Disarming Montage

2011

One important and influential popular culture product is fiction film. Arguably, even though fiction film is often seen as a mere entertainment outlet, its undeniable status as a socio-cultural commentator allows fiction films to impart values as well as capture popular imagination and consciousness. Fiction films, needless to say, can move or provoke the audience with their depiction of and focus on real-life events such as personal angst, the World Wars, the cold war, political struggles, economic downturns and natural disaster. One prevailing trend with regards to fiction film is that after the event of September 11, 2001, the interest in the war film genre gains its momentum. Speculations about the post-September 11war that ensued, such as that in Iraq, have allowed variegated representations of war to be made on silver screen, either reaffirming or challenging the audience’s perception of war. Employing close textual analysis, the main aim of this paper is to reveal the prevale...

2015

In an age of mediated conflict, the fields of media and communication studies need to critically address the increasingly important relation between film and violent conflict. The number of films dealing with violent conflicts is expanding, but scholars still struggle to find suitable frameworks to study them. Instead, concepts such as “accented” and “exilic” filmmaking are often used. Seeking to advance the study of film and violent conflict, and based on interdisciplinary insights, this article proposes a framework of cinematic engagement that takes the level of involvement of filmmakers as a key element of differentiation. The proposed framework is illustrated with examples from Kurdish cinema, which is deeply rooted in one of the longest-standing conflicts in the Middle East.

Panel: Split Spaces of Documentary Media. Article version of this research (Film Criticism, 2019) can be found here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fc/13761232.0043.106?view=text;rgn=main

Disappearing War: Cinema and the Politics of Erasure in the War on Terror , 2017

This chapter explores the heightened visibility of certain people, images and experiences and reduced visibility of others in the 'War on Terror', illustrating this with American Sniper (2014) and Good Kill (2014) together with other filmic examples and news reports. It then turns to Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary Concerning Violence (2014), which explores the reverse perspective of those on the receiving end of the West’s actions. Although this film deals with decolonisation struggles in Africa in the 60s, 70s and 80s, using archive footage from Swedish state television, it encourages viewers to see beyond the period and connect it to current issues, evoking the ‘colonial present’ in which violence inflicted on marginalised people continues in new forms.

Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an ' uncinematic ' element in the negation of movement in modern cinema, ' which constitutes its artistic character '. Similarly, Lyotard defended an ' acinema ', which rather than selecting and excluding movements through editing, accepts what is ' fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed '. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou embraces a similar idea, by describing cinema as an ' impure circulation ' that incorporates the other arts. Resonating with Bazin and his defence of ' impure cinema ', that is, of cinema's interbreeding with other arts, Badiou seems to agree with him also in identifying the uncinematic as the location of the Real. This article will investigate the particular impurities of cinema that drive it beyond the specificities of the medium and into the realm of the other arts and the reality of life itself. Privileged examples will be drawn from various moments in film history and geography, starting with the analysis of two films by Jafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (In film nist, 2011), whose anti-cinema stance in announced in its own title; and The Mirror (Aineh, 1997), another relentless exercise in self-negation. It goes on to examine Kenji Mizoguchi's deconstruction of cinematic acting in his exploration of the geidomono genre (films about theatre actors) in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangigku monogatari, 1939), and culminates in the conjuring of the physical experience of death through the systematic demolition of film genres in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012).

Civil War and Narrative, 2017

Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory attempts to answer the question of what happens to first-hand memories when they are filtered down through subsequent generations. According to Hirsch, postmemories are powerful because they are invested with imagination and creation. Because of the aforementioned attributes Hirsch assigned to postmemory, it follows that postmemory can fill in memory gaps. This raises the unresolved problem of postmemory and the appropriation of the past. This paper investigates how and in what ways films can create instrumental and thus didactic cultural memories by way of looking at the recent very popular and successful film in Greece about the Greek Civil War, Psychi Vathia/Deep Soul (2006) by Pantelis Voulgaris and analyses the ways in which it complicates historical representation. In particular, I focus on the formal and thematic elements of the film and suggest that Voulgaris shows history as transition and offers a didactic postmemory of a fixed horizon.

Tamil Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Caste, Gender, and Technology (Edited by Selvaraj Velayutham and Vijay Devadas), 2021

This chapter studies the ‘new Madurai genre’ as a Third Wave Tamil cinema, where caste finds a new currency. It foregrounds the dangerous and deviant heroes, who recur within Madurai as a cinematic space, in films such as Kadhal (Love, 2004), Veyil (Torrid Sun, 2005), Paruthiveeran (Cotton Champ, 2007), and Subramaniapuram (2008). They contest the cinematic construction of the homogenous ‘ethno-specific’ Tamil nation. If the First Wave interrupted the ‘Indian’ cinema’s project of discursively constructing a national people, the Third Wave offers a version of the Tamil country that is caste-infected and criminal prone. At the same time, it deconstructs the urbane cosmopolitan address that a Second Wave constructed in the 1990s. These films not only go beyond ‘neo-native’ imaginations to critique the First and Second waves, but also spatialize caste and criminality as conscripts of cinema.