SPECIAL ISSUE ON FILM
Robert Kolker, guest editor
CONTENTS
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Editor's Introduction
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Articles
Gina Marchetti, "Transnational Cinema, Hybrid
Identities and the Films of Evans Chan"
Stephen Mamber, "Simultaneity and Overlap in
Stanley Kubrick's _The Killing_"
Joseph Christopher Schaub, "Presenting the Cyborg's
Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov's
Kino-Eye"
Jorge Otero-Pailos, "Casablanca's Regime: The
Shifting Aesthetics of Political Technologies
(1907-1943)"
William D. Routt, "The Madness of Images and
Thinking Cinema" [WWW Version Only]
Adrian Miles, "_Singin' In the Rain_: A
Hypertextual Reading" [WWW Version Only]
Peter Donaldson, "Digital Archives and Sibylline
Fragments: _The Tempest_ and the End of Books
[WWW Version Only]
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Review Essay
Edward Brunner, "Ersatz Truths: Variations on the
%Faux% Documentary." A review of Rick Prelinger's
_Ephemeral Films 1931-1960_: _To New Horizons_
and _You Can't Get There from Here_ and Prelinger's
_Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Dark
Side of the American Dream:_ Volume 1: _The Rainbow
is Yours_ with Volume 2: _Capitalist Realism_;
Volume 3: _The Behavior Offensive_ with Volume 4:
_Menace and Jeopardy_; and Volume 5: _Teenage
Transgression_ with Volume 6: _The Uncharted
Landscape_. CD-ROMs. New York: Voyager, 1994 and
1996.
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Reviews
Kim Fedderson and J.M. Richardson, "Looking for
Richard in _Looking for Richard_: Al Pacino
Appropriates the Bard and Flogs Him Back to the
Brits." A review of the recent film/video.
Anthony Enns, "The Art and Artifice of Peter
Greenaway." A review of Alan Woods' _Being Naked
Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway_.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.
Mark Welch, "The Grim Fascination of an
Uncomfortable Legacy." A review of Eric
Rentschler's _The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi
Cinema and its Afterlife_. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1996.
Benzi Zhang, "(Global) Sense and (Local)
Sensibility: Poetics/Politics of Reading Film as
(Auto)Ethnography." A review of Rey Chow's
_Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality,
Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema_. New
York: Columbia UP, 1995.
Hassan Melehy, "Looking Forward to Godard." A
review of Wheeler Winston Dixon's _The Films of
Jean-Luc Godard_. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
M. Klaver, r rickey, and L. Howell, "Peripheral
Visions." A review of E. Ann Kaplan's _Looking
for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial
Gaze_. New York: Routledge, 1996.
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Response
Arkady Plotnitsky and Richard Crew, Exchange on
Plotnitsky's essay, "'But It Is Above All Not
True': Derrida, Relativity and the 'Science Wars,'"
_Postmodern Culture_ 7.2
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Letters
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Notices
[WWW Version only]
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Abstracts
Gina Marchetti, "Transnational Cinema, Hybrid
Identities and the Films of Evans Chan"
o Abstract: This article attempts to rethink cultural
relationships within the dynamics of an
increasingly globalized media environment, using
the case of Evans Chan as the focus for the study.
Chan is a New York-based filmmaker, born in
mainland China, bred in Macao, educated in Hong
Kong and America, who makes independent narrative
films primarily for a Hong Kong, overseas Chinese,
"greater China" audience. To date, Chan has
completed two features, _To Liv(e)_ (1991) and
_Crossings_ (1994). Both of these films openly
address issues that find only a marginal voice in
the mainstream cinema of Hong Kong, the United
States, and other Chinese cinemas globally. His
work will be used here as an illustration of the
necessity for a new approach to nation and culture
within media criticism.
