{"title":"The transnational tales of an Indian creative producer: the case of Guneet Monga","authors":"Neha Bhatia","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2109846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2109846","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies of Indian cinema have traditionally placed more emphasis on directors, stars, aesthetics and issues of ideology than on the practices of creative producers. Although these are important concerns, the role of Indian producers deserves careful scholarly attention, especially in the context of transnational film projects, where producers are often involved from the pre-development stage through production and distribution. To address this problem, this article examines the production stories of an Indian creative producer, Guneet Monga (1983-), who is well-known for setting up Indian-European co-productions that deviate from contemporaneous spectacle-driven mainstream Bollywood productions. Through an in-depth personal interview with the producer herself and insights from film and media production studies, this article demonstrates how Monga’s micro-production stories reveal larger creative and collaborative practices that are transforming India’s independent film production culture and making it more transnational. This article shows that producers––the least researched figure in Indian film scholarship––gain several navigational tactics through transnational co-productions such as telling tales of tenacity, hustling and interpersonal networking, among others. These tactics, in turn, challenge the precarious conditions of working in the Bollywood-dominated film culture of India.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74008223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Screening postcolonial intellectuals: cinematic engagements and postcolonial activism","authors":"S. Ponzanesi, Ana Cristina Mendes","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2094612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2094612","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77472460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transnational Latin American Television: genres, formats and adaptations","authors":"Gabriel Moreno-Esparza","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2076980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2076980","url":null,"abstract":"captures the particularity of the non-western political cinema of this age without getting lost in the outer reaches of Deleuze-speak. Curiously, despite explicit engagement with complex post-structuralist thinkers, Holtmeier frequently rests within the liberal-phenomenological. Holtmeier asserts that ‘film is an affective medium’ (19), that ‘cinema brings verisimilitude to politics by depicting the lived experiences of individuals caught in the midst of these cultural clashes’ (40), and in approaching mainstream critique of ISIS militants as overly humanised in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (2015), Holtmeier demurs that they are not ‘humanized so much as their militant subjectivities are compromised and complicated.’ (77) So – humanised then? If ISIS fighters are not individual agents who spend time grooming children or travelling to warzones and damning local culture but ‘complicated, globally networked subjects’ (78) then exactly what liberation or progress beyond neoliberalism and boundaries and precarity is made? Holtmeier is strong and precise when unpacking the subtle juxtapositions of globalism and fundamentalism in Timbuktu and more, but it is unclear which politics are being served in this analysis of the political cinema.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86040437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interrogating the limits of humanitarian art: the uncomfortable invitations of Ai Weiwei","authors":"Eszter Zimanyi","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2094613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2094613","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent contemporary artists to engage the so-called ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ since 2015. His work spans several mediums, from feature-length documentary films to gallery exhibits, public installations, and social media content. Ai has garnered both admiration and criticism for his representations of migrants and refugees, with some critics alleging Ai’s works are tone-deaf and self-serving publicity stunts that disregard the uneven power dynamics between the artist and his subjects. These critiques, however, often overlook Ai’s postcolonial positionality and the ways in which his own experiences with exile shape his approach to representing mass displacement. In this essay, I offer a reappraisal of Ai Weiwei’s work by considering how his documentary practices productively discomfit viewers and invite audiences to interrogate the limitations of humanitarian art. Through close readings of his documentary film Human Flow (2017), gallery installation Laundromat (2016), and the notorious India Today portrait of Ai Weiwei as Alan Kurdi, I show how Ai destabilizes humanitarian documentary tropes typically used to represent refugees. In doing so, Ai calls attention to the constructed nature of his own work and invites viewers to re-examine their practices of looking.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88551695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Documentary re-enactment in Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes: countering the work of the imperial camera shutter","authors":"Ana Cristina Mendes","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2076857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2076857","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Framed by an understanding of Raoul Peck as a transnational filmmaker performing the role of a public intellectual, this article reads Exterminate All the Brutes, his self-referential and self-reflective documentary released on HBO in 2021, as an essay film that scrutinizes the role of image-making in the production of history to advance a form of counterhistory and a practice of ‘potential history.’ This reading of the structural hinge between visual apparatuses, imperialism, and white supremacy – the core story Peck aims to crack open ‘from the inside out’ in the essay film – engages with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s arguments, in Potential History, on how the camera shutter operates as the primary mechanism of imperialism. To demonstrate Peck’s deployment of scripted fictional scenes in Exterminate as a documentary strategy of creating a counterhistory and rehearsing ‘potential history,’ I consider two re-enactments: 1) the archival montage of wet-plate photographs (c. 1872–1873) of the Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley and his enslaved adopted child Ndugu M’hali (renamed Kalulu), and 2) the dramatization of Frederic W. Farrar’s lecture on the ‘Aptitude of Races’ delivered at the Ethnological Society of London in 1866.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88181002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the spiral of time: conversation between Domi Olivieri and Trinh T. Minh-ha","authors":"D. Olivieri, T. Minh-ha","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2078568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2078568","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article consists of a conversation between dr. Domitilla (domi) Olivieri, scholar and activist, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, renowned filmmaker, writer, theorist, and professor. Through questions and answers, the piece starts with Trinh’s take on the notion of the intellectual; the dialogue then continues by traversing some of the themes and issues that characterise Trinh’s work as a filmmaker and a scholar: films as forms of political and intellectual intervention; the matter of (diasporic) communities, subjectivities, and locations; how the issue of labels and genres plays out in the film industry; the question of audiences; the film as encounter; politics of knowledge productions; matters of time and temporalities. Sustaining the conversation is also an understanding that Trinh’s films do not only address issues of (trans)national movements, encounters, technologies, poetry, and rhythms of lives, but they also enact and perform those very movements. Finally, the article discusses Trinh’s legacies as feminist and postcolonial practices, and the role of criticism and (non)knowing in her work across genres and registers of filmmaking that are complex and poetic, as well as strongly political.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82822160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Portrait of the postcolonial intellectual as a wise old woman: Toni Morrison, word-work, and The Foreigner’s Home","authors":"L. Plate","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2069754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2069754","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Foreigner’s Home is a documentary film that is grounded in footage shot at the Louvre in November 2006, when the African American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was guest-curator at the famous Parisian museum. It experiments with form to further public dialogue about citizenship, belonging, the legacies of slavery, and the power of art, articulating interviews, archival film footage, animation, and music in a homage to and amplification of Morrison’s intellectual and artistic vision. In this article, I discuss the documentary’s cinematic representation of Toni Morrison as a postcolonial intellectual, exploring its treatment of her as object of filmmaking, and inquiring into the ways in which this contributes to revisiting notions of aesthetic engagement and political intervention into the public sphere. Analyzing the film and bringing it in dialogue with other texts by and about Morrison, I examine the ways in which the documentary weaves and modulates the notion of the public intellectual Morrison represents. Dialogue, I argue, stands at the heart of this vision. Therefore, I especially attend to the dialogues the film stages, not only between people but also between texts, media, artworks, and artforms.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78802493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a transnational turn(?): success stories, transgressive politics, and artistic initiative in recent Greek Cypriot cinema","authors":"C. Constandinides","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2061124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2061124","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Film reviewer Theo Panayides has enthusiastically declared the year 2018 as the most ‘prestigious’ in the history of Cypriot cinema, making particular reference to Tonia Mishiali’s Pause and Marios Piperides’ Smuggling Hendrix. The starting point of this study is the unprecedented (considering Cyprus’ micro-state status) attention enjoyed by the two films mainly due to the symbolic value they accumulated through prestigious entries into the film festival circuit. Initially, the article focuses on those elements that film reviews/news have deemed successful and are associated with the exposure of the films to transnational exchanges. While aspects of both films evidently point back to a desire to speak to an international audience, and film reviews underline the achievement of Mishiali and Piperides in doing so, I argue that the success of the films also lies in the way they foreground local matters through the very act of refusing to comply with dominant canons in the history of Cypriot cinema. Finally, the study focuses on recent cinematic activity in Cyprus to illustrate that Mishiali and Piperides’ initiatives have helped energize developments which point towards a systematic transnational turn. To further support this view, I draw from Hjort’s illuminating work on small cinemas.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80815144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}