Cinema On The Periphery

Highlights the industries, markets, identities, and histories that distinguish cinema beyond the traditional hubs of mainstream Western cinema. From Iceland to Iran, from Singapore to Scotland, a growing intellectual and cultural wave of production is taking cinema beyond the borders of its place of origin--exploring faraway places, interacting with barely known peoples, and making new localities imaginable. In these films, previously entrenched spatial divisions no longer function as firmly fixed grid coordinates, the hierarchical position of place as "center" is subverted, and new forms of representation become possible. In Cinema at the Periphery, editors Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal assemble criticism that explores issues of the periphery, including questions of transnationality, place, space, passage, and migration. Cinema at the Periphery examines the periphery in terms of locations, practices, methods, and themes. It includes geographic case studies of small national cinemas located at the global margins, like New Zealand and Scotland, but also of filmmaking that comes from peripheral cultures, like Palestinian "stateless" cinema, Australian Aboriginal films, and cinema from Quebec. Therefore, the volume is divided into two key areas: industries and markets on the one hand, and identities and histories on the other. Yet as a whole, the contributors illustrate that the concept of "periphery" is not fixed but is always changing according to patterns of industry, ideology, and taste. Cinema at the Periphery highlights the inextricable interrelationship that exists between production modes and circulation channels and the emerging narratives of histories and identities they enable. In the present era of globalization, this timely examination of the periphery will interest teachers and students of film and media studies.

A comparative approach to contemporary Irish and Spanish cinema which examines the ways in which the films produced have been marked by Ireland and Spain's distinctive encounters with modernity.

This revised and updated edition of a successful and established text provides a much-needed historical overview of French cinema from its roots through to the political and social developments in the 1990s and beyond.

Galician audio/visual culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth following the process of political and cultural devolution in post-Franco Spain. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with global currents and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book examines contemporary audio/visual production in Galicia as privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed and consumed, both at home and abroad. The cultural redefinition of Galicia in the global age is explored through different media texts (popular music, cinema, video) which cross established boundaries and deterritorialise new border zones where tradition and modernity dissolve, generating creative tensions between the urban and the rural, the local and the global, the real and the imagined. The book aims for the deperipheralization and deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map by overcoming long-established hegemonic exclusions, whether based on language, discipline, genre, gender, origins, or territorial demarcation, while aiming to disjoint the center/periphery dichotomy that has relegated Galician culture to the margins. In essence, it is an attempt to resituate Galicia and Galician studies out of the periphery and open them to the world.

Galician culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth since the re-establishment of democracy and the development of its political autonomy. Audio/visual production (music and cinema in particular) has provided some of the privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed, and consumed at home and abroad. Some of these include innovative animation features in the leading edge of international production, avant-garde non-fiction films winning accolades around the world, videos widely distributed through the Internet, Movida groups emerging from the periphery, and folk artists merging into the pan-Celtic music movement globally. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with the global currents at large and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book aims to explore some of the dramatic changes which have taken place in the Galician cultural landscape and argues for a perspectival shift towards a postnational and interdisciplinary cultural studies approach based on a deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map. Book jacket.

Tom O'Regan's book is the first of its kind on Australian post-war cinema. It takes as its starting point Bazin's question 'What is cinema?'and asks what the construct of a 'national' cinema means. It looks at the broader concept from a different angle, taking film beyond the confines of 'art' into the broader cultural world. O'Regan's analysis situates Australian cinema in its historical and cultural perspective producing a valuable insight into the issues that have been raised by film policy, the cinema market place and public discourse on film production strategies. Since 1970 Australian film has enjoyed a revival. This book contains detailed critiques of the key films of this period and uses them to illustrate the recent theories on the international and Australian cinema industries. Its conclusions on the nature of the nation's cinema and the discourses within it are relevant within a far wider context; film as a global phenomenon.

The title of this collection echoes Siegfried Kracauer's statement that the lavish movie palaces of 1920s Germany served to stimulate peripheral vision and thus prevent the audience from being absorbed by the spectacle itself. In consideration of questions concerning spatial transformations in and around Weimar cinema, the eight essays in this volume, though some more explicitly than others, have Kracauer as their interlocutor. The first major critic of classic German cinema, Kracauer is patron of the optics that seeks insight on the periphery, inviting the analysis of those other spaces that are implicated, if not present, in the films themselves. The films treated in this volume include such Expressionist mainstays as Lang's Metropolis and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as generally less familiar works, e.g., Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a City, Jessner's Backstairs, Berger's Day and Night, and the mountain films of Fanck and Riefenstahl. Among the "hidden stages" analyzed are amusement parks, carnivals, department stores, train compartments, city streets, the womb, the theater, the chamber, basement apartments-and ultimately Neubabelsberg, the gargantuan studio-complex near Berlin where so many of these peripheral spaces came to be simulated. With references that range from set architecture to Christmas celebrations, from the poetry of Rilke to chamber music, from the introduction of sound to Macy's parades, and from an "urban unconscious" to a "cinematic sublime," Peripheral Visions is a richly nuanced collection that will be of lasting interest to students and scholars of film and German cultural studies.

Uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages.