Pub Date : 2022-04-17DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2061143
Ana Cristina Mendes, Ai Weiwei
ABSTRACT Ai Weiwei positions himself first and foremost as a thinker, driven by curiosity and even selfishness, and not shying away from ridicule. Through immersion and direct response to different, unfamiliar conditions, he aims to defamiliarize pre-set thinking, not letting himself be trapped by rationality and led by simplified, predetermined conclusions about the world. Despite the self-proclaimed selfishness at their core, Ai’s artistic acts become selfless through resonance, inviting the viewer into his thought experiments with the world, which he engages with as if the world were a readymade. This conversation departed from the transnational film Tree (2021), where Ai meticulously documents the work of Brazilian and Chinese artisans in creating his 32-metre iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018–2020). We began with political curiosity as a creative driver for the artist, the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, and the choice of the audiovisual medium to reflect reality. The conversation branched out to consider aesthetics, tying the issue of aestheticization to Ai’s role as a public intellectual, from an earlier refusal of aesthetics or ‘beautification’ in the interest of unmediated transparency to the realization that new aesthetics are needed for new publics.
{"title":"The world as a readymade: a conversation with Ai Weiwei","authors":"Ana Cristina Mendes, Ai Weiwei","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2061143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2061143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ai Weiwei positions himself first and foremost as a thinker, driven by curiosity and even selfishness, and not shying away from ridicule. Through immersion and direct response to different, unfamiliar conditions, he aims to defamiliarize pre-set thinking, not letting himself be trapped by rationality and led by simplified, predetermined conclusions about the world. Despite the self-proclaimed selfishness at their core, Ai’s artistic acts become selfless through resonance, inviting the viewer into his thought experiments with the world, which he engages with as if the world were a readymade. This conversation departed from the transnational film Tree (2021), where Ai meticulously documents the work of Brazilian and Chinese artisans in creating his 32-metre iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018–2020). We began with political curiosity as a creative driver for the artist, the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, and the choice of the audiovisual medium to reflect reality. The conversation branched out to consider aesthetics, tying the issue of aestheticization to Ai’s role as a public intellectual, from an earlier refusal of aesthetics or ‘beautification’ in the interest of unmediated transparency to the realization that new aesthetics are needed for new publics.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83534080","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 : 2022-04-13DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2061130
James J. Harvey
ABSTRACT The Unfinished Conversation – and the extended cinema release, The Stuart Hall Project – is, on the one hand, a continuation of Akomfrah’s engagement with iconic black public figures (Days of Hope and The March on Martin Luther King; The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong; Mariah Carey: The Billion Dollar Babe; Urban Soul: The Making of Modern R&B). Unlike Akomfrah’s conceptual approach in those films though, the Stuart Hall films are the dialectical sum of two major thinkers’ ideas. Focusing on Hall’s life and work, the films incorporate what Hall termed ‘the kaleidoscopic conditions of blackness’ into their aesthetic design. This article engages closely with the extended cinema release to explore Akomfrah’s approach to Hall’s mode of analysis, analysing the films’ decentring of wider social narratives, which, I argue, are seamlessly interwoven into both the design of Akomfrah’s montage and the analytic methods of Hall’s work in the field of Cultural Studies. Through close analysis of sequences in The Stuart Hall Project, I demonstrate how Akomfrah’s refined approach to archival montage hails Hall’s writings on identity, realising new analytic possibilities in the coming together of two major postcolonial intellectuals.
