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The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory’s radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism’s queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood’s task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film’s sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?

In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman's lived experience. I will approach this by exploring how remembering this film has become a personally transformative experience as I look back on it through the lens of postmodern and feminist discourses that have emerged since it was made. In addition, I will explore how this process of imaginatively looking back on an artistic creation to generate new discourses in the present is similar to the transformative process of analysis. Lastly, I will present a clinical example, where my embodied countertransference response to a patient's subjection to the objectifying male gaze opens space for a new discourse about her body to emerge.

In the three decades after 1980, major changes took place in the ways in which culture in Tibet was produced, transmitted, and consumed.¹ These changes, however, were not evidence of the radical transformation often claimed as the result of digitization, but were brought about by earlier forms of technological development. In terms of music and radio, it was the arrival of cheap cassette players and recorders in Tibet in the late 1980s that allowed Tibetans to choose for the first time when to listen and, within the limits allowed by the market and the government, what to listen to (Dhondup

My chapter looks at Chinese independent cinema as an institutionalizing enterprise. In other words, although many filmmakers keep emphasizing the individualistic quality of their agenda or the idiosyncrasy of their film works, independent films have developed things in common, such as certain thematics, addresses, formalistic styles, and modes of production. Their survival is also predicated more and more on shared infrastructures of film communities, distribution agents, and exhibition networks. Of course, this does not mean that the institution of Chinese independent cinema is settled and finalized; it isn’t like a breed of crops circled by impermeable ideological or physical fences.

This article discusses two recent works by emerging documentary auteur Zhao Liang, Crime and Punishment(2007) and Petition(2009). These penetrating observations of state-society relations in contemporary China render visible those who are un(der)represented, critique the deception of mass media images, and show the various complex ways in which power is connected to surveillance and visibility. Thus the filmmaker, his camera, and the spectators are implicated in power relationships as we cast voyeuristic, panoptic, activist, empathetic, or critical gazes upon the representatives of state power and upon the disenfranchised.

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.

Taking Hao Jie’s Single Man as a case study, this chapter discusses the effect of globalization on independent DV production—a home-grown phenomenon born out of the availability of DV cameras and computer editing software and the spreading of the internet. Starting as a marginalized practice without access to the domestic market, and expressing a desire to saturate the visual field with obfuscated images and to create a counter-archive (a counter-memory of the Chinese people), it attracted international attention, which in turn allowed it to have access to alternative forms of financing as well as the input of foreign talent. The fluidity of digital modes of production also contributed to an eradication of the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Instead, the real divide lies between “the desire for cinema” and “the desire for documentation.”

In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. This digital turn has given us a 'DV China' that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups. This study takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices.

In their introduction to a collaborative study of crowds organized by the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000, Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews observe that while the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a rise of collective social action and various forms of mass assembly, the second half was a period of the decline of collective political formations and the replacement by virtual and media-based assemblies for physical crowds (Schnapp and Tiews 2006, xi). The postindustrial political economy in the West is “characterized by the coexistence of media aggregation and bodily disaggregation,” Schnapp and Tiews claim (xi).

At the closing awards ceremony for the 7th Annual DOChina Festival held in May 2010 in Songzhuang—a gentrified artists’ village at the far eastern edge of the Beijing municipality—young animator, poet, and filmmaker Xue Jianqiang was recognized with an honorable mention for his haunting documentary Martian Syndrome. The award came with 2000 RMB, a Panasonic DV camera (the jury’s official comments noted that Xue lacked his own camcorder and had to borrow one to make his film), and the chance to speak before a gathering of who’s who in Chinese independent documentary filmmaking.

Film scholarship on the movie-making, movie-viewing, and movie-circulating practices that have developed since the mid-1990s in China has appropriately emphasized the role played by the rise of digital video (DV) and its impact on independent and, in particular, documentary filmmaking. In this chapter, I want to explore one line of development in DV independent production that has received much less attention—what I call animateur cinema—which concerns short digital animations that are made by and/or circulated for online (or on-mobile) moviemakers/viewers. Fan-originated digital animation or egao animation can also be found online, but my focus is on animateur cinema

Since its beginning in the early 1990s, independent Chinese documentary has steadily built a reputation with its unflinching presentation of the underbelly of China’s economic boom and social sea changes. Individuals and groups whose experiences register the drastic costs of this process have become the most natural and common subject matter of independent documentaries. From the struggling artists who were among the first to quit state employment and go independent in Bumming in Beijing (Wu Wenguang 1990) to the art-aspiring young migrants from the rural area in The Other Bank (Jiang Yue 1995), from the homeless youngsters in Along the

In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. This digital turn has given us a 'DV China' that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups. This study takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices

The films of director Gan Xiao’er are the first narrative features to take up Chinese Christians in their everyday concerns. This chapter discusses a pair of his films, one a fiction feature, the other a documentary made about taking that feature on the road and showing it in churches. It is about filmmaking practice—and especially documentary—as social occasion, as the concatenation between people of self-reflective moments of cultural creativity and critique. By social occasion, I mean that Gan has documented in the second film the moments of self-conscious “participation” in the fiction feature and in the documentary itself.

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

The notion of “self” and “other” and its representation in artwork and literature is an important theme in current cultural sciences as well as in our everyday life in contemporary Western societies. Moreover, the concept of “self” and “other” and its imaginary dichotomy is gaining more and more political impact in a world of resurfacing ideology-ridden conflicts. The essays deal with Jewish reality in contemporary Germany and its reflection in movies from the special point of view of cultural sciences, political sciences, and religious studies. This anthology presents challengingly new insights into topics rarely covered, such as youth culture or humor, and finally discusses the images of Jewish life as realities still to be constructed.

A non-foundationalist construct for the Feiticeiro/a character that assumes neither an essentialist nature nor a determinist set of activities is possible. This does not prescribe a ‘type’ of ‘pervert’ character, but instead delineates an epistemic framing for a Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an etymologically based semiotic approach to character construction that accounts for a Derridean view that language is constituted by binary reciprocal delimitations and for a view of sex as a dereified expression of materialised instances of engagement by sexual subjects, in terms of which sexuality is rendered as an opened-outward and connected function. The chapter further deals with an approach based in an empathic engagement between audiences and Feiticeiro/a characters, which is apposite for audiences identifying with but not necessarily liking characters. The chapter closes the volume’s argument around how transgressive, sexually focused Feiticeiro/a characters might productively be constructed in terms other than of essences and determinist actions, but in terms of ‘meaning’ found in the points of connection between heterogeneous bodily surfaces.