{"title":"Ambiguous images of Soviet-Kyrgyz mountainscapes in The Sky of Our Childhood (1966)","authors":"Anna Ladinig","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2102402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2102402","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Mountains play dominant and strategic roles in Kyrgyz cinema. They serve as an important mediator in the constructed antagonism between ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ evoked by media representations and, further, in the conventional associations between ‘nature’ and ‘national’, on the one hand, and ‘progress’ and ‘Soviet’, on the other. This article explores how mountainscapes constitute and interweave ‘Sovietness’ and ‘Kyrgyzness’ with reference to the 1966 film The Sky of Our Childhood (Nebo nashego detstva, 1966), directed by Tolomush Okeyev. The mountainscape serves not as a mere backdrop to the narrative but expresses ambiguities as a result of its transformative power.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43843310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Landscape and the moving image","authors":"R. Farrell","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2164457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2164457","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60389293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cinematic cultures of descent: the other sides of the mountaineering story","authors":"Eva Müller","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2102405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2102405","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay introduces the descent as a critical vantage point that broadens the mountain film genre and reconsiders modernist debates with an eye towards cinema’s socio-ecological substance. I analyze three films—Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2008), Nils Gaup’s Ofelaš (1987), and Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice (2012)—for how they highlight social connectivity and environmental sustainability in their accounts of national tragedy, Indigenous legend, and eco-catastrophe. Central to this inquiry are the multiperspectival and self-reflective qualities of cinema and the ways in which its immersive qualities dovetail into cinematic world-building and global decolonization. By bringing media ecology together with postcolonial scholarship on alpinist control and film historical reflections on descent, I argue that cinematic cultures of descent reveal the hidden stakes of alpinism and challenge established ideas of the perception of self and Other in modern mountaineering. This, in turn, prompts fresh registers of thinking mountains and mountaineering in ways that invite cultural renegotiations of gender roles, power, and individualism among mountaineers. Ultimately, it highlights the special role film plays in facilitating a change of perspective, thus affecting behavior in the human and non-human world.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44605679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anti-Heimat cinema: the Jewish invention of the German landscape","authors":"Kajsa Philippa Niehusen","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2167468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2167468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43112714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014","authors":"S. Cubitt","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2102403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2102403","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44897966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The landscapes of western movies: a history of filming on location, 1900–1970","authors":"J. Winn","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2165375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2165375","url":null,"abstract":"with most matters they may deem under-examined or neglected within it. In other words, her entry shows there is still much to be studied and debated in terms of how artists have figured (and continue to aesthetically figure) landscape. Lastly, since Elwes openly acknowledges the benefits of experiencing artwork in person, this book should provide all types of readers with a useful companion for navigating environmentally themed experimental art local to them. Accordingly, I envision Elwes’ book for both academic and non-academic contexts. In my current university setting, it could be a great teaching aid for units on topics like environmental art and experimental film. Selections also could be included in environmental media production courses to introduce students to the rich alternatives for creating media on environmental issues outside of a typical documentary or narrative frame. For instance, this past summer, my advisor was involved in a nine-week environmental media production and documentary studies program called the ‘Coastal Media Project’. While planning her syllabus, she mentioned looking forward to introducing students to environmentally themed films other than conventional nature and wildlife documentaries. Given these remarks, I am confident the program would have welcomed Elwes’ insights had they been available during its run. And if it gets greenlit for future sessions, I’ll recommend the book with enthusiasm to the faculty, filmmakers, and students involved.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42901663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Highroads and skyroads: mountain roadbuilding in U.S. government films of the 1920s and ‘30s","authors":"J. Peterson","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2102401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2102401","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the 1920s and ‘30s, the U.S. federal government produced many educational films about national parks and national forests. These films were widely shown in nontheatrical venues such as schools, as well as in commercial movie theaters as shorts before the main feature film. Neglected for decades, these films are of interest now, in the age of global warming, for the way they represent ideas about nature and conservation from a century ago. Significantly, as much as these films depict natural scenery, they also focus on cars, roads, and roadbuilding. This essay focuses on three government films depicting mountains in the interwar years, the first era of roadbuilding in the national parks and forests. These films reveal the state’s role in promoting fossil capitalism and settler colonialism, constructing what was then a new and contradictory idea of ‘wilderness’ in modernity.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49197593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting Brokeback Mountain – how mountains matter, or: melodrama, melancholy, (im-)mobility","authors":"S. Sielke","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2114257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2114257","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Returning to Brokeback Mountain and its mountainous aesthetics, my contribution develops a three-part argument that reengages the cinematic landscape projected in Ang Lee’s ‘love story’ – a landscape that echoes, as I show, a national visual culture mapped and remapped by paradigmatic moments in art, photography, and film. In part one, ‘Brokeback Mountain and “the force-field of melodrama”’, I show how mountains figure and function in the central genre of film history where they foreground, yet also curtail, the political dimension of personal fears and longings. Calling on the tradition of the Western as much as on the work of Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Andrew Wyeth, William Eggleston, Richard Avedon, and beyond, Brokeback Mountain – so I delineate in my second part ‘(Im-)mobility, mediation, melancholy’ – superimposes its own version of the West on representations we are more familiar with, producing a visual space and soundscape that is bound to shift our perspective. In its third and final part, ‘Landscaping a desire that has no name – or art’, my contribution shows why, since then, mountains have never been the same in the US-American cultural imaginary, and why we look at Westerns, at Adams, and Avedon even more mournfully now, superimposing on them Brokeback Mountain’s gender melancholy.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49404860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cinematic figurations of mountains","authors":"Cornelia Klecker, Christian Quendler","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2163864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2163864","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies in mountain cinema often focus on the innovations and legacies of the classical German film of the 1920s and ’30s. This introduction to a special issue on cinematic mountains proposes to rethink the relationship between mountains and cinema along a different path. Drawing on the criticism of Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, and Luc Moullet, we discuss three film-theoretical figurations of mountains. The first one concerns the politics of cinema; it invokes mountains as sites of creative visions at a remove from accustomed habits, standards, and conventions. The second addresses the environmental relation of cinema as a spatial and geographic artform. The third cinematic figuration of mountains regards filmic techniques and their virtue to reveal new facets of mountains and meaningful environmental connections.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43412286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On longing for loss: a theory of cinematic memory and an aesthetics of nostalgia","authors":"Zoë Anne Laks","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2132074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2132074","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that ‘pastness’ becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46457116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}