Genre Hybridisation: Global Cinematic Flow 3894728639, 9783894728632

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Ivo Ritzer / Peter W. Schulze (eds.) Genre Hybridisation

Marburger Schriften zur Medienforschung 44 ISSN 1867–5131

Ivo Ritzer / Peter W. Schulze (Eds.)

Genre Hybridisation Global Cinematic Flows

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Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

Schüren Verlag GmbH Universitätsstr. 55 · D-35037 Marburg www.schueren-verlag.de Print © Schüren 2013 eBook © Schüren 2016 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Gestaltung: Nadine Schrey Umschlag: Wolfgang Diemer, Köln, unter Verwendung eines Filmstills aus Sukiyaki Western Django (Takashi Miike, J 2007, Universum Film) Print-ISBN 978-3-89472-863-2 eBook-ISBN 978-3-7410-0041-6

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Table of Contents

Ivo Ritzer / Peter W. Schulze Genre Hybridisation Global Cinematic Flows

9

(Post)National Cinemas Tim Bergfelder Transnational Genre Hybridity Between Vernacular Modernism and Postmodern Parody

39

Harald Steinwender Spectacular Bodies and Funfair Attractions The Italian Peplum Cycle from Cabiria to Il colosso di Rodi

56

Marcus Stiglegger Sons of Cain Traditions of Gothic Horror in Antonio Margheriti’s Spaghetti Westerns

72

Fernando Ramos Arenas Towards a Generic Understanding of the Giallo Crime-Horror Hybrids in Italian Cinema of the 1970s

81

Cosmopolitan Agencies Dimitris Eleftheriotis The Films of Jules Dassin Cosmopolitan Hybridity Ivo Ritzer Sudden Death(s) Hybridisation, Deterritorialisation, and the Post-Colonial Imaginary in Transnational Philippine Media Culture

95

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Ella Shohat Cinematic Citizenship in the Liminal Zone Between Palestine and Israel

142

Transcultural Subjects Barry Keith Grant «Extremely useful, extremely adaptable» Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Two Nosferatus

163

Andreas Stuhlmann The Melodrama Hybrid Forms, Cross-Cultural Narratives, Global Emotions

177

Florian Mundhenke «You Can’t Stop What’s Coming» Hybridisation of the Western Genre Formula as an Intercultural Strategy of Meaning-Making

197

Peter W. Schulze Mexicanidad Meets Americanism The Circulation of National Imaginaries and Generic Regimes Between the Western and the Comedia Ranchera

215

Glocalising Hollywood Ute Fendler African Francophone Cineastes Going ‹Genres› Two Examples for (E)Merging Genres

239

Claudia Böhme Global Horror Meets Local Spirits The Evolution of Tanzania’s Horror Film Genre

250

Andreas Rauscher Strange Hybrids from a Hong Kong Studio Wuxia and Hollywood Fantasy in A Chinese Ghost Story

265

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Irina Gradinari From Hollywood to Russia: New Russian Action Cinema around 2000 Masculinity, Politics and National Identity in the Films of Aleksey Balabanov

281

Undoing Genre Robert Stam Documentary Variations On a Hybrid Theme

297

Richard Porton Hybridising Documentary Between Fiction and Non-Fiction

314

Oksana Bulgakowa The Socialist Hybrid

337

Lúcia Nagib The Classical-Modern Hybrid and the Politics of Intermediality

351

Picture Credits

364

About the Authors

367

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Ivo Ritzer/Peter W. Schulze

Genre Hybridisation Global Cinematic Flows

«In a given society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalised and individual texts are produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre, whether or not literary, is nothing other than the codification of discursive properties». Tzvetan Todorov (17f.) «We need a corpus of basic studies that do not limit themselves to generalizing from a list of agreed-upon masterpieces. And, crucially, we need to get out of the United States [as a] cross-cultural approach to the topic might help loosen up the current critical logjam». Alan Williams (124)

1. Film Genres and Genre Films Genre structures mould the culture of moving pictures. The inventory of patterns manifest in films is provided by generic conventions, which are highly relevant discursive parameters on the levels of both production and reception. Genres serve as a creative organising principle for film productions while also devising expectations on the reception’s side. Concepts of genre also affect academic studies by aiding accomplishments in various fields, e.g. classification, cultural history, stylistic analysis, narratology, and ideological criticism. Therefore, genres are of great 9

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importance in the entire media scene. They often shed light on the aesthetic, economic and social dimensions of the particular conditions under which they were made and which they represent respectively. Generic structures also help to observe and analyse complex (inter)medial and (inter)cultural exchanges, because genres correlate with one another and are always subject to transformation. Although the idea of auteurism predominated in film studies for a long time, by now there is broad consent that filmic patterns cannot be reduced to one creative mind. Their significance exceeds individual autonomy. Instead, they bear relation to generic norms: «Individual artists and filmmakers manipulate signs and meanings, but in contexts which are authorised by communal public consent, and these contexts [...] we call genres» (Ryall, «Genre and Hollywood» 328). The differentiation between generic models is not consistent, but spans specific subject and structure matters or iconographical and visual contexts (western, adventure film, war film, crime film, science fiction film, fantasy film, musical), as well as specific ‹physically› affective constellations (comedy, horror film, melodrama, pornography). Not only are the genres’ specific traits purely conventional, but also their constructed distinctions. Thus, genres hold no definite structure, but– in the sense of Ludwig Wittgenstein – bear certain family resemblances only: «[w]e see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing [...]: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc.» (32). Just like Wittgenstein’s language-games, genres do not resemble each other because they have a common feature, but because they share multiple properties. Therefore, they cannot be designated essentialistically, but can be utilised pragmatically to describe a complex of films which – to follow Jörg Schweinitz’s approach – «has an effect on both producer and recipient [as an] institution of film culture.» (115). As a set of potential interpretations, genres shape knowledge and experience by systems of representation. Rick Altman (Film/Genre 17) has pointed out the multiple meanings inherent in the concept of genre. Genre functions both • as a label, as the name of a category central to the decisions and communications of distributors and exhibitors. • as a contract, as the viewing position required by each genre film of its audience. • as a blueprint, as a formula that precedes, programmes and patterns industry production. • as a structure, as the formal framework on which individual films are founded. Thus, while genres can be seen as such sets of meaning (label, contract, blueprint), individual texts provide textures. Whereas label, contract and blueprint refer to film genres, the genre film is defined by generic structures. As Barry Keith Grant pragmatically notes, genre films «are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations» 10

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(1). Due to the use of heavily coded conventions and modes of seriality, genre films and auteur films are considered to be mutually exclusive categories. The first designates an artistically ambitious, European-influenced cinema which is interested in ethics and insight. The other is characterised as a mass-produced American cinema, a symbol of escapism and the satisfaction of basic needs: «The pure image, the clear personal style, the intellectually respectable content are contrasted with the impurities of convention, the repetitions of character and plot» (Braudy 412). According to this, the European tradition of the politique des auteurs opposes the US-dominated politique des genres. The belief in the irreconcilability of the generic and the artistic holds persistently: «The belief that popularity and excellence are incompatible […] survives, particularly in the notion that the cinema offers two distinct phenomena, one important called art, and the other, trivial, known as entertainment» (BerryFlint 40). Genres are equated with conventionalised formulas which are breached by the artistically motivated ‹genius› of the director-auteur. But as a matter of fact, Andrew Tudor identified art cinema as a genre in itself as early as in the 1970s: a genre «of films thought by a relatively highly educated middle-class group of filmgoers» (145). However, in addition to the target audience, Tudor neglects to specify any film-intrinsic determinants. To him, genre is not so much a tool of taxonomy, but of prescriptive polemic. His hypostatisation of reception turns a blind eye on the aesthetic differences of genre and art cinema which are proclaimed in film studies since the 1980s. Characteristics like linear causality (concerning interpersonal conflicts) and continuity editing (ergo transparency) are attributed to genre cinema. Art cinema, however, is attested with an off-centre narration (concerning subjective alienation) and self-reflexive commentary (ergo anti-illusionism) (see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film 156–233). Genre and art cinema are thus considered as mutually exclusive categories. We will not fall into line with this assertion, but instead refer to the pioneering work of Stuart M. Kaminsky whose writings have unfortunately often been overlooked. For Kaminsky, auteurism and genre theory are not exclusive at all: «The concept of authorship in film study is not», he states, «a consideration which should or needs to be set in opposition to the concept of genre». Rather, Kaminsky proposes a dual focus: «In fact, I believe a consideration of any film should recognise: (a) that it is the creation of a person or a group of persons reflecting the contribution of that person or persons (authorship); and (b) that the film does not exist in a cultural vacuum; that it must, of necessity, have roots in other works which surround it or have appeared before it (genre)». (16f.)

We propose to see genre and art cinema both as historically specific instances of discursive material, never fully distinguishable by textual properties. In accordance with Ivo Ritzer’s more recent work on the dialectic relationship between genre and authorship (2009), several of the essays in this volume deal with the creative agency 11

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of filmmakers. Thereby, we want to stress the hybrid nature of the intersection between genres and their constructive reworking. Attributing significant importance to genre auteurs such as Jules Dassin, Aleksey Balabanov, Eddie Romero, Tsui Hark or Sergio Leone, we wish to broaden the limited approach to genre. Along these lines, less logical codifications than the viewers’ horizons of expectations are defining, depending on cultural institutions and prevalent systems of legitimisation and meaning potential. Neither fully contingent nor arbitrary, genres may well be analysed in their given historical constellations. Being fluid structures rather than static bundles of artworks, they mediate between text and context.

2. Audiences and the Evolution of Genres The French term genre can be traced back etymologically to the Latin noun ‹genus› meaning class, group or type. In literary criticism the terminology has been used early on to discriminate between different types of text, but this does not apply to the early years of cinema. Only since around 1910 – because of a surplus of film productions – the term genre has been utilised for cinema as well: as a rhetoric criterion of selection which serves the communication between cinema operator and film distributer, and organises the reception and cognition of the audience. This aspect of communication is (with some modifications) still valid today. Thus, genres work as indicators of communication: «First and foremost, genres are terms of communication. By classifying different films they serve as a way of communication about films, on the parts of recipients as well as producers and between them both. Genres organise knowledge about cinematic composition and regulate the production of films. They provide guidance, create expectations and determine reception.» (Hickethier 63)

In genre cinema, communication between producers and consumers manifests itself in recursive visual patterns and recurrent standardised situations. But their respective functions differ depending on how they are integrated into the narrative framework which injects the actual meaning into the visual elements. Steve Neale speaks from a psychoanalytical point-of-view of «systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject» (Genre 19). The subject in this case is not an individual person, but a hypostatised entity, a fragile network of psychosocial forces, which is constituted through language and participates in the genesis of generic structures. In any case, this is not to proclaim a producer-centred approach. Genres attain stability only by critical audience reception shaping the production process. Far from being only functions of the text, viewers actively negotiate a film’s meaning. They participate in interactive processes, directing the constantly proceeding evolutions of a genre. The industry 12

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is not able to exhaustively determine the terms upon which audiences use genres. The success of a genre is always the result of the interplay of economic interests and the cultural gratifications of the viewers. As a consequence, according to Raphaëlle Moine, genre «is not only a classificatory category, but also an interpretive category». She observes that in this regard the concept of genre «only finds meaning in the interactions between works, and between works and their contexts of production and reception» (96). A theory of genre therefore has to be attentive to both filmic texts as well as cultural, social and ideological contexts. Genres are «sets of cultural conventions» (Tudor 139), rhetoric agreements for producers and consumers of films to communicate indirectly via semantic indicators. Hence, as institutions, genres organise frameworks of expectations. Fredric Jameson concurs with this in regard to literature: «genres are essentially contracts» (Marxism and Form 135). To define these contracts more precisely, it is necessary to explore the structures within which the film is produced, merchandised and received as a genre. Just like the auteur has a function for film, so has genre. This indicates «a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentication of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilisation» (Foucault 107). Following Foucault, the same inquiry has to be undertaken as in regard to the function of the auteur: «What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?» (119)

The association of a film with a genre is always defined by practices of interpretation. Therefore, questions of formal classification are much less important to us than issues of historical analysis of discourses. Inspired by Foucault, Malte Hagener has contrasted a formalist and unhistorical approach to genre with a discourse analytical perspective that is descriptive and non-normative, allowing a more dynamic understanding of genres. Whereas formalist genre critics have long asked for clear definitions as well as selective criteria of inclusion and exclusion, discourse analysis looks for uses and stakes of genre classifications. The latter approach is of particular importance because every subsuming of a film under a specific genre always already performs an operation of standardisation, not only on the film but also the genre itself. In other words, genre is never a neutral category given in advance; the act of addressing every instance of genre rather generates a particular understanding of it. Hagener proposes the concept of a genre «cluster» (19–20) in his argumentation, making a case for the recognition of intersections between generic elements that have to be seen as unstable, temporary, and contingent configurations. From this point-of-view, not only 13

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the «development of genres» (20) mentioned by Hagener can be seen as diverse processes of clustering, but also hybridisations of different generic elements. Every cluster bundles up various parameters that may stem from very distinct contexts but form a new compound in every new film. According to Martin Seel and Angela Keppler, it gets problematic, though, if «products and categories are minimised to mere effects of the communicative exchange» (58). Indeed, it seems important that the potential understanding between producers and consumers must be implied in the film itself. Otherwise, communication would not even be a possibility: «Genres may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films and which supervise both their construction by the film maker and their reading by an audience» (Ryall, «Teaching through Genre» 28). Thereby, Ryall adds a descriptive dimension to the question of communicative aspects and broaches the issue of filmic forms itself. Ryall is the first to regard genre as a criterion of classification which both evaluates semiotic characteristics and carves out fundamental correlations between individual films in order to assign single artefacts to a collective. By doing that, he gives special regard to recursive visual patterns and recurring standardised situations. But Ryall’s pioneering research did not receive a strong response until the 1980s, when a more broadly perceived discourse about the concept of genre came up. Especially Rick Altman criticised the process of simply registering or describing conflictive visual elements instead of analysing them with regard to their function within the narrative framework, which integrates them and charges them with meaning. Alongside analysing the semantic order (like the followers of Claude Lévi-Strauss did), the syntactic structure of the order must be investigated as well. Referring to Vladimir Propp, Altman thus demands a semantic/syntactic approach: «we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions that depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets and the like – thus stressing the semantic elements that make up the genre – and definitions that play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders – relationships that might be called the genre’s fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged». («A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre» 30)

But a sharp differentiation between the semantic and the syntactic, i.e. the linguistic and the textual dimension in Altman’s model, remains precarious. Is the final shoot out in the western a semantic or a syntactic element? Or is it both? Similar questions arise with regard to vocal numbers in the musical and sex-scenes in a pornographic film. Besides, not even Altman can avoid the danger of a circular approach, criticised as the «empiricist method» by Janet Staiger (186). Films are chosen for their representative function in regard to a genre to begin with, just to later tauto14

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logically prove their belonging to this genre in the second step. In other words, the analyst has to depend on a prior determination of the generic structures formed by her specific goals. Both approaches put forward a rather problematic concept of essentialism, referring normatively either to supposedly essential characteristics for a genre or to a supposedly essential canon of film constituting the genre. Nonetheless, Altman’s categories can be utilised pragmatically to determine the evolution of genres. Every new genre film participates with its individual organisation of semantic and syntactic elements in the development of its genre. Genres are not subject to a stable set of regulations. The principles of language (langue) allow for an unlimited choice of individual utterances (parole). Because of their reciprocal relationship, language itself can be changed by an utterance. Thus, genres must be understood as a provisional, since dynamic, category, which requires a historicised way of thinking: It requires a diachronic instead of a synchronic analysis. Francesco Casetti differentiates between three possible developments of genres: specification (the refinement of a common pattern), masking (essential traits appear in a different form) and actualisation (modifications which transform the traditional pattern without touching its original content). Therefore, genres cannot be understood as closed systems, but only as processes of systematisation. They are always in flux and undergo changes, especially when the semantic dimension (the general inventory of signs of genres) is realigned by the syntactic dimension (the special approach of the filmmakers).

3. The Genre System As Barry Langford has recently summarised, genres actively produce meaning, culturally and practically alike. They are of value both for theorisation as for film practice: «For film-makers, organising production around genres and cycles holds out the promise of attracting and retaining audiences in a reliable way, so reducing commercial risk. For audiences, genre categories provide basic product differentiation while the generic ‹contract› of familiarity leavened by novelty seems to offer some guarantee that the price of admission will purchase another shot of an experience already enjoyed (once or many times) before. For scholars, genre provides a historically-grounded method of establishing ‹family resemblances› between films produced and released under widely differing circumstances, and of mediating the relationship between the mythologies of popular culture and social, political and economic contexts.» (1)

In this sense, genres can be seen as discursive entities fundamentally organising the production, the understanding as well as the analysis of artefacts. We perceive 15

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genres as narrative categories. This makes every film telling a story a genre film. There is no film without genre and no genre without film. What the viewer notices is always the film in its generic horizon. But according to Jacques Derrida, this participation never amounts to belonging: «And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself, because of the effect of the code and of the generic mark.» («The Law of Genre» 65)

Derrida establishes the trait of participation between the inner and the outer, presence and absence; it is always constituted by its opposite. Thus, with every film, genre appears newly and differently. There is no finite logic constraining textual energy. Neither can every genre be subsumed under a certain header nor does an essence exist from which they might be deduced. Every film transformatively shapes its genre in the very process of ‹speaking› it. However, what features such a genre bears, what expectations it raises, what sets of artistic potentials it provides or to what extent it is engaged by audiences, remains the object of genre theory. Films provide genres with a space of transmission and performance. Between the paradigms of genres lies a temporal space which is open for experiments, extravagances and follies. Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance points to such a place of dynamic and flux. This is where cinema is situated: at the différance between genres. «It is because of différance», Derrida explicates, «that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called present element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element.» (Margins of Philosophy 13)

Thus, meaning can only come into existence if the present bears a relation to the past which has taken place as well as the future which might take place. It always remains deferred, i.e. it is never present, always absent. The signifier is always the signified already. If transferred to cinema and its genres, the moment of signifying is thereby perpetually bound to conventions evolving from the past which can be remodelled in the future. Cinema is always tied to familiar structures, but at the same time leaves nuances of a différance which utilises the familiar for the alien. Its play of difference and repetition, «narrow enough for recognition of the genre to take place, but wide enough to allow enormous individual variation» (Pye 187), establishes porous patterns always open to generic hybridisation. Or, as Jean-Loup Bourget puts it, the genre film’s extreme «conventionality is the very paradoxical reason for its creativity» (51). We do not see genre hybridisation as an instant of creative exhaustion. On the contrary, it seems to us as a liberating force challenging notions of homogene16

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ity, purity or essence. In hybrid texts, it is no longer possible to assert a dominant generic trait to a film. In spite of a defining property, hybridisation creates open texts. Adopting a notion by Langford (28), we would say that while hybridisation makes for a rather problematic concept of «film genre», the «genre film», however, remains more than ever alive and kicking. The individual hybrid text does not only self-consciously work with(in) given generic traditions, it also contests dominant ideologies of a genre.

4. Genre Hybridisation and Cultural Globalisation Compared with Hollywood, other cinemas have to «carve a space locally and internationally for themselves in the face of the dominant international cinema, Hollywood» (O’Regan 5). Indeed, Hollywood cinema has dominated movie theatres in most countries (see Segrave), and to a certain degree still functions as «the world’s mainstream film style» (Bordwell, «The Classical Hollywood Style» 4). Outside of Hollywood, national cinemas often were in need of «maintaining cultural identity while responding to the dominance and influence of American cinema», as Raphaëlle Moine points out, using the example of French cinema of the 1950s (152– 154). Many cinemas react to Hollywood’s output, which fundamentally is a cinema of genres, not only by adopting the dominant genre system but also by hybridising its aesthetic parameters. Nonetheless, this does not imply a ‹pure› generic matrix in Hollywood cinema. Quite on the contrary, many Hollywood productions themselves are «hybrid and multi-generic» (Neale, Genre and Hollywood 51). In her influential article Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History, originally published in Film Criticism in 1997, Janet Staiger makes the point that Hollywood productions have never been ‹pure›. Notwithstanding, she does not fall prey to the fallacy of solely inverting the ‹purity› paradigm by indiscriminatingly labelling Hollywood cinema as hybrid, which would eliminate the heuristic value of the notion of hybridity. Instead, Staiger differentiates between different forms of genre mixture by distinguishing hybridity from «inbreeding», a term she introduces to genre theory. Rather than regarding Hollywood productions as «truly cross-cultural», as the term hybridity would suggest, she argues that «the strands of patterns that intermix Hollywood filmmaking» belong to «the same language family of Western culture» (196) and thus should be considered as forms of inbreeding. Ascribing a potentially subversive trait to the notion of hybridity, as is common in the humanities in the last decades, Staiger acknowledges the existence of «internal hybrids» created by minority groups in Hollywood cinema that make use of genre mixing in order to «dialogue with or criticise the dominant» (Staiger 197). Of special interest in the present context are Staiger’s considerations not only of aesthetics, but also of social and political dimensions of genre hybridisation as well 17

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as the location of the concept in a realm that exceeds Hollywood cinema. Indeed, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have shown in Unthinking Eurocentrism, their standard work on ‹postcolonial›1 film history first published in 1994, manifold cinematic traditions exist that do not draw to Hollywood as a matrix of representation (see Shohat and Stam). Therefore, Hollywood cinema should by no means be regarded as the sole benchmark of hybridisation (even if it is a pivotal matrix of global genre hybrids). Instead of asserting binary oppositions between Hollywood and ‹world cinema›, a «polycentric approach to film studies» is more productive as Lúcia Nagib et al. have argued (xxii). Numerous films draw on generic patterns that stem from various cinematic and non-filmic traditions of diverse cultural backgrounds. Genres are appropriated according to specific cultural contexts, often without paying attention to notions of ‹authenticity›, ‹purity› or ‹origin›. The ‹generic identities› of the referred models thus are reshaped through specific «productions of locality» (see Appadurai 178–199). Unlike the paradigm of cultural imperialism, which assumes a mere homogenisation of local cinemas around the world according to the stipulation of dominant Hollywood productions, processes of heterogenisation are at work at the same time. Global cinematic flows are far from unidirectional, but rather characterise themselves by their many facets and multi-directionality. As part of the global cultural economy, the dialectics of globalising and localising forces in cinema exceed the aesthetic realm. In his much-cited essay Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Arjun Appadurai elaborates a valuable framework for the categorisation and analysis of the cultural economy of globalisation, which he understands as a «complex, overlapping, disjunctive order» (32). Appadurai distinguishes five interconnected dimensions of «global cultural flows» which he denominates as «ethnoscapes», «technoscapes», «financescapes», «mediascapes» and «ideoscapes«. Rather than being coherent, delimited entities, theses ‹scapes› exhibit «fluid, irregular shapes» that are «deeply perspectival constructs» (33), inflected by particular interrelations and contexts in which they are situated. Thus, Appadurai’s approach considers the interconnected and multifaceted global fluxes of persons, technologies, capital, media representations and ideologies. Of special relevance in the present context, the mediascapes provide «complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world» and include aspects such as production, dissemination/exhibition and reception as well as different modes (fiction or documentary) and hardware (analogue or digital technologies). Although not explicitly mentioned in Appadurai’s essay, the mediascapes with their «series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms)» (35) correspond to the concept of genre, as it is conceived here. Following Rick Altman, we regard genres as sites of conflicting discourses and representations: 1

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Shohat and Stam, however, criticise the usage of the term ‹postcolonial› and convincingly introduce the term «polycentric multiculturalism» (48).

Genre Hybridisation

«Because a genre is not one thing serving one purpose, but multiple things serving multiple purposes for multiple groups, it remains a permanently contested site. [G]enres [are] ever in process, constantly subject to reconfiguration, recombination and reformulation.» (Film/Genre 195)

These conflicts inherent to genres do not solely occur as stylistic tensions or alterations on a formal level, but also manifest themselves in the negotiation of different imaginaries expressed via certain generic regimes that are again frequently subject to particular forms of hybridisation. Nonetheless, genre hybridisations do not necessarily imply the subversion of power relations, as many authors – especially in postcolonial discourse – would have it. Hybridity has become a buzz word in various disciplines. Since the proclamation of the ‹era of postmodernity› in the early 1980s2 and the emergence of a «global heterophilia» (Werbner 19), hybridity or hybridisation advanced as a key term in various discourses – not only in the humanities including disciplines such literary studies, linguistics or media theory, but also in the natural sciences and technologies. Whereas in the field of technology hybridisation applies to an increase of efficiency and complexity, in the humanities it refers to «the mixture of materials, concatenations of codes, the combination of distinct modelling in theoretical discussions» (Schneider 57). A common denominator of hybridity is the almost unanimously positive connotation – contrary to the former usage of the term in the context of evolutionary biology and racial ideology, which also served as justifications for the colonisation of non-European peoples, as Robert J. C. Young has shown (6). Despite its origins, the term is used in the humanities to express an anti-essentialist notion of cultural productions and culture in general. In this regard Edward W. Said makes the point that «all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic» (xxv). Whereas Said refers to the term ‹hybrid› to underline the specific configurations of distinct cultures and the power relations implied in them, the term has often been used with the result of erasing differences or to uncritically celebrate hybridity as a subversive cultural practice without sufficiently localising the phenomenon. Rather than a counter-hegemonic cultural practice, hybridity often «becomes an end in itself, serving only to undo binary oppositions», while «dodging entirely the question of location» (Mani 31). The prevalent conception of hybridity as subversion of repressive power structures often tends to have an apologetic character. In regard to the uncritical usage of the term, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has pointed out the risk of a palliative «romancing hybridity» (398f.) or a «hybridist triumphalism as an end in itself» (403). This premonitory observation is of particular relevance if one considers that hybridity is also a factor of production 2

See Gumbrecht for the origin and usage of the term ‹postmodernity›.

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in consumer culture, which serves to gain additional market shares and to maximise profits vis-à-vis the increasingly glocalised3 capitalism, in which the «becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural» (Jameson «Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue» 60) are reciprocally intertwined. Indeed, strategies of hybridisation are ever more common in the sector of cultural economy. Regarding cinema, hybridity not only occurs as a response in ‹minor cinemas› to the dominance of U.S. American film industry, but also increasingly in Hollywood itself (see Jaffe), not least as a sales strategy for the purpose of market expansion. This being the case, different forms, functions and intensities of hybridity need to be specified as a corrective and located to the respective socio-historical constellations. Or, as Ella Shohat pointed out in her seminal essay Notes on the ‹Post-Colonial›, first published in 1992 in Social Text: «As a descriptive catchall term, hybridity per se fails to discriminate between the diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced assimilation, internalised selfrejection, political co-optation, social conformism, cultural mimicry and creative transcendence.» (Shohat 137)

Therefore, hybridity is not per se a subversive cultural practice, as conceived in many approaches, such as the elaborations of Homi K. Bhabha, who ranks amongst the most prominent and influential theorists on the (postcolonial) discourse of hybridity in the humanities. Bhabha attributes subversive qualities to hybrid phenomena and at the same time tends to disregard social and historical context4. Characteristic of his approach, Bhabha states in a broad brush that «Strategies of hybridisation reveal an estranging movement in the ‹authoritative›, even authoritarian inscription of the cultural sign. [T]he hybrid strategy or discourse opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal.» (58)

Interestingly, as early as 1971 Silviano Santiago published an essay called O entrelugar do discurso latino-americano (The In-Between Space of Latina American Discourse), in which certain notions resemble Bhabha’s theorisation, such as the concept of hybridity and «in-between space»5, although Santiago’s approach stems 3 4 5

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The term ‹glocalisation› blends the words ‹global› and ‹local› to point out that «homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies are mutually implicative» (Robertson 27) in so-called globalisation processes. For a critique on Bhabha’s psychoanalytically grounded conception of hybridity see Fludernik. Bhabha’s conception of «in-between space» in relation to the notion of hybridity is explicitly elaborated in the following passage: «the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‹inter› – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible

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from the perspective of cultural anthropology and is more closely tied to social and historical backgrounds. According to Santiago, notions of ‹unity› (unidade) and ‹purity› (pureza) disseminated by European colonial empires in Latin America have been «contaminated» by local cultural practices. Although the «hybrid element» («elemento híbrido») gained importance according to Santiago, he does not deduce the subversion of colonial power structures per se. Rather, he states that imaginaries in (neo)colonial societies could not develop in mere naivety. As a result, and this is of special interest in the present context, forms of «writing on other writing» («escritura sobre outra escritura», Santiago 23) emerged, often resulting in pastiche, parody and digression.6 The notion of «writing on other writing» indeed is central for genre productions, which are strongly based upon structures of repetition and variation. The genres and modes mentioned by Santiago correspond to a concept of postmodernism, as prominently elaborated by Ihab Hassan, who regards hybridisation as one of eleven characteristics of the postmodern – also including, as already mentioned by Santiago, parody and pastiche. Hybridisation as a trait of the postmodern is conceived as «the mutant replication of genres», which leads to the «deformation of cultural genres» (196f.). Whereas genres traditionally were assumed to have «recognisable features within a context of both persistence and change» and therefore were conceived within the dialectics of identity and difference, these traits are ever harder to maintain, according to Hassan. This notion echoes Derrida’s deconstructivist call for «undoing genre» already mentioned above. The concept of hybridity traces back to Mikhail Bakhtin, who theorised «hybridisation» in Discourse in the Novel (Slovo v romane), his seminal study on «genre stylistics» of the novel, written in 1934/35. According to Bakhtin, a dialogue between different languages can occur even within one sentence and thus create a polyphony directed against the «standardisation and centralisation of the verbal-ideological world» (163). In this context, Bakhtin introduces the term hybridisation, defined as a blending of two social spheres within a single utterance. Importantly, «intended hybrids» are differentiated from «organic hybrids», which exist in every language (244–247).7 Without denying the subversive potentials that Bakhtin already emphasised, the take in the present volume argues for a conception of hybridity that pays close attention to the distinct forms of the respective phenomena as well as the particular constellations in which they occur. Thus, we concord with Néstor García

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to begin envisaging national and nationalist histories of the ‹people›. And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.» (38f.). Apart from Santiago’s reflections, another Brazilian author, Oswald de Andrade, pioneered in the conception of a culturally specific form of hybridisation: the antropofagia, conceptualised in the Manifesto Antropofago, published in 1928 (see Schulze). See Stam for the first thorough transfer of Bakhtin’s concepts to film studies.

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Canclini, who underlines that «hybridisation takes place under specific historical and social circumstances» (XII). As Dimitris Eleftheriotis has pointed out in his important book on Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks (2001), processes of cultural interaction and exchange are always at work and should therefore be considered as the beginning not the end of matter: «the fact that ‹everything is hybrid› should not be a point of arrival but a point of departure in the investigation of the different conditions and forms of hybridisation». With this in mind, a careful attention to aesthetics as well as structural forms such as economic relations is highly necessary: «While it is beyond doubt that hybrid forms […] are the product of cultural interaction and exchange, there is a need for a theoretical approach that accounts for the textual specificities of the films and offers an understanding of how these forms relate to a broader field of power relations and to national and international historical contexts.» (Eleftheriotis 101f.)

Even though, we do not claim to propose the new theoretical approach Eleftheriotis has called for, the present volume nonetheless intends to open up new perspectives on hybrid configurations in cinema at the level of global cinematic flows. Various articles in the present volume problematise the concept of genre from different angles based on diverse case studies and historical backgrounds. Rather than offering a single view of genre hybridisation, the phenomenon is illuminated from different perspectives, resulting in a kaleidoscopic picture accounting for the different facets inherent to genre configurations in regard to global cinematic flows.

5. (Post)National Cinemas Commencing the volume, Tim Bergfelder’s seminal essay fundamentally reconsiders central questions of both the conception of cinematic genres and cultural globalisation. He points out that there remains a widespread assumption that popular film genres are synonymous with Hollywood, or at least that they originated in the American context before being exported and adapted across the world. In the first part of his essay, Bergfelder discusses how this assumption has developed across the history of academic genre criticism and how it fits within debates about Hollywood’s supposedly universal appeal versus the distinctiveness of national cinemas. He argues for a more complex understanding of the emergence and global circulation of popular genres, suggesting transcultural affinities that are often ignored when international film relations are scrutinised under the more generalising headings of cultural imperialism and colonisation, and industrial hegemonies. In the second half of his article, Bergfelder homes in on a specific case study: the Edgar Wallace 22

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films of the 1960s, one of the most successful domestic genre cycles in the history of German cinema, hybridising traditions of comedy, the detective thriller, film noir, Weimar cinema, gothic horror and superhero comic books. Bergfelder’s focus is on the specific hybrid configuration of the original series, claiming a fundamental hybridity in that the original films were for the most part genuinely scary, bleak and disturbing, yet included comic interludes. In this respect, the series contravened audience expectations associated with horror and comedy as distinct genres, not fully fitting into either category. Finally, Bergfelder looks at the differences evident in the later spoof films that parodied the Wallace cycle and became popular in the mid- to late 2000s. The author’s question is again what the films can tell us about the evolution of generic formulae more generally, and their chances in the contemporary media landscape to translate and export across borders. In doing this, Bergfelder considers terms of genre and nation not as stable or fixed categories, but as processes that occur very unevenly across different cultural contexts and historical periods. He argues that the dynamic between these concepts has been constitutive of most of cinema since its inception, while flows of influence never run in just one direction; there also are no unambiguous points of origin of generic developments or conventions. At the same time hybridisation processes, which occur simultaneously at the levels of the text, of production, and of reception, undoubtedly take on localised forms and fulfil localised functions. Harald Steinwender discusses one of the earliest and most important traditions of genre hybridisation in European cinema. During the «anni d’oro», the golden years of Italian cinema between 1955 and 1970, the Cinecittà film industry managed to launch an enormously successful production of genre pictures, turning Italy into a producer and exporter of popular movies for mass audiences. The first wave of genre films to cross national borders and succeed in international distribution were the peplum films, an Italian subgenre (or filone) of the adventure movie, ranging back to costume epics such as Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) which set commercial records for the Italian silent film. The post-war pepla claimed a first triumph with Pietro Francisci’s low-budget Le fatiche di Ercole/Labours of Hercules (1958), a colourful adventure movie featuring bodybuilder Steve Reeves in the lead. Following Francisci’s blockbuster, most pepla of the late 1950s and early 1960s were realised as co-productions and used elements of Greek or Roman mythology or history as well as fantasy motives. A great many of these sword-andsandal pictures are fascinating examples of a free and easy use of mythology and history in popular European filmmaking that is matched by an almost post-modern dealing with generic boundaries, genre hybridisation becoming the rule rather than the exception. Drawing to key movies such as Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra/Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), Riccardo Freda’s Maciste all’Inferno/The Witch’s Curse (1962) and Sergio Leone’s Il colosso di Rodi/The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), Steinwender analyses the ironic nature 23

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of the peplum, its strategies of genre hybridisation as well as its gender and body politics, most obvious in the casting of bodybuilders, and points out connections to the Italian-European westerns of the 1960s. Marcus Stiglegger picks up on this point and engages with the case of ItalianEuropean gothic westerns. Drawing on theoretical concepts by Rick Altman and Ivo Ritzer, he describes how the semantic set of the gothic horror film is adopted into the set of syntactic elements established by the Italian-European westerns of the 1960s. At first he defines the semantic-syntactic set of both gothic horror and Italian western, following up with a close reading of the extraordinary westerns directed by Antonio Margheriti such as Joko invoca Dio ... e muori/Vengeance (1968) and E Dio disse a Caino/And God Said to Cain (1969). These hybrids of western and gothic horror use the familiar imagery and well-established semantic set of gothic horror to create a picturesque and interesting backdrop for syntactically conventional but gothically executed revenge stories commonly known from the context of Italian-European westerns. Seen as surreal or even horrific plays, these films offer strong atmosphere, cruel inflictions, high pitched desires and biblical metaphors. Fernando Ramos considers the giallo, another particularly popular filone. During the early 1970s a group of Italian-European popular films challenged the common conceptions of the murder mystery genre. Combining elements of literary conventions of the hard-boiled fiction with a colourful mix of horror, violence and sex, gialli were on one hand the result of the dependency of the Italian film industry from the aesthetic parameters established in the local market by American popular cinema, but were also part of a broader trans-European development, not least as a result of the co-production status of many of these pictures. Formal and narrative similarities can also be found in the same period in British, German or Spanish films. At the same time, the gialli were also very much an Italian phenomenon; their structural characteristics as genre are strongly related to local circumstances of production, distribution and consumption of Italian popular cinema. Relying on the semantic/syntactic approach to genre studies proposed by Rick Altman, the chapter analyses this paradox and focuses on the structural characteristics of this group of films (which clearly depart from classical narrative structures) and on their relation to a set of institutional and reception-related aspects (which often fall under the category of a «pragmatic» approach to genre studies) in order to problematise a categorisation of the gialli as generic entity, especially regarding their nature as a result of a process of international generic hybridisation.

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6. Cosmopolitan Agencies Dimitris Eleftheriotis discusses fundamental questions of genre hybridisation and global cultural flows from the perspective of cosmopolitanism. His pivotal essay considers the films of Jules Dassin, an émigré/diasporic/exilic director, in relation to hybridisation and globalisation. Eleftheriotis opens with a brief examination of these terms before proposing the blossoming discourse of cosmopolitanism as an alternative conceptual framework. There are certain, rather marginal, strands in the discourse on cosmopolitanism that can be brought to bear on Dassin’s films. Two concepts in particular are of pertinence for Eleftheriotis here, the sociological category of the «stranger» (Simmel) and that of the «errant subject» (Agamben via Foucault). Dassin’s life and work are marked by an extreme form of strangeness, a position of displacement that is characteristic of his entire career. In Simmel’s definition of the stranger a peculiar dialectic of proximity/distance is ascribed in such a cosmopolitan position and disposition. A similar dialectic can be traced in Dassin’s work through a series of formal conventions such as voice-over, observational structures, point-of-view systems and editing, foreign characters, narrative structures, the use of urban space, fluid and eclectic employment of the melodramatic and the comedic, performance, mise-en-scène and frame composition. Eleftheriotis explores the relationship between proximity and distance through a detailed analysis of selective Dassin films but also identifies some of the inconsistencies in its use. The examples focus on The Naked City (1948), Du rififi chez les homes/Rififi (1955) and Pote Tin Kyriaki/Never on Sunday (1960), made in the USA, France and Greece respectively, chosen as evocative instances in which aesthetic choices are evidently the product of negotiation around production practices, critical evaluations and processes of cultural differentiation and exchange. Eleftheriotis’ inspiring case study of Dassin as a cosmopolitan author who operated in conditions that enabled, even demanded hybridisation, offers two usefully generalisable concluding points. Cosmopolitan positions and dispositions engage creative agents in cinematic negotiations that are informed by sensibilities, aesthetics and ethics that can be traced across a dialectic relationship between proximity and distance. Such dialectic operates in an inconsistent and errant manner that undermines the stability of conventional markers of authorial style as well as that of rigid national or generic frames. Ivo Ritzer focuses on the work of Filipino «national artist» Eddie Romero, especially his Philippine-U.S. co-productions, and the ‹testamentary› text Sudden Death (1975) as a paradigmatic example of hybrid media culture. In a generic hybridisation of western, conspiracy thriller and blaxploitation martial arts film, this movie does not only hybridise several genres and production cycles but also exerts a substantial discourse on the post-colonial imaginary in the Philippines. On that note, Sudden Death questions several interrelated fields of film as well as cultural theory. In the area of production (as well as distribution and exhibi25

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tion) it positions the Philippines in a transnational system of film circulation. As a result, the movie’s treatment of the notion of national cinema hints at representations and subjectivities signified by an appropriation of Hollywood genres. On a textual level this poses important questions of inscribing aesthetic differences to these very genres in the process of hybridising them. Ritzer’s paradigmatic textual analysis of Sudden Death works out the complex practices of hybridising generic traditions, the modes by which these hybridisations embody the paradigm of cultural globalisation of media and the significance of the Philippine experience of being colonised by the imperialist power of U.S. empire. In doing this, he argues that global cultural flows in media are not one-way processes which perpetuate cinematic homogenisation, but open up hybrid spaces of cultural media exchange and geopolitical interaction. Instead of overemphasising structural factors of economic dominance, Ritzer draws on theoretical concepts by Homi Bhabha, Mary Louise Pratt or Marwan M. Kraidy who recognise structural factors as important determinants, yet refuse to see global flows of media culture as mono-directed in a limiting sense of ‹cultural imperialism›. Mobilising the framework of a critical transculturalism, Ritzer aims for a careful consideration of hybridity in order to both defy claims of idealist cultural essentialism which sees national cinemas threatened by ‹foreign› generic conventions as well as point out the fluid spaces of negotiation which provide media cultures with potentials of transformation. In Ritzer’s view, Romero’s films such as Sudden Death are not only shaped by colonialist ideology but are active shaping processes in their own right, forming complex reciprocal encounters of global flows in media culture. By way of tinkering, tampering and toying, Hollywood genres are taken apart, reassembled and transformed, in the end forming a discourse critical of colonial power. According to Ritzer, Romero’s cinema thus takes place in a cultural exchange between local Philippine media culture and Hollywood’s global genre system, never fixed in an absolute power structure. Ella Shohat has been examining fundamental issues that concern the scope of the present volume in works such as Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989), and especially in the recent postscript to her seminal book, which is partly reprinted here. In her pioneering study, Shohat moves beyond a nationalist perspective and discusses ‹Israeli› and ‹Palestine› cinema relationally, as densely intertwined and inserted in transnational, globalising contexts. In connection with institutional politics, diverse discourses and narratives, she considers the complex politics of representation in documentary and fiction films, including the emergence of «new hybrid generic spaces» in the past decades that have transcended delineations of genres like the traditional war film or the Bourekas. During the 1990s, «generic walls separating ‹ethnic tension› and ‹national conflict› narratives» began to crumble, allowing for new cinematic encounters. Often omitted in the discussion of genre, the «politics of casting» are called to attention as a site for critically exploring both the «chromatic hierarchy of the Israeli/Arab stereotypes» 26

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and the «schizophrenic existence of the Arab-Jew within a partitioned land». Shohat underlines that in the past two decades films have been representing Israel as a multilingual space, thus moving beyond the «Hebrew/Arabic split» and reflecting complex processes of globalisation and migration. This is particularly evident in the case of Palestinians-in-Israel filmmakers, a great number of whom have emigrated, including Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman or Hanna Elias. Their films address issues of multiple dislocations within exilic and transnational perspectives. As demonstrated, the diasporic films explore complex identities shaped along «the fault-lines of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, partition, migration, and exile».

7. Transcultural Subjects Barry Keith Grant considers adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, providing new insights from a transcultural perspective. Picking up the famous line of John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – «When the facts become legend, print the legend» – Grant argues that this certainly has been the case with Vlad the Impaler, for whom history has largely given way to myth. Bram Stoker’s late Victorian novel Dracula, published in 1897 and based in part on Vlad, established the conventions of vampire mythology, but his mythic image has proven extremely useful for filmmakers, generating at least six versions of particular cinematic, sociological and ideological interest: Nosferatu (Germany, 1922, directed by F. W. Murnau), Dracula (USA, 1931, directed by Tod Browning), Dracula (UK, 1958, directed by Terence Fisher), Nosferatu (Germany, 1979, directed by Werner Herzog), Dracula (USA, 1979, directed by John Badham) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (USA, 1992, directed by Francis Ford Coppola). Each of these films imagines the monstrousness of the vampire differently and is indicative of the cultural context of its creation. Considering Stoker’s novel in the context of Robin Wood’s influential conception of the ideological structure of horror, Grant’s analysis focuses on the two German adaptations, the closest of the films to their source text, and the way each has offered a different conception of the vampire and of the relation between normality and the monstrous from that of Stoker’s novel. In doing this, Grant also illuminatingly discusses the hybridisation of generic conventions of the horror film with art cinema elements and the auteur style of Murnau as well as Herzog. Andreas Stuhlmann’s contribution deals with the development of film melodrama as a transcultural narrative over a period of sixty years. Stuhlmann examines melodrama in the light of the discontent of cultural globalisation, the effects of the concept of successive paradigm shifts, the ambiguity of the idea of hybridity and the history of genre theory, reflecting on strengths and flaws of the theoretical framework of hybridisation. The article traces a line of themes and motives from the genre’s hayday in Hollywood’s studio system to contemporary examples, from 27

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Douglas Sirk’s oeuvre and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), through to Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (1999), Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head-On (2004) and Wong kar-wai’s Fa yeung nin wa/In the Mood for Love (2000). Building on earlier research, the essay traces the expansion of the concept of melodrama from a stage to a screen genre with a globally prevalent set of stylistic features and a cinematic sensibility. The process of adaptation at play in this process can be seen as an intercultural translation beyond the question of genre. The genealogy of auteur filmmakers poses an alternative tradition of intercultural narratives, across boundaries of space and time to the globally dominant paradigm of melodramatic formats on television. Florian Mundhenke examines how genre hybridisation works in respect to the core elements of genre structures such as characters, motifs, themes, and narratives. The essay reviews basic genre elements and then considers theories of generic evolution and hybridisation. This theoretical framework is applied to the western, a genre particularly lending itself to such an analysis because of its long history with numerous diversifications in different national cinemas, and frequent attempts of critics to both declare the death of the genre and later proclaim its revival. Against the backdrop of his theoretical reflections, Mundhenke reconsiders how elements of the western genre have developed until the present, especially regarding motifs, themes, and characters. Subsequently, this framework is used to analyse a recent example as a case study: Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2008). Mundhenke infers that since the 2000s, genre hybridisation and intercultural dialogue through standardised genre formulas have grown both in significance and frequency. He concludes that genre structures provide strategies of framing, illuminating, and explaining global and culturally diverse realities by means of familiar formulas. Peter W. Schulze discusses transregional cinematic flows between Hollywood and the Mexican film industry, using the example of two major genres; the American western and its Mexican counterpart, the comedia ranchera. Conceived as a paradigmatic study of cinematic «glocalisation» (Robertson), the essay traces some of the complex interconnections between the two genres and the «media capital» (Curtin) at work; it examines the circulation of stars and other film personnel and transnational cross-media synergies among film and music industries, as well as political interventions from governments and economic and technological interrelations between the respective (trans)national culture industries. Specific attention is paid to the negotiation of generic and cultural identities vis-à-vis intertwined globalising and localising processes. Both western and comedia ranchera have shaped national imaginaries to a degree that they appear to be quintessentially U.S. American or Mexican, respectively. Contrary to these «invented traditions» (Hobsbawm/ Ranger), both the ‹national(ist)› figures of the cowboy and the charro, who play central roles in the western and the ranchera culture, are far from being genuinely U.S. American or Mexican. Schulze traces their ‹multiple origins› from early mod28

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ern globalisation of equestrian culture to mid-20th century genre configurations in cinema, which has been a major catalyst in the globalisation of cultural economy. Although genre hybridisations and the «multiple generic identities» (Moine) of the western and the comedia ranchera are highlighted, the essay avoids the widespread «hybridist triumphalism as an end in itself» (Spivak). Schulze points out that when the comedia ranchera emerged in Mexico, affirmative discourses on mestizaje and the «raza cósmica» (Vasconcelos) may have prevailed in terms of the construction of a hybrid cultural identity with nation-building function. Nevertheless, intranational exclusions based on ethnicity, gender, class and regional belonging seem to be structurally inherent in the genre. Rather than being perceived as a ‹subversive› quality, the generic and cultural hybridity of the comedia ranchera is grasped in the sense of a «postcolonial exotic» (Huggan); it is interpreted to be a form of folkloric autoexoticisation as a means of global commodification of cultural difference. This representational strategy proves to be aimed especially at the Latin American film market with its domination by Hollywood films, many of which capitalised on U.S. American folklore in the western genre.

8. Glocalising Hollywood Ute Fendler deals with recent tendencies of «(e)merging genres» in Francophone African cinemas. Usually, these are primarily regarded as ‹cinémas d’auteur›. However, recent films draw increasingly from elements of popular genres to address larger audiences and thus call into existence a new vein in African film production. The essay discusses two recent examples as case studies of «(e)merging genres», Cédric Ido’s Hasaki ya Suda/The Swords (Burkina Faso/France, 2011) and Viva Riva (Congo, 2010) by Djo Munga. As Fendler underlines, the short film Hasaki ya Suda surprised critics because of its hybrid aesthetic and narrative structures, as well as its apocalyptic setting, which have appealed to a global audience. The awardwinning crime thriller Viva Riva deals with a network of gangs across national borders in central Africa and makes use of generic structures of sex and crime that are hardly found in any other Francophone film. As demonstrated, both The Swords and Viva Riva draw from popular genre patterns which are modified in a particular way, but, notably, steering clear of a particularism that would prevent their reception by an international popular audience. Referring to Alain Badiou’s concept of cinematic abstraction, Fendler makes the point that the two films considered illustrate how Francophone African filmmakers hybridise internationally popular genres in order to reach a global audience. Claudia Böhme analyses the hybrid character of Tanzanian horror films. She demonstrates that Tanzanian filmmakers draw on ideas and iconographies from Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood and local folklore, literature and theatre to 29

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build the narratives. Böhme shows how, through the appropriation of different contents, aesthetic and artistic practices, filmmakers build up distinct genre aesthetics. While the composition of a film is influenced by transnational stylistic currents everywhere, she claims that the integration of these sources into local traditions and practices of narrative production is crucial. Tanzanian horror films not only differ from their Western counterparts in their practices of production and reception, but also in aesthetics and style. The film Nsyuka, released in 2004, was both the first Tanzanian horror film as well as one of the first films of the developing Tanzanian video film industry. By now the Tanzanian horror film, filamu ya kutisha, is an established genre with subgenres and stylistic currents featuring Tanzanian witches, vampires, zombies or mami wata. While the filmmakers are obviously influenced by transnational stylistic currents, Böhme proofs that the remediation and integration of local oral literature, discourses and practices is one of the main characteristics of these films. She argues that the filamu ya kutisha is part of a rich story-telling tradition in Tanzania which is remediated in film. By looking at the construction of these monsters it becomes clear that the remediation in the new medium has severely changed them. While the creatures of folklore have been rather ambiguous in their character, neither entirely good nor bad, they have turned into evil and bloodthirsty monsters in the films. In discussing the filamu ya kutisha in comparison with genre conceptions in the West, and giving a close-up perspective of Tanzania’s film monsters, Böhme points to their specific hybrid genre aesthetics. Andreas Rauscher discusses how Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s did not only redefine the possibilities of cinematic space by combining martial arts wirework with spectacular visual effects, but also crossed borders between horror, romance and comedy as well as between Eastern wuxia epics and new standards of Western Hollywood fantasy. The article examines Tsui Hark’s and Ching Siu-Tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story franchise (since 1987) as a paradigmatic case of creative transnational genre aesthetics. Tsui’s auteurist appropriation of a classic folk tale by Chinese author Pu Songling and the effects-wizardry of I.L.M. and George Lucas resulted in a template that indicates the potential of global hybrid story worlds that are continued in video games by Canadian developer Bioware as well as in the hip hop collages of the Wu Tang Clan. To start with, Rauscher carefully situates A Chinese Ghost Story in the cultural context of 1980s Hong Kong cinema and in regard to the adaptation process of updating a story well-known to the Asian audience as a template for an internationally competitive fantasy special effects epic. In Rauscher’s estimation, its hybrid style rediscovers an immediate emotional impact, at the same time sophisticated in its approach to genre syntax and nevertheless providing a sense of wonder created by its feel for rhythm and innovative iconography. He puts forward the argument that the process of hybridisation works in A Chinese Ghost Story on the level of storytelling as well as on the level of style; in contrast to several Hollywood franchises it is not reduced to creating a fixed 30

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formula. Instead, the resurrection of the wuxia genre became not a simple form of adaptation, but an ongoing transformation resulting in a story world no longer restricted to Hong Kong cinema and a specific medium. Therefore, Rauscher finally deals with formalist questions of style and artistic appropriation that have become part of a cultural flow process enabling originally specific Asian genre concepts to travel not only across continents but also into the realm of video games. In this way, as an alternative to considering genre concepts to be stagnant forms, the chapter considers the rules and motives of wuxia, offering an inspiring playground for formalist experimentation as well as a seismograph for cultural developments even beyond the disappearing space of the Hong Kong of previous decades. Irina Gradinari focuses on the influence of Hollywood cinema, specifically of American action films of the 1980s, on the development of its post-Soviet counterpart. In the 1990s, Russian filmmakers adapted and transformed Hollywood muscular cinema in order to formulate a new Russian national identity. They employ formulas, taken from action films of the Reagan Era, whose plots were usually based on the opposition between the USA and the Soviet Union, usually implying a chauvinistic dehumanisation of the «enemies» (i.e. the Vietnamese or the Soviets). In this context, Gradinari poses the question how in this type of action cinema anti-Soviet ideas could have been turned into its opposite and how it could be functionalised for the so-called New Russian Idea. She elaborates that Hollywood action films provide Russian cinema with a successful compensation mechanism for self-empowerment and genre structures like generic hybridity and bricolage. On one hand, they allow immediate pleasure through identification with the omnipotence of the main character in a period of social crisis. On the other hand, they allow to renegotiate the current discourses of post-Soviet society and to update Soviet and Russian aesthetics. Gradinari suggests that the end of the Soviet ideology required a reformulation of subject constructions and systems of articulation. Due to the incapacity of habitual forms of representation to adequately articulate actual social meanings, the adoption of existent Hollywood genres was triggered. Gradinari’s main focus is on the Russian cult film Brat/Brother (1997) by Aleksey Balabanov, as this film uses generic elements of U.S. muscular cinema, hybridising them with modes of typification known from Soviet traditions of representation as well as character configurations typical of Russian folk tales. In Gradinari’s view, especially Balabanov’s films thereby postulate a superiority of Soviet and Russian aesthetics over Hollywood cinema, thus enabling the audience’s satisfaction through the cinematic compensation of failed social utopias.

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9. Undoing Genre Robert Stam sheds new light on the categorisation of documentary and fiction as film genres, challenging their prevalent classification as polar opposites or mutually exclusive generic forms. In an intriguing conjunction, his essay reflects upon the theoretical discourse on documentary/fiction, drawing from striking examples, many of which have not sufficiently been considered in Anglophone film studies. Stam regards documentary and fiction as trans-genres harbouring infinite crossings and variations. He shows that an analysis depending on its theoretical grid can possibly interpret the same film both as fiction and documentary. Thus he argues against the notion of generic essence, and instead proposes to speak of «documentary operations as opposed to fictive operations». As demonstrated, this corresponds with the practice of various filmmakers and theoreticians, who have coined hybridising terms, such as Agnès Varda’s «documenteur», Frederick Wiseman’s «reality fictions» or Jacques Rancière’s «fiction documentaire». Even though assumed examples of convergences between documentary and fiction may dissolve many distinctions, Stam still underlines the differences of the two as theorised in documentary discourse, in which «documentary operations» are characterised especially by what Jean-Louis Comolli has called the «risk of the real» or, as others have described, by an ethical responsibility. The essay reveals that the question of the mimetic real in the sense of a verisimilar style increasingly gets displaced by «the register of who is empowered to represent the real». The fact that ‹giving voice› can be highly problematic, is demonstrated using the example of the deconstructive documentary Mato Eles?/Should I Kill Them? (1983) by Brazilian filmmaker Sérgio Bianchi. A similar critical function is shown to be performed by certain fake documentaries, or so-called mockumentaries, which may foster «an anti-hermeneutics of suspicion», as Stam notes. The importance of a «control of the archive» in the sense of Jacques Derrida’s analysis is shown by example of African-American queer-feminist filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1995) and her «use of intertextual mimicry». Richard Porton delineates some of the intriguing ramifications of fiction/nonfiction hybrids in contemporary film culture. The first section, preoccupied with what Bill Nichols calls the «blurred boundaries» of recent documentary practice, focuses on the stylistic and generic importance of non-fiction films such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Illisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass (2009) or Nikolaus Geyrhalter Our Daily Bread (2005) which merge an interest in the contours of reality with an experimental aesthetic orientation. Particular attention is given to ‹performative› documentaries (e.g. Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, 2011), which synthesise social criticism with an avant-garde cinema approach. Furthermore, the essay explores the hybridism embraced by practitioners of art cinema like Abbas Kiarostami, Jia Zhangke, and Pedro Costa – fiction filmmakers, 32

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whose work reflects both a revivified neorealism and an awareness of documentary traditions, as is shown by the examples of Kiarostami’s Nema-ye Nazdik/CloseUp (2000), Jia’s Er shi si cheng ji/24 City (2008) and Costa’s trilogy Cartas da Fontainhas/Letters From Fontainhas (1997–2006). Finally, Porton considers essay films such as Avi Mograbi’s Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay/Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2006), Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) or Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2012). He is particularly concerned with these films’ fusion of a literary style pioneered by Montaigne with political and social commentary. The essay films discussed «generate a digressive aesthetic and contrarian scepticism by juxtaposing ostensibly dissimilar preoccupations», as Porton points out. Most of the films discussed in the essay reflect upon the ambiguous consequences of modernity. Oksana Bulgakowa provides new research on the peculiarities of the «Soviet antigenre production system» in the period between 1934 and 1954. Stalinist cinema was dominated by film types and categories such as the «revolutionary film», the «labour (production) film» and the «kolkhoz film», all of which did not correspond to established cinematic genres. Traditional genre cinema was rejected – tellingly, the film minister Boris Shumyatsky was shot in 1938 after having been accused of installing a system of Hollywood genre production in Soviet cinema. As Bulgakowa points out, the revolutionary film was of utmost importance and almost every leading Soviet film director adapted the history of the October uprising. The result was that one screenplay could easily be transferred to another and certain shots became canonical and were repeatedly reproduced. Bulgakowa underlines that both the «production film» and the «kolkhoz film» refer to their milieu and subject (the representation of labour) and do not define the generic structures of these film types. In 1935 Sergei Eisenstein tried to make a different «kolkoz film», Bezhin lug/Bezhin Meadow, an oedipal revolt of the son and the ritual revenge of the father, but the Central Committee stopped the production of the film. Interestingly, hybrid forms between fictional, educational and documentary films emerged, such as the «biography of the objects» suggested by Sergei Tretyakov or Dziga Vertov’s method of a non-fictional associative film. Mikhail Kalatozov’s Jim Shvante/Sol’ Svanetii/Salt for Svanetia (1930) is based on Tretyakov’s bio-interview, but both the «production film» and the bio-interview are transformed into an avantgarde picture of an auteur. The hybrid forms developed in Stalinist cinema include elements of film genres (for example, elements of romantic comedy in «kolkhoz films» or structures of monumental pictures in the «revolutionary film»). Nonetheless, the stylistic peculiarities and the politics of the affect of the hybrids resist their inclusion into a genre system. Lúcia Nagib critically notes that it has become redundant to champion the breaking of boundaries in media and the arts, which is prone to the celebration of hybridity as an end in itself. Her seminal essay on «The Classical-Modern Hybrid 33

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and the Politics of Intermediality» offers new perspectives on hybridisation and mixed media in film studies. Nagib retraces the history of Bazin’s conception of intermediality, which he has defined as «impure cinema», and enquires the relations to his understanding of ‹modern› cinema, based on ‹realism› and ‹ambiguity› resulting from time and space uncut. The concept of ‹impurity› is then expanded by Jacques Rancière’s politics of «dissensus» and applied to an intermedial film sequence of Mikio Naruse’s Yama no oto/The Sound of the Mountain (1954), an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s novel. Nagib addresses the issue of the hybrid genre by calling into question the classical-modern divide in cinema. Due to its reliance on montage, Yama no oto might be qualified as a ‹classic› in the Bazinian sense. However, Nagib strikingly demonstrates that the qualities of Naruse’s film actually derive from a combination of representative and aesthetic regimes, locating a combination of the ‹classical› and the ‹modern› in a single scene concerning a noh mask. In the film sequence analysed, the noh mask introduces a moment of yugen, in the sense of an ineffable meaning, or dissensus in Rancière’s terms. «Dissolution of frontiers», as Nagib shows, «takes place at all levels: between different art media, modern and classical genres, and between genders and sexualities, all of which remain as elusive and non-pedagogical as yugen.»

Works Cited Altman, Rick. «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.» Film Genre Reader. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 26–40. Print. – Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Print. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print. Bachtin, Michail M. «Das Wort im Roman.» Die Ästhetik des Wortes. Ed. and introduction Rainer Grübel. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. 154–300. Print. Berry-Flint, Sarah. «Genre.» A Companion to Film Theory. Eds. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 25–44. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. «The Commitment to Theory.» The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 19–39. Print. – «Culture’s In-Between.» Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul 34

du Gay. London: Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1996. 53–60. Print. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge, 1985. Print. – «The Classical Hollywood Style, 1917– 60.» The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Eds. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. London: Routledge, 1988. 1–84. Print. Bourget, Jean-Loup. «Social Implications in the Hollywood Genres.» Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 51–59. Print. Braudy, Leo. «Genre: The Conventions of Connection.» Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 411–433. Print. Casetti, Francesco. «Filmgenres, Verständigungsvorgänge und kommunikativer Vertrag.» montage/av 10.2 (2001): 155– 173. Print.

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Derrida, Jacques. «The Law of Genre.» Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55–81. Print. – Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Print. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. New York: Continuum, 2001. Print. Fludernik, Monika. «The Constitution of Hybridity: Postcolonial Interventions.» Hybridity and Postcolonialism. Twentieth-Century Indian Literature. Ed. Monika Fludernik. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998. 19–53. Print. Foucault, Michel. «What is An Author?» The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 101–120. Print. García Canclini, Néstor: Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Con introducción a la edición 2001. México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 2001. Print. Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower, 2007. Print. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. «Postmoderne.» Dimensionen und Grenzen der Begriffsgeschichte. München: Fink, 2006. 81–7. Print. Hagener, Malte. «Der Begriff Genre.» Die Lust am Genre. Eds. Rainer Rother and Julia Pattis. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2011. 11–22. Print. Hassan, Ihab. «Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective.» The Post-modern Reader. Ed. Charles Jencks. London: Academy Editions and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. 196–207. Print. Hickethier, Knut. «Genretheorie und Genreanalyse.» Moderne Film Theorie. Ed. Jürgen Felix. Mainz: Bender, 2003. 62–96. Print. Jaffe, Ira S. Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theory of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Print.

– «Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue.» The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. 54–77. Print. Keppler, Angela and Martin Seel. «Über den Status filmischer Genres.» montage/av 11.2 (2002): 58–68. Print. Langford, Barry. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Print. Mani, Lata. «Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception.» Feminist Review 35 (1990): 24–41. Print. Moine, Raphaëlle. Cinema Genre. Trans. Alistair Fox and Hilary Radner. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Print. Nagib, Lúcia, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah. «Introduction.» Theorizing World Cinema. Eds. Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. xvii-xxxii. Print. Neale, Steve. Genre. London: BFI, 1980. Print. – Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. O’Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Pye, Douglas. «The Western (Genre and Movies).» Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 187–202. Print. Ritzer, Ivo. Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. Robertson, Roland. «Glocalization: TimeSpace and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.» Global Modernities. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson. London: Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1995. 25–44. Print. Ryall, Tom. «Teaching through Genre.» Screen Education 17 (Winter 1975/76): 27–33. Print. – «Genre and Hollywood.» The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. London: Oxford University Press, 1998. 327–338. Print. 35

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Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Print. Santiago, Silviano. «O entre-lugar do discurso latino-americano.» Uma literatura nos trópicos. Ensaios sobre dependência cultural. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978. 11–28. Print. Schneider, Irmela. «Von der Vielsprachigkeit zur ‹Kunst der Hybridation›. Diskurse des Hybriden.» Hybridkultur: Medien, Netze, Künste. Eds. Irmela Schneider and Christian W. Thomsen. Köln: Wienand, 1997. 13–66. Print. Schulze, Peter W. Strategien kultureller Kannibalisierung: Postkoloniale Repräsentationen vom Modernismo zum Cinema Novo. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. Print. Schweinitz, Jörg. «‹Genre› und lebendiges Genrebewusstsein: Geschichte eines Begriffs und Probleme seiner Konzeptualisierung in der Filmwissenschaft.» montage/av 3.2 (1994): 99–118. Print. Segrave, Kerry. American Films Abroad. Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland, 1997. Print. Shohat, Ella. «Notes on the ‹Post-Colonial›. The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. 126–139. Print. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print. Staiger, Janet. «Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History.» Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 185–199. Print. Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print. Tudor, Andrew. Theories of Film. New York: Viking, 1974. Print. Werbner, Pnina. «Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity.» Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. Eds. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood. London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997. 1–26. Print. Williams, Alan. «Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?» Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.2 (1984): 121–125. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. Print. Young, Robert J. C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

(Post)National Cinemas

Tim Bergfelder

Transnational Genre Hybridity Between Vernacular Modernism and Postmodern Parody

There remains a widespread assumption that popular film genres are synonymous with Hollywood, or at least that they originated in the American context before being exported and adapted across the world. In the first part of this essay I shall discuss how this assumption has developed across the history of academic genre criticism, and how it fits within debates about Hollywood’s supposedly universal appeal versus the distinctiveness of national cinemas. In the process I will argue for a more complex understanding of the emergence and global circulation of popular genres. In the second half of this article, I home in on a specific case study – the Edgar Wallace films of the 1960s, one of the most successful domestic genre cycles in the history of German cinema, and parodied in a couple of spoofs that became popular in the mid- to late 2000s. My focus will be on the specific hybrid configuration of the original series, before looking at the differences evident in the later films, and what this might tell us about the evolution of generic formulae more generally, and their chances in the contemporary media landscape to translate and export across borders. Although genre theory and criticism is a well-established strand within academic film studies, its discursive prominence has waxed and waned over the decades (Grant, Film Genre). Initially making its appearance in the 1940s and 1950s in writings by critics such as Robert Warshow (1948) and André Bazin (1956), the academic study of film genre began to develop more strongly, at least in the AngloAmerican context, in the late 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with the increasing institutionalisation of film studies as a university discipline and subject area. In Britain 39

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this trend was associated with notable interventions from scholars including Ed Buscombe (1970), Andrew Tudor (1973), and Steve Neale (1980), and in the US with writers such as John Cawelti (1971), Barry Keith Grant (1977), and Thomas Schatz (1981), among others. By the mid-1960s adopting genre as a critical framework was instrumental in shifting the notion of creative agency from the individual auteur towards conceiving of cinematic production as a force field between aesthetic and formal criteria, and their social, historical, and industrial determinants. In this respect genre criticism helped pave the way for what we can now identify as the twin strands of formalist and sociological/historicist traditions within film studies, with all their attendant methodologies, which encompass both purely contextually-oriented approaches such as audiences and reception studies at one end of the spectrum, and studies with a more textually and intertextually oriented focus at the other end. Although the first wave of genre criticism was quickly superseded by, or rather incorporated into, other concerns and priorities, popular genres never really faded out of focus as such, and have become a perennial staple of film curricula. As critical priorities shifted from psychoanalysis and poststructuralism in the 1970s and early 1980s towards questions of film history in the 1990s and 2000s, genre studies evolved accordingly. However, although much has changed in academic discourses on film since the 1960s, one aspect of genre theory, at least in its Anglo-American incarnation, has remained surprisingly consistent, namely that in most cases the «original» template for popular genre film is tacitly understood to be Hollywood. Indeed many of the most influential studies on genre in the last fifteen years have primarily focussed on American cinema (Neale 1999 and 2002; Altman; Langford). Although it is generally acknowledged that thrillers, comedies, westerns, musicals, melodramas, horror films, and other genres are a staple of many film cultures and markets beyond Hollywood, and that this has been the case throughout film history, this fact has often been read reductively as an instance of imitation and copying. Thus, in his famous taxonomy of different types of national cinemas, Stephen Crofts (1993) contrasted the promiscuous hybridity of indigenous commercial cinemas, which are in most cases based on popular genres, with more authentic and original expressions of national culture, embodied by practices such as «art» and «third» cinema. In a similar vein, Toby Miller has questioned whether popular film genres in Europe represent a «cinema that mimics Hollywood at the expense of a diverse alternative cinema of smaller budgets and local expressivity» (Miller et al. 94). A more sophisticated model of explaining historically the global hegemony of Hollywood’s aesthetic practices and its relationship with indigenous popular genres was suggested by the late Miriam Hansen who argued that classical Hollywood functions as a form of global «vernacular modernism». The latter’s original mass appeal in the 1920s and 1930s was based on its ability to open up «hitherto unperceived modes of sensory perception and experience», and «to suggest a different 40

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organisation of the daily world» («The Mass Production of the Senses» 72). According to Hansen, these latter qualities not only paved the way in the first decades of the 20th century for the dominance of Hollywood itself, but also influenced, shaped, and transformed indigenous filmmaking practices across the globe, including its formally and ideologically most radical variants («Vernacular Modernism»). Hansen’s intervention has provided a particularly productive method for tracking the global spread and appeal of American modernity through cinema in the first half of the 20th century, and it suggests transcultural affinities that are often ignored when international film relations are scrutinised under the more generalising headings of cultural imperialism and colonisation, and industrial hegemonies. As Dudley Andrew has argued, «buying into classical cinema does not mean digesting its values whole, for its universal language breaks apart on national or regional shorelines into a Babel of varied receptions» (23). Hansen’s challenge has been taken up over the past decade, with important new studies on the diverse localised migrations and transformations of American popular genre formulae and their reception across the world (Maltby and Stokes; Gürata; Wright; Smith). Nevertheless, the «vernacular modernism» paradigm has been criticised on account of its pre-supposition of Hollywood’s universality, and indeed the question arises whether popular modes of film production outside of the United States can only be understood by their adherence to a version of modernity that is specifically and exclusively American. Lucía Nagib has pointedly asked whether Hansen’s suggestions mean to imply that «national cinemas would not have existed if it were not for the overwhelming presence of Hollywood» (31). It is worth noting in this context that during the early decades of filmmaking in Europe, many prototypes of so-called «classical» Hollywood genres emerged either prior to or in parallel to developments in the United States, as in the case of the epic pioneered in Italy (Alovisio and Bertellini). Similarly, there had been prototypical «westerns» in European cinema before Hollywood codified stories about the exploration and settling of the Wild West into a recognisable genre (Bock et al).1 In cases like these, the constitution of specific generic formulae owed at least as much to pre-existing social contexts (for example migratory patterns from Europe to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries) and cultural traditions and antecedents (literary, dramatic, iconographic, etc.), as to a direct influence of Hollywood. After all, the latter’s dominance only became fully felt after the end of World War I, when many basic patterns had already been established. It would be a mistake to dismiss such local contexts and generic developments as merely parochial eccentricities, eventually swept aside by the lure of the more «modern» Hollywood product. For once, although no one would seriously dispute 1

See also Steve Neale’s discussion of the problems in assigning The Great Train Robbery (1903) the status of a prototype western, in «Questions of Genre».

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Hollywood’s overall economic dominance, scholars have argued that the actual extent of its hegemonic status in specific markets and historical periods has not been as all-encompassing as is sometimes assumed, while the resistance of local audiences and their preference for domestic films throughout cinema’s history has been underestimated. A particular case in point would be popular Indian cinema that developed not only almost completely outside the hegemonic reach of Hollywood, but also according to a very distinctive understanding and meaning of modernity, which created its own hierarchies and stratification of popular genres (Vasudevan 2000 and 2010). But one can find examples from contexts which fall more directly within Hollywood’s economic sphere of influence, such as the case of post-World War II German cinema (Garncarz). Conversely, it is worth recalling that a number of foreign influences contributed significantly to Hollywood’s rise to hegemonic status and arguably to its modernity. American major studios have always been astute in recognising innovation and neutralising foreign competition by adapting, transforming, and absorbing it into its own continuously rejuvenating fabric; hence the Italian epics of the early 1910s led to Griffith, while other examples of a more reciprocal traffic include the American studios «talent hunts» in Europe during the 1920s, aesthetic borrowings from Soviet montage or the French New Wave, readjustments to established generic formulae in response to foreign films (e.g. the Hollywood western post-Kurosawa and post-Leone), the films by certain Hollywood directors such as Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, or Hollywood’s remakes of European cinema and more recently of films from Japan and Hong Kong.2 While it is important to conceive of the relationship between Hollywood and its others in a dynamic and reciprocal way, and to question the alleged universality of generic formulae or of Hollywood’s appeal, it seems equally necessary to remain wary of its conceptual opposite, the notion of a bounded, discrete, and fixed «national cinema», since as Hansen correctly pointed out, «that very category in many cases describes defensive formations shaped in competition with and resistance to Hollywood products» («The Mass Production of the Senses» 67). National cinema has become the principal lens through which popular genres outside Hollywood have been and still are being read, and nowhere is this tendency as pronounced as in the case of European cinema. Once again, it may be useful to map the genesis of an academic discourse here. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, perhaps most significantly triggered by the publication of Ginette Vincendeau and Richard Dyer’s eponymous collection (1992), «popular European cinema» as an area of study became a prominent trend within film studies. That this initiative came out of Britain at the time is perhaps not surprising in retrospect, since unlike in many other European countries there was already an established tradition of serious and 2

42

For the crucial influence of French cinema on Hollywood, see Abel; and Mazdon.

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sympathetic academic engagement in the UK with domestic popular genres, dating back to studies such as Charles Barr’s Ealing Studios in the late 1970s (1977), and the rediscovery of 1940s costume melodramas in the 1980s and 1990s (Harper 1993; Cook 1996). These studies had been characterised not only by an increased attention to historical detail, archival and other empirical sources, but also by their shift in emphasis away from ideology critiques of an all-oppressive and inescapable capitalist culture industry towards unearthing the emancipatory, socially enabling and community-forming dimensions of popular genres and their industrial infrastructure, an attitude that had been informed by cultural and gender studies paradigms, but also by new conceptualisations of national identity. This shift in emphasis brought in its wake a reversal of value assumptions. While earlier accounts had dismissed indigenous popular genres as derivative products complicit in the cultural indoctrination by Hollywood and conversely auteur-based art cinema as the only true form of nationally legitimate cinematic expression that could stave off the threat of cultural Americanisation (see the earlier references to Crofts and Miller), a new approach came to see domestic popular genres as a key to the national imaginary. Art cinema, on the other hand, became the arcane enclave of a remote intellectual elite, while Hollywood in many instances almost slipped out of the equation entirely. In attempting to capture an authentic national essence, it seemed necessary to suppress external influence at a textual level and at the level of production, whether originating from Hollywood or elsewhere. In other words, one cluster of reductive binaries became exchanged for another. Ironically, although many studies sailed under the heading of «European cinema», the supranational implications of that term were rarely if ever taken seriously (Bergfelder, «National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema?»). In recent years, the concept of popular European cinema, and thus the study of popular European film genres, appears to have faded as an academic priority, perhaps mirroring a broader decline since the 1990s in the optimism and utopian expectations with which a common European cultural or political project is being perceived. But perhaps an even more important reason for this decline may be the fundamental transformations cinema, cinephilia, and to some extent film studies itself as an academic subject, have undergone in the new millennium, following the gradual disappearance of analogue media, the migration from the big screen to online and mobile forms of circulation and exhibition, and more individualised and fragmented modes of reception. Meanwhile, new conceptual frameworks and critical categories, such as «transnational cinema», have not resolved the binary oppositions between a totalising universality of «global Hollywood» and a narrowly conceived definition of national cinema either – or it could even be that in the contemporary media landscape these oppositions no longer matter. In any case the focus appears to have shifted away from the consideration of cinema as a sociohistorical mass imaginary towards interstitial types of existential experience (exile, 43

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diaspora, migration, mobility more generally), marginal or decentralised modes of production, and the study of circulatory hubs and fluid exhibition networks.3 In order to render concrete the discursive, ideological, and technological shifts and debates that I have mapped over the preceding pages, and in order to propose a different perspective on the binary dichotomy between «global Hollywood» and «national cinema», I shall be looking at a specific case study in the remainder of this essay. The German Edgar Wallace series consisted of approximately thirty-five medium- to low-budget thrillers between 1959 and 1972, mostly produced by the Berlin-based company Rialto, some in co-production agreements with Danish, Italian, British, French, and Spanish partners (Bergfelder, International Adventures). Ridiculed and dismissed by the critical establishment at the time, the series became the financially most successful franchise of the German film industry, often outperforming Hollywood imports at the box office, while having little impact outside of the country (with the exception of Italy, where the series is said to have had some influence on the local industry’s own giallo cycle). In Germany, on the other hand, the series has remained omnipresent even after its production was discontinued, through regular repeats on television since the 1970s, and through VHS and later DVD editions from the 1980s. The series was briefly, and largely unsuccessfully, revived with new television productions in the late 1990s, but re-entered public consciousness more profoundly with two spoofs, Der Wixxer (2004) and its sequel Neues vom Wixxer (2007), which count among the most successful German releases of the decade. From outside Germany, the Edgar Wallace phenomenon has been viewed with some incomprehension and puzzlement. Although one of the most prolific and best-selling British novelists, playwrights, and journalists during his lifetime, Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) is little known today in his homeland, primarily to those with an interest in the development of British crime fiction, although Wallace also wrote colonial adventure stories set in Africa, and tales about horseracing, one of his own personal passions. Film historians may vaguely recall Wallace as one of the contributors to the screenplay of King Kong (1933), although the extent of his involvement is somewhat disputed since he died in the early stages of the project. And finally a very select group might remember an early 1960s British B-film series, later shown on TV, of adaptations of his work. Overall, however, it is fair to say that Edgar Wallace in Britain and everywhere except in Germany, is a forgotten author. In Germany, Wallace’s writings caught on as early as the Weimar years: Max Reinhardt brought his plays to the Berlin stage, his detective tales were referenced in the early writings of Siegfried Kracauer, and the first German film adaptations of his work date back to the early 1930s. It is in the years after World War II, however, 3

44

For a discussion of these issues and divergent definitions of what transnational cinema might entail, see, e.g., Ezra and Rowden; Ďurovičová and Newman; Higbee and Lim.

Transnational Genre Hybridity

1 Der Frosch mit der Maske

that the German Wallace phenomenon really took off, initially facilitated through the cheap but attractively packaged paperback versions of his novels, which came to occupy a similar function in the West-German cultural landscape as the série noire thrillers in France, or the giallo pulp novels in Italy, adopting red as a signifier of modern, cosmopolitan forms of popular entertainment that was available and accessible to all strata of the population, but had at the same time a touch of the forbidden and risqué. The first post-war West German Wallace adaptation was a West-German-Danish co-production, Der Frosch mit der Maske/The Fellowship of the Frog (1959), setting the tone and template for the series. It is worth pointing out that nearly half of the films, although notionally based on actual Wallace titles, deviated to such an extent from the original stories that they really constitute original narratives. A number of generic conventions remained constant throughout the series: the setting was invariable a foggy, nocturnal England, creating a distinctive topography that consisted of labyrinthine Gothic castles, seedy dock dives, and (especially in later films), trendy and cosmopolitan Soho. Except for a few stock shots of Big Ben, Tower Bridge and similar London landmarks, however, the films were shot either in the studio or on German locations, with German actors (including some veterans from Weimar and Nazi cinema) playing English characters, but speaking German. In terms of plot, most films had at their centre intrigues concerning a large inheritance or an elaborate revenge, with a series of bizarrely stylised (but rarely graphically depicted) murders. Nearly every film featured a master criminal, frequently masked in unusual attire and armed with idiosyncratic weapons (examples include The Monk with a Whip, The Shark with the Harpoon, The Green Archer, 45

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etc.). Otherwise the series relied on clearly demarcated stock characters: the film’s heroes were mostly young, upwardly mobile male Scotland Yard inspectors, whose main task, apart from solving crimes, was to protect heiresses and other women in peril. A gallery of suspects featured mentally deranged henchmen (invariably portrayed by Klaus Kinski), venal aristocrats, petty criminals, and sinister or alternatively senile older authority figures. There was usually a character to provide comic relief (for most of the series played by the comedian Eddi Arent). Apart from the jokes associated with the latter type of character, the series exhibited a more general tendency towards irony and self-reflexivity within its narratives; thus characters might be seen reading the novel on which the film is based, or in another instance one hears screams and shots go off off-screen, but it is then revealed that another Wallace film is filmed nearby. The series’ self-reflexivity extended to the films’ style: especially the early entries into the series, which were filmed in black-and-white, employed chiaroscuro lighting, in conscious emulation of the look of Weimar’s «haunted screen». Once the series switched to colour from the mid-1960s onwards, it started to experiment with garish primary colours, and psychedelic effects. The cinematography featured deliberately unusual camera positions and implausible point-of-view shots (e.g. a shot from inside the mouth through the teeth). The musical scores used electronic instruments (such as the Theremin, and the Trautonium) and mixed atonal and experimental elements with contemporary pop music, occasional ethnic influences, and interspersed this with exaggerated and intensified sound effects (echoing screams, manic laughter, gun shots). As should be evident even from this very brief summary of the Wallace films, the series invokes associations with a number of specific genre conventions and historical templates – comedy, the detective thriller, film noir, Weimar cinema, gothic horror (specifically the haunted house variety), while the masked master criminals are reminiscent of characters from superhero comic books. Although largely «local» in terms of its mode of production, in terms of its narratives and characters, it is difficult to pinpoint what is specifically «national» about the series; indeed there is hardly any reference to Germany in it. However, the fact that it clearly touched a nerve with domestic audiences, while failing (mostly) elsewhere, is instructive in complicating simple assumptions what a «national» cinema is supposed to be about. As I have argued elsewhere, the domestic success of the Wallace films was due precisely not for its invocation of a national identity, or only in a roundabout way. What the Wallace films imagined instead was an escape from the constraints of the nation, a pleasurable impersonation of the other that, especially important in the first twenty years after the war, could provide a space and a time without the memory of war and national guilt. At the same time, the films could still address nationally specific anxieties and sensibilities by deflecting it on a fantasy Britain (for example a barely articulated suspicion, dread, or mistrust of the authority figures 46

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of the previous generation), and could channel pre-war visual iconographies, such as expressionism, reading preferences, and modernist impulses (as in the music), which had been deemed deviant during the Nazi period. The particular generic regime that the Wallace series adopted was both informed by, but also jarred with international conventions and paradigms, which becomes clear when one studies the reception of the series abroad. The few films that were distributed in the UK in the 1960s elicited, not unexpectedly, bemused comments about the inauthenticity of the portrayal of England. Perhaps more interestingly, what Anglophone critics found difficult to accept was the series’ unusual combination of comedy and horror. The concept of a horror comedy or a spoof had been an established staple of Hollywood production for decades, in «scare comedies» such as the Bob Hope films The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940), or later comedian vehicles such as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), among other examples. But while these examples featured conventions and iconographies of the horror genre, the primary generic anchoring of the films remained comedy. The generic hybridity of Wallace films, on the other hand, was more fundamental; the films were for the most part genuinely scary, bleak, and disturbing, yet included comic interludes. In this respect, the series contravened (at least in the UK and US) audience expectations associated with horror and comedy as distinct genres, not fully fitting into either category. The 1960s was the last decade in German cinema when domestic productions could still regularly outclass Hollywood imports at the box office. From the early 1970s onwards, this situation changed radically, with audience preferences shifting irrevocably towards Hollywood (Garncarz 144–166). Since then, the lists of the most successful films in Germany do not differ significantly from those in other countries, and German audiences have gravitated in the main towards the same Hollywood blockbusters as cinemagoers in the United States, the UK, or other parts of Europe. In the 2000s (Reitze), the top-grossing titles were invariably tied to franchises such as the Harry Potter films, the Lord of the Rings saga, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Marvel superhero films, alongside Walt Disney, DreamWorks, and Pixar animation features and stand-alone hits such as Mamma Mia (2008) and Avatar (2009). What is perhaps more revealing is which domestic productions do well and which do not. Outside Germany, the last decade has been seen by critics and scholars of German cinema as a «renaissance», and as a return to artistic form following the demise of the New German cinema in the early 1980s (Fisher and Prager; Cooke and Homewood). Filmmakers such as Fatih Akin, or the so-called «Berlin School» have been hailed as the new representatives of a German national cinema, and while they may have won prizes at festivals, their domestic box-office success has been negligible. The only two German films in the last ten years that have found a reasonable level of recognition abroad and which were simultaneously successful in Germany, were Goodbye Lenin (2003) and Der Untergang/Downfall (2004). 47

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What remains of a «popular» German cinema in the 2000s and 2010s still can be differentiated according to classic generic distinctions and categories. Among the genres of the past decade are (melo)dramas such as Das Wunder von Bern/ The Miracle of Bern (2003), Die weisse Massai/The White Masai (2005), Die Welle/The Wave (2008), and horror films like Anatomie/Anatomy (2000), but the overwhelming majority of the top German hits have been comedies, followed by adaptations of children’s books and animation. Among the comedies, two main sub-strands predominate, on the one hand the kind of romantic comedy that Eric Rentschler identified already in the 1990s as a «cinema of consensus», and which has simply persisted into the present, and on the other the film parody or spoof. Squarely falling into the latter category are the two most successful German films of the 2000s, and indeed two of the most successful German films of all time: Der Schuh des Manitu/Manitou’s Shoe (2001), a parody of the 1960s German Karl May western, and (T)raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1/Starship Surprise (2004), a spoof of both the original 1960s TV series Star Trek and the German version of the 1970s US series The Love Boat. Both films starred and were written, directed, and produced by the comedian Michael «Bully» Herbig, who started his career in radio and who became subsequently nationally famous through his television sketch show. This trans- and multi-media career trajectory of popular comedians has been a common occurrence in the German film industry since at least the 1980s, and has sustained the film ventures of other (primarily TV) comics such as Otto Waalkes and Hape Kerkeling. The two Edgar Wallace spoofs, Der Wixxer (2004) and Neues vom Wixxer (2007) embody and illustrate perfectly the kind of contemporary German popular genre cinema mapped in the previous paragraphs. Like Der Schuh des Manitu and (T)raumschiff Surprise, the films draw nostalgically on a fondly remembered «classic» from the 1960s, and are more generally informed by a wide-ranging literacy in (international) film and television history as well as trivia. The specific revival of the 1960s may at least in part have something to do with the age of the people behind these films – both Michael Herbig and Oliver Kalkofe, the writer and star of Der Wixxer, were born in the mid- to late 1960s and are likely to have encountered the templates they are parodying for the first time on television in the 1970s. Also, like Herbig, Kalkofe made his name initially in radio and television before branching out into the cinema. Interestingly both of them also worked in dubbing. The professional background in stand-up, sitcom, or sketch formats is clearly evident in the films, which often feel less like sustained narratives, and more like a series of set pieces. However, the main structural template of and influence in these films is not so much television, but instead a particular style of Hollywood spoof that encompasses films by Mel Brooks (High Anxiety, 1977; Dracula – Dead and Loving It, 1995), the Zucker Brothers (Airplane!, 1980; The Naked Gun, 1988, and its sequels), Jim Abrahams (Hot Shots!, 1991), Keenen Ivory Wayans (Scary Movie, 2000), and 48

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the Austin Powers film series (1997–2002). David Bordwell has noted that this kind of parody had been «rare in the studio era, confined by mostly to variety show skits on radio and television» (55), but, as has been pointed out, by the 1990s, films like these were among Hollywood’s most popular and profitable outputs, and they also proved successful with German audiences (Harries, «Film Parody» 281). Although parody is commonly understood to be breaking, undermining, and making fun of conventions and rules (generic or otherwise), Dan Harries (Film Parody) has argued very convincingly that film parody relies on its own conventions, which marks it out as a quasi-genre of its own and creates its own anti-canon, albeit in a somewhat cannibalistic fashion. Spoofs generally mark the self-consciously formalist and «baroque» stage in the development of a genre, although they may either occur concurrently with the genre in its «classical» incarnation, or appear decades after the genre’s first appearance, as in the case here with the Wixxer films. What complicates this teleology somewhat is that in the latter case already the original Wallace series can be seen to have exhibited baroque tendencies. Drawing on Rick Altman’s taxonomy of a genre’s lexical elements (setting, characters, mise-en-scène), its syntax (narrative structure) and style, Harries identifies a number of methods that film parody uses to unhinge the norms and conventions of the films or the genre that is being parodied. These methods include reiteration (citation of the original text/genre), the inversion of meaning, misdirection (as a play with expectations that originate from the original), literalisation (usually a play on words or names from the original), the extraneous inclusion of elements from other texts and genres that have nothing to do and often jar with the original, and finally exaggeration. All of Harries’ strategies of parodic narration can be found to a greater and lesser extent in the two Wixxer films. In terms of the narrative structure, the films cite the original films’ standard opening where a suspenseful pre-credit sequence is interrupted by the metallic disembodied voice saying «Here is Edgar Wallace», followed by the sound of gunshots and the bullet holes form the letters «Edgar Wallace»; only here the opening line is «Here is Edgar Wallace’s neighbour». The main setting of the first Wixxer film is «Blackwhite Castle», the latter being both a reference to the original series which featured Blackwood Castle, and at the same time a literalisation insofar as the castle is continuously shot in black and white, whereas the surrounding countryside and other locations are shot in colour. This remains one of the few effective audio-visual gags the two Wixxer films have to offer, apart from a rather obvious blurring between diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the odd side wipe and split screen. Spoofing the original series’ byzantine narrative twists, Blackwhite Castle is at the same time a respectable home for the breeding of pug dogs, but also harbours in its cellar a white slavery network that kidnaps young women to transform them into girl groups through auditions based on X-factor-type casting shows. Inverting the clean-cut, asexual, and smart heroes of the 1960s series, Kalkofe plays the central hero as a chubby, hard-boiled, hard-drinking gumshoe in 49

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the film noir tradition, who appears to have a somewhat homoerotic attachment to his murdered ex-colleague. Puns and puerile and/or sexual innuendos over the characters» names abound – the main villain is called Der Wixxer, which is both a reference to the film Der Hexer (and almost a homophone), but also is a vulgar expression in German for someone masturbating. The three main policemen are called Very Long, Even Longer, and Rather Short, while other characters include Miss Minipony, the Earl of Cockwood, Freddy Fartface, Miss Dryc**t, and Miss Pennymarkt (the latter the name of a German discount supermarket chain). There is a Hitler-lookalike butler named Hatler, while contemporary actor Lars Rudolph offers a passable imitation of the mannerisms Klaus Kinski employed in the original Wallace films. Actors and other crew associated with the original series (Grit Böttcher, the assistant director Eva Ebner, and in the sequel Neues vom Wixxer, one of the original series’ main stars, Joachim Fuchsberger) appear in cameos, as do a number of German celebrities, such as the host of the German version Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Günter Jauch, and the oompah music duo «Die Wildecker Herzbuben». Other films and cultural reference cited include Airplane! (appropriately), The Silence of The Lambs, Matrixstyle martial arts scenes in slow and stop-motion, the bicycle-against-the-moon image from Spielberg’s E.T., Edvard Munch’s The Scream, David Hasselhoff ’s German hit «Looking For Freedom», and The Muppet Show. The sequel, which offers more of the same, adds allusions to the TV hit series 24, the 1970s Czech children’s TV classic Pan Tau, and features the appearance of 1980s British pop group Madness. I have noted previously that the original Wallace films displayed their own brand of self-reflexivity, transnational citation, and hybridity, but from the comparison with the Wixxer films, the differences should be evident. For all their playfulness, the 1960s films still functioned as plausible and coherent narratives. Their characters may have been stereotypes, but they were never caricatures. The Wixxer films, by contrast, only work in relation to their own enclosed self-referential framework, and have no psychological depth or narrative arc. Despite all their international cine-literacy, the two spoofs have remained a resolutely domestic and provincial German phenomenon; neither of the two films has had much of an international distribution and they remain available on DVD solely without English subtitles. Equally inexportable proved a subsequent attempt by the same production company and director (though this time without Kalkofe) to parody yet another 1960s series, the FBI agent franchise Jerry Cotton. The resulting spoof Jerry Cotton (2010), featuring Penelope Cruz’s sister Monica in the female lead, did not even emulate domestically the success of its predecessors. As I have suggested above, the afterlife of the 1960s Wallace series in the present, whether in the form of their original texts or in the guise of newly created homages and spoofs, is tied up with changed contexts of cinephilia, canonicity, cultural value, and nostalgia, as well as new consumption practices. In Germany, the origi50

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nal Wallace series has almost achieved canonical status and is now deemed worthy of serious documentaries on cultural TV channels such as ARTE, frequently cited by new generations of filmmakers as German cinema’s «golden age». For the contemporary cinephile, there are DVD box sets. The original films have even become internationally sought-after collector items for the discerning cult-film hunter, as became clear when Quentin Tarantino nominated Wallace director Alfred Vohrer as his favourite German director (Rodek). But it is not just DVDs, but also the dissemination through YouTube and online streaming services that irrevocably changes consumption patterns. The increased level of global awareness that has been fostered by the internet and expansion of online forms of circulation has had another effect, namely eroding the special status European cinema had for much of cinema’s previous hundred years, whether popular or otherwise. As Thomas Elsaesser predicted some time ago, after having assumed a position of superiority for over a century, European cinema is now, for better or worse, nothing more than an equal substratum of global cinema, and in consequence needs to re-define itself in relation to this expanded field (485–513). In this respect, it may be productive to compare the two Wixxer films not so much with their antecedents in the 1960s, but synchronically with two French films, that were released about the same time. OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions/OSS117: Cairo: Nest of Spies (2006) and its sequel OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus/OSS117: Lost in Rio (2009), are like the two Wixxer films a spoof of a popular French film series from the 1960s, a quasi-James Bond cycle focusing on a suave French secret agent embroiled in Cold War intrigues and global travel. Like the Wallace films, the original series has a complicated pedigree of influences that includes domestic popular cultural traditions and pan-European co-production practices. Directed by Michel Hazanavicius and starring Jean Dujardin, the two films preceded their Oscar-winning triumph The Artist (2011), and enjoyed quite significant international dissemination. They have gained acclaim by well-known critics such as Roger Ebert in the United States (Ebert), but also domestically by the venerable Cahiers du Cinema (Burdeau), and are easily available in subtitled digital copies. One of the reasons for their transnational success may be that although their main generic anchoring is comedy, they function less like parodies, according to the template that Harries has identified, and which the two Wixxer films have followed so assiduously. Unlike the latter, Hazanavicius’ homage to the 1960s does not require any prior knowledge or familiarity with the originals. His various cinematic references and quotations, which includes nods to Masked Mexican Wrestlers to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), can be picked up by the cult film connoisseur, while there are plenty of jokes (especially puns) that will only be understood by Frenchspeaking viewers, but neither expertise is essential in terms of the films’ overall intelligibility. Instead the films work at the level of pastiche, conveying an idea of what 1960s cinema – in Europe, but also in Hollywood – looked and felt like. The films 51

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display a careful cinephilic attention to detail: they get the colour scheme of a 1960s film right, the somewhat crispy texture of the image; the costumes feel authentic, and the images revel in techniques one associates with the period, such as split-screens, in a much more subtle and effective way than similar elements in the Wixxer films. Christine Sprengler (86) has identified this form of approach in contemporary cinema as «deliberate archaism», recreating «not only the look and feel of the period in question, but also the appearance of art from that [...] time». In this respect, the OSS117 films are the European equivalent of the on-screen nostalgic homage to older popular genres one finds in Quentin Tarantino’s nods to popular European traditions in Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012). But they are also not a world apart from the kind of pastiche one finds in Todd Haynes’ homage to of Sirkian melodrama and 1950s aesthetics in Far From Heaven (2002). As in the case of Haynes and Tarantino, there is more at stake in Hazanavicius’ pastiche than merely the show-off of cinematic references. The OSS 117 films elicit their laughter by sending up those social norms and conventions that the original films, despite their own sense of parody and bonhomie, took for granted, in other words, the ubiquitous sexism, racism, homosexual panic, and imperialism, which lurked behind the original films’ ostensibly cosmopolitan façade.4 And yet, the social anxieties and political concerns are also all of today, which is particularly evident in the first film, with its Muslim fundamentalist threat and eerie anticipation of the Arab Spring that in this form would never have featured in the films of the 1960s. All of this makes the update of a 1960s template not only very current, but also internationally marketable. In this respect, the OSS 117 films may represent one version of how popular European cinema, in its triangulated relationship between the national, the European, and the global can still work today. In contrast, the German Wallace spoofs prove too indebted to an older template to transcend their national origins, and they remain too self-enclosed in their referential framework. In order to partake in the film’s half-nostalgic, half-mocking project, the audience has to be familiar with the original series and its nationally specific cultural context. Despite its plethora of global cultural references, many jokes (for example, the appearance of some of the original series villains, but also the use of domestic celebrities) are completely lost on a non-German viewer, and although the film approximates in parts the visual style of its antecedents, it lacks the precision and cinephilic affection to capture the earlier aesthetic convincingly. In addition, the profanity of some of the jokes and puns not withstanding (the impact of which for German viewers incidentally is often deflected by using English for the most profane terms), the «humour» in the Wixxer films remains safe and harmless. Since the targets of the jokes are merely cultural references rather than social or political contexts, issues or anxieties, the Wixxer films, unlike the OSS 117 pastiches, ulti4

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For a different, more ambivalent interpretation of the two films, see Bell.

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2 OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions

mately offend no one. Moreover, by opting unequivocally for broad farce, they miss out on what made the original series so unique and memorable, namely its hybrid indeterminacy. In the early 1990s, Fredric Jameson famously referred to pastiche as the postmodern manifestation of a «blank parody» (16), but the comparison between the self-reflexivity of the original Wallace series, the parody of the Wixxer films, and the pastiche of the OSS 117 films seems to suggest that in contemporary cinema it is parody itself that has become blank, while pastiche can still hold the potential to innovate, critique, and elicit affect.5 In conclusion, what I have tried to argue in this essay is that when we talk about genre hybridisation and the various intersections between the universal, the national, and the local, it is useful to consider these terms not as stable or fixed categories, but as processes that occur very unevenly across different cultural contexts and historical periods. In some respects, as I have argued, the dynamic between these terms has been constitutive of most of cinema since its inception, while flows of influence never run just in one direction; there are also no neat and unambiguous points of origin of generic developments or conventions. At the same time hybridisation processes, which occur simultaneously at the level of the text, at the level of production, and at the level of reception, undoubtedly take localised forms and fulfil localised functions. 5

See also Dyer.

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Works Cited Abel, Richard. The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Print. Alovisio, Silvio and Giorgio Bertellini. «The Pastrone System: Italia Film from the Origins to World War I.» Film History 12.3 (2000): 250–261. Print. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print. Andrew, Dudley. «An Atlas of World Cinema.» Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. Eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 19–29. Print. Barr, Charles. Ealing Studios. London: Cameron, 1977. Print. Bazin, André. «The Evolution of the Western.» What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. 149–158. Print. Bell, Dorian. «Agent OSS 117: France, Colonial Memory, and the Politics of Parody.» Contemporary French Civilization 34.2 (2010): 1–21. Print. Bergfelder, Tim. International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s. New York: Berghahn, 2005. Print. – «National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies.» Media, Culture and Society 27.3 (2005): 315–331. Print. Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It. Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Print. Burdeau, Emmanuel. «Agent Doublé.» Cahiers du cinéma 611 (2006): 52–53. Print. Buscombe, Ed. «The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema.» Screen 11.2 (1970): 33–45. Print. Cawelti, John. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1971. Print.

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Cook, Pam. Fashioning the Nation. Costume and Identity in British Film. London: BFI, 1996. Print. Cooke, Paul and Chris Homewood, eds. New Directions in German Cinema. London: Tauris, 2011. Print. Crofts, Stephen. «Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s.» Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14.3 (1993): 49–67. Print. Ďurovičová, Nataša and Kathleen Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Dyer, Richard. Pastiche. London: Routledge, 2007. Print. – and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Ebert, Roger. Rev. of OSS 117: Cairo – Nest of Spies, dir. Michel Hazanavicius. rogerebert.com. Chicago Sun-Times. 26 Jun. 2008. Web. 17 Feb. 2013. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Print. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Fisher, Jaimey and Brad Prager, eds. The Collapse of the Conventional: German Films and its Politics at the Turn of the TwentyFirst Century. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Print. Garncarz, Joseph. Hollywood in Deutschland: Zur Internationalisierung der Kinokultur 1925–1990. Frankfurt/Main: Stroemfeld, 2013. Print. Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower, 2007. Print. – Film Genre: Theory and Criticism. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977. Print. Gürata, Ahmet. «Translating Modernity: Remakes in Turkish Cinema.» Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 242–254. Print.

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Hansen, Miriam. «Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale». World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Eds. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. London: Routledge, 2010. 287–314. Print. – «The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.» Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77. Print. Harper, Sue. Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of The British Costume Film. London: BFI, 1994. Print. Harries, Dan: Film Parody. London: BFI, 2000. Print. – «Film Parody and The Resuscitation of Genre». Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. Ed. Steve Neale. London: BFI, 2002. 281–293. Print. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim. «Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.» Transnational Cinemas 1.1 (2010): 7–22. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Print. Langford, Barry. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Print. Maltby, Richard and Melvyn Stokes, eds. Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange. London: BFI, 2004. Print. Mazdon, Lucy. Encore Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema. London: BFI, 2000. Print. Miller, Toby et al. Global Hollywood. London: BFI, 2001. Print. Nagib, Lucía. «Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema.» Remapping World Cinema. Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. Eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 30–37. Print. Neale, Steve: Genre. London: BFI, 1980. Print. – ed. Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. London: BFI, 2002. Print.

– Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. – «Questions of Genre.» Screen 31.1 (1990): 52–56. Print. Reitze, Helmut, ed. Media Perspektiven Basisdaten - Daten zur Mediensituation in Deutschland 2012. Frankfurt/Main: Media Perspektiven, 2012. Print. Rentschler, Eric. «From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus.» Cinema and Nation. Eds. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie. London: Routledge, 2000. 260–277. Print. Rodek, Hans-Georg. «Quentin Tarantinos Spass mit obskuren Namen.» Die Welt. 3 Aug. 2009. Web. 17 Feb. 2013. Roschlau, Johannes et al., eds. Europa im Sattel: Western zwischen Sibirien und Atlantik. Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik, 2012. Print. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. London: Random House, 1981. Print. Smith, Iain Robert. The Hollywood Meme: Global Adaptations of American Film and Television. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014 (forthcoming). Print. Sprengler, Christine. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. New York: Berghahn, 2009. Print. Tudor, Andrew. Theories of Film. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Vasudevan, Ravi, ed. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. – The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Robert Warshow, «The Gangster as Tragic Hero.» Partisan Review 15.2 (1948): 240– 244. Print. Wright, Neelam Sidhar: «Bollywood Eclipsed. The Postmodern Aesthetics, Scholarly Appeal, and Remaking of Contemporary Popular Indian Cinema.» Diss. University of Sussex, 2010. Print.

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Harald Steinwender

Spectacular Bodies and Funfair Attractions The Italian Peplum Cycle from Cabiria to Il colosso di Rodi

1. Pepla and Italian cinema European cinema is usually understood as a cinema of auteurs, as an art house or highbrow cinema. This bias persists even today in most academic studies on the history of Italian cinema. But the art cinema was seldom a success with the public. In fact, it was the often dismissed cinema populare films that proved to be a crucial factor in the short boom of the Italian film industry after World War II, in particular between 1955 and 1970. It was during these decades that Cinecittà managed to launch an enormously successful production of genre pictures. The pepla, the first wave of these genre films to be exported successfully, marked a basic change in the Italian film industry and turned Italy into being both producer and exporter of popular movies for mass audiences (Wagstaff, «Italian Genre Films» 84). The pepla, the Italian sword-and-sandal pictures, were often realised as co-productions and they are extreme examples of the Cinecittà industry’s tendency to exploit popular genres to the max by copying and imitating a successful film again and again, rapidly fuelling the emergence of a new subgenre or filone.1 In my paper I will line out 1

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The term filone is used in studies on Italian genre cinema to describe the tendency of the Cinecittà film industry to follow a successful genre film with a series of variations (or rip-offs) which constitute an often

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the roots of the genre cycle usually called peplum as well as its impact on the Italian film industry. I will discuss its ironic nature, its strategies of genre hybridisation as well as its gender and body politics, and point out connections to the ItalianEuropean westerns of the 1960s. The term peplum originates in the Latinised Greek word peplos which refers to the wide, folded chest and loin cloths which often featured in historical epics (Schenk 190f.). It describes an Italian variation of the adventure movie using elements of Greek or Roman mythology or history and often fantasy motives. The term was first used in France during the early 1960s while in Italy a variety of denotations were common, for example film storico-mitologico (historical-mythological film), often with the addendum «a basso costo», which means low-budget, as well as the terms supercolossi (über-bodies) and il genere colossale (the colossal genre) (Spinazzola 166–170). Pepla were produced with international success as early as in the silent era. Between 1908 and 1913 there were at least three versions of The Last Days of Pompeii. Furthermore costume epics like La caduta di Troia/The Fall of Troy (1911), Quo vadis? (1913) and Cabiria (1914) set commercial records for the Italian silent film (Usai 119; Gregor and Patalas 22). At this time the heroes of the later pepla first emerged on screen: Ursus for example made his entrance in the 1913 version of Quo vadis? and Cabiria, set during the Second Punic War, saw the first appearance of Maciste, played by the former dock worker Bartolomeo Pagano. Maciste, gifted with nearly super-human muscle power, had been created especially for this movie by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who also wrote the intertitles (Usai 119). As D’Annunzio could also be considered the inventor of fascist aesthetics in Italy (Payne 126), unsurprisingly these movies have often been analysed for their political content. For Jerzy Toeplitz, the first wave of Italian epic movies, and especially Cabiria, was nothing more than an expression of the aggressive militarism and imperialist efforts of the Italian bourgeoisie (Toeplitz 61–64), and film historian Gian Piero Brunetta points out that «this compact set of historical films helped establish symbols that would guide the political rituals of fascism.» (Brunetta 34). Doubtlessly, Maciste was soon exploited for chauvinistic purposes: In the obviously propagandist Maciste alpino/The Warrior (1916) Pagano played the hero again, but this time as an Italian mountain soldier during World War I. In Maciste poliziotto (1918), released two years later and also set in present time, Maciste was fighting sinister left-wing agitators (Frayling 34). Both movies dislocate the mythical hero from the setting in ancient times and the genre of the historical epic. They are short lived cycle of films. Mikel J. Koven points out that «filone here tends to be used more idiomatically, as in the phrase ‹sullo stesso filone› (‹in the tradition of›) or ‹seguire il filone› (‹to follow the tradition of›).» (5).

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early examples of the free and easy dealings of the peplum with genre rules as well as examples of the transition of the historical epic into another genre of the Italian silent film, the today nearly forgotten «artist movies» which were constructed around performers and often set in circuses.2 Contrary to prestige epics, these films weren’t concerned too much about historical events but centred around muscle men, often equipped with «exceptionally physical strength and an unclouded simpleness of emotions» (Usai 123). Oddly enough, the production of strongman pictures as well as historical epics stagnated in Mussolini’s new Italy. One might think the fascist regime should have considered this kind of movie a good means to illustrate the need for a strong ruler, but it is possible however that the propagandist implications of these movies were regarded too obvious (Seeßlen 8). The post-war peplum cycle was launched with three successful films: Alessandro Blasetti’s Fabiola (1949), Mario Camerini’s Ulisse/Ulysses/The Loves and Adventures of Ulysses (1954) and, triggering most follow-up «neo-mythological» movies, Pietro Francisci’s low-budget Le fatiche di Ercole/Hercules/ Labors of Hercules (1958), a colourful adventure movie featuring bodybuilder Steve Reeves as the lead. Francisci’s film is first a fantasy-adventure but to some extent based on mythological sources as we follow Hercules fighting the Nemeïc Lion, the Crete Bull and meeting the Queen of the Amazons. It proved extremely successful in Italy with a box office of 900 million Lire (about 1.4 million US-Dollar at the time). In the US, Francisci’s film became an early example of blockbuster marketing when Joseph E. Levine bought the distribution rights and released 600 prints of the film after a PR campaign unparalleled to that day. In the end, 24 million Americans watched Le fatiche di Ercole at its first cinema release (Lucanio 12f.; 180f.). At this point, the peplum craze in Italy took off. Francisci directed a first sequel entitled Ercole e la regina di Lidia/Hercules Unchained (1959) which proved as successful as its predecessor in Italy as well as in international markets, and Carlo Campogalliani’s Ursus/Mighty Ursus (1961) made even more money in Italy (Brunetta 503; Günsberg 99; Micciché 109) – 961 million Lire or about 1.5 million US-Dollars at the time. Between 1958 and 1965, approximately 170 to 300 pepla were produced (Günsberg 97, Micciché 108f.), depending on the definition of the genre.

2 Popular B-movie spin-offs and series of the 1920s featured heroes like Saetta, Za-la-Mort, Gambino, Ajax and Sansone and usually combined melodrama and romance with crime plots, spectacular action scenes and an episodic narration (Bernardini and Martinelli 4; Spiess 7).

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2. Mise-en-spectacle: Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra The second rise of the peplum was, much like its American counterpart, a result of the industry’s fear of television. These often colourful films usually shot in Scoperatios – Dyaliscope, TotalScope, Cromoscope, Euroscope etc. – were aimed at offering the audience something that only cinema could give (Spinazzola 165f.). Thus the peplum films took great care of the artistic and picturesque aspect «in the form of tableaux which rely on compositional devices, colour relationships (red and greens, yellows and blues), backlighting and sfumato effects which are all common features of pompier paintings.» (Lagny 173)

But while the American epics of the 1950s and 1960s had the necessary money to provide gigantic production designs and mass scenes, the low budget pepla were solely to rely on cheap special effects and colourful lighting to deliver the expected eye candy. Usually the trash-appeal of most of these movies was made only too plain with papier mâché rocks and columns, artificial lightning and an overall infantilismo at work relating to plots and character development (Seeßlen 8). First of all, the Italian «mini-epics» committed themselves to ironic variants of the mythic adventure story as they absorbed elements of comic books and fantasy motives. In this sense the post-war peplum was nearly a pure matter of escapism. Hercules, Maciste et al. in medieval Scotland, in ancient Rome, in Atlantis or in Hades, encountering the Mongols or Aztecs, vampires, gigantic apes or Cyclopes – everything was possible but boredom or realism. The genre’s devotion to the visual and the artificial is best to be seen in Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra/Hercules in the Haunted World/ Hercules in the Centre of the Earth (1961), a work recently recognized by academics at last (e.g. Bondanella 172–174), and in its own right a pop art variation of the genre’s classic aesthetics, narrative and mythology. Bava, who later became famous for his colourful horror films, was one of the godfathers of the second wave of the genre in Italy – at least with regard to the visual language of the filone. Bava had already worked as camera operator on Camerini’s Ulisse and as lighting cameraman on Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole and Ercole e la regina di Lidia, and had co-directed La battaglia di Maratona/The Giant of Marathon (1959) with Jacques Tourneur. With his first peplum as credited director Bava, who also cowrote the screenplay and worked as director of photography on Ercole al centro della terra, chose an extremely reduced but at the same time complex narrative – «a storyline that is almost entirely scenic and fantasmagorical» (Lucas 2002). Ercole al centro della terra is a follow-up of Vittorio Cottafavi’s highly successful 70mm-extravaganza Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide/Hercules Conquers Atlantis/Hercules and the Captive Women (1961), starring

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1 Ercole al centro della terra

British bodybuilder Reg Park who had replaced Steve Reeves as Greek demigod Hercules with the previous movie. The plot picks up immediately after the events of Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide with Hercules returning from his former adventures to the kingdom of Ecalia and his beloved Princess Deianira (Leonora Ruffo). But upon his arrival Hercules must learn that his bride has gone mad. According to the Sybil Medea (Gaia Germani), Deianira’s delusion results from a spell, only to be broken with the «Stone of Forgetfulness» which is hidden in the Stygian marsh, deep in the Kingdom of the Dead in the middle of the Earth. Key to the gates of Hades is the Golden Apple, kept in the Garden of the Hesperides. Needless to say, Hercules immediately takes off to gain the magic stone, accompanied by his friends Theseus (George Ardisson) and Telemachus (Franco Giacobini). In Hades the hero has to stand up against various adversaries, among them Procrustes, a golem made of green stone, and resist tantalising temptations, e.g. a naked woman chained to a tree. Complications arise when Theseus falls in love with Meiazotide (Ida Galli), the favourite daughter of Pluto, god of the Underworld. Nevertheless, the men manage to steal the stone and return to Ecalia where Hercules realizes that Deianira’s uncle Lyco is behind the evil spell and plans to drink Deianira’s blood during a lunar eclipse to gain immortality – fittingly, Lyco is played by Christopher Lee who three years earlier had become a star with Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958). In the gloomy lit finale the vampire-like Lyco attacks Hercules 60

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with flying ghouls and a small army of vampires only to fall in ashes in the end when hit by sunlight (another nod to Fisher’s horror film). Bava, like his fellow peplum director Francisci, was a trained painter and his main interest indeed lies in the visual aspects of storytelling. The Technicolor images of Ercole al centro della terra are suffused with vibrant orange and green, red and blue, pink and purple. Setpieces like the Garden of the Hesperides and the screaming trees with bleeding roots in Hades belong to the most ingenious vistas of the genre. Unquestionable, these images influenced later directors like Tim Burton and Sam Raimi. At one point in Ercole al centro della terra, the Queen of the Hesperides (Marisa Belli) warns Hercules, «Don’t believe in what you see!» But in fact the whole point of Bava’s film is exactly to believe in mise-en-scène, the power of images and the importance of visual storytelling. Bava’s faith in the image is so absolute that it infiltrates the editing of his film: whenever a character in this film asks a question like «Who is responsible for this?», Bava answers with visual means: either within the picture, Christopher Lee’s conspirator appearing in the depth of field, or, even more obvious, with a cut to the answer, which is a take and therefore a picture of Lycos. Bava’s interest in a kind of «pure cinema» (Grafe 30) expresses itself in his nearly total neglect of dialogue, compensated by careful lighting with the use of primary colours. The mix of gaudy colours and colourful half shadows is completed with geometric designs dominating the interior and exterior sets built in Cinecittà and Bava’s penchant to mystify the outdoor settings with wafting artificial fog, e.g. the grottos of the Castellana Caves, located in the province of Bari, Apulia, that stand in for Hades. This «extraverted» style is not at all unusual for pepla of that era. Duccio Tessari, a prolific screen writer of Italian genre movies and contributor to the screenplay of Ercole al centro della terra, explains his rules for writing a peplum in the Italian film magazine Cineforum, and a considerable amount of them evolve around visual story telling. Rule number nine reads for example: «Much smoke and fire should be used: a brazier, a burning tent, or a flaming spear are worth more than any dialogue.» (qtd. in Günsberg 104). And in rule number three Tessari explains that a peplum director should characterise the protagonists via the colour scheme by using white and yellow for the «good» characters and red and black for the villains: «The audience must recognize immediately which characters to side with» (103). But Bava’s attempts at realising his «pure cinema» don’t stop at the surface of images; Ercole al centro della terra turns out as a cinema of pleasures, structurally relating to the early forms of cinema which Tom Gunning describes as a «cinema of attractions». The showing proves the base core of most pepla, in contrary to most of the rules of classical Hollywood style, sometimes to a point of nearly abandoning a recognisable plot. In Bava’s peplum classic the favourite pastimes of the hero – bending iron bars, breaking chains and throwing huge rocks – do in fact evocate funfair attractions and thereby characteristics of the early film and its first 61

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screening situations at fairs, varietés and public festivals. Both editing and camera movement contribute to the proper presentation of the sensations: «The composition and editing […] are used not to make cuts from one shot to another imperceptible, as they are in the classical cinema of transparency, but on the contrary to make them stand out», as Michèle Lagny (170) emphasises. Due to these stylistics used in films like Ercole al centro della terra Lagny uses the term «mise-enspectacle» to characterise the peplum formula.

3. The Patchwork Character of the Genre: Riccardo Freda’s Maciste all’Inferno Above all, pepla are cultural patchworks. Titles, subjects and main protagonists refer to silent films, 19th century novels and topics of humanistic education. While most of the Italian critics in the 1950s and the following three decades dismissed the pepla as films targeting at an audience of illiterates (Brunetta 499f.), today film historian Pierre Sorlin considers these movies as quite ambitious (125) and Marcia Landy points out their «intertextual» nature (185). The free and easy use of mythology and history was matched in a nearly postmodern dealing with generic boundaries, the hybridisation of genre elements becoming the rule rather than the exception (Seeßlen 7). Giacomo Gentilomo’s Maciste contro il vampiro/Goliath and the Vampires/The Vampires/ Maciste vs. the Vampire (1961) and Maciste e la regina di Samar aka Maciste contro gli uomini della Luna/Hercules Against the Moon Men/ Hercules and the Queen of Samar (1964) combined the genre with science fiction and the horror film. Umberto Lenzi’s Zorro contro Maciste/Samson and the Slave Queen/Zorro Against Maciste (1963) and Luigi Capuano’s Sansone contro il Corsaro Nero/Hercules and the Black Pirates (1964) borrowed motives from pirate films and the swashbuckler formula, and with Piero Pierotti’s Sansone e il tesoro degli Incas/Hercules and the Treasure of the Incas/Lost Treasure of the Aztecs (1964) elements of the western genre were absorbed. Even a movie like Gli amori di Ercole/The loves of Hercules (1960), was shot, characteristically cast with Jane Mansfield in the double role as Deianira and Hippolyta. One of the crudest – or more exactly put: typical – examples of the genre’s tendency to amalgamate various genre influences is Riccardo Freda’s Maciste all’Inferno/The Witch’s Curse/Maciste in Hell, released in 1962. The opening sequence already undermines genre expectations with a setting evoking the atmosphere of the gothic horror films of the British Hammer studio. Freda opens his trash/art opus magnum with a prologue set in the Scottish town of Loch Laird in the year of 1550, where the townspeople burn a witch (Vira Silenti) alive. Dying, the 62

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woman curses her executioners and their offspring.3 One century later a descendant of the witch (Hélène Chanel) returns to the village to marry the local lord of the manor. Of course, history starts repeating itself as the mad villagers capture the young woman to kill her like her ancestor. Up to this point Maciste all’Inferno is a straight gothic horror movie bearing no connection to the peplum genre whatsoever. But after nearly one quarter of its running time when the supposed witch is to be hung from the gallows, a muscular stranger rides into town and rescues her. It’s Maciste, barely dressed with a loincloth and played by Adriano Bellini, better known under his screen name Kirk Morris – one of the few stars of the post war peplum not of American but of Italian nationality. The hero, obviously in the wrong genre, stops the mob and declares to prove the woman’s innocence. By uprooting a tree he opens a passage into Hades to step down into hell, all’inferno, intending to break the witches’ spell. With Maciste’s journey through Hades Freda abandons the up to this point straight storytelling and stages a series of episodic adventures in which Maciste is confronted with various tests and adversaries which make up nearly the rest of the film. He even meets the tormented Sisyphus working his boulder uphill and Prometheus (Remo De Angelis), suffering from Zeus’s eagle feeding on his liver. The most interesting aspect of the movie is Maciste’s loss of memory in the cause of his labours, and the necessity to remember his former adventures. This plot twist provides Freda with the excuse to integrate sequences of former pepla into his film, notwithstanding the fact that in some of these sequences nicked from Antonio Leonviola’s Maciste nella terra dei Ciclopi/Atlas Against the Cyclops/Monster from Unknown World/Atlas in the Land of the Cyclops (1961) and Freda’s own Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan/Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World/Maciste at the Court of the Great Khan/Goliath and the Golden City (1961) the hero wasn’t even played by Morris but by the actors Gordon Mitchell and Gordon Scott. That way Freda creates a series of «metacinematic moments» (Bondanella 176) as the fictional character of Maciste recalls the cinematic adventures of his namesakes. Furthermore Freda’s film varies Guido Brignone’s early peplum of the same title made in 1925, a well-known influence on Fellini (Bondanella 11; 176f.) and a famous example of an early peplum hybridising genres by using a predominant fantasy setting. But even more than Brignone who quoted Dante’s Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Bosch’s triptych The Hay Wagon, Freda’s bold recycling technique draws attention to the bricolage character of the genre which is built up of films manufactured of spare parts of cinema history, serialised formulas and interchangeable protagonists who live through the fixed routine of flexing muscles, bending iron and fighting adversaries over and over. To a certain extent the pepla could be considered as an 3

This sequence is also a nod to Mario Bava’s masterpiece of gothic horror La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday/Revenge of the Vampire/The Mask of Satan (1960).

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2 Maciste all’Inferno

example of what Pierre Bourdieu labelled the «symbolic protest» of the petit bourgeoisie: These films implanted popular but little accepted genre references to legitimate culture and introduced a «revenge» on highbrow culture as well as a rehabilitation of the marginal culture (Lagny 173; Bourdieu 566).

4. Sergio Leone’s Il colosso di Rodi and the Body of the heros While Freda’s Maciste all’Inferno stands as a typical example of a low budget peplum using meta-cinematic irony, Sergio Leone tried to meet the Italian and the American traditions of the epic and monumental on a much higher scale. Il colosso di Rodi/The Colossus of Rhodes made in 1961 with a modest budget was Leone’s official directorial debut after his contribution to Mario Bonnard’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/The Last Days of Pompeii (1959). Like most of the films being made at the high point of the peplum craze, it was realised as an European co-production, in this case with Italian, Spanish and French participation. Concerning production values and its elaborate execution, Il colosso di Rodi certainly belongs to a different class than Freda’s C-movie and even Bava’s classic. Leone’s use of tableaux vivants, match cuts, sweeping camera movements and 64

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sequence shots already establishes the meticulous visual story telling which is going to earn the director fame and bears the touch of the «epic» Leone of Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Giù la testa/Duck, You Sucker/A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) (Steinwender, Sergio Leone 302, 307f.). With regard to the peplum genre, Il colosso di Rodi gives a glimpse how Leone will deal with genre rules in his later westerns. On the one hand he uses most of the typical characters, plot twists and stylistics of the genre up to the campy set design that critic Oreste De Fornari compared with «a Fellinian dream» (De Fornari 33). He pays homage to the genre with obvious references to classics like Cabiria (with a sacrificial ceremony evocating the one from Pastrone’s masterpiece), visual bits and pieces taken from Mervyn LeRoy’s 1951 version of Quo Vadis (e.g. a feast at the emperor’s court and the choreography of a dance sequence) up to a parody of the Rank Organisation logo when one of Rhodes’ rebels (Giovanni Pazzafini) hits a gong posing like the British film company’s familiar «Gongman». On the other hand, there is an important deviation concerning the hero and the body politics of the genre. Usually, the major attraction of the Italian swordand-sandal pictures had been the ultra-corpi, the «über-bodies» of the male leads, their «most striking recurring feature» (Lagny 170) and the aspect that determines the hybrid genre of peplum above its various genre influences from adventure film, historical epic, melodrama and fantasy. Samson, Maciste, Ursus and Hercules had without exception been embodied by bodybuilders turned actors. Their quality was defined by their physical shape and not their ability to act.4 In the post-war pepla the hero’s athletic body is constantly emphasised by the light clothing presenting the muscular torso and the exercised legs. This physically impressive appearance was preferentially confronted with statues of ideal proportions and celebrated in single takes (Lagny 171). Thus the male body, usually put on display half-naked in the countryside and filmed from a low angle became itself a kind of «Technicolorlandscape» as described by Maggie Günsberg (104). One of the standard scenes of the «exposed body experience» was the hero’s demonstration of his tremendous, super-human powers by knocking down a building’s supporting column, making it crumble by mere muscle power (Seeßlen 28). In Domenico Paolella’s Ercole contro i tiranni di Babilonia aka Golia alla conquista di Bagdad/Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon (1964) the hero destroys a whole city by similar means. Furthermore, there are uncountable numbers of oversized papier mâché 4

What Gad Klein later wrote about Arnold Schwarzenegger in John Milius’s neo-peplum Conan the Barbarian (1982), was also true for the pepla of the 1950s and 60s: This embodiment of the hero «emancipates the body from the long tradition of the dominance of the face in acting. The most important step which is carried out here is the one from portraying to embodiment. […] [What we have here is] the great achievement of a materialistic fantasy movie, where all the supernatural and magic is inferior to the real physical power of a male body.» (qtd. in Seeßlen 230).

