Living with Hollywood: British film policy and the definition of ‘nationality’

Focusing upon how a ‘national’ film has been historically defined in Britain, this article traces the history of legal definitions of a ‘British’ film and identifies some of the issues around nationality that these have raised. The article begins with a discussion of the introduction of quotas for ‘British’ films in the 1920s and the adoption of the Eady levy as a means of providing production finance to ‘British’ films in the post-war period. It then goes on to examine the introduction, in response to EU regulations governing the film industry, of a ‘Cultural Test’ for ‘British film’ in 2007 and to consider the way in which eligibility for tax reliefs has depended upon a film qualifying as ‘British’. In assessing whether the Cultural Test may be regarded as constituting a ‘break’ in British film policy in terms of a shift from economic to cultural objectives, the article not only indicates the manner in which cultural and economic objectives have been brought into alignment but also identifies how the definition of the ‘national’ for the purposes of tax relief has been designed to encourage ‘transnational’ Hollywood production within the UK. In doing so, the article also indicates how ‘national’ discourses and practices have continued to inform and structure the economic and cultural dynamics of contemporary ‘British’ cinema as well as engaging with, rather than necessarily standing in opposition to, ‘transnational’ and globalising trends.     

Policy and creative strategies: Hong Kong CEPA films in the China market

Abstract

This article examines the creative strategies of Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) films in engagements with the China market under the framework of CEPA introduced in 2004. One of the aims of CEPA for the film sector is to boost co-production between Hong Kong and the mainland. In the past 10 years, CEPA has dramatically changed Hong Kong cinema’s relationship with China in that major film directors have moved to produce CEPA films to tap into the rapidly growing mainland market. This shift has been considered as part of HKSAR’s overall mainlandization and subsequent disappearance of a distinct local identity. This article revisits this view by presenting two case studies to see if indeed Hong Kong CEPA pictures are devoid of Hong Kong elements. The case studies analyze textual elements of two CEPA blockbuster films, The Mermaid (dir. Stephen Chow, 2016) and The Taking of Tiger Mountain 3D (dir. Tsui Hark, 2014). Citing the intertextual allusions to the directors’ old works seen in these two films, the authors argue that the market advantage granted by the CEPA scheme in effect allowed Hong Kong filmmakers to revive and extend signature creative strategies of Hong Kong cinema, despite censorship constraints.     

Trapped in clichés: masculinity,films and tourism in Iceland

When the Icelandic television series ‘Trapped’ was aired it instantly garnered worldwide attention. The main character, a rugged Icelandic man, is presented as being one with the harsh cold landscape. This article demonstrates how visual materials, like ‘Trapped,’ have become extremely important in the presentation of Iceland to the outside world, as well as working to present Iceland as a tourism destination. Furthermore, we evidence how ‘Trapped’ identifies with the Nordic noir genre. Our analysis shows that the series ‘Trapped’ and recent Icelandic films rest on the strong and entrenched association of Icelandicness with maleness, while also reflecting on existing stereotypes about Iceland and the Icelandic people as being exotic, both of which have become reanimated through the tourism industry. Thus, visual material such as ‘Trapped’ constitutes a part of, and becomes in and of itself symbolic of recurrent masculinity in Iceland. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of framing the ‘official’ production of locations as tourism destinations by both state and commercial industries in relation to other cultural productions that often also engage with mobile historical stereotyping and commercial attempts at nation branding.     

Love & loss in the 1960s

Roland Barthes observed that though there is a ‘lover's discourse’ shared by all those who are in love, it is a discourse ignored or disparaged by ‘surrounding languages’. Concerned that the discourse of heritage may participate in this closure against the ‘in love’ experience, I begin to explore ways the field of heritage studies might start speaking this language. Specifically, I ponder the ways that a young Chinese woman in the film Days of being wild, following the breakup of a love affair, becomes locked in a landscape of lost love that is populated with objects sticky with affect, objects which although they transmit painful affects nevertheless bind her by a dynamic that Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. I then turn to imagine the way a Balinese house compound gateway might, in a similar way, have become impregnated with affects relating to victims of the 1965–1966 killings in Bali and how, for those left behind, it might assume the ability to ‘presence’ a lost one. Archaeology and heritage studies have great potential to foster empathy with the experience of past others, but this calls for a sophisticated understanding of how objects become imbued with affect and how they transmit it.     

Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony

The author argues that in the burgeoning new literature about social memory anthropologists have not yet contributed all that they might. In particular, little has been written from an anthropological point of view about memory and film. The article seeks to examine the possible roles of documentary film in memory transmission. During the twentieth century, film and video became increasingly important vehicles of memory, while the digital revolution has made video such a pervasive medium in the new century that it will become more and more vital as a source of historical evidence and reflection. While the evidence presented by visually recorded interviews certainly requires critical evaluation, there is no reason to suppose that recorded interviews are any less reliable than texts; they may in fact offer clues that a text cannot. Some of the most interesting films of memory are the work of independent filmmakers engaged in a courageous personal quest to break officially imposed silences. The article examines the potential of film to preserve memories as trace—that is, as a form of historical evidence; as event—testifying itself being a performative act which generates its own meanings and demands a dialogical engagement with/by an audience; and as trajectory—for individual memories must be transmitted in order to become social. As they are launched into the flow of collective memory, they have a chance to endure over time, multiplying available perspectives on the past. Films of memory are thus part of the struggle against the forgetting of past injustices, and ultimately have the potential to contribute to shifts in our interpretations of history.     

