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A discussion of authorship, relating to the feminist study of the role of women in early cinema.

Inventions have their greatest impact when they go beyond their possible practical applications and act upon the imagination. When Martin Behaim invented the first globe in 1490, a functionally useless object consisting mostly of terra incognita, he was widely ridiculed; but somehow the ideas that his globe represented stuck, and within a few decades the basic validity of his construction was confirmed by the voyages of Columbus, Cabot, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and others. Today, with efforts to situate the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, in the context of globalization, there is a similar division between those who dismiss it as being of no importance and those who see in it a looming (for good or ill) global revolution. But, as with Behaim's globe, the imaginary possibilities of these innovations are important in determining how and to what extent human existence is to be transformed by them

The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways. Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Migrating to the Movies begins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early "race films" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.

Transference, Tradition, Technology explores Canadian Aboriginal new media and references the work of artists within a political, cultural and aesthetic milieu. The book constructs a Native art history relating to these disciplines, one that is grounded in the philosophical and cosmological foundations of Aboriginal concepts of community and identity within the rigour of contemporary arts discourse. Approachable in nature but scholarly in content, this book is the first of its kind. A text book for students and teachers of Canadian Aboriginal history and visual and media art, and a source for writers, scholars and historians, Transference, Tradition, Technology is co-produced with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton; and Indigenous Media Arts Group, Vancouver.

Globalization has intensified interconnectivity among television industries worldwide. Interconnectivity happens through structural and institutional linkages among television systems and industries worldwide, resulting in an increasingly integrated global business governed by similar practices and goals. The dynamics are reflected in the popularity of television formats. On the surface, global dissemination of formats may suggest not only the global integration of the economy of the industry but also the standardization of content. A dozen media companies are able to do business worldwide by selling the same idea, and audiences seem to be watching national variations of the same show. At a deeper level, however, formats attest to the fact that television still remains tied to local and national cultures. Bringing up examples of Latin American cases, this article argues that television is simultaneously global and national, shaped by the globalization of media economics and the pull of local and national cultures.

Conçu comme un discours et non comme un simple référent géographique, le Nord se déploie dans des formes littéraires et culturelles qui en déterminent les particularités. Pluriculturel, variable selon les époques, les lieux et les points de vue, le Nord ouvre des problématiques sur les liens entre le référent et la représentation, entre le discours et l'imaginaire. Qu'il soit scandinave, québécois, finlandais, inuit ou européen, qu'il se manifeste dans les récits, les films, les romans, la poésie, la photographie ou les arts visuels, qu'il soit le lieu d'une dénonciation post-coloniale ou d'un discours impérialiste, d'une recherche formelle ou de l'expression de la culture populaire, le discours du Nord et sur le Nord converge en des paradigmes et des problématiques qui lui sont propres. Dans ce recueil, issu des travaux du Laboratoire international d'étude multidisciplinaire comparée des représentations du Nord et initié par la tenue d'un colloque organisé en décembre 2003 par Joël Bouchard et Amélie Nadeau, le lecteur trouvera quelques pistes d'analyse pour saisir la complexité du système discursif du Nord, réparties en trois sections intitulées: «Formes et intertextualité», «Territoires», ainsi que «Iconographie, voyages, et cinéma».

Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the 'Brown Atlantic' through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, Monsoon Wedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.

