Cinema South III

Journal of Philosophy, Culture and Religion, 2018

Cinema has introduced new approaches of expression for contemporary philosophy, that is inherited by Nietzsche, by departing from philosophy to meet the non-philosophic. Going to graphic museums or to cinema is a pivotal moment in order to encounter a particular concept; cinematic signs express ideas not only in the form of scenes, colours, lines of drawing, but also in the form of musical sounds. To understand a concept is no more and no less easy than watching a film, as a result, we will try through this article to address the importance of cinematic discourse and the relationship with the other , through the cinema of the Third World. In other words, how can cinematic art draw a new relationship with the other, opening up this relationship to what the self and the closed circles of identity are?. And how to address the subject of the other in international cinema. Keywords : Philosophy, third-world cinema, the Other, Liberation

Studies in Documentary Film, 2019

Critical Arts, 2018

The civil rights movement in the USA offers sites of struggle for access, equality, and power related to racialised spaces. This article discusses documentary film's potential to journey into and assess this significant social movement through a Thirdspace perspective, motivated by the documentary film Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue and guided by a collaborative ethnographic process. Central Avenue, a primarily black-owned business district that thrived as a physical space in Tampa, Florida, until 1974, is the impetus to utilise Thirdspace. A redesigned city park, reopened in 2016, memorialises the community to form a new racialised identity. Connecting past and present, this offers an intervening space of innovative possibility to explore hope and despair, collaboration and contestation, and the lived and imagined realities of the community. Through the documentary film, Central Avenue serves as a space to analyse civil rights locally and emerges as a symbolic battlefield of historical and social forces connected to segregation. Documentary film as visual art provides a vehicle to understand a racialised community through a collective lens of place, space, and race, and to recreate Central Avenue as a thematic thread of black life in Tampa, produced through a trialectic Thirdspace approach.

Dastavezi. The Audio-Visual South Asia (1), 2019

This is the first edition of Dastavezi, a journal for scholars and filmmakers, filmmakers as scholars, and filmmaking scholars working on regional and transregional South Asia. Dastavezi aims to be a platform for the dialogue between textual and audiovisual productions in current research. In the introduction we address some common difficulties and convergences of-as well as differences between filmic and academic practices.

2011

Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South." This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the rearrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a politics as intertwined. Even more importantly, it provided the possibility of practicing film and politics with an equally integral poetics. This poetics, furthermore, was a poetics imbued with a distinctive voice, one that was fearless and forthright. This is the opening scene for this dissertation: The opening of this book. My first acknowledgement, then, must go to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose scholarship and artwork remain enormously generative achievements, always producing further affirmations and criticalities. If this dissertation marks a return to this book, it is only because many people have made this time-space travel possible. The writing of a dissertation, as many have observed before me, is a collective project. First and foremost, the voices I would like to acknowledge belong to those of my dissertation committee. My dissertation chair, Trinh T. Minh-ha, is a mentor, teacher, and colleague who consistently opens pathways of passionate, transformative scholarship, for myself and many, many others. Minh-ha's friendship and hospitality, rigorous scholarship and poetics, breadth and depth of knowledge across the disciplines, and keen critique combined with kind generosity, have made this project possible. Her books and films form a constellation of visionary openings. Laura E. Pérez opened the initial door to the University of California-Berkeley and has kept opening doors ever since. Her work on spirituality and transformation come from rich insights drawn from life, of which she is never afraid. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has a voice that enables a wide and deep imaginary of liberation. His dislocating of modernity and unleashing of being also creates a condition that makes this work possible. Deniz Göktürk is a fearless and precise critic, the best of friends for a writer. Her engaged transnational scholarship is also a model for this work, as well as her humor, commitment to interdisciplinarity, and productive skepticism. My department at the University of California-Berkeley, the staff and faculty of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, are committed advocates for the assertion of other worlds of sense and new forms of rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship. In addition, the staff and faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women's Studies have been generous, providing me with another supportive location at which to think and work. Beyond these companions, there have been important conversations in seminars, working groups and conferences that have contributed to the production of this work. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the members of the Visuality and Alterity Working Group (2005-2008), including Lindsay Benedict, Laura Fantone, and Annie Fukushima, whose work established a set of terms that enriched the thinking done here. The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC-Berkeley provided a wonderful home for that group. I have listened, over the years, to other voices, which have been constantly in the background: Those of my family. I thus acknowledge the contribution of my children, Isadora and Joaquin Bratton-Benfield. Their voices provide the soundtrack of my life, and is, in fact, a sound that infuses it with sheer pleasure. My partner, Christopher Alan Bratton, is a trusted interlocutor and creative collaborator whose spirit infuses this project. My parents, Dalida Quijada Benfield and Marion W. Benfield, Jr. are loving and generous, and have been important examples for me of risk-taking and fearless living.

Visual Anthropology Review, 2010

Transstellar Journals, 2019

Documentary films have become an important channel for audiences to process and decipher information today. Having an inherent power to critically address contemporary issues in a threadbare manner, they have a cornucopia of new insights for tackling different problems plaguing our society. Higher perceptions of reality and factuality positively affect learning and engagement among the public. The genre with its claim to indexicality and veridicality has an important social function of setting the agenda by penetrating public consciousness, which in turn amplifies the sphere of civic discourse on various social issues. Good storytelling in documentary films can ignite powerful emotions and evoke empathy among its audiences. Such an impact facilitates major change in viewpoints and fuels social change. This paper has used the tool of textual analysis to examine two critically acclaimed and pivotal social issue documentaries-'Some Stories Around Witches' made by four time national film award winner Lipika Singh Darai and 'Veil Done' filmed by Juhi Bhatt which won the national film award for the 'Best Film on Social Issues' in 2018. This will help us decipher the mechanics of factual storytelling, the cinematic devices used to infuse emotions, creating a gripping and thought-provoking film.

2017

In this essay, a film by Ron Fricke, Samsara (2011) will be analyzed as documentary film form and its narration; how a documentary film suggests meanings and arguments, whether documentaries show reality itself or a documentary film-maker reflects his/her own opinions and thoughts into the film consciously/unconsciously through the perspective of a film called Samsara. The reason why this film has chosen is that Samsara (2011) shows the world ‘’itself’’ by focusing on human, religion, civilization and nature; in a very general summary the world and humanity. Although Samsara oftens called as a non-narrative film -since there is no actors/actresses or conversations in the film-, this essay’s goal is discussing how a ‘’non-narrative’’ documentary film has its own ‘’narrative’’ and meanings.

Journal article by Michael Chanan; Screen, 1997