‘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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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 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.

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.

I’d flown into Riyadh from Bahrain as one of a film crew; about twenty of us travelling the world in a Pan American Airways DC-4 airliner shooting scenes for the huge screen Cinerama production of Seven Wonders of the World (1956). We were there to film one man’s idea of a world wonder, the Arabian king, ‘the richest man in the world’. Our invitation was pried loose by Lowell Thomas, a famously regular American guy, who made movies his own way. He had chartered our airliner to fly anywhere, anytime, and also a World War II bomber with a Cinerama camera in the nose and then he winged it. No script, no plan, no prep, no budget, but it worked for him.

Sixty years after the first Cinerama film premiered at The Broadway Theatre in New York, James Morrison remembers working in Saudi Arabia with the Cinerama crew.

Harry Palmer, Michael Caine & The Ipcress File, Part 2

We’re talking about a film that crystallized a pragmatic, dynamic point in time, between the beginning and the beginning of the end… after the New Wave and before Swinging London… before the party but after the invite… from Tom Jones to Tom Jones… before mini-skirts but after the Pill… between Christine Keeler and Germaine Greer… before Mod went to pot and LSD OD’d on psychedelia… between John Lennon and John Lennon MBE and John Lennon… after rebellion, before it all ended in tear gas… between This Sporting Life and If…

Gary McMahon returns to the sixties one more time.

Deep, Deep, Down: The social satire of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik

In Italy, the word for comic book is ‘fumetti’, which translates as ‘little puff of smoke’, referring to the speech balloon which communicates the dialogue in the comic to the reader, thereby implying the integration of images and words. Until the early-1960s, Italian comic books were aimed exclusively at children, but this changed with the publication of the first issue of Diabolik. The character was created by the sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani while both were working as schoolteachers, and his stories initially appeared on a monthly basis in black-and-white booklets. Perhaps in response to the conformist climate of the period, the Giussani sisters created the character of a master thief who was bold and brave, yet at odds with the state in which he lived.

John Berra brings out the social-political satire lurking beneath the comic book veneer of a misunderstood cult movie.

Erotic, Silent, Dead: The concept of women in the films of Stanley Kubrick

In the context of violence, always captured on film in its most extreme brutality, it is striking that women are, in sharp contrast, nearly always depicted as delicate, graceful figures. As a viewer, one often feels – in spite of oneself – the urge to intervene, to give a warning, to protest at the filmic deployment of the female body; and yet one is as helpless to change the events on the screen as the women themselves, who are unable to defend themselves against the circumstances in which they are trapped.

Sabine Planka on Stanley Kubrick’s women.

Room to Rent: Sexual dissidence in the films of Khaled El Hagar

Controversy is a defining aspect of the Egyptian film-maker Khaled El Hagar’s reputation in Egypt. This, one can argue, is due to the dogmatic nature of the Egyptian film industry as is outlined by the six legal statutes, which exist to prevent cinema from instigating dissidence. Arguably, El Hagar has endured more public criticism than almost any other Arab film-maker of the last two decades. El Hagar, which translates roughly as ‘The rock’, is an apt moniker considering the sheer resilience that the film-maker has had to endure in order to continue producing narrative pictures. His films have been banned, censored and the film-maker himself has survived a period of exile from Egypt after his graduation film A Gulf Between Us (1991) was shown to an Egyptian audience in 1995, instigating a media stir.

Omar Kholeif wonders whether El Hagar is ‘unique [within Egyptian cinema] in the methods of his visual portrayals of queer acceptance’.

Rethinking the Female Voice and the Ideology of Sound: On Stanley Kwan’s film Center Stage (Ruan Lingyu, 1992)

Center Stage, by Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan, offers a retrospect of the life of the Chinese cinema legend Ruan Lingyu (1910–1935) and the events leading up to her suicide at the age of 25. Ruan’s legendary life stirred Kwan to make a film based on the scant remaining sources of Ruan’s life and career. In discussing Kwan’s representation and reproduction of the female voice, I wish to examine the extent to which Kwan’s film does or does not revive the female subject’s voice, paying careful attention to the restrictions on such revivification which inhere in the cinematic apparatus itself.

Li Guo on the disempowered woman’s voice.

