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.     

A Land and a People of Extremes – Ireland and the Irish in German Cinema

Irish film history has often been seen as a pragmatic “creative bricolage” that draws almost exclusively on images of Ireland and Irishness that have emanated from the cinema industries of the USA and the United Kingdom. Yet, Ireland has also featured in the film industries of other non-Anglophone countries and the images produced in these contexts also represent an element within the vast and extensive archive of Irish filmic images. This article writes the first chapter in the expansion of Irish film history by examining the depiction of Ireland and Irishness in German film. Ireland and the Irish, not unlike the Anglo-American gaze, are depicted as a people and a land of extremes marked by an intensity of emotion, nationalism, Catholicism and alcohol, while extremes of poverty and wild untameable landscapes also feature prominently.     

Decolonial encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: indigeneity,coevalness and intercultural dialogue

This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining how the film deconstructs colonialist imagery and discourses, and engages with the notion and cinematic representation of indigeneity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article identifies and discusses the strategies employed in the film to decolonise the category of the ‘Indian’: challenging the colonial linguistic of domination and undermining the tropes of imperialist representations; staging and re-enacting colonial encounters; and subverting the power relations embedded in colonialist ethnography. The article argues that El abrazo de la serpiente acts as an instrument of political and cultural inquiry into the past and the present, and that it both proposes and enacts interculturalidad and intercultural dialogue as a cinematic approach to native culture. While the notion of indigeneity at play is not unproblematic, the film succeeds in foregrounding Indigenous points of view and ‘points of hearing’, challenging a Eurocentric politics of recognition and evolutionary epistemology in favour of a ‘coevalness’ of the native.     

From Paper to Celluloid and Back Again: Finance and Form in Jorge Délano’s Films

This essay argues that our current understanding of the cinematic work by the pioneering Chilean film director Jorge Délano obscures a sophisticated interaction between politics, art and economics, one that reveals unexamined aspects of how the film industry developed in Chile. Most notably, it argues that Délano’s illustrated political satire magazine Topaze was central to the development of early sound cinema in the country. Following Rielle Navitski, the essay utilizes and examines tensions between models drawn from periodical studies and the concepts of remediation and intermediality in film studies. Examining illustrations from the first three years of Topaze’s production (1931–1933) in the context of the country’s economic situation, the essay argues that Délano remediated cinema in Topaze as a strategy of capital accumulation. This analysis also makes it possible to see how one of his sound films, Escándalo (1940), similarly remediated the illustrated paper periodical as he pursued financing for the production of cinematic commodities for export. The essay ends by examining the relationship between these issues and the political situation in early Cold War Chile.     

Ghostliness in Asian Diasporic Film and Literature

This paper examines the ways in which tropes of ghostliness and haunting are deployed in three recent books to describe the cultural effects of globalisation, modernisation and transnational movement in contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic film and literature.     

War,Modernity, and Motion in the Edison Films of 1898

This essay examines films created by the Edison Company of the US military campaign in the Caribbean in 1898 and their projection and reception in Vaudeville theaters and other similar venues in the larger urban areas of the US. Through an analysis of these films in regards to their production and reception contexts, it discusses relationships between entertainment, nationalism, and colonialism in this early cinema. Features foregrounding technology, production capacity, tourism, and military campaigns in tropical settings are examined in order to explore the blurred boundaries between journalism and entertainment in the context and how specifically the technology of the incipient cinema shaped these perceptions. The venues, in which they were exhibited, situated these war films within larger variety shows including oddities, acrobats, skits, and musical entertainment, together with technological exhibitions involving devices revered for both their destructive and constructive capabilities. It considers, furthermore, how tourism and the possibilities for travel related to the war shaped entertainment and dialogued with public desires regarding American empire and the roles of the Caribbean and, by relation, Latin America in these scenarios. The essay seeks to underscore, finally, how these films, and the war that they attempt to depict, resonated deeply with a type of audience and a corresponding mode of spectatorship that would come to expect an entertaining dimension in journalism.     

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Grudgingly Accept Product Placement: Nicolás López,Chilewood and Criteria for A Neoliberal Cinema

This essay examines the films of Chilewood, a collaboration between Chilean director Nicolás López and U.S. director Eli Roth and which is based in Santiago, Chile. Chilewood’s films underscore a stylistic fragmentation in contemporary Chilean cinema, which largely rests on a distinction between genre cinema and auteur cinema. Within the Chilewood endeavour, Chile serves as a node of production for genre cinema (romantic comedies, comedies, disaster films, thrillers, horror) for both domestic audiences and international audiences. While Chilewood’s films provide an instance to examine different forms of transnationalism through production, financing and content, these same facets can be assessed for their neoliberal aspects that vary with each production.     

Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert

The cinematic landscape provides a rich opportunity to explore cultural representations of place, space and nature. This essay focuses on the depiction of landscape in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 ). Previous approaches to the critical interpretation of landscape in the cinema of Antonioni have been characterized by three principal weaknesses: a narrow emphasis on formalist and auterist lines of influence between different branches of the visual arts; an attachment to exceptionalist characterizations of the Italian cinematic landscape; and a transhistorical interpretation of existential themes such as alienation. In this essay we shall consider two neglected themes: the significance of the technological sublime for the aesthetic experience of industrial landscapes; and the impact of abstract expressionism on Antonioni's cinematic vision. We will counter simplistic categorizations of Antonioni's work by considering the complexity of the relationship between the cinematic landscape and wider developments in twentieth-century modernism. The essay concludes by locating Red Desert at a unique juncture in the development of modernist conceptions of nature and landscape.