{"title":"Cosmopolitanism, modernity and youth in the 1960s: the transnational wanderings of teen idols from Argentina, Mexico and Spain","authors":"Laura Podalsky","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2020.1756058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2020.1756058","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay traces the tri-continental flows of youth films and music between South America (Argentina), North America (Mexico and the United States) and Europe (Spain and Italy) in the mid-late 1960s. Focusing on co-productions starring youth idols Palito Ortega, Enrique Guzmán, and Rocío Dúrcal, the essay examines both the industrial imperatives behind those currents and the socio-cultural promise of the films’ representational conventions. The article recognizes the emergence of tighter synergies between culture industries around the world during this period (from film and music to television), and examines the films within larger horizons of reception. Ultimately, the article suggests that such youth films enacted a form of vernacular cosmopolitanism through the aegis of their young, middle-class protagonists who manage to navigate successfully between the ‘old world’ and the ‘new’ and between the traditional and the modern; and who provide a spatio-temporal bridge bringing audiences up-to-date and into the world beyond national borders.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89670076","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":"Invisible Transnationalism: Iranian New Wave and its Influences on the New Marathi Film","authors":"H. Ingle","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2020.1754032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2020.1754032","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article presents a critical mapping of invisible or subterranean transnationalism in the context of two geo-spatially distant cinemas. Interrogating the specific textual instances of the new Marathi film, I demonstrate that its narrative aesthetics has been significantly influenced by the New Iranian Cinema. The New Marathi film, which has emerged after Shwaas (2004), carries an unmistakable reworking of several Iranian films. Apart from certain productions that have children as their protagonists, several films like Valu (2009), Jhing Chik Jhing (2010), etc. derive their fundamental narrative premise from the minimalist plots of Iranian films like The Wind Will Carry Us, Children of Heaven, and The White Balloon. This, however, is circumscribed by the circulation of Iranian films through pirated DVDs, pirate networks, and peer-to-peer sharing. The article forwards two notions for invisible transnationalism: a) the valorization of Iranian films by Marathi filmmakers as an ideological remapping for narrative expressivity, and b) how this shapes the historical juncture defining the new-ness of the Marathi film.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76655785","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":"Envisioning the World: How Film Shapes the Earth, film programme, 8–22 june 2019, Close-Up Film Centre, London","authors":"Tiago de Luca","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2019.1692604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1692604","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This report describes the three-part film programme Envisioning the World: How Film Shapes the Earth which took place at Close-Up Film Centre in London, 8-22 June.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82352851","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":"India’s superhero recreations: inhabiting the Elseworld of Malegaon’s Superman","authors":"S. Narayanswamy","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2019.1692603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1692603","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores how Mollywood cinema mediates trauma in the Malegaon region, with a focus on the superhero spoof genre. Mollywood, native to the town of Malegaon in Maharashtra, India is a highly localised film industry infamous for its low budget DIY aesthetic, with its products often being reduced to their ‘ironic’ spoof value. I argue that films like Malegaon ka Superman/Malegaon’s Superman (2009) are in fact successful adaptations for a local market, which reimagine an international franchise for their cultural contexts, thereby adding to the ‘thick text’ of the transnational canon of globally recognised characters. Following the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992, the region continues to experience the ongoing legacy of political conflict, religious violence and economic depression. This essay outlines how Malegaon ka Superman confronts this legacy of violence and poverty, and the impact on the community. I explore how the film weaves the popular lore of Superman and the canon of Superman from Hollywood into the Bollywood narrative tradition, to create a hybridised product for the Mollywood market. Alongside the transnational processes involved in adapting a global franchise for a specialised cultural context, including an address to the disruptions and disconnections from the ‘original’ text, this paper will also reveal how such adaptations offer a means of negotiating trauma for local audiences.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88208576","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":"Posthumous Reconciliation: 21st century Cuban-Soviet-North American Filmic Collaboration","authors":"J. Loss","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2019.1679332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1679332","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991 may have felt to Cubans as if they had been abandoned, in the filmic representation of the two countries and their citizens within two recent transnational films made during the short-lived Cuban-U.S. thaw, they are closer than ever, and Cuba is in the driver’s seat. The United States is but an afterthought. This article focuses specifically on Sergio & Sergei (2017), directed by Cuban Ernesto Daranas, and produced by the ICAIC, Spain’s Mediapro, Cuba’s RTV Comercial, and Wing and Prayer Productions (U.S. Actor/Ron Perlman’s Indie Finance and Production Company); and Un Traductor/A Translator, 2018, directed by Cuban/Canadian brothers Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso, and produced by Sebastián Barriuso and Canadian Lindsay Gossling. It argues that the films advance idealized versions of the Soviet male or Sovietized Cuban as well as ‘old-fashioned’ values of solidarity in the face of a more sinister present. Demonstrating that the reconciliation these films enact is hardly on the U.S.