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In the late 1980s, against the backdrop of worsening Franco-Romanian relations and internal crisis, Sergiu Nicolaescu, who had established an international reputation for epic films about Romanian history, agreed to make François Villon – Poetul vagabond in co-production with TF1 and Cine Berlin, firstly as a television series broadcast in 1987, then as a feature film, released in Romanian cinemas in 1989, the final year of the Ceaușescu regime. This article studies Nicolaescu’s film, its production and its reception, drawing on archival documents, the Romanian press of the time, and Nicolaescu’s memoirs. To what extent was Villon’s story used to criticise the regime? And how far does this co-production mark a watershed in both Nicolaescu’s career and in Franco-Romanian film collaboration? Postprint

The work was supported by the The Leverhulme Trust . In this essay, we analyse two mainstream Italian TV dramas about the Mediterranean crossing produced by the Italian national public broadcasting company RAI. Lampedusa dall’orizzonte in poi (2016, Marco Pontecorvo) and I fantasmi di Portopalo (2017a,b Alessandro Angelini) were both two-part mini-series broadcast in prime-time slots on consecutive nights on RAI 1. Inspired by real events which took place in 2008 and 1996, respectively, the first features the well-known actor Claudio Amendola, while the second stars Giuseppe Fiorello, perhaps the most popular face on Italian state television. The essay examines the ways in which these two specifically national productions both reproduce conventional media representations of migration and offer the viewer new ways to approach the topic through their transmedial presence on multiple platforms. We analyse the narratives and cinematography of the films themselves and explore how the star personae of the main actors and their appearances across different platforms affect audience reception. Our argument is indebted on work done in the field of critical race theory to illuminate the representational logics of agency in the Mediterranean and the definitions of the human which they produce. Publisher PDF

Funding information: I am grateful for the support of the AHRC through the network grant, ‘Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network: Promoting dialogue across critical and creative practice’, from which this research emerged, and to Nguyễn for generously sharing her work and ideas with me on several occasions, including at Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 16 March 2018 (see https://www.seacrn.org). Publisher PDF

To Be a Woman is a short campaigning film made in 1950–1 by documentary film-maker Jill Craigie. This article offers an account of the film which aims to recover the affective life of both the film text and the archival correspondence between Craigie and the General Secretary of the National Union of Women Teachers, which refers to its production history. The article analyses the ‘feeling tones’ of the letters that describe both Craigie's attempts to get the film made and her difficulties in distributing it. It is argued that paying attention to these affective aspects of the archive and the film together enables a recalibration of (in a variant of Raymond Williams's formulation) the structure of feminist feeling in both the film and, to an extent, the wider public realm in the immediate post-war period. Paying attention to the film's affective dynamics in this way is also revealing, it is suggested, of its class and race positionality, enabling a more nuanced critical account of its politics.

This paper critically contextualizes the open secret of Karan Johar’s sexuality as a key marketable commodity in the neoliberal framework of the ‘KJo’ brand. It examines the cultural legibility of the open secret of his sexuality. It argues that the juxtaposition between the ubiquity of his open secret and his maintained silence on identifying his sexuality serves as an incitement that enables a study of his role in incrementally making space for a depoliticized and individualized upper-class male same-sex sexuality. By mapping the textuality of his open secret in the culture industry surrounding the Hindi film industry this paper offers a nuanced critique of the co-option of male same-sex sexuality by Karan Johar and its deployment as a gimmick.

Beginning with an imagined encounter between Buster Keaton and Henri Bergson, this article offers a fundamental rereading of Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) and its theoretical, historical, and formal links to slapstick cinema. It focuses on neglected references by Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and James Agee to a sympathetic, schizophrenic, and "boffo" laughter viscerally connecting audiences to slapstick's absurdly vitalized machines and acrobatic automatons. It argues for a more dialectical relationship between terms often opposed in Bergsonian accounts of both slapstick comedy and cinematic apperception, including vitality and mechanism, laughing and comical bodies, and cold pragmatism and sensorial sympathy. Postprint

This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party. Publisher PDF

This article focuses on Pola Negri, one of the most iconic stars of the silent era, and concentrates on her performance and image in the Hollywood film Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927). Assessing Negri's character within the wartime context of the plot, her screen presence and narrative function are analysed in relation to wartime anxiety, gender roles, and the role of the home front. Specifically, this article argues that Negri's exceptional display of anxiety, in contrast to the acting of her male co-protagonists, can be fruitfully understood as a distinctly “female”, empowering quality, aiding her role of main agent in the film. In the light of selected texts by Sigmund Freud, Charles Bachelard, and Lindsey Stonebridge, this article offers a close reading of Negri's performance, showing that Negri productively unblocks and mobilises the inherent anxiety of the film's time and place. Positioned in traditionally female locations, the home front and the domestic space, Negri acts upon the former by controlling the latter, enabling not only her own rescue, but also that of her menfolk: her soldier lover and, indirectly, the whole Austro-Hungarian army. This discussion is linked to the dramatic shift in Negri's image in Hotel Imperial, a shift which has traditionally been criticised as a weakening of her persona; this article instead argues that, far from being “tamed” by the shedding of her vamp connotations, Negri emerges as the film's strongest presence, gaining agency and power while explicitly rejecting patriarchal constructions of female sex-appeal. Publisher PDF

In The T-Shirt, disagreement overflows into brutal confrontation, as the two characters provoke each other to act out roles preordained by the power of symbols. What Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ is rendered here as social pathology, dramatized in miniature in the violent encounter of two ordinary people. Postprint

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women.(McSorley, 2012)War films celebrated for their use of sound, such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998), The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008), and, more recently, American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), have tended to focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of war from the perspective of soldiers, whose agency and placement within the very centre of the action drives the film's narrative (Hochberg, 2013, p.45).1 By contrast, the two Iranian films I will discuss here, Bahram Beizai's Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, gharibeye koochak, 1990) and Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand, 2004), record the experience of war from the perspectives of those whose lives have been radically and violently disrupted by it, but who have had no active role in shaping its outcome. Focusing on the experiences of children, both films use sound design to articulate a sense of their characters' fragmented subjectivity and powerlessness through techniques such as point-of-audition, close-perspective miking, and non-synchronous sound and image. In both films, characters rarely speak about their trauma. Instead, embodied sounds and vocalisations are heard on the soundtrack at key points in the narrative to align the spectator with their perspective while emphasising the characters' vulnerability at the centre of the larger, global 'sensate regimes of war' in which they have no voice or control (Butler, 2013, p.110).In this way, they also have strong affinities with other 'anti-war' films, which, although set in very different historical and geographical contexts, also feature children as their central protagonists, such as Diamonds of the Night (Demanty noci, Jan Nemec, 1964) and Come and See (Idi I smotri, Elem Klimov, 1985). However, there are important differences between them. While Nemec and Klimov's films, both set in World War II, were made decades after the events they depict, Bashu was filmed during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and Turtles during the US invasion of Iraq, shortly before the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003. Both of the Iranian films feature non-professional child actors 'indigenous to the world represented in the films', who had themselves lived through this time, thereby adding a further level of immediacy and urgency to the performances and the very notion of embodiment that I discuss in this essay (Lury, 2010b, p.285). Through close comparative analysis of the sound design in each of these films, I argue that sound plays a crucial restorative role by articulating a sense of characters' agency and subjectivity so often denied to civilian victims of war, both in official records and in their cinematic representation. As such I claim that the films offer a radical alternative to dominant conceptualisations of war as depicted in Hollywood cinema, challenging and broadening our understanding of the genre as well as potentially deepening our understanding of the impact of war on the lives of civilians and refugees.Breath and the Sounding BodyIn her book The Place of Breath in Cinema, Davina Quinlivan asserts that 'the notion of breathing stimulates new ways in which to question the nature of seeing, perceiving and sensing things which are not always entirely visible in film' (2012, pp.1-2). For Quinlivan, breath destabilises and makes permeable the boundaries between self and other, between inside and outside the body, and between the seen and unseen on screen. The audiovisual representation of the respiring body can therefore hold an ambiguous power and fascination. Breath, of course, is often spoken of as the material manifestation of the life force; phrases such as one's 'dying breath' convey poignantly the precariousness of the line between the animated, feeling body, and the corpse. …