The Magnus-Rademaker Scientific Film Collection: Ethical Issues on Animal Experimentation (1908–1940)

The Magnus-Rademaker scientific film collection (1908–1940) deals with the physiology of body posture by the equilibrium of reflex musculature contractions for which experimental studies were carried out with animals (e.g., labyrinthectomies, cerebellectomies, and brain stem sections) as well as observations done on patients. The films were made for demonstrations at congresses as well as educational objectives and film stills were published in their books. The purpose of the present study is to position these films and their makers within the contemporary discourse on ethical issues and animal rights in the Netherlands and the earlier international debates. Following an introduction on animal rights and antivivisection movements, we describe what Magnus and Rademaker thought about these issues. Their publications did not provide much information in this respect, probably reflecting their adherence to implicit ethical codes that did not need explicit mentioning in publications. Newspaper articles, however, revealed interesting information. Unnecessary suffering of an animal never found mercy in Magnus’ opinion. The use of cinematography was expanded to the reduction of animal experimentation in student education, at least in the case of Rademaker, who in the 1930s was involved in a governmental committee for the regulation of vivisection and cooperated with the antivivisection movement. This resulted not only in a propaganda film for the movement but also in films that demonstrate physiological experiments for students with the purpose to avert repetition and to improve the teaching of experiments. We were able to identify the pertinent films in the Magnus-Rademaker film collection. The production of vivisection films with this purpose appears to have been common, as is shown in news messages in European medical journals of the period.     

Just this Once: urban Ireland in film

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements – replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones – the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannán na hÉireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalism's cultural flattening.     

Cultural globalization and the dominance of the American film industry: cultural policies,national film industries,and transnational film

The global film market is a strategic site for examining the global influence of American media culture. Using a database compiled by the European Audiovisual Observatory, I show that the global film market consists of 34 countries that produce over 25 films per year. Thirty-two countries produce less than 26 films. The countries that produce over 25 films per year were categorized as Super Producers (four countries), Major Producers (seven countries), Medium Producers (11 countries), and Minor Producers (12 countries). Lists of top 10 films in these countries show that US films dominate, followed by local films. A discussion of national cultural policies shows that film policy contributes to the success of national film industries but does not enable them to challenge US dominance. Hollywood’s need for global box office receipts has led to changes in the content of Hollywood film toward deculturized, transnational films, a trend that is also evident in other countries.     

The pleasures of the chase: a motif in Digenes Akrites

Abstract

Thanks to the work of Stylianos Alexiou, the Escorial version of Digenes Akrites (hereafter ‘E’;) has taken its rightful place as part of the heroic poetry of medieval Christendom. Even if the claim for E's priority over the Grottaferrata version (G) does not meet with universal acceptance, E is at least in the field as an alternative. There are, perhaps, three main types of argument against the priority of G. The first is that the linguistic idiom betrays a second-order, solecistic ‘translation’ of a work in a less learned language; the second is that E has preserved proper names, military terms and so on which derive from the Eastern borders and which have been lost in G. Both of these have been expounded by Alexiou in some detail. A third type of argument might concentrate on what we may call the ethos of the E version as distinct from that of G, and one small detail of this is the subject of this note.     

Professor Camillo Negro’s Neuropathological Films

Camillo Negro, Professor in Neurology at the University of Torino, was a pioneer of scientific film. From 1906 to 1908, with the help of his assistant Giuseppe Roasenda and in collaboration with Roberto Omegna, one of the most experienced cinematographers in Italy, he filmed some of his patients for scientific and educational purposes. During the war years, he continued his scientific film project at the Military Hospital in Torino, filming shell-shocked soldiers. In autumn 2011, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, in partnership with the Faculty of Neurosciences of the University of Torino, presented a new critical edition of the neuropathological films directed by Negro. The Museum’s collection also includes 16 mm footage probably filmed in 1930 by Doctor Fedele Negro, Camillo’s son. One of these films is devoted to celebrating the effects of the so-called “Bulgarian cure” on Parkinson’s disease.     

古代壁画、彩绘显现剂应用机理和性能研究

针对粘结硬质、钙化土锈的壁画和彩绘在保护修复中使用的去除剂和显现加固剂复合应用后对其性能进行了研究测试。从光学角度对明胶膜和加样后膜折射率进行测试,对土锈剩余层粒径与厚度进行测试,又从耐久性、柔韧性等方面对两种试剂复合用的模拟壁画进行了系统评价。结果表明:两种膜的折射率几乎相同,当土锈剩余层粒径在120μm以内,厚度在70μm内的土粒都可以通过显现加固剂进行显现,恢复其古朴原貌,且不触及颜料层。复合应用后对模拟样板老化后性能测试,数据显示各方面性能良好。     

Translation And The Colonial Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist

Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth–century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères , the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post–colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation–in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields."     

