Global Cinema

The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/ philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.

This chapter will explore geological strata of political locality in contemporary South Korean film and a wide spectrum of their globalized expressions by focusing on four major auteurs: Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, Lee Chang-dong, and Bong Joon-ho. Establishing their worldwide recognition throughout the millennial boom of Korean cinema, these directors have more or less exposed different positions and tendencies of what was called “386 generation” – Korea’s most politically engaged generation that led the leftist anti-dictatorship student movement in the 1980s. Their contemporaneity is that which, for example, such other auteurs as Hong Sang-soo and Im Kwon-taek do not share and, in particular, international audiences could not detect without deeply looking at its local contexts.
While tracing these auteurs’ historical 386 issues of democratization, human rights, American imperialism, and two Koreas’ division/reunification, this chapter will direct attention to their overlap or transition to more global phenomena. Especially notable are the ways in which the “abject” characters cast out of their community try to regain their suspended social subjectivity or reveal transformed subjectivities while opening alternative relationships through the motifs of bricolage, double occupancy, artistic creation, game or puzzle, and self-imposed or social mission. Here, the political in the Korean auteurs secretly resonates with that in global cinema which extends to biopolitical concerns contoured by neoliberal transnational capitalism and threats of terroristic catastrophe. For the abject implies “bare life” deprived of political identity, symptomatic of exclusion from any inclusive regime now globally locatable.
The chapter will map out various auteuristic themes in this regard: the loss and recovery of ordinary life social minorities undergo in Lee, ideological systems that class and legal conflicts debunk in Bong, vengeance and judgment driven by out-law desire in Park, and the sin and redemption of animalistic ghost figures in Kim. This mapping will help delve into the nature and boundaries of such notions as power, justice, community, and ethics in view of political philosophy and critical theory. At the same time the auteurs will be repositioned and reconnected from different angles including realism and idealism, genre and style, and their engagement in political parties and actual issues. But since the political in post-80s Korea does not directly manifest itself so much as it often resides displaced and replaced behind some universally appealing aesthetic appearance, the task is to read the artistic transformation of the political allegorically and symptomatically. For this, a broad corpus will be examined from the auteurs’ major narrative features to their shorts and documentaries, and even other directors’ films they wrote or produced.
Auteurism based on the myth of classical individuality may be deconstructed here, or say, reconstructed into a generational structure of contemporary auteurs’s multilayered political consciousness or unconscious. The Korean auteurs may then offer an interesting case of reflecting how the 21st century cinema has evolved the political on a localized plane of immanent globality.

Günümüzde küreselleşme ekonomik, politik, toplumsal alanlarda olduğu gibi kültürel/ sanatsal üretim ve çalışmalarda da yoğun etkileri söz konusu olmaktadır. Özellikle global film dağıtımının merkezi konumundaki Hollywood’da üretilen filmler bütün dünyayı kültürel olarak etkilemekte ve dönüştürmektedir. Bu durum sinema sanatının ticari ve kültürel propaganda yönünden küreselleşmenin en etkin araçlarından bir haline gelmesine yol açmaktadır. Amerikan yaşam tarzının ve batı kültürünün adeta taşıyıcılığını yapan küresel sinema anlayışının dünyanın her yerinde yaygınlık kazanması başka ülkelerin ekonomik, sosyal, politik yapılarıyla ve en önemlisi yerel kültürel değerlerini ciddi olarak tehdit etmektedir. Türk sinemasında da yeni sektörel eğilimler, film dağıtım ve gösterim ağlarının yapısı ve kültürel değişimler gözlemlendiğinde Hollywood sinemasının dizginlenemeyen gücünü arkasına alan küreselleşmenin yoğun etkilerini görmemiz mümkün olmaktadır Bu çalışmada; sinema sanatının dünya çapındaki gücünden ve yaygınlığından hareketle Küreselleşmenin  Türk Sineması’nın yapım, dağıtım ve gösterim işleyişlerine olan etkilerinin araştırılması ve ortaya konulması amaçlanmıştır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Küresel Sinema, Dünya Sinema Sektörü, Hollywood, Türk Sineması, Film Yapım, Dağıtım, Gösterim