Leshu Torchin uses Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley's genre-defying take on race, slavery, and capitalism in 21st century America, as a launching pad for a broader discussion of what she terms the “economic rights” film. Often global in scope, these films argue for rights to sustenance, shelter, education, health, and labor while mapping out the myriad systems that impede access to these rights. Torchin suggests that Sorry's playful hybridity, combining science fiction, performance art, and even corporate-video mockumentary to invoke recent experimentations in black American media, belies a preoccupation around labor that positions the film within the “economic rights” film's robust legacy. Publisher PDF

In its history, production, plots and gestures, slapstick comedy was tied to the rise of modern labor in terms of both Taylorist theory and Fordist practice. Comic heroes ranging from live action comedians Chaplin or Keaton to animated animals Felix or Mickey worked against work through the playful excesses of their obediences and transgressions within an increasingly rationalized, industrial world. The digital animation studio Pixar summoned slapstick and its specifically Fordist resonances in its 2008 feature, WALL-E, yet offered a twist in humanizing a figure of perfected Fordism itself with its title character, a robot repetitively working in a post-apocalyptic earth devoid of human life. Explicitly modeled after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, WALL-E contrasts with the film’s humans, who are entirely liberated from labor through automation in a satirical reflection of both post-Fordist accounts of the ‘end of work’ as well as broader critiques of a distracting digital culture. This article focuses on the film’s revitalization of slapstick traditions within the context of recent debates about post-Fordism, the future of automated labor and the transformation of working human bodies. Just as slapstick’s relationship to modern labor touched on the playful mode of its cinematic production as well as their form as indexical montage so too does Pixar’s corporate reputation as ‘Creativity, Inc’ suggest a complex relationship between its slapstick hero and the digital labor animating his movement. The same will be argued of Pixar’s vaunted techniques with both digital image-making and commodity generation, both of which suggest a nostalgic animation of slapstick’s antinomies as much as a disavowal of the post-Fordist production of which Pixar is vanguard. Postprint

Surface has become an important consideration of sensory film theory, conceived of in various forms: the screen itself as less a barrier than a permeable skin, the site of a meaningful interaction between film and audience; the image as a surface to be experienced haptically, the eye functioning as a hand that brushes across and engages with the field of vision; surfaces within the film, be they organic or fabricated, presenting a tactile appeal. Surface evokes contact and touch, the look or sound it produces (or produced on it) inviting consideration of its materiality, and perhaps even a tactile interchange. If the surface of film, across its varied associations, presents the possibility of an intersubjective contact between film and audience, this article seeks to include another body: that of the filmmaker. There are many people who contribute to the material constitution of a film and I would suggest that we might seek to appreciate its textures just as we might that of a painting. Focus on the fine detail of textures within the film becomes a way to foreground the contributions of filmmakers who have been less central to discussions of meaning, but whose work in the making of décor, costume and sound effects, has a significant impact on filmic affect. Through detailed discussion of film moments, archival design materials and interviews with film designers, this article will attend to the exchanges of meaning situated on the audio-visual surfaces of film. Publisher PDF

