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

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/).

Now in its 19th year and presented in partnership with Instituto Cervantes, Manchester, the Festival’s diverse selection ranges from comedy to civil war and horror. The 2013 Festival programme is the most ambitious to date, featuring an extensive range of Spanish and Catalan language films including big blockbusters, small independent feature films and documentaries.

¡Viva! remains one of Cornerhouse’s most popular events. Produced by Film Programme Manager Rachel Hayward and Festival Coordinator Jessie Gibbs, the 18th Festival edition received over 8,000 visitors during a three-week period, with a film programme presenting features from a diverse array of Spanish speaking countries including Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Peru covering comedy, animation, documentary, horror, action and historical drama. Rachel Hayward added: “We’re already looking forward to our annual celebration of Spanish and Latin American film culture, and following the hugely successful 2012 edition of the Festival, we’re excited to be showcasing some exceptional films. After months of film viewing to select the very best in new Spanish and Latin American filmmaking, the ¡Viva! team have programmed an exciting variety of films, events and language sessions that promise some fascinating experiences for ¡Viva!  regulars and people discovering the festival for the first time.”

¡Viva! 2013 will also continue Cornerhouse’s award-winning language study sessions with a series of events for Spanish language learners of all levels.  GCSE, AS and A2 students will be treated to a wide range of festival film screenings with accompanying in-depth language sessions led by native Spanish speakers from MMU and Festival Partner Instituto Cervantes. Adult learners can practice their language skills by dropping into one of the festival’s Spanish and Catalan events, taking part in a post-screening discussion or taking part in the specially programmed adult study morning.

In conjunction with ¡Viva! Film Festival, Cornerhouse is delighted to announce the first UK public solo exhibition by commended Mexican artist Yoshua Okón. Okón’s practice blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation whilst questioning habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality.

Full details of the 2013 ¡Viva! Festival film programme will be announced in December 2012.

Otelo Burning

By Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Programme Associate.

In a year when cultural institutions of all kinds have felt under direct attack, building the size and scope of an African film festival in London has been no easy task. With funding cuts, and an increasingly rampant rhetoric of ‘necessity’ and ‘efficiency’, the question ‘why does London need an African film festival’ has been consistent. Yet, at Film Africa 2012, which runs from November 1-11, we’ve demonstrated, in a number of ways, just how vital a festival of this kind is. At Film Africa 2011 we had over 2000 people in attendance, and this year, with our expanded film and events programmes, this is set to grow even bigger.

With over 70 films screening, and 35 filmmakers in attendance, Film Africa is a unique opportunity to participate in African film culture, to watch it shift and re-negotiate itself in times of political and cultural change, to marvel at the inventiveness and determination of low-budget films, or to be amazed by big production feature films like Tey by Alain Gomis, Grey Matter by Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza, or Otelo Burning by Sara Blecher.  The festival co-directors, Lindiwe Dovey and Namvula Rennie, along with a set of Programme Associates, have ensured that Film Africa 2012’s extensive film programme cuts across contemporary themes such as sexuality, continental crossings, sport, and public space and citizen journalism. In the spirit of making film accessible and celebrating the importance of public space for expression and creativity, we have also commissioned an alternative cinema space, the Picha House, where films will be shown for free throughout the festival.

We have an exciting shortlist of films for our Silver Baobab Award for Best Short African film, which showcases the talent of young filmmakers, experimenting with form and narrative. Our 2011 award winner, Rungano Nyoni, went on to be nominated for a BAFTA with her film, Mwansa The Great. We are also inaugurating an award this year for the audience’s favourite film.

Film Africa has also increased its support for filmmakers, both established and emerging. Alongside the awards, we are hosting a series of master classes with directors, held for free at the BFI Southbank, the second annual Distribution Forum, and an Open Screen event (the cinematic version of the Open Mic). Not just a celebration of film, the festival also showcases African music and performance art, and runs a series of family activities and educational screenings for young people.

Our response to the question of relevancy has been to show how vital and embedded a film festival can be for a new and contemporary African and diasporic film culture in the UK.

For more information, please visit www.filmafrica.org.uk, or follow us on twitter @FilmAfrica #FilmAfrica2012

Tickets are now on sale.

Conference at NYU Steinhardt: May 31-June 2, 2013

CALL FOR PAPERS

The annual conference, Music and the Moving Image, encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between music, sound, and the entire universe of moving images (film, TV, video games, mobile media, and interactive performances) through paper presentations.

This year’s conference will feature two roundtables: “Film Scoring: Teaching the Practice,” chaired by Dan Carlin, Dir. Scoring for Motion Pictures & Television Program, USC. The panel will include Paul Chihara, Head of Visual Media Program, UCLA; George S. Clinton, Chair of Berklee College Film Scoring; Halldor Krogh, Dir. Film Scoring, Lillehammer University, Norway; and Ron Sadoff, Dir. NYU Steinhardt Film Scoring.

A panel dedicated to “Music Production Libraries in Television” will feature Doug Wood (composer, COO Omnimusic). We welcome submissions that address TV music.

