Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques最新文献

{"title":"David Cronenberg: Interviews","authors":"Murray Leeder","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2022-0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2022-0042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41319030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Two Sides of <i>American Sniper</i>: Reflections on Clint Eastwood’s “Doubleness” Ten Years Later","authors":"William Beard","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2021-0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2021-0034","url":null,"abstract":"Résumé : Le film American Sniper de Clint Eastwood (version française : Tireur d’élite américain ; 2014) a soulevé de grands débats à sa sortie : de nombreux critiques lui ont reproché de constituer une célébration choquante de la bravoure des militaires étatsuniens en Iraq. Le film s’inspire de l’autobiographie de Chris Kyle, légendaire tireur d’élite de l’armée américaine actif en Iraq, dont la vie et la mort après son retour aux États-Unis ont été célébrées dans les médias de tout le pays. L’article propose de réexaminer ce film d’un point de vue critique particulier, qu’on pourrait appeler le modèle de la vision double, caractéristique de nombreux films parmi les plus importants d’Eastwood. Analysé de ce point de vue, American Sniper révèle une superposition complexe de perspectives thématiques qui tendent à s’opposer. En particulier, cette lecture contredit la version triomphaliste existante de l’activité militaire et jette sur la stature héroïque de Kyle et, par extension, de la présence américaine en Iraq, un regard chargé d’un doute complexe.","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135938136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forfaiture de Cecil B. Demille","authors":"Karine Abadie","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2022-0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2022-0048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43194422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reclaiming Popular Documentary","authors":"BarbaraD.F. Evans","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2022-0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2022-0052","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past twenty years, documentary film and television have become far more popular and widely available than in previous decades. Yet the scholarship on documentary has tended to privilege the most formally inventive and politically radical documentary films, from Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) to Tongues Untied (Marlon T. Riggs, 1989) and The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012). Noël Carroll pointed out this tendency to focus on the “art-documentary” in 1996, and the trend has continued.1 It is easy to dismiss popular documentaries, from fawning celebrity portraits to protracted true-crime miniseries, but doing so leaves a vital area of film and media understudied at the very moment when audiences are viewing and engaging with documentary media more than ever before. Reclaiming Popular Documentary is an excellent start to correcting this oversight. Edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson, the volume contains invigorating contributions that cover a wide swath of documentary media. In the introduction, Milliken and Anderson ask, “What is the relationship between documentary and entertainment and between popular documentary and advocacy? Can popular documentary be productively reconceived in relation to genre, modes, or rhetorical forms? Assuming the","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43980568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution ed. by Susan Lord and María Caridad Cumaná (review)","authors":"Darien Sánchez-Nicolás","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2022-0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2022-0019","url":null,"abstract":"As a newly minted art historian, I had the immense pleasure of presenting at the Coloquio Sara Gómez: Imagen múltiple (Sara Gómez Colloquium: Multiple Images) in Havana in the fall of 2007. During those two busy days in Havana, Sara Gómez was the focal point around which a diverse crowd of film historians, art historians, journalists, filmmakers, film students, and researchers from a broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences came together to analyze the enormous potential of gendered film practice, analysis, and theorization in Cuba, as well as the many challenges this work has faced. Gómez’s film corpus served as a platform for an engaged, intersectional approach to Cuban audiovisual tradition at a time when feminist, queer, and critical race theories were only timidly alluded to and not openly or comprehensively discussed in Cuba. Little did I know that I was witnessing the birth of the book The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution. Much like the multiple perspectives offered during that colloquium, Susan Lord and María Caridad Cumaná, with the collaboration of Victor Fowler Calzada—all part of the colloquium’s original line-up of presenters—harness the same inquisitive, pluralistic spirit of that event in this volume. Only now it is enhanced with the added perspectives and research focus afforded by time. From the onset, the volume embraces the varied, complex readings that this Afro-Cuban auteur tackled head on in the ecstatic early years of Cuban revolutionary film culture. Gómez shared this enthusiasm, of course, but she was careful to remain critical toward the same processes and organizations that she herself helped build from the ground. The Cinema of Sara Gómez compiles “a history, criticism, biography, methodology, and theory of [her] work,” according to Lord. It takes the form of essays and a wide variety of archival material: film scripts, interviews, personal photographs, film stills, a detailed filmography, and posters (Lord 1-2). The sheer diversity of knowledge interventions, theoretical lenses, testimonial voices, and artifacts is one of the most singular contributions of this book. Throughout its pages, Gómez’s full being is revealed through her professional career—as a young journalist, ethnographer, film director, and","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69686533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics by Ryan Pierson (review)","authors":"Marc Furstenau","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2022-0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2022-0018","url":null,"abstract":"It