The Colonial Film Unit (CFU) (1939–1955) produced over 200 films, which were exhibited non-theatrically to African audiences through its fleet of mobile cinema vans. While the CFU closely monitored, and theorised on, its film texts, the particular ways in which these films were exhibited and received was afforded far less attention and remains critically overlooked by scholars. In this article, I examine the development of the mobile film show across a range of colonial territories. The London-based CFU sought to standardise film exhibition across the empire, imagining these film shows as political events, as a means of monitoring, addressing and homogenising disparate groups of colonial subjects. The regulation of film space can be understood within this context as part of the broader effort to regulate colonial space. Integral to this process was the local commentator, an often-overlooked figure within African cinema. The local commentator would organise the film show, provide additional talks, answer questions, counter unrest and recontextualise the films for local audiences, often without any direct European supervision. In examining government reports, personal interviews and, in particular, a series of audience surveys, the article repositions the commentator as a pivotal presence in the latter years of empire; a rising voice within African cultural and political life. Postprint

Once he was cast as the powerful, yet sexually-on-display Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik (George Melford, 1921), Rudolph Valentino rose to super-stardom, the bearer of a conflicted image defined by a fragmented patriarchal discourse. The enduring resonance of the ‘Sheik’ identification, combined with a lack of critical attention to Valentino’s performance, have obscured the different qualities he projected in earlier leading roles, at the dawn of his star trajectory. This paper focuses on Valentino’s three other surviving films from 1921, which preceded The Sheik in rapid succession. It argues that here Valentino’s narrative roles, and most especially his performance, are increasingly defined by a sense of loss, powerlessness, and lack of control, informing his predominantly erotic function on screen. Drawing on the work of Leo Bersani and Sigmund Freud, this paper highlights how a key strand of Valentino’s performance suggests the body’s failure to control and connect with the world beyond the Self. In an expression of sexual melancholia, Valentino’s intensity of desire, mourning, and pain marks his physical presence, constructing an erotic identity that attempts yet always fails to defer loss. In contrast with his ‘sexual menace’ image, cristallised by the Sheik persona and tempered by his ambivalent relation to the gaze, in these earlier films Valentino provides a different antidote to patriarchal brutality, embodying the essentially melancholic nature of erotic experience. Postprint Non

After the “flamboyant fever dream” and ontological experimentations of The Act of Killing (2013), Joshua Oppenheimer’s latest film, The Look of Silence comes as something of a shock. A poetic, intimate film, it relies on more traditional documentary styles, interviews and observation in particular. At the same time, the film illustrates the challenges of documentary testimony, both practical (in terms of collection, credibility and deployment) and existential (as a hybrid of truth and fiction). The challenges and oscillation offer a way of expressing the conditions of the survivors, caught between a past they know to be true and the amnesiac historiography that surrounds them. Although such strategies produce a similar destabilization of ontological and epistemological certainty akin to those found in Killing, there is nonetheless a departure as the sobriety confers a moral authority that enables this film to be deployed in social justice projects. Postprint