With one foot in the United States and the other in
Hong Kong, Chan can freely address issues as
diverse as Hong Kong's return to China in 1997, the
legacy of the events of June 4th in Tian'anmen
Square, the role of women in the world economy, and
the processes of immigration and dispersal
involving the Chinese globally. While fears of
censorship arising from Hong Kong's laws and the
unofficial censorship of the marketplace in the
United States place a boundary around what can and
cannot be said in the cinema, Chan, with his
transnational production team, manages to seriously
explore controversial issues. In this way, Chan
creates a transnational, transcultural discourse
through the medium of the motion picture, pointing
to a new type of cultural sphere that must be noted
within media studies.--gm
Stephen Mamber, "Simultaneity and Overlap in Stanley
Kubrick's _The Killing_"
o Abstract: This article explores the temporal
construction of the 1956 Stanley Kubrick film,
_The Killing_. A caper story presented through an
elaborate series of isolated segments, the film is
organized around moments of simultaneity and
overlap--a grand conceptual design explored in the
article partly through the use of a chart and some
3-D re-creations. The linkage between the film's
temporal strategy and its spatial construction is
also examined.--sm
Jorge Otero-Pailos, "Casablanca's Regime: The Shifting
Aesthetics of Political Technologies (1907-1943)"
o Abstract: In this essay, I illustrate how the film
_Casablanca_, while bearing little visual
resemblance to the city in Morocco where it draws
its name, exists and performs in symbiosis with the
real Casablanca. I argue for a more cohesive
analysis of the Casablanca phenomenon, presenting a
previously neglected urban/filmic comparative study
as intrinsic to our historical understanding of
both aesthetic objects. This work delineates the
construction of Casablanca around both World Wars,
first by France (architecturally), and then by
North America (filmically). The history of each
building effort is presented %vis a vis% that of
the other, capitalizing on their dist urbing
similarities of intent, methodology, anticipated
political effects, and relation to dominant modes
of perception. The modern city was a full scale
urban experiment of France's colonial
administration, meant to boost national self esteem
and secure military support from the people in the
face of World War I, while the film was a
calculated American attempt to quell national
anxiety about engaging in World War II. Both
objects were produced on the run, riddled with
incertitude, and invested with an agenda to
aestheticize politics in an attempt to establish
social order by mobilizing entire populations
towards war. The success of each effort lay in its
ability to excite the desires of their audience by
drawing on familiar conceptions of reality and
manipulating them so as to drive the general
perception of the world towards a politicized
%imago mundi% of clear rights and wrongs.
"Casablanca's Regime" introduces the reader to
Casablanca as an exceptional virtual city, where
images--architectural, filmic, or otherwise--are
jointly weapons of political control, and
instruments of seduction.--jop
Joseph Christopher Schaub, "Presenting the Cyborg's
Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye"
o Abstract: Since Donna Haraway's groundbreaking
essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto," there has been a great
deal of debate concerning the liberatory potential
of cyborg subjectivity. Of particular interest
have been the effects that the cyborg, which
dissolves the boundary between human and machine,
will have upon the equally contested boundaries
which comprise distinctions of gender in the late
twentieth century. In this paper I examine a
cyborg construction which appears in the early
twentieth century films of the Soviet theorist and
filmmaker Dziga Vertov. The Kino-eye (or
camera-eye) is a cyborg combination of the
mechanical movie camera and the human eye. It is
most fully explored in Vertov's _Man With a Movie
Camera_ (1929), the %magnum opus% of his cinematic
theories. _Man With a Movie Camera_ has
interesting contemporary implications because of
the prominence that Vertov gives to women in this
film. The Kino-eye is seen as a cyborg combination
that incorporates both the male cameraman and the
female editor. As the film unfolds woman is
depicted as maker of meaning, rather than
spectacle. That Vertov, a Russian Futurist, was
unusual in this respect can be seen by comparing
his work to the writings of his contemporaries. In
particular, the misogynist writings of the Italian
Futurists provide a strong contrast to the theories
of the cyborg Vertov explored in his own film work.