The Heroic Laughter of Modernity: The life, cinema and afterlife of a Bengali matinee idol

Uttam Kumar had a rewarding artistic career as the leading figure in the Bengali film industry – doubtlessly once the most critically discerning and artistically progressive fraternity among the few language-based film industries that comprise Indian cinema, its all-pervasive Hindi (now Bollywood) industry included. Actually it would be an understatement to say that he was a leading figure. He, much to his own dismay, virtually colonized the industry. In fact, Atlas-like he carried an entire industry on his shoulders, and like Prometheus, gave the industry’s underclass as well as its shenanigans, the fire of livelihood for three decades.

Sayandeb Chowdhury on the ‘greatest screen legend ever to grace Bengali cinema’.

The Globalized Avatar of the Hindi Cinema Hero: Hrithik Roshan’s ‘double role’ in Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai (2000)

In 2000, veteran director Rakesh Roshan directed his son Hrithik in his screen debut, Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai (‘Say This Is Love’) to enormous box-office success. It is a classic example of what is termed a masala (spice) film, one with a furious mix of all manner of plot elements: a love story across class lines (with requisite opposition from a disapproving parent), leering villains, choreographed dances and action scenes, and a catchy soundtrack. Yet the film’s success rested not only on its familiar masala but also on its innovative use of a cinematic device called the ‘double role’ or ‘dual role’ in order to revamp the blueprint of the desirable romance hero.

Jayashree Kamble looks at how the Hindi cinema hero has changed in the era of neoliberal globalization.

Rethinking Russian Ark

Because Sokurov mainly selects only those parts from Russian history that pertain to the country’s flourishing era, history in Russian Ark (2000) is in Nietzsche’s terms ‘beautified’. If one argues that the film is about the Russian Empire and its emperors from Peter the Great to the last emperor Nicholas II, then what about all those other emperors in between? For example, Russian Ark leaves out Paul I, the successor of Catherine the Great; Alexander the Blessed, the successor of Paul I; Alexander the Liberator, the successor of Nicholas I; and Alexander III, the successor of Alexander the Liberator. If Russian Ark is about Imperial Russia, which followed the Tsardom of Russia, why are these emperors not included?

George Sikharulidze finds ‘covert propaganda’ in Aleksandr Sokurov’s celebrated one-shot film.

A Conversation with Baldvin Zophoníasson

‘I wanted the film to be claustrophobic. I wanted it to show their world, nothing else. When you are a teenager, the whole world is the world that circles you. That was the feeling I wanted to capture in the frames.’

Icelandic director Baldvin Zophoníasson talks to Tom Ue about his successful first feature film Jitters.

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Could it be that the yuppie is finally dying? And does that mean that the eighties are over? Is it a burial ode that David Cronenberg has given us with his latest film, Cosmopolis?

Bred by the neoliberal stage of finance capitalism, the yuppie personality was made up of nine parts Social Darwinism and one part cocaine. There seems to be no agreement as to when exactly the term was coined, though 1982 is the year most frequently offered. That is also the year Michael J. Fox first appeared on American television screens as teenage Reagan-loving wannabe yuppie Alex Keaton in the generational sitcom Family Ties. Fox also garnered the lead when Jay McInerney’s 1984 debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was adapted for the screen in 1988. But neither of Fox’s characters had the indomitable cynicism needed to become the face of the era. And the same was true for Tom Hanks, whose Sherman McCoy was, in a commercial miscalculation, deliberately “niceified” when Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was brought to the screen in 1990.

Wall Street

In 1987 it was to be Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas that gave us the cinematic character that more than any other came to symbolize his era. Gordon Gekko had indomitable cynicism to spare and lived the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. But, strictly speaking, established and middle-aged Gekko was not the yuppie of Wall Street. The role of young upwardly-mobile professional was that of Charlie Sheen as the stockbroker Bud Fox. In the end, Bud Fox turns out to be little more than a good kid led momentarily astray, whilst neoliberalism is brushed off as the product of individual greed that can be outmaneuvered by the collaboration of a “responsible” labour union and a morally superior capitalist. Stone’s naïve social liberalism made sure his ending had little resemblance to the real world of relentless top-down class war.

