Journal Article ‘Practically infinite manipulability’: domestic dogs, canine performance and digital cinema Get access Michael Lawrence Michael Lawrence Michael.Lawrence@sussex.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 56, Issue 1, Spring 2015, Pages 115–120, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjv009 Published: 11 March 2015

In the mid 1990s, many LGBT film festivals began to avoid including obviously human figures in their promotional imagery and branding. On websites and posters, and in programmes and street advertising, images of LGBT humans were exchanged for avatars of queerness: cartoon monsters, brightly coloured everyday objects or cute animals. Most often these avatars appeared in groups, as a gathering of faceless alien astronauts, an array of cupcakes or a crowd of penguins.1 This deceptively simple imagery raises the question of the human by an intriguing evasion of human figures. This evasion asks us to consider how LGBT politics figures the human and how the queer appears in international human rights debates. Film festivals in general have become the subject of renewed interest in film studies, including two recent discussions in Screen, the formation of a scholarly interest group within SCMS, and several anthologies.2 Driven by the field's broader desire to address the industrial side of international cinema and to interrogate the institutional and economic circuitry of categories such as ‘global art cinema’ and ‘world cinema’, these studies approach the film festival as an industrial institution that offers a key vantage point from which to understand cinema's shifting role in world politics. As if anticipating these debates, André Bazin cynically noted in the 1950s that the film festival appears to the public as ‘the very epitome of a worldly affair’.3 If our perception of the modern film festival continues to imagine it as an institution that brings worldly experiences to nearby venues, then LGBT festivals are equally tasked with speaking simultaneously to local, regional, national and international audiences. This self-representation seems crucial for a festival's future viability, regardless of who turns up at its actual screenings. The nonhuman trend in queer film festival branding moreover coincides with a rapid expansion of queer filmmaking and filmgoing around the world. Barbara Mennel describes this in her overview of LGBT film history as a period of ‘intense global proliferation’ of queer film.4 Scholars of film festivals use similar terms, identifying a roughly fifteen-year period ‘marked by the international proliferation of the gay and lesbian festival model’ and by increased pressure on existing queer festivals to appear international.5

This essay explores the peculiar, largely unexplored queerness of Mike and George Kuchar's 1960s films through a combination of close reading, material culture studies, art history and critical theory. Using the conceptual leverage provided by Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on the carnivalesque and Georges Bataille's notion of heterology, it proposes that queerness in the Kuchars’ films takes the form of a generalized demotion whose main objects are sexuality, desire, and the material culture of plastic consumables in their immediate environment. These are insistently reduced to, or brought in contact with, excrement, and thus rendered doubly disreputable – because of their the scandalous nature and low cultural status, and because they are smeared with a defiling substance whose open display signals bodily and communal disorder. The essay traces the origins of their queer worldview in the popular culture of the 1950s, especially in the crime and horror comics, explores the role of excrement in the iconography and syntax of their films, and shows how the excremental is used to subvert the hygienic aspirations of the plastic modernity of their youth. A final section locates their strategies of subversion and their scatophilia in the broader context of 1960s experimental art and reads their work as a queer critique of the mid-century everyday.

Peggy Ahwesh's From Romance to Ritual (1985), a ten-minute, Super-8 film, begins in a stone circle, or more accurately in the complex of three ruined stone circles at Avebury in southwest England, though the film does not immediately make this clear. The film's opening moments offer us a sequence of eight shots of large rocks; these we come to recognize as standing stones. The fifth shot shows us a woman standing in front of one of these stones. We sense the presence of a second woman. This is Ahwesh herself, though the film never tells us this per se; she holds the camera and is heard but remains unseen. The first woman (Margie Strosser, one of Ahwesh's frequent collaborators) clowns about for the second. Both are audibly American and seem to be on holiday. I will return to the texture of this film's opening a little later, but first I want to ask what it means to begin a film, so to speak, in ruins.

The analysis of cinematic style in the films of the Dardenne brothers has primarily focused on the combination of realism and ethics. This paper instead focuses on the combination of realist and modernist styles in certain aspects of the Dardennes’ films. The emphasis is on two particular stylistic traits: first, the use of a medium distance two-shot, and second, the use of a back-and-forth handheld camera movement used typically in conversation scenes. These techniques are taken up in relation to what philosopher Stanley Cavell has called ‘empathic projection’, a term recently used by art historian Michael Fried in relation to art and cinema. It is the combination of realist and modernist styles that gives rise to the spectator's projection of empathic feeling onto or into characters in the films of the Dardenne brothers.

