‘The Last Silent Star Standing’: An Oral History of 1920s Film with Diana Serra Cary

To delve into her life – almost Zelig-like in the manner she appears in photographs sparring playfully with Jack Dempsey, performing a graceful pose with Irene Castle, being held in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s arms – is to encounter a living connection to a who’s who of 1920s American history and culture. Cary, who possesses an IQ of 145, was discovered in 1920 at 19 months and immediately paired with a veteran performer: Brownie the Wonder Dog. Her 50 two-reelers circled the globe, making Century, that long-ago Poverty Row studio she worked for, a tidy profit. Her movies were so lucrative that Century (which had Universal as its distributor) boasted a ‘Baby Peggy unit’: a production crew entirely devoted to turning out this successful series.

Jeffrey Crouse has talked to Diana Serra Cary, the last(?) of the silent stars.

The Passive Hero: From Yugoslavia to Independence, an Investigation into Slovenian Film

As a part-time resident of Slovenia myself (married to the Slovenian artist and translator Urška Charney), I was pleased to attend the premiere of Shanghai Gypsy. There, in a theatre in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s fairy-tale capital, I encountered a who’s who of the Slovenian screen. The majority of the nation’s film and television stars occupied the relatively small theatre space, faces and names that I recognize because of their ubiquity. In a nation of 2 million souls, there are perhaps 100 recognizable film and television personalities, and they seem to appear in everything. A new entrant to the group is a rare thing. While this may seem small to the point of claustrophobia, there are advantages, at least from a foreigner’s perspective, to swimming in what one might reasonably call a ‘small pond’. If you know any one person in this Slovenian screen-world, you are likely connected to everyone else in it. Kevin Bacon may require six degrees of separation in the popular who-starred-with-who Hollywood game. In Slovenia, you’d need only one or two degrees to reach anyone else.

Noah Charney has met the people that matters most in the small world of Slovenian film-making.

A Pacifist and/or Cowardly Yank in Britain: The Americanization of Emily (1964) as anti-war classic

Very controversial upon its original release the film was indeed a pioneering anti-war film that poked fun at silly patriotism, noble self-sacrifice and the glorification of war before such films were fashionable in Hollywood and widely accepted by the public. Columnist Liz Smith years later described The Americanization of Emily as ‘too good for its time, and now a classic for the cognoscenti’. [Director] Arthur Hiller has always insisted that the film was not anti-war but rather ‘anti-glorification of war’. ‘It’s not war that’s insane; it’s the morality of it,’ as James Garner’s Charlie Madison puts it. With an ambiguous ending that leaves viewers today feeling either cheated and/or confused about the larger implications of the film, perhaps only the satire and black comedy rescue Emily from ‘dated, overblown oblivion’…

From the vantage point of the era of neverending ‘war on terror’, Richard A. Voeltz celebrates an ‘anti-glorification of war’ film that will turn 50 in 2014.

Time is Money – The Acceleration of Time and the Vanquishing of Space in Melancholia, Another Earth, and In Time

Resembling the true-life story of Patricia Hearst, the granddaughter of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who ended up joining the very group that kidnapped her, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the mid-1970s United States, [In Time] then develops into a Bonnie and Clyde scenario. However, Will and Sylvia can ultimately be seen as the progenitors of a new species of humans, a species liberated from the slavery of time as a life-binding currency. Will and Sylvia, as the first couple to have actively worked out their freedom from the shackles of time and as freedom fighters, are a novel yet subversive Adam and Eve. Having tasted of the tree of forbidden knowledge (becoming conscious of the reality of things), they actively decide to leave the Garden of Eden and the governance of hierarchical time zones.

William Anselmi and Lise Hogan look at the politics of three high-profile dystopic films of the 2010s.