The Program Committee: Krin Gabbard (Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema); Raymond Knapp (The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity); Katherine Spring (Saying It With Songs (forthcoming)); and coeditors of Music and the Moving Image, Gillian B. Anderson (Haexan; Pandora’s Box; Music for Silent Film 1892-1929: A Guide); and NYU faculty, Ron Sadoff (The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation).

MaMI follows the NYU/ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop, May 21-30, 2013.

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/scoring/ascap

MaMI Conference website: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/scoring/conference

Abstracts or synopses of papers (250 words) should be submitted no later than Dec. 17, 2012 to:  

• Dr. Ron Sadoff, chair of the program committee
• mamicon2013 AT gmail.com
  

For more information, please e-mail: ron.sadoff AT nyu.edu

Dept. of Music and Performing Arts Professions, Program in Film Scoring:
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/scoring/
NYU – 35 West 4th St, New York, NY 10012
Conference fee: $185.00 – Students: $85.00; NYU Housing Available

For more information about this project, please see this PDF: Planetary Projection

Or visit Planetary Projection‘s online album:  http://www.caboosebooks.net/planetary-projection

Welcome to July!  Here’s hoping the heat is not too awful for those of you experiencing summer at the moment.  It is my pleasure to offer you a vibrant list of available review items.  As always, thanks for your support of and service to Film International.

If you are interested in one of the below items (and don’t owe any reviews), please email me your mailing address and selection at:

filminternationalreviews AT gmail.com

It helps, too, if you send a list of a few items you are interested in, in order of importance, in case your first choice(s) is already taken.

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

DEADLINE for these reviews: December 1, 2012

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

Books

• The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Wayne Koestenbaum (U of California P) — TAKEN
  
• Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Karl Schoonover (U of Minnesota P) — TAKEN
• The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema, Gina Marchetti (Temple UP) — TAKEN
• Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture: Vol. 2, Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb, eds. (Wallflower) — TAKEN
• The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections, Richard Koeck and Les Roberts, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan) — TAKEN
  
• Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, Sangita Gopal (U of Chicago P) — TAKEN
• The Creative Artist’s Legal Guide: Copyright, Trademark, and Contracts in Film and Media Production, Bill Seiter and Ellen Seiter (Yale UP) — TAKEN
• Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line, Dina Iordanova and Stuart Cunningham, eds. (St Andrews Film Studies) — TAKEN
• Directory of World Cinema: China, Gary Bettinson, ed. (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Directory of World Cinema: Germany, Michelle Langford, ed. (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Directory of World Cinema: Iran, Parviz Jahed, ed. (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Greek Cinema: Texts, Histories, Identities, Lydia Papadimitriou and Yannis Tzioumakis (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Henry Mancini …Reinventing Film Music, John Caps (U of Illinois P) — TAKEN
• Iranian Cinema & Globalization: National, Transnational and Islamic Dimensions, Shahab Esfandiary (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Jacques Rivette, Mary M. Wiles (U of Illinois P) — TAKEN
• Love in the Time of Cinema, Kristi McKim (Palgrave Macmillan) — TAKEN
• Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective, Donna King and Carrie Lee Smith, eds. (Vanderbilt UP) — TAKEN
• Merchant-Ivory Interviews, Laurence Raw, ed. (UP of Mississippi) — TAKEN
• Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney (Wallflower) — TAKEN
• Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson & Radical Politics, Brian Price (U of Minnesota P) — TAKEN
• New Zealand Film & Television: Institution, Industry and Cultural Change, Trisha Dunleavy and Hester Joyce (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah, Michael Bliss, ed. (Southern Illinois UP) — TAKEN
• Polanski and Perception: The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski, Davide Caputo (Intellect) — TAKEN
• Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society, Flavia Brizio-Skov, ed. (I.B. Tauris) — TAKEN
• Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, Tejaswini Ganti (Duke UP) — TAKEN
• Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic, David A. Gerstner (U of Illinois P) — TAKEN
• Richard Linklater, David T. Johnson (U of Illinois P) — TAKEN
• The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration, Douglas A. Cunningham, ed. (Scarecrow Press) — TAKEN
• Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities, David Martin -Jones (Edinburgh UP) — TAKEN
• Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, Gertrud Koch et al., eds. (Austrian Film Museum) — TAKEN
• Shoot It!: Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Independent Film, David Spaner (Arsenal Pulp Press) — TAKEN
• A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984, Hamid Naficy (Duke UP) — TAKEN
• Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, Tilman Baumgärtel, ed. (Hong Kong UP) — TAKEN
• Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer, Brian Taves (UP of Kentucky) — TAKEN
• Word Is Out, Greg Youmans (Arsenal Pulp Press) — TAKEN
• Zero Patience, Susan Knabe and Wendy Gay Pearson (Arsenal Pulp Press) — TAKEN

Media (region 1, standard DVD unless otherwise noted)

• The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock (Criterion) — TAKEN
• Accattone, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Eureka, region 2 DVD & Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• ¡Alambrista!, Robert M. Young (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze (Criterion) — TAKEN
• Belle de jour, Luis Buñuel (Criterion) — TAKEN
• Cano Dorado, Eduardo Pinto (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• David Lean Directs Noël Coward (Criterion) — TAKEN
• The Gold Rush, Charles Chaplin (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• The Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Eureka, region 2 DVD & Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Hawks and Sparrows, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• The Insect Woman, Shôhei Imamura (Eureka Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Island of Lost Souls, Erie C. Kenton (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Letter Never Sent, Mikhail Kalatozov (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Lifeboat, Alfred Hitchcock (Eureka, region 2 DVD & Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Lovely by Surprise, Kirt Gunn (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Metropolis (Giorgio Moroder Presents), Fritz Lang (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Metropolitan, Whit Stillman (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• A Night to Remember, Roy Ward Baker (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Pigsty, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• Punishment Park, Peter Watkins (Eureka Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Ruggles of Red Cap, Leo McCarey (Eureka, region 2 DVD & Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• The Samurai Trilogy, Hiroshi Inagaki (Criterion Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Summer Interlude, Ingmar Bergman (Criterion) — TAKEN
• Summer with Monika, Ingmar Bergman (Criterion) — TAKEN
• Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin (Criterion Eclipse) — TAKEN
• Tomie: Unlimited, Noboru Iguchi (Bounty Films, region 2) — TAKEN
• Yatterman, Takashi Miike (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN
• The Yellow Sea, Na Hong-Jin (Eureka, region 2 DVD & Blu-ray) — TAKEN
• Zift, Javor Gadev (Eureka, region 2) — TAKEN

The exhibition will be accompanied by a season of contemporary Arab and Lebanese cinema, screening some of the most critically acclaimed films to come out of the Arab World. Produced by a generation of filmmakers whose memories of Lebanon’s bloody civil war remain omnipresent, these recent examples illustrate one of the Arab world’s most emblematic nations, from a transitional stage of post-traumatic crisis through to post-revolutionary catharsis.

Screenings will include I Want To See (Je Veux Voir) from Directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joerige, the UK premiere of Okay, Enough, Goodbye (Tayeb, khalas, yalla) by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (lkhtifa’aat Soad Hosni el-Thalaathat) by Rania Stephan (followed by a Q&A with members of the filmmaking team), Stray Bullet by Georges Hachem and a preview of Where Do We Go Now? (Et maintenant, on va ou?) by Nadine Labaki.

Here, Subversion curator Omar Kholeif discusses the motivation and ideas behind the exhibition…

The spark for Subversion clicked in my head in 2009. I had just come back from a frustrating summer in Egypt trying to do some work on some deteriorating film archives, and when I returned to the UK everyone was buzzing about a show in London that had lots of Middle Eastern (and Arab) artists in it. I won’t name the exhibition, as everyone (myself included) has criticised it enough. However, it’s safe to say that it triggered all sorts of emotions within me and many of the artists with whom I was working, both from within and from outside of the Arab world. At that point I felt, and I still feel much the same way now, that Western institutions were still talking about artists from particular parts of the world using the same rhetoric that originated from post-colonial writers in the 1990s. In a sense, we had never moved beyond out dated modes of identity politics. Instead, I wanted to talk about what it means to be an individual in a post-internet, post social media human condition.

I started having a series of open conversations with Cornerhouse when Sarah Perks (Cornerhouse Programme and Engagement Director) was pulling together the Contemporary Art Iraq (2010) exhibition. I respected and appreciated the motivation of the project, and Cornerhouse’s desire to piece together a story that side stepped the narrative of victimhood we had all come to expect. After these initial conversations, I went back to the artists whom I found most compelling; in particular, the films of Larissa Sansour and Sharif Waked. One of the themes that resonated most strongly, and which continued to re-surface through subsequent discussions, was this notion that artists from and of the Arab world felt that they had to perform to a sense of national or regional identity that politicians, the news media, and the art world and its cultural brokers had cast upon them.  This is what influenced the title of the show. The name Subversion is intended to be ironic or playful – a critique of the fact the media only tends to think or speak in oppositional binary terms.

My own personal history as a Glaswegian Egyptian-Turkish writer and curator was much the same as the artist. Like many of the artists I was looking at, I felt that collectively curators and writers associated with the politically unstable Arab world were being asked to step up and perform to an identity that the world wanted us to play. With Subversion my aim was to do just the opposite. I worked with artists who referenced this very language but who wanted to dissent, poke fun, critique and re-define themselves as artists of the imagination, and not of any specific social or political condition. Together they reference a deep culture of subversion that traces back to the 1940s and 50s with the work of the Egyptian trickster, Ismail Yassin, whose slapstick film performances poked fun at the roles that many Arabs had to play under a militarised social condition. With Subversion we bring this narrative up to date for the good of our artists and our audiences.

Subversion is on show in Galleries 1, 2 & 3 between Sat 14 April – Tue 5 June.

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• michael.abecassis AT modern-langs.ox.ac.uk

ACME is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal devoted to the anthropological studies of societies and cultures in the Middle East and Central Eurasia.