The Velvet Light Trap 53 (2004) 26-39 On December 2, 2001, HBO began airing Project Greenlight, a twelve-part documentary series chronicling the production of a feature film by novice writer-director Pete Jones. With its spectacle of backroom dealings, unchecked egos, and human frailties, the television series capitalized on the contemporaneous success of like-minded "reality" programs such as Survivor and Temptation Island. Perhaps more closely, Project Greenlight also tapped into the current vogue for the "behind-the-scenes" and the "making-of" genres, represented by straight-to-video titles such as Star Trek-Deep Space Nine: Behind the Scenes (1993), Making of Jurassic Park (1995), and The Matrix Revisited (2001), television programs such as the Sundance Channel's Anatomy of a Scene, HBO's First Look, and MTV's Making the Video, and the proliferation of behind-the-scenes and making-of packaging on DVDs. A reflection of the growth of film-related ancillary products in the 1980s, the ever-expanding Hollywood ego, and the demands of a twenty-four-hour television cable market, the increased appearance of the making-of documentary format no doubt also reflects the renewed interest in amateur filmmaking promulgated by the age of desktop video. Perhaps as a manifestation of this interest, making-of documentaries have become increasingly more detailed in their coverage. Whereas the 1981 television special The Making of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (Phillip Schuman) focuses mostly on the film's stunt work, special effects, location shoots, and set design, the recently released making-of documentary The Matrix Revisited focuses on script development, preproduction, production, postproduction, and exhibition, introducing viewers to costume designers, storyboard artists, and editors along the way. This attention to production detail can also be seen in Sundance's Anatomy of a Scene, which hones in on the construction, from music to costume to camera work, of a single scene. And certainly raising the bar on the level of detail included in the making-of genre is Project Greenlight, which is a "warts-and-all" look at film production, from squabbles over budgets to catering fiascos. Despite the making-of video's increased attention to the minutiae of filmmaking, one of the areas that remains outside the purview of most Hollywood making-of documentaries is the production of sex. Discussions about the cinematic logistics of creating a sex scene—how, when, and with what resources—are usually not featured in making-of documentaries. Of course, given our celebrity-driven culture, the question of sex vis-à-vis film production, particularly a Hollywood film production, is hardly absent from the publicity that surrounds a film. It is not uncommon to hear actresses or actors discussing what it was like to kiss another actor on the set. But these kinds of concerns are usually the province of entertainment magazines and television, not the province of ancillary related products such as the making-of video. While stories of roles requiring nudity or sex scenes abound on television shows such as Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, and E! News Daily,these kinds of topics are less likely to appear in production-generated documentaries. Indeed, while the production of the provocative sex scene between Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in Monster's Ball (Marc Forster, 2001) generated much discussion on television entertainment programs, talk shows, and newsmagazines, it was the film's prison execution sequence that was featured in the Sundance Channel's making-of special on the film. Given the lack of focus on sex scenes in most making-of documentaries, it is interesting to note that the two existing making-of documentaries for lesbian-made, lesbian-themed feature films—The Making of Bar Girls (1995) and Moments: The Making of Claire of the Moon (1992)—both heavily focus on the production of lesbian sex. Moreover, both lesbian making-of documentaries emphasize the cast's and the crew's sexual titillation over the creation of sexual sequences. In this essay I look at what this strategy reveals about the collective climate and concerns of lesbian feature filmmaking in the United States today.

This article begins with an analysis of the problems of ‘physical repatriation’, as I review the case of the return of a First Nations mask to its community of origin. First Nations struggle to fit their concepts of ownership into western ones, where objects are viewed as alienable. As an alternative, the art of John Powell and Marianne Nicolson depicts a ‘figurative repatriation’ that does not rely on either the courts or museums to recognize legal or moral ownership. I argue that these contemporary artworks are social agents, which bring First Nations cultural objects home by staking out territory within museums. These ‘artist warriors’ forcibly recover (both literally and metaphorically) First Nations objects on display in foreign settings and reinscribe meaning at the level of the personal and the communal. They make objectified assertions of native identity that reclaim the right to self-definition. Moreover, these claims are made all the more powerful through their conscious location within an oppositional discourse framed by the Canadian western art world.

« Tantôt présents ou documents figurés, tantôt considérés comme de la monnaie, les wampums sont des colliers de perles fabriquées de coquillages marins qui étaient utilisés par les Indiens du Nord-Est de l'Amérique et les Européens. Si des milliers de wampums sont cités dans les archives coloniales, peu d'entre eux sont parvenus jusqu'à nous et la tradition de leur échange a depuis longtemps cessé d'être pratiquée. Les wampums du Musée de la civilisation de Québec ont été acquis à la fin du XIXe siècle dans un contexte particulier où collectionneurs et numismates s'arrachaient les objets amérindiens et où ceux-ci, pour diverses raisons, acceptaient de s'en départir. Cette collection n'avait jamais été étudiée, ni par les historiens, ni par les ethnologues ou par les muséologues. Par un raisonnement critique, en avançant toujours avec prudence et sans jamais céder à la simplification, Jonathan C. Lainey soulève les difficultés et les problèmes reliés à leur étude et à leur interprétation. Il reconstitue méticuleusement les différentes étapes de la vie des objets, leur muséification et le sens qu'on peut leur donner aujourd'hui. Plus qu'une simple étude sur les wampums, cet ouvrage a le mérite de porter un regard sur certaines réalités historiques relatives à la culture matérielle d'un groupe amérindien de la région de Québec, les Hurons de Lorette. Ce sont le rapport à l'Autre, les processus d'appropriation et les transferts culturels qui sont abordés par l'étude de la transformation de l'usage des wampums, devenus aujourd'hui objets de musée. Reposant sur une ethnographie et une iconographie riches et détaillées, ce livre constitue une contribution importante aux études ethnohistoriques et aux études amérindiennes de l'Amérique du Nord-Est. »-- Résumé de l'éditeur.