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Associate editor Amir Ganjavie (ganjavie@yorku.ca)

Articles are invited for publication in an edited volume of Film International on the topic of Iranian independent cinema. Independent Iranian cinema consists of the low budget Iranian films with limited affiliation to the government and its financial resources that are critical of the mainstream commercial cinema. It includes the works of notable Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhbalbaf, and Asghar Farhadi as well as the underground movies that are produced and distributed without the permission of the authorities and are subject to censorship and intense pressure of the government. The contribution this journal strives to make is to generate critical debate regarding the historical and current situation facing Iran’s independent cinema and its major figures, the code of practice of the film censorship and the barriers facing independent cinema in Iran. The overarching aim of this special issue is to highlight current thinking on the problematic of independent Iranian cinema. As such, promising submissions will inevitably be analytical and interpretative, rather than primarily descriptive. Equally, all submissions should demonstrate grounding in the theories of cinema and Iranian studies (coming from within the discipline of Cinema, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Philosophy, Politics, Film Studies, Ethnography, Modern Languages and Literatures, as well as from cinema practitioners, such as filmmakers, photographers, musicians, and scriptwriters). Authors are also expected to be familiar with the developing literature on Iranian cinema.

If you are interested please submit a 500 word proposal/abstract (preferably in word.doc format) to Parviz Jahed (parviz.jahed@cine-eye.com) and Amir Ganjavie (ganjavie@yorku.ca) by 31 July 2013. Your proposal/abstract should clearly articulate why/how the essay explores/develops/articulates problematic of independent Iranian cinema.

More information on Film International, including Notes for Contributors, can be accessed here.

With the exhaustion of film narrative an accomplished fact, it would seem that new, “anti-narratives” might be an early clue to a new direction. Inspired by the famous comment by Jean-Luc Godard that a film should “have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” as well as the flexibility of the original plotline for his breakthrough film Breathless (1959) – “she loves him, or maybe she doesn’t. He loves her, or maybe he doesn’t. It ends badly, or maybe it doesn’t” – as well as the excellent example of scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière, who noted in an interview that when he co-wrote The Phantom of Liberty (1974) with Luis Buñuel, their narrative design aimed at “starting one story, and continuing until it became interesting, and then immediately cutting away to a less interesting narrative, until that, too, became interesting, and then cutting away to an even less interesting narrative again, and so on,” as well as the final moments of Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967), in which a paranoid Peter Fonda, convinced that the police are chasing him, is soothed by Salli Sachse, who responds, “What police? There are no police. I don’t believe in police,” we offer these ideas at possible filmic narratives, aimed at mimicking the “undramatic” thrust of Edmund Spenser’s epic, unfinished poem The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), in the hope that they may offer some fresh inspiration to the burned out scribes currently toiling in Hollywood, or, as Film Comment puts it in a regular monthly feature, “Running on Empty.” As you will notice, these scenarios are decidedly lacking in conflict; who says you need conflict to create a successful screenplay? It’s so 20^th century. With that in mind –

*Two armies meet on a vast plain, seemingly destined to battle to the death. At the last moment, both of the commanding generals decide that war is useless – “A whole lot of us are going to get killed!” – and successfully negotiate a peaceful settlement, and retire from the battlefield without a single blow exchanged.

*A group of young hipsters in a “mumblecore” movie suddenly realize that they can’t understand what they’re saying to each other. They begin texting, and the problem is solved.

*In the American west in the 1880s, a frontier sheriff learns that three men he sent to prison years ago are coming back to town on the noon train to kill him. Realizing that no one in town will help him, he takes his wife, who is a pacifist and supports him in this decision, and leaves town immediately, never to return.

*An eccentric millionaire offers five strangers $1,000,000 each if they will spend the night in a genuinely haunted house, where many murders have occurred. All the guests immediately decline, and the party is cancelled.

*A young woman is startled by a man who appears at her doorway late one rainy night. However, he only wants to return her wallet. She thanks him, and he leaves.

*At long last, a mission to Mars is successful. Landing on the surface of the planet, the astronauts find nothing, and realize that the entire effort has been a waste of time and money.

*A lonely old puppeteer creates a puppet of a young boy, and wishes that it would come alive, and be a real son to him. But he quickly realizes this will never happen, and instead mounts an elaborate puppet show, after throwing the puppet in the trash.

*A washed up prizefighter makes one last attempt at a comeback. To the surprise of everyone, he knocks out his much abler opponent with a single punch, and then takes the prize money, opens a restaurant, and retires. He throws away all his fighting memorabilia; “Who wants to remember that?” he says to his patrons.

*After years of toiling in her wicked stepmother’s house, Cinderella’s fairy godmother appears and turns her into a gorgeous princess just in time for the royal ball. She dances all night with the dashing young prince, but vanishes at the stroke of midnight, leaving only a glass slipper behind. “I wonder who she was?” muses the prince, and then forgets all about her.

