{"title":"Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar (review)","authors":"Lakshmi Padmanabhan","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Rochona Majumdar’s Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony is a history of the art cinema movement in India in the immediate aftermath of decolonization and an argument for reading Indian art cinema, particularly the work of Bengali filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray, as forms of historiographic thinking, which provide conceptual insights into the postcolonial present. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures charts the cultural history of the art cinema movement in India, focusing on the 1950s to the 1980s, a period that saw the rise of state support for independent filmmaking fueled by an optimistic vision of the newly formed nation-state’s role in cultural life and the subsequent decline of these institutions and the disillusionment that followed the intense political upheavals of the 1970s. The book, which is divided into two parts, is structured by the historical break between the optimistic political atmosphere of the early decades following Indian independence and the political disillusionment of the 1970s and after. Majumdar opens by connecting the rise of art cinema or “good films” with the pedagogical project of the newly formed nation-state to produce “good citizens.”1 It is worth noting here that throughout the text, Majumdar","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77776773","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":"Queer Childhood Sexuality in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros","authors":"C. Shimizu","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Global circulations of cinema produce intimate attachments to subjects located elsewhere, whose different lives across the distance come into proximity. The English title of the Philippine indie film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2005), The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, is quite beautiful yet imprecise in its translation of the original Tagalog in the worldwide release. Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros literally converts to “the blossoming young womanhood of Maximo Oliveros.” The original Tagalog title is gendered: the word dalaga means young woman and the conjugation of pagdadalaga indicates becoming. To translate growing womanhood as blossoming in the sense of flowering goes beyond developing as an adult woman in the community. Flowering can also be read as a vaginal reference in the sense of burgeoning labia.1 The film is thus so much richer than its English title suggests in its representation of the adolescent child’s sexual development and how it is situated in a larger constellation of gendered identities, a complexity that I will parse for this film that circulates widely in Filipinx and queer diasporas today.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76383596","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":"Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s by Rox Samer (review)","authors":"Cait McKinney","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91074924","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":"Reanimating the Socialist Child—Queerly: The Sideways of a Chinese Animation Nezha naohai","authors":"Yiman Wang","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0034","url":null,"abstract":"IN THE BEGINNING—IS SUICIDE, with a sword, by a child, in an animation, in one of my earliest movie memories. I was shocked, captivated, obsessed. Four decades later, merely mentally picturing the scene still arrests my heart, undams my tears. This scene remains so overwhelming because it ambushed me. Growing up in socialist China, going to block-booked movies was a student’s obligation. With no trailer, no spoiler, not even offered a poster, I had no interest in a film called Nezha naohai (Prince Nezha’s Triumph Against Dragon King, Wang Shuchen, Xu Jingda, Yan Dingxian, 1979). Who is Nezha anyway—a difficult name, sounding odd, barely even sensible as a name. Why should I care about someone with a nonsensible name doing something nonsensical like churning up the sea (the literal meaning of the Chinese title)? Little did I know that this pivotal scene of the child’s suicide and subsequent rebirth would become a portal for my appreciation of the queering power within a patently individualistic child hero animated feature. In the theater, I remained unengaged despite all the spectacular scenes of Nezha fighting and defeating the dragons and other anthropomorphized aquatic animals—until the scene of suicide. The freeze-frame extreme close-up of Nezha’s large enraged eyes filling the screen drove into my heart the unbearable intensity of memories, despair, defiance, letting go, and grief, even as life is drifting away from Nezha’s body.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84747077","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 Megacity of Bangkok Rescaled through Queerness","authors":"C. Zhang","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0032","url":null,"abstract":"On March 15, 2021, the organizers of Thailand Festival, an annual event sponsored by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, announced that they would collaborate with the Royal Thai Consulate-General in Osaka, Japan, to bring the grand celebration online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring Thai actors Singto (Prachaya Ruangroj) and Krist (Perawat Sangpotirat), this event was designed to introduce an array of tourist spots to Japanese people through a staged “dating” trip of these two young men across Bangkok, who have risen to international stardom through their performance in the Boys’ Love (BL) drama SOTUS: The Series (GMM One, 2016–2017).1 Since the 2014 debut of the TV show Love Sick: The Series (Channel 9, 2014–2015), Thailand has emerged as a prominent player in the global BL market, and its influence has now