Empire,Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

This article examines efforts by a range of British visitors to produce ‘home movies’ or amateur film of Kenya from 1928 to 1972, and attempts by both the British film-makers and Kenyans to navigate and influence this production. By bringing cine-cameras to Kenya to record images to be consumed back in the metropole by family and friends as ‘holiday films’, these British visitors laid bare what a number of historians have identified as the ‘imperial gaze’ that defined both colonial and post-colonial conceptions of Africa. Colonialism’s obsession with ordering and positioning bodies within a projected image of power and control made cinema the perfect vessel for such an exercise, while amateur film, with its often clumsy framing and highly personal interaction between the film-maker and the film subject, grants us unique insight into the sometimes coercive, transactional and forced efforts involved in projecting such an image. The amateur films that sit at the centre of this article, which were produced by British visitors to Kenya both before and after independence, offers us the opportunity to examine the wide range of behaviours of both the film-maker and the filmed which underpinned the production of repetitive imperial image-making in colonial and post-colonial Kenya.     

Shooting the Isolation and Marginality of Masculinities in Iranian Cinema

This article examines the isolation and marginality of Iranian men living in contemporary Iran with a focus on three post-2005 films. As a patriarchal society, Iran has been the subject of many studies on the subjugation and marginality of women. This study demonstrates how recent Iranian films have skillfully employed the cinematic language to narrate men’s stories of alienation and despair. These filmic constructions provide a valuable and complex insight into masculine identities, challenging perceptions of the essentialized image of the Middle Eastern male. By employing Connell’s hierarchy of masculinities, the article demonstrates the position of marginalized men in relation to the dominant ideals of masculinity and the influence of these discourses on the lives of such men. The films discussed here do not perpetuate the construction of the ‘true’ gender, but instead challenge ideas of heroism, manliness and patriarchy.     

论文化差异对英汉翻译的影响

翻译是一种语际交流活动,是两种语言之间的转换。中西两种不同的文化在多方面存在着明显差异,这种文化差异直接影响着对英、汉语的翻译。作为一名翻译工作者,必须加强对不同语言文化差异的理解和研究,提高双语的文化修养,使翻译真正成为不同文化间交流的桥梁。     

EMOTIONAL TRANSLATIONS: CONCEPTUAL HISTORY BEYOND LANGUAGE

Conceptual history is a useful tool for writing the history of emotions. The investigation of how a community used emotion words at certain times and in certain places allows us to understand specific emotion knowledge without being trapped by universalism. But conceptual history is also an inadequate tool for writing the history of emotions. Its exclusive focus on language fails to capture the meanings that can be derived from emotional expressions in other media such as painting, music, architecture, film, or even food. Here emotion history can contribute to a rethinking of conceptual history, bringing the body and the senses back in. This article proposes a theoretical model to expand conceptual history beyond language by exploring three processes of emotional translation: First, how the translation between reality and its interpretation is mediated by the body and the senses. Second, how translations between different media and sign systems shape and change the meanings of concepts. Third, how concepts translate into practices that have an impact on reality. The applicability of the model is not limited to the research on concepts of emotion; the article argues that emotions have a crucial role in all processes of conceptual change. The article further suggests that historicizing concepts can best be achieved by reconstructing the relations that actors have created between elements within multimedial semantic nets. The approach will be exemplified by looking at the South Asian concept of the monsoon and the emotional translations between rain and experiences of love and romance.     

Men and the Desert: Contested masculinities In Ice Cold in Alex

This article explores the relationship between space, identity and film through the war film genre and in particular Ice Cold in Alex (1958). Although war films have suffered particular neglect by geographers, their appeal is enduring, helping to shape British national identity and popular constructions of masculinity. Through an analysis and critique of the film, this article makes two interconnected points. First, it highlights the value of film to geographers as a creative medium in which spaces and identities are imagined, (re)created, contested and negotiated. Second, it brings recent work on masculinities to bear on a detailed examination of Ice Cold to illustrate how war films have produced and sustained a specific unconventional form of heroic masculine British national identity through the passage of an ‘off-road’ movie. Here we demonstrate that masculinities are forged not only in the maelstrom of power interrelationships between men and other men and between men and women, but also importantly in relation to the landscape, in this example the desert as other. This glimpse allows us to challenge hegemonic norms as well as the construction of the desert as an active agent in the co-construction of the main characters' identities.     

新闻英语的特点及翻译

新闻是最新事实的报道,它是大众媒体中扮演着一个很重要的角色即吸引观众的注意并向之传送正在发生的时间的信息。从语言上说,新闻英语文体属于普通英语,即标准英语的主体层,但是它的词汇、标题和概括性导语又具有特别鲜明的特点,即新颖、生动、紧凑。全文主要从三个方面阐述了论题。文章首先介绍了新闻英语的概念、词汇及其翻译;其次从词汇、写作、修辞和文体等方面分析了新闻英语的语言特色。文章最后还从新闻英语的翻译来进一步反映新闻英语的特点。掌握英语新闻的语言特色可使我们更好地加以运用,使新闻文采顿生,加强主题思想表达的力度,渲染气氛,增添文章的趣味性。