*A deranged scientist makes his way back to his abandoned laboratory in a castle high in the Carpathian mountains, only to discover the Wolfman and the Frankenstein monster there, both encased in huge blocks of ice. “Let’s thaw them out, and they’ll help us in our research!” the scientist exclaims. “That’s a terrible idea,” responds his assistant. The scientist agrees – “What was I thinking!” – and both promptly leave the castle.

*A young Marine is discharged after serving in Vietnam. He moves to New York City, and unable to sleep, takes a job driving a cab all night. One day, a teenage hooker jumps in his cab, trying to escape from her pimp. The pimp pulls her out of the cab, and throws the cabbie a $20 bill. Pocketing the bill, the cabbie shrugs, and forgets all about it. Things like this happen all the time.

*An underdog football team enters a Championship game against a highly rated opposing team. As everyone predicted, they lose, but no one cares; it’s been an entertaining afternoon.

*A woman gives up her baby for adoption. She never regrets it for a moment.

*A young woman impulsively steals $40,000 from her employer, and drives away in her car. Exhausted after hours of driving, she pulls into the Bates Motel for the night. But after a moment, she decides to hit a local diner instead for some really strong coffee, drives back to Phoenix, returns the money, and her employer forgives her. Meanwhile, a nice young man is busy cleaning the bathrooms of the motel, as he does every week.

*A mysterious man drives from coast to coast in the United States, picking up numerous hitchhikers along the way. In this fashion, he makes many new friends.

*A young boy and girl are lost in the forest. Realizing this, the girl pulls out a compass, figures out where they are, and guides them both to safety.

*Deep in space, a spaceship picks up a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Figuring correctly that it would be dangerous to investigate, they ignore it, and continue on to their destination.

*A man feels that he is about to commit a series of horrendous crimes – serial killings – and seeks treatment. He never murders anyone, and the treatments are a complete success. He becomes a respected member of the community.

*A gang of aging thieves gathers together to pull one last big robbery. But then, given the risk, they decide it isn’t worth it, and abandon the plan entirely.

*Two teenagers realize that their respective families strenuously object to their budding romance, and decide it isn’t worth it to pursue the matter any further.

*A flying saucer lands in the Arctic, embedded under sheets of ice, and a team of scientists use thermite bombs to unearth it. The bombs destroy both the ship and its occupants entirely. The scientists shrug and leave. The incident goes unreported.

*A young boy and his faithful dog are out for a walk in the country, when the boy falls down a deep well. The dog, frightened, runs away. The boy is never found.

*A cursed videotape causes all who watch it to die within 24 hours. Realizing this, a young mother destroys the tape by throwing it into the furnace; besides, VHS is obsolete.

*Five young men and women gather in a cabin in the woods. In the basement of the house, a young woman finds a book, bound with barbed wire under a pile of dead animals. “This looks dangerous – let’s get out of here” she tells her friends, and the group quickly departs the cabin and checks in to a nearby motel, with a great swimming pool and sauna.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the author, most recently, of Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood, and the forthcoming Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is the editor in chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the author of many books on film and popular culture.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

An account on the difference between celluloid and the nowaday omnipresent digital film experience by Mats Carlsson.

I would argue that the fear of the digital (felt by some) and the claim of a different feel attributable to the digitalized watching experience, grounds itself on a level other than that of actual perception. What we have here is a problem of symbolism. This might sound theoretical and vague, however our language and understanding of ourselves and reality are mediated at the level of the sign.

Russian Ark

Where the photographic image in one frame of film stock is born out of the inscription of light, via a chemical reaction, the digital camera records light electronically. The intermediary, in the form of a computer, organizes this information into digital data. Herein lies the obvious, fundamental difference between the two mediums, not in the perception of the finished image. What do I try to claim here? Well, along the line of Baudrillardian thought and good old-fashioned semiotics, the photographic film image is to be seen as the signifier, that which refers to the event that unfolded in front of the camera. Following this logic the event itself would be the signified; the filmic image and the event together forming a complete sign as it were. However, this process is halted when the inscription of light is interrupted by the interpretation of the computer (the interpretation of light by the intermediary). Between the event and image something is added or subtracted, depending on one’s outlook.

