Votre recherche

In the last decade or so, cinema has revealed itself to be an ideal medium for the transfer and/or remediation of the spoken word as well as stories coming from oral tradition and Indigenous culture. Indeed, cinema is a place of expression which favours cyclical creativity and contributes to the decolonization of stereotyped images propagated by external voices that do not understand the subtleties of languages (real and symbolic) that are anchored in indigenous peoples’ cultural memory. By exploring indigenous cinema as practised by women of diverse nations, this piece demonstrates how cinema can induce the compression and dilation of time, to bring to the audience the fluidity of a story that has been reconfigured according to a new time and carried by spoken words that have chosen to either emancipate themselves from the image or to materialize themselves in it. Furthermore, this article illustrates how a new generation of Indigenous women use cinema to retrace and/or rewrite their personal narrative with the help of autobiographical or collective stories that travel back in time to fill in the blanks left by a fragile memory and to express their will to make peace with a difficult colonial past. Finally, the writings of Lee Maracle (I Am Woman, 1988) and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (Manifeste Assi, 2014) are being brought forth to show how films such as Suckerfish (Lisa Jackson, 2004) Bithos (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, 2015) and Four Faces of the Moon (Amanda Strong, 2016) contribute to the individual and community healing of Indigenous peoples of Canada, through an aesthetic of reconciliation. The exploration of these works, therefore allows us to shed light on and better understand the roles/internal mechanisms of visual autobiographies in the larger context of reconciliation with individual and collective stories/memories.

Le lieu de la rupture, ici, se voit déplacé : s'il faut rompre, en cinéma autochtone, ce n'est pas avec ses propres prédécesseurs, comme l'ont fait Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et Agnes Varda. Des cinéastes tels Barnaby, Freeland et Grace peuvent ainsi s'appuyer sur le travail d'ouvreurs de sentiers tels le réalisateur māori Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, en traduction française, Nous étions guerriers, 1994), le réalisateur cheyenne et arapaho Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals, 1998) , ainsi que des précurseurs incontournables tels Barclay, en Aotearoa, Nouvelle-Zélande, et la documentariste abénaquise Alanis Obomsawin, figure de proue du cinéma autochtone au Canada. Dans un récent document interne sur le cinéma autochtone en son sein, l'Office national du film (ONF), cet important producteur et diffuseur public d'œuvres audiovisuelles au Canada, explique que pour « comprendre la situation actuelle des cinéastes autochtones a l'ONF », il faut l'envisager a partir des « anciennes politiques gouvernementales visant explicitement a éliminer toute culture autochtone de la société canadienne ». Elle est également sous-tendue par le désir de proposer un storytelling, un art de raconter, issu des peuples autochtones, déterminé par ces derniers tant au niveau de la forme et du contenu cinématographique que dans le processus de production, de réalisation et de diffusion de ces œuvres.

"African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness uses critical race theory to discuss American films that embrace contemporary issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender. Its linear history chronicles black-oriented narrative film from post-World War II through the presidential administration of Barack Obama. Editor Mark A. Reid has assembled a stellar list of contributors who approach their film analyses as an intersectional practice that combines queer theory, feminism/womanism, and class analytical strategies alongside conventional film history and theory. Taken together, the essays invigorate a "Black Lives Consciousness," which speaks to the value of black bodies that might be traumatized and those bodies that are coming into being-ness through intersectional theoretical analysis and everyday activism. The volume includes essays such as Gerald R. Butters's, "Blaxploitation Film," which charts the genre and its uses of violence, sex, and misogyny to provoke a realization of other philosophical and sociopolitical themes that concern intersectional praxis. Dan Flory's "African-American Film Noir" explains the intertextual-fictional and socio-ecological-dynamics of black action films. Melba J. Boyd's essay, "'Who's that Nigga on that Nag?': Django Unchained and the Return of the Blaxploitation Hero," argues that the film provides cultural and historical insight, "signifies" on blackface stereotypes, and chastises Hollywood cinema's misrepresentation of slavery. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness embraces varied social experiences within a cinematic Black Lives Consciousness intersectionality. The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike."

Analyses the narrative and formal elements of Kim Kyung-mook's "Stateless things" (2011) to argue how it critiques South Korea’s ethnocentrism and homophobic social structures by delineating a queer use of space. Gives recent examples of homoeroticism in commercial and independent South Korean cinema. Argues that Kim's film expand the definition of queer Korean cinema by deconstructing and reconstructing the heteronormative, progress-driven cityscape of Seoul.

Conservative discourses remain powerful in contemporary life. These demonise the notion of sexual transgressiveness without helping to give a clear, value neutral definition of what ‘transgressive’ is. Screenwriters attempting to write it into characters are therefore likely to rely on psychiatric epistemologies for sexual ‘perversion’ as framings for subjectivity. Unfortunately, Freudian epistemologies of ‘perversion’ render the psychical subject as invisible through built-in determining comparative reference to heteropatriarchal norms and through distinctions between ‘non-pathological’ and ‘pathological’ definitions. This chapter explores the Freudian constructs that entrench this, together with post-structuralist foundations that might revise the constitution and role of the individual subject (and therefore of filmic characters as facsimiles of real people) as he/she relates to the material world as a physical entity, and as he/she manipulates the discourses to which he/she is subject.