Taking the animal and the machine as two ontological others of the human, this paper looks into how they “are added to” and “replace” the humanist others based on race, gender, class, etc. in contemporary cinema. This “supplement” urges us to reframe identity politics and cultural studies in a larger “polis” emerging between and encompassing both the human world, which becomes ever more globally homogenized, and its radical environment, natural or technological. The topic is a global cinematic phenomenon that even local films directly embody. The animal is captured on the boundaries between “the symbolic” and “the real,” between “the actual” and “the virtual” in the artistic works of Werner Herzog, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Peter Greenaway. The machine convolutes the issues of informatics, embodiment, and cyborgism, often through SF fantasy that pervades Hollywood blockbusters and Japanimation. The rare amalgam of animal–machine receives further attention in David Cronenberg's films, and becoming-animal/-machine in Avatar empowers the human in the posthuman sense of biopower that transforms the body and registers it on a larger network. From this perspective, discourses on the animal (zooesis) and technology (technesis) work together to bring a new political potential. Animality and technology no longer form a naïve dichotomy of nature vs. civilization but combine in ways of making more visible the new condition of life. It unfolds in a cinematic “zone,” an ephemeral “clearing” for “bare life” within the globalized world. This zone exists in the exceptional state of temporary potential to de-/repoliticize any humanistic politics.

The introduction to a volume that collects 12 essays from contributors examining the place of religion in films from around the world. Following Fredric Jameson's nomination of cinema as a "geopolitical aesthetic," Plate's introduction adapts this to call cinema a "georeligious aesthetic."
Published by Palgrave, 2003.

Towards the end of the decade long Iran–Iraq war, Saddam Hussein launched a deadly attack against the Kurds, known as the Anfal Campaign, killing more than a hundred thousand. One of the largest acts of genocide occurred on 18 March 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja. On that day, sweet-smelling poison gas was poured over the city, killing at least five thousand. Since 2001 Kurdish moviemakers have memorialized the tragedy of the Halabja massacre by producing cinematic dramas and narrative documentaries. These films are part of a discourse of authenticity and a politics of culture that permeate the Kurdish independence movement. This essay proposes that Halabja films can be divided into three stages: the era of consolidation, 2000 to 2009; the golden era, 2009 to early 2014; and the fall which followed the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Each era reveals new attitudes towards politics, society, and the massacre.

This paper explores how the films of Wong Kar-wai maintain a local sense of Hong Kong and yet is very much relevant to a global audience. In order to understand the auteur's visual language, the paper conducts textual analysis of three of Wong Kar-wai's films; Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). The paper tries to look at the identity of Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai's films and to understand how that identity appeals to a wider global audience, transcending cultural boundaries.