Vidocq

This is the subversion of the digital revolution, not the subversion of images, but of reality itself. This may sound very scary – as if a dystopia of falseness has fallen upon us – all in the guise of the flowering of technology. However, this isn’t necessarily the case. We must remember that reality as such is our’s for the making. The semiological system of signifier, signified and sign, our way of communicating and interpreting the real, is changing.

Is this the transcendence or ruining of reality? One thing is certain, the installment of digital representations of reality reads the implosion of the sign as we know it. What is experienced today is an implosion: the signifier and the signified, one and the same.

Mats Carlsson is an undergraduate at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, his special interests include psychoanalysis, phenomenology and critical theory applied within the framework of cinema in particular and the broader media landscape in general.

Wheeler Winston Dixon presents his new book.

Film stocks are vanishing, but the image remains, albeit in a new, sleeker format. Today, viewers can instantly stream movies on demand on televisions, computers, and smartphones. Long gone are the days when films could only be seen in theaters: Videos are now accessible at the click of a virtual button, and there are no reels, tapes, or discs to store. Any product that is worth keeping may be collected in the virtual cloud and accessed at will through services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Instant.

The movies have changed, and we are changing with them. The ways we communicate, receive information, travel, and socialize have all been revolutionized. Streaming: Movies, Media, and Instant Access reveals the positive and negative consequences of the transition to digital formatting and distribution, exploring the ways in which digital cinema has altered contemporary filmmaking and our culture. Many industry professionals and audience members feel that the new format fundamentally alters the art while others laud the liberation of the moving image from the “imperfect” medium of film, asserting that it is both inevitable and desirable. I argue that the change is neither good nor bad; it’s simply a fact.

Hollywood has embraced digital production and distribution because it is easier, faster, and cheaper, but the displacement of older technology will not come without controversy. Streaming illuminates the challenges of preserving digital media and explores what stands to be lost, from the rich hues present in film stocks to the classic movies that are not profitable enough to offer as streaming video. It also investigates the financial challenges of the new distribution model, the incorporation of new content such as webisodes, and the issue of ownership in an age when companies have the power to pull purchased items from consumer devices at their own discretion.

Streaming deals with the 21^st century shift to digital production and distribution, explaining how the new technology is affecting movies, music, books, and games, and how instant access is permanently changing the habits of viewers, and influencing our culture.

Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, is coeditor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and the author of numerous books, including A History of Horror, Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema, and Film Talk: Directors at Work.

‘You know that I am still a radical leftist precisely due to my pessimism. For the true Utopia is to think that things can somehow go on as they are. No, if we allow things to drift along the way they are we will be in a new totalitarian society twenty years or so from now. I am a pessimist. That’s why I like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil so much as a portrait of totalitarianism without borders. It will not be the old fascisms with the almighty leader. No, it will be, I think, a falsely permissive and fraudulently inclusive authoritarian system, something very fluid, constantly mutating, shape-shifting to remain the same.’

Slavoj Žižek talking to Rajko Radovic.

Effacing the Effaced: Chris Marker’s Collectivist Period

The film world suffered a great loss in August 2012 with the death of Chris Marker, a pioneer of the medium in many ways. An unfortunate refrain in many of the posts about him, however, was the recurring emphasis on the fact that his 1962 25-minute masterpiece La Jeteé provided the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) – which is true, but inordinately diminishes Marker’s other monumental achievements on film. Some RIPs mentioned Sans soleil (1983), but only a handful of sites seemed familiar at all with his wider body of work. Marker’s oeuvre ran broad and deep, and even then much of his most interesting work was made when he dissolved his public persona into film-making collectives.

Patrick Tolle resurrects Chris Marker, the collectivist.

Cinema Returns to the Source: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Despite the span of millennia separating the two cultures and their technologies, the medium of sound film and the cultural practices of cinema have striking similarities with the artistic medium, setting, and patterns of reception of the cave paintings. Herzog alludes to these correspondences throughout the film and even foregrounds them flamboyantly at times. The film also highlights that the paintings are the earliest known instance of the dynamic simulation of mental images in an external medium. As he portrays the cave art in this way, he frames his filming of Chauvet Cave as cinema returning to the moment in history that prefigures the invention of film. With the technological and cultural similarities between the cave paintings and cinema as the backdrop, the film then probes whether the audience’s involvement in its cave sequences may form a bridge back to our ancestors who stood on the threshold to history 35,000 years ago.