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rocks, false trees or hay wagons to be thrown through the air by the hero.5 With Freda’s Maciste all’Inferno the hero eventually degenerated into a nearly mute figure of action, simply defined by his physics and seemingly unable (or unwilling) to articulate himself. It is of course easy to read the genre as an erotic text centring on the male body. As director Domenico Paolella explained, the trend to design an over-defined male body lead some of the costume designers to put small cushions in the underpants of the peplum leads, drawing attention to their genitalia and pretending even here an effect of their workout (statements by Paolella: see documentary Kino Kolossal – Herkules, Maciste & Co; 2000). In the gender context Günsberg draws attention to the casting of bodybuilders as heroes: «To develop the body to this degree requires work, time, discipline and a certain degree of wealth. [...] The biological body is reshaped according to cultural definitions of ideal masculinity. [...] It is in this sense that gender is also performative, performed on the body-as-surface.» (Günsberg 108–110)

With their overemphasised images of the male body the pepla took a tightrope walk between the motives of the recently overcome fascism and the problems of the present as described by the Companion to Italian Cinema: «The peplum affirmed the worth of male physical strength in a rapidly industrialising society and addressed the fascist imagery of the superhero, often condemning totalitarian societies while asserting the need for strong, white male leadership.» (Nowell-Smith, Hay and Volpi 94f.)

Certainly did the peplum-protagonist show aspects of what Klaus Theweleit described in Male Fantasies, his important analysis of soldiers’ literature of World War I and II, as the «body armour» of the fascist soldierly male. The armouring of the body through muscles, the preference of the pepla for virility and fighting and the affinity of their heroes for the people and nation, nature and soil was matching up to a visual return of the repressed past. And of course Mussolini had also presented himself as a strongman. But an important difference remained: the new strongmen were fighting for democracy. They formed up for polis and plebs, against unjust tyrants, dictators and totalitarian rulers. Maciste, Hercules and Sansone are no warriors of steel for any race or elite. Contrary to Theweleit’s soldierly men, the muscle armoured males of the second pepla boom are simple, honest and modest, indulgent even with the villains. It is by this twist that the genre carried out a re-coding of the fascist body cult, a depoliticisation and a cleansing of all aspects which too blatantly brought to mind the 5

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Most of the peplum directors dealt with well-worn routines like that with a wink and irony. In Ercole al centro della terra there is for example a refreshing nonsense moment when Hercules complains about throwing all these boulders. But when he drawls that this will be «the last rock, I’ll throw today», there’s no point in adding that it won’t be.

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criminal fascist regime. With the old images of male bodies as sole source of power, but within a revised context, the peplum found a way to simultaneously relive the fascist iconography, the dream of supermen fighting for their people, and to enjoy this fantasy under conditions carefully designed as innocent: «In this sense, the heroic muscleman of the peplum offered reassurance to unskilled male audiences by validating muscle power over and above intellectual and other skills, a reassurance mirrored on the political plane by the hero’s status as man of the people, rather than ruler, a role he openly rejects.» (Günsberg 102)6

Although Leone made Il colosso di Rodi with accordance to design an actionfilled peplum he clearly refuses the convention of the heroic body. With his lead Dario, played by Rory Calhoun, an actor best known for his appearances in TV series and 1950s westerns like Otto Preminger’s River of No Return (1954), Leone transforms the physical power of the hero into hedonistic dandyism. Calhoun’s protagonist is not exceptionally strong; he is not driven by altruistic motives but mostly by his libido and egoism. Dario visits Rhodes while on vacation (!) and plans to relax on the picturesque island. Instead, he stumbles through the plot driven by local freedom fighters, the court’s conspirators and Phoenician invaders. This hero without a cause, later described by Leone with regard to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) as a «kind of a poor man’s Cary Grant» (Simsolo 70), strolls with an ironic smile on his face through the island of Rhodes of the year 280 BC and the chaos surrounding him. Admittedly, this odd hero has the ability to fight, for example against five soldiers while balancing on the shoulders and arms of the mighty statue. But even in this sequence he is hardly defined by his warrior skills; in fact, the fight breaks up when Dario, facing the superior number of attackers, jumps into the ocean. In spite of his alleged former heroic deeds as a warrior he seems to be more bon vivant than the usual peplum-hero (De Fornari 31). There is one truly spectacular torso in Il colosso di Rodi: the gigantic statue of the Colossus of Rhodes. With this monument Leone sets an ironic endpoint of the genre: «casting» a statue as the central attraction instead of a man of flesh and blood seems to be the logical development insofar as the former muscle men usually had been placed next to sculptures and impersonated by actors who could only act like sculptures. With his monument made of steel Leone exaggerated the craze for the spectacular male body to the extreme as much as he was ridiculing it. By these means he stayed true to the rules of the genre while nevertheless rejecting them. Leone’s colossus is a vicious caricature of the naive muscle heroes: an empty shell, without any intellect, the mere outward appearance of human shape. Tow6

Peplum director Domenico Paolella also read these films as «psychoanalysis of the poor» and pointed out in an essay on the genre that the pepla externalised the fears and resistance of the poorer classes regarding the rapid modernisation of Italy.

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3 Il colosso di Rodi

ering above everybody and everything, as fortification in the harbour promising security and strength, in the end it is but another cheat. The new technical marvel is a killing machine which will later throw boiling oil onto the citizens of Rhodes. It is also revealed as a gigantic prison and torture chamber for the political opponents of the regime. With his monument Leone pins down the essence of the fascist body more tellingly than most pepla dared. Theweleit described the male killing machines of fascism as soulless, driven by the neurotic, as a «new man [...] whose physis is mechanised, whose psyche has been eliminated.» (161f.). Leone’s colossus is the perfect fascist soldier, a tool for the power, a sheer executor, never asking any question and killing at the push of a button. In the early pre-production phase Leone made it plain that he intended the colossus to be a caricature of the fascist body cult. He even told one interviewer that the statue was meant to bear the facial features of Mussolini. In the end Leone didn’t go that far, but still the colossus was modelled after the fascist style of sculpture. As Christopher Frayling has pointed out it mimics the statues in the Stadio dei Marmi, former Foro Mussolini, in Rome (Frayling 99). With the Colossus’ destruction during an earthquake, Leone made a programmatic point: Like the era of the musclemen came to an end in Italian politics some 15 years before, it should end in the Italian cinema. Four years later he did in fact launch the new wave of genre films with his western Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars. The new genre had no room for oiled up bodybuilders playing good and simple leads; the new heroes were shabby and selfish pragmatists. The Eastwood-character in the «Dollars»-films resembled the earlier Dario, defined not by physical strength but by egoism and wit. Dario’s ironic attitude as well as the three-day-beard he’s post68

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ing while the action takes place in Il colosso di Rodi even seem to anticipate the looks of the ragged and depraved Eastwood-persona of the following movie. There are of course many parallels between the peplum and the western all’italiana, which became the new hybrid genre to take over from 1964 onward when the audience got fed up with the muscleman pictures. A great many of the Italian westerns were like their predecessors co-produced with other European countries. Their directors and screenwriters proved a fondness for episodic plot lines, their heroes became serialised as well – even if sometimes just for the export markets (Wagstaff, «Forkful of Westerns» 250; 257). Masculinity was deployed as means for a morbid spectacle and eroticised (Günsberg 201f.). But without cities and empires to crumble, it was the human body itself to be mutilated and destroyed by heroes and villains alike (Seeßlen 31). Contrary to the altruistic heroes of the pepla, the anti-heroes of the western regarded fair play as bad for their killing business. Besides, the western all’italiana showed a sometimes radical political attitude and an obvious anti-Americanism and was therein the child of the 1960s while the pepla were true 1950s movies. The Italian western continued the tendency of the Italian popular cinema to hybridise genres. They, too, were patchworks and fused motives from Japanese Samurai films, Italian pepla and the American western. Again the protagonists, beginning with Clint Eastwood’s «Man with No Name», were a type of supermen but this time for their weapon handling abilities. The new genre produced hybridisations of various kinds: the slapstick-westerns of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill; mash-ups of western and martial arts film like Mario Caiano’s Il mio nome è Shangai Joe/The Fighting Fists of Shangai Joe (1972)7; «gothic» or «horror westerns» like Sergio Garrone’s Django, il bastardo/Django the Avenger (1969).8 Even westerns with peplum and science fiction elements appeared at the end of the cycle, like Ferdinando Baldi’s Get Mean/Timebreaker (1976) that featured a gunfighter (Tony Anthony as the «Stranger») who is transferred into a fantasy Spain of the middle ages where he has to fight Vikings, Moors and witches. The «anything goes» attitude of the peplum didn’t stop with the decline of the genre. It was in fact an important part of the strategy that enabled Italy’s post-war cinema to cross national borders and succeed in international distribution. Much like the western all’italiana the film gialli (the psycho-sexual thrillers) and the poliziotteschi (the Italian police films), the film sexy (the sex comedies) and the fake-documentaries of the mondo cycle, even some of the superspettacoli d’autore, the spectacular art house blockbuster films (Spinazzola 237–258), followed this tradition: a combination of originality and serialisation, of exaggeration, carefreeness and a lack of restraint which made the Italian cinema between 1955 and 1980 a truly popular cinema.

7 8

See Ritzer «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern)». See Steinwender «Western all’inferno», and Marcus Stiglegger’s essay in this volume.

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Works Cited Bernardini, Aldo and Vittorio Martinelli. «Einige Bemerkungen zum Italienischen Kino der Zwanziger Jahre.» Der Italienische Film der Zwanziger Jahre. Eds. Aldo Bernardini and Vittorio Martinelli. Special Issue of Filmblätter Kommunales Kino 13 (1979): 2–6. Print. Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2009. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Die feinen Unterschiede: Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. 1979. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1987. Print. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del Cinema Italiano: Dal 1945 Agli Anni Ottanta. Rome: Riuniti, 1982. Print. – The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Films from Its Origins to the Twenty-first Century. 2003. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print. De Fornari, Oreste. Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream of Legendary America. Rev. ed. Rome: Gremese, 1997. Print. Frayling, Christopher. Sergio Leone. Something To Do With Death. London: Faber, 2000. Print. Ghigi, Giuseppe. «Come si Spiegano le Fortune Dei ‹Pepla› su cui Sembra si Ritorna a Puntare.» Cineforum 170 (1977): 733– 746. Print. Grafe, Frieda. «Ercole al Centro della Terra.» Filmfarben. Vol. 1. Berlin: Brinkmann, 2002. 29–31. Print. Gregor, Ulrich and Enno Patalas. Geschichte des Films: 1895–1939. Vol. 1. 1973. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1976. Print. Gunning, Tom. «The Cinema of Attractions». Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986): 63–70. Günsberg, Maggie. Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Koven, Mikel J. La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006. Print. Lagny, Michèle. «Popular Taste. The Peplum.» Popular European Cinema. Ed. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau. London: Routledge, 1992. 163–180. Print. 70

– Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Lucanio, Patrick. With Fire and Sword: Italian Spectacles on American Screens. 1958– 1968. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1994. Print. Lucas, Tim. «Hercules in the Center of the World». Liner notes. Hercules in the Haunted World. Dir. Marco Brava. Fantoma, 2002. DVD. Micciché, Lino. Il cinema Italiano degli anni ’60. 4th ed. Venice: Marsilio, 1986. Print. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, James Hay and Gianni Volpi. The Companion to Italian Cinema. London: BFI, 1996. Print. Paolella, Domenico. «La Psychanalyse du Pauvere.» Midi-Minuit Fantastique 12 (1965): 1–10. Print. Payne, Stanley. Geschichte des Faschismus: Aufstieg und Fall einer europäischen Bewegung. Berlin: Propyläen, 2001. Print. Ritzer, Ivo. Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. – «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern). The Western all’italiana and its Asian Connections.» Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Eds. Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze. Marburg: Schüren, 2012. 25–57. Print. Schenk, Irmbert. «Von Cabiria zu Mussolini: Zur Geburt des monumentalen Historienfilms in Italien.» Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne. Ed. Malte Hagener, Johann N. Schmidt and Michael Wedel. Berlin: Bertz, 2004. 179–192. Seeßlen, Georg. Abenteuer: Geschichte und Mythologie des Abenteuerfilms. 3rd rev. and exp. ed. Marburg: Schüren, 1996. Print. Simsolo, Noël. Conversations avec Sergio Leone. Paris: Stock, 1987. Print. Sorlin, Pierre. Italian National Cinema. 1896–1996. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Spiess, Eberhard. «Der Italienische Stummfilm der Zwanziger Jahre zwischen Maciste und Mussolini.» Der Italienische Film der Zwanziger Jahre. Eds. Aldo

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Bernardini and Vittorio Martinelli. Special Issue of Filmblätter Kommunales Kino 13 (1979): 7f. Print. Spinazzola, Vittorio. Cinema e Pubblico. Lo Spettacolo Filmico in Italia: 1945–1965. 2nd ed. Roma: Bulzoni, 1985. Print. Steinwender, Harald. Sergio Leone. Es war einmal in Europa. 2nd rev. ed. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2012. Print. – «Western all’inferno. Gothic- und Horrorelemente im italienischen Western.» Europa im Sattel: Western zwischen Sibirien und Atlantik. Eds. Johannes Roschlau et al. Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik, 2012. 141–154. Print. Theweleit, Klaus. Männerphantasien. 2 vols. Ed. expanded by afterword. Munich: Piper, 2000. Print. Toeplitz, Jerzy. Geschichte des Films: 1895– 1933. Vol. 1. Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1987. Print.

Usai, Paolo Cherchi. «Italien. Monumentales und Melodramatisches.» Geschichte des Internationalen Films. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Trans. Hans-Michael Bock. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998. 117–124. Print. Wagstaff, Christopher. «A Forkful of Westerns. Industry, Audiences and the Italian Western.» Popular European Cinema. Eds. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau. London: Routledge, 1992. 245–261. Print. – «Italian Genre Films in the World Market.» Hollywood and Europe. Economics, Culture, National Identity. 1945–95. Eds. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci. London: BFI, 1998. 74–85. Print.

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Marcus Stiglegger

Sons of Cain Traditions of Gothic Horror in Antonio Margheriti’s Spaghetti Westerns

1. Blades and Men A man is running for his life. He enters a foggy swamp area, where moving is becoming increasingly more difficult. A rider follows him in slow-motion, only barely visible through the fog. When the desperate man stops to gasp for breath, his follower aims a hatchet at him and throws. In close-up we see the axe chopping off the man’s hand, leaving him bleeding and crying, now easy prey to his hunter. This is the mysterious and brutal opening sequence of the late spaghetti western Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (1977) by Sergio Martino. What at first seems like a scene from a late seventies slasher horror movie appears to be the beginning of a western. Mannaja tells the twisted story of bounty hunter Blade (Maurizio Merli), who arrives at the mining town of Suttonville in company of the lawless Burt Craven (Donal O’Brien) as his injured prisoner. As Blade is immediately involved in a quarrel, he uses his tomahawk with rare skill. Thus, he comes to the attention of the city’s wealthy and crippled mayor, McGowan (Philippe Leroy) and his corrupt assistant Voller (John Steiner). They hire him to find the mayor’s daughter (Sonja Jeannine) who has mysteriously disappeared. Blade soon uncovers that she has been kidnapped by Voller, a traitor who works for a gang that regularly plunders stage 72

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coaches with freight from his original boss’s silver mine. Blade is caught, tortured and subsequently left to die by Voller and his men. But Blade survives, recovers and returns even stronger driven by hate. He re-enters Suttonville like a messenger of judgement day. Mannaja is not the first spaghetti western to use gothic horror imagery and mythical symbolism to spice up a revenge plot typical of earlier genre films. While horror elements were already present in Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) (cf. Leeuwen; Steinwender), Giulio Questi pushed the limits further in his surreal Se sei vivo spara/Django Kill (1967) where bloody torture and murder are presented in a challenging way, especially in a sequence where a greedy mob rips the golden bullets out of a wounded man’s body. Se sei vivo spara also begins with a reincarnation sequence where the hero (Thomas Milian) crawls out of his grave like a living dead. These elements are also hinted at in Sergio Garrone’s Django il bastardo/Django the Bastard (1969), where a Union soldier (Anthony Steffen) eventually returns from the dead to take revenge on three officers who betrayed his unit in battle (cf. Eleftheriotis; Leeuwen; Steinwender). Martino’s Mannaja openly refers to an example by his colleague Enzo G. Castellari: Keoma (1976), where the hero returns to his corrupt father and his half-brothers. In Keoma there already is the abandoned and muddy ghost town, the Christlike passion and crucifixion, the mysterious reincarnation and ritualistic revenge, as seen in Mannaja. Even past and present are united here in the same shot. While Castellari is an action cinema virtuoso and mainly refers to Sam Peckinpah’s westerns, Sergio Martino is a specialist in thrillers, the so-called gialli. He films what Ivo Ritzer has called the «horizontal genre» («Der Horror des Hybriden» 542) of the American western in, to again quote Ritzer’s work on horror westerns, a «vertical» mode – Mannaja does not focus on the endless plains of the landscape – it looks inside the mythological pattern, much as the psychosexual giallo thriller. In fact, director Martino had already filmed his giallo thriller Torso (1973) in exactly the 73

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same swamp-location some years before Mannaja. Although this specific mixture of western, thriller and horror film is rare even by post-modern standards, this hybridisation has a tradition in Italian genre cinema, as Austin Fisher notes in relation to the Italian filoni (genre cycles): «The short life-spans of the various filoni, and their emergence from the same studios, meant both that hybrid genres arose […] and that a relatively circumscribed set of directors made a living across this spectrum. […] Sharing an irreverent take on popular Hollywood genre convention, as well as the same crews and international co-financers, the transition from one filone to another was fluid.» (40)

This observation might explain the fast changing productions cycles of certain hybrid tendencies within Italian genre cinema which sometimes worked as a kind of experimental area for the fusion of genre semantics and syntaxes. Although not mentioned explicitly in Rick Altman’s instructional essay «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre» (1984), this phenomenon of horror or gothic western may thus be considered to be an example of his second type of generic development: «I suggest that genres arise in one of two fundamental ways: either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements.» (12) In the case of Italian gothic western, the semantic-syntactic set of the gothic horror film is adopted into the set of syntactic elements established by the spaghetti western. In the following two paragraphs the semantic-syntactic set of gothic horror and western will be defined, followed by a close reading of Antonio Margheriti’s gothic westerns all’italiana.

2. Italian Gothic In 1957, Riccardo Freda’s horror film I vampiri/Lust of the Vampire launched a phenomenon that may be called Italian Gothic, a distinctive Italian approach towards elements of gothic fiction established within literature of the 19th century and Universal horror films respectively. This film adapts a traditional vampire story and spices it up with some sexualised violence, semi-nudity and atmospheric black and white image composition. The film’s co-director was Mario Bava, who became the iconic figure in Italian Gothic horror with La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday (1960) only three years later. I vampiri even predated the huge success of British Hammer Film’s Curse of Frankenstein (1957, directed by Terence Fisher) by several months. Traditional gothic fiction, often referred to as gothic horror, originally was a genre of literature that combined elements of horror and romance. The initial novel often quoted is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), already subtitled 74

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A Gothic Story. Gothic fiction addresses the audience’s affects by invoking situations of terror, unease and unfulfilled desire. It is mainly defined by a semantics that aims to evoke such affective structures. The usual setting of gothic fiction can be seen as a character in its own right. Usually old and ruin-like castles, manors, abbeys or monastery are presented as a kind of hermetic world, where the curse of past lives and sins unfolds and terrorises the protagonists. Also, the deserted ghost town may be considered a gothic setting. These places semantically already evoke an atmosphere of horror and dread and signify the deterioration of the world. In a melancholic perspective, the state of ruin refers to earlier prosperous times which are long gone. Thus, gothic fiction is also connected to the revival of gothic architecture in the 19th century, to the decorative creation of artificial ruins in parks and gardens. At the same time, these elements refer to the dandy-like characters of the male gothic hero as they embody a reflection of distorted inner feelings. Furthermore, there is an expressionistic aspect to gothic aesthetics that is directly linked to German expressionistic cinema like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari/ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919; directed by Robert Wiene) or Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu (1922, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau). The medieval aspect of gothic architecture also involves the cruel aspects re-appearing in gothic fiction: an iconography of torture chambers, weapon collections, and secret tunnels beneath the building. It has to be noted that the English term gothic also means mysterious. Historical events like the inquisition re-appear in gothic fiction like an ancient curse, too (on the gothic tradition cf. DavenportHines 1998; Bloom 2007). According to the stereotypes of the setting, Italian Gothic also semantically refers to the basic characters of gothic fiction. There is a troubled, often cursed and ambivalent male protagonist, the gothic hero. Female characters are divided into femme fatale and femme fragile; the virginal maiden refers to the latter and appears to be young, beautiful, pure, innocent, kind, and virtuous. But syntactically she can be corrupted and transformed into a femme fatale. Sometimes there appears another female character, the older, often foolish woman who is a victim of the gothic villain, often a dark tyrant with seductive qualities. All these characters appear in traditional vampire stories and thus are reflected in Universal horror films and later adaptations. While British Hammer Film productions went for bright red blood in Technicolor and corseted beauties in literary plots, Italian Gothic cinema soon tended to add even more semantics of sexualised violence, torture and hybrid hints to other genres such as the giallo thriller. Mario Bava for example directed a cross-over of peplum fantasy and gothic horror in Ercole al centro della terra/Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), with Christopher Lee starring as the leading vampire. Although being used to genre hybrids, it must be noted that Mario Bava created several generic combinations – among them a hybrid of Viking adventure 75

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film and spaghetti western called I oltelli del vendicatore/Knifes of the Avenger (1966), starring giallo and western regular Cameron Mitchell – but never included gothic horror elements in his few more conventional spaghetti westerns (La strada per Forte Alamo/The Road to Fort Alamo, 1964; Ringo del Nebraska/A Guman Called Nebraska, 1966). This was different with his colleague Antonio Margheriti, another Italian Gothic visionary – as we will see now.

3. Antonio Margheriti: Genre Bender As scholarly work such as Dimitris Eleftheriotis’ «Spaghetti Western, Genre Criticism and National Cinema» and Ivo Ritzer’s «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern)» has demonstrated, the Spaghetti Western is a hybrid genre sui generis: «The western all’italiana never was a western all’italiana. To be more precise, the western all’italiana was never exclusively a western all’italiana. From the beginning, it was a project of transnational cooperation, mainly between various European countries: Italy, Spain, Germany and France. The western all’italiana is a highly hybrid product reminding us that the local always has to be seen against the background of the global.» (Ritzer «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern)» 25)

The hybridisation of gothic horror and spaghetti western particularly stresses this hybridity by combining semantics of different genres. While the ‹classical› American western told and re-told the Northern American myth of the Birth of a Nation out of the chaotic (regenerating) violence of the civil war and the conquest of the frontier realised by upright lawmen and farmers fighting against bandits and rioting Indians – the spaghetti westerns ignored the frontier myth from the start (cf. Frayling; Fisher). Most spaghetti western focussed on ambivalent loners, mercenaries and cynical men of violence without patriotic ambitions. They shoot their enemies and leave their love interest behind when turning their backs on the often dusty or muddy ghost town. The iconic directors Leone and Sergio Corbucci also introduced the hint at a gothic mysticism within their films C’era una volta il West and Django where the heroic main characters Harmonica (Charles Bronson) and Django (Franco Nero) appear like ghosts of vengeance from a dark past. Both are symbolically killed or severely tortured earlier in the films and might be considered reincarnations. Sergio Leone’s main-actorturned-director Clint Eastwood cyclically referred to this element of reincarnation in his own western films High Plains Drifter (1971) and Pale Rider (1985), continuing this European tradition of genre hybridisation within American genre cinema (cf. Stiglegger). Yet, the gothic spaghetti westerns visionary par excellence was Antonio Margheriti. A common name in both phenomena, spaghetti gothic and western, he started 76

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out his career in the Italian film industry in 1956 as a screenwriter and began directing in 1958. Margheriti is a genre professional known for his science fiction, horror, spaghetti western and war movies. He may not count as what Ivo Ritzer has called a «genre auteur» (Walter Hill) but he certainly shaped many filone in his own way. Margheriti’s filmography includes several style-defining gothic horror films following the success of Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri and Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio: Danza Macabra/Castle of Blood (1963) starring Barbara Steele, La Vergine di Norimberga/The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963) starring Christopher Lee, I lunghi capelli della morte/The Long Hair of Death (1964) starring Barbara Steele, as well as Nella stretta morsa del ragno / Web of the Spider (1971) starring Klaus Kinski as Edgar Allan Poe (which is actually a colour remake of Danza Macabra). These films all feature the characteristics of spaghetti gothic, i.e. sexualised violence, atmospheric black and white image composition and a gothic setting. They use old buildings as uncanny spaces, where and the suppressed returns. For example, in his spaghetti gothic film Danza Macabra a journalist challenges famous writer Edgar Allan Poe on the authenticity of his stories which leads to him accepting a bet from Poe’s friend Lord Blackwood to spend the night in a haunted castle on All Soul’s Day. In the abandoned castle ghosts of the murdered inhabitants appear to him throughout the night, re-enacting the events that led to their deaths. It transpires that they need his blood in order to maintain their existence. Scream queen Barbara Steele plays a ghost who attempts to help the journalist escape. The protagonist here is caught in a ghostly play on chiaroscuro black and white canvas. In 1967 Antonio Margheriti forged his skills as a gifted horror director with a western revenge plot and created Joko, invoca Dio…e muori!. Here, Jokko Barrat a.k.a. Rocco (Richard Harrison, an actor well known from numerous peplum dramas) is one of several gold thieves left holding an empty bag, arriving too late to avert the death of his young partner, Richie, who is ripped apart by four horses in the pre-title sequence. Jokko systematically roams the countryside, looking to take revenge for Richie’s death, to kill each of his five ex-buddies, and to retrieve his share of the robbery. While most of the film appears quite formulaic here, the first shot shows Richie tied to the surrounding horses in a glorious top shot. This otherworldly perspective not only seals Richie’s fate from the start but also associates the search for vengeance with a divine Day of Wrath. And before Jokko can fulfil this sacred duty, he has to follow the villain Mendoza into a dusty abyss that more and more covers their bodies with white dust. Before he can fire the fatal shot at Mendoza, Jokko is completely covered in white dust and looks like a ghost – as does the villain. Mendoza is signified as the uncontrollable evil by his hectic and unpredictable gestures and his grotesque facial expressions. Even in death Mendoza is shown as a prevailing threat: When Jokko and his lover leave the mine, the camera pans back and ends in a close shot of Mendoza’s dead face. Still covered with white dust, 77

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2 Joko, invoca Dio…e muori!

his lips are frozen in a triumphant grin and one of his broken eyes is wide open while the other one is closed. The curse of the past will never vanish is what Margheriti implies here. Also his mise-en-scène places the film into gothic territory: «The western setting has now been completely exchanged for a traditionally gothic symbolical underground labyrinth. Both the colour schemes and the traditional western soundtrack recall the cinematography and sounds of Roger Corman’s baroque Poe adaptations for AIP in the 1960s. Rather than visualising the underground world as an abandoned gold mine, with railway carriages, old beams and broken pick-axes, Vengeance has the underground passages lead to a central room that looks like a laboratory. Joko’s visage is no longer characterised by the typical macho cowboy gaze oozing his masculine heroic determinism to fight for the good of the community. […] By cutting loose its ties to the American West and focusing on the hero’s psychological struggle with his own violent drives, the movie becomes a gothic allegory of how masculine aggression under western ideological forces has taken monstrous proportions in the form of Mendoza.» (Leeuwen)

E Dio disse a Caino again tells the tale of an almost apocalyptical revenge, but now all profane references are reduced while gothic pathos is played out. Klaus Kinski – who played gothic icon Edgar Allen Poe in the same year under Margheriti’s direction – stars as Gary Hamilton, an innocent man set up for a crime he did not commit. After ten years of hard work in a chain gang, he is freed by Presidential pardon. He instantly returns to his former home town to finally take revenge for the injustice he had to experience. Overwhelmed by his greed, the corrupted rancher Acombar (Peter Carsten) had decided to steal the goldmine previously owned by Gary Hamilton in order to make a better life for himself and his family. One stormy night Hamilton returns to demand his rightful share from Acombar. Thus, in E Dio disse a Caino the title already suggests the dies irae-motivation of the avenger who is clearly portrayed as a super-human being coming over the rancher and his family 78

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3 E Dio disse a Caino

like judgement day. While Joko, invoca Dio…e muori! only features a mysterious setting in the end (the abandoned mine) in E Dio disse a Caino the whole town seems more and more like a haunted place, isolated from the rest of the world by a heavy storm and whiling dust. Klaus Kinski – who is a regular spaghetti western villain himself – is clearly not as likeable as Jokko in Joko, invoca Dio…e muori! His feverish eyes, the sweat on his face, the wild blond hair – all this adds to a slightly psychotic appearance. Yet he acts in cold and calm confidence. At the same time, the antagonist Acombar is not purely evil (like Mendoza in Joko, invoca Dio…e muori!). He is an ambivalent sovereign residing over his family and his (illegally) acquired land. On the visual level Margheriti directly refers to the gothic iconography of his earlier and contemporary horror films. In very close shots he shows eyes opened wide in fear and anger, or hands clinging to the steel of a weapon in a state of pure terror. Flickering fire is the main source of light in this increasingly dark film. The entire town and ranch seem to be undermined by secret tunnels that interconnect the buildings. And finally the forces of nature seem to act on their own supporting the tormented hero’s mission of revenge. E Dio disse a Caino is a film of dark beauty demonstrating the grey zone between humanity and pure evil. Following the hermetic logic of a gothic fairy tale, flames consume the haunted place in the end. The mythical subtext of the origin of American society is completely irrelevant for these gothic westerns from Southern Europe. One could even doubt whether spaghetti westerns are actually real westerns according to the classical genre mythology and iconography. While Leone was the director whose films worked as a kind of commentary on this myth, hybrids of western and gothic horror use the familiar imagery and well-established semantic set of gothic horror to create a 79

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picturesque and interesting backdrop for syntactically conventional but gothically executed revenge stories commonly known from the context of Italian-European westerns. Seen as surreal or even horrific plays, these films offer strong atmosphere, cruel inflictions, high pitched desires and biblical metaphors. Gothic westerns might have been the literal coffin nail for the spaghetti western, but they still shine as dark beauties in the history of European genre cinema. And they might work even better in the pastiche-ridden post-modern context today than they did during the time when they actually came out. Works Cited Altman, Rick. «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.» Cinema Journal 23.3 (1984): 6–18. Print. Bloom, Clive. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. London: Fourth Estate, 1998. Print. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. «Spaghetti Western, Genre Criticism and National Cinema: Re-defining the Frame of Reference.» Action and Adventure Cinema. Ed. Yvonne Tasker. London: Routledge, 2004. 209– 227. Print. Fisher, Austin. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western. Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. Print. Frayling, Christopher: Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. 1981. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Leeuwen, Evert Jan van. «Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hol-

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lywood Myth.» Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008): n. pag. Web. 21 Nov. 2012. Ritzer, Ivo. «Der Horror des Hybriden: Genre Trouble in J.T. Pettys The Burrowers (2008).» Dawn of an Evil Millennium: Horror/Kultur im Neuen Jahrtausend. Ed. Jörg Van Bebber. Darmstadt: Büchner, 2011. 540–546. Print. – Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. – «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern). The Western all’italiana and its Asian Connections.» Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Eds. Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze. Marburg: Schüren, 2012. 25–57. Print. Steinwender, Harald. «Western all’inferno: Gothic- und Horrorelemente im Italienischen Western.» Europa im Sattel. Western zwischen Sibirien und Atlantik. Eds. Johannes Roschlau, et al. Munich: Ed. Text + Kritik, 2012. 141–154. Print. Stiglegger, Marcus. «Dies Irae in Sand und Frost: Agonale Western.» Screenshot 2 (2002): 30–33. Print.

Fernando Ramos Arenas

Towards a Generic Understanding of the Giallo Crime-Horror Hybrids in Italian Cinema of the 1970s

During the early 1970s a group of Italian popular films challenged the usual conceptions of the murder mystery genre with an explosive mixture of horror, violence and sex. The gialli, as these productions soon became known, can be seen as a result of the dependency of the Italian film industry on the models established in the local market by American popular cinema, but also as part of a broader trans-European development: during this period, formal and narrative similarities can be found in films from countries like England, Germany, or Spain. The gialli were nevertheless also a very Italian phenomenon; their structural characteristics, their understanding as genre, are strongly related to local circumstances of production, distribution and consumption. While the sparse literature that exists on the gialli tends to concentrate on the position of these films within the Italian film industry, stressing their role as a product of exploitation practices in an international process of hybridisation, or analysing their thematic similarities (see Needham; Koven or Baschiera and Di Chiara). In this chapter I will focus on the structural characteristics of this group of films and on its relation to concrete conditions of exhibition and reception in order to problematise its categorisation as a generic entity. In this regard, I would like to offer an explanation for the way the semantic and especially syntactic characteristics of these movies are related to a set of institutional and reception-related aspects that fall, according to the terminology proposed by Rick Altman («Conclusion»), under the category of a «pragmatic» approach to genre studies. 81

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But before synthesising some of the main aspects of Altman’s «semantic-syntactic» model in order to organise the generic characteristics of the gialli (and point out their shifting position as a product of international genre hybridisation), I will firstly explain some aspects of the cultural and industrial background in which they emerged that, I believe, are central to understand where these films come from and how they were produced and consumed.

1. Hybrid Origins The history of these productions can be traced back, on a intermedial basis, to the popular literature of the first half of the twentieth century. The concept acts in fact as a metonym for the entire mystery genre: Giallo, the word for «yellow» in Italian, refers to the color of the cover of cheap paperback books published from the 1920s onwards offering mystery and murder stories from authors such as Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace or Arthur Conan Doyle and also, some years later, the hard-boiled fiction of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. As some of these books were adapted for the cinema (especially from the early 1960s onwards), the term also refers to the films telling these kind of murder mystery stories; a set of specific filmic characteristics which would have allowed the differentiation and categorisation of these films as a homogeneous group was yet to be established. In this sense, Ossessione/Obsession (1943), Luchino Visconti’s version of Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which has often been called the first giallo in Italian film history (Koven 3), can be considered as such only regarding its literary basis, the book itself being a giallo, rather than due to the film’s intrinsic cinematic characteristics. The cinematic giallo was in its beginnings, with early examples dating back to the early 1960s, a lowbrow genre crossover of murder mystery and horror which would blossom during the 1970s before, at the end of the same decade, entering a long but continuing period of decline which has lasted to this day. In this article I will reflect on the films produced in this golden era during the 1970s, concentrating on titles such as Il rosso segno della follia/Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1969), Profondo Rosso/Deep Red (1975) or Solamente Nero/The Bloodstained Shadow (1978), works whose directors should be also considered as the most representative auteurs of this genre. The popular nature of these films is central to an understanding of their emergence, evolution, and, therefore, their structural characteristics. While the prestigious productions of an Italian art house cinema conquered the tastes of film critics with a renewed élan after World War II, Italian popular films were also achieving a grade of international economic success unknown since the 1910s. Parallel to the collapse of the Hollywood Studio System from the late 1950s onwards, Italy «produced, co-produced and exported more films to the world market than any other 82

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country in Europe, at times eclipsing even Hollywood with its cinematic output» (Edmonstone 11). The hundreds of spaghetti westerns, pepla, horror and mystery films produced in those years demonstrated not only the good health of the Italian film industry, but also, on an aesthetic and narrative level, its dependence on the models dictated by American productions. Many of the most successful films can therefore be understood as a result of this close relationship of the Italian film industry to the American cinema, adopting an original that was not only copied but also often enhanced, codified, and modified through excess and exploitation. Christopher Frayling (xxi) noted in his study on the spaghetti western an aspect that can be applied to the whole industry of Italian popular film: In the 1960s and early 1970s, these films were «certainly popular, and were the product of an industry which seems to have been directly in touch with its audience.» The figures prove his point. There were about 200 feature films released every year (a total surpassed at the time only by India and Japan), 13,000 cinemas (a total surpassed only by the USSR and the USA), and 540 million cinema attendances per year (a total surpassed only by the USSR and India) in a country whose total population was around 55 million. Still, the impressive figures of the Italian film industry were often not sufficient to cover the production costs of most of these popular films. Filmmakers quite often needed the participation of foreign investors, a fact that, in addition to an industry characterised by its atomisation in very small units and companies of short existence, influenced the final product in very different ways. For example, there was an inclination towards standardisation which proved to be crucial for an understanding of the homogeneity of these films. There was nevertheless another consequence of this process, a kind of tendency to rework the characteristics of the films, making each of them more outrageous and eccentric than the last one.1 This development towards a kind of narrative bizarreness, which on the one hand is undoubtedly connected to exploitation production practices, is on the other hand considered by Tim Bergfelder to be the continuation of a «specifically ‹baroque› European tradition of popular narratives which had its origins in the early decades of cinema, and even further back in the pulp fiction of the nineteenth century» (138). As mentioned above, in the case of the giallo this literary influence is even more obvious than in other examples of popular cinema; it can be affirmed however, that the gialli were reliant, compared to the German Edgar Wallace productions or British films on Fu Manchu of the 1960s for example, on a more closed narrative and characters whose whereabouts were usually not serialised.2 Common to all these European 1 2

In his analysis of the spaghetti westerns Christopher Frayling (70) points out that this tendency towards narrative excesses can be also observed in other examples of popular cinema of regions like Brazil, India or Mexico. «At closer inspection, these films do not resemble so much the paradigm of classical narrative cin-

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productions, but especially to the Italian popular films, be they horror, melodrama, western, or crime and sex films, is that they were rarely defined as «pure» genres. As Bergfelder also pointed out, the different generic aspects were rather used as narrational or stylistic components in hybrid combinations (138). In the case of the giallo the hybridity is not just of a trans-generic but also of a intermedial and trans-national nature: mystery novels, industrial exploitation and internationalised production practices are indeed its central aspects. In their consumption, the gialli, as one of the best examples of popular cinema, played mainly to the national spectators, distancing themselves on these grounds from an art house cinema production aimed at international audiences (Dyer and Vincendeau 1). Gialli targeted different audiences, were mainly screened in thirdrun theaters, but they failed to establish themselves under other circumstances. Regarding their critical reception within the highly politicised Italian film criticism of the 1970s, these films were seldom reviewed in newspapers; the only exceptions usually occurred following the patterns of auteur-oriented criticism, which meant, specifically, some of the productions by «genre auteurs» (Ritzer 114) such as Dario Argento or Mario Bava.

