Drawing upon the work of various critical race theorists, including Frantz Fanon, Kevin Quashie, Hortense J. Spillers, Calvin L. Warren and Sylvia Wynter, this article suggests that if Blackness has historically been, and continues to be, cast outside of being and into being, or what Wynter terms désêtre, then for Blackness to give expression to itself and/or to prove (or improvise) its “aliveness” is a necessarily “poetic” process, given that poetry/poiesis is the bringing into being of that which previously did not exist. Looking at a range of films, including Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are colder than Death (USA, 2014) and Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (USA, 2016), Barry Jenkins’s The Gaze (USA, 2021) and Paige Taul’s I am (USA, 2017), the article considers this cinematic poiesis in the light of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of poetry, drawing out the structuring antiblackness at work in the latter and in modernity more generally, before suggesting that cinematically to present Blackness in a loving fashion/to love Blackness through film is what Denise Ferreira da Silva might term a radical and “poethical” gesture, using poetry to decolonise our white supremacist world.
The essay aims at offering a journey within the documentary heritage of contemporary Italian women filmmakers, a survey drawing a varied map of approaches to the film medium, which take part in the redefinition process of cinema and its paradigms. The movies of these female directors deploy an exemplary commitment to (audio)visually exploring places, both central and peripheral, pointing out their nomadic vision and an itinerant gaze upon the world that is able to capture the current challenges and complexities with passion and rigour. Their works modulate in an original way the relationship between authorial intervention and social, cultural, historiographical investigation. Moreover, they propose a viewing on the most opaque and elusive sides of the contemporary realities, an observation that overall constitutes an innovation in the field of cinema as well as a change in the image of women, who are fully subjects of history, culture, and agency.
Since the early twentieth century, colour has been used for the purposes of improving health, well-being and safety, optimising productivity, reducing accidents, and minimising fatigue and stress. In the context of these interests, it became highly important to systematically study the reactions that colour could have on a standard subject, in order to manage and regulate the space and time of the experience, from work to leisure, education to treatment. These chromo-technics of regulation can now be studied based on one of the possible meanings of the concept of ‘biopolitics’ as proposed by Michel Foucault. The essay focuses on Italy and particularly the period between 1957 and 1964, when several initiatives dedicated to colour were implemented. These were years of strong national economic growth and increased life expectancy, giving rise to a growing wave of ‘chromophilia’. I aim to highlight several points of convergence between the dissemination of chromo-technics and Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, Michelangelo Antononi, 1964) in order to demonstrate how the film develops a subtle consideration of colour biopolitics at the centre of contemporary visual culture.
Political thrillers often encourage the feeling that a mere individual has the power to make a difference on a large scale. Caught up in a chain of events they wished they had never uncovered, a protagonist can occupy a position in which their actions have far-reaching consequences, with the rookie CIA analyst accidentally bringing down a whole corrupt political system being only one example. Much of the critical attention these films have garnered falls under the rubric of detective work in that the protagonist is seen as exposing a web of corruption which would otherwise have gone on unnoticed. However, this paper is focused on how the scale of the individual comes into contact with other, larger scales of events. Points of contact between scales are important because they are where change can take place, thus allowing an individual to influence the supra-individual.
The aim of my paper is to highlight the influence of cinema and of visual techniques in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s narratives of his Yokohama period (1921–23). Famous novels by Tanizaki have been adapted for the screen, and they are widely studied by critics of the history of Japanese cinema. My perspective is not these filmic adaptations, nor the correlations between text and film. I will focus instead on the impact of Tanizaki’s experience of cinematic production during his stay in Yokohama on his narrative style. In Yokohama he actively cooperated with the Taishō Katsuei film company and with the director Thomas (Kisaburō) Kurihara after the latter’s return to Japan from Hollywood. The focus of my paper is on the novel Ave Maria (1923), which has not yet been studied from this point of view, and on the effect cinematic techniques had on Tanizaki’s literary world of dreams. I will examine in particular the references to films and Hollywood actresses, literary descriptions influenced by close-ups and motion pictures as well as the black and white cinema as sensual and aesthetic experiences of light and shadow.