Roger F. Cook on Werner Herzog’s film that links cave paintings and cinema.

The Rhetorical Force of Conflicting Emotions in Operation Filmmaker: A Cognitive Approach to Documentary Performance & Emotion

Whereas many recent Iraq documentaries set out to mobilize, pushing their viewers to engage in concrete socio-political action, Operation Filmmaker points to a different kind of persuasive political work that such nonfiction texts might perform. By underlining the untoward consequences of impulsive altruism, the extent to which ostensibly upright actions might serve ulterior motives and the necessity for thinking before acting, the film actually discourages viewers from engaging in the kind of emotion-driven behaviour to which several other documentaries appeal. These evocative lessons, however, fulfill an ideological function of their own, unsettling spectators’ understanding of specific events and of general principles of behaviour, and thus potentially altering our means of knowing and interacting with the world.

Elizabeth Marquis analyses a documentary that ‘communicates its warning against emotion-based decision-making precisely by manipulating spectator affect.’

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The long-awaited call for reviews is finally here.

Film International is actively seeking reviews for publication online or in print (at our discretion) of the following books and DVDs:

Books

• Bollywood: Gods, Glamour and Gossip, Kush Varia (Wallflower) — TAKEN
  
• The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom, Deborah Allison (Lexington Books) — TAKEN
  
• Directory of World Cinema: France, Tim Palmer, Charlie Michael, eds. (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Film Genre Reader IV, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (U of Texas P) — TAKEN
• The International Film Musical, Corey K. Creekmur, Linda Y. Mokdad, eds. (Edinburgh UP) — TAKEN
• Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, Sarah Keller, Jason N. Paul, eds. (Amsterdam UP) — TAKEN
• The New American Crime Film, Matthew Sorrento (McFarland) — TAKEN
• Postcolonial Cinema Studies, Sandra Ponzanesi, Marguerite Waller, eds. (Routledge) — TAKEN
• Remaking Brazil: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, Tatiana Signorelli Heise (U of Wales P) — TAKEN
• The Romy Schneider Story, C. McGivern (Reel Publishing) — TAKEN
• Selected Film Essays and Interviews, Bruce F. Kawin (Anthem) — TAKEN
• A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010, Hamid Naficy (Duke UP) — TAKEN
• War, Politics, and Superheroes, Marc DiPaolo (McFarland) — TAKEN
• Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking, Hunter Vaughan (Columbia UP) — TAKEN

DVDs (region 1, standard DVD unless otherwise noted)

• The Ballad of Narayama, Keisuke Kinoshita (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
  
• The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
  
• City of Women, Federico Fellini (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Cleopatra, Cecil B. DeMille (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Floating Weeds, Yasujiro Ozu (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Following, Christopher Nolan (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Funeral Season, Matthew Lancit (Documentary Educational Resources) — TAKEN
• Gate of Hell, Teinosuke Kinugasa (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• The Kid with a Bike, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti (Eureka Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Masaki Kobayashi: Against the System (Criterion/Eclipse) — TAKEN
• Oedipus Rex, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Pina: Dance, Dance, Otherwise We Are Lost, Wim Wenders (Criterion Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D) — TAKEN
• La Poison, Sacha Guitry (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• The Qatsi Trilogy, Godfrey Reggio (Criterion) — TAKEN
• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang (Eureka Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Trouble in Paradise, Ernst Lubitsch (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Two-Lane Blacktop, Monte Hellman (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN

If you are interested in one of the above items (and don’t owe any reviews), please email me your mailing address at:  filminternationalreviews AT gmail.com

As always, first come, first served. If an item has “TAKEN” by it, it has already been claimed.

DEADLINE for these reviews: June 1, 2013

The Lives and Deaths of the Yuppie is the working title of a book project co-edited by Daniel Lindvall and Saër Maty Bâ. The aim of the book is to present a range of analyses of ‘the yuppie’ and ‘yuppiedom’ within late 20^th and early 21^st century film and television. We understand the yuppie to be a key character type of neoliberal history and culture. We particularly encourage essays written from a perspective of historical materialism and/or ideology critique and in a style accessible to the intelligent general reader. At this stage we already have a handful of writers committed to the project but are still looking for another 4-5 contributions. Whilst we are open to general suggestions, we are particularly interested in articles covering the following subjects:

The Romantic Comedy (rom-com)
Indie cinema
Zombies and Vampires
The Gangster/Crime/Mob film
US Hispanic/Latino American cinema

Abstracts of 300-500 words should be emailed to the editors no later than April 1, at daniel.lindvall@filmint.nu with a copy to drsaerba1@gmail.com and accompanied by a 150-word biography.