2. Semantic and Syntactic Dimensions of the Giallo Giallo is an «obvious» cinema and the world inhabited by its characters is also immediately recognisable, as Koven points out (40). And it is in fact on the semantic level, that is, in that «list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like», as noted by Altman («A Semantic/Syntactic Approach» 10), where one can find the most recognisable iconography and imagery of the giallo as a genre, mainly in the accessories of the (usually serial) killer, mostly wearing black leather gloves, a hat and an overcoat, some of these items already present in the iconography of murderers of their literary roots. It is also easy to find a lowbrow «campy» eroticism mixed with horror (a connection that usually built on psychoanalytical foundations) that can be observed, within the trans-generic and trans-national process of hybridisation, in other Italian sub-genres, in the British Hammer films or in other European exploitation coproductions of the period. This erotic content was often combined with a misogynistic touch and clear elements of sadomasochism. It is in the act of killing itself, in the murder, that a wider set of recognisable semantic characteristics are clearly displayed. It is indeed the physical, very graphic description of the violent acts that defines, on a semantic level, most gialli and differentiates them from other, more ema established by Hollywood in the late 1910s and subsequently adopted by national European cinemas, as the episodic serials of early European cinema.» (Bergfelder 139)

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traditional murder mystery crime films. The giallo is in this regard the apotheosis of form. It is a genre of explicit exhibition that also often involves the spectator, encouraging his scopophilia by letting him take up the position of the stalker or murderer through point-of-view shots. The best examples of these perfectly executed violent scenes and also of this integration of the spectator can be found in the work of Dario Argento: «he painstakingly conceived each frame of his films. By virtue of being his own camera operator, he also became the killer of his films» wrote Gian Piero Brunetta in his History of the Italian cinema (202). Fritz Lang is in his style and thematic aspects often considered one of the main influences on Argento: It is no coincidence that Lang himself made his contribution to the European mystery crime genre of the 1960s with his own krimi: Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse/Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), which marked the end of his career and dealt with one of the favorite topoi of the giallo: the gaze, referring to the control it implies, but also to the double position of the innocent person, who, by watching a crime being committed, becomes a witness and a possible victim. Some English gialli titles may serve here to illustrate this obsession with the gaze: Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Evil Eye/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962), Gil Occhi Freddi Della Paura/ Cold Eyes of Fear by Enzo G. Castellari (1971), Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer?/The Case of the Bloody Iris, directed by Giuliano Carnimeo, 1972, L’occhio nel labirinto/ The Eye in the Labyrinth by Mario Caiano, 1972, Umberto Lenzi’s Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro/ Eyeball/The Secret Killer (1975) or Il gatto dagli occhi di giada/The Cat with Jade Eyes by Antonio Bido, 1977. The cinematic representation of the gaze also points out two of the most distinctive stylistic characteristics of the giallo: the use (actually, the abuse) of fast zooms and of extreme close-ups, usually showing eyes to emphasise the importance of the act of seeing. It is in Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo where one can find the first example of a film establishing the canonical narrative structure of the giallo. While at the same time multiple generic variations are possible, this structure can be summarised thus: an innocent figure, often a tourist, artist or any other kind of stranger in a community, «witnesses a brutal murder that appears to be the work of a serial killer. He or she takes on the role of amateur detective in order to hunt down this killer» (Koven 3) and while doing so, he often succeeds where the police originally failed. The giallo is, in contrast to other groups of contemporary films like German krimis, French polar or the Italian poliziotteschi, not mainly structured around the whereabouts of the policemen or other representatives of the law during the investigation; it focuses on the role of the investigator, which in the giallo is often played by an amateur detective. The relationships linking lexical elements, which Altman sees as the object of investigation of a syntactically based genre analysis («A Semantic/Syntactic 85

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1 L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo

Approach» 12), present in the gialli a closed narrative structure that had already been laid down by (or adopted from) the mystery novel. Therefore, the murderers are (almost) always human and they tend to be motivated by greed or psychosexual disorders. In the end, the mystery can be solved, the criminal often being a figure already shown during the film; no matter how improbable the solution may be, it is also a logical one, even if that logic is twisted. Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, released in 1970, is the first giallo to combine in the same picture both at the syntactic and semantic level the set of characteristics that can be seen as distinctive principles of a genre. One finds the amateur detective trying to solve the crime, the archetypal disguise of the killer (leather gloves, dark hat, etc.), and on the level of the mise-en-scène, the stylish violence scenes, often accompanied by a loud and extremely emphatic soundtrack (especially in the excessive moments of the murder scenes), the repeated use of camera zooms, the common utilisation of medium shots and extreme close-ups. The exploitation origins and the unstable structures of the Italian production industry, where the success of films like Argento’s often provoked an avalanche of similar products, can serve as central aspects explaining a syntactic homogeneity which remained within the rules of formula quite constant until the late 1970s. Regarding the «semantic-syntactic» approach of Altman, the giallo presents in its syntactic form a dualistic structure that clearly departs from the classical Hollywood narrative. Altman observed in regard to the musical («American Film Musical») that some genres diverge in their syntactic organisation from the classical narrative, which follows a chronological, linear progression and causal motivation, and tend to be organised around an episodic structure that solves the contradictions existing among characters and their needs or motivations. In the case of the giallo one also finds similar differences from the traditional narrative: the duality refers firstly to 86

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the dramatic structure which gives a form to the films but also, on a second level, to those scenes of violence which seem not to be contained by the unifying, narrative forces of a filmic work and tend towards that aspect of the film known as the «excess» (Thompson): the use of cutting, mise-en-scène or soundtrack reaches a level that appears to be beyond the traditional narrative boundaries, often implying a lack of motivation within the film text. This disruption of temporal, spatial continuities in the violence scenes is a characteristic which can be found in many gialli, but also in other popular Italian sub-genres of the time, such as poliziotteschi, orrore or mondo (Edmonstone). There is however a fundamental difference when comparing the gialli to these other groups of films: the violent scenes, as outrageous as they might be, are usually fully integrated into the story; they deliver essential plot points in order to solve the mystery of whodunit. And while it is true that there are some elements which tend towards the excess, against the unifying elements of the narrative logic they do not really trespass its limits; they also serve this narrative as stylistic devices. Regarding the distribution and reception of most of these films in third-run theaters, where vast parts of the audience were less concerned with the cinematographic text than with the social experience of the viewing itself (Koven, 19–44), the gialli often rested on formulaic narratives which enabled the plot to be understood without much participation from the audiences: audiences that at the same time seemed to cultivate another kind of relationship to the cinematic text, different to the one inherent in the classical narrative and explained according to traditional assumptions of film theory; audiences that were not always looking for absolute immersion in the diegetic world but seeking a paracinematic, distanced reaction to the filmic text. The narrative can therefore be seen as the basic structure which provides the stage for a «cinema of attractions» concentrated on a few shocking scenes of sex, violence, suspense or murder that deliver the necessary astonishment, awe, and often, simultaneously, laughter. It is also in these pieces of graphic sex and violence where directors demonstrate their technical skills to their full extent: these are the moments in the films where they know they can count on the attention of the spectator. The film functions then as a puzzle plot, which seeks to structure the logic of the crime and its solution but, at the same time, it also acts as a product delivering shock and visceral entertainment for very different types of audiences. In this way, the giallo fulfills the characteristics of the postmodern narration as expressed by Umberto Eco (81), as he explained that this kind of text (like his novel The Name of the Rose) can be successfully read on different levels offering interesting approaches to different audiences. In many cases the complexity of its narrative gives way to spectacle and «becomes a flimsy framework to hang the various set pieces of graphic sex and violence» (Koven 107). The unity of the narrative traditionally worshiped by film theory falls into pieces. There is a further element in the consideration of the gialli as examples of a cinema of attractions which should also be pointed out referring to the circum87

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stances of the reception of these films, mainly in the circuit of third-run theaters (terza visione) (Wagstaff). This questions the traditional assumptions regarding the cinema consumption mainly as a dispositif that is to enable passive behavior and a textual immersion of the spectator in the all-absorbing fictional world of the films. Gialli, like other examples of contemporary popular Italian cinema, were often consumed under circumstances that enabled a distanced spectatorship and stressed the aspect of going to the cinema as a social practice or leisure activity. In this respect, the gialli audience shows in the popular theatre reception practices similar patterns to those of television spectators (a medium that was yet to become particularly widespread in the southern part of Italy during the heydays of the giallo [Frayling xxi]) and in this regard it also reveals a passion for the cinema structured around the pleasures of communal viewing (Eleftheriotis 180). The most durable genres are those which developed a coherent syntax (Altman, «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach» 16). Is the short life of the giallo thus the result of an underdeveloped, overly simplistic syntactic structure? The syntactic structure is not only coherent, but overtly rigid, resisting further evolution over subsequent years. The explicitness of the semantic aspects of these films (the iconographic value of the physical objects and imagery, the recurrent themes, the simi2 Passi di danza su una lama di rasoio lar figures present in most of them, etc.) also blocked an evolution based on a coherent syntax adopting a new series of semantic elements: while similarities can be attested in other exploitation subgenres of this period, such as horror, melodrama or slasher films, the gialli would remain, due to their rigid set of characteristics, a short lived phenomenon. The tendencies towards self-reflexivity, which can already be observed in early examples of this genre, attest a consciousness of the assumptions, the implications but also the rules these productions imposed on themselves (cf. the Leticia Roman, the protagonist of Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo from 1962 reading a giallo novel at the beginning of the movie and therefore directly addressing the origins of the film, or Passi di danza su una lama di rasoio/Death Carries a Cane by Maurizio Pradeaux, 1973). The culmination of this tendency might be Dario Argento’s film Giallo, which premiered in 2009, bearing this reflexivity in its very title.

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3. Generic Considerations and Conclusions Until now I have attempted to delineate some of the semantic and syntactic characteristics of the gialli. Yet that does not answer the following question: what kind of generic phenomenon do they represent? Is the giallo one of those «local genres» proposed by Raphaëlle Moine (169) in contrast to their trans-historical or transnational counterparts? These films show rather the limitations proposed by this duality: the giallo is Italian but not in the way a typical example of the local genre, the heimatfilm, is German. In order to answer the question one must acknowledge the dialectic of genre hybridisation, which remains behind the local response to a global phenomenon. The giallo is a local and specific phenomenon but also one which obviously could not have been possible without that set of cultural transfers and financial cross-linking outlined at the beginning of this chapter. In this case, however, the term genre does not indicate, as it often does, an essence, a more or less specific description of a setting, a feeling or a mood. It functions rather in a more peculiar manner as a somewhat broad conceptual label with highly moveable boundaries that shift around to include films which, under other circumstances, would be categorised, regarding this aspect of feeling or mood, as poliziotteschi like Morte sospetta di una minorenne/The Suspicious Death of a Minor by Sergio Martino, 1975; as slasher films, like Mario Bava’s 5 bambole per la luna d’agosto/Island of Terror (1971) or as conspiracy films like Terza ipotesi su un caso di perfetta strategia criminale/Who Killed the Prosecutor and Why? by Giuseppe Vari in 1972 (cf. Needham 135). In this tradition, Gian Piero Brunetta (199–204) sees the main representatives of the giallo as part of the horror genre: giallo is not considered a genre in its own right. Other authors therefore see the necessity of redefining the giallo in a broader category than that of the genre. Regarding its ramifications and different articulations, Gary Needham understands the giallo as a discourse relying on a very broad definition: «something constructed out of the various associations, networks, tensions and articulations of Italian cinema’s textual and industrial specificity in the postwar period» (138). Dardano Sacchetti, the Italian screenwriter who co-wrote some of Argento’s and Bava’s films, supports this cultural-historical interpretation: he sees in many of these productions, but also in other products of an exploitation cinema so popular in Italy during this period, a revolt against traditional values similar to the ones of the nouveau roman in France, Angry Young Men in Britain or the Beat Generation in the USA. In a broader context, he understands the emergence of the giallo as a reaction against the elegant films which dominated Italian film production during the 1960s. The gialli and their exploitation relatives were not products of a genre but of a generation (Lardin 173), a reaction against the inflexibility and growing (left wing) politicisation of the Italian cultural milieu.

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At this point, it seems to me quite reasonable to return to the original Italian term, the filone, which can clarify some of these terminological problems. The giallo is indeed a filone, a generic cycle like the spaghetti western, the peplum or the mondo. Filone stands for «themes and subjects which can be copied while public interest lasts, and then abandoned for the next fashion» (Spicer 263). But filone in Italian also means «vein», in the sense of the mineral vein that may be exploited in order to be profitable. A quite appropriate term that points to the industrial components of this group of films, produced cheaply and quickly to react promptly to the latest success among the audiences. The gialli, produced extensively like other filone typical of the Italian popular cinema of this period between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, would come and go in fast cycles lasting no more than a few years. The success of a film would cause an avalanche of similar products but also fertile hybridisation in cycles: peplum, orrore, mondo or giallo. With the characterisation of these films as filone I would like to stress two aspects that, as already explained, seem central to an understanding of the semantic and syntactic characteristics of the giallo: firstly the reception practices which encouraged a paracinematic approach to these films and, in so doing, the duality of narrative and spectacle which situates the giallo in regions close to those of the cinema of attractions. Secondly, the dialogical relationship between audiences and producers, which can be classified under Altman’s «pragmatic» approach («Conclusion»), was in this regard central to the structural characteristic of the films: context and text are in this case deeply intertwined. A further aspect of these contextual considerations relates also to the dynamics of their production; it was the exploitation applied to maximise the profits and the combination of different hybrid aspects in a static set of semantic and syntactic characteristics that gave the giallo its definitive shape. However, this set of characteristics turned out to be too rigid to allow further evolution or allow a positive reception in other (geographical or social) contexts. At the end of the 1970s the giallo would be overrun by other filoni and by two other forces which deeply modified the distribution practices of exploitation products: the increasing availability of television to Italian cinema audiences, especially in the south of the country, and Hollywood, which with blockbusters in the late 1970s and its own B-picture production proposed its own response to the challenges of the national film markets. These films remained a perfect example of a local codification and reinterpretation of international hybridisation on very different levels, a combination in which a set of diverse factors regarding production, consumption and inter-textual influences crystallised in a product of strange and short-lived stability.

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Works Cited Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Print. – «Conclusion: A Semantic/Syntactic/ Pragmatic Approach to Genre.» Genre, Gender, Race, and World Cinema. An Anthology. Ed. Julie F. Codel. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. 13–22. Print. – «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.» Cinema Journal 23.3 (1984): 6–18. Print. Baschiera, Stefano and Francesco Di Chiara . «Once Upon a Time in Italy: Transnational Features of Genre Production 1960s– 1970s.» Film International 8.6 (2011): 30–39. Print. Bergfelder, Tim. «The Nation Vanishes. European Co-Productions and Popular Genre Formula in the 1950s and 1960s.» Cinema and Nation. Eds. Mette Hojrt and Scott Mackenzie. London: Routledge, 2000. 131–142. Print. Brunetta, Gian Piero: The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-first Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print. Dyer, Richard and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Eco, Umberto: «Nachschrift zum Namen der Rose.» 1983. Trans. Burkhart Kroeber. Munich: Hanser, 1986. Print. Edmonstone, Robert J. «Beyond Brutality: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses.» Diss. University of Glasgow, 2008. Print.

Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. Popular Cinemas of Europe. New York: Continuum, 2001. Print. Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. 1981. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Koven, Mikel J. La Dolce Morte. Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006. Print. Lardín, Rubén, ed. Ven y Mira. El Cine Fantástico y de Terror en la Zona Prohibida. San Sebastián: Donostia Kultura, 2011. Print. Moine, Raphaëlle: Cinema Genre. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Print. Needham, Gary. «Playing with Genre: Defining the Italian Giallo.» Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe. Ed. Steven Jay Schneider. Godalming: FAB, 2003. 135–144. Print. Ritzer, Ivo. Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. Spicer, Andrew. European Film Noir. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Print. Thompson, Kristin: «The Concept of Cinematic Excess.» Cine-Tracts 1.2 (1977): 54–63. Print. Wagstaff, Christopher. «Forkful of Westerns. Industry, Audiences and the Italian Western.» Popular European Cinema. Dyer and Vincendeau 1992. 245–261. Print.

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Cosmopolitan Agencies

Dimitris Eleftheriotis

The Films of Jules Dassin Cosmopolitan Hybridity

1. From Hybridity and Globalisation to Cosmopolitanism This paper considers the films of Jules Dassin, an émigré/diasporic/exilic director, in relation to the two key concepts of the conference, hybridisation and globalisation. It will open with a cursory but hopefully suggestive examination of the two terms before proposing the blossoming discourse of cosmopolitanism as an alternative conceptual framework that has the potential to engage productively with the terms and themes of this conference. Cosmopolitanism has a long and at times dubious history but its use in the present paper aspires to justify the choice. Importantly, the term has been dictated, at least partially, by the object of my analysis, Jules Dassin and his films. While it was impossible to find an interview or statement where the director defines himself as a ‹cosmopolitan› this is precisely the terms in which close collaborators and members of his family have described him in personal communications: ‹πολιτης του κοσμου›, ‹citizen of the world›, were the words that they used. I think that this is particularly significant in the sense that Dassin’s agency is somewhat compromised in the labelling imposed on him (no matter how wellintentioned that might be) but also because it indicates that the creation of a certain identity, self-willed or enforced, becomes a stake in the way itinerant directors and their work become involved in tactical games with significant critical and political implications. A clear demonstration of that is the poster in figure 1 for a retrospective 95

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season organised by the Hellenic Foundation for Culture and held in London in the autumn of 2002. There Dassin, who persistently refused offers of citizenship by France and Greece and who always cherished his Jewish and American identities, is presented as an ‹honorary Greek›, a designation that repeatedly surfaces within Greek critical discourses and political and institutional practices.1 In relation to the second key term, ‹hybridisation›, I would like to present two instances of different types of research that come from beyond the disciplinary boundaries of film studies, one from very close to home (in all senses of the word), the other distant. Both engage with globalisation and hybridisation, and offer particularly instructive 1 Dassin: an honorable Greek conceptual and methodological suggestions. The first instance is from research projects undertaken at the Centre for Textile Conservation, which is part of the School of Culture and Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow where my own department of film studies is also situated. The National Museums of Scotland commissioned the research as part of celebrations commemorating the Battle of Culloden (1746), that particularly poignant and definitive event in Scottish history. The task was to authenticate items of tartan clothing, thought to belong to Prince Charles Edward Stuart (‹Bonnie Prince Charlie› or ‹The Young Pretender›) but more importantly to support with scientific and historical evidence a particular and culturally significant national narrative about an exclusively Scottish and generations-old cottage industry producing clan tartans. The research did confirm that the Prince wore the tartan but, ironically, its other findings undermined the validity of the national narrative. It was found that the characteristic eighteenth century bright colours of tartan were not due to dyes extracted from local plants and bushes as previously believed but from imported ones. The omnipresent red, for example, was achieved with the help of cochineal or alternatively lac, both produced from dried non-indigenous insects and, through Mediterranean trade routes, imported from South America (the former) and Asia (the latter). Significantly and perhaps ironically, they were chosen over the indig1

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Dassin was described as ‹a Greek in the ancient sense of the word› in the presentation of an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Athens. See Ta Nea, 26 November 1999.

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enous alternatives because of their superiority in terms of vividness of colour and resistance to fading (see Quye; Quye/Cheape). What is particularly instructive about this is that the materials used in the production of tartans, arguably the most potent and globally recognisable emblems of Scottishness, are in fact not Scottish at all. The point is made here not to demonstrate the dullness of indigenous Scottish dyes but because it suggests that eighteenth century Scotland, far from being an insular, self-sufficient nation, was in fact open to the global economic and cultural processes. And it was its cosmopolitan disposition that enabled the production of these essentially hybrid materials. Furthermore, the insects, these tiny, fleeting organisms, that were chosen over the rooted indigenous plants, are particularly evocative in terms of scale, the micro level undermining and eclipsing the macro, presenting us with a picture of trans-cultural flows and exchanges that consist of a multitude of micro-process – each one with its own peculiar microhistory that is irreducible to a unified and all-conquering process of globalisation. My second example comes from Sheldon Pollock’s work on Southern Asian literatures in the period 1000 AD – 1500 AD. In an essay entitled «The cosmopolitan vernacular», a term that he considered in a number of other essays and one usefully appropriated recently for film studies by Tim Bergfelder (2011), Pollock investigates the emergence of vernacular written cultures (more specifically in this case Kannada) within the Sanskrit cosmopolis. The essay suggests that not only the vernacular re-configures the cosmopolitan but more importantly that the two are inextricably linked, producing each other in their dynamic interaction and he concludes (Pollock 34): «‹Indigenous› cultures are produced in the course of long-terms translocal interactions by the very same processes that produce the global itself. The local/global dualism, therefore, needs to be historicised out of existence […].» (My emphasis)

Two key points emerge from Pollock’s argument. First, that globalisation has a much longer history and a more expansive geographical territory of application than it is commonly recognised. Second, that by paying attention to the kind of phenomena that Pollock describes it is possible to escape the latent Eurocentrism of the anti-Eurocentric postcolonial discourse that paradoxically discovers Europe in every aspect of global history. In the Sanskrit/Kannada interaction Europe is completely bypassed as an irrelevance. In evaluating the usefulness of ‹hybridity› and ‹hybridisation› as apt conceptual frameworks for understanding and analysing cultural, cinematic or, even more specifically, generic interactions, it is worth noting the links of the term with biology that inevitably harks back to the dubious history of the discipline.2 Significantly, within nineteenth century biological discourses, hybridity had predominantly 2

For an extensive discussion of the discursive positioning of hybridity see Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas of Europe: 97–103.

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negative connotations of impurity, which, in one of the most unfortunate developments of the twentieth century, were superseded by fantasies of genetic enrichment. It is thus very surprising that in an essay directly addressing this conference’s theme, ‹hybridisation through globalisation›, Fredric Jameson has no qualms in praising contemporary ‹world cinema› as performing genetic transfers, implanting fragments of DNA from one cinematic context to another (see Jameson). As Jameson’s positive take on biology demonstrates, hybridisation is often perceived as an interaction between two primary and pure entities that leads to a new, impure but excitingly so, secondary form. And more often than not in the context of genre criticism these new forms surface as hybrid products of a cross-fertilisation between global processes and local traditions. Usually they are situated within a context of national appropriation of Hollywood genres or, in a more politicised critical vocabulary, as products of homogenising global trends encountering resisting indigenous forms. However, what both the ‹hybrid tartan› and the ‹cosmopolitan vernacular› suggest is the urgent need to open up the conceptual frame of our research to the micro-histories of transcultural interaction. Of course this is the much trodden in the last fifteen years or so field of the ‹transnational›, a term that depending on its use and conceptualisation can vary significantly from the banal and descriptive to the reflective and genuinely intuitive. One of the obvious limitations of the term is that, following Pollock and Quye, we can argue that everything is indeed the product of cultural interaction and certainly every film ever made can justifiably be seen as transnational in one way or another. The term, nevertheless, has also been used in sophisticated attempts to address the challenges of the cultural ‹mix›, notably so by Bergfelder who following Hannerz proposed the transnational as a more ‹humble term› than the all-encompassing «globalisation» (Bergfelder «National, transnational or supranational cinema?»). The most successful research within this paradigm focuses on micro-histories that in their complexity challenge any reductive applications of ‹hybridisation›; for example, the specific investigations into the works of émigré directors and actors in ‹cosmopolitan› places like Hollywood, London or Paris (see, for example, Phillips; Phillips/Vincendeau; Bergfelder/Cargnelli). Such micro-histories invariably involve identifiable subjects and agents and the present enquiry into the films of Jules Dassin is following on that path. An equally promising discursive context is that of recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the critical discourse that has emerged from the social sciences (politics, law, ethics, philosophy) primarily, within which ‹cosmopolitanism› is not only an alternative term but more importantly is conceptually deployed in a rigorous interrogation of the processes of globalisation (on transnationalism see, for example, Appiah; Beck, «The Truth of Others»; Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision; Douzinas; Erskine). It is crucial to note, nevertheless, that the term is less used in the context of the arts and in film studies it remains largely untheorised despite its extensive 98

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application (see, for example, Naficy, «Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics»; Marks; Naficy, An Accented Cinema; Suner. Works on cosmopolitan themes in film include Nava; Schwartz; Loshitzky). There are several good reasons for such hesitant engagement with the term that extend beyond political reservations regarding its dubious history. The discourse on cosmopolitanism is usually structured around a distribution of sharply divided positions: it tends to be about ‹us› (metropolitan intellectuals, law-makers, politicians, philosophers) and ‹them› (foreigners, refugees, exiles, asylum seekers), with an emphasis on the ethical and political questions concerning, for example, the ‹rights of others› or the principle of ‹universal hospitality›. In terms of the latter, Jacques Derrida’s passionate plea for unconditional cosmopolitan hospitality in which cities become open spaces, these cities are clearly European (Strasbourg is the specific example that he offers) where the seekers of hospitality (asylum, refuge, etc.) are decisively non-European (in his example, Kurds; see Derrida). In such approaches cosmopolitan positions (as arise from the challenges of globalisation) are markedly separated from cosmopolitan dispositions (as arise in response to these challenges) and the agents of each are decisively different. The discourse around a ‹cosmopolitan outlook› is carried out by citizens positioned in a very different way in global power structures from those who experience the displacing effects of cosmopolitanism. But filmmakers situated in positions of displacement are also the producers of texts that are manifestations of cosmopolitan dispositions, their works erasing in effect the ‹us/them› binary. Furthermore, a particularly thorny issue in legal, political and ethical discourses is the relationship between local, national and international frames of reference as demonstrated for example in the search for cosmopolitan norms (see Benhabib). By contrast the interconnection of the local, the national and the global has by now become a point of departure rather than arrival in film studies and something that arguably every film effortlessly accomplishes. Finally, the cosmopolitanism of the political philosopher or human rights activist revolves around the often controversial and heavily charged but perfectly knowable limits of citizenship. Cultural production and creativity, on the other hand, are manifestations of subjectivity. What the films of Dassin bring into play is a practical challenge to these limitations: his life and work bridge the gap between displaced citizenship and creative subjectivity displaying a connection between his position and a cosmopolitan disposition.

2. Dassin, Cosmopolitanism and Hybridity There are certain strands in the discourse on cosmopolitanism that further bridge the conceptual gaps and can be brought to bear on the films of Dassin. Two concepts in particular, one a hundred year old, the other re-discovered recently, which 99

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are discursively located in-between subjectivity and citizenship are crucially pertinent: the sociological category of the ‹stranger› that goes back to at least Georg Simmel’s influential 1908 essay (see Simmel) and the ‹errant› subject as appropriated by Giorgio Agamben (via Foucault) as an evocative account of the formation of identity (see Agamben). As I have argued elsewhere (see Eleftheriotis, «The foreignness of Jules Dassin»), Dassin’s life and work are marked by an extreme form of strangeness, foreignness, defined as a position of displacement that is characteristic of his entire career. A brief summary of the latter might be useful at this point. Dassin was born in 1911 to an Eastern European Jewish family moved to the USA from the cosmopolitan port of Odessa. His family moved to New York in the 1930s where Jules joined the worker’s theatre group Artef and later the Communist Party. Following ‹assembly line› work at MGM in the early 1940s he made his name through RKO films, Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) – both produced by maverick producer Mark Hellinger – and Thieves’ Highway (1949). He was famously ‹blacklisted› in the late 1940s and was forced to move to Europe where in 1950 he finished his ‹British› (set in London) film Night and the City. Because of his status he struggled to find subsequent work but Rififi, made in France in 1955, brought him back to critical and popular attention. He spent the 1950s and 60s between France, Italy (where he made La Legge/The Law, 1959) and Greece (with Never on Sunday, 1960, arguably his last big success). He also shot Topcapi in 1964, a perfect fit for Tim Bergfelder’s cosmopolitan mode of production that was widespread in Europe in the 1950s and 60s (see Bergfelder, «The Nation Vanishes»). Following a military coup in Greece in 1967 he lived in ‹exile› in Paris and New York before settling down in Athens in 1974 with his wife, actor and subsequent Minister for Culture, Melina Mercouri. He died there in 2008. Beyond his itinerant life, Dassin occupies an awkward, decentred position in critical canons with selective ‹fragments› of his work been appropriated and acclaimed within generic (most obviously his RKO films) or national historical frames (British, French, Greek). Perennially critical of his own films, Dassin closely resembles Simmel’s stranger, a social type marked by displacement but also one who enjoys certain advantages. Physically close but culturally distant, the stranger possesses the ability to observe social relations with acute perception and with the penetration enabled by a ‹bird’s eye› view. In such definitions a peculiar dialectic of proximity/distance is ascribed in the stranger’s cosmopolitan position and disposition. A similar dialectic can be traced in Dassin’s work as demonstrated by a series of formal conventions such as voice-over, observational structures, point-of-view systems, editing, the abundance of foreign characters, narrative structures, the use of urban space, fluid and eclectic employment of the melodramatic and the comedic, modes of performance, mise-en-scène and frame composition. This is a dialectic that I will explore in the next section through a detailed analysis of selective examples but it is worth noting the cultural and critical ambiva100

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lence that surrounds attitudes to detachment and closeness. Amanda Anderson has traced the ambiguity towards detachment back to the genealogy of the Enlightenment as praise for critical distance, which is nevertheless often associated with impersonal and unsympathetic institutions (medical, educational, legal) and characterised by ‹cold›, disinterested objectivity (see Anderson). A similar ambiguity can be located within the specific boundaries of film criticism/theory in relation to Dassin who is praised for his ability to observe but condemned for his attempts at empathy (see, for example, McArthur; Ebert). The adverse critical reception of his peculiar mix of proximity/distance is further aggravated by the inconsistent, ‹erratic› articulations of that dialectic in Dassin’s films. Importantly, inconsistency is a cardinal sin in conventional (and not only) critical discourses of authorship – a director’s recognisable auteurism is always established through a consistent employment of an identifiable set of formal and stylistic conventions. However, I would like to propose that inconsistency is a key characteristic of cosmopolitan authorship and as such, it challenges hegemonic definitions of authorship. Agamben’s account of the formation of subjectivity through a series of errant encounters with the world and the normative discourses that regulate such experiences is particularly useful in relation to cosmopolitan authorship. While it is crucial to avoid generalisations, errant subjectivity provides a very evocative model of creativity that operates in conditions of displaced strangeness arising from a cosmopolitan position that necessarily involves accidental encounters, opportunism, ‹hit-and-miss› moments, as exilic, diasporic or émigré directors stumble across the normative instrumentalism of national institutions. Dassin’s deployment of the proximity/distance dialectic can be persistently traced through the various phases of his career but is deployed inconsistently, even erratically, as he attempts to navigate the widely varied practices, conventions and values that pertain to the different national industries and cultural contexts that he encountered. More germane to the concerns of the present collection is the possibility that a model of cosmopolitan authorship that encompasses the errant subject and erratic creativity, as well as the proximity/distance dialectic, can provide a flexible and relevant conceptual frame in approaching certain instances of ‹hybridisation through globalisation›. The ever increasing in volume and intensity global flows of cultural exchange and mobility create conditions of multiple and largely unpredictable encounters between institutions, texts, creative personnel, cultural users and critics, encounters that are open to the dynamics of strangeness and the erratic behaviours that it entails. The composite/hybrid products of such interactions are sometimes the product of intentional and tactical exploitation of opportunities but more commonly they bear the marks of contingency and necessarily inconsistency. The simple but challenging response to the demands of our contemporary cosmopolitan condition and the increasing hybridisation of cultural production, circulation and 101

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consumption is to adapt and revise our critical vocabulary in order to account for the inconsistent and erratic nature that characterises such exchanges and flows.

3. Tracing the Textual Deployment of Proximity/Distance In what follows I will demonstrate the particular ways in which the proximity/ distance dialectic surfaces in selective Dassin films and also identify some of the inconsistencies in its use. The examples focus on three of his films (The Naked City, Rififi and Never on Sunday), made in the USA, France and Greece respectively; they are chosen as particularly powerful instances in which aesthetic choices expressed in their form are evidently the product of negotiation around production practices, critical evaluations and processes of cultural differentiation and exchange. Arguably the film that established Dassin’s career as a master noir director was The Naked City produced by Mark Hellinger for RKO which capitalised on the considerable popularity of the photojournalistic, realist photographs of Arthur Fellig (‹Weegee›) depicting everyday New York scenes (with a clear emphasis on crime) collected in the 1945 paperback publication that gave the film its title. As a cinematic articulation of space, the city becomes a most obvious expression of the proximity/ distance dialectic. In the modern metropolises of the twentieth century the densely configured urban space fosters relationships based on close physical co-habitation but also social estrangement if not alienation. In Dassin’s The Naked City, New York, this most emblematic post-WWII city, with its multicultural and multi-ethnic population (that included Dassin, Hellinger and Weegee) provided an ideal spatial articulation of the dialectic. The film, heralded as pioneering the representation of urban space that underpinned the noir cycle in the following ten years (see Dimendberg; Sanders; Kozloff) opens with aerial views of the gigantic scale of the city intercut with shots of some of its citizens as they go on about their nocturnal activities (fig. 2). In the opening sequence that uses striking aerial cinematography (emphasised by the loud humming of a plane’s engine on the soundtrack) the proximity/distance dialectic is articulated through the extreme long shot/long shot editing motif and the thematic scale shifts. Even more striking is the sequence’s voice over that provides an aural credit roll during which producer Mark Hellinger identifies himself as the narrator. In that way a Brechtian distantiation announces the affective address of the film as a detached, observational mode of engagement with its subject matter and characters. Importantly, in critical considerations of the film and its startling opening, authorial agency is generally attributed to Hellinger (perhaps prompted by the voice over and his reputation as a New York journalist) and intertextually to the photographs of Weegee. Both Edward Dimendberg and Sarah Kozloff dismiss without much consideration Dassin’s role in shaping the (audio and visual) form of the opening 102

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2 Opening of The Naked City

of the film. It might be that the links of the producer and the photographer with New York forged through their journalistic and photojournalistic works are too strong for the critics to overlook. Or alternatively the reason might be that Dassin’s overall authorial inconsistency and errant use of generic conventions predicated by the experience of different national film industries and modes of production undermine his position as an auteur. This is particularly interesting and, I suggest, an obvious symptom of critical blindness to the conditions of cosmopolitan authorship. It is surprising that both critics chose to ignore (or simply do not know) an 103

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earlier Dassin film, Young Ideas, made during his MGM ‹assembly line› years, which opens in almost identical fashion, a montage of aerial views of streets and skyscrapers followed by a montage of different individuals reading the same novel, ‹As I Knew Paris›, written by the protagonist Josephine Evans (Mary Astor) (fig. 3). Despite the contrast in tone of the two sequences (the first serious and ambitious, the second light-hearted and playful – following the generic blueprints of noir and comedy respectively) the structural similarity in terms of theme and editing is evident, suggesting that Dassin was particularly influential in determining the aesthetics of the opening of The Naked City. Perhaps it was his quiet adaptability that assisted him in asserting ultimate control over the film’s form, providing the perfect antidote to Hellinger’s forceful personality. Documentation included in the 2007 Criterion Collection DVD publication of The Naked City provides further evidence of Dassin’s influence, focusing on an aesthetic disagreement between the director and Hellinger regarding the film’s conclusion in the Williamsburg Bridge. Having maintained an unwavering commitment to the distant observational mode of narration throughout the film (see fig. 5 below) that consistently disaggregates characters from the point-of-view system (through editing, camera position and use of voice over) the film surrenders its formal rigour during the climactic finale. As the film’s villain (Garzah played by Ted de Corsia) manically runs towards the bridge, Dassin displays remarkable affective proximity with the fugitive, moving the camera closer to register his emotions, offering him point-of-view as he stares at the height of the bridge tower, even altering the drama of the scene with a touch of comedy as the pursued Garzah skips over the rope that children play with. The tone of the Williamsburg bridge sequence clearly infuriated Hellinger who wrote to Dassin: «We have lost our narrator, and our feeling of the city, and in so doing the picture has tailed off into the type of sequence that has been done a thousand and one times. We are personalizing the story of a man who was merely incidental to our entire yarn, and we can lose everything we have gained through this procedure […] Garza [sic], running into camera, is not our story. Garza slipping on the top of the bridge is not our story. Garza’s fears and frustrations are not our story. Our story is to see Garza through the eyes of the bystander, and the narrator, and it is when we get away from that realization that we fumble and stumble so badly.»3

Clearly Hellinger has a point, the finale of the film feels like a different film and his concerns are very much in line with an approach to filmmaking and to criticism that values consistency of style. However, it can also be seen as an ethical cosmo3

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«Notes on Chase Sequence – The Naked City», included as the leaflet ‹Production Notes› in the DVD of The Naked City published by Criterion Collection in 2007.

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3 Opening of Young Ideas

politan attitude as Dassin seems unable to resist emotional proximity with ‹a man who is merely incidental› or with the pathos inherent in the scene. The brief scene in which the murder is committed that follows after the opening sequence offers a clear demonstration of how distancing is achieved in the rest of the film with the camera remaining uninvolved in the dramatic action, displaying instead a penchant for stylised, elegant and very ‹noirish› compositions in stark contrast with the chase sequence discussed above. Of course there is a clear narrative motivation in operation as the identity of the murderer is concealed in that way 105

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4a–f The Naked City’s finale

(reinforced by the equally distancing shot that follows – fig. 5) but it is unusual in that the identity of the victim is also concealed. While the proximity/distance dialectic and the inconsistency of its deployment is evident in the previous examples, in Rififi it is the surprising, often abrupt, emergence of closeness in detached observational modes of narration and vice versa that is striking. Take for example the scene of the heist (fig. 6), universally praised for the way that throughout its considerable length it strips down the soundtrack to include only diegetic sounds. According to critics, this gives the film an ‹arty› flavour, leav106

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5g–j Observational mode in The Naked City

ing the spectator to witness the action without the conventional ‹assistance› of tense extra-diegetic score, creating thus an emotionally ‹cold› and detached position for the spectator. However, as the objective of Tony (Jean Servais) and his group is to make as little noise as they can to remain undetected, every single sound that they produce gains an amplified significance, which is arguably a very effective strategy in representing the tension of the scene from their own acoustic perspective. Furthermore, this detached observation is of a scene of consummate teamwork that showcases the closeness of the group. The scene in which Remi Grutter (Robert Hossein) kidnaps Tonio (Dominique Maurin) is a perfect example of a shift in visual attachment to the various diegetic agents involved. Opening with a conventional shot of the happy Tonio and his mother Louise (Janine Darcey) running in a park, the film distances itself from their actions by placing them at a distance, further emphasised by the bars on the foreground that function as a physical and visual barrier (fig. 7). The detachment from mother and son, nevertheless, allows for the ‹discovery› of Remi, now in close proximity to the camera. As Tonio and Louise are forced into the gangsters’ car, the film cuts surprisingly to the inside of the bus from where the action is observed but not fully understood by an anonymous pair of a father and son. Poignantly, as Tonio’s balloon flies helplessly towards the sky, the man tells his son: «Hold your balloon tight. See what can happen to it?» This sharp contextualisation of the dramatic event, which again removes the camera from the heart of the action, repre107

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6 Teamwork in Rififi

sents a clear detachment from the suffering of the victims. On another level, nevertheless, by contrasting the helplessness of the kidnapped Tonio with the secure position of the boy on the bus the film adds empathy to the scene. Significantly, this position of emotional closeness is achieved through visual detachment and mediated from the emotional perspective of a ‹stranger›. The position of the stranger is dramatised in a number of Dassin’s films but most pertinently in Never on Sunday which tells the story of Homer (played by Dassin himself), an American intellectual with a romantic passion for classical Greece, who in his visit to Piraeus gets involved with sex-worker Illia (Melina Mercouri). 108

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7 Tonio’s kidnapping in Rififi

The film occupies an ambiguous position, for its exoticisation of Greekness (see, for example Tsitsopoulou), but also seen as economically valuable in its tourist promotion of the country and its culture, Dassin’s cultural distance being in effect both condemned and endorsed. The choice4 of the name ‹Homer› for his character is also significant as it suggests an artificial affinity by a stranger who, despite his efforts

4

Unlike most of his other films, which relied heavily on scriptwriters or were adaptations, Dassin solely wrote the script of the film.

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to become accepted, is forced to leave the country after realising that his views of Greece and Greekness are far removed from those of the locals. In the closing sequence of the film, Homer commits another cultural ‹faux pas› (by telling the bouzouki player that he is not a real musician because he cannot read music) that leads to a confrontation with the locals. Although thanks to Illia’s intervention the tension is eventually resolved amicably, through dancing and the traditional smashing of glasses, the near-fight becomes the final straw that propels Homer to leave altogether (fig. 8). Homer’s character (a thinly disguised ironic representation of the director himself) creates a self-portrait of Dassin as an errant stranger who is continuously led astray and commits serious errors of judgement. In an earlier scene, Homer and Illia visit the ancient theatre of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis to attend a performance of Medea. As they watch the play, performed in the classical style that befits the setting, the camera reveals Illia reacting to the unfolding theatrical events in a completely different manner to the rest of the audience and to the obvious incredulity and bewilderment of Homer. After the performance, as the couple walk around the Acropolis, Illia offers an outlandish interpretation that reads the play as a clever orchestration of events by Medea that involves not an actual killing of her children but a staged one. Jason is fooled by her trick and for Illia that makes Euripides’s play clearly a comedy. Homer vehemently objects to such appropriation of the tragedy. Thus, Dassin places Medea in relative and antagonistic frames of interpretation. Furthermore, although his alter ego Homer disapproves of Illia’s liberties with the authenticity of ancient Greek culture, the director himself reworks the play into a contemporary setting in Kravgi gynaikon/A Dream of Passion (Greece/ Switzerland, 1978) which also involves in its plot a contemporary performance of Medea. The film’s credit sequence is a succession of shots of fragments of Greek antiquities. The soundtrack is a mixture of music and the voices of performers of yet another version of Medea. The chorus’s recitation is interrupted by a male voice asking «Are they speaking in ancient Greek?», to which the unmistakable voice of Mercouri responds, «The chorus, yes; the others speak in modern Greek».5 In that sense not only the play (and by extension Greek culture) is placed in a kaleidoscopic relational structure (with at least six versions of Medea offered across the two films) but also the position of a stranger/observer is again suggested, here in unambiguous linguistic terms. While the employment of syncretism and self-reflexivity indicates anxiety about difference, the recurring reference to classicism throughout Dassin’s Greek-phase of his career suggests that he also sought comfort in the universality of Ancient Greek culture, typical of what Simmel defined as ‹generally human commonness›. 5

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This is prescient in a rather uncanny way as Mercouri functioned as cultural translator and social mediator throughout Dassin’s life and career in Greece.

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8 Homer and the Greeks in Never On Sunday

Resorting to the universal as an inroad to cultural acceptance and connection reintroduces the proximity/distance dialectic in a devastating way: «But between nearness and distance, there arises a specific tension when the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stresses that which is not common.» (Simmel 407)

Like Homer in Never on Sunday, Dassin was never fully accepted in Greece, his tendency to retreat to universal classical references becoming a barrier for his engagement with the contemporary. The shots of Illia and Homer arguing over the meaning of Medea (fig. 9) offer a visual articulation of the paradoxical and inconsistent deployment of the proximity/distance dialectic: while the action foregrounds conflict and difference, thus drawing attention to cultural specificity, the imagery celebrates a beautifully lit and photographed Acropolis that can appeal to ‹universal› audiences. 111

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9 The fight over Medea in Never On Sunday

The case study of Dassin as a cosmopolitan author who operated in conditions that enabled, even demanded hybridisation, offers two usefully generalisable concluding propositions. Cosmopolitan positions and dispositions engage creative agents in cinematic negotiations that are informed by sensibilities, aesthetics and ethics that can be traced across a dialectic relationship between proximity and distance. Moreover, such dialectic operates in an inconsistent and errant manner that undermines the stability of conventional markers of authorial style as well as that of rigid national or generic frames.