Instead, the ultimate yuppie, Patrick Bateman, was brought to us in 1991 courtesy of Brett Easton Ellis in his third novel, American Psycho. That same year Time magazine famously published the obituary of the yuppie. But that was way, way too early. To be sure, the self-confidence of the yuppie was shaken by the crisis of the early nineties, much as it was ten years later by the dot com crash and 9/11, but both times he (or more rarely she) would return with a vengeance. How could it be differently when economic inequality was forever on the rise and finance capital kept being treated as the all-powerful divinity whose appetites must forever be satisfied, no matter the human cost. “Compared with us, the eighties greedhead was practically restrained,” concluded one self-styled yuppie recently: “If anything, your average upwardly mobile young professional has so outstripped and outclassed the mid-eighties yuppie that if Gordon Gekko himself were to show up in polite society in 2006, he would look kind of provincial.”

American Psycho

Today research has taught us more than we knew thirty years ago about how inequality destroys the humanity of us. The economic divide that places a super-wealthy elite in a condition of invulnerability, social and physical isolation, simultaneously blocks the ability to empathize. The distance separating them from the rest of us becomes so great that they simply lose the ability to see us as proper fellow humans. The logic of the market that transforms everything and everyone into commodities does the rest. When a yuppie looks at us we should probably imagine that he looks at us much as we might look at a dog. Of course there are all sorts of dogs; good dogs, cute dogs, difficult dogs, dangerous dogs, dogs that need to be put down. This is the psychological realism that was captured with such steely elegance by Mary Harron and Christian Bale when they brought American Psycho to the screen in 2000. Patrick Bateman is the image of a monstrous, deranged neoliberalism at its peek; invincible and opaque. No matter how far into madness Bateman takes his blood thirst the world cannot see through the polished masque that he ritually dons every morning with the help of his battery of ultra-exclusive skin care products.

Cosmopolis

The 28-year old financial billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), whose continuously disrupted journey across Manhattan in a sound proof limousine is narrated in Cosmopolis, is every bit as mentally estranged from the everyday world around him as Bateman and just as brutally indifferent. But Packer’s universe is falling apart around him, assaulted both by anti-capitalist protesters and a market that suddenly turns unpredictable. In the course of the film’s 108 minutes he loses everything. Seen as a story about the financial crisis as such this is obviously not a very realistic depiction. With very few exceptions, the ultra-rich have become even richer, protected with absolute loyalty by the neoliberal state that remains the slavishly obedient guarantor of their wealth and power. But Cosmopolis is, perhaps, rather more realistic if understood as the nightmare of the contemporary yuppie in a time when neither the vulnerability of the economy in itself nor the realization of Earth’s incapacity to sustain the capitalist production system can be fully repressed. Perhaps, then, what we see here is the initial crumbling of the psychological foundation of the yuppie, the sociopathic self-confidence.

Cosmopolis

Erich Hobsbawm has spoken of “the short twentieth century,” from the outbreak of World War One to the fall of the Soviet Union. Giovanni Arrighi, on the other hand, wrote about “the long twentieth century,” starting with the Great Depression of 1873-96. Perhaps we could also speak of “the long 1980s” of unlimited neoliberal self-confidence, beginning with the election of the first Thatcher government and possibly reaching the beginning of its end with the Lehman Brothers crash in September 2008. Then again, Eric Packer may well wake up from his nightmare once more, like he did after the initial crisis of the twenty-first century, the period when Don DeLillo’s here adapted novel was written. After all, the yuppie has proven just as difficult to kill off as those other monsters of the long 1980s, Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers.

Daniel Lindvall is Film International’s editor-in-chief.

Over the course of two months Deirdre O’Neill and Mike Wayne of Inside Film worked with artistic director Jimmy Fairhurst and a group of volunteers from Salford and Manchester. Drawing on their own experiences of working class life and directed by Jimmy, they created an extraordinarily powerful theatrical performance that was in turn, moving, funny, defiant and angry and showed that the condition of the working class remains marked by the same kinds of hardships, struggles and inequalities as in Engels’ time.

The people who came together to do this show turned from a group of strangers, many of who had never acted before, into The Ragged Collective, in little more than two months.

The whole process, from first rehearsal to the first night performance has been captured on film by Inside Film. The resulting documentary links the struggle to get the performance on stage to the broader struggles of the working class today.

Find out more here.