문화 상품으로서의 한류를 넘어 동시대 글로벌 현상들의 국지적인 반영으로 한국적 글로벌 시네마를 규정할 때, 한반도를 둘러싼 두 방향의 초국적 자본 네트워크와 거기서 배태/배제되는 문제적 에이전트들은 최근 한국영화에 등장하는 주목할 현상이라 하겠다. 본 논문은 남한을 기준으로 북한, 러시아, 연변 등 중국 동북부로 이어지는 ‘서북 네트워크’와, 일본, 동남아, 홍콩 등 중국 동남부로 이어지는 ‘동남 네트워크’를 매핑하면서, DMZ의 함의를 직간접적으로 드러내는 첫번 째 네트워크를 집중 분석한다.
이 서북 네트워크를 배경으로 하는 영화들은 구소련과 중국 등 구공산권이 자본주의적 세계 체제로 편입하는 와중에 탈북자와 조선족 이민자들이 남한 사회로 유입되면서 겪는 갈등을 주로 다룬다. <무산일기>나 <댄스타운> 등 네오리얼리즘적 독립영화들에서 보듯, 그들은 포괄적 다문화 체제 내의 배제의 징후처럼 무산계급 이하의 서발턴으로, 정치적 주체성을 박탈당한 비체 즉 사회적 앱젝트(abject)로 등장하여, 정체성이 유보된 헐벗은 삶(bare life)을 살아간다. 이 동물적 생명은 종종 자본의 ‘개’가 되어 일종의 미션을 수행하는 에이전트로 형상화되고, 노예적 삶을 전도하기 위해 자본의 ‘도둑’이 되는 모험을 동반하기도 한다. 이때 내러티브는 공동체로부터의 탈각이라는 상징적 죽음과 종종 결말에 드리운 물리적 죽음이라는 이중 죽음 사이에서 벌어지는 주체성 회복 시도 혹은 그 실패로 구조화된다. 조선족 중국 감독 장률의 <망종>, <경계>, <두만강> 등에서는 운명의 이중 구속 같은 개와 도둑의 이 이중 모티브가 중국과 몽골로 확장되는데, 탈북자들의 정처 없는 횡단은 대안적 주체성에 대한 아스라한 가능성을 유목적으로 시사하기도 한다.
<공동경비구역 JSA> 이래 북한에 대한 이미지를 쇄신해온 간첩 소재 장르 영화들은 또 다른 분석의 축을 이루면서 국경과 월경의 다층적인 의미를 촉발한다. 가령 김기덕 제작의 <풍산개>에서 개처럼 남북을 오가며 미션을 수행하는 이중 첩자는 군사분계선을 넘을 땐 나체 상태로 DMZ의 진흙과 뒤섞이며 생태적 헐벗음을 체현하는 탈영토적 노마드가 된다. 남북 두 체제가 초법적 예외 상태에서 착취하고 제거하려는 이 앱젝트 에이전트는 체제의 내재적 외부에서 내부를 급습하는 유령적 테러리스트이기도 하다. 연장선에서, DMZ를 둘러싼 혈투를 유럽으로 옮겨놓은 <베를린>과 남한 내 조선족 에이전트의 테러리스트화를 극명하게 보여주는 <황해>는 퍼즐 같은 내러티브 속에 스릴러의 현실 반영성을 강화한다. 특히 후자에 드러난 폭력적 지하경제의 우발적 네트워크와 거기서 요구되는 인지자본주의적 생존 능력은 바로 그 자본 체제에 대항할 앱젝트의 매트릭스와 노하우로 전유되고, 이를 통해 새로운 주체성은 유토피아가 아닌 탈-장소의 아토피아적 운동 속에 수행적으로 생성된다.

Potrà sembrare una scelta discutibile parlare del cinema di Alejandro González Iñárritu a partire dai suoi cortometraggi o persino da un’opera non cinematografica. Crediamo però che i lavori “alternativi” che convocheremo per compiere questa breve esplorazione nell’opera del regista messicano non siano semplicemente delle glosse ai sei lungometraggi realizzati dal 2000 a oggi, ma offrano piuttosto chiavi interpretative decisive della poetica e della politica della sua intera produzione. Il taglio con cui affronteremo l’analisi fa leva sul tema del confine. Da un lato in senso fisico e spaziale: il confine come frontiera da attraversare e conquistare – la stessa transculturalità del cinema di Iñárritu è di fatto un continuo attraversamento, anche sul piano biografico, della frontiera tra Messico e Stati Uniti. Dall’altro in senso metaforico e metacinematografico: il confine come soglia dello sguardo, discorso sulla natura visibile e udibile del cinema, sulla sua capacità di fornire accesso alla realtà pur senza negare l’inemendabilità di alcuni suoi risvolti.

After briefly reviewing the extraordinary variety of British magazines for film fans and the importance of these publications in the construction of stardom, Ellen Wright and Phyll Smith focus on what was the first sustained attempt to cultivate and sustain a fan base for leading English actors through the establishment of their own appreciation societies. In fact, it was not until the 1940s that the London-based studios succeeded in creating star personas and cementing fan loyalty in the way that the Hollywood studios been developing over the previous 20 years. This chapter examines the establishment of studio-approved fan clubs for favorite stars such as Patricia Roc, Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, Richard Attenborough and Michael Rennie—a disproportionate number of these actors being associated with Gainsborough Studios, whose costume melodramas had been highly popular with female audiences.