Language and Literature, Japanese language and literature
<p>Este artículo investiga la construcción textual del espectador en varias películas africanas. Un espectador que aparece inscrito «en filigrana» a través de los ges-tos enunciativos y estrategias paratextuales de cineastas que siguen la lógica poética del cine de autor. Es a través del análisis de estas estrategias estilísticas y narrativas, de los recursos simbólicos utilizados, de las huellas metadiscursivas presentes en los textos, como se puede averiguar, más allá de las intenciones expresadas por los propios cineastas, o de los resultados en taquilla, en qué medida los autores han pensado o no en los públicos africanos, y si se dirigen exclusivamente a ellos.</p><p><strong>Palabras clave:</strong> relato, sistema textual, paratexto, espectador implícito, semiopragmática, <em>griot</em>, cine de autor.</p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This article explores the textual construction of the spectator in various African films. A spectator that seems to be registered as a ‘watermark’ through the expository gestures and paratextual strategies of filmmakers that follow the poetic logic of auteur cinema. It is through the analysis of these stylistic and narrative strategies, of the symbolic resources used, and of the metadiscursive traces present in the texts, that the extent to which the authors have taken into consideration the African audience, and whether or not they are aiming exclusively at them, can be explored - even in terms beyond those directly expressed by the filmmakers themselves.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> story, textual system, paratext, implicit spectator, semio-pragmatics, <em>griot</em>, auteur cinema</p>
<p>El presente trabajo plantea un recorrido histórico por la representación del pueblo ainu en el cine de los orígenes. Hemos dividido el corpus en tres bloques: primero, la presencia ainu entre las primeras <em>actualités </em>de los Lumière rodadas en Japón. Segundo, en las <em>actualités </em>de la compañía Pathé y la referencia a un documental perdido de Torii Rūyzō. Tercero, en los <em>travelogues </em>realizados en Japón por los exploradores en los años 10 Frederick Starr y Benjamin Brodsky. Al comparar el análisis cinematográfico con la realidad social del pueblo ainu se pone de relieve cómo los documentales trataron de proyectar una etnicidad correspondiente a un tiempo anterior al momento en que fueron filmados. Los cineastas buscaron asombrar al público occidental por medio de la visión exótica y ahistórica de un pueblo lejano cultural y geográficamente. El estudio de las circunstancias de producción de las imágenes revela la puesta en escena y la construcción planificada de la identidad ainu. Todo ello acaba por cuestionar la validez del documental etnográfico de la época como testimonio social.</p><p><strong>Palabras clave</strong>: ainu, <em>actualités, travelogue, </em>documental, cine etnográfico, cine japonés, Lumière, Constant Girel, Pathé, Benjamin Brodsky.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This work is a historical study of the representation of the Ainu people in the early years of cinema. The corpus has been divided into three sections: first, the Ainu in the first Lumière actualités filmed in Japan. Second, in the actualités of Pathé productions and the reference to the lost documentary of Torii Ryozo. Third, in the travelogues made in Japan by Frederick Starr and Benjamin Brodsky in the 1910s.When comparing the film analysis to the social reality of the Ainu, it becomes clear how documentaries tried to project a deceiving ethnicity belonging to a time prior to the moment they were filmed. Thus, filmmakers aimed at causing attraction of the Western audience through the exotic and ahistorical view of a cultural and geographically distant people. The approach to the productional circumstances of the images reveals the <em>mise en scène</em>, the premeditated construction of Ainu identity. All this could cast doubt on the validity of the ethnographic documentary as social testimony.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Ainu, <em>actualités, travelogue, </em>documentary film, ethnographic cinema, Japanese cinema, Lumière, Constant Girel, Pathé, Benjamin Brodsky.</p>
<p>Cet article traite du <em>Festival International du Cinéma Méditerranéen</em> (Tétouan) et des<em> Rencontres Internationales des Cinémas Arabes</em> (Marseille), et interroge les enjeux communs à certains films programmés lors des dernières éditions de ces manifestations.</p><p> </p>
While it is possible to define one aspect of cinema's institutionalisation during the first twenty years of French film as the process of normalising quality in a more or less consensual and lasting manner, this article seeks to show, through the case of Pathé and its role in this institutionalisation, that the quality at issue was cinematic and not simply filmic. Employing a vast collection of sources taken from the press of the day, this study offers a typology of different forms of quality in cinema as they were seen at the time of this initial phase in the institutionalisation process.