Votre recherche

Pedro Almodóvar is an internationally acclaimed Spanish director. The national and international fascination over Almodóvar's cinema lies in his ability to reflect the problems of contemporary society, his lucidity in combining the urban and the rural, his ability to express the frustrations of modern man, as well as his freshness and spontaneity. Although the vast majority of studies on this Spanish director have focused on women and the gay world, his films are crowded with many types and archetypes of heterosexual men. This groundbreaking edited volume studies the men in the cinema of Almodóvar from a broad yet comprehensive and complementary perspective. Each chapter of All About Almodóvar's Men methodically dissects these male characters—their misery and their greatness, their frustrations and their desires—offering a kaleidoscopic view of man that goes beyond the narrow framework in which many studies have locked the rich cinema of Almodóvar.

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.

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.

A post-humanist lens is useful as a starting-point to remedy the absenting and invisibilising effects of sexological epistemologies for the purposes of conceiving a constitution of ‘pervert’ filmic characters, since certain strains of existential thinking have a meta-theoretical pliancy that is useful for reflecting the non-binary character of complex people beyond simple identity categories, across a range of types and styles of filmic products. If matched with a semiological approach such as that espoused by Barthes, it thereby becomes possible to manipulate signs in the form of character constructions to represent people as more than the sum of their parts and to contain deeper significations that are built into the fabric of their construction. This requires a deeper understanding of the semiotic notion of ‘semes’ as the foundation for character construction. To this end, this chapter explores how sexual ‘perversion’ as reflected in notion of the ‘feitiço’ might serve as a foundation for a new episteme for ‘perverse’ characters, as the Feiticeiro/a as ‘sorcerer/sorceress’.

The notion of ‘perversity’ suggests inherent transgressiveness. However, a focus on practices does not help identify who filmic characters are in ways that might inform a paradigm for character identity suitable for translation into a visual medium. Failing to achieve this clarity, ‘perverts’ often end up as ‘ambulatory objects’ at once imagined and defined by what is not present. This chapter engages how this manifests in the nineteenth-century sexological discourses that reflected perverse prurience in terms of assumptions that all entities might be empirically identifiable in the same way that material phenomena can be perceived by means of the senses, which is especially visible in the various incarnations of Freudian constructs of ‘fetishism’ that refuse personal agency through reliance on a range of psychodynamic constructs.

If character actions are not to be seen in deterministic ways, then an alternative framing should be considered on which writers might base constructs of complexity of action. This is possible if action itself is seen as an expression of relationality rather than as activity-as-substance. Looking at people in this way enables the behaviour of Feiticeiro/a characters to be seen as activities that are more than the actions of combinations of sexed bodies in physical spaces. This chapter explores a construct for action on this basis as it becomes possible by acknowledging in a construct of ‘doing’ the phenomenological notions of ‘being’ as a Feiticeiro/a form constituted by a hybrid of ‘object-discourse-nature-society’ characterised by networks of confluence. The chapter explores the notion of the Feiticeiro/a character in terms of an internal coherency, taking account of interactions and activities (as exhibited through their material form), ‘naturalness’, linearity of course of action and embodied notions of meaning-creation.

Interesting and challenging Hollywood-style films that centre on sexually transgressive characters are not easy to script. Many writers fail as a result of an over-valuation of image at the expense of psychologically complex and challenging subjectivity. A hook for exploring the nature of this phenomenon lies in the notion of ‘involving and disturbing’, with a focus on how films might represent it and how audiences might perceive it, and with attention paid to how characters might be constructed. The chapter expands on how this notion of audience engagement might engage with screenwriting as a design function, aimed to construct characters in visual terms yet through words rather than pictures. In addressing certain epistemic limitations to writing character complexity, an alternative epistemic framing for ‘perverse’ characters is considered in terms of characterological ‘is-ness’, philosophical constitution and behaviours and actions.

In seeking to find a solid paradigm for the Feiticeiro/a character, it is tempting to approach the established psychiatric categories. Unfortunately, many of these suggest that people are ineffably different from others and that people will behave according to type in a predictable, even inevitable way. This chapter explores the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which merely re-inscribes essentialist and determinist tendencies by means of processes akin to the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence and linguistic fixity. The chapter explores further how this is embedded in the category of ‘fetishism’, ‘fetishistic transvestism’ and ‘transvestic fetishism’, which contain certain problematic vestigial tails of Freudian categories that make the psychiatric definitions of ‘fetishism’ unsuitable as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character.