This essay suggests that collectively watching a film with quiet attention should be considered a kind of joint action. When silently watching a film in a cinema the viewers are not merely engaged in individual actions – watching a film with others often implies a shared activity based on a collective intention in which the viewers jointly attend to a single object: the film. Drawing on recent debates about collective intentionality and shared feelings in analytic philosophy and phenomenology, I show that this import of social philosophy can have important ramifications for film theory and history. Proponents of diverse film theoretical approaches like cultural studies, cognitive film theory, film phenomenology or reception aesthetics consider the viewer actively involved with the film. If this is true and the spectators are all active, sitting in the same movie theatre watching the same film in a quiet, attentive way, it seems reasonable to argue that in some important sense they act jointly. My argument will serve as a step towards a more comprehensive theory and phenomenology of collective spectatorship at the movies, an aspect undervalued in the history of film theory.

This essay deals with the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. Much of the interest Pontecorvo's film has generated since its release in 1965 has been contradictory. On the one hand it has been touted as a seminal work of Third Cinema, a movement defined by its political content and in which the camera is seen as a weapon of cultural intervention in the struggle against colonial and neocolonial oppression. On the other hand the film has been criticized for being equivocal politically and for representing the French colonial system in too positive a light to deliver a truly transformative message. By drawing a distinction between tactical and strategic or ideological equivocalness in The Battle of Algiers, this essay intervenes in the ongoing debate surrounding the film's meaning(s) and its status within Third Cinema, and provides a detailed explication of what might be considered an exemplary deployment of transformative postcolonial aesthetics. The essay argues that, though exposing the film to contradictory readings and uses, Pontecorvo's fusion of ‘documentary’ and fictional aesthetics, is a deliberate tactic used to hone the film's firm anticolonial position and ultimately to reinforce the film's efficacy as a subversive tool.

Journal Article Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art Get access Colin Gardner, Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 226 pp. David Foster David Foster david.foster1@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 55, Issue 3, Autumn 2014, Pages 432–435, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hju024 Published: 01 September 2014

This essay proposes an allegorical reading of Jacques Rivette's <it>Histoire de Marie et Julien</it> (2004), interpreting the film not as a supernatural romance (the received reading) but as a portrayal of depression. Using the work of Julia Kristeva (<it>Black Sun</it>) and of Abraham and Torok (<it>The Shell and the Kernel</it>) on how depression is manifest in cultural forms as well as in clinical symptoms, it also applies comparisons with Gothic fiction, plus ideas from current occupational therapy on co-creation and the process of narrativizing as a means of seeking a way out of depression. Following close textual analysis of the film itself, of performance style, mise-en-scene, sound, colour, and so on, the essay ultimately argues that Rivette's film can be seen as an exemplar not just of how depression can be represented on screen, but of cinema's potential role as what Kristeva calls a ‘counter-depressant’.

In recent film studies scholarship, political economy has become increasingly prominent as an approach that enriches our understanding of the multiple dimensions of cinema. Such notable examples as Michael Curtin's Playing to the World's Biggest Audience1 and Darrell William Davis's and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh's East Asian Screen Industries2 clearly demonstrate that cinema is not only an art form and sociocultural discourse, but also part of complex economic networks and activities.3 Among the research that treats cinema primarily as a creative industry, studies of East Asian film productions are flourishing. From these we have learned that martial arts films produced by Asian filmmakers have been finding enthusiastic audiences in the West since Ang Lee's Wo hu cang long/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) broke box-office records while receiving critical acclaim and winning the Oscar for best foreign language film.4 Two years later, Zhang Yimou's Yingxiong/Hero (2002) also prevailed in both Asian and western markets.5 We are regularly reminded of the transborder pan-Asian initiatives that aim to break Hollywood domination. For example, Media Asia, founded in 1994 with the backing of a substantial multimedia distribution business, created a series of high-profile and high-quality films such as the Wu jian dao/Infernal Affairs trilogy (Wai-Keung Lau and Alan Mak, 2002 and 2003) and Tou wenzi D/Initial D (Wai-Keung Lau and Alan Mak, 2005). The original version of Infernal Affairs was remade by director Martin Scorsese and Hollywood A-listers Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio as the Oscar-winning The Departed (2006).6 Moreover, a Hong Kong-based film company, Applause Pictures, was established in 2000 to explore pan-Asian filmmaking. It also produced many successful projects such as the musical romance Ruguo ai/Perhaps Love (Peter Chan Ho-Sun, 2005) and the historical epic Tou ming zhuang/The Warlords (Peter Chan Ho-Sun and Wai-Man Yip, 2007).7