The Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel, the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article, I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature Jinpa () marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters, the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history, culture and tradition haunt the men in the film, Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of carriers of culture, he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.
{"title":"Boxed within the frame: Tibetan masculinities in transformation in Pema Tseden’s Jinpa","authors":"Z. Pecic","doi":"10.1386/ncin_00032_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00032_1","url":null,"abstract":"The Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel, the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article, I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature Jinpa () marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters, the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history, culture and tradition haunt the men in the film, Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of carriers of culture, he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.","PeriodicalId":38663,"journal":{"name":"New Cinemas","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44222624","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}
This article explores the ways in which Alice Rohrwacher’s Le maraviglie, as exemplary of a growing tendency within contemporary cinema, negotiates ideas of place and belonging through the trope of the rural child. It contends that the cinematic child in the film articulates a dynamic and open – rather than static, localized and fixed – understanding of place. Against the Romantic tendency to associate childhood and nature as a way of grounding essentialist ideas of place, the film draws on children’s heightened openness to the others in order to embody what Doreen Massey calls a global sense of place (1991): a sense of place built upon the social relations created in the encounter with the other. By bringing together film analysis, childhood studies and theorizations of place, this article builds an interdisciplinary approach to look into this shifting use of the child figure. It first explores two different reactions to the threats of the global presented in the film – the family’s mode of living and the reality TV show contest – as reterritorializing attempts to ground a sense of place in the local. It then argues that, in the way in which the child protagonist bonds with a newcomer to the farm, she rejects both these notions and opens herself up to alternative understandings of place. In a gradual recovery of her childhood that culminates in the last scene of the film, she comes to embody a progressive sense of place that emphasizes the hybrid nature of global places.
{"title":"‘Where is here?’: Place and rurality through the cinematic child","authors":"Andrés Buesa","doi":"10.1386/ncin_00031_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00031_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the ways in which Alice Rohrwacher’s Le maraviglie, as exemplary of a growing tendency within contemporary cinema, negotiates ideas of place and belonging through the trope of the rural child. It contends that the cinematic child in the film articulates a dynamic and open – rather than static, localized and fixed – understanding of place. Against the Romantic tendency to associate childhood and nature as a way of grounding essentialist ideas of place, the film draws on children’s heightened openness to the others in order to embody what Doreen Massey calls a global sense of place (1991): a sense of place built upon the social relations created in the encounter with the other. By bringing together film analysis, childhood studies and theorizations of place, this article builds an interdisciplinary approach to look into this shifting use of the child figure. It first explores two different reactions to the threats of the global presented in the film – the family’s mode of living and the reality TV show contest – as reterritorializing attempts to ground a sense of place in the local. It then argues that, in the way in which the child protagonist bonds with a newcomer to the farm, she rejects both these notions and opens herself up to alternative understandings of place. In a gradual recovery of her childhood that culminates in the last scene of the film, she comes to embody a progressive sense of place that emphasizes the hybrid nature of global places.","PeriodicalId":38663,"journal":{"name":"New Cinemas","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45864171","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}
Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s forgotten masterpiece Beed-o Baad (Willow and Wind) () is an Iranian children film written by Abbas Kiarostami, that pays tribute to the children of the post-war generation. As in other children’s films of the period, the young hero has a mission, which he stubbornly pursues. Set in a village in Northern Iran, the story follows the boy’s efforts to repair a broken glass during very stormy weather. This article will examine the visual motives of Willow and Wind (a boy climbing a hill, single trees, wind, rain) paying particular attention to the interaction with nature. The tree and the wind alluded to in the title underline the struggle and determination of Iranian children. In line with the children’s films produced by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA, aka Kanoon), it applauds the willpower of a generation with enormous responsibilities, while placing his protagonist as a role model for audiences of all ages. However, by rejecting the happy ending, the film opposes the predominant narrative model of Iranian educational films of the 1980s and 1990s while criticizing adults’ treatment of boys in post-revolutionary Iran. In this moral tale, Talebi stresses the dignity and resourcefulness of rural Iran but condemns the solitude of children, and the distance between the worlds of adults and children setting a precedent for future Iranian children’s films.
{"title":"Childhood and nature in the Iranian post-war film Willow and Wind (Talebi 1999)","authors":"Lidia Merás","doi":"10.1386/ncin_00023_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00023_1","url":null,"abstract":"Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s forgotten masterpiece Beed-o Baad (Willow and Wind) () is an Iranian children film written by Abbas Kiarostami, that pays tribute to the children of the post-war generation. As in other children’s films of the period, the young hero has a mission, which he stubbornly pursues. Set in a village in Northern Iran, the story follows the boy’s efforts to repair a broken glass during very stormy weather. This article will examine the visual motives of Willow and Wind (a boy climbing a hill, single trees, wind, rain) paying particular attention to the interaction with nature. The tree and the wind alluded to in the title underline the struggle and determination of Iranian children. In line with the children’s films produced by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA, aka Kanoon), it applauds the willpower of a generation with enormous responsibilities, while placing his protagonist as a role model for audiences of all ages. However, by rejecting the happy ending, the film opposes the predominant narrative model of Iranian educational films of the 1980s and 1990s while criticizing adults’ treatment of boys in post-revolutionary Iran. In this moral tale, Talebi stresses the dignity and resourcefulness of rural Iran but condemns the solitude of children, and the distance between the worlds of adults and children setting a precedent for future Iranian children’s films.","PeriodicalId":38663,"journal":{"name":"New Cinemas","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43722538","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}
This article seeks to inaugurate the global frame of an oral cinema: a cinema that, to a significant extent, is defined by its relationship to community oral cultures. Whilst the case studies featured are largely those arising from Scotland – in particular Simon Miller’s Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (), Timothy Neat’s Play Me Something () and the author’s own film Mysterious Object (currently in post-production) – discussion deliberately reaches outwards to a global, comparative frame drawing upon the more sophisticated treatments of orality in the West African cinemas of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene and the Inuit cinema of Zacharius Kunuk. Whilst alive to the dangers of homogenization and destructive, western-led universalisms, this article ultimately attempts to establish a space for utopian montage (), wherein divergent yet mutually resonant traditions within world cinema may be co-positioned in order to explore aspects of shared practice and solidarity.