If the Feiticeiro/a character is to be seen as a structure rather than a substance, the nature of such a structure requires elaboration. If this paradigm is to be internally coherent, a relation of intertwined co-existence between characters and audiences should be built into the framing in ways that provide functional epistemic signposts for mechanisms to translate characters’ intrinsic complexity to these audiences. This chapter approaches this by accounting both for the particularly visual nature of the filmic medium and for how screenplays are not a visual medium themselves and are put to different uses than other forms of narrative writing, therefore requiring distinctive attributes. An orientational notion of relationship between medium and audience is suggested as a foundation for the structure of Feiticeiro/a characters in terms of the philosophical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘appearance’, on the basis of which decisions might be made as to which elements of the character’s constitution should be made apparent and which should either remain invisible or intentionally be obfuscated.

The categories for ‘perversion’ in the World Health Organization’s ICD fail to describe people and their practices, thereby obscuring the remarkable singularity of individuals and diversity of groups. Instead, they prescribe heteronormative sexual behaviour, which is unhelpful as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an alternative epistemic construct, as becomes available in the notion of a focalising character, which reflects a ‘semic’ construct that negates the notion of a ‘pervert’ character as a substance, but instead embraces the notion of a Feiticeiro/a character as a structure. The chapter further explores the philosophical nature of this structure as it relates to the thematic elements of a narrative whilst engaging in believable activities in a material world. The chapter then suggests an approach to structure based in a phenomenological notion of the replacement of ‘substance’ with ‘form’/‘structure’ as the foundation of meaning.

An episteme for the Feiticeiro/a as a filmic character who is ‘perverse’ needs a form if it is to be useful to writers wanting to construct complex transgressive sexual characters. The beginnings of this framing are productively associated with the semiotic notion of ‘connotation’. This chapter explores what is meant by complexity in character construction and suggests a framing focused on character as an embodied being as a helpful starting-point for an episteme for characterological ‘perversion’. The chapter explores this as a non-foundationalist framing that transcends problematic Cartesian distinctions, concrete object materiality and woolly broad-stroke statements of a disembodied discursive constitution of social and personal experience.

If the Feiticeiro/a as a psychologically defined and complex character is to be seen as an embodied form/structure (not substance) that exists in dialectical relationships between self, other and discursive constructions of society, a clearer indication should be made about what kinds of behaviours or actions he/she should engage in. This chapter explores how psychiatric diagnostic criteria fail to provide assistance, despite professing to authoritatively mark stable, reliable and accurate epistemic boundaries to sexual activity. The chapter thereby addresses questions of the description of actions versus the demarcation of thoughts, objects, feelings and time as invisible and abstracted notions that are virtually the opposite of what is useful for an episteme for the Feiticeiro/a. It also approaches how the diagnostic criteria codify ‘perverse’ activity in determinist terms, thereby insidiously refusing an epistemic construct of action into which is built an acknowledgement of the behaviours of the Feiticeiro/a as a complex subjectivity.

Since Nell Shipman wrote and starred in Back to God's Country (1919), Canadian women have been making films. The accolades given to film-makers such as Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, When Night is Falling), Alanis Obomsawin (My Name Is Kahenttiiosta, Walker), and Micheline Lanctot (Deux Actrices) at festivals throughout the world in recent years attest to the growing international recognition for films made by Canadian women. With Gendering the Nation the editors have produced a definitive collection of essays, both original and previously published, that address the impact and influence of a century of women's film-making in Canada. In dialogue with new paradigms for understanding the relationship of cinema with nation and gender, Gendering the Nation seeks to situate women's cinema through the complex optic of national culture. This collection of critical essays employs a variety of frameworks to analyse cinematic practices that range from narrative to documentary to the avant garde.

How might certain moving images move us into transgender becoming? Th e recent proliferation of transgender images in the media of the Global North has been widely regarded as supporting transgender political and social equality.

Galt and Schoonover conceived and developed this book through a queer critical lens that invites questions and does not pretend to know—or desire to know—every possible outcome. Queer is neither adjective nor noun for Galt and Schoonover. Queer is a verb, and a transitive one at that. Queering the world and queering cinema studies are active processes in which Schoonover and Galt delight as theorists, historians, and consumers of media. To extend the travel metaphor a step further: they are intrepid, genial travel guides, and so much more.

This book looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic.

As a method of learning more about contemporary culture than written documentation in libraries can provide, some 10 years ago I began to make documentary films. These films and what they showed me became, afterwards, secondary objects of analysis. Learning from and theorizing what I learned by reconsidering my own films yielded insights brought forth by the people “in” them. This became an ongoing, spiraling form of analysis-theory dialectic, and since my own films are the subject of my examination, I call it auto-theory. The best example is my video installation Nothing Is Missing (2006–2010). Here, 17 mothers of migrants, all living in different countries, explain in their own language what happened to their lives when one or more of their children decided to leave. These videos document a relationship, but not the one between maker and subject. The maker, here, is rather a facilitator, and the relationship that is documented, the one between the mother and someone close to her that has been modified by the migration of a child, is transformed in the process. The videos document this transformation itself, in the performance of it. This performative transformation is the subject of my article – it is what is being documented in the films.

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