《未完成的对话》和《斯图尔特·霍尔计划》的延长上映，一方面是阿康弗拉与标志性黑人公众人物(《希望的日子》和《马丁·路德·金大游行》;路易斯·阿姆斯特朗的奇妙世界;玛丽亚·凯莉:十亿美元宝贝;都市灵魂:现代R&B的形成)。与Akomfrah在那些电影中的概念方法不同，Stuart Hall的电影是两位主要思想家思想的辩证总和。这些电影聚焦于霍尔的生活和工作，将霍尔所说的“黑暗的万花筒”融入到他们的美学设计中。本文将密切关注电影放映的延长，以探索阿康弗拉对霍尔分析模式的方法，分析电影对更广泛的社会叙事的分散，我认为，这些叙事与阿康弗拉蒙太奇的设计和霍尔在文化研究领域的工作分析方法无缝地交织在一起。通过对《斯图尔特·霍尔计划》(The Stuart Hall Project)中片段的仔细分析，我展示了Akomfrah对档案蒙太奇的精致处理方式是如何向霍尔关于身份的著作致敬的，并在两位主要后殖民知识分子的结合中实现了新的分析可能性。
{"title":"‘The kaleidoscopic conditions’ of John Akomfrah’s Stuart Hall","authors":"James J. Harvey","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2061130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2061130","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Unfinished Conversation – and the extended cinema release, The Stuart Hall Project – is, on the one hand, a continuation of Akomfrah’s engagement with iconic black public figures (Days of Hope and The March on Martin Luther King; The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong; Mariah Carey: The Billion Dollar Babe; Urban Soul: The Making of Modern R&B). Unlike Akomfrah’s conceptual approach in those films though, the Stuart Hall films are the dialectical sum of two major thinkers’ ideas. Focusing on Hall’s life and work, the films incorporate what Hall termed ‘the kaleidoscopic conditions of blackness’ into their aesthetic design. This article engages closely with the extended cinema release to explore Akomfrah’s approach to Hall’s mode of analysis, analysing the films’ decentring of wider social narratives, which, I argue, are seamlessly interwoven into both the design of Akomfrah’s montage and the analytic methods of Hall’s work in the field of Cultural Studies. Through close analysis of sequences in The Stuart Hall Project, I demonstrate how Akomfrah’s refined approach to archival montage hails Hall’s writings on identity, realising new analytic possibilities in the coming together of two major postcolonial intellectuals.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88420880","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2061124
C. Constandinides
ABSTRACT Film reviewer Theo Panayides has enthusiastically declared the year 2018 as the most ‘prestigious’ in the history of Cypriot cinema, making particular reference to Tonia Mishiali’s Pause and Marios Piperides’ Smuggling Hendrix. The starting point of this study is the unprecedented (considering Cyprus’ micro-state status) attention enjoyed by the two films mainly due to the symbolic value they accumulated through prestigious entries into the film festival circuit. Initially, the article focuses on those elements that film reviews/news have deemed successful and are associated with the exposure of the films to transnational exchanges. While aspects of both films evidently point back to a desire to speak to an international audience, and film reviews underline the achievement of Mishiali and Piperides in doing so, I argue that the success of the films also lies in the way they foreground local matters through the very act of refusing to comply with dominant canons in the history of Cypriot cinema. Finally, the study focuses on recent cinematic activity in Cyprus to illustrate that Mishiali and Piperides’ initiatives have helped energize developments which point towards a systematic transnational turn. To further support this view, I draw from Hjort’s illuminating work on small cinemas.
{"title":"Towards a transnational turn(?): success stories, transgressive politics, and artistic initiative in recent Greek Cypriot cinema","authors":"C. Constandinides","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2061124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2061124","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Film reviewer Theo Panayides has enthusiastically declared the year 2018 as the most ‘prestigious’ in the history of Cypriot cinema, making particular reference to Tonia Mishiali’s Pause and Marios Piperides’ Smuggling Hendrix. The starting point of this study is the unprecedented (considering Cyprus’ micro-state status) attention enjoyed by the two films mainly due to the symbolic value they accumulated through prestigious entries into the film festival circuit. Initially, the article focuses on those elements that film reviews/news have deemed successful and are associated with the exposure of the films to transnational exchanges. While aspects of both films evidently point back to a desire to speak to an international audience, and film reviews underline the achievement of Mishiali and Piperides in doing so, I argue that the success of the films also lies in the way they foreground local matters through the very act of refusing to comply with dominant canons in the history of Cypriot cinema. Finally, the study focuses on recent cinematic activity in Cyprus to illustrate that Mishiali and Piperides’ initiatives have helped energize developments which point towards a systematic transnational turn. To further support this view, I draw from Hjort’s illuminating work on small cinemas.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80815144","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2044248
J. Zelechowski
ABSTRACT This article analyses the feature films of the Polish Dutch filmmaker Urszula Antoniak through the lens of border and migration studies. I argue that Antoniak’s films are characterized by an aesthetic of migration that visualizes the radical identity formation of both her migrant and non-(im)migrant figures. Antoniak’s fourth film Pomiędzy słowami/Beyond Words (2017) challenges the presumptions that underlie her own aesthetic of migration by situating her characters explicitly in the geo-political, legal, and social contexts that make radical self-regeneration possible for some and not for others. In the end, the migrants in Beyond Words remain metonyms for the redefinition of the self that is possible due to the experience of migration; however, they also recalibrate that redefinition to include community, the evasion or abdication of hegemonic oversight, as well as a new conception of what it means to be a migrant or ‘native’.