This paper then, also explores the way that Vertov
rescues the cyborg (his Kino-eye construct) from
the misogynist framework of its initial Italian
Futurist conception, and suggest that there is much
that can be applied from his work to the
contemporary debate on gender in cyberspace.--jcs
William D. Routt, "The Madness of Images and Thinking
Cinema" [WWW Version Only]
o Abstract: This article attempts a preliminary
understanding of the experience--or sensation--of
place evoked in the cinema, based on some of the
earliest films and their spectators. It exposits
certain ideas contained in Vachel Lindsay's _The
Art of the Moving Picture_ and finds a delirious
resemblance between these ideas and some in Gilles
Deleuze's two Cinema books. Perhaps the piece
suggests that madness is a property of the
sensation of place in the cinema. Animated gif
files, maddening their sources, offer a crude
supplementary patchwork commentary.--wdr
Adrian Miles, "_Singin' in the Rain_: A Hypertextual
Reading" [WWW Version Only]
o Abstract: _Singin' in the Rain_ is a canonical
self-reflexive film which combines an informed
self-consciousness with an argument about its own
legitimacy as art. The film's argument is
structurally evident within one of the film's more
famous self-reflexive sequences, "You Were Meant
for Me." Through the incorporation of video into
the essay and an emphasis on a hypertextual writing
style, this hypertext attempts to find a middle
ground between hypertext and film theory where each
complements the other. It is hoped that the
inclusion of part of the object of study within the
work exerts some hermeneutic force on the reading
and the writing, and it is intended as a
preliminary move in an exploration of new academic
genres in film theory that hypertext and
digitisation might allow.--am
Peter Donaldson, "Digital Archives and Sibylline
Fragments: _The Tempest_ and the End of Books"
[WWW Version Only]
o Abstract: This multimedia essay traces how Peter
Greenaway's film _Prospero's Books_ reads _The
Tempest_, anachronistically, as a play about the
end of books and the advent of electronic forms.
Greenaway finds _The Tempest_ relevant to this
shift because, as he puts it, we are living in the
early years of a new "Gutenberg Revolution," in
which the ambitions of the Renaissance magus with
his magic books are being realized, in part,
through digital technologies.
_Prospero's Books_ is an anticipatory or proleptic
allegory of the digital future, figuring the
figuring the destruction of libraries and their
rebirth as "magically" enhanced electronic books.
It is set in the past, and extrapolates from the
several passages in the play in which Prospero's
books are mentioned the story of twenty-four
wonder-working books through which Prospero
achieves his magic; yet, by calling attention to
the digital special effects by which these books
have been created on screen--"paint" and
photoprocessing applications, computer animation,
multiple screen overlays--Greenaway suggests that
the magically enhanced codex volume is as much a
part of our future as our past.
The essay also compares the "creative" magical
volumes of Greenaway's film to several kinds of
documentary evidence concering the fate of real
books (Shakespeare's Folios) and their vicissitudes
in the material world (damage, compositorial
variation) and the use of specialized books such
as fold-out anatomies in ways that parallel
Greenaway's attempt to rival the miracle of human
reproduction in digitally enhanced cinema.
Like _Prospero's Books_, this essay itself exists
in a transitional form (networked hypertext with
linked images and brief video citations), and like
_Prospero's Books_ it imagines future forms and
depends on them. It is relatively linear in its
form, and bounded in its contours, presenting a
small number of textual and visual citations. Yet
it asks its readers to imagine that they are
exploring a path, one particular path, through an
immense networked digital archive.
Such an archive would include the complete film
_Prospero's Books_--as well as all other
Shakespearean film adaptations, linked to relevant
lines of text; which includes all extant copies and
page fragments of the Folio text of _The Tempest_,
and an extensive library of commentary; which is
linked as well to extensive collections of
anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance
forward, and to texts and images that illustrate
the motif of the "end of the book" in the late
twentieth century.--pd
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