The immediate aim of this chapter is to provide a critical overview of the place of lesbian films within New Queer Cinema. The task is not an easy one in a field which is as contentious as it is broad. The main difficulty seems to be how best to approach a range of definitions, from ‘new’ to ‘queer’ to ‘lesbian’, since with every one of them, we risk biting off more than we can chew. As often happens with formal titles, so with the New Queer Cinema, its lifespan (‘officially’ 1992-2000) now seems to have been a great deal shorter

In 1989, three years before the New Queer Wave was even invented or discovered, two very different yet interconnected films were produced on either side of the Atlantic. Both soon became critically successful and both would win a number of prizes at different international film festivals and venues. In retrospect, these two films have come to constitute the very incitement to the Wave. British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston premiered in early 1989 and American filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied premiered later that same year, the latter including a still photo from the former so as to pay homage

Hong Kong is famous internationally as a financial market, a shopping paradise, and Chinese film production hub, but notoriously (and perhaps even attractively for some) Hong Kong is also a hotbed of piracy of computer software, DVDs, watches and toys.1 While many cultural products such as television dramas and movies are original and quite reputable in the region, media critics argue that the copycat phenomenon, which includes borrowing, inserting and modifying other cultural texts to augment local production, is common in the media and entertainment industries (Fung 1998). Whenever a new form, style, or popular culture trend emerges in Hong Kong, market forces soon kick in to replicate it. However, this kind of reproduction, as shown by the history of cultural production in Hong Kong, does not necessarily lead to a degradation of programme quality. Reproduction is not only a savvy strategy to reduce the financial risks inherent to new products, but also aims at producing ‘improved’ versions which can reap more profits for the industry.

In March 2001 a Japanese newspaper report entitled ‘Indians are addicted to a quiz show’ drew attention to a phenomenally popular television programme in India – a quiz show that attracts millions of viewers in which challengers strive to win prize money (Asahi Shinbun 2001). What was particularly eye-catching for the journalist was the profligately decorated studio set located in Mumbai (Bombay) and the caring guidance of the MC, a film star famous in India. The name of the show, as you might have already inferred, was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

Unlike smaller nation-states in this study the People’s Republic of China has never really countenanced a scarcity of domestic television content. Supply has been constant, indicating both the importance and the sheer size of the sector. The nationalized broadcast media has for several decades churned out cheaply produced films, documentaries, dramas, and news programmes. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, audience demand for domestic content began to wane as more as more international programmes found their way into schedules, particularly in southern China. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001 seemed to herald soul-searching among its media mandarins. What would happen? Would China be inundated by foreign content (the worst case scenario) or would China, as it has done over time, absorb and regulate foreign influences?

The previous chapter introduced in broad brushstrokes the issues at stake in this study, beginning with a critique of globalization and moving on to sketch in finer detail national television systems, the role of local content, and the economic importance of formats. The chapter concluded with a brief overview of the vagaries of copyright law as it applies to formats. Here, we initiate a discussion of Asian television systems beginning with a much different perspective on the ramifications of cultural borrowing. In this context we note that the format business straddles the divide between creative endeavour and innovation on the one hand, and slavish imitation on the other. This polarization manifests in widespread misunderstanding of the goals of format producers and distributors, and the role that formats play in the shaping of television schedules. We need therefore to flesh out the in-between issues. These are primarily concerned with the relationship between the format and its localization, television consumption within ‘cultural continents’, and changes in media systems. Taking this further we note the relationship between production and reception within Asia, the growth of television industries in the region and the relationship between formatting and new media distribution platforms that use interactive technologies allowing viewers to feedback responses. This exercise enables us to identify an alternative list of conceptual tools to those championed by political economy scholars.

From time to time certain television shows ‘stop the nation’. In 2002 the localized version of the Celador licensed format2 Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? glued over a third of Indonesian television households to their screens at 7pm on Saturday nights.3 Is it the vicarious thrill of winning undreamed-of riches in a country which has been the slowest to recover from the Asian economic crisis of 1997 that attracts the audience? Circuses without bread? Perhaps, but this phenomenon is probably not profoundly related to local matters. We need look no further than the thin, phosphor coated screen. Millionaire, as it is referred to in television circles in Jakarta, is entertaining television. As other chapters testify, it has wowed viewers in countries in very varied economic circumstances. Millionaire is just one of a number of quiz and game show formats screening across all channels in Indonesia and is representative of the core business of international format providers in Indonesia which has been growing steadily since 1994.

Television has been called ‘a Western-originated project’ (Barker 1997: 5) and an institution of Western capitalist modernity. The global circulation of Western-centred, or more specifically, American-centred cultural products, contributes to the formation and dissemination of a global shared culture that reaches across the boundaries of nation-states. In the process American cultural products play a role in the formation of local television cultures.

Taiwan residents enjoy one of the most abundant television diets in East Asia. Eighty per cent of households subscribe to cable television services, offering a buffet of more than eighty channels including niche and full service channels. Taiwan’s television industry, while relatively small in comparison with its competitors in East Asia, has established a reputation for creatively re-generating formats developed elsewhere.