Sunday, 7 October 2012

New JUMP CUT: gender, globalization, Third Cinema, history, political activism, racial representation, cinematic form, melodrama, genre, new media, and media institutions

Frame grab from La nación clandestina/The Hidden Nation (Jorge Sanjinés, 1989). Read a great selection of new and translated articles on this Bolivian filmmaker among the numerous essays just published in the latest issue of JUMP CUT
Film Studies For Free welcomes with wide open e-arms the fabulous new issue of JUMP CUT. Just look at all that high quality content, the links to which stretch out below, almost as far as the mouse can scroll.  

JUMP CUT truly goes from strength to strength with its focus on contemporary and international cinema, media, aesthetics, reception and politics. FSFF hasn't digested the entire issue yet, but so far particularly likes the dossier on Third Cinema filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés, Ian Murphy's article on two films by Claire Denis, and Diane Waldman's very thoughtful review of Vicki Callahan's important edited collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History together with Suzanne Leonard's great study of Fatal Attraction.

Its brilliant and hardworking editors -- John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage -- deserve our admiration and sincere thanks for all the excellent, politically and ethically engaged research they help to bring into the public domain in our disciplines. Their stance and efforts are as crucial now as they have ever been.

Finally, in the week that brought the very sad news of the death of Octavio Getino, best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación as well as for elaborating with Solanas and others the notion of Third Cinema, and in memory of this great film theorist and practitioner, interested readers might like to be reminded of FSFF's earlier related entries (see below), which contain links to numerous, past JUMP CUT offerings, and also check out Michael Chanan's tribute to Getino and historian Eric Hobsbawm here.


THE FIRST WORD
ASIAN CINEMA AND TV DRAMA
  • “Family” in Li Yang’s Blind Shaft and Blind Mountain by Amanda Weiss. A look at globalization and the family in Li Yang's migrant films Blind Shaft (2003) and Blind Mountain (2007).
  • Migrant workers, women, and China’s modernization on screen 
by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau.
 Even though China's migrant workers constitute the biggest human migration in the world at this time the life circumstances of these workers receive little attention in Chinese cinema. This article explores how visual media, including installation arts, documentary films, and narrative films expose the often neglected issues of women migrants.
  • Defining the popular auteur, or what it means to be human within the machine 
by Caroline Guo.
 Review of Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film by Stephen Teo. 
Stephen Teo tackles Johnnie To’s multifaceted role in the Hong Kong film industry: this review picks up where his monograph leaves off to grapple with the filmmaker’s ongoing evolution and rethink the notion of the “popular auteur.”
  • Negotiating censorship: Narrow Dwelling as social critique
 by Wing Shan Ho.
 Housing crisis and extra-marital affair—this essay explores how the TV drama Narrow Dwelling skillfully critiques social inequalities under the censor’s eye.
  • Digital pleasure palaces: Bollywood seduces the global Indian at the multiplex 
by Manjunath Pendakur. 
Malls, multiplexes and digital cinemas are symbols of the fast-modernizing, neoliberal India of the 21st century and, in these turbulent conditions, Bollywood is expanding its audiences at home and abroad while the political-economic-technological changes have resulted in new conflicts and a reshaping of the film industry's internal structure and operation.
  • Chokher Bali: a historico-cultural translation of Tagore
 by Srimati Mukherjee
. Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh challenges the moribund aspects of cultural tradition and shows that mobilization in and out of the “fixed” space of the widow is possible.
LATIN AMERICAN MEDIA
Articles on Bolivian filmmaker, Jorge Sanjinés
  • Andean realism and the integral sequence shot 
by David M.J. Wood. 
Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés’ radical film theory and praxis: an Andean take on the critique of mainstream cinema and the redemptive power of realism.
  • The impossibility of mestizaje in The Hidden Nation: 
emblematic constructions in the cinema of Jorge Sanjinés
 by Alber Quispe Escobar, translated with explanatory notes by Keith John Richards.
  • The all-encompassing sequence shot
by Jorge Sanjinés, translated by Cecilia Cornejo and Dennis Hanlon.
Jorge Sanjinés' 1989 essay explains the development of the "Andean sequence shot" and why it is consonant with indigenous Andean concepts of community and time. A key piece of Third Cinema theory never before translated into English.
  • The “new” and the “old” in Bolivian cinema
 by Verónica Córdova S., translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. 
Verónica Córdova S. remarks on the motivations of the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 60s as contrasted with current trends and concerns of present-day Bolivian filmmakers. Using the films of Jorge Sanjinés as a model, Córdova explains how new technological advances in filmmaking are influencing Bolivian film production, while, hopefully, remaining in dialogue with the past generation of filmmakers.
  • A cinema of questions: a response to Verónica Córdova 
by Martín Boulocq, translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. 
Martín Boulocq responds to Verónica Córdova's comments regarding the motivation of past and present Bolivian filmmakers, offering an entirely unique perspective on what motivates filmmakers to make films.
  • Insurgentes: the slight return of Jorge Sanjinés 
by Keith John Richards.
 Jorge Sanjinés’ most recent film, Insurgentes, has aroused differences of opinion within Bolivia; this review examines the film in the context of recent developments in the country.
THEMES IN HOLLYWOOD AND OTHER CINEMAS
1. Race/ethnicity
2. The Mideast
3. History
4. Institutions: Law, Production, Exhibition
5. Queering the entertainment
DOCUMENTARY
EXPERIMENTAL and NEW MEDIA
CRITICAL ANALYSES
THE LAST WORD

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