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Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. «The Problem of Subjectivity.» Lecture at the European Graduate School, 2009: n. pag. Web. 16 Jun. 2013. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Print. Beck, Ulrich. «The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach.» Common Knowledge 10:3 (2004): 430–449. Print. – The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Print. Benhabib, Seyla. «Democratic Iterations: The Local, the National and the Global.» Another Cosmopolitanism: Seyla Benhabib. Ed. Robert Post. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 45–80. Print. Bergfelder, Tim. «The Nation Vanishes: European Co-Productions and Popular Genre Formulae in the 1950s and 1960s.» Cinema and Nation. Eds. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie. London: Routledge, 2000. 139–152. Print. – «National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies.» Media Culture and Society 27:3 (2005): 315–331. Print. – and Christian Cargnelli, eds. Destination London: German-speaking Émigrés and British Cinema. Oxford: Berghahn, 2008. Print. Bergfelder, Tim. «Love Beyond the Nation: Cosmopolitanism and Transnational Desire in Cinema.» Europe and Love in Cinema. Eds. Luisa Passerini, Jo Labanyi and Karen Diehl. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011. 76–99. Print. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print. Douzinas, Costas. Human Rights and Empire: the Political Philosophy of Cosmo-

politanism. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Ebert, Roger. «Up Tight!» Chicago SunTimes, 19 Feb. 1969. Print. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. London: Continuum International, 2001. Print. – «The Foreignness of Jules Dassin: Notes on Cosmopolitan Authorship.» Screen 53:4 (2012): 339–358. Print. Erskine, Toni. Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of ‹Dislocated Communities›. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. Jameson, Fredric. «Globalization and Hybridization.» World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Eds. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. New York: Routledge, 2010. 315–319. Print. Kozloff, Sarah. «Humanizing ‹the Voice of God›: Narration in The Naked City.» Cinema Journal 23:4 (1984). 41–53. Print. Loshitzky, Yosefa. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Print. McArthur, Colin. «Jules Dassin.» Underworld USA. London: Secker and Warburg, 1972. 93–101. Print. Naficy, Hamid. «Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre.» Local/Global. Eds. Wimal Dissanayake and Rob Wilson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 119–144. Print. – An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print. Nava, Mica. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Print. Phillips, Alastair. City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929–

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1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. Print. – and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood. London: British Film Institute, 2006. Print. Pollock, Sheldon. «The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.» The Journal of Asian Studies 57: 1 (1998): 6–37. Print. Quye, Anita. «Investigating the Scottish Tartan.» Education in Chemistry 41:2 (2004): 40–43. Print. – and Hugh Cheape. «Rediscovering the Arisaid.» Costume 42:1 (2008): 1–20. Print. Sanders, James. «Eight Million Stories.» Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 325– 344. Print.

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Schwartz, Vanessa R. It’s So French: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print. Simmel, Georg. «The Stranger.» The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Ed. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1964. 402–408. Print. Suner, Asuman. «Outside In: ‹Accented Cinema› at Large.» Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7:3 (2006): 363–382. Print. Tsitsopoulou, Vassiliki. «Greekness, Gender Stereotypes, and the Hollywood Musical in Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday.» Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18:1 (2000): 79–93. Print.

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Sudden Death(s) Hybridisation, Deterritorialisation and the Post-Colonial Imaginary in Transnational Philippine Media Culture

«Far from seeing in the State the principle of a territorialization that would inscribe people according to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement of deterritorialization that divides the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial inscription, to the new full body, to the new socius». Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (212)

This article deals with sudden deaths. It focuses on the Philippine-U.S. co-produced movie titled Sudden Death (1975; released in the U.S. in 1977) as a paradigmatic example of hybrid media culture. In a generic hybridisation of western, conspiracy thriller, blaxploitation, and martial arts film, Sudden Death not only depicts several protagonists suffering sudden death, but also marks the sudden death of an almost two decades long career in transnational film production.1 Since the late 1950s Philippine filmmaker Eddie Romero has served as a director, writer and producer of more than twenty movies shot in the Philippines and destined for deterri1

With the term ‹transnational› I refer to films produced by global finance arrangements, featuring personnel from different nations and addressing an international audience. I do not claim that these films are set outside the Philippines or cosmopolitan areas within the Philippines. Neither am I concerned with diasporan films made by or relating to Filipino exiles. On discussions of the notion of transnational cinema see, e.g., Ezra and Rowden; Ďurovičová and Newman; Higbee and Lim.

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torialised distribution in the global market, mainly in the United States. Romero is an important pioneer in post-colonial filmmaking: a – presumably the – key figure in post-colonial Philippine cinema acting as a cultural intermediary opening up the local landscape of film production to the international scope of cultural globalisation. On that note, Sudden Death puts into question several interrelated fields of media as well as cultural theory. In the area of production (as well as distribution and exhibition) it positions the Philippines in a transnational system of film circulation. As a result, the movie’s treatment of the notion of national cinema hints at representations and subjectivities signified by an appropriation of Hollywood genres. On a textual level this poses important questions of inscribing aesthetic differences to these very genres in the process of hybridising them. My paradigmatic analysis of Sudden Death will therefore work out the complex practices of hybridising generic traditions, the modes by which these hybridisations embody the paradigm of the cultural globalisation of media and the significance of the Philippine experience of being colonised by the imperialist power of U.S. empire. In doing this, I will not so much make a point about Eddie Romero as a «genre auteur» (Ritzer, Walter Hill), but wish to make the theoretical argument that global cultural flows in media are not one-way processes which perpetuate cinematic homogenisation, but open up hybrid spaces of cultural media exchange and geopolitical interaction. Instead of overemphasising structural factors of economic dominance, I will draw on Marwan M. Kraidy’s concept of «critical transculturalism» (9) which recognises structural factors as important determinants, yet refuses to see global flows of media culture as mono-directed in a limiting sense of ‹cultural imperialism›.2 Mobilising the framework of a critical transculturalism, this article aims for a «contextual approach to hybridity» (Kraidy xii) in order to both defy claims of idealist cultural essentialism which sees national cinemas threatened by ‹foreign› generic conventions as well as point out the fluid spaces of negotiation which provide media cultures with potentials of transformation.

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Robert Stam and Ella Shohat have argued for a similar perspective avoiding monocausal hypotheses and shedding light on a network of reciprocal dependencies: «The term ‹globalization› usually evokes a complex realignment of social forces engendering an overpowering wave of global political, cultural, and economic interdependency» (146).

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1. Globalising Philippine Cinema «Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers». Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (xii)

After having worked in the domestic industry for several years, writing for Sampaguita Pictures, one of the three big studios dominating Philippine cinema in the post-war era (with Premiere Pictures and LVN being the other two), films like Gerardo De Leon’s Ang Maestra (1941), Lorenzo P. Tuells’ Si, Si, Señorito (1947) or Paquito Bolero’s Kaaway Ng Bayan (1947), and himself directing films for Sampaguita Pictures such as Ang Kamay Ng Diyos (1947), Always Kay Ganda Mo (1949), Ang Prinsesa At Ang Pulubi (1950), Sabas, Ang Barbaro (1952) and May Bakas Ang Lumipas (1954), Romero turned his back to pictures shot in Tagalog (the official Philippine language spoken around Manila). Stemming from the context of an almost completely national cinema where films are made without considering foreign markets, Romero became an independent in the international film scene focusing on establishing a transatlantic system of genre film production. He set into motion the «complex transmutations of cultural practices and forms» described by John Tomlinson, becoming one of the prime filmmakers to seize on generic traditions «as they pass rapidly and effortlessly across national boundaries through the transnational cultural economy» (27). As an agent in the order of a new post-national system «of production and marketing, characterised by the more flexible labour processes and markets, of geographical mobility and rapid shifts in consumption practices» (Harvey 124), Romero’s pioneering work certainly bears witness to processes of globalisation, yet it might be located at the more intimate level of independent filmmaking and non-corporate idiosyncrasies vis-à-vis the multinational conglomerates of today. His and the Filipino cinema’s first film shot in English and intended for an international audience was The Day of the Trumpet (1957; released in 1963 as Cavalry Command in the U.S.), a hybrid of western and war movie ambivalently dealing with the military action of the U.S. army in the Philippine-American War at the turn of the twentieth century: «one of bloodiest conflicts in modern history» (Capino 8) which led to the U.S. colonisation of the Philippines.3 3

On the movie’s contradictory representation of colonialism see Hawkins 184–194. On the one hand Hawkins accounts for its «reductive, patriotic salute to the virtues of American empire» by the «concluding message of mutual benefit, the idea that the colonial encounter brought forth a favourable new order enjoyed by both Americans and Filipinos» (186), on the other hand he points out the importance of a Filipino rebel figure who provides a «blistering critique of the United States, an alternative history in which the nation’s intervention in the Philippines is viewed as irrefutably duplicitous and exploitive, stabbed its way into American movie theatres from lines written by a Filipino and delivered by a magnetic and somewhat sympathetic Filipino character» (189).

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1–2 The Day of the Trumpet /Cavalry Command

Starring John Agar known from Hollywood westerns such as John Ford’s She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949; RKO) or Raoul Walsh’s Along the Great Divide (1951; Warner Brothers) and being the most expensive film in Filipino cinema at that time, The Day of the Trumpet marked the first release by Premiere Productions, one of the major Philippine film studios headed by Cirio H. Santiago who would soon become an important producer-director and play a central part in transnational Philippine cinema. Romero soon left Premiere Productions and created his own company called Lynn-Romero Productions, managed by Romero and Kane W. Lynn, a U.S. expatriate and World War II veteran who remained in the country after the war had ended. Having steered John Cromwell’s crime drama The Scavengers (1958) and Gerry de Leon’s horror film Terror Is a Man (1959), Lynn-Romero Productions also quickly disbanded, giving way to Hemisphere Pictures, once again headed by Romero and Kane W. Lynn. Apart from his activities as producer, Romero directed numerous films also made in the Philippines for distribution overseas. They further figured in an effort to deliberately globalising Philippine cinema by dialogue in English language and American actors to gain a wider audience: an «attempt to bring internationally known stars to the Philippines to better reach the world marketplace, since their Filipino productions, while doing well in the foreign marketplace, did very poorly in America and other English speaking territories» (Ray 64). 118

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The Day of the Trumpet was followed by a cycle of thrillers consisting of Man on the Run (1958; Cirio Santiago Film Organization/ Halcyon/People’s Pictures; released in the U.S. as The Kidnappers by Manson Distributing Corp. in 1964) starring Burgess Meredith, Moro Witch Doctor (1964; Associated Producers/Hemisphere; released in the Philippines as Amok) featuring Jock Mahoney, and The Passionate Strangers (1966, MJP). These thrillers were accompanied by a cycle of unusually oneiric and nonheroic war films set in the Pacific depicting the collaborative fight of U.S. and Philippine soldiers against the imperial Japanese army. Charac- 3 Manila, Open City terised by Romero’s «intimate and idiosyncratic revision of the U.S.-Philippine experience in World War II» (Hawkins 207), it started with Lost Battalion (1961; Alta Vista; released in the U.S. through American International Pictures; released in the Philippines as Escape to Paradise) and spawned The Raiders of Leyte Gulf (1963; Hemisphere; released in the Philippines as Target 1–1–1), The Walls of Hell (1964; Hemisphere/ Filipinas Productions; released in the Philippines as Intramuros) starring Jock Mahoney, The Ravagers (1965; Hemisphere) featuring John Saxon, and finally Manila, Open City (1968; Nepomuceno). While The Day of the Trumpet and Man on the Run were produced for general exhibition in U.S. indoor theatres, the other films would be shown on the edges of the commercial film industry in drive-ins, rural or second-to-third-run indoor cinemas neglected by the Hollywood majors. The late 1960s saw a further generic cycle initiated by Eddie Romero consisting of the grindhouse and drive-in horror films Brides of Blood (1968; Hemisphere/Independent International) and Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1968; Hemisphere/Independent International), both codirected by Romero and his mentor Gerry de Leon, as well as Beast of Blood (1971; Hemisphere/Independent International) and The Beast of the Yellow Night (1971; Four Associates Ltd./New World), written and directed by Romero alone. All four films star John Ashley, a former actor of U.S. beach party movies with whom Romero founded the company Four Associates Ltd. in 1971. Ashley’s and Romero’s horror films are today widely recognised as profound cinematic statements regard119

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4 Beast of Blood 5 The Woman Hunt

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ing the post-colonial relationship between the Philippines and North America.4 Back then, they proved to be extremely successful grindhouse movies. The Beast of the Yellow Night was already co-produced by Roger Corman’s company New World Pictures after Corman had noticed the U.S. success of the ‹blood island trilogy›, i.e. Brides of Blood, Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Beast of Blood. Corman also recognised the potential to limit production costs by shooting in the wide range of Philippine locations and employing English-speaking Filipino actors who, due to the economic inequalities between the U.S. and the Philippines, kindly accepted the relatively high salaries (measured against the Filipino movie industry) offered by a small U.S. independent studio like New World Pictures. Corman hired Romero not only as executive producer for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971; New World) which started a cycle of proto-feminist women-inprison-movies also including U.S.-Philippine co-productions such as Gerry de Leons Women in Cages (1971; New World), Joe Viola’s The Hot Box (1972; New World), Jack Hill’s The Big Bird Cage (1972; New World) or Cirio H. Santiago’s Caged Fury (1983; Lea).5 Corman also gave Romero the opportunity to direct Black Mama, White Mama (1973; Four Associates Ltd./AIP), a variation of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958; United Artists) shot in the Philippines and based on a screenplay by Jonathan Demme. Black Mama, White Mama was ensued by The Woman Hunt (1973; Four Associates Ltd./New World) again a

See Lim, Hawkins 228–252, and Capino 3–32. On the cycle see Hawkins 252–275.

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highly self-conscious play on a Hollywood classic, this time Irving Pichel’s/Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game (1932; RKO). These pictures satisfied Corman’s needs and thereby also aroused the interest of other U.S. independent companies producing movies for the North American drivein, suburban theatre, rural venue, workingclass neighbourhood or slum cinema market. Dimension Pictures, led by New World Pictures co-founder Lawrence Woolner, former Corman protégé Stephanie Rothman who had directed films like The Student Nurses (1970) or The Velvet Vampire (1971) for New Wold, and Rothman’s husband Charles S. Swartz, tried to copy Corman’s formula and engaged Romero to write and direct The Twilight People (1973; Four Associates Ltd./Dimension), a further horror film in the tradition of the ‹blood island trilogy›, as well as to direct the fantasy-adventure Beyond Atlantis (1973) based on a story by Rothman herself. Following Beyond Atlantis, Romero shot one more movie for erstwhile Corman employer American International Pictures (AIP) called Savage Sisters (1974; Cinema Projects International/AIP), a tonguein-cheek adventure romp in the vein of Romero’s and AIP’s previous production Black Mama, White Mama, showing three female leads fronting a revolution in a Banana Republic, staying true to Corman’s motto of a «little bit of statement, a little bit of sex» showing «support for freedom fighters around the world» (Thomas). Romero’s last film in his continuous series of transnational co-productions which started with The Day of the Trumpet would be Sudden Death, once again produced by his

6 Beyond Atlantis

7 Savage Sisters

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8 Kamakalawa

Hemisphere Pictures in assistance with U.S. companies Topar Films and Caruth C. Byrd Pictures Inc.6 Unlike his fellow producer-director Cirio H. Santiago who would continue to direct U.S.-Philippine co-productions up to the 2000s, Romero ended his work in the global genre circuit after Sudden Death – in the face of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975; Universal) and its initiation of the Hollywood Renaissance, but probably mainly due to the sudden passing away of his partner Kane W. Lynn in 1975 – and became a leading figure of the Philippine New Wave Cinema, directing highly regarded Tagalog epics such as Ganito Kami Noon ... Paano Kayo Ngayon?/We Were Like This Yesterday, How Is It Today? (1976; Hemisphere), Sinong Kapiling? Sinong Kasiping?/Who Are You with Now? Who Are You Bedding Now? (1977; Hemisphere/Mariposa), Aguila/The Eagle (1980; Bancom Audiovision Corp.), Palaban (1980; Bacom Audiovision Corp./ Hemisphere), or Kamakalawa/The Day before Yesterday (1981; Hemisphere). While these movies explicitly concerned with Filipino identity led to Romero 6

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The demand for new films resulting from the appearance of distribution channels such as home video and cable TV would lead to two more Filipino-U.S. co-productions helmed by Eddie Romero in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For Eastern Film Management Corporation he directed the adventure film White Force (1988), and the war movie Runaway Flight – A Case Of Honor (1991). Both pictures were never shown in theatres.

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being officially honoured by the government as a «national artist» of the Philippines, Sudden Death’s sudden death to Romero’s transnational career not only stresses out the contingencies of media culture but can also count as his definitive legacy to deterritorialised genre filmmaking. It is a transcultural ‹testamentary› text which not only hybridises several genres and production cycles, but also conducts a substantial discourse on the post-colonial imaginary in the Philippines. Romero’s film travels across national boundaries and works as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange including the infinite circulation of capital and representations, yet also opens up a critical perspective of this process. As Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have argued, the arising hybridity of globalisation does not abolish power monopolies but constitutes a new flexibility through which the global capital operates: «The end of the dialectic of modernity has not resulted in the end of the dialectic of exploitation. Today, nearly all of humanity is to some degree absorbed within or subordinated to the networks of capitalist exploitation» (43). It is this exploitation in a neo-colonial context that is Romero’s concern.

2. Hybridisation of Genres «[N]ational cinemas and Hollywood are not only communicating vessels, but (to change the metaphor) exist in a space set up like a hall of mirrors, in which recognition, imaginary identity and mis-cognition enjoy equal status». Thomas Elsaesser (47)

Although «financed entirely by Americans» and «made-to-order for American distribution prior to production» (Lim 24), most of the creative impetus of Sudden Death stems from Filipinos. Yet, although set in the Philippines and directed by a Filipino filmmaker, the movie is shot almost entirely in English, stars North American actors and concerns violent conflicts between U.S. protagonists as its central dramatic point. Therefore, at first glance it would seem to make sense to consider Sudden Death a typical exploitation movie. Exploitation pictures are not a genre in themselves, but signify a specific mode of film production possessing several aesthetic and ideological implications.7 Filipino-U.S. exploitation films firstly exploit sensational subject matters considered to be controversial to illegitimate by the mainstream movie industry (from sex to violence), secondly, the poorly paid personnel involved in shooting the film (from technicians to stunt men) and thirdly, the natural landscape of the archipelago as a source of exotic pleasure (from jungles to tropical beaches). Nevertheless, exploitation films cannot be margin7

On exploitation cinema see Fischer; Hillier 38–49; Langer; Clark; Watson; Schaefer; Doherty; and Cook.

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alised as cheap and unsuccessful imitations of bigger budgeted and more sophisticated Hollywood prototypes. Jane Gaines, Michael Gary Hawkins and Bliss Cua Lim have all pointed out that the term exploitation possesses a double semantic. «Etymologically», Gaines states, «exploitation has affiliations with two contradictory poles of meaning, one having to do with crowning achievements and the other with selfish overreaching that often entails the exhaustion of natural resources and labour power» (31). This way the term exploitation is semantically not just connected to exploiting something (verb) but also the exploits of somebody (noun). It refers to a negative as well as a positive connotation, hinting at the fact 9 Sudden Death that exploitation movies function in a fundamentally different manner than mainstream Hollywood models, and their aesthetic, economic as well as ideological practices take this function into account. Exploitation cinema is tailored to meet the niche tastes of a minority audience visiting drive-in, rural or second-run movie theatres which are not considered by dominant cinema. Furthermore, it cannot count as a simple oppression and abuse of inexpensive labour because it simultaneously provides its filmmakers with the possibility of artistic creation, material gain, social prestige and cultural possession. Besides, in the case of Philippine cinema the co-production of exploitation movies surely emphasised the location’s exoticism for tales of sex and violence, providing orientalist visual pleasure but also helping to build up and modernise the domestic industry. Dependant on the work of Filipinos, the films have to be recognised as products by Filipino artists also addressing an international audience. They are open to negotiation, reconfiguration and appropriations of generic forms constituting a web of cultural exchange never onesided in orientation. These acts of appropriation make it possible to participate in a deterritorialised economy of media culture production empowering its subjects. Although there undoubtedly exists an economic hierarchy between the Philippines and the U.S., between a Third World cinema and the dominant global cinema, Filipino exploitation films are never necessarily and exclusively products of colonialist ideology. In short, the co-produced Philippine exploitation movies did not designate Filipinos to passive victims of U.S. neo-colonisation, neither rooted in a his124

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10 Sudden Death

tory of unbalanced power nor the U.S. supported Marcos government.8 Instead, they performed as active agents of cultural globalisation drawing not only on several genres but also their own picture of the Philippines’ post-colonial imaginary. Sudden Death appears to be a truly hybrid film not only in its production context but also on a textual level combining elements from several distinct genres. What emerges is a «cluster» (Hagener 19) of generic parameters that stem from very different traditions. First of all, Sudden Death is heavily indebted to the tradition of the western. From -- naming its protagonists Harrison «Duke» Smith and Wyatt Spain (fig. 10) -- to evoking the Lone Ranger in conversations several times -- to dialogue lines like «we do what we have to do» -- to showing its protagonists wearing gun belts in combat -- to its opening sequence which restages the slaughter of the McBain family in Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968; Rafran-San Marco Production/Paramount) with the slow-motion violence of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969; Warner Brothers/Seven Arts)9

8

In contrast to their control over the local industry, the Marcos government, as notes Michael Gary Hawkins, «exercised no censorship over the coproduced films made in the Philippines, happy to have the foreign investment and often willing to aid in production by leasing military hardware to film companies» (272). 9 Uncredited editor on Sudden Death is Hollywood maverick director Monte Hellman, with whom Eddie Romero has already worked on films such as Back Door to Hell (1964; Lippert Inc/Medallion Films Inc) or Flight to Fury/Cordillera (1964; Lippert Inc/Filipinas Productions Inc). Cf. Leavold.

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11 The Wild Wild West

-- to the casting of the leading role with actor Robert Conrad who had been the star of the popular TV western series The Wild Wild West (1965–1969; CBS), the movie strongly invokes tropes of «the American genre par excellance» (Rieupeyrout). On top of that, Sudden Death closely follows traditional western plots, in particular the so-called vengeance and the so-called professional western. The vengeance western is exemplified by John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939; United Artists), Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950; Universal), Robert Aldrich’s Apache (1954; United Artists), Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961; Paramount) or Henry Hathaway’s Nevada Smith (1966; Embassy/Solar). Will Wright has characterised this type of western by several constant plot functions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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The hero is or was a member of society. The villains do harm to the hero and to society. Society is unable to punish the villains. The hero seeks vengeance. The hero goes outside of society. The hero is revealed to have a special ability. Society recognises a difference between themselves and the hero: the hero is given a special status.

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8. A representative of society asks the hero to give up his revenge. 9. The hero gives up his revenge. 10. The hero fights the villains. 11. The hero defeats the villains. 12. The hero gives up his special status. 13. The hero enters society. (69) The professional western, by contrast, is defined by the narration about two or more heroes undertaking a job while being fully detached from society. Again, Will Wright has outlined the professional western’s most important plot functions in films such as Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959; Warner Brothers), Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965; Paramount), Sergio Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966; Produzioni Europee Associati/United Artists), or George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1970; 20th Century Fox): 1. The heroes are professionals. 2. The heroes undertake a job. 3. The villains are very strong. 4. Society is ineffective or incapable of defending itself. 5. The job involves the heroes in a fight. 6. The heroes have special abilities. 7. The heroes form a group for the job. 8. As a group, the heroes share respect and loyalty. 9. The heroes are independent of society. 10. The heroes fight the villains. 11. The heroes defeat the villains. 12. The heroes stay (or die) together. (113) Sudden Death turns out to be a hybrid cluster of the professional plot and vengeance plot. Taken together, both plots outline the movie’s narrative structure but it updates the historical setting into a contemporary one showing urban warfare rather than traditional open range landscapes. Just like what Don Siegel did with former TV star Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry (1971; Warner Brothers) – a movie which was explicitly invoked in the advertising for Sudden Death (fig. 12) – Romero directs the film as a «street western» (Kael). It is about Smith (Robert Conrad), an ex-covert operations soldier (vengeance function 6, professional function 1) who has given up his job and is no longer part of the army or U.S. society (vengeance function 1). Together with his daughter (Nancy Conrad), his Filipino girlfriend (Aline Samson) and his Philippine mentor (Eddie Garcia) he lives in a beach hut on a remote shore in the Pacific (fig. 13). 127

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The disillusioned and laconic Smith is approached by U.S. sugar company president Neilson (Ken Metcalfe), whose entire family has been murdered by a shady syndicate of international businessmen because, as a liberal leftwinger, he was sympathetic to the plight of the local workers. Intent on exploiting the island’s national resources, the group, comprised of European, Asian and Arabian millionaires (including such shady subjects as a German exNazi and a Saudi-Arabian oil-sheik) led by an U.S. shipping magnet, try to blame a cell of local anti-American revolutionaries (vengeance function 2, professional function 3). Neilson is desperate because the public authorities are unable to hold the killers accountable for their crimes (vengeance function 3, professional function 4). Smith at first refuses to investigate, but after Neilson himself gets killed by a car bomb he relents (professional function 2). Although his girlfriend begs him not to go (vengeance function 8), together with his old army buddy Spain (Felton Perry), another former specialist 12–13 Sudden Death in fighting (professional function 6, 9), he forms a team to avenge Neilson and bring those responsible to justice (vengeance function 4, professional function 7, 8). They get involved in several violent confrontations (vengeance function 10, professional function 5, 10) and finally kill all the villains including their henchmen (vengeance function 11, professional function 11), as well as the treacherous U.S. undercover government agent (John Ashley) who is on the criminal ring’s payroll. Together they return to Smith’s beach hut to find his daughter and girlfriend murdered (professional function 12). The film closes with a red-tinted freeze-frame of Smith’s consternated face. This ending places Sudden Death squarely in the western tradition. Rather, it strongly links the films to a then-contemporary genre in Hollywood cinema, namely that of the conspiracy thriller as a «cognitive mapping» (Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 3) of the world-system of late capitalism. The 128

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1970s conspiracy thrillers depict the USA as «dominated by corruption, individual powerlessness, dark, inexplicable threats, topsy-turvy values and double-faced heroes» (Horwath 78). Films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974; Paramount/American Zoetrope), Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974; Paramount), All the President’s Men (1976; Warner Brothers), or Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To (1976; New World) are defined by a mood of suspicion and paranoia also to be found in Sudden Death. Smith is confronted with a transnational conspiracy of powerful industrialists operating in secret, untouched by authorities. Having seemingly seized unlimited power they undermine the individual’s freedom through aggressive corporatism. Their presence is invisible yet known and hence highly threatening. Caught up in the web of intrigue, Smith knows no way out other than resorting to brute force. Yet neither his methods nor his experience as a commando can stop the conspiracy at work in due course. Although killing the culprits, he must discover that they had already massacred his family. Sudden Death ends with a feeling of futility, a radical sense of impotence with respect to the conspirators. Even in (sudden) death, suggests Romero, they triumph over the agents of detection. Apart from its connections to the western and the conspiracy thriller, Sudden Death’s generic cluster is also heavily linked to the cycle of blaxploitation, due to its funky soundtrack by soul musician Johnny Pate and, most of all, the presence of the African-American character of Wyatt Spain (fig. 14). Blaxploitation pictures are low- to mid-budget (though not necessarily independently produced) commercial movies, sometimes but not always made by African-Americans (actors, directors, crewmen, seldom producers), targeted at an Afro-American audience (by incorporating aspects of African-American culture, from ghetto themes to Black Nationalism) and featuring strong, sexually active 14 Sudden Death

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15 The Final Comedown

16 Black Belt Jones

African-American leads (both male and female alike) prevailing over white foes (often racists).10 As noted, exploitation films do not form a genre, nor do blaxploitation pictures. Rather, they «transcend generic boundaries» (Clark 149) as there are blaxploitation movies across several generic traditions: most of all, urban crime dramas following the success of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1970; Cinemation Industries) and Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971; MGM), such as Gordon Parks Jr.’s Superfly (1972; Warner Brothers), Jack Starrett’s Slaughter (1972; AIP) or Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973; AIP), but also horror films such as William Crain’s Blacula (1972; AIP) and Dr. Black and Mr. White (1975; Dimension), William A. Levey’s Blackenstein (1973; Exclusive International), and William Girdler’s Abby (1974; AIP). These films keep their traditional generic syntax in play by adding semantics such as AfricanAmerica protagonists and ethnic-related conflicts, hence «associating a new type of material or approach with already existing genres» (Altman 60) by breaking ethnic barriers. The script of Sudden Death originates from African-American Oscar Williams who has also written and directed one of the most political of all blaxploitation films, The Final Comedown (1972; New World). Furthermore, Williams is the screenwriter of Robert Clouse’s Black Belt Jones (1974; Warner Brothers) starring Jim Kelly, a film about an African-American martial arts master who saves an L.A. karate school from the local mob. The character of Jones is strongly evoked by Sudden Death’s Spain who gets introduced as an L.A. karate school teacher with superior fighting abilities. Mar-

10 On blaxploitation see Guerrero; Reid; Rhines; Bogle; Lawrence; and Koven.

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tial arts form an important trope of several blaxploitation films, not only Black Belt Jones and its follow-up Hot Potato (1976; Warner Brothers) written and directed by Oscar Williams himself, but also titles such as Jack Starrett’s Cleopatra Jones (1973; Warner Brothers), Charles Bail’s Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975; Warner Brothers/Shaw Brothers), or Al Adamson’s Black Samurai (1977; BJLJ), once again starring Jim Kelly.11 Following the blaxploitation success and «kung fu craze» (Desser) initiated by Asian stars such as Bruce Lee, the Philippines co-produced a cycle of several blaxploitation martial arts movies for U.S. distribution of which Sudden Death forms a central part, accompanied by Cesar Gallardo’s Bamboo Gods 17 Black Mama, White Mama and Iron Men (1974; AIP/Premiere), as well as Cirio H. Santiago’s T.N.T. Jackson (1975; New World/Premiere), Ebony, Ivory & Jade (1976; Cosa Nueva/Capricorn Films/Dimension) and Death Force (1978; Cosa Nueva). Romero had already directed a blaxploitation film with his Black Mama, White Mama starring Pam Grier, yet – in accordance to Cirio H. Santiago’s Savage! (1973; New World) and The Muthers (1976; Dimension) – this early blaxploitation picture does not rely on martial arts. The feature of martial arts would become important with Robert Clouse’s highly profitable Enter the Dragon (1973; Golden Harvest/Warner Brothers), starring both Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly. Certainly, it is no coincidence that both AfricanAmerican and Asian martial arts heroes resonated particularly well with the audience from the same ethnic background. «Part of the appeal of Southeast Asian martial arts films to the non-white and marginal audiences», notes Gina Marchetti to Cirio H. Santiago’s later non-blaxploitation martial arts film Firecracker (1981; New World), «comes from the fact that these films provide a fantasy in which characters outside the mainstream of white U.S. power are allowed to express strength, intelligence,

11 On the popularity of martial arts in African-American culture see Kaminksy; Prashad; Kato; ChaJua; Wilkins; and Koven 132–134.

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18 Sudden Death

and moral fortitude – those qualities denied to them in daily life – and to do so in a spectacular fashion».

From this perspective, Spain’s fighting in Sudden Death can count as a possibility of identification and edifying entertainment for a viewing subject socially marginalised, for both Philippine and African-American alike (fig. 18).

3. Post-Colonial Mimicry «In the States they were still making these low-budget six-reelers, Monogram Pictures and so forth, Westerns with Bob Steele, Tim McCoy, this sort of thing. […] And I looked at them and said, ‹I could do that.› I wasn’t going to get too ambitious. But I could do that at least. And I began to think, why not make a film that can appeal to both American and Philippine audiences». Eddie Romero (qtd. in Server 47)

Raised in the Philippines before 1946, when the country still was an official colony of the United States, Romero was heavily influenced by North American culture: «[H]ailing as I did from one of the Visayan islands in the centre of our archipelago, I did not speak more than a few words of Tagalog, now called Pilipino, the language spoken in the films I was making. I wrote my scripts in English, trusted my assistants for the accuracy and dramatic effectiveness of their translations, and directed by ear. Fortunately, there had been some precedent for this particular anomaly, as a number of foreigners, notably Americans, had directed Filipino films before me, and most of the people in the industry did speak English. But I was probably the first native to fall into such an embarrassing predicament.» (222) 132

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Romero thus took up a tradition in Philippine cinema prior to the advent of an indigenous movie industry continuing the shooting practices of early American film pioneers who had directed their movies in the then North American colony. Occupying the dual position of Filipino and U.S. director, he seemed predestined for the decades-long liaison between U.S. and Philippine genre filmmaking. Romero could be called a mimic man in the sense of Homi Bhabha who has imagined a post-colonial subjectivity ambivalently torn between binary motives: on the one hand to the likeness of the coloniser, on the other to the difference of the other. This procedural uncertainty is called colonial mimicry by Bhabha. It is, in the words of Bhabha, «the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite» (86). Although the mimic man comes quite close to the coloniser, he can never fully embrace him and is destined to fail in trying to eliminate difference. Seen from this perspective, Eddie Romero might struggle to mimic U.S. genres, yet his attempts of mimicry never succeed entirely. A trace of his past – and present – as a colonised subject remains. As a «living haunt of contradictions» (Fanon 218), an embodiment of oppressed subjectivity inflicted by the empire’s instituted violence, Romero is a genre director who consistently exceeds Hollywood’s conventions. Romero’s films clearly reflect the economy of violence brought to the Philippines by U.S. empire claiming leadership over the ‹free world›. They intrude, distort and overwrite their generic material in perhaps the ultimate «fantasy of the colonised» which Bhabha points out, i.e. «to occupy the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s avenging anger» (44). By way of tinkering, tampering and toying, Hollywood genres are taken apart, reassembled and transformed, in the end forming a discourse critical of colonial power. Instead of simply ‹Othering› the U.S. and forming an opposition to it, Romero swallows up Hollywood genres, dismantling its global hegemony in making it less monolithic. His agency lies in the directed appropriation of generic traditions by a process of transculturation as described by Mary Louise Pratt: «While subjected peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own and what they use it for» (6). Romero’s films are not merely shaped by colonialist ideology but are active processes of shaping in their own right, forming complex reciprocal encounters of global flows in media culture. The transcultural Philippine cinema of Romero works as a contact zone; it is one of those social spaces where, according to Pratt, «disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today» (4). Romero’s cinema takes place in a cultural exchange between local Philippine media culture and Hollywood’s global genre system, never fixed in an absolute power structure. In this sense, Sudden Death flourishes a cultural autonomy over generic material that may be read as definitely empowering. 133

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Nick Deocampo has outlined five local strategies in which Philippine cinema historically reacted to the global influence of U.S. cultural colonisation. These are firstly «imitation», secondly «indigenization», thirdly «parody», fourthly «acceptance», and fifthly «resistance» (289). Eddie Romero’s co-produced films, however, do not fit neatly in either of Deocampo’s categories. They clearly are neither parodies nor do they show outright resistance to Hollywood genres. Yet, easy acceptance and sheer imitation of Hollywood cinema would also fall short of characterising their aesthetic approach. Most likely, Romero indigenises genres such as the western, conspiracy thriller and blaxploitation martial arts film, though he does not engage in blatant national essentialism. Rather, rewriting the encounter between ex-colony and empire, Romero unmasks neo-colonialist power present in the Philippines. Like the ‹blood island films› and the women-in-prison-movies, Sudden Death does not verbally specify its setting. The Philippines are always just referred to as «this island». Romero himself has pointed out that he has decided to do so because his American audience probably «wouldn’t know where the Philippines were» (Lim 35). This hints at the fact that the U.S. does not often represent its empire, not even their only former colony. Yet, despite his claims Romero no longer obscures the Philippines into an imaginary place and mythic nowhere land. He rather makes the empire unequivocally visible. While the script may try to erase the specificity of the Philippines in order to evoke a general exotic country, this attempt is permanently undermined by details of Romero’s mise-en-scène. For instance, he shows the national flag of the Philippines at the edge of a road, makes visible the lettering «Philippine Airlines» at the Manila airport, dresses the police in Filipino uniforms, or lets secondary players exchange dialogue in Tagalog, including Smith’s girlfriend who only speaks English when she’s mad at him. Hence, Sudden Death certainly is a film about the Philippines, not just in Fredric Jameson’s sense of symbolically projecting «a political dimension in the form of a national allegory» («Third-World Literature» 69) but an open address of the Philippine’s specificity, and it is also a profoundly critical one. Romero’s direction lances a «cinematic counter-telling» in perpetuating the «reclaiming and re-accentuating colonialism and its ramifications in the present in a vast project of remapping and renaming» (Shohat 290). Sudden Death features an explicit indictment of the devastation caused by the invasion of U.S. power into the Third World, showing capitalism and ruthless corporatism as the roots of all evil. The movie almost completely removes positive icons of North American presence from the Philippines. There is no superior technology, no comfortable hotels, no luxury food to be found. In sum, no cultural signs of Manifest Destiny are shown establishing a Philippines devoid of the ‹benefits› of U.S. consumerism. Never does Sudden Death indulge in an affirmative fantasy of U.S. imperial power. On the contrary, the North American presence on the island seems to burden it with all possible maladies: bribery, murder, and vice – one of the company millionaires even turns out to be a homosexual paedophile who assaults 134

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young Filipino boys. Romero shows the drawback of U.S. empire depicting his villains prepared to do anything to gain profit and secure their business interests. The Philippines are the object of a heinous conspiracy, not part of the local scene. As a consequence, Filipinos do not benefit from the North American presence, either economically or ideologically. Apart from a larksome local funfair, what we see of the Philippines are rundown nightclubs and poor cottages opposed by the stately homes of the wealthy villains (fig. 19). Also, the buddy-professionals Smith and Spain are a far cry from virtuous heroes. They trade in cynical dialogue, often offensively sexist and homophobic (fig. 20). Their fighting techniques are dirty, kicking enemies in the soft parts or torturing them during investigation. One of the most memorable set-pieces shows Smith chasing 19–21 Sudden Death the dubious U.S. undercover agent who has tried to kill him. Having apprehended him, he unscrupulously murders the unarmed man. To his «I’m a government agent, what are you gonna do when they come asking about me?» he just replies: «Lie», and shoots him in cold blood (fig. 21). Just as the bad-good guys, Smith and Spain, the bad-bad guys are played by North American actors. This way Romero obviously respects the needs of his Filipino audience critically of North America’s foreign influence: «Those in the Philippine audience who daily suffer the burden of a neo-colonial presence, as well as those in the international audience who suffer similar inequities, can enjoy the vanquishing of white, rich U.S. villains on a level more profound than accepting the simple exigencies of a well-known formula.» (Marchetti)

Certainly Romero’s film can be read as an acting-out of the forbidden fantasy of outright hostility towards colonial power. In fact, there is not one positive character in Sudden Death feeling faithful to the U.S. imperial empire. The neo-colonial 135

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subjectivity is exposed as bringing criminality and corruption to the Philippines’ inhabitants. In the benevolent name of establishing peace and endowing security it brings economic and physical destruction to the Filipinos. The main villains, middle-aged men with grey hair, expensive suits, cultivated appearances and paternalistic demeanour embody a sort of villainess not often found in Hollywood genres. They almost seem to epitomise clichés aligned with U.S. empire and imperial control. Their engagement with an U.S. government undercover agent with contacts to the C.I.A. further hints at their involvement with the U.S. covert operations and secret military commitments during the Cold War. It is to remember, that the U.S. not only supported dictatorships in Latin America but also in Asia and the Philippines themselves. The autocratic administration of President Marcos during the 1970s was actively promoted by North America due to its strong anti-communist leanings. While even the protagonists are all but nobleminded heroes, the only people depicted wholly positively are the Filipino characters associated with 22 Sudden Death Smith: his girlfriend who does not want him to get involved in killing again, and his mentor who has taught him the tricks to survive under fire. It is highly significant that both characters are killed over the course of the film. Smith has brought disaster upon them, not being able to protect them from the evil businessmen. His own immorality has disastrously recoiled on him. Rather than overcoming his past as a «killing machine» he is forever trapped in a cycle of violence which directly leads to the sudden death of his loved ones (fig. 22). The final close up of Smith shows a man in complete despair, unable to act. It suggests that his successful cognitive mapping (and violent force) has finally led to his immobilisation by the very conspiracy he was able to expose. As Fredric Jameson states in regard to the conspiracy thriller, this is not because the conspiracy at work «has some special form of ‹power› that the victims lack, but simply because it is collective and the victims, taken one by one in their isolation, are not» (The Geopolitical Aesthetic 66). Yet, Romero does not seem to be a complete negativist. Native goodness has not altogether vanished at the end of Sudden Death. There is still the falsely accused group of Marxist revolutionaries whom Romero has portrayed with some sympathy, too. They appear to be the Philippines’ last hope in a world governed by U.S. business interests.