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The image of a motionless spectator seated before a fixed screen once formed an unquestioned axiom of most film theory and history, but few today would see this as the only or even dominant model of spectatorship. The proliferation of mobile screens in the digital age, along with several decades of research into early forms of peripatetic spectatorship (the flâneur, the detective, pre-cinematic forms of urban spectacle, etc.), have attuned film scholars to other, more dynamic modalities of film reception. This attention to mobile audiences has been particularly pronounced in research on exhibitions. In part-and particularly in scholarship focused on film and video installations-the meeting of film and exhibition culture might appear as a new phenomenon. Dominique Paini thus famously argued that the migration of experimental film into galleries since the 1980s had liberated cinema audiences from their "frontal captivity," reviving the experience of the 19th-century flâneur and making the spectator-now free to move through the exhibition at his or her own tempo-an active contributor to the filmic experience.1 But while some scholars have insisted on the unprecedented nature of film's recent presence in the museum,2 other film historians have documented a much longer history of the multiple imbrications between film, museums, and exhibitions.' As historians of early cinema have argued, moreover, the cinema itself was no less influenced, in its very emergence, by 19lh-century exhibition culture. While this included popular forms such as vaudeville and wax museums, it also included "higher" forms such as the universal exhibitions which, as Tom Gunning has shown, helped to inculcate a mode of astonished spectatorship that would help to set the stage, alongside variety culture and scientific illustrations, for the cinema of attractions.As showcases for industrial progress, the universal exhibitions, with their emphasis on novelty and their future orientation, clearly differed from the institution of the museum as a safeguard of high culture and heritage. Rather than taking objects out of circulation to imbue them with aesthetic value, universal exhibitions displayed objects as prototypes for capitalist circulation. This futureoriented status helps to explain why, with few exceptions, one finds no avantgarde campaign against trade and technology exhibitions remotely comparable to the modernist critiques of the museum.5 On the contrary, avant-garde artists from Hans Richter to Herbert Bayer to El Lissitzky readily collaborated with exhibitions and industrial fairs, where they found ample opportunities to experiment with new forms of dynamic and kinetic reception.6 On account of this emphasis on novelty and dynamism, technology and trade exhibitions have long functioned as important arenas for the elaboration of more mobile forms of filmic reception. In this article, I want to examine some of the imbrications between film and exhibitions conceived as two technologies for eliciting and directing the movement of spectators and consumers. I will do so by focusing attention on a specific film genre that developed in the German-speaking world in the 1920s: the exhibition advertisement. Although commissioned as advertisements for specific exhibitions, these films, I argue, also thematized and worked through changing models of advertising and advertising spectatorship.Beginning just after WWI, one can find numerous publicity films intended as advertisements for trade and technology exhibitions in cities like Vienna, Berlin, and Basel. Well-known examples include Guido Seeber's advertisement for the 1925 Kipho exhibition of film and photography industries and Richter's Die neue Wohnung (1930), an advertisement for the Werkbund architecture exhibition in Basel.7 But there were also many other advertisements by well-known animators of the time such as Peter Eng, Hans Fischerkoesen, and Walter Ruttmann. While the proliferation of such advertisements in the 1920s attests to the appeal that exhibitions had for experimental filmmakers generally, they should also be seen as the result of broader institutional factors. …

Over the decades, the films of Yasujirō Ozu have inspired a number of contradictory responses from film critics and theorists. Initially, formal aspects of his work, which Western commentators found difficult to comprehend in relation to the thematic dimensions of the films, were often said to reflect aesthetic and philosophical principles associated with Zen Buddhism. Like the recurrence of plots that explore the transformations of the Japanese family, many formal attributes of Ozu's films were assumed to express various ideas related to traditional Japanese values. In their work on Ozu, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell do an admirable job of debunking many clichés and misconceptions about the relationship of Ozu's work to Zen philosophy, aesthetics, and social conventions. Undoubtedly though, a metaphysical outlook emerges in Ozu's work that is neither wholly conditioned by the socialised norms of Zen and tradition, nor entirely free of them. This paper considers and analyses a claim made by Gilles Deleuze about the metaphysical orientation of Ozu's work, one which ascribes aspects of Ozu's style to a Zen conception of time. This particular argument concerns Ozu's famous still lifes, and it is my contention that through considering some aspects of Deleuze's reading of Ozu alongside Bordwell, Thompson, and Noël Burch's writing on the director, we can see what is asked of us by a film like Ozu's Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), which offers us an opportunity to rethink the relations between cinematic form, narrative, and emotion. Publisher PDF

Montgomery Clift has been underexplored by film scholars, who have mostly focused on his early career. This article uses queer theory to examine Clift's later work, focusing on Wild River (dir. Elia Kazan, 1960); it argues that in this film Clift's narrative role, performance, and star persona radically challenge normative masculinity and heterosexuality. Publisher PDF