-Cuban axis, this article shows how the films clearly manage to project upon that axis a warm, friendly, and worldly Cuba – with secure, multi-lingual protagonists at the fore who seem proud of their country and open to the world, albeit cautiously.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88436895","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":"Border aesthetics and catachresis in Ali Abbasi’s Gräns/Border (2018)","authors":"Meta Mazaj","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2019.1682229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1682229","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Gräns/Border by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi won Un Certain Regard at Cannes as it was proclaimed an ‘instant cult classic’. This paper argues that the ambivalent status of Border – seen as both an audacious genre bender and a social realist film addressing issues of migration – bespeaks its articulation of the borderscape as a catachrestic locus that challenges familiar representational modes in border aesthetics. In doing so, the film, this paper contends, de-structures our perception of alterity, forges a new sensory cognition of the world, and new aesthetic experiences of migratory transitions. Most contemporary films engage migrant and border ecologies through their thematic content, where the border emerges either as a vulnerable space in need of protection or as a hopeful place of politically exciting hybridity and moral possibility. Instead, Border rearticulates generic signifying practices to imagine the border not as spatial ‘fact’ but as an epistemological ground or ‘border effect’ that incites new modes of geopolitical attunement. At stake here is not just a different concept of borders, but the possibility of film form to restructure our sensory perception of the world to offer new figurative possibilities for migratory and border cinema.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73438521","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":"Childhood and nation in contemporary world cinema: borders and encounters","authors":"Danielle E. Hipkins","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2020.1739378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2020.1739378","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80964506","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":"Bereft of nature: renegotiating national identity in the films of Rashid Masharawi","authors":"B. Trbic","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2020.1720302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2020.1720302","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay examines Rashid Masharawi’s transnationally produced films against the backdrop of problematizing the Palestinian relationship with the realm of nature. Grounded in the idea of minor transnationalism, modelled by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, drawing upon the conceptualization of ‘minor literatures’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the transnational film theory of Mette Hjort, it focuses on Masharawi’s feature films, Curfew, Haïfa, Ticket to Jerusalem, Laila’s Birthday and Palestine Stereo. Set in and around refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Masharawi’s ‘minor films’ accentuate the absence of nature from the lives of local individuals and communities, and their disconnections from the realms of natural transcendence. Masharawi affirms his position on cinema as a vehicle for the advancement of modernity, but does not negate or marginalize the ties of Palestinians to their land. Urging his audiences to contemplate the tropes in the national imaginary and the discontinuities from the romanticized narratives of land in the pre-Nakba period, he seeks what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the ‘collective paradigms of political enunciation,’ corresponding to the new modes of subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84924062","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":"Childhood, animality and emotions in indonesian film director Edwin’s Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Wants to Fly (2008)","authors":"Maria Elena Indelicato, I. Pražić, Qui Zitong","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2019.1676547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1676547","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article looks at the ways childhood, animality and emotions are imbricated in the Chinese Indonesian film director Edwin’s film: Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008). By examining their entanglement, it demonstrates how the director’s use of childhood as a trope of becoming externalises the complex configuration of emotions embodied by Chinese in Indonesia. Further, this article explores this configuration as the subjective dimension of Sinophobia, here approached as the historical process of positioning Chinese Indonesians as an object of national disgust. Complementing this analysis, this article also examines Edwin’s employment of a pig-imaginary to visually convey the affective effects of contemporary racism in Indonesia. This article concludes arguing that, by employing both childhood and animality, Blind Pig effectively troubles what Chineseness is by means of visualising how it feels from the embodied perspective of a minoritised diasporic subject.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79421768","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":"Early screen culture in colonial Hong Kong (1897–1907)","authors":"E. Yeh","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2019.1684709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1684709","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Early screen culture in Hong Kong remains underexplored, despite the rigorous work of film historians. According to new evidence on film exhibitions in Hong Kong from 1897 to late 1907, early screen practice was multi-faceted. It ranged from technological marvels and the co-programming of motion pictures with musicals and magic shows to the enjoyment of theatre spaces, in addition to the on-screen excitement projected to the audience. Given the heterogeneity of early film screening in the Crown Colony, I present three accounts of early screen culture in colonial Hong Kong: the primacy of technical marvels and the management of cinema machines; the symbiosis between motion pictures and established forms of entertainment; and the emergence of film exhibition as a commercial institution. To understand the implications of cinema in connection to colonial governance, I use the concept of dispositif, a machine of display and a device of power relations, to analyse the role of cinema in the deployment of colonial power.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82635705","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}