{"title":"Borders and migration in Urszula Antoniak’s Pomiędzy słowami/Beyond Words (2017)","authors":"J. Zelechowski","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2044248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2044248","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses the feature films of the Polish Dutch filmmaker Urszula Antoniak through the lens of border and migration studies. I argue that Antoniak’s films are characterized by an aesthetic of migration that visualizes the radical identity formation of both her migrant and non-(im)migrant figures. Antoniak’s fourth film Pomiędzy słowami/Beyond Words (2017) challenges the presumptions that underlie her own aesthetic of migration by situating her characters explicitly in the geo-political, legal, and social contexts that make radical self-regeneration possible for some and not for others. In the end, the migrants in Beyond Words remain metonyms for the redefinition of the self that is possible due to the experience of migration; however, they also recalibrate that redefinition to include community, the evasion or abdication of hegemonic oversight, as well as a new conception of what it means to be a migrant or ‘native’.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75521600","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2064087
Santiago Lomas Martínez
ABSTRACT Pili and Mili were two of the most important musical stars in Hispanic cinemas during the 1960s. They were twins and starred in ten films, from 1963 to 1970, that made them internationally famous. Discovered by powerful Spanish producer Benito Perojo, their stardom was developed mainly in co-productions with different European and Latin-American countries, especially Mexico. This article aims to rediscover Pili and Mili’s films as one of the most important transnational film cycles devoted to musical stars in Hispanic film markets during the 1960s. It pays attention to the distinctive features that their films proposed with respect to others featuring contemporary stars: Pili and Mili hardly sang and did not release music records, but presented themselves mainly as extremely adaptable dancers; moreover, instead of being strongly attached to certain music styles, they constantly demonstrated a transnational versatility in their movies. Transnational mobility, the performance of non-Spanish characters and hybridisations with other transnational film genres of the 1960s, among other transnational dimensions, are also analysed in their films.
{"title":"Dancing across European and Latin-American Borders: Pili and Mili’s transnational musical films of the 1960s","authors":"Santiago Lomas Martínez","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2064087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2064087","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Pili and Mili were two of the most important musical stars in Hispanic cinemas during the 1960s. They were twins and starred in ten films, from 1963 to 1970, that made them internationally famous. Discovered by powerful Spanish producer Benito Perojo, their stardom was developed mainly in co-productions with different European and Latin-American countries, especially Mexico. This article aims to rediscover Pili and Mili’s films as one of the most important transnational film cycles devoted to musical stars in Hispanic film markets during the 1960s. It pays attention to the distinctive features that their films proposed with respect to others featuring contemporary stars: Pili and Mili hardly sang and did not release music records, but presented themselves mainly as extremely adaptable dancers; moreover, instead of being strongly attached to certain music styles, they constantly demonstrated a transnational versatility in their movies. Transnational mobility, the performance of non-Spanish characters and hybridisations with other transnational film genres of the 1960s, among other transnational dimensions, are also analysed in their films.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88582927","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2066898
{"title":"Notice of duplicate publication: The battle of Algiers","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2066898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2066898","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89863807","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2066852
{"title":"Notice of duplicate publication: Vitalina’s (in)visibility: contemporary Portugal and the cinema of human mobility","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2066852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2066852","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82171687","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2034218
Mariana Liz
ABSTRACT Critically acclaimed in film festivals around the world, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela was a strong contender in the 2019 race for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award. At the time, many suggested the film was not only an exquisite work of art, but also relevant for debates about immigration and racism. This is a fruitful analytical angle, which I propose to examine in relation to the critical reception of Pedro Costa’s work, the current socio-political context in Portugal, and the notion of cinema of human mobility. This article puts forward a close textual reading of the film’s style grounded in historical, political and social matters. I suggest that the film tells Vitalina’s story, but only briefly; shows her decadent living conditions, but only partially; and hears her lament, but only faintly, and I argue Vitalina Varela is a particularly rich case study to illustrate important debates about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary transnational cinema.