On November 28, 2012, Secret City, a new feature-length documentary about the City of London and the Corporation that runs it, was screened in Venezuela’s Bolivar Hall in London. As a postgraduate student and member of the production team I have, over the past year, gained insight into the relationship between the theory surrounding the film and the practice involved in making it.

Here I want to carry out a brief textual analysis of Secret City, emphasising the dialogical and multidisciplinary aspects embedded in its methodology, arguing that this methodology constitutes a praxis that can be applied to other spheres of cultural production, particularly education. This praxis appeals to me as a young academic looking to draw knowledge from a broad range of disciplines, with a concern for the future of education at a time in which it is under attack by a government with a demonstrable hostility towards academia.

One of the first problems we faced in making Secret City was the multifaceted nature of the story we wanted to tell. Cursory research into the City of London showed how the film had to navigate between many discourses, specifically (but not limited to) those of history, geography, economics, politics and theology. The question became one of how a film could articulate this complexity and maintain a coherent narrative structure.

The overcoming of this problem can be seen in the multi-strand narrative of the film. By juxtaposing different interviews, each with seemingly hermetic subject matter, the relations between strands gain clarity in tandem with the building-up of a dialogical voice that sets itself against the ‘official’ voice of the Corporation of London. Furthermore, the voice of the author is given up to a cumulative polyphony of image and sound as the film traverses disciplinary boundries.

From the beginning Secret City posits the main problem of its subject matter as being a lack of awareness, that is, the people situated within the City have little knowledge of its history or how it functions. Through engagement with a public whose reactions range from surprised to completely puzzled the film displays the disconnection between people and place brought about via the obfuscation of history.

We see, then, how the monological, ‘official’ voice curtails knowledge for its own ends. As the narration states “it’s about power, and what people know about that power”. The monological appears again in the form of a mayoral procession and I am reminded of Robert Stam’s comparison between the repressive rigidity of the military parade and the more liberating, dialogical aspects of the carnival.

The main advantage of the multi-strand narrative structure of Secret City is its widened scope for embracing dialogical aspects. As part of this the film uses a palimpestic textual strategy, building layer upon layer of historical maps and footage along with the ‘present day’ voice of its interviewees. The film becomes multi-temporal as well as multi-textual, allowing it to break down disciplinary frontiers. Through history, geography, economics and other such disciplines the film articulates the material crisis of capitalism in its institutional context. It shows how the City awarded votes to businesses based on the size of their workforce (again, unawares to that workforce), its refusal to expand, thus sharing some of its wealth with the poorer boroughs that surround it, and how the City even blackballed a representative elected on a reform platform.

Building such a narrative means the interviewees begin to speak to each other, as well as to the audience. This strengthens the dialogical sphere of the film as it continues to mount a collective argument against the City of London. The film therefore establishes a connection between theory and practice by providing a space in which this dialogism is articulated against its material situation.

Used as a means to re-connect theory with practice, this dialogism stands in opposition to the government’s stifling focus on ‘vocational’ training. “For us” Paolo Friere says in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed “the requirement is seen not in terms of explaining to, but rather dialoguing with people about their actions…but action is only human when it is not merely an occupation but also a preoccupation, that is, when it is not dichotomized from reflection”.

While this methodology may seem abstract, it is clearly materialised both in the form of Secret City and in the act of making it. The monological voice of the City of London is of the same caste as the monological voice the government is attempting to impose on education from above. As Friere says, students and educators, as an increasingly oppressed group, must recognise the difference between “systematic education, which can only be changed by political power, and educational projects, which should be carried out with the oppressed in the process of organising them”.

Secret City is an example of one of those projects. It constitutes a form of resistance against the greed of finance capital and the assault on education. Through its action the film engages in what Lukacs calls “consciously activating the subsequent development of experience”. This experience takes the shape of a dialogical voice that stands in opposition to a government whose ‘business- friendly’ conception of education seems to entail the continuous erosion of theory from the practice of its institutions.

