{"title":"Politicizing the superhero genre: The case of Watchmen (HBO, 2019)","authors":"Evdokia Stefanopoulou","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2022.509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2022.509","url":null,"abstract":"The HBO limited television series Watchmen (2019) represents a politically engaged superhero television show, marking a shift in recent efforts to render the genre more inclusive in terms of gender and race. Specifically, in mixing fictional and real events surrounding racial violence, such as the 1921 Tulsa massacre, Watchmen inscribes the potential of the superhero genre to tackle prescient political issues and social anxieties, that became even more poignant in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests. The present paper explores Watchmen’s deep resonances with contemporary social and political issues, not only at the level of representations, but also at the series’ production context, and argues that the show marks a key moment in the politicization of the superhero genre.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84263317","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":"The Relation of Female Characters to Nature in the Turkish Series Wounded Love (2016–2018): Ecofeminist Approaches","authors":"Fazıla Derya Agiş","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2022.410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2022.410","url":null,"abstract":"This study analyzes the female characters and their relationship to nature in the Turkish series, entitled “You are my country” (“Vatanım Sensin” originally in Turkish) or “Wounded Love” (2016-2018) from an ecofeminist point of view. The Turkish and Greek mothers, daughters, and sisters try to unify their families after each attack in the series. Thus, their efforts will be analyzed within the framework of “Ecofeminism” as Turkey is a land linguistically feminized in Latin as “Turquia” with a female gender ending -a. The ecological metaphorical spaces associated with the images of Turkish and Greek women trying to preserve the family continuity during the liberation war of Turkey will be analyzed; such ecological spaces include the Aegean Sea, forests, and roads of Izmir, Ankara, and Salonica. Moreover, ecological metaphorical objects include flowers, trees, and animals. Illnesses, famines, plunders, and forced migrations are the main reasons for the losses of some family members; this study examines how these lost members get united through the metaphorical uses of the environmental spaces important for women, who try to keep the new Turkey free through their efforts in the 1920s within the framework of ecofeminism, a term coined by Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88939370","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":"Post-Coloniality: Projection of Ghana In Video-Films","authors":"Augustine Danso","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.347","url":null,"abstract":"The rise of the mainstream video industry has been significant towards socio-cultural and economic development in Ghana; however, this study will not focus on the impacts of the video industry of Ghana. This article primarily examines the image construction of Ghana in video-films. Over the past few years, videofilms in Post-colonial Ghana have often been critiqued by film scholars and critics for reinforcing superstitious beliefs and instigating backward tendencies that derail national development. Normative scholarships have critically explored the visuality of Ghanaian video-films and their themes. Nonetheless, these normative scholarships have often overlooked the nexus between the Ghanaian society and video texts. It is against this scholarly gap that this study engages the meta-question of how video-films project Ghana in their texts. This article will engage a critical textual reading of a few popular films from the Pentecostal and Occult genres to contextualize the ideological sub-texts and the image construction of Ghana in these selected video-films. I argue that major ‘postmodern’ thematic concerns in Ghanaian video-films considerably denigrate and malign Ghana’s image, as well as neglect issues of national interests.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78554949","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":"Coming of Age in the Diaspora: Bollywood and the Representation of Second Generation British Indian Diaspora","authors":"Utsa Mukherjee,Anil Pradhan,Ravinder Barn","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.366","url":null,"abstract":"Bollywood films are a unique visual repository of India’s public imaginings, and they can, therefore, serve as guides to how India sees its past, present, and aspirational future (Dwyer, 2010). Through close intertextual readings of three key popular films depicting British Indian youth, this article explores the ways in which the UK-born/raised second-generation Indian diaspora has come to be represented within Bollywood. We argue that inter-generational negotiations around long-distance nationalism, social reproduction, and marriage are pivotal to the articulation and regulation of diasporic youth subjectivities in Bollywood films. By foregrounding the interplay of gender, sexuality, and nation, our analysis illuminates the role of Bollywood in mediating a transnational Indian identity which is tethered simultaneously to economic neoliberalism and social conservatism.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"62 6","pages":"114-146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138503887","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":"Changes in Women’s Representations in Turkish Cinema from the 1980s to the Early 1990s","authors":"F. Özen","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.450","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the representations of women alongside the social and historical background of Turkish cinema from the 1980s through the early 1990s. In the following section, I articulate the political events in the 1980s - the early1990s and its impacts on Turkish society and cinema. I delve into the modernist representations of women in the 1980s cinema to analyze women’s gender codes (based on social/cultural and cinematic codes). Finally, in the last section, I examine Atıf Yılmaz’s cinematic images of women in his films and analyze two of his films A Sip of Love (1984) and The Night, Angel and Our Gang (1994) in terms of gender codes.