{"title":"Vitalina’s (in)visibility: contemporary Portugal and the cinema of human mobility","authors":"Mariana Liz","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2034218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2034218","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Critically acclaimed in film festivals around the world, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela was a strong contender in the 2019 race for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award. At the time, many suggested the film was not only an exquisite work of art, but also relevant for debates about immigration and racism. This is a fruitful analytical angle, which I propose to examine in relation to the critical reception of Pedro Costa’s work, the current socio-political context in Portugal, and the notion of cinema of human mobility. This article puts forward a close textual reading of the film’s style grounded in historical, political and social matters. I suggest that the film tells Vitalina’s story, but only briefly; shows her decadent living conditions, but only partially; and hears her lament, but only faintly, and I argue Vitalina Varela is a particularly rich case study to illustrate important debates about the relationship between politics and aesthetics in contemporary transnational cinema.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78150005","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2041335
Sebastian Byrne
ABSTRACT This article examines Taiwanese actress Shu Qi’s theatrical mode of performance in Andrew Lau’s film, A Beautiful Life/Mei Li Ren Sheng (2011), as a way of trying to understand the diverse nature of Shu’s transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of pivotal scenes from the film, the article argues that Shu’s virtuoso performance highlights a transnational acting style that challenges cultural understandings of acting in Chinese-language cinemas built around minimalism, thus suggesting the need for a reappraisal of what constitutes a ‘good’ screen performance in the East Asian region. Shu’s exaggerated performance style ultimately influences the performance delivery of her co-star, mainland Chinese actor Liu Ye. The emerging interplay between Shu’s and Liu’s acting techniques showcases the regional and transnational potential of Chinese film acting that exploits the energetic and corporeal registers of performance. In place of a minimalist acting style that focuses upon limited bodily movement and emotional restraint, the delineation of the somatic aspects of Shu’s performance, and a critical recognition of the presentational and expressive features of her voice, actions, and gestures, contributes to a more multilayered and exploratory understanding of East Asian and transnational film performance.
{"title":"Histrionics of a Hong Kong migrant: Shu Qi’s transnational performance style in A Beautiful Life","authors":"Sebastian Byrne","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2041335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2041335","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines Taiwanese actress Shu Qi’s theatrical mode of performance in Andrew Lau’s film, A Beautiful Life/Mei Li Ren Sheng (2011), as a way of trying to understand the diverse nature of Shu’s transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of pivotal scenes from the film, the article argues that Shu’s virtuoso performance highlights a transnational acting style that challenges cultural understandings of acting in Chinese-language cinemas built around minimalism, thus suggesting the need for a reappraisal of what constitutes a ‘good’ screen performance in the East Asian region. Shu’s exaggerated performance style ultimately influences the performance delivery of her co-star, mainland Chinese actor Liu Ye. The emerging interplay between Shu’s and Liu’s acting techniques showcases the regional and transnational potential of Chinese film acting that exploits the energetic and corporeal registers of performance. In place of a minimalist acting style that focuses upon limited bodily movement and emotional restraint, the delineation of the somatic aspects of Shu’s performance, and a critical recognition of the presentational and expressive features of her voice, actions, and gestures, contributes to a more multilayered and exploratory understanding of East Asian and transnational film performance.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79593901","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}
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