national and transnational belonging, etc. By focusing on issues of homeness, integration, religious difference, and cultural recognition, on the one hand, and questions of home-returning and home-reconstruction, on the other hand, I argue that no matter where Nadda’s characters dwell, they belong to the Western set of values, and they represent each a facet of her multiple identities, chief among them Western individuality. I also investigate the filmmaker’s gender-based approach to mainstream cinematic genres such as romantic comedy and thriller and her interest in these genres as a TV director as well.
{"title":"West as home in Ruba Nadda’s films","authors":"May Telmissany","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2231777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2231777","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this essay, I draw on the concepts of accented/transnational cinemas to discuss four feature films directed by Canadian Syrian filmmaker and TV director Ruba Nadda. Through Sabah (2005); Cairo Time (2009); Inescapable (2012); and October Gale (2014), the viewers witness the reconstruction of the West as home from the standpoint of a Canadian-born Toronto-based woman filmmaker of Arab descent. Despite Nadda’s constant yearning to her Arab origins, one can claim that borders between Arab and non-Arab are not always blurred in her films. Instead, cultural bridges are built across borders to transcend the traditional poetics of exile/immigration and to overcome politics of cultural despair triggered by binaries such as East and West, homeland and hostland, national and transnational belonging, etc. By focusing on issues of homeness, integration, religious difference, and cultural recognition, on the one hand, and questions of home-returning and home-reconstruction, on the other hand, I argue that no matter where Nadda’s characters dwell, they belong to the Western set of values, and they represent each a facet of her multiple identities, chief among them Western individuality. I also investigate the filmmaker’s gender-based approach to mainstream cinematic genres such as romantic comedy and thriller and her interest in these genres as a TV director as well.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"25 1","pages":"103 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83981765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2231775
Z. Khosroshahi, Sara Saljoughi
ABSTRACT This introduction outlines the special issue’s call for a transnational feminist approach to film and media from the Middle East and North Africa. The authors provide an overview of approaches to gender in Middle Eastern and North African film, as well as surveying new methodological directions in the field. They argue that a transnational feminist approach brings together divergent fields and has numerous generative possibilities for the contemporary political context. Finally, the authors briefly outline each contribution to the special issue.
{"title":"Introduction: Transnational feminist approaches to film and media from the Middle East and North Africa","authors":"Z. Khosroshahi, Sara Saljoughi","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2231775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2231775","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introduction outlines the special issue’s call for a transnational feminist approach to film and media from the Middle East and North Africa. The authors provide an overview of approaches to gender in Middle Eastern and North African film, as well as surveying new methodological directions in the field. They argue that a transnational feminist approach brings together divergent fields and has numerous generative possibilities for the contemporary political context. Finally, the authors briefly outline each contribution to the special issue.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"45 1","pages":"83 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81875499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2023.2192110
Qi Ai, Liao Zhang
ABSTRACT Held annually during late July in Xi’ning in northwest China, the FIRST International Film Festival (hereafter FIRST) is an exhibition event and cultivation platform for new emerging Chinese filmmakers developing at home and expanding overseas visibility. It is probably the only festival in the country that persevered with offline activities over three years from 2020 to 2022, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Conducted in July 2022, this interview focuses upon Mr. Wen Song and Mr. Yinglong Tong, the founder and the Head of Publicity of the festival, respectively. It contains three parts and through these conversations, readers can learn about the festival’s core tenets and industry positioning, the impact of the pandemic on the festival’s programmes and on its operation. More important, this primary information reveals how Chinese film festivals in general and FIRST in particular survived and sustained itself in the pandemic period (2020) and the post-pandemic period (after 2020). It offers a lens through which readers can see the cultural landscape of the Chinese film industry in this uncertain period.
{"title":"The FIRST international film festival and its operation under the COVID-19 pandemic: an interview with Wen Song and Yinglong Tong","authors":"Qi Ai, Liao Zhang","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2023.2192110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2023.2192110","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Held annually during late July in Xi’ning in northwest China, the FIRST International Film Festival (hereafter FIRST) is an exhibition event and cultivation platform for new emerging Chinese filmmakers developing at home and expanding overseas visibility. It is probably the only festival in the country that persevered with offline activities over three years from 2020 to 2022, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Conducted in July 2022, this interview focuses upon Mr. Wen Song and Mr. Yinglong Tong, the founder and the Head of Publicity of the festival, respectively. It contains three parts and through these conversations, readers can learn about the festival’s core tenets and industry positioning, the impact of the pandemic on the festival’s programmes and on its operation. More important, this primary information reveals how Chinese film festivals in general and FIRST in particular survived and sustained itself in the pandemic period (2020) and the post-pandemic period (after 2020). It offers a lens through which readers can see the cultural landscape of the Chinese film industry in this uncertain period.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81326464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：