Routledge New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2015 / BOOK REVIEW: Cinematic homecomings: exile and return in transnational cinema (Rebecca Prime) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema
Cinematic Homecomings expands upon existing studies of transnational cinema by addressing the questions raised by reverse migration and the return home in a variety of historical and national contexts, from postcolonialism to post-Communism. By looking beyond exile, the contributors offer a multidirectional perspective on the relationship between migration, mobility, and transnational cinema.
This chapter aims to present an overview of the history of the transnational in film studies, and consider the ways in which the discipline has responded to developments in the social sciences following a transnational momentum in film studies from 2005, with the following years seeing a number of conceptual and theoretical essays and edited volumes and the founding of a journal, Transnational Cinemas in 2010. It outlines the key areas of focus in the first phase of transnational cinema studies: migration and cinema and exilic and diasporic filmmaking; transnationalising readings of national and regional cinema; historical readings of transnational cinema; and film festival studies. Following this, the chapter discusses approaches to transnational film theory through an analysis of a selection of definitional essays on the subject. The final section of the chapter presents an overview of the second phase of transnational film studies, and considers the expanded reach of the transnational to the many fields that make up the discipline.
Book Review: Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden)
Open Jornal of Social Science Research, 2014
Transnational cinema: The film reader (Ezra & Rowden, 2006) is an anthology of papers on transnational cinema from the two earlier decades. It introduces the emerging debates of the transnational scene. It discusses transnational cinema as the most transportable art form as integration of digital technology has caused the rapid disappearance of permeable national media borders. Transnational cinema is characterized by awareness and diversity, and a speed capable of linking people across nations in minimum possible time. It affects the global economy and the cinematic literacy of its audiences and becomes the source of anxiety worldwide. Such themes draw on much discussed worldwide naturalization of Hollywood by taking the space of national cinemas in different countries. Transnational cinema: The film reader discusses the cultural repercussions of a global shift from multiple national cinemas to a diverse transnational cinema; the movement of Hollywood into the era of the multiplex; multicultural and diasporic interventions; and the ethics and aesthetics of Hollywood mis-èn-scene.
2010
The idea of developing the notion of transnational cinema as a tool to describe and articulate conceptions of cultural change in diasporic, global, non mainstream cinema, is what allows us to go beyond national cultural fields, but still allows us to account for the relationship between local and global. Transnational cinema becomes a site of interrogating the formation of representation, cultural practice and identity. By moving away from stereotyping, as form of representation, by engaging in social practices that promote diversity and by changing the notion of identity as necessarily being constructed in opposition to 'others' is how transnational cinema makes a contribution translocate cosmopolitanism. 'Cultural' cosmopolitanism lies at the heart of transnational cinema as presented in this article and cultural cosmopolitanism as social practice also lies at the heart of politics of diversity. This article explores how film, through hybridity in both content and ...
Concepts of transnational cinema: towards a critical transnationalism in film studies
Transnational Cinemas, 2010
This article aims to map out the various concepts of transnational cinema that have appeared over the past ten to fifteen years, and its state of deployment, related issues and problematics. It argues for a critical form of transnationalism in film studies that might help us interpret more productively the interface between global and local, national and transnational. It also aims to move away from a Eurocentric approach towards the reading of such films. It will illustrate how the concept of transnational cinema has been at once useful and problematic, liberating and limiting, by focusing on two case studies -diasporic and postcolonial cinemas and Chinese and East Asian cinemas -that provide fertile ground for interrogating the concept of the transnational.
This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of 'the aporia' to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic-undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about 'aporias of foreignness' allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2024
Transnational metacinema describes a range of films that depict film production across borders. The diverse corpus includes fictional works explicitly addressing the ethics of film crews working between nations, hybrid nonfictions that reflexively consider their own use of archival footage and re-enactments, cannibal horror films featuring documentarian protagonists, and Hollywood satires. This article considers themes of colonization and exploitation that traverse these examples. Each case complicates the sustaining, modernist notion that reflexivity disrupts viewing pleasure, inviting more politically aware spectatorship. Many examples promote self-awareness in the filmmaker-audience relationship at the expense of concern for the Indigenous and marginalized populations represented.
Aporias of foreignness: transnational encounters in cinema
Transnational Cinemas, 2018
This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of 'the aporia' to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic-undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about 'aporias of foreignness' allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.