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4. Conclusion «Until recently […] imagination and fantasy were antidotes to the finitude of social experience. In the past two decades, as the deterritorialization of persons, images and ideas has taken on a new force, this weight has shifted imperceptibly». Arjun Appadurai (53)

I have chosen Eddie Romero’s last Filipino-U.S. grindhouse co-production Sudden Death as a prime example of generic hybridity and cultural globalisation operating through deterritorialisations which traverse distinct national boundaries. In doing this, Romero’s post-colonial films – and Sudden Death specifically – develop global cinematic flows superseding separate spaces of discourse. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, Romero demonstrates that dominant power «can no longer be content to over-code territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific codes for flows that are increasingly deterritorialised» (238). The notion of uncontrollable flows of desire put forward by Deleuze and Guattari is set into direct relation to phenomena of globalisation by Arjun Appadurai. Without a doubt, Romero’s mode of genre hybridisation in Sudden Death immediately evokes connotations of Appadurai’s «loosening of bonds between people, wealth and territories [that] fundamentally alters the basis of cultural reproduction» (49). Sudden Death certainly bears witness to the «complex overlapping, disjunctive order» described by Appadurai «that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models» (32). Appadurai’s model of a global cultural economy proposes five dimensions of global cultural flows for exploring such disjunctures all at work in Romero’s exploits: «(a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) financescapes; and (e) ideoscapes» (33). Romero’s films clearly work across ideoscapes, i.e. narrative constructions, and technoscapes, i.e. cinematic devices, and being transnational co-productions they also fuse different financescapes. Romero and his creative staff are themselves part of an ethnoscape in close connection with the U.S. motion picture industry. Last but not least, as I have demonstrated, his films – and Sudden Death in particular – hybridise various mediascapes by merging multiple generic traits to unstable clusters. While Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari stress deterritorialised lines of flight providing potential of resistance, the deterritorialisation of globalisation possesses a double edge according to Arjun Appadurai. On the one hand it releases unknown options of democratisation; on the other it produces new problems of participation as well as representation. To my mind, Sudden Death clearly veers towards the first option, setting free marginalised voices while also rendering evident the issue of post- and neo-colonial power relations in its very self. Unlike the simplistic account by some elitist post-colonial film theory which in Third World cinema proposes a linear progress from an early period strongly indebted to Hollywood genres 137

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up to an ideal state of national production for and by the former colonised, Romero’s multi-faceted films trouble the essentialist notion of a national cinema and cultural boundaries, blurring any distinction between self and other. They do not just adhere to the in itself highly problematic concept of a homogenous «Western Hollywood film industry» (Gabriel 31) but indigenise various influences according to local sensibilities. Thus, they hint at the ambivalent third space on which cultural identity has to be based. It is this contradictory space giving birth to the meaning of culture: «the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory […] may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.» (Bhabha 38)

Hybridity lies at the centre of Sudden Death. As a «sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities» the movie produces a «strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal» (Bhabha 157). Clusters of generic hybridity deconstruct the putative universality of empire, disturbing dominant notions of authenticity and purity. The movie is connected to international genres such as martial arts films from Hong Kong, African-American genre pictures, or the spaghetti westerns from Italy, all themselves highly hybrid traditions (Ritzer, «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern)»). Instead of assimilating the conventions of Asian, European and U.S. genres, Romero rewrites them, works them over through processes of cultural translation while mimicking them only on the surface. Sudden Death «takes its time reshaping metropolitan culture to its own specifications» until «the metropolitan forms are somehow no longer so easily recognisable – they become hybridized» (Hannerz, «Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures» 124). Self-consciously flaunting rather than hiding its multiple generic borrowings, the movie shows Romero’s cultural knowledge of Asian, European and U.S. genres. His cinematic cosmopolitanism is defined by a sense of control and mastery over his material, reminding us of Ulf Hannerz’s proposition that the «cosmopolitan may embrace the alien culture, but he does not become committed to it. All the time he knows where the exit is» («Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture» 240). In his delicate selectiveness lies Eddie Romero’s unique contribution to the hybridisation of genres, the deterritorialisation of cultural globalisation, and the post-colonial imaginary in clusters of transnational media culture.

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Works Cited Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film. 4th ed. New York: Continuum, 2003. Print. Capino, José B. Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Print. Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita. «Black Audiences, Blaxploitation and Kung Fu Films, and Challenges to White Celluloid Masculinity.» China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Ed. Poshek Fu. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 199–223. Print. Clark, Randall. At a Theater or Drive-In near You: The History, Culture, and Politics of the American Exploitation Film. New York: Garland, 1995. Print. Cook, Pam. «The Pleasures and Perils of Exploitation Films.» Screening the Past. London: Routledge, 2005. 52–64. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. New York: Continuum, 2004. Print. Deocampo, Nick. Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines. Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2003. Print. Desser, David. «The Kung Fu Craze: Hong Kong Cinema’s First American Reception.» The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity. Eds. Poshek Fu and David Desser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 19–43. Print. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Rev. and exp. ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Print. Ďurovičová, Nataša and Kathleen Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational

Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Print. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1968. Print. Fischer, Craig. «Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the Exploitation Genre.» Velvet Light Trap 30 (Fall 1992): 18–33. Print. Gabriel, Teshome. «Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics.» Questions of Third Cinema. Eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen. London: BFI, 1989. 53–64. Print. Gaines, Jane. «From Elephants to Lux Soap: The Programming and ‹Flow› of Early Motion Picture Exploitation.» Velvet Light Trap 25 (Spring 1990): 29–43. Print. Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Print. Hagener, Malte. «Der Begriff Genre.» Die Lust am Genre. Eds. Rainer Rother and Julia Pattis. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2011. 11–22. Print Hannerz, Ulf. «Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.» Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalisation and Modernity. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 237–251. Print. – «Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.» Culture, Globalization, and the World-System. Ed. Anthony D. King. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 107–128. Print. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Print. Hawkins, Michael Gary. «Co-Producing the Postcolonial: US-Philippine Cinematic Relations, 1946–1986.» Diss. University of California, 2008. Print. 139

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Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim. «Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.» Transnational Cinemas 1.1 (2010): 7–22. Print. Hillier, Jim. The New Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 1994. Print. Horwath, Alexander. «A Walking Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction).» The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Eds. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. 83– 106. Print. Jameson, Fredric. «Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.» Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88. Print. – The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Print. Kael, Pauline (1974). «The Street Western.» The New Yorker, 25 Feb 1974: 100–106. Print. Kaminsky, Stuart M. «Kung Fu Film As Ghetto Myth.» Journal of Popular Film 3.2 (1974): 129–38. Print. Kato, M. T. From Kung Fu to Hip-Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Print. Koven, Mikel J. Blaxploitation Films. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Print. Kraidy, Marwan M. Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Langer, Mark. «Exploitation Film.» Film History 6.3 (1994): 147–748. Print. Lim, Bliss Cua. «American Pictures Made by Filipinos: Eddie Romero’s Jungle-Horror Exploitation Films.» Spectator 22.1 (2002): 23–45. Print. Lawrence, Novotny. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre. London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Leavold, Andrew. «Sudden Death (1975).» Bamboo Gods and Iron Men. n.p., 8 March 2009. Web. 05 Apr. 2013. 140

Marchetti, Gina. «Firecracker: Contest and Contradiction.» Jump Cut 32 (1987): n. pag. Ejumpcut.org. Web. 05 Apr. 2013. Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. New York: Beacon Press, 2001. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Ray, Fred Olen. The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors. Jefferson: MacFarland, 1991. Print. Reid, Mark A. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Print. Rhines, J. A. Black Film/White Money. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Print. Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis. Le western ou le cinéma américain par excellence. Paris: Éd. du Cerf, 1953. Print. Ritzer, Ivo. Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. – «When the West(ern) meets the East(ern). The Western all’italiana and Its Asian Connections.» Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Eds. Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze. Marburg: Schüren, 2012. 25–57. Print. Romero, Eddie. «My Work and Myself.» Readings in Philippine Cinema. Ed. Rafael Maria Guerrero. Manila: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, 1983. 218– 225. Print. Schaefer, Eric. Bold Daring Shocking: A True History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print. Server, Lee. «Our Man in Manila: Eddie Romero.» Film Comment 35.2 (1999): 44–51. Print. Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Print. Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

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Thomas, Kevin. «Roger Corman: Director Who Changed the Face of Hollywood.» Los Angeles Times, 9 Jan. 1972. Print. Tomlinson, John. «Global Culture, Deterritorialisation and the Cosmopolitanism of Youth Culture.» Resituating Culture. Ed. Gavan Titley. Strasbourg: Cedex, 2004. 21–29. Print. Watson, Paul. «There’s No Accounting for Taste: Exploitation Cinema and the Limits of Film Theory.» Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience. Eds. Deborah Cartmell et al. London: Pluto Press, 1997. 66–83. Print.

Wilkins, Fanon Che. «Shaw Brothers Cinema and the Hip-Hop Imagination.» China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Ed. Poshek Fu. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 224–245. Print. Wright, Will. Sixguns & Society. A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Print.

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Cinematic Citizenship in the Liminal Zone Between Palestine and Israel1

1. The Politics of Representation Revisited Films about the Arab/Israeli conflict were usually assigned to the generic space of epic. The Bourekas genre, meanwhile, was assigned to the comic category. But its relegation to the supposedly ‹lower› genre of comedy did not prevent it from also articulating Ashkenazi/Mizrahi tensions, so that it became a celluloid reflection of the nationalist splitting of the question of Palestine from that of Arab-Jews. Yet a close examination of the narratives revealed the subterranean links between the two ‹segregated› genres, within a co-entangled habitus. Although usually absent in the heroic-nationalist genre, the latent presence of the Arab-Jew could be read throughout, at times even through the narrative’s negations and denials. By making the silences speak, my project called attention to the paradoxical presence-absence of the Arab-Jew. The politics of casting, for example, offered a dense site for exploring the schizophrenic existence of the Arab-Jew within a partitioned land.2 Often cast to play the enemy in the war film – the Arab – the Arab-Jew’s corporeal presence on the JewishIsraeli screen staged another, unspoken, clash. The Jewishness of the Arab-Jew made it possible to safely enlist him or her in the Israeli re-enactment of the Israeli-Arab 1 2

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This essay is an excerpt from the «Postscript» of Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. New Edition. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Reprint with kind permission of I.B. Tauris. I continued to explore this topic in «The Struggle Over Representation» and in «Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle Over Representation».

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war; but the Arabness of the Arab-Jew relegated him or her to re-enact the very same denigrated role – the Arab – he or she was asked not to perform as a citizen. In the 1950s film Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, an Arab-Jew extra, cast to play a Jordanian soldier, forgot, perhaps symptomatically, his enemy role, and ran to kiss the Torah during the filming of the 1948 Jewish withdrawal from the old city of Jerusalem. The entire scene, employing some six hundred extras had to be shot over again. On the battlefield, the hyphen between ‹the Arab› and ‹the Jew› was bound to exist within an anxious zone of remembrance and forgetfulness. While the Arab-Jew was to be cleansed of Arab traces, his or her Jewishness was guaranteed an entry permit into the national family. Arab/Muslim spaces were gradually emptied of their Jewish members, while Palestine was dismembered of its indigenous Jews, as it was subjected to the Middle East’s version of Manifest Destiny. In the re-enactment of settlement and war, the cinema narrated the ‹vanishing› of the Arab/ Palestinian, but through the linguistic acoustics and corporeal visibility, ironically, of the Arab-Jews who ‹stood in› for them as their body doubles. Hollywood and American TV have continued to cast Mizrahim to play the equally dubious Middle Eastern roles of either fanatic terrorists or of noble savages (for example, in 1 Beyond the Walls: Subverting the chromatic hierarchy Rambo III, 1988, Steal the Sky, 1988, True Lies, 1994, and Not Without My Daughter, 1991). Israeli filmmakers, meanwhile, have gradually become concerned with corrective self-representation through casting. Already in the 1980s, one of the early critical films, Uri Barabash’s Beyond the Walls (1984), set out to subvert the chromatic hierarchy of the Israeli/Arab stereotypes, casting a blue-eyed Palestinian actor (Muhammad Bakri) and a dark Jew (Arnon Tzadok). This visual inversion nevertheless persisted in the casting of Mizrahim in the ‹dark› roles. At screenings in diverse festivals, audiences and critics sometimes assumed on chromatic grounds that Bakri’s character was actually ‹the Israeli› and Tzadok’s character was actually ‹the Palestinian›.3 With the growing debates over 3

Despite my noting of this irony, the University of Texas Press doubled the irony by reproducing this error, when a caption identified Bakri as Tzadok and vice versa.

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multicultural identity, postcoloniality, and post-Zionism during the 1990s, the trend of experimenting with fixed and ossified identities became more visible in Israeli cultural practices. The generic walls separating ‹ethnic tension› and ‹national conflict› narratives began to gradually crumble. As a result, different cinematic encounters became possible, creating new hybrid generic spaces, where the war film, the Bourekas, and personal cinema have begun to meet and interface in fascinating ways. Bypassing earlier rigid ethnic and national categories, the emerging tendency to break with paradigmatic generic spaces has been at times performed through a refusal of an explicitly labelled ethnicity altogether. Jewish characters have come to bear a more ambiguous and diffuse marker – ‹the Israeli› – no longer imagined as either the Euro-Israeli Sabra or the Sephardi/Mizrahi immigrant, and no longer fixed within nationalist-war or ethnic tension genres. The character’s blurred ethnicity sometimes contrasts with the actor’s own visible Ashkenaziness or Mizrahiness, however, not merely in terms of the biographical origins of the actor, but also in looks, accent, body language, cultural allusions, and so forth; thus, throwing off balance the conventional genre/ethnic equations, especially since the films do not revolve around ethnic tensions. Eran Riklis’s Cup Final (1991), a farcical film set on the Lebanese/Israeli border, shows Israeli soldiers and their Palestinian kidnappers united in their desire to watch the soccer World Cup Final. The film cast Moshe Ivgy, a Moroccan-Israeli actor – and by implication in the role of a Mizrahi character – to play the Israeli soldier. Such films fashion Mizrahi characters as somehow above Mizrahiness, incarnations of a new refashioned universal Israeliness situated between East and West. While moving beyond Mizrahi stereotypes into a post-ethnicity Israel, such representational practices also end up bracketing, as it were, the Arab or Middle Eastern past of the Mizrahi actor/character. In Cup Final, Ivgy’s character shares with the Palestinian the masculine space of soccer spectatorship, but is narratively barred from an engagement with shared Arabness.4 By framing the narrative around Palestinian kidnappers and besieged Israelis, furthermore, the film, despite the humanisation of the Palestinian characters, evokes the earlier heroic-nationalist genre in its penchant for images of siege and encirclement. Conforming to the usual Palestinian aggression/ Israeli retaliation sequencing of events, the conflict begins with ‹their› (the Arabs) hostile actions, which renders the film’s Israeli ‹us› innocent, the micro-narrative allegorising the macro-narrative of the conflict’s genealogy. The humanised noble Palestinian actor/character nonetheless thus continues to carry the burden of the conflict’s original sin, while the ethnically elusive Mizrahi actor/screen body remains 4 The Palestinian and Arab-Jewish encounter on the Lebanese border is narrated differently in Yousry Nasrallah’s film adaptation (2004) of Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun, recounting post 1948 events of Palestinians crossing back the border to see their families in the Galilee, and an Arab-Jewish character longing for Lebanon.

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under the shield of ‹the Israeli›. The newly trans-ethnic Israeli characters persist to signify ambivalently around the traces of Arabness of the Mizrahi body. No longer fixed to the ‹negativities› of a cultural Arab geography, Mizrahi identity over the past decade has expanded yet remains tethered to an exclusivist vision. Some recent films stage such encounters between the Mizrahi and the Palestinian or the Arab, even when that encounter does not form the film’s explicit theme. Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (2007), for example, revolves around a tour to Israel by an Egyptian orchestra, which accidentally ends up in an isolated Southern development town, where Mizrahi characters interact, rather than with the Palestinians, with Egyptian Arabs. The Mizrahiness of the actors/characters and their impoverished social circumstances against the backdrop of the Negev recall the 1950s and 1960s settlement policies of newly arrived North African and Middle Eastern Jews. In contrast to earlier Israeli films, such as Menahem Golan’s Fortuna (1966), where the South (i.e., Algeria in relation to both France and Israel) signified fatal backwardness, in The Band’s Visit, underdevelopment and provinciality come to play a sympathetic role in a cross-cultural theatre of the absurd. But here again one wonders about the flaunting of a Mizrahiness ultimately devoid of its own Arabness, even of any search for its Arabness. While such narratives have moved beyond the limits of previous generic spaces and of ready-made nationalist paradigms, they also betray a certain anxiety about the staging of the Arab-Jew in relation to his or her Arabness. Despite a few references to Arab culture, Mizrahi identity is addressed in the present-tense as though always-already confined to an Israeli-Sabra national zone, as though this unusual encounter with the Egyptian Arab did not carry dense significance for a collective that had been dislocated overnight from its Arab cultural geography. Wrapped in the safe embrace of universal absurdity, the specificity of the encounter seems to be narratively aborted, aligned with some invisible walls that render such a historical rendezvous out-of-bounds. This diegesis raises the question of whether, and to what extent, recent cinema echoes, albeit in a lighter postmodern fashion, the same amnesia critiqued earlier in Israeli Cinema in relation to both the nationalist-heroic genre in films such as Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, on the one hand, and the Palestinian Wave in films such as Beyond the Walls, on the other.5 At times, casting has also become a creative site generating multiple layers of significance. Within a Boalian theatre of the oppressed, Palestinian actors could enact their Israeli oppressor. Palestinian (from Israel) actors, such as Makram Khoury, were cast to play Israeli military roles, already in the 1980s films A Very Narrow Bridge (1985), The Smile of the Lamb (1986), and Wedding in Galilee (1987), directed by Michel Khleifi, a Palestinian from Nazareth. Within anti-occupation cinema, such provocative, virtually anti-illusionistic casting had the effect of non-essentialising violence, placing the blame on the system of military occupa5

See Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation.

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2 Divine Intervention: Casting as iconoclastic vengeance

tion itself. As one Palestinian female character in Wedding in the Galilee puts it provocatively to the Israeli soldier: «You will have to take off your uniform if you want to dance.» In contrast to Egyptian or Syrian films where Arab actors have played Israelis, Elia Suleiman (also a Palestinian from Nazareth) casts Israeli actors to play the soldiers, yet the aesthetic aggression lies elsewhere. Divine Intervention (2002) has the Israeli star Menashe Noy play the role of the villain, a soldier who sadistically abuses Palestinians at the checkpoints, stopping all cars and using the microphone to order the drivers out of their cars to sing and dance «Am Israel Hai» (Long Live the People of Israel.) For the role of Santa Klaus killed by Palestinian children, meanwhile, the film casts George Ibrahim, a Palestinian-Israeli known for his man-and-puppet children’s show Sami and Susu, broadcast by the state controlled one TV channel, on its Arabic program, from 1974 to 1986. Arabic radio and TV broadcastings have supplied work for Palestinians and Arab-Jews but have been viewed as state propaganda, pacifying the natives. In Divine Intervention, George Ibrahim’s popular Sami character, a kind of a cute Arab on state TV, is the object of an iconoclastic vengeance wrought by Suleiman’s children. Creative casting or role reversals for some actors can serve to disavow a dubious cinematic past. For the Mizrahi actor Yossef Shiloach, whose success thrived on playing both evil Arabs and buffoonish Mizrahis, the partial jettisoning of this regrettable history paralleled the actor’s involvement in leftist Mizrahi circles that sought to assert a different vision of peace. In alternative films such as Moshe Mizrahi’s films, Shiloach did portray complex Sephardic characters already during the 1970s, but he explicitly took a position against stereotyping around the time he 146

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joined the Mizrahi Front activist group in the second half of the 1980s. He protested the National Theatre HaBima’s adaptation of Ephraim Kishon’s Orientalist play/ film Sallah. (In contrast to the 1964 film that predictably cast an Ashkenazi-Sabra actor, Topol, to play the paradigmatically stereotypical Mizrahi, the 1988 HaBima version cast Ze’ev Revah, a Moroccan Mizrahi actor and Bourekas filmmaker, a casting that hardly altered the narrative’s Orientalist vision.) During that period, Shiloach searched for an alternative path, but he also continued to act in films embedded in hegemonic discourse. Shiloach played in Yizhak Halutzi’s Braids (1989), a non-stereotypical yet ideologically charged film depicting the heroism of the Zionist underground in Iraq, a film produced in the very same year Shiloach participated in the historical meeting between Mizrahim/Arab-Jews and Palestinians in Toledo, Spain. (A key Toledo organiser was the alternative filmmaker Simone Bitton.) In fact, Shiloach continued to play ‹the Arab› or ‹the Muslim› in Hollywood films such as Rambo III, Not Without My Daughter, Night Terrors (1993), and Chain of Command (1994), which featured highly problematic representations of the Middle East. Such contradictions, I may add, reveal the ways that Israeli and American Orientalist representations have been deeply intertwined not only ideologically but also institutionally. Negotiating between contradictory positions, performers are inevitably caught up in the web of casting politics emblematic of a powerful institutional apparatus. With the growing visibility of Mizrahi cultural activism in the 1990s, there has been a surge in narratives set within enclosed Mizrahi neighbourhood spaces, which employ virtually all-Mizrahi casts, as in the case of Yamin Messika’s Love Victim (1994) and The Vineyard of Hope (1997) and Benny Torati’s Yonanam (1987) and Desperado Square (2001). Involved in Mizrahi activism long before directing films, both Messika and Torati approached casting as part of a larger movement to consciously accentuate a symbolic return of the Mizrahim to their Arab and Middle Eastern culture. Torati’s Desperado Square predominantly casts Mizrahim players to perform in a Mizrahi narrative. Here Shiloach plays the role of Israel Hahodi, whose name combines his first name ‹Israel› with his nickname ‹the Indian›, an index of his country of origin but also a reference to his beloved Hindi music/cinema – a virtual embodiment of Bollywood culture. Desperado Square also creates a certain dissonance by casting an Ashkenazi actress, Yona Elian, for the female protagonist role, and the Palestinian Mohammad Bakri for the male protagonist role. The presence of Yona Elian, a 1970s star of the Bourekas melodrama, forms part of a broader intertextual dialogue with the fading Bourekas genre. Yet, Elian’s screen persona ‹passed› for Mizrahi, given the memory of her role as the heroine of George Ovadia’s melodramas (especially Nurit, 1972). The casting of the Palestinian Bakri as the Mizrahi protagonist, meanwhile, inverts earlier heroic-nationalist filmic paradigms, where Mizrahim played Arab antagonists within a casting politics that denied subjectivity both to the Arab character and the Arab-Jewish actor. 147

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The casting of Bakri in Yehuda Ne’eman’s Nuzhat al-Fuad (2007) is similarly intriguing. The film strings together contemporary Tel Aviv stories with layered allusions to A Thousand and One Nights. Bakri plays two contemporary figures, a Palestinian patient and an Iraqi-Jewish writer, along with the historical figure of the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun Al-Rashid. Bakri, who has often performed the role of the dignified Palestinian in a series of Israeli, Palestinian, and international productions, here lends his poised screen aura to the Mizrahi characters.6 Casting Bakri as Mizrahi or Arab-Jew incorporates and assimilates Bakri’s established role as the dignified Palestinian in the Palestinian film wave since the 1980s, but here it is appropriated and resignified. The ‹return of the repressed› is now not the absent Palestinian of the heroicnationalist genre but the repressed Arab-Jew whose Arabness is accentuated precisely through the blurring of the boundaries between the screened (Arab) ‹body› of the Mizrahi and that of the Palestinian. This incorporation of the Palestinian actor/body forms part of a larger tendency to deny Arabness to the Arab-Jew. Bakri’s character enacts the role of a returning brother after years of disappearance from the town, a return that melodramatically resonates with the film’s closure. At the same time, Desperado Square’s provocative casting is not without its allegorical limits and representational dilemmas, as the corporeal interface between the Palestinian and the Arab-Jew blurs their different positionings within the state of Israel, while also narratively keeping the explicit figure of the Palestinian away from Mizrahi space. My critique of casting hierarchies in the book formed part of a broader discussion of the politics of representation, probing the East/West relations in narrative, genre, discourse, and institutional politics, along with the specifically cinematic elements. Unlike novels, cinematic narratives require concrete choices involving complexion and facial characteristics. Appearance and description in the cinema are grounded in the concrete and the specific; phrases such as ‹menacing looks› or ‹seductive eyes› have to be translated into the shape, colour, and physiognomy of a particular performer. In contrast to written texts, the voice in the cinema too raises the problem of embodiment. The voice, not unlike the body and face, is inevitably specific: it is gendered, classed, and raced; it has a grain, an accent, an intonation, a timbre, a pronunciation, and even a vocal manner, all of which may remain ‹inaudible› in a text. The performer’s voice, furthermore, has to be mediated via a specific language. It was, we may recall, the Iraqi Arye Elias’s Arabic accent, looks, and body language that prevented him from playing Shakespearian roles (in Hebrew), despite playing such roles in Baghdad. At the same time, it was also Elias’s Iraqiness that has made him a desired screen presence for the emergent Mizrahi cinema, especially 6 Bakri performed in films directed by Jewish Israelis such as Eran Riklis’s Cup Final and Uri Barabash’s Beyond the Walls; by Palestinians such as Michel Khleifi’s The Tale of Three Jewels (1994), Ali Nassar’s The Milky Way (1997), and Rashid Masharawi’s Haifa (1995); as well as Constantin Costa-Gavras’ Hanna K. (1983) and Saverio Costanzo’s Private (2004).

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3 Sacred Language, Spoken Language: Living in-between languages

given the melancholy realisation of the slow disappearance of the older generation Iraqis, Moroccans, Egyptians, or Yemenis who actually lived in the Arab world. Audio-visual narrative forces the filmmaker to take a stance. Cinematic production necessitates a selection of actors in a casting process that inevitably locates face and body within concepts of gender, race, class, and nation. Indeed, as noted in the book, in Western iconography, Christ was gradually remodelled as Aryan, deemed more appropriate for the supreme being as seen by a white normative ethos. The deSemitisation of the Jewish body becomes more evident in a visual medium such as the cinema, than it does in a verbal medium such as the novel. Thus, the break with such imagery becomes especially meaningful within a national and social space where Arab looks and Arabic language tend to signify an imminent danger that triggers the policing machine. Recent films have also explored the Zionist project of the Hebrew revival, from the realm of the sacred to the mundane, seen in Nurit Aviv’s documentary Sacred Language, Spoken Language (2008). Her From Language to Language (2004), meanwhile, engages the consequences of the forced cultural-linguistic conversion into Hebrew of a heteroglossic space. The film interviews artists for whom Hebrew is not their mother tongue, reflecting on their complex relationship to Hebrew, living in-between languages. Accented Hebrew on the screen signified newcomers, but it would be misleading to think that all accents and non-Hebrew languages occupied the same status in the eyes and ears of the dominant culture. Yiddish, Russian, German, English, Ladino, Arabic, Turkish, or Farsi possessed very different coefficients of cultural capital (Bourdieu). Arabic is itself caught within a fraught citizenship. Iraqi, Moroccan, 149

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or Yemeni Arabic dialects or accents in Hebrew are associated with the safe zone of Jewishness, while a Palestinian Arabic accent in Hebrew remains explosively charged. On the screen, beginning with the anti-occupation films of the 1980s, gradually Palestinian Arabic has come to possess a less negative presence, yet still occupies a highly anxious narrative slot. Over the past two decades, Israeli films have come to accentuate the multiplicity of languages in Israel, with some films even eclipsing the national language, Hebrew, in order to reflect a new immigrant social milieu. Already TV films like Ram Levi’s Bread (1987) staged performances in Moroccan Arabic, and Arabic is significantly present in Shmuel Hasfari and Hanna Azouly-Hasfari’s Sh’hur and Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz’s The Seven Days (2008). A substantial part of the dialogue in The Band’s Visit takes place in English, which disqualified the film for the Academy Award nomination in the foreign film category, while a few snippets of Arabic dialogue are performed by Palestinian and Mizrahi actors mimicking the Egyptian dialect. Dover Koshashvili’s Late Marriage (2001) is primarily spoken in Georgian, while Leonid Gorovets’s Coffee with Lemon (1994) and Arik Kaplun’s Yana’s Friends (1999) feature dialogue in Russian. Vietnamese is crucial in Duki Dror’s documentary The Journey of Vaan Nguyen (2005), which tells the story of ‹the boat people›, Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Israel in the late 1970s, but who now want to return to Vietnam, while their children, who feel Israeli, face an identity conflict. Radu Mihaileanu’s Live and Become (2005) and Dan Wolman’s Foreign Sister (2004), or documentaries such as Dastao Damato’s Black Music (2005) and David Davro’s Sisay (2005), incorporate Amharic. Filipino is spoken by a ‹foreign worker› character in Etgar Keret’s Jelly Fish (2007); French in Amos Gitai’s Disengagement (2007); and English in David Ofek and Yossi Madmony’s The Barbecue People (2003) and in Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s James’ Journey to Jerusalem (2003). Representing Israel as a multilingual space, beyond the Hebrew/Arabic split, places the country within a globalised world of increasingly fluid identities. Hebrew in contemporary Israeli cinema tends to break away from earlier cinematic monoculturalist realism, even moving beyond a strict Jewish nationalism to represent a more extensive social fabric including Mizrahim, Ethiopians, Russians, Georgians, and a variety of ‹foreign workers›, along with Arab/Palestinians. Arabic is increasingly spoken alongside Hebrew; and the Hebrew spoken by Palestinian characters/ actors is hardly given an accent (e.g., Eytan Fox’s The Bubble, 2006). Corrective representation of Israeli polyglossia becomes a vital element in the shaping of a new cinematic realism. In sum, whereas early Zionist cinema was embedded in the mission of ‹Hebrew Language Revival› redeemed away from the Diaspora Babel, contemporary Israeli cinema features a polyglossia no longer haunted by national linguistic anxiety. From the place of a secure core national idiom, Israeli cinema is opening its ears to its surrounding linguistic diversity, though it is still overshadowed by the East/West civilisational clash. Not coincidentally, Ne’eman’s Nuzhat 150

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al-Fuad (2007) has Arabic enunciated only in the fantasy sequences, allegorising the repressed existence and the denied legitimacy of a language only possible in the state of dreams and memories – a linguistic unconscious, often nightmarish, reflected upon in Samir’s Forget Baghdad (2003). A younger generation of Mizrahi filmmakers has come to focus on Arabic as the link to a vanishing past. In documentaries such as Rami Kimchi’s Cinema Egypt (2001), Sigalit Banai’s Mama Faiza (2002), Duki Dror’s Café Noah (1996), and Taqasim (1999), Arabic functions as both metonym and metaphor for a world prior to the transformation of the Arab-Jew into an Israeli. [...]

2. Palestinians-in-Israel: Cinematic Citizenship in the Liminal Zone [...] The densely interwoven relation of Israel and Palestine, as well as of the transnational traffic of media images, sounds, and peoples, then begs us to broaden the discussion of ‹national cinema› generally, and of ‹Israeli cinema› more specifically, beyond films produced or directed by individuals from a single ethnicity/ nation within demarcated borders. When my book was originally published, some Israeli reviewers questioned, even mocked, my decision to scrutinise co-productions (Rebels Against the Light) or even foreign productions (Exodus) since they were not ‹Israeli films›. Apart from the fact that some of the co-productions were directed by Israelis (even if recent immigrants) and that foreign productions involved Israeli crews or actors, shot on location in Israel, and so forth, their narrative movement replicated the official metanarrative. These quibbles, more importantly, only reveal the ideological and ethnic drift of a supposedly normative Israeliness and the nationalist imaginary of a purist definition of what constitutes Hebrew-Israeli identity and culture. How, for example, should we place the work of Simone Bitton, a native of Morocco, who moved with her family to Israel at the age of 11, then left Israel in 1976 to study film and cinematography at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques in Paris? Bitton has since been based in France, but a glance at her filmography reveals her multiple affiliations. Her documentaries about the Arab world, such as her film about the disappeared Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka, Ben Barka: The Moroccan Equation (2002), or her documentaries on Egyptian singers and musicians Muhammad Abdul Wahab, Farid al-Atrash, and Umm Kulthum, are inseparable from her own history of dislocation. Although usually 151

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made for French TV and shot largely in Egypt, the films were also broadcast on Israeli Arabic TV and consumed avidly by Mizrahim. At the same time, her films on Israel/Palestine – Mahmoud Darwish: As the Land is the Language (1998), the Palestinian-Israeli politician Azmi Bishara (Citizen Bishara, 2001), Palestine: The Story of a Land (1993), The Bombing (1999), and The Wall – form another vital aspect of her affiliations. Bitton’s work on Israel and Palestine must be situated in relation to her work on cultural production in the Arab world. It would be misleading, therefore, to simply identify her work as ‹Israeli›, just as it would be misleading to completely overlook its Israeli dimension, including in its strong challenge to Zionist orthodoxy. Her work does not fall into an either/or paradigm, whence the necessity of reading it as situated in the interstitial spaces of Morocco, Israel, Palestine, and France. More recently, diasporic Arab filmmakers have also explored the leaky cultural boundaries between Israel and the Arab world in films such as the reflexive documentary Forget Baghdad, by the Iraqi-Swiss filmmaker Samir. While technically a Swiss film, it was partly filmed in Israel, and treats multiple dislocations, not only on a Swiss-Iraqi axis, but also, and more centrally, on an Iraqi-Israeli axis, as well as the Iraqi-American and Iraqi-French axes. Organised largely around the life stories of Iraqi-Israeli writers (Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael, Samir Naqqash, and Mousa Houri), mostly former members of the Communist Party, Forget Baghdad reopens a lost chapter of Middle Eastern history. «What does it mean to be an enemy of your own past?» asks the filmmaker. Within an aesthetic of multi-layered fragmentation, the film tells a cross-border tale of a religious minority in Iraq becoming an ethnic minority in Israel: Jews in Iraq and Iraqis in Israel. The film also delves into the painful yet humorous stories of the younger generation represented by Samir himself (whose family also had to flee Iraq) and by the trajectory of another interviewee (the author of this text) cross-cutting between the Iraqi homes in Switzerland and Israel.7 Forget Baghdad deploys a rich array of archival materials – British, Iraqi, and Israeli newsreels, Hollywood features (Son of the Sheik, 1926, Exodus, and Schwarzenegger’s True Lies), Israeli Bourekas comedies (Sallah), and Egyptian musical-comedies involving Muslims, Jews, and Christians (Helmy Rafla’s Fatma, Marica and Rachelle, 1949). ‹Israel›, in my usage, stands less for cultural-nationalist content than for a state where Palestinians also live and struggle for representation. Films made by Palestinians are also partially about Israel. Writing about Palestinian filmmakers, including also those in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, as well as those in the Diaspora raise equally vexed questions. At this point of history, ‹Palestine› and ‹Israel› are co-implicated and must be discussed relationally. In the aftermath of a colonial-settler project, the scattering of dispossessed Palestinians, multiple dislocations, and the ongo7

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4 Forget Baghdad: Enemy of one’s own past

ing occupation, the question of a ‹right of return› has been contested, even though sometimes treated as ‹off the table› in peace negotiations. And while in the following I will largely touch on the work of Palestinian filmmakers who grew up fil-dakhel (i.e., inside, or within the boundaries of the state of Israel, and subjected to military rule until 1966), the discussion of Palestine-within-Israel inevitably traverses state borders. Indeed, these contradictions often provide the themes of the films themselves. The point here is that the boundaries of Israel and Palestine, which on one level would seem to constitute an irreconcilable wall-like division, are often subverted and interrogated by very complex filmic and cultural negotiations. In some ways, it is virtually impossible to speak of Israeli cinema without ‹Palestine›, just as it is virtually impossible to speak of Palestinian cinema without ‹Israel›. ‹Palestine› and ‹Israel› as imagined in the cinema are not merely national place markers, but constitute an intellectual space of conflictual and interdependent utopias and dystopias. The boundaries between ‹Israel Cinema› and ‹Palestinian cinema›, then, are clear only to the extent that we endow each one with an overarching nationalist teleology. The label ‹Palestinian cinema› is assumed not only by diasporic Palestinians, but also by filmmakers born and raised within the state of Israel. Yet the boundaries are complicated not only when one examines biography, ideology, and citizenship, but also when the use of the Hebrew language and Israeli cultural references, along with Israeli production contexts and institutional sponsorship and reception, are taken into consideration. Rashid Masharawi, a filmmaker from Gaza who grew up in the Shati refugee camp, began his career while working on the sets of Israeli films. For his film The Shelter (1989), which revolved around workers from Gaza in Israel, obliged to spend their nights illegally locked down in makeshift 153

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shelters on an Israeli construction site, Masharawi cast the Palestinian-Israeli actor Mohammad Bakri as the protagonist. Bakri, who began his career in Haifa Theatre and in films such as Costa Gavras’ Hanna K., has acted in numerous Israeli films screened in Israeli film festivals and film societies.8 To cite another pertinent example, Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) was partly funded by the Israeli Fund For Quality Films, viewed by the filmmaker himself as part of «a civil rights fight».9 His later film, Divine Intervention (2002), provoked opposition to its submission for the entry as the Foreign-Language Oscar, since Palestine was not a country (see Fahim). Collaborative work between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers has especially posed a challenge to fixed categorisations, for example, between Elia Suleiman (a citizen of Israel) and Amos Gitai in War and Peace in Vesoul (1997), who also shared a spotlight at the Cannes Film Festival; or On the Edge of Peace (1998) co-produced by the Palestinian Daoud Kuttab and the Israelis Ilan Ziv and Amit Breur; or between the Jewish Israeli Eyal Sivan, who has been living in France and now the U.K., and the Palestinian Michel Khleifi (also a citizen of Israel) who has been living in Belgium, on Route 181 (2004). How would such collaborations, especially when performed within shared political perspectives, fit into any schematic opposition between Israeli and Palestinian cinema? The relationship between biography and geography are further complicated when a Palestinian filmmaker from Israel makes a film about the West Bank. The plots of films by Hany Abu-Assad (who is from Nazareth and has been living in Holland), such as Rana’s Wedding (2002) and Paradise Now (2005) revolve largely around the West Bank; the former shot on location in East Jerusalem, Ramallah, and at checkpoints in-between, looking at the quotidian details of the conflict as a young woman faces roadblocks, soldiers, and stone throwers on the way to her lover, while the latter tells a comic-tragic tale of two Palestinian men preparing for a suicide mission inside Israel. Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin Jenin (2002), a documentary about the 2002 Israeli takeover of the Jenin camps and its tragic aftermath of rubble and massacre, provoked anger in Israel. (Bakri was also denounced when one of his relatives was associated with a suicide bombing.) After years of being feted in Israel as the beloved Arab, he metamorphosed into a traitor, a persona non-grata, a veritable ‹enemy of the people›. His subsequent documentary, Since You Left (2005), which details the efforts in the Israeli legislature to have legal actions taken against Bakri, investigates the hurdles and limitations involved in living as an ‹Arab Israeli› by reflecting on his Kafkaesque downward spiral. As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Bakri’s personal saga in some ways recalls the absurd existence endured 8 Costa-Gavras made one of the first Hollywood films sympathetic to Palestinians (Hanna K., 1983), although limited by a liberal and in some ways orientalist perspective (see Porton/Shohat). 9 Erickson; see also Richard Porton’s interview with Elia Suleiman, «Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora».

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by the protagonist of Emile Habiby’s novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, which Bakri in fact adapted for the stage and performed in both Arabic and Hebrew both in Israel and in the West Bank. If Habiby’s novel is framed within the epistolary genre as a letter to a creature from outer space, Bakri’s film is framed as an audio-visual letter to his dead mentor, Habiby, to whom he recounts the fantastic tragic-comic tale of his own life. The boundaries between ‹inside› and ‹outside›, then, are permeated by ambiguity. Palestinian cinema filmed, produced, or even subsidised by Israeli institutions, allegorises the paradoxes of Palestinian-Israeli citizenship. Caught between Israelisation projects and seen from the dominant perspective as ‹the enemy from within›, the Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel have been taking an active role in their self-representation. Most visible within recent years are such organisations as Adalah and such figures as ex-Knesset member Azmi Bishara, who has been arguing for Israel as a «state of its citizens». (As we have seen, Bishara was the subject of Simone Bitton’s Citizen Bishara). Inside and outside Israel/Palestine, Palestinian scholars have been critically examining identity formations of Palestinians within Israel (for example, work by Nahla Abdo, Nur Masalha, Nadim Rouhana, As’ad Ganim, Marwan Bishara, Rohda Kanane, Ibtissam Ibrahim, Isis Nusair, Samera Esmeir, Bashir Abu Manneh, Suheir Daoud, Leena Meari, and Ahmad Sa’di). Palestinians within Israel have been revisiting images, sometimes disseminated even by diasporic Palestinian and Arab intellectuals, which have branded them ‹traitors› and ‹collaborators›. Emile Habiby’s words inscribed on his tombstone provide one answer to such narratives: «Remained in Haifa». In Bakri’s Since You Left, a visit to Habiby’s tombstone triggers a confessional monologue that becomes a dialogue with Habiby’s legacy. (A member of the communist party and a member of the Knesset, Habiby was also the subject of Dalia Karpel’s documentary I Stayed in Haifa, 1997). In his monologue/dialogue with Habiby in Since you Left, Bakri recalls their shared travels outside of Israel/Palestine. In Cypress, Bakri reminds his deceased interlocutor of an incident where a taxi driver asked where they were from, and they answered that they were Palestinians. The driver continues to insist on a more precise answer, since Palestinians are dispersed in many countries, but he roars with laughter when they say «Israel». The distraction generated by his astonishment at this absurdity results in a car accident. What is being negotiated in such conversations, then, is the variable perspective on those who remained in what became Israel, i.e., the Palestinian ‹inside› Israel. While for exiled authors on the ‹outside› – for example Ghassan Kanafani in his 1970 novella Returning to Haifa – the ‹inside› is in allegorical terms hopelessly lost to Zionism, for Habiby and Bakri, ‹remaining› in Haifa can be seen as constituting an ‹inside› version of sumud, a term usually associated with the West Bank. (Indeed, one of the characters in The Pessoptimist is named «Baqiyya», or she who has stayed, in contrast to the woman ‹outside›, named «Yuaad», or to be returned.) Palestinian fictions in Israel or fil155

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5 Wedding in Galilee: Exiles on their land

dakhel, in other words, have explored the paradoxes of Palestinian existence within Israel; their implied addressees are also Palestinians on the outside. Over the past two decades, a new cinema, taking both documentary and fiction form, has focused on Palestinians within Israel, living as veritable exiles on their own land. Michel Khleifi’s Wedding in Galilee was one of the first major Palestinian features to highlight the plight of Palestinians within Israel. The allegorical strategies hinge on the ritual of the wedding, overdetermined with meaning due to its implicit linking of families, histories, and genealogies, but here exacerbated by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The wedding is infiltrated by the Israeli military because the bridegroom’s father, the Mukhtar, is required to get a permit from the governor to continue the festivities until nightfall. His invitation to the governor and his staff brings to the surface latent tensions not only between Israel and Palestine, but also between diverse ideological and generational forces within the Palestinian community. The camera oscillates between diverse perspectives, contrasting the attitudes of the young radicals born under Israeli occupation with those of the older, ‹patient› generation. In films such as Wedding in Galilee, the loss of Palestine is represented through images of emasculation and loss of virility, as the son becomes impotent as a result of his filial resentments at his father’s accommodating conduct.10 While one 10 Similarly in Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and in the adaptation, The Dupes, the 1948 defeat is metaphorised by the castration of the character Abu al-Khaizran due to a bomb.