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87084742","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":"Mapping Yeşilçam: A relational approach to the Turkish film industry","authors":"Serkan Şavk, Burak Dogu","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.425","url":null,"abstract":"Turkey’s Yeşilçam film industry produced more than 5500 films during its lifetime of 40 years. The industry had a unique narrative approach shaped around its economic model, Turkey’s ambivalent connection with modernization and the country’s domestic culture. Yet, particular characteristic qualities of the industry remained rather limited up until the last decade, in which vast databases were built up as a consequence of the digital turn. In this study, we develop a relational approach and conduct network analysis to the Yeşilçam with the aim to better understand the patterns of its constitution. Our findings suggest that Yeşilçam was not a homogenous industry as often considered by the film scholarship, rather divided into two main clusters in which professional, narrative and financial dynamics were significantly different.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88214174","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":"Locating the Storyteller in Silent Waters: Sabiha Sumar’s Cinematic Tale of Shared Histories and Divided Identities","authors":"Rahat Imran","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.426","url":null,"abstract":"In her multi award-winning feature film Silent Waters (2003), Pakistani woman filmmaker Sabiha Sumar connects the socio-political traumas of the Partition of India and creation of Pakistan (1947) with the onset of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization period (1977-1988) in Pakistan. Presenting a story based on real-life events, the film focuses on the impact of religious fundamentalism and nationalism on women in particular. Examining Silent Waters as an example of “history on film/film on history” (Rosenstone 2013), and film as an “agent, product, and source of history” (Ferro 1983), the discussion identifies and analyzes the filmmaker’s own tacitly embedded location and participation in the filmic narrative as an experiential ‘auto/bio-historiographer’, arguing for the value of this new paradigm in Cinema Studies.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"62 8","pages":"231-285"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138503886","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":"Yilmaz Güney’s The Fields of Yuréghir and Arkadaş: From Despair to Hope","authors":"S. Carruthers","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.407","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses two relatively unknown works of Yilmaz Güney in the English-speaking world: Boynu Bükük Öldüler (They Bowed their Heads in Shame),1 a semi-autobiographical novel, which in 1972 won the Orhan Kémel prize, and Arkadaş (The Friend), a film released in Turkey by Güney Film in 1974. More than ten years separate these two works. The Fields of Yuréghir was written during Güney’s imprisonment from 1960 to 1963, a period marked by the military coup of 27 May 1960, which lasted until 1961 and a series of coalition governments from 1961 to 1965 under the premiership of İsmet İnönü (1884-1973) of the Republican Party. Arkadaş was filmed in 1974 against the backdrop of the Turkish invasion of Northern Cyprus in August 1974, a time of great patriotic fervour under the charismatic and left-leaning premiership of Bülent Ecevit (1925-2006). Güney had by then experienced considerable success as a filmmaker and actor. Arkadaş is a product of this favourable constellation of circumstances, both political and personal, that marked this brief period that was abruptly ended by his imprisonment in September 1974. The article is divided into the following sections: a short biography of Yilmaz Güney; a summary of The Fields of Yuréghir and Arkadaş; a thematic analysis of the two works under the headings of political engagement, sexual mores, religion, and national identity; and a conclusion. ","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"204 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76972844","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":"Real, Reel and the Anthropocene: Eco-trauma Testimonies in the Film Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal","authors":"Bibin Thomas, Reju George Mathew","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.391","url":null,"abstract":"The paper attempts to read the Endosulfan disaster in Kerala as an instance of the Anthropocene wherein the unscientific use of a pesticide resulted in the persistent misery of a population and the ecology in which they struggle to survive. The suffering is further presented to a larger audience through the film Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal (2015, Dir. Dr Biju) by assimilating the reel and the real to bear testimony to their struggles amidst the toxicity of the chemical. The film, as the paper argues, becomes a representative text in the eco-trauma genre that on the one hand displays the disaster while on the other offers a cultural resistance against the unchecked use of chemicals around us. The film situates the Endosulfan disaster amongst the global movements against the pesticides and emphasises the need of a healthy environment.","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75693771","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":"Reading the Simultaneous Motion and Reality Bending Concepts through Doctor Strange","authors":"Gülşah Uner, E. Erdogan","doi":"10.5195/cinej.2021.301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2021.301","url":null,"abstract":"In order to exemplify the interaction between architecture and science fiction films, Doctor Strange (2016), one of today's cinema examples, was chosen because of that the special effects created in computer environment by transferring the dreams to the film have a surrealist effect on the film; of the fantastic spaces that arise with the deformation of real places become the main character of the film; of foreseeing a different future in terms of architecture. Within the scope of the study, the film was read through the changes of time and space of the concepts of “reality bending” and “simultaneous motion”. As a result of the readings on these concepts, the relationship of cinema with architecture has gained a different dimension, and it has been seen that this film can create a fantastic perspective and inspiration to the designers about the future deconstructivist buildings. ","PeriodicalId":41802,"journal":{"name":"CINEJ Cinema Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73577013","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}