Orienting the Coppolas: A New Approach to US Film Imperialism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered
Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2005
Although the reader's general comments were quite sympathetic to my rather flagrandy formalist analysis of the "Suzie Q" segment, he did point out that I had, to quote a remark scribbled in the margin on the last page, "glossed over... some of the historical imagery." Little did I know then that the question of history in relation to Apocalypse Now would resurface almost a decade later in a slighdy more ceremonial context. Given the chance, am I going to skirt the issue once again? Can we felicitously talk about a form of historical imagery that has not been sublated by what Thomas Elsaesser in his book on Weimar cinema calls the historical imaginary? Embedded in the current topic, quite intriguingly, is a peculiar type of paradox. On the one hand, I am specifically asked to present my analysis of Francis Coppola's excessive and perhaps over-discussed film Apocalypse Now (1979), on the other hand this analysis is one that should be carried out with special reference to the interpretive-or perhaps methodological-categories of film genre, historical context, and literary pretext. We are clearly in the realm of prefixed textualities here. However, I am not at all sure that an analysis of Apocalypse Now that is authentically my own would in fact be compatible with the concerns indicated in the lecture topic. That is, had it occurred to me to do scholarly work on this ' This essay is a revised version of a lecture offered as a "trial lecture" for the degree of Dr. Art. at the University of Bergen, December 11, 2003. The topic for the lecture was "Your analysis of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) with special reference to the film's genre, historical context, and literary pretext." The occasion usefully presented me with an opportunity to reassess the nature and substance of Coppola's vision in terms of what may be seen as an anti-generic yet re-historicized sensibility. 121 Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered 122 particular film, my critical emphasis would in all likelihood be different. Can I, therefore, legitimately discuss Coppola's film with regard to genre, context, and pretext and still call the analysis mine? The struggle to reconcile these conflicting perspectives will in diverse ways inform the present argument, indisputably providing much horror along the way. Reflecting upon Apocalypse Now for the first time in years, I realize that it is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to conceive of the film's narrative as a phenomenological entity entirely divorced from notions of sheer size, scope, scale, or magnitude. A 16-month shooting schedule, 200 hours worth of footage, an editing process that took three years to complete, three different endings, and a sense of a general turmoil on the set (substance abuse, a heart attack, threats of suicide) that would probably impress even Sam Peckinpah-the significance of these facts is not merely anecdotal. The confounding enormity of the film is an inextricable part of Coppola's text and as such it militates against any predilection for structuralist ramification; as a cinematic project, Apocalypse Now is simply too monumentally unwieldy to be relegated to the formal stringencies of genre. Moreover, an essential question that needs to be addressed is how our appreciation and understanding of Coppola's film is enriched by defining it as a Vietnam film, a war film, or even as a genre film to begin with. If, for instance, Apocalypse Now is a Vietnam film, is it a Vietnam film in the same way that, say, Casualties of War (Brian De Palma 1989) is one? Does the former suggest a generic intention, or intentionality, in the same way that for example Chicago (Rob Marshall 2002) intends to be (in the sense of wanting to be or aspiring to be) a musical, or Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes 2002) a melodrama? Furthermore, why is it that the problem of genre may be brought up with respect to Apocalypse Now but hardly in relation to the literary text from which it putatively draws its principal inspiration? (Heart of Darkness is not adventure, not travel literature, but a novel or novella, period). The idea of genre usually implies an inherited array of formal or thematic conventions or attributes, which in turn comprises a tradition. Meticulously to pinpoint the textual features that conform to preestablished generic taxonomies is on the whole an unwelcome enterprise, an analytical process that soon would have to confront what Andrew Tudor once referred to as the '"empiricist dilemma'" (1986: 5): to determine whether a given film is a Western requires a set of empirically verifiable criteria, but in order to know what these criteria are one would first need an a priori conception of what constitutes a Western. Such
Hollywood’s transnational imaginaries: colonial agency and vision fromIndiana JonestoWorld War Z
Continuum, 2018
The concept of transnational cinema, in increasing use over the last decade, remains one whose sense and significance in the context of production, thematic organization and reception remains fuzzy, eliciting similar debates as the concept of globalization more generally did before it. The paper attempts to re-specify what the concept of the transnational could mean for film and to locate in the process some distinct variants or modalities of the transnational. The paper does this through an exploration of the production and aesthetics, politics and narrative structure of three Hollywood blockbusters, locating each within distinct global configurations of the contemporary political order, and identifying their isomorphism with wider public discourses and policies. The 'transnational' in these specific films describes, not merely a cross-national mix of production locales, actors, narrative elements and distribution venues, but a narrative imaginary that, conjoined with Hollywood's global reach-its economy of pleasure-can engender a dynamic through which diverse audiences may be drawn into the perceptual and affective space of the neo-colonial or imperial order. Over the last two decades of film scholarship, the idea of 'transnational cinema' has been increasingly used, interrogated and debated. Yet, as many contemporary film scholars argue (e.g. Choi 2012; Higbee and Lim 2010; Shaw 2013) the concept of transnational cinema remains in need of further specification, and its currently multiple uses call for a critical fine tuning or re-evaluation. What kind of signifier is the 'transnational' when applied to cinema? Which films are transnational and in what way? What difference does the concept make to our understanding of film practices and the texts that are produced, circulated and consumed, i.e. to our understanding of the dynamics of cultural production, and the world in which film, and its cultures, are produced? The concept of the 'transnational' is, of course, in use across the humanities and social sciences and represents the recognition that socioeconomic , political and cultural processes are not contained within 'national' boundaries (see, for example,
NO FUTURE: The Colonial Gaze, Tales of Return in Recent Latin American Film
Humanities , 2022
The past is certain, the future an illusion. Contemporary films such as Ivy Maraey: land without evil (Juan Carlos Valdivia 2013), Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra 2015), The Fever (Maya Da Rin 2020), and Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles 2020) are border films, from the genre of contact films. They announce how coloniality maintains a grip on frontier territories in the Americas. These films also present particular indigenous visions that challenge western epistemes and confront audiences with particular ways of being in the world, where the modern subject finds its limit. The article introduces a critical perspective on cinema as a colonial tool, producing forms of capture that are part of the modern archive and the notion of linear time. These films also build on cinematic traditions such as tercer cine and afro-futurism, and are strong on concepts such as cosmopolitanism, resistance, and subalternity. They present forms of adaptation, reaction, return, and redemption while maintaining the status of cinema as a capturing device, entertainment, and capital investment (the triad of destruction in modernity/coloniality).