This chapter contemplates the ethical dimensions of the specific brand of observational cinema found in China. Because there is no popular understanding of independent documentary—and also because filmmakers almost invariably use amateur video cameras and shoot alone—many subjects are oblivious to the fact that their images are being captured for films being screened around the world. It is in this sense that, while their cameras are perfectly visible, they are also hidden. This enables directors to capture “life unawares,” as if people were being shot by a hidden camera. In this context, directors make the films they want, ignoring the ethical implications of shooting people without being upfront about their intentions or asking for consent. The chapter closely examines a set of films to explore the axiographics of the documentary, in other words how ethics is rendered in the time and space of the moving image.

The call for the “De-Westernization” (Curran & Park, 2000) of media studies hasattracted much attention in recent years. It is generally associated with the need to giveserious considerations to media systems outside the West. This paper critically reviewsthe meaning of “de-Westernization,” and argues that the main challenge is not simply to broaden the geographic scope by considering cases from the global South. The inclusionof non-Western cases could lead to the consolidation of “area studies”, a balkanizedresearch that may not contribute to a common set of questions and unifying theories.Instead, it is necessary to approach de-Westernization in order to promote cosmopolitanscholarship, an analytical approach that is open to the globalization of problems andacademic production. Rather than being constrained by geographical divisions, de-Westernization should help to expand analytical perspectives and brings theoretical andcomparative questions to the forefront of media studies.

This article analyzes the term ‘citizen journalism’ against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings in order to show how it overlooks the local context of digital media practices. The first part examines videos emanating from Syria to illustrate how they blur the lines between acts of witnessing, reporting, and lobbying, as well as between professional and amateur productions, and civic and violent intentions. The second part highlights the genealogies of citizenship and journalism in an Arab context and cautions against assumptions about their universality. The article argues that the oscillation of Western narratives between hopes about digital media's role in democratization in the Arab World and fears about their use in terrorism circumscribe the theorization of digital media practices.

Globalized communication flows transcend and transform national borders. Transnational media outlets targeting audiences around the globe, issues of global concern are subjected to border-crossing public debates, media events receive transnational attention, and public diplomacy efforts succeed—and fail—in characteristic patterns around the world. In response to these phenomena the article shows how the study of transnational communication can benefit from combining 3 theoretical perspectives that are rarely studied together: communication as deliberation, as ritual, and as strategy. Particularly in explaining the failures of transnational communication, explanatory potential often seems to lie just outside the limited vision of each of the 3 perspectives—and outside the scope of empirical analyses that are limited to Western contexts.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, a number of calls were made by scholars to “internationalize” or “dewesternize” the field of media and communication studies. I argue that these approaches have indirectly silenced a much longer disciplinary history outside “the West” that has not only produced empirical knowledge but has also actively challenged Western epistemologies. This article seeks to reinscribe the epistemological and historical foundations of media and communication studies in Africa. By framing the research of African media and communication scholars within the changing nature of knowledge production, shifting power relations between African nations, and the evolving role of African universities, I demonstrate how academic knowledge production is frequently driven and constrained by particular dominant social, political, and economic interests.

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on ‘Western’ ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of ‘the West and the rest’ in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures ‘connect’ globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study. The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics. Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

How should one think about popular media in the African context? Should we attempt to understand and analyse the increasing proliferation of tabloids, reality television shows, pop music, websites and mobile communications through the analytical frameworks constructed by scholars in the Global North, or does Africa pose unique research questions? Is there a danger of either essentializing Africa by treating her as ‘different’, or by ignoring her specificity by approaching her media via Western theoretical constructs? The scholar wishing to understand the interface between popular media, development and democracy in contemporary African societies is faced with a complex double bind. Elsewhere (Nyamnjoh 2005: 2-3) I have argued that African worldviews and cultural values are doubly excluded from global media discourses, first by the ideology of hierarchies and boundedness of cultures, and second by cultural industries more interested in profits than the promotion of creative diversity and cultural plurality. Little attention is accorded to how Africans negotiate and navigate the various identity margins and cultural influences in their lives, in ways that are not easily reducible to simple options or straightforward choices. The consequence of rigid dichotomies or stubborn prescriptiveness based on externally induced expectations of social transformation is an idea of democracy hardly informed by popular articulations of personhood and agency in Africa, and media whose professional values and content are not in tune with the expectations of those they purport to serve. The predicament of media practitioners in such a situation, as well as those wishing to understand African media practice through media theory, is obvious: to be of real service to liberal democracy and its expectations of modernity, they must ignore alternative ideas of personhood and agency in the cultural communities within which such practices take place and of which such practitioners and, often, scholars form part. Attending to the interests of particular cultural groups as strategically essential entities risks contradicting the principles of liberal democracy and its emphasis on civic citizenship and the autonomous individual, which media practitioners in African societies are being held accountable to.

The history of gay and lesbian cinema is a storied one, and became that much larger with the recent success of Brokeback Mountain. But the history of gay and lesbian filmmakers is its own story. In The View From Here, queer directors and screenwriters speak passionately about the medium, in particular their personal experiences navi-gating the often cynical and cruel film industry. All of them offer fascinating anecdotes and ideas about cinema, and speak candidly about their attempts to combat studio apathy and demands of “the market” to create films that are entertaining, engaging, and truthful.