circled back to Japan, where BL originated.2 Indeed, Thai BL has built a solid fan base by integrating the hyperromanticized queerness popularized by Japanese BL and the androgynous masculinity characterizing K-pop culture into its unique sociocultural milieu. Thailand’s contextual specificity as a rainbow mecca has attracted myriad","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89292004","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":"Death in the Streets, Blood on Your Hands: Chocolate Babies and the End of AIDS","authors":"R. Mills","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article considers Stephen Winter's Chocolate Babies (1996), a low-budget feature made amid, and in response to, the ravages of AIDS in New York City. Paying close attention to the film's conjunctural cinematic syntax, I argue that Winter here critiques a once-prominent consensus that rapid biomedical advancements were bringing about the epidemic's \"end.\" Throughout, I put Chocolate Babies in dialogue with numerous critics who refused to accept the politically vacant terms of biomedicine as a neat conclusion to the decades-long struggle against AIDS. Winter's film, I ultimately suggest, extends such antagonisms, affirming the necessity of an enduring state of emergency.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88685346","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":"Cinema Wears the Mask: The Metaphysics of Animism in Une histoire de vent","authors":"P. Tang","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In response to ongoing ecological crises, recent turns to animism in ecocriticism have celebrated a materialist dimension of this worldview that understands the world as a relational mesh collectively formed by agential entities, human and nonhuman alike. But as animism increasingly gets grounded in contemporary concerns and materialism rather than indigeneity and the soulful metaphysics behind the term's etymology, critiques of its politics emerge as well. By analyzing Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan's Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind, 1988), this article demonstrates how animism does not need be secularized in order to be ecopolitical.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80613421","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":"In Focus Introduction: Queering Asian Media","authors":"Jamie J. Zhao, Yiman Wang","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0030","url":null,"abstract":"It has been nearly a decade since the publication of Cinema Journal’s 2014 In Focus dossier on “Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media.”1 The dossier powerfully demonstrated an essential scholarly refocus from “a US-based politics of ‘coming out’” to more diverse queer deconstructions, non -confrontational queer practices, negotiative queer productions in media and cultural studies.2 This shift was largely inspired by the late queer media scholar Alexander Doty’s “contra-straight” theorization of the seemingly heteronormative mainstream media text and context.3 Following this model, in combination with Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, recent scholarship has understood queer as not only minority identities but also disruptive positions, sentiments, styles, and practices that productively reorient normative imaginations, regulations, and sociopolitical identities in global media studies.4 In par-","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86342837","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":"\"Open the Door and I'll Get It for Myself\": Minority Production Assistant Programs and the Politics of the Urban Location Shoot, 1969–1974","authors":"Noelle Griffis","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0026","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article traces the development of the Community Film Workshop Council's minority apprentice program and its attempt to break through decades of exclusionary hiring practices in feature film production. The program coincided with the rise of feature filmmaking on location in New York City and the corresponding need to integrate the city's film crews. Through an archival study of the program and the essential roles that the apprentices played on films, including The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (Ossie Davis, 1970), I demonstrate how media activism, policy, and labor relations are fundamental to both challenging and maintaining industrial power structures.","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80216264","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":"Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television by Annie Berke (review)","authors":"Sara Bakerman","doi":"10.1353/cj.2023.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.0037","url":null,"abstract":"In the summer of 2020, in the midst of a chat about future projects, a senior scholar asked me for recommendations of exemplary studies of individuals in media contexts. As a well-known scholar of the television industry, she wanted to turn her attention to the individuals who created and experienced cultures of production from the inside. Certainly, such studies exist—many of them influence my own work on aging stars—but none came to mind in the moment.1 Today, dear scholar, I’d like to suggest Annie Berke’s Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television as a sterling addition to that category. Berke’s book, published in January 2022 by the University of California Press, is notably the first in the new Feminist Media Histories book series edited by Shelley Stamp.2 Like the journal for which that series is named (also founded by Stamp), Their Own Best Creations seamlessly bridges the fields of media studies and feminist studies via a rich and lively exploration","PeriodicalId":55936,"journal":{"name":"JCMS-Journal of Cinema and Media Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84116313","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}