It is up to us as academics to find new ways of fostering a creative understanding in both students and educators. If, as Doreen Massey says in Secret City, “we are situated in a geography of relations, and all those relations are filled with power” then a multidisciplinary approach is essential to drawing as much power as possible from that geography.

Anthony Killick, MA student, Film and Television Studies, Bristol University and production assistant on Secret City (http://secretcity-thefilm.com/).

Imad and Swel Noury are conduits of a sort of cinematic bricollage. They are young – at the time of writing, Imad is 29 and Swel is 33. Born in Casablanca to a well-known Moroccan father – television and film director, Hakim Noury, and a Spanish film producer mother, Pilar Cazorla – both of whom function as frequent collaborators with the duo. Living and producing work in both Morocco and Spain, the film-makers’ work samples a cross-section of disparate cultural forms. Inspired as much by European New Wave cinema, as they are Moroccan desert landscapes, and the gloss of high fashion, the brothers’ collaborative process sees them melding these disparate elements into a heroic bilingual, sometimes trilingual cinema – their films utilize French, Arabic and English in their vernacular.

Omar El-Khairy and Omar Kholeif introduce the Noury Brothers’ unique brand of cinema.

Woman Run Amok: Two Films by Lars von Trier

It has taken me some time to come to terms with the films of Lars von Trier. His work has struck me as uneven (both within each film and in the progression of his career), and his public persona too much that of a provocateur (his ‘I am a Nazi’ remark at Cannes 2011 only the most recent example). I admire provocation, if it has some purpose. Von Trier’s actions seemed adolescent, publicity-seeking, or flatly reactionary, but I may have been as gullible and as easily dismayed as the nitwit media, the subject of his actions. Today, I look back on his provocations in the context of his work and find them wholly admirable; he is among the few people capable of upsetting bourgeois reviewers and their readers (I am one of course), and it seems to me that the upset he causes is intimately connected to his art [...].

Christopher Sharrett on Lars von Trier’s ‘unrelentingly negative critique of patriarchal capitalist society’.

No Start, No End: Auteurism and the Auteur Theory

In tandem with its signature theory, auteurism has made many things ‘go’, but this functionality has come at a steep cost. Auteurism has turned attention away from the political, economic, collaborative, and biological contexts of the film industry, its romantic stress on the individual artist obscuring many realities. But as I have implied, academics should recognize that this meme will not be gotten rid of simply by critiquing its epistemological defects. Auteurism accesses something too basic in human nature for this to be possible. It simplifies in a way that is too convenient, too malleable. And it is currently the basis of too much infrastructure. As scholars, we should face these facts head on. We should be aware of auteurism’s shortcomings as well as its stability. This dual awareness will help us recognize its best academic uses, which are in my view rarely evaluative and never celebratory.

David Andrews revisits auteurism, thinking about its influence, its shortcomings, and its persistence.

Nollywood Style: Nigerian movies and ‘shifting perceptions of worth’

Whatever international prestige lies around the corner, the modes of film-making that established Nollywood – the cheap and rapidly produced videos of the 1990s and 2000s – will probably always be maligned as ‘illegitimate’ cinema. Yet this earlier work continues to resonate, finding new audiences via the Internet and other venues, and might be seen as the quintessence of Nollywood style. It was during the 1990s when I first encountered Nollywood – and in particular the films of Chico Ejiro, addressed in more detail below – at public screenings in Brixton and on the Stockwell Park Estate in south London. These boisterous events, primarily aimed at British-Nigerian filmgoers, suggested that far from suffering from a lack or aspiring towards some unattainable norm, the films had already developed techniques of production, distribution, and consumption that were gesturing to the future of film-making.

Jeffrey Geiger battles the widespread and misguided resistance to serious examination of Nollywood movies.

Happenstance and Construction: An exploration into the work of artist film-maker Ben Rivers

‘I’m just back from Bulgaria, where I’ve been filming for a longer collaborative project with another film-maker, Ben Russell, which will be in three acts, on the theme of utopias. I’m fascinated with utopias. I believe we all share some visions of kinds of utopias…’

James Murray-White interviews British Indy film-maker Ben Rivers.