is practically a commonplace to say that the subject of animation is marginal in the field of film studies. Indeed, animated films, sometimes called “cartoons,” have often been deliberately excluded from consideration, understood as an unassimilable exception and contrasted with the primary object of analysis—the live-action film, the photographic recording of “real” physical events unfolding in time and space. In Ryan Pierson’s engaging and informative book, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, he seeks not only to reveal the significance of animation but also to show how an “aesthetics” of animated film may provide a more powerful conceptual framework for film studies and film theory more generally, as the basis for a more informative stylistic analysis of cinematic representation broadly conceived. In this respect, perhaps the most important sentence in his book comes in an endnote, where he declares, “I do not wish to define a rigid separation between animation and live-action” (163, n. 1). Yet it is just such a rigid separation that has arguably characterized much of film studies and film theory. Pierson’s book is an important contribution to the more general argument, especially relevant in the so-called “digital era,” that any fundamental distinction between animation and live-action must be discarded, or at the very least reconsidered. By thinking of animation as Pierson proposes, as “an art of coordinating sensory units into perceptible figures and forces,” as “experiments in the possibilities of sensory organization” (4), he provides a powerful means for doing so. Pierson would perhaps not go so far as to say, as Rudolf Arnheim did in 1938, that “the film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man [sic], namely an animated cartoon or painting.” Pierson seeks to reveal the full creative powers of the animator in order to establish the aesthetic bona fides of the animated film, but he is not interested in simply declaring animation superior to live-action, as a crude rebuttal to those who have judged it inferior. He carefully describes and analyzes some of the most significant techniques in animation, focusing specifically on animation of the mid-twentieth century, stressing the importance of that era as “the period in which ‘animation’ as we currently define it—that is, animation as opposed to the more limited term","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69686459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada by Stephen Broomer and Michael Zryd (review)","authors":"Bart Testa","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2022-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2022-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada has already seen warm reviews in the Toronto Star, the Winnipeg Free Press, and Cinema Scope. This reception likely comes with the recognition that Moments of Perception addresses the need for an accessible survey of Canadian experimental films that brings the topic up-to-date. The book offers obvious utility for the classroom. No one teaching a course on this cinema would fail to find it an indispensable source for syllabus building. Readers of Moments of Perception can feel confident that they are in the capable hands of well-informed writers. The authors, York University film professor Michael Zryd and three filmmaker-programmer-critics, have each spent decades working in experimental film circles. Barbara Sternberg and Jim Shedden are veteran organizers of conferences (including the International Experimental Film Congress in 1989) and innumerable film series. Sternberg is a veteran organizer of film co-ops. Shedden has edited some key Canadian publications on experimental cinema, notably Presence/Absence: The Films of Michael Snow 1956-1991 (1995). Stephen Broomer has published an invaluable interpretive study of Jack Chambers, Joyce Weiland, and Michael Snow in Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film (2017). In Hamilton Babylon (2016), Broomer devised a detailed history of the McMaster Film Board, a 1960s avant-garde start-up led by John Hofsess. Before Moments of Perception, there was no book offering this kind of coverage. Most books have focused on one filmmaker, such as Catherine Russell’s David Rimmer–Films and Tapes, 1967–1993 (1995). Or, they’ve covered a thematic selection, such as Process Cinema: Handmade Films in the Digital Age (2019), edited by Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault. Bruce Elder’s Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989) has some features of a survey, but soon enough, the book’s focus narrows to Chambers and Snow. In contrast, Moments of Perception offers some thirty short profiles (all","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69686657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria by Billie Jeanne Brownlee (review)","authors":"Viviane Saglier","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2021-0061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2021-0061","url":null,"abstract":"While the Arab world—often grasped through the non-neutral geopolitical categorization of the Middle East—has been widely under-represented in the field of film and media studies, it tends to acquire greater visibility in times of crisis or political upheaval. Following the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s, a surge in scholarship contributed to solidifying the emerging field of Arab film and media studies. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud’s edited collection Syria Speaks (2014), Marwan M. Kraidy’s The Naked Blogger of Cairo (2016), Donatella Della Ratta’s Shooting a Revolution (2018), Alisa Lebow’s digital project Filming Revolution (2018), Kay Dickinson’s Arab Film and Video Manifestos (2018), and Della Ratta, Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle’s edited collection The Arab Archive (2020) have all brilliantly examined how Arab media histories and cultures and their entanglements with revolutions raise questions about the politics of media. Billie Jeanne Brownlee’s New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria (2020) takes part in this conversation from a perspective that is distinct in two regards: first, by combining insights from political science and media studies; second, by looking at the prehistory of new media during the decade that preceded Syria’s revolution-turned-proxy war rather than the uprisings per se. If we critically examine New Media and Revolution’s two main contributions together, it can help us understand the benefits and limitations of