'Le récit de vie(s)': immobility and fluidity in Ying Chen's works

The article explores the themes of fluidity and immobility in the works of Ying Chen, a francophone Chinese writer whose early texts are associated with 'les écritures migrantes' of Quebec. From her third book, the narratives take on a post-death perspective and the narrator moves between her present existence and past lives.

New Wave Italian Style

An investigation of the long controversy around the definition of an Italian New Wave cinema of the 1960s, this essay engages (and takes issue) with the reasons behind the critics’ reluctance to recognise its existence. After establishing a theoretical and historical framework for a transnational under- standing of the phenomenon of the European and World New Waves, it offers a reasoned analysis of the multiple industrial and artistic attempts at a generational renewal of Italian cinema that were made in Italy during the 1960s. Ultimately, the essay suggests that it would not only be appropriate, but also highly productive to reconsider the vibrant and heterogeneous young Italian cinema of the 1960s under the generational and transnational New Wave label, instead of continuing to approach the decade exclusively in the light of Neorealism.

Modes of Griot Inscription in African Cinema

A recurring idea in criticism of African cinema has been that the films frequently deploy the narrative techniques of ‘the griot’, the storyteller of African tradition. In particular, Manthia Diawara (1989) has alerted us to the inscription of the oral narrator within the visual discourse of particular African films, while other critics have considered how the films recall the narrative forms of traditional oral tales. However, these critics’ exclusive attention to the visual track and/or narrative form overlooks another inscription of the griot - an inscription that exists at the level of music. Examining music and image relationships in an aesthetically diverse set of African films, this paper demonstrates how griot inscription emerges as a major variable, modulating between music and image within and between texts. This propels music, and the griot, to a status of primary importance in terms of understanding the ways in which the films engage with, and re-appropriate, notions of ‘African-ness’, while negotiating the tensions of address generated when oral forms of narrative meet the literate, industrial form of cinema.

Cinema Lucida: Johan van der Keuken and the Meaning of Loss

Ever sceptical about the positivistic claims of ethnographic and so-called realist documentary, Johan van der Keuken’s film-making is the work of a curious, spontaneous and disorientated observer of the essential strangeness of both the foreign and the familiar, new landscapes and cities, experiences, and people. While there are various explicitly political and socially orientated films and themes across his work, it is those films and moments when what is being conveyed is a sense of him being somewhere liminal, being ‘in-between’ situations, cultures, styles and interpretations, reticent, uncertain but incorrigibly curious that constitute his most valuable contribution to documentary film aesthetics. Not surprisingly, such characteristics often come to the fore in those films where he tries to make sense of loss, the passing of lives and the legacies left behind. This article discusses questions of history and personal loss in a number of his films.

Architecture in Cinema: A Relation of Representation Based on Space

Architecture, whether in the foreground or background, is an intrinsic part of any film, and cinema holds a position as a transformative reference in contemporary architecture. This book addresses the role of architecture in cinema, and through a focus on the use of space, it presents a critical overview of the relation between the two. Through framing, flattening and editing, cinematic space, as the representation of architectural space, focuses on its certain qualities, while eliminating others. Thus, cinema emphasizes individual aspects of space that may be overlooked when the whole context is considered. Space 'acts' in the foreground rather than simply filling the background in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wim Wenders, which are used to analyze two significant cinematic approaches to space, space as form and space as symbol. The detailed analysis of Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect and Wenders' Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) offers an innovative and original perspective on space to those interested in both fields of architecture and film studies.