{"title":"Inaugurating discussions of an oral cinema: Placing the translation-to-screen of Scottish community oral storytelling traditions within a wider frame of global filmmaking practice","authors":"Jamie Chambers","doi":"10.1386/ncin_00022_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00022_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article seeks to inaugurate the global frame of an oral cinema: a cinema that, to a significant extent, is defined by its relationship to community oral cultures. Whilst the case studies featured are largely those arising from Scotland – in particular Simon Miller’s Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (), Timothy Neat’s Play Me Something () and the author’s own film Mysterious Object (currently in post-production) – discussion deliberately reaches outwards to a global, comparative frame drawing upon the more sophisticated treatments of orality in the West African cinemas of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene and the Inuit cinema of Zacharius Kunuk. Whilst alive to the dangers of homogenization and destructive, western-led universalisms, this article ultimately attempts to establish a space for utopian montage (), wherein divergent yet mutually resonant traditions within world cinema may be co-positioned in order to explore aspects of shared practice and solidarity.","PeriodicalId":38663,"journal":{"name":"New Cinemas","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43377898","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}
Hilde van der Wal, Nicolás Medina Marañón, Steven Willemsen
This article explores how ambiguous-unreliable narration occurs in cinema as a distinct mode of unreliability. In defining ambiguous narration, we build on Semir Zeki’s neurobiological notion of ambiguity, from which we understand ambiguous narration as a mode that presents a series of questions consistently answered in mutually contradictory ways. We pay specific attention to Robert Vogt’s definition of ambiguous-unreliable narration in order to get a grip on the possible storyworlds presented by Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 feature film Burning. The film cues viewers to consider multiple interpretations of diegetic truth, each interpretation tapping into another possible world of events by positing questions with multiple non-hierarchable answers. As such, it becomes clear how Burning plays upon different concepts of ‘truth’. Drawing on the work of Vittorio Bufacchi and Kevin Reuter and Georg Brun, we can see how Burning ambiguates the line between correspondentist and coherentist readings of truth, thereby revealing something significant about truth-assigning strategies. We argue that Burning mimetically evokes post-truth phenomena, a periodizing concept in which the differentiation between fact-based truths, opinions and lies is blurry, creating an ambiguous information environment characterized by an uncertainty of what one can consider (un)trustworthy or (un)reliable. By proposing a cognitive narratological approach, we demonstrate how film storytelling can mimetically evoke this experience of uncertainty. In light of these findings, this research addresses the educative value of ambiguous-unreliable narration within fiction, especially within curricular programmes that incorporate media literacy training.
{"title":"Burning questions and multiple answers: Ambiguous-unreliable narration and the uncertainties of truth and trust","authors":"Hilde van der Wal, Nicolás Medina Marañón, Steven Willemsen","doi":"10.1386/ncin_00024_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00024_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how ambiguous-unreliable narration occurs in cinema as a distinct mode of unreliability. In defining ambiguous narration, we build on Semir Zeki’s neurobiological notion of ambiguity, from which we understand ambiguous narration as a mode that presents a series of questions consistently answered in mutually contradictory ways. We pay specific attention to Robert Vogt’s definition of ambiguous-unreliable narration in order to get a grip on the possible storyworlds presented by Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 feature film Burning. The film cues viewers to consider multiple interpretations of diegetic truth, each interpretation tapping into another possible world of events by positing questions with multiple non-hierarchable answers. As such, it becomes clear how Burning plays upon different concepts of ‘truth’. Drawing on the work of Vittorio Bufacchi and Kevin Reuter and Georg Brun, we can see how Burning ambiguates the line between correspondentist and coherentist readings of truth, thereby revealing something significant about truth-assigning strategies. We argue that Burning mimetically evokes post-truth phenomena, a periodizing concept in which the differentiation between fact-based truths, opinions and lies is blurry, creating an ambiguous information environment characterized by an uncertainty of what one can consider (un)trustworthy or (un)reliable. By proposing a cognitive narratological approach, we demonstrate how film storytelling can mimetically evoke this experience of uncertainty. In light of these findings, this research addresses the educative value of ambiguous-unreliable narration within fiction, especially within curricular programmes that incorporate media literacy training.","PeriodicalId":38663,"journal":{"name":"New Cinemas","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41908326","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}
Review of: Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art, Cristina Albu (2016) Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 303 pp., ISBN 978-1-51790-006-9, p/bk, $30 Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating, Scott C. Richmond (2016) Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 215 pp., ISBN 978-0-81669-099-2, p/bk, $27 Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, Alanna Thain (2017) Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 332 pp., ISBN 978-0-81669-295-8, p/bk, $20
{"title":"Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art, Cristina Albu (2016)\u0000Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating, Scott C. Richmond (2016)\u0000Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, Alanna Thain (2017)","authors":"Claire Lozier","doi":"10.1386/ncin_00026_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00026_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art, Cristina Albu (2016)\u0000 Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 303 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-51790-006-9, p/bk, $30\u0000 \u0000 Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating, Scott C. Richmond (2016)\u0000 Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 215 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-0-81669-099-2, p/bk, $27\u0000 \u0000 Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, Alanna Thain (2017)\u0000 Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 332 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-0-81669-295-8, p/bk, $20","PeriodicalId":38663,"journal":{"name":"New Cinemas","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47793141","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}