The title sequence of Chariots of Fire – filmed on the West Sands beach of St Andrews, Scotland – has become one of the most reworked and reinterpreted moments of British cinema, transposed across a variety of places, politics and times. In exploring these moves – from the period of its setting in 1924, through its production in 1980, and to its most recent reworkings in the London 2012 Olympics – the article examines the constantly evolving legacies of the sequence and the cultural capital which it has accrued via these various contexts. By considering the original production and its subsequent multiple receptions, the article positions the sequence at the vanguard of shifts in film production and cultural heritage. Viewed from the vantage point of the 2012 Olympics, the film provides an integral source of cultural capital not just for national but also for local and regional economies as they increasingly target new sources of revenue in a post-industrial age. Postprint

This paper looks in detail at the representation of sexuality in the family in three films of the mid to late 1990s, Balasko's Gazon maudit, Berliner's Ma Vie en rose, and Giusti's Pourquoi pas moi? Its double focus is the changing structure of the French family at the end of the twentieth century, considered against key political developments such as the pacte civil de solidaritye (PaCS) of November 1999, and the cinematic fantasies in which these structural changes are envisioned. Fable, fantasy or anti-realism mark the endings of Gazon maudit and Pourquoi pas moi?, while sequences of childhood fantasy punctuate the entire length of Ma Vie en rose. No particular theoretical approach to fantasy is preferred, but the conclusion of the paper is that cinema may be a privileged cultural vehicle for politically enabling fantasy, and that the three films discussed demonstrate this where the French family is concerned.

Over the past decade Spanish-Language Cinema has established itself beside Spanish and Latin American Cinema, and Morir en San Hilario is a good example of these new flexible collaborations rather than a strict transnational co-production. Billed as a comedy, the film could also be described as a variation on the road film, a circular journey to Utopia, a Spanish village/pueblo film, and a twenty-first-century ‘Ars moriendi’ developing the topos of ‘Homo viator’. This is not a frequent combination to be found on cinema screens and Laura Mañà’s gamble was to integrate these ingredients and create a fable to reflect on life and death. She does this through comedy, exaggerations, parody and a narrative style identified as magic realism. Her originality, however, overlaps with the lasting legacy of the fifteenth-century Castilian soldier-poet, Jorge Manrique (c.1440-1479) and his ‘Stanzas written upon the death of his father’, a landmark of Spanish Literature. Postprint

This article asks the question: what went wrong with Dunkirk (1958)? Why isn’t this ambitious film remembered as the pinnacle of Ealing’s achievement and a fitting memorial to an event which has become integral to mythologies of the British nation? The production did not lack resources. Backed by a new joint production arrangement with MGM, the film was closely superintended by Michael Balcon, who confessed in a letter to screenwriter David Divine that he had ‘a passion for the subject’.3 The film enjoyed the full cooperation of Army and Admiralty, and was cast with familiar faces capable themselves of attracting an audience. Yet Dunkirk received only a lukewarm critical reception and has, since its release, attracted the bare minimum of critical attention.4 The reasons for this somewhat bathetic end to an enormous project are manifold. Balcon was obliged to navigate his embryonic film product through a range of pre-production crises including the breakdown of relations with the initial scriptwriter, R. C. Sherriff, the threat of legal action surrounding versions of the story

Most scholars would agree that cinephilia results not simply from a spontaneous love of movies but historically has also been inseparable from processes of legitimization, audience training, and formations of taste. Yet we still know little about the deeper history of cinephilia's emergence: how audiences learned to love the movies and why. This article considers one site for thinking about this question during the “first wave” of cinephilia in the 1920s, namely the puzzle contest as it developed and proliferated in the new landscape of popular magazines in England, France, Germany, and other European countries. Culminating in a discussion of the Viennese magazine Mein Film, this article examines the media-historical and cultural contexts of photographic puzzles to show how they figured in a broader program of participatory and playful pedagogy by which readers could learn to frame film knowledge, film affect, and film experience in the context of an emerging European star system. Publisher PDF