transdisciplinary studies while reasserting the necessity of an approach to film and media studies that is in-depth and politically engaged. Against the techno-determinist narrative that dominated in the early years of the uprisings, Brownlee reasserts that new media, understood capaciously as satellite TV, blogs, news websites, Facebook, and YouTube, functioned as a means rather than a cause of upheaval. By implementing a shift in the periodization of the Syrian revolution, the book examines the “infra-politics” of media practices and the emergence of a “contentious culture” since 2000 (9). The regime’s transition from Hafez al-Assad to his son Bashar in 2000 led to a contradictory media landscape. New policies were implemented to privatize new media infrastructures (especially the Internet and satellite TV), which were 10.3138/cjfs-2021-0061","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69686428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Films of Denys Arcand by Jim Leach (review)","authors":"Bart Testa","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2021-0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2021-0060","url":null,"abstract":"This is a book we need. It is a full survey of Denys Arcand’s career, with a generous discussion of each film in sequence. James Leach has previously published a book on another Quebec director, Claude Jutra Filmmaker (1999), and a solid historical survey, Film in Canada (2011). Leach knows how to work through the tangle of Quebec film criticism—a must with a much-debated director like Arcand— and he acts as a judicious mediator for the anglophone academic reader. Arcand’s career has been unusual. He became one of the mostly widely known Canadian directors, comparable in fame to Cronenberg and Egoyan, but Arcand’s recognition rests really on just three films, beginning with Le Déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986). It was released some fifteen years after Arcand’s first feature-length documentary, On est au coton (Cotton Mill, Treadmill, 1970), famously suppressed by its production company, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Reaching back into Arcand’s seven preceding shorts that made up the director’s apprenticeship, and following through his whole filmography, Leach strives to find a consistent through line. He almost gets all the way, until Arcand’s most recent films, Le Règne de la beauté (An Eye for Beauty, 2014) and La Chute de l’empire américain (The Fall of the American Empire, 2018). Leach begins his book with a discussion of Arcand’s education, which he takes to be fundamental. Born in 1941 in a small Quebec town, Deschambault, and the product of a Jesuit-Catholic education, Arcand sees himself as a child of the “Great Darkness,” referring to the long era of the Duplessis regime (1936– 1960) and of clerical dominance over Catholic Quebec’s culture. Arcand’s intellectual and artistic life began, however, when he entered the Université de Montréal in 1960. This was at the very start of the Quiet Revolution, which would rapidly secularize and modernize Quebec society. Quickly politicized, Arcand was an eager participant and was already making films by 1962. For his generation of Québécois filmmakers, the Quiet Revolution was the opening. Leach claims, “Arcand’s entire career as a filmmaker can be seen as a recurring commentary on the impact of these social changes.” However, his ambivalent and complex response, and his eventual disappointment, rendered some of his films jagged and dissonant, unlike those of other major Quebec filmmakers who 10.3138/cjfs-2021-0060","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69686387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema by Daisuke Miyao (review)","authors":"Catherine Russell","doi":"10.3138/cjfs-2021-0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjfs-2021-0042","url":null,"abstract":"Early Japanese cinema is a notoriously challenging period for film historians, because so few prints and production documents survived the geological and geopolitical crises of the twentieth century. Daisuke Miyao has provided some valuable insights into this period by approaching it from the angle of the French connection, particularly the Lumière brothers and their well-travelled emissaries, as well as the vogue for all things Japanese that swept the West at the turn of the century. The term Japonisme may refer to the influence of Japanese aesthetics on European art from the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, but Miyao expands its scope to include the ways that Japanese culture was in turn affected by the French “Orientalist” view of Japan. Japonisme thus becomes “a nodal point in a transmedial network” (5). The key term that Miyao uses to explain the influence of Japanese aesthetics on the Lumière brothers’ films is à traverse cinema, which translates literally as “to cross” or perhaps “cinema that crosses.” A prime example is on the cover of the book: the steel bars of the Eiffel Tower framing and crossing a long view of the Palais du Trocadéro, a monumental building fronted by an equally monumental terrace. This foreground/background composition in which two different viewpoints, or focal distances of far and close, are effectively layered is offered as exemplary of Japonisme. As a frame enlargement, the image does not capture the movement of the elevator on which the camera was positioned, and the term à traverse is, for Miyao, a strictly compositional concept, although he will eventually link it to “phantom ride” cinema. Oddly, the term à traverse is not used for the cultural exchange between France and Japan; nor is the significance of the Trocadéro in French ethnography and orientalism considered in the analysis of this image. Using illustrations of woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai, compared to frame enlargements from a wide range of Lumière actualités, Miyao draws comparisons between the compositional principles of multi-planar perspective. He argues, via Japanese and Western art historians, that the technique entered Japan in the eighteenth century as a means of creating perspective. Influenced by Western arts of mimetic realism, Japanese artists created their own “physiological realism,” delivering heterogeneous spaces within a single frame. Impressionists such as Monet then adapted that technique back into Western","PeriodicalId":41748,"journal":{"name":"Canadian Journal of Film Studies-Revue Canadienne d Etudes Cinematographiques","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69686782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}