Fragmentation, Intertextuality and Hyperreality: The Postmodern and Popular Filipino Films
Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2016
Watching popular films can help students take certain arguments in the theory of knowledge more seriously. Such claims bring to fore what the postmodernist critic Frederic Jameson (1998) refers to as the erosion of distinction between high culture (as represented by philosophy and the act of philosophizing) and popular culture (embodied by popular films) as when these products of mass culture are used as texts for philosophical and literary studies. The present study was designed to analyze popular Filipino films as text, in order to achieve the researcher’s aims: one is to prove that movies can truly be philosophic and literary, by highlighting the dominant features of postmodernist fiction discernible in the selected contemporary films, and how these features were related to the over-all narrative structure, characterization, and thematic content, and more importantly, to participate in the effacement of the line between high art and commercial art, demonstrating in the end that &...
Against a Migrant Cinema. Critical Reflections on the Postcolonial Perspective.
Cinergie, 2019
The notion of “migrant cinema”, on the one hand, tends to historicize a phenomenon,recognizing in the current socio-political context a common ground on which such products, despite theirdiversity, can grow; on the other hand, like any codification, this historicization tends to bring back to thecollective sphere what is often an individual artistic expression: as it does not speak of society, it is simplynot interesting. In this sense, as we will try to argue in this essay, the postcolonial perspective on the onehand proves to be effective, as it opens up film studies to important methodological contaminations; on theother hand, as a negative consequence, it tends to treat “migrant cinema” as a genre in its own right, thustransforming the “eye of the migrant” into an “eye on migrant”. In a critical-theoretical perspective, thispaper will debate on how the denial of the existence of a migrant cinema is not an attempt to deconstruct aconsolidatedhistoriographicalframe, butonthecontrary, itisawaytoavoidthatthishistoricizationimpliesand replicates the same dynamics of abjection that it tends to eliminate.
" Literature argues not by articulating premises and conclusions but by prompting its audience to develop them for itself. " 0. It is tempting to address at length in an abstract fashion the forceful and condensed premise that we are supposed to examine, discuss and argue about as a tool to re-theorize not only critical interpretation but the process, structure and ethics of literary communication; it is all too tempting because it would allow us to display and exploit a vast array of concepts borrowed from the history of poetics, rhetoric and reception. But most of the questions that have intrigued me in the past fifteen or twenty years about globalization, World Literature, postcolonial fiction, translatedness, etc. and that the liminal statement or proposition quoted might help me solve or at least reformulate or reset, invite me on the contrary to remain sober in this respect and limit myself to exposing briefly my understanding or misunderstanding of the basic assumptions behind this statement. 1) " Literature argues " Literature, whether it argues or not and however it does it, is presented as an entity that resembles a human subject insofar as it is the subject of acts of speech. It is not only a regime of discourse, or a code. The letter of literature, its text is not treated as an arbitrary collection of signs or a dead archive but as the living locus of an intentionality, it is not self-contained, autotelic, it seeks to produce effects. 2) " literature prompt[s] its audience " " Literature " is not seen as the totality of the situations, agents and processes involved in the production, transmission and exchange of aestheticized/aestheticizable acts of speech, but more probably as a corpus of texts in which a will-to-do is deposited and that is activated by reading. Therefore, as an event, it takes place within a space-time oriented by classical communicational directionality, a message being conveyed from a sender to a receiver. 3) " its audience to develop them for itself " The end user (receiver/interpreter) of " literature " is collective and autonomous. The extent to which its members or component parts (individual readers) collaborate to unify the reception field or develop conflicting interpretations is not specified any more than the nature of the bond between literature and audience: is it a merely pragmatic bond, or reciprocal belonging, or an ongoing negotiation between forces? This crucial question is left open and it is mainly through this indeterminacy that we can try to apply the proposed maxim to the reception-programming strategies of postcolonial fiction and assess its productivity without questioning at this stage the assumptions revealed in 1) and 2).