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may object to the film’s masculinist preference for female (over male) nudity, and at times for Orientalist imagery, female characters do nonetheless exercise a vital presence in the story, privileged as nurturers of the collective memory. (The film was made around the time that children and women became major participants in the first Intifada.)11 At the same time, although Wedding in Galilee alludes to the differences and tensions within the Palestinian community, it also asserts a common struggle against the occupation, along with a common history and cultural identity indigenous to the land. Images of Palestinian lives on the screen thus challenge the Israeli denial of Palestinian existence, whether through the physical elimination of Palestinian villages or through the verbal-ideological obfuscation implicit in terms like ‹nomads›. In this sense, the camera’s painstaking, affectionate scrutiny of rural ceremonies and rituals makes less an anthropological than a simple political point: ‹We are here, and we exist.› The fluid movement from character to character and the embroidering of diverse discourses and languages (daily slang, proverbs, popular rhymes, sloganeering speeches, and hallucinatory poetic monologs) display the nation’s textured complexity. Even more, the film associates earth, crops, trees, vegetation, and abundance of food with Palestinians – in contradistinction to the Zionist narrative of pioneers ‹making the desert bloom›, while simultaneously celebrating the fusion of Muslim and Christian Palestinian customs – in contradistinction to an official discourse that devalues Palestinian national identity by speaking of the ‹non-Jewish minorities›. The narrative structure thus reinforces national legitimisation. By focusing on a Palestinian ritual circumscribed by Israeli power, the film subverts the media trope of Arabs besieging Israel and Palestinians disrupting Israeli routines.12 A tale with Palestinians at the centre and Israelis as ‹visitors› inverts a master-narrative that favours the land’s ‹original›, that is, Jewish, inhabitants over its present-day Arab ‹guests›. In Palestinian eyes, Israel represents just one more invasive foreign power arriving in the wake of the Ottomans and the British. Wedding in Galilee, like Khleifi’s earlier documentary Fertile Memories (1980), suggests that Palestinian memory is not only alive, but also capable of engendering new beginnings.13 11 For a discussion of the gendering of Palestine in political discourse, especially of the language of the communiqués issued by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) depicting Intifada as «the Palestinian wedding», see Massad, «Conceiving the Masculine»; and Massad’s The Persistence of the Palestinian Question. 12 Produced before the first Intifada, Wedding in Galilee was one of the first features length films to transcend the Manichaean schema of «peaceloving Israelis» versus «violence-prone Arabs», while also avoiding a reverse tale of «good Palestinians» versus «evil Israelis». As in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Khleifi humanises the individual military members, but highlights instead the oppressive nature of colonial rule. 13 In one visibly allegorical sequence, Palestinian and Israelis together coax a mare out of a field that the Israelis have mined, evoking a vision of a communal future. A pastoral epilogue depicting the Mukhtar’s child running in the fields underlines a desire for harmony in a bloodstained land, as if closing the circle opened at the beginning of the film, where the voices of Palestinian children at

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Films such as Wedding in Galilee, The Mountain (1992), The Olive Harvest (2003), Since You Left, and Ibtisam Mara’ana’s Paradise Lost (2003) craft images of Palestine in Israel. A great number of the filmmakers – Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, Hanna Elias, Hany Abu-Assad, and Ula Tabari – have left, working on Palestine-in-Israel outside, in Brussels, Paris, New York, Amsterdam, or Los Angeles, thus making it necessary to address the issue of multiple dislocations, beyond a strict national geography and within diasporic, exilic, and transnational perspectives. Suleiman’s early films, Homage by Assassination (1991) and Introduction to the End of an Argument (1990, co-directed with the LebaneseCanadian Jayce Salloum), were made when the filmmaker was based in New York, while later films, Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention, were produced after Suleiman had relocated to Paris, but both retain their relation to Nazareth as a key frame of reference. Making diasporic films on the Israel/ Palestine axis accentuates a paradoxical situation of multiple insides and outsides. Moving in between spaces can be said to be at the core of this cinema, both in terms of the narrative and in terms of the process of production. The films and artwork of Palestinians, whether of those born in exile (Mai Masri, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, and Annmarie Jacir), or of those growing up under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza (Rashid Mashrawi and Sobhi al-Zobaidi), or of those raised in Israel (Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, Hana Elias, and Sharif Waked), are themselves embedded in an artistic modus operandi implicated in the intricacies of fragmented lives dating back to 1948. Indeed such recent work has shifted the emphasis from earlier macro-narratives of national liberation, re-envisioning ‹the nation› as a dappled multiplicity of trajectories. While most Third Worldist films assumed the fundamental coherence of national identity, with the expulsion of the colonial intruder fully completing the process of national becoming, diasporic films call attention to the fault-lines of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, partition, migration, and exile. Many of the films explore the complex identities wrought by exile – from one’s own geography, from one’s own history, from one’s own body – with the assistance of innovative narrative strategies. Homage by Assassination, for example, chronicles Suleiman’s claustrophobic experience in New York during the Persian Gulf war, foregrounding multiple failures of communication: a radio announcer’s aborted efforts to reach the filmmaker by phone; the filmmaker’s failed attempts to talk to his family in Nazareth; his impotent look at old family photographs; despairing answering-machine jokes about the Palestinian situation. The glorious dream of nationhood is here reframed play dissolve into the roar of Israeli jets. Coming after the soldier’s evacuation of the village, this epilogue affirms a desire for liberation. Palestinian and Israeli national cultures thus suffuse each other’s memories and tales, but, from a Palestinian perspective, a dialogical future will be made possible only by an end to the occupation. The analysis here of Wedding in Galilee is taken from my articles «Wedding in Galilee» and from «Anomalies of the National».

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as a Palestinian flag on a TV monitor, the land as a map on a wall, and the return (Aawda) as the ‹return› key on a computer keyboard. At one point, Suleiman receives a fax from a friend, who narrates her history as an Arab-Jew, her multiple identifications during the bombing of Iraq and the Scud attacks on Israel, and the story of her family’s displacement from Iraq, through Israel/Palestine, and then on to the United States.14 The communications media become the imperfect means by which dislocated people retain their national imaginary, while also creating new diasporic spaces of belonging, including in countries (the United States, Britain) whose foreign policies have helped create their fragmented lives. Like Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), Homage by Assassination invokes the diverse spatialities and temporalities marking the exile experience. A shot of two clocks, in New York and in Nazareth, points to the double spatio-temporality lived by the diasporic subject, a temporal doubleness underlined by an intertitle saying that the filmmaker’s mother, due to the Scud attacks, is adjusting her gas mask at that very moment. The friend’s letter similarly stresses the fractured space-time of being in the United States while identifying with relatives in both Iraq and Israel. A certain linguistic sleight of hand is also crucial for Palestinian filmmakers within Israel. The schism between Hebrew and Arabic is emphasised, while also negotiating other languages depending on exilic trajectories. Yet, language is not a mere vehicle to register the reality of exile; it becomes part of the aesthetic/cinematic space. Homage by Assassination plays with a strategic refusal to translate the Arabic when the director (in person) types out Arab proverbs on a computer screen, without providing any translation, echoing Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, where recorded conversations between the filmmaker and her mother or Arabic handwritten letters are shown – all without subtitles. Such diasporic media artists thus cunningly provoke non-Arab spectators by simulating the same alienation experienced by a displaced person, invoking, through inversion, the asymmetry in cultural exchange between exiles and their ‹host› communities. At the same time, they catalyse a sense of belongingness for the minoritarian-speech community, a strategy especially suggestive in the case of diasporic filmmakers, who often wind up in the First World precisely because colonial/imperial power has turned them into displaced persons. Rather than evoking a longed-for ancestral home, Homage by Assassination, like Measures of Distance, affirms the process of recreating identity in the liminal space of diaspora, where dense sound/image layering makes it possible to capture the fluid, multiple identities of the dislocated subject.

14 The friend in question is myself, reading in voiceover a text based on a piece written during the Gulf War (Shohat, «Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew»).

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Works Cited Erickson, Steve. «A Breakdown of Communication: Elia Suleiman Talks About Divine Intervention.» IndieWire, 15 Januar 2003 n. pag. web. 14 Jul. 2013. Fahim, Kareem. «Stateless Cinema: Palestinian Film and Oscar Eligibility.» The Village Voice, 21 Jan. 2003. n. pag. web. 14 Jul. 2013. Khoury, Elias. Gate of the Sun. Trans. Humphrey Davies. New York: Archipelago Books, 2006. Print. Massad, Joseph. «Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestinian Nationalism.» The Middle East Journal 49:3 (1995): 467–483. Print. – The Persistence of the Palestinian Question. London: Routledge, 2006. Porton, Richard. «Notes from the Palestinian Diaspora.» [Interview with Elia Suleiman] Cineaste 28:3, 22 Jun. 2003. Print. – and Ella Shohat. «The Trouble with Hanna.» Film Quarterly 38:2 (1984–1985): 50–55. Print. Shohat, Ella. «Wedding in Galilee.» Middle East Report 154 (1988): 44–46. Print. – «Anomalies of the National: Represen-

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ting Israel/Palestine.» Wide Angle 11:3 (1989): 33–41. Print. – «Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew.» Movement Research: Performance Journal 5 (1992): 7–8. Print. – «Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle Over Representation.» Unthinking Eurocentrism. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. New York: Routledge, 1994. 178–219. Print. – «The Struggle Over Representation: Casting, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification.» Late Imperial Culture. Eds. Román de La Campa, E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1995. 166–178. Print. – Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Rev. ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Print. Tsoffar, Ruth. «Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – the Iraqi Connection.» The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. Ed. Gonul Donmez-Colin. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 256–265. Print.

Transcultural Subjects

Barry Keith Grant

«Extremely Useful, Extremely Adaptable» Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Two Nosferatus

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) have become the wellsprings of modern horror (and, to some extent, of science fiction as well). All three have inspired numerous adaptations and imitations in a variety of media. In film, Frankenstein was first filmed by the Edison Co. as early as 1910, and there have been innumerable versions and variations since, while Stevenson’s story may hold the record for mostfilmed novel of all time, having been adapted to the screen no less than ten times. But there is no doubt that the most persistently permeable of these three archetypal monsters has been Dracula. Just as Stoker’s vampire stirs at sunset, so some variation of his vampire seems always to be near when the houselights in the cinema go down. Stephen King’s assertion in Danse Macabre that «horror is an extremely useful, extremely adaptable genre» (138) is certainly well demonstrated by the numerous interpretations of the Dracula figure. For example, Paul Morrissey mobilises a Marxist metaphor for his depiction of the aristocratic vampire in Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1973), interpreting Dracula’s relationship to his victims as one of economic exploitation. As Marxist critic Franco Moretti has written, Dracula represents «the true monopolist: solitary and despotic, he will not brook competition. Like monopoly capital, his ambition is to subjugate the last vestiges of the liberal era and destroy all forms of economic independence.» (Moretti 92) Of course, in Capital Marx himself employed the metaphor of vampirism in speaking of class struggle: «Capital,» he wrote, «is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.» (qtd. in Moretti 91) 163

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Accordingly, Morrissey’s film concludes with the revolutionary metaphor of castle workers chopping off the limbs of the bloodsucking, exploitative aristocrat, the Master’s torso left twitching helplessly on the ground. Exploring the same territory quite differently – in a more jugular vein, to paraphrase Mad magazine – Love at First Bite (1979) takes a humorous approach by bringing a dashing Dracula, in the form of the handsome George Hamilton, to contemporary New York City, where women are attracted to him rather than repelled because he represents eternal commitment in an impermanent world of male «me-generation» emotional vacillation. Stoker’s novel was not the first vampire story published in English (that distinction belongs to The Vampyr, featuring another undead aristocrat, Lord Ruthven. Written by John Polidori, physician and friend to Byron, it was published in 1819, the year after the appearance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), and in the almost 80 years from The Vampyr to Dracula, there accumulated a considerable tradition of vampire fiction and drama, and of course vampire stories existed in oral folklore for centuries before Stoker’s book. But it was Stoker’s novel which forever made Dracula the archetypal image of the vampire in the popular imagination. As David J. Skal writes in his cultural history of horror, The Monster Show, «Stoker broke radically with the seductive, Byronic image of vampirism that had already been popularized on the stage and in penny dreadfuls like James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre (1847); Dracula spends little time on social niceties and is physically repellent, a cadaverous old man who grows younger as he drinks blood but who never becomes attractive.» (83)

It may be somewhat of an exaggeration to claim, as the authors of the book The Great Villains do, that Stoker’s novel is the second most widely read book in the world after the Bible; but it is certainly true that more than any other single work it established the conventions of vampire mythology. The book contains many of the details of vampire lore – for example, the notion that vampires do not cast reflections in mirrors; their ability to transform into bats, wolves, and mist – that are now givens of the genre, whether to accept or reject. These conventions are so established that they have long been the source of parody, as in, for example, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) when the Jewish innkeeper Shagal, now one of the undead, responds to a potential victim’s defensive wielding of a crucifix with «Oy, have you got the wrong vampire!» Weathering the genre’s shifting fortunes and conventions, Dracula has continued on, seemingly as protean as the shape-shifting creature Stoker described him to be. This transformative ability is itself one of the subjects of Francis Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), in which Gary Oldman’s Count never appears the same way twice. Bela Lugosi’s incarnation of the undead Count, first on stage and then in Universal Studio’s classic 1931 movie directed by Tod Browning, engraved the physiognomy 164

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of Dracula forever in our collective imagination. The 1927 American production of the play featured the then-unknown Hungarian actor as the eponymous vampire, and, with the death of the originally cast Lon Chaney, Lugosi recreated his stage role for the film. Billed as «the strangest love story ever told,» Browning’s film was released, with intended irony, on Valentine’s Day, 1931. Actually, the film is an adaptation not of the novel but of the play adaptation of it by American writer John L. Balderston and Irish actor Hamilton Deane. This explains the several changes in the narrative as well as why Browning’s film often seems so stagebound. Characters enter and exit the dramatic space on cue; Dracula, in his bat form, never seems more than a rubber toy dangling on a wire; and much of the action, including the anti-climactic death of the vampire, takes place off-screen. Nevertheless, the film seems to have offered one of those perfect instances of casting, like Humphrey Bogart as the weary existentialist Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942) or Arnold Schwarzenegger as the implacable Terminator. As Carlos Clarens writes in his book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, «it is useless to debate whether he was a good actor or not; Lugosi was Dracula.» (62) Indeed, Lugosi’s Dracula has become a central icon of western culture – so familiar that children are acquainted with him early on in the tamed forms of The Count on American public television’s long-running Sesame Street and as a caricature, Count Chocula, on the box of a breakfast cereal. Lugosi’s portrayal has become so iconic that he himself became one of its victims, consumed by his own character like prey to a vampire, a slave to the Master. «Poor Bela,» as Boris Karloff would often refer to him, was in his last years reduced to working with Ed Wood, Jr., regarded by some as the worst filmmaker of all time, and taking on self-parodic roles, a zombie controlled by the will of the monster he created. The role even pursued him to his grave, where he was buried wearing his Dracula cape. Dracula was an actual historical person – Vlad the Impaler, or Dracul, a 15th century prince in Transylvania, now part of Romania. Stoker even has Van Helsing tell us so about two-thirds of the way into the novel. The details of Vlad’s gory history are vividly recounted by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu in their 1973 book, In Search of Dracula. McNally and Florescu recount how Vlad’s murderous activities were disseminated throughout central and eastern Europe and, as folklore, grew to mythic proportion. In John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the newspaper editor, when he learns the more mundane truth about the famous shootout in which the eponymous villain is killed, utters the famous line «When the facts become legend, print the legend.» Certainly this has been the case with Vlad, for whom history has largely given way to myth. Accordingly, his mythic image has proven «extremely useful» for filmmakers, generating at least five versions of particular interest in addition to Browning’s film: Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu (1922), directed by F.W. Murnau (1922); Dracula, directed by Terence Fisher (1958); Nosferatu – Phantom der 165

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Nacht/Nosferatu, directed by Werner Herzog (1979); Dracula, directed by John Badham (1979); and Coppola’s aforementioned Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Considering Stoker’s novel in the context of Robin Wood’s influential conception of the ideological structure of horror, the following discussion will focus on the two German adaptations and the way each has offered a different conception of the vampire from that of Stoker by hybridising the genre of gothic horror with auteur idiosyncrasies and traditions of the «haunted screen». Wood has offered a concise yet workable structural definition of the horror genre, arguing that all horror narratives are structured by the fundamental opposition between the monstrous and the normal. In his words, the subject of horror is «the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses.» (Hollywood 75) Founded on the Freudian notion of the return of the repressed, the horror film expresses ideological contradictions which through standard ideological manoeuvres cultural texts usually seek to deny. The embodiment of horror, the monster, is thus seen as the Other in the sense used by Roland Barthes in Mythologies: that which we cannot admit about ourselves and so disavow by projecting outward, onto another. (151) Wood provides a list of specific Others in the horror genre: women, the proletariat, other cultures, ethnic groups, alternative ideologies or political systems, children, and deviations from sexual norms. This last – deviations from sexual norms – is probably the most significant in that it often is the defining characteristic in the representations of women, proletarians, and ethnic others. Questions of sexuality and gender inform the majority of vampire stories, as understood as early as Ernest Jones, student of Freud and author of Hamlet and Oedipus, in his 1931 book On the Nightmare: «As to the essential attribute of the vampire, namely Bloodsucking, we find a great many predecessors of the Vampire proper. In general it may be said that the habit of sucking living blood is throughout connected with ideas of cannibalism on the one hand and the incubat-succubat [demons who descended upon their victims while asleep and forced them to have sexual intercourse], two facts which alone reveal the sexual origin of the belief.» (116)

Wood points out that Dracula is «a remarkably comprehensive amalgam of our culture’s sexual dreads» («Burying» 369) because as Stoker depicts him he represents sexual potency, non-procreative sexuality, promiscuity, abnormal sexuality, bisexuality, and incest – all forms of sexual expression that would have horrified Stoker’s Victorian audience. As a committed political critic, for Wood the crucial aspect of any horror film is the relation between the genre’s two basic terms – that is, how a given text defines what is «normal» and what is «monstrous» – for this will determine the text’s value as social critique. Broadly speaking, conservative films endorse the ideological status quo, upholding deviations from the norm as monstrous, while radical examples of 166

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the genre challenge these values, either by making the monster sympathetic or by showing normal society to be in some way monstrous in itself. Conventional horror movies tend to allow spectators the pleasure of identifying with the monster’s outsider status, but then contain any potentially anarchic response by having the monster defeated by characters representative of social authority. In the cliché articulation of this ideological dynamic, victorious human heroes gaze at the remains of the monster and ruminate with seeming profundity that there are certain things man is not meant to know. The conclusion of Browning’s version of Dracula expresses this same sentiment in a somewhat different way: as Dracula is killed and Nina released from his spell, she and Jonathan ascend the stairs to the heavenly state of heterosexuality, marriage, and monogamy, literally marching to the tune of the beckoning church bells. Stoker’s Dracula also ends with the emphatic patriarchal defeat of the vampire, but the book is in fact more ambivalent ideologically. On the one hand, it is thoroughly informed by a melodramatic sensibility, at once a symptom and an expression of its fundamentally binary structure. As Linda Williams has noted, melodrama and horror are comparable in that both genres rely on emotional excess (143). But more importantly, melodrama, like much of horror, tends to establish a comfortable, simplistic moral dichotomy within its narrative world. This is certainly true of Stoker’s book. In Dracula there is little of the torturous ethical ambiguity that informs more modern vampire stories such as, say, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), wherein the protagonist Louis, in becoming a vampire, sheds his mortal body but not his soul, and as a result is tortured by his inability to reconcile a lingering faith in God with the irreducible fact of vampirism. Stoker would have been well acquainted with the conventions of stage melodrama, for he was enamoured of the theatre and served for 27 years as business manager for the famous English stage actor, Henry Irving. In his «Essay on Man,» Alexander Pope wrote that humankind is «Plac’d on the isthmus of a middle state ... Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; ... Two Principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain.»

(131f.)

While in this passage Pope, astonishingly, anticipated psychoanalytic theories of civilisation and its discontents, in Stoker’s Dracula, that isthmus seems firmly grounded on solid rock. Human conflict is starkly bifurcated into opposing characters: Dracula, the monster from the id, is the incarnation of the urge of self-love, to possess the Other through desire; but he is defeated by Van Helsing, embodiment of the superego’s restraint of reason. Whenever the other characters succumb to emotional turmoil, Van Helsing is there to gird them with empirical evidence and rationality. Mina never truly succumbs to the sensuous decadence of vampirism, even as she is transforming into one of the undead. The only character in whom Pope’s 167

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mortal storm might be said to rage is the zoophagous Renfield: in his madness he vacillates between incoherency and lucidity, a wandering denizen on the blasted heath of Pope’s isthmus. But Renfield is little more than a cardboard exemplum, as his position of scrutinised patient in Dr. Seward’s asylum suggests. Dr. Seward frequently muses that Renfield’s situation must have wider metaphorical implications, and indeed, his fate is intended as a clear warning to the presumptive gentle reader to remain virtuous – that is, not to succumb to the primal passions that lurk so close to home, in the Carfax Abbeys of our own subconscious. In considering the novel’s conservative ideological thrust, it is worth thinking of Dracula in relation to H.G. Wells’s contemporaneous War of the Worlds (1898). Published just one year after Stoker’s novel, it may be seen to offer a similarly nightmarish reversal of colonialism – as Wells describes the late 19th century, it was a time when the influence of the British Empire was at its height. In both stories a foreign Other descends upon the centre of the British Empire, challenging the very values on which it is built. The Martians had been scrutinising Earth and earthlings for ages –«intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us» (265) – just as Dracula has been dwelling in the Carpathians for centuries. But in both cases it may be that the horror is less the fact of the monsters’ existence than their arrival in England. As Mina puts it in Dracula, «And yet, if it be true, what terrible things there are in the world, what an awful thing if that man, that monster, be really in London!» (193) But where Wells’s book is slyly critical of such cultural complacency, in Dracula the bourgeois English values for which Stoker’s heroes fight are never questioned, at least overtly. Wells ends The War of the Worlds by telling us that the Martians were ultimately defeated by bacteria, «the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth.» (380) Of course, this line must be taken with some degree of irony (an irony lost in both Byron Haskin’s 1953 and Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film versions), since its author was a free-thinking Socialist who takes frequent swipes at the church throughout the book. By contrast, in Dracula Jonathan Harker tells us with no apparent irony at all that he is greatly heartened in the seemingly impossible pursuit of the wily vampire because «There is something of a guiding purpose manifest throughout, which is comforting.» (321) This divine purpose is embodied in the character of Van Helsing, who is at once a scientist, doctor, priest, and father figure. Van Helsing is always aware of the truth regarding the strange events that transpire, and always able to keep his head about him, even when engaged in what he calls the «wild work» of decapitating others. He assuages the anxieties of the reader no less than that of the other characters in his observation during the climactic chase that «This very creature that we pursue, he take hundreds of years to get so far as London; and yet in one day, when we know of the disposal of him we drive him out.» (320)

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This conservative moral vision is reflected in the distinct binaries that elsewhere inform Stoker’s tale. Such categories as reason and emotion, desire and restraint, science and faith, male and female, all are as distinct in the world of the novel as is night and day – itself an important binary that structures the narrative. For example, we are frequently reminded in the book that men are men and that women are women; that the proper role of women is to nurture men, while men are obliged to protect their women from the monstrous blandishments of other males. Lucy succumbs to Dracula first and more easily than Mina because, with her several suitors, she represents the threat of an acknowledged feminine desire. But Stoker’s noble men, so frequently admired by Mina, are men to the very end. The final line of the final chapter tells us that, as a result of wounds inflected by the gypsys’ knives, the American Quincy Morris died «a gallant gentleman.» (381) Several theorists of horror have suggested that the genre works by breaking down the culturally established borders that structure our informing binary view of the world: for example, Barbara Creed reads Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection as the erasure of boundaries between categories in the horror film, particularly regarding the body (8–15), while Noël Carroll explains the genre’s monsters as representing an «interstitial» state of being (43–58). In Stoker’s novel, though, any fears of collapsing boundaries represented by the threat of the vampire seem ultimately assuaged. The working class, who are uniformly motivated by money and superstition, remain as distinct from the bourgeoisie as men are from women, as night is from day. Yet, for all of this, at the same time as Dracula vigorously endorses a rigid Victorian worldview, it might also be said that, perhaps even despite its author’s intentions, the sexual power embodied by the vampire is not simply denied, disavowed, and projected outwards as the monstrous Other, but in fact also acknowledges its allure. This ambivalence presents itself as the result of a tension between the narrative and Stoker’s prose style. For the most part, Stoker’s prose is stilted, stiff – cadaverous, one might say. This leaden seriousness – what now we might more charitably call the campy quality – of Stoker’s style is perfectly captured by Ken Russell in his adaptation of another of the author’s vampire tales, The Lair of the White Worm (1988). Much of the awkwardness of Stoker’s writing in Dracula is the result of his decision to structure the narrative in the tradition of the epistolary novel as pioneered by Samuel Richardson. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and other earlier Gothic novels also employed this structural device. But Stoker’s characters not only incessantly and improbably write, they also spend a lot of time and energy collating what they have already written, recounting events into new-fangled dictaphones, typing on portable typewriters, and writing about the importance of their writing, dictating, and collating. Even Renfield keeps «a little notebook» in which he jots down his ravings.

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The downside of this device is that it severely tests even the most forgiving reader’s suspension of disbelief – as in the passage where Lucy, despite the trauma of a particularly horrible ordeal she has just experienced, does not fail to provide a full account of what has transpired, even as her mother’s corpse lay across her bed. Perhaps Stoker thought that the horrifying effect of his tale would be amplified by being cast as a series of testaments, just as a film image becomes more powerful when we know that it is documentary (see Sobchack). (It is worth considering that Dracula was written only two years after the invention of the cinema, and that the earliest movies were what we would now call documentaries, rather than fictions. Certainly the influence of the cinema is present in Wells’s first novel, The Time Machine, published in 1895, the same year in which film history begins.) Stoker’s insistence on having each part of the story documented in the first person, no matter how improbable the context, unintentionally signals the text’s own rather forced construction, similar to the derision with which viewers today react to the fastmotion images in Murnau’s film of Nosferatu’s coach carrying Harker to the castle, which is faithful to Stoker’s description and which the director intended to illustrate the crossing of the threshold into the realm of the supernatural at the Borgo Pass rather than as Keystone-Cops comic relief. But in Stoker, the ordinariness invoked by the tasks of writing a journal and of keeping it organised serves also to make the truly horrifying passages, as well as the erotic ones – and they are often one and the same – leap out all the more vividly. For there are moments, flashes when Stoker’s writing shifts from the prosaic to intoxicatingly sensual, as in the depiction of Dracula’s three women of the night and the discovery of Mina in bed with Dracula, drinking blood from his open vein – a scene that throbs with the forbidden but enticing appeal of fellatio. «What I saw appalled me,» declares Dr. Seward (287), but he manages to provide a rather detailed description nonetheless. In such moments as this and when Van Helsing stakes one of Dracula’s women, whom he describes as «so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion» (374), Stoker’s text, and his supposedly noble-minded characters, express the repressed desires that the story wants to disclaim as monstrous. The novel’s erotic tinge is emphasised most emphatically in Badham’s version of the novel, starring matinee idol Frank Langella as Dracula: made in 1979, the vampire’s sensual kiss here offered women both the appeal of consuming passion in a mortal world and the possibility of unfettered female desire in the era of women’s liberation. Some writers have suggested that this tension in the novel is the result of the author’s own sexual ambivalence, that Stoker was unable to acknowledge a strong homoerotic attachment to Henry Irving. Stoker apparently became taken with Irving from the first time he saw the actor on stage in an 1871 performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals, and regarded the actor with such awe that their relationship 170

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has been described as analogous to that of Renfield’s enslavement to Dracula. In his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker wrote that «I knew him [Irving] as well as it is given to any man to know another» (I, x) and later describes one of his first impressions of the actor onstage as «A figure full of dash and fine irony, and whose ridicule seemed to bite.» (I, 4, emphasis in the original) Certainly a homoerotic subtext is present in the scenes where Dracula visits Jonathan in his bedchamber and when Stoker’s noble men mix their blood in rituals of transfusion. But whatever the validity of this conjecture, it is this very tension in the book between desire and denial that has provided the unhallowed ground upon which filmmakers have built their adaptations. Murnau’s film, the first major adaptation of Stoker’s novel, was made without the author’s permission, the filmmakers minimising their reliance on the novel by changing numerous details of the plot, including relocating the setting from England to Bremen. Despite these changes in the narrative, though, Murnau retains Stoker’s ambivalence toward Dracula’s sexuality. Murnau had been trained as an art historian and was well aware of the compositional expressivity of the moving image. Writing about what he called «the architectural film», he said: «What I refer to [rather aptly, in the present context] is the fluid architecture of bodies with blood in their veins moving through mobile space: the interplay of lines rising, falling, disappearing; the encounter of surfaces [...] all this adds up to a symphony made up of the harmony of bodies and the rhythms of space; the play of pure movement, vigorous and abundant.» (qtd. in Eisner 84)

Murnau pushed this appreciation of the cinema as a plastic, sculptural medium to its limit in the film he made the following year, The Last Laugh (1924), a work celebrated in film history for eliminating subtitles by liberating the camera from the tripod. In Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens, this pure movement comes less from a moving camera then from movement within the frame and from the kinetics of editing, most famously in the scene aboard The Demeter, the ship unknowingly transporting him to Bremen. In Stoker’s account, Dracula is hardly seen, his face glimpsed only for a moment by the doomed ship’s captain. But Murnau employs the plastic qualities of the image to play with the idea of the ship as a psychological metaphor. In the film, as in Stoker’s novel, the vampire embodies the repressed sexual desire lacking in the normal world as represented by the seemingly asexual, almost impotent Harker. So Murnau often shows Nosferatu coming out of archways and dark spaces, using literal architecture to suggest the tentative emergence of repressed desire. But on the ship, as the vampire nears Bremen, he is fully released from the hold – a most appropriate term in this context, given that he signifies the return of the repressed. Murnau shows the ship sweeping through the sea and traversing the width of the film frame, the movement signifying the vampire’s growing strength; and then the extreme low 171

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1 Nosferatu – Eine Symfonie des Grauens

angle shot of Nosferatu, now in complete control of the vessel, towering above us, the rigging of the superego in the background unable to contain him. This is, in Murnau’s words, «vigorous and abundant» imagery of the id unleashed, a stunning visual equivalent to the erotic eruptions in Stoker’s prose. This ambivalence is further expressed in Murnau’s editing and mise-en-scène. Surprisingly, the film uses a good deal of location photography and natural imagery, in striking contrast to the standard practice of German expressionism, which was to construct even complete forests, as in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), entirely within the studio. The images of hyenas, real castles and exteriors, and microscopic polyps coexist with shots incorporating fast motion, superimpositions, and dissolves. One might say that, stylistically, the film suggests a connection rather than asserts a distinction between the worlds of Harker and Nosferatu. The editing works similarly when the two journey to Bremen. Murnau shows in succession shots of the Demeter’s thrusting prow, Nina waiting expectantly, Jonathan in a coach, Lucy again, the ship again, and finally an ambiguous insert title of Nina saying, «He’s coming, I must go to meet him.» Subsequently, she waits by the shore, although it is Nosferatu who journeys by sea while her husband travels by land. Is Mina waiting for Jonathan, her fiancé, or for Nosferatu himself? The ambiguity in the editing suggests that she desires the illicit sexuality represented by Murnau as much as the bland security of her husband, whom Jack Kerouac disparagingly calls the «young jerk hero.» (63) Werner Herzog’s 1979 «remake» Nosferatu – Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre was an homage to the film he considers the best work by 172

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2 Nosferatu – Phantom der nacht

the greatest German director; but he insists that his film is not simply a remake of Murnau’s and, indeed, it is, as Bruce Kawin has put it, considerably more than a «revamping» of it (45, 47). In Herzog’s version, the love Dracula seeks is less physical than spiritual. Here the vampire embodies a doomed romanticism that seeks to transcend the limitations of our mortal coil. For Herzog, Dracula is more a tragic hero than an evil villain, and in Klaus Kinski’s incarnation Nosferatu is a tortured, isolated visionary, like the other Herzog protagonists Kinski has created: among them, the conquistador steadfastly maintaining visions of Eldorado in the face of the conquering jungle in Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes/Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), and the idealistic Fitzcarraldo, determinedly dragging a ship over Brazilian mountains in Fitzcarraldo (1982) in order to spread the beauty of opera to new regions. Nosferatu tells Jonathan that «Time is an abyss ... Centuries come and go ... Death is not the worst; there are things more horrible. Can you imagine enduring centuries, and each day experiencing the same futilities?» Weary of immortality and, like the plants in the jungle that for Herzog, as he says to the camera in Mein liebster Feind/My Best Fiend – Klaus Kinski (1999), scream in the agony of their existence, so Nosferatu longs for both the physical release of true death and the spiritual release attained through transcendent love. The vampire implores Lucy on bended knee at her bedside for the kind of love she gives to Jonathan. Herzog emphasises Nosferatu’s unbearable heaviness of being in a number of ways. When, for example, he disembarks from the ghostly ship, the vampire does not slip away into the night in the form of mist or wolf, as in the novel; rather, 173

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he must trundle along burdened by his own weighty coffins. When he appears in Lucy’s bedroom, telling her that «the absence of love is the most abject pain,» against all convention he casts a reflection in her mirror, traditional vampire lore cast aside to underscore Nosferatu’s entrapment within his unchanging body in Kinski’s most restrained of his five roles for Herzog. Also, as Kawin points out, Herzog consistently duplicates Murnau’s mise-en-scène but places the camera in different positions. (45) Thus, noticeably different from Murnau’s film, when Nosferatu takes over the Demeter in Herzog’s film he is shown in a lower corner of a darkened frame, never able to move past a mast that divides the screen in half. Even in his seeming release Nosferatu is as much an oppressed victim as the return of the repressed. At certain points Herzog employs a hand-held camera, as when Jonathan traverses the Borgo Pass, giving these scenes an aura of immediacy and realism due to the technique’s indelible association with the concrete immediacy of cinemaverité documentary – quite unlike the supernatural ethereality suggested by Murnau’s use of fast motion and negative imagery. Where Murnau’s Nosferatu dissolves through camera magic into nothing, Herzog’s vampire experiences acute physical duress: the light blinds him, he struggles to catch his breath, and then crashes in a seizure to the floor, where he expires unceremoniously in a foetal position, his body remaining there, a desiccated husk. In the novel, Dracula is killed by the wild work of a group of men aptly described by Gregory Waller as a noble community of male hunters (35–41). In Murnau’s version, however, the vampire is killed through the sacrifice of a woman who is pure at heart – an idea only alluded to in the novel. In both films Nosferatu is killed because the woman sacrifices herself, keeping the vampire with her until dawn. In Murnau, the bright morning sunshine that kills Dracula may also bring with it the promise of spiritual rebirth; but in Herzog’s version, Mina sacrifices herself to no avail, for Harker takes his place as a vampire. The brute fact of physical existence – and by extension, the world of reason and science represented by Van Helsing – forever anchors spiritual vision with feet of clay in the form of self-consciousness. Tellingly, Herzog’s Van Helsing is treated as a criminal rather than hero by the remains of society, whose hegemonic power has itself already disintegrated. Dressed like the pallbearers carrying the plague’s numerous victims of Nosferatu’s rats, Van Helsing makes the wrong diagnosis, concluding that Jonathan has a «brain fever» and that Mina is suffering from an overworked imagination. All the institutionalized forces of dominant ideology – those represented by Van Helsing – are subverted rather than endorsed. As soon as social order breaks down, people begin revelling in the street, the rigid lines of pallbearers seen previously in a high angle shot now indulging in an aimless hedonism that for Stoker was represented by the vampire, not by humanity. The two films take a different slant on the binary opposition that informs the vampire story and the horror genre generally. Stoker endorses normality although he is genuinely lured by the monstrous; Murnau translates this sexual tension into 174

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cinematic terms, while Herzog shifts this sexual monstrousness to an existential anguish. Wood has argued that «it is time for our culture to abandon Dracula and pass beyond him, relinquishing him to social history […] The Count has served his purpose by insisting that the repressed cannot be kept down, that it must always surface and strive to be recognized. But we cannot purge him of his connotations of evil – the evil that Victorian society projected onto sexuality and by which our contemporary notions of sexuality are still contaminated.» (378)

Wood may be rather utopian in his wish to jettison Dracula from popular mythology, for we are all contaminated by his plague to one degree or another; but Wood is certainly correct in observing that as long as desire and guilt commingle in our minds, Dracula will remain with us. For this reason, Stoker’s story is likely to continue to appeal – to provide, in T.S. Eliot’s sense, a tradition within which individual talents have been able to flourish, like the vampire himself on native soil – and inspire yet further adaptations.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, Ed. and trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Print. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Clarens, Carlos. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: Capricorn, 1968. Print. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Eisner, Lotte. Murnau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Print. Jones, Ernest. On the Nightmare. New York: Liveright, 1971. Print. Kawin, Bruce. «Nosferatu.» Film Quarterly 33: 3 (Spring 1980): 45–47. Print. Kerouac, Jack. «Nosferatu.» In Focus on the Horror Film. Ed. Roy Huss and T.J. Ross. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972. 63–66. Print. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. Print. McNally, Raymond T., and Radu Florescu. In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dra-

cula and the Vampire Legends. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973. Print. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders. London: Verso, 1983. Print. Pope, Alexander. «Essay on Man: Epistle II.» Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope. Ed. Aubrey Williams. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Print. Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print. Sobchack, Vivian. «The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness.» Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 258–285. Print. Stacy, Jan and Ryder Syvertsen. The Great Book of Movie Villains: A Guide to the Screen’s Meanies, Tough Guys and Bullies. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1984. Print. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Signet, 1965. Print. – Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Print. Waller, Gregory. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn 175

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of the Dead. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Print. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. In Seven Famous Novels by H.G. Wells. New York: Knopf, 1934. Print. Williams, Linda. «Body Genres: Gender, Genre, Excess.» Film Genre Reader IV. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. 159–177. Print.

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Wood, Robin. «Burying the Undead: The Obsolescence of Count Dracula.» The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 364–378. Print. – Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Print.

Andreas Stuhlmann

The Melodrama Excessive Styles, Transcultural Narratives, Global Tears

The texts in this volume are looking at the hybridisation of genres as a paradigm of cultural globalisation. There is a set of implicit hypotheses at play: a) there are not only such things as ‹hybrid films›, but there is also a tendency of ‹hybridisation› that affects the idea of genre; b) this tendency works as a model, a pattern for globalisation, and, maybe least controversial, c) there is a strain of the mainly political and socio-economical trend of globalisation that can be labelled as ‹cultural› governed by paradigms such as hybrid genre film. The case study for further discussion of these hypotheses will be the melodrama.

«It’s the Economy, Stupid» – Globalisation and its Discontent Starting with that last claim, Joseph Stiglitz defined globalisation as «the closer integration of the countries and people of the world [...] brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge and (to a lesser extent) people across international borders». (9)

While in addition to this basic definition David Held and others have distinguished between an economic, environmental, political, and a cultural globalisation, the primacy of economics still dominates the globalisation discourse (see Held et al.). Arjun Appadurai however rather emphasises the «disjuncture and difference» in 177

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the global cultural economy, because he sees productive tensions at work between cultural homogenisation and heterogenisation. Even though all the factors Stiglitz described have affected film production around the globe, the genre of a film does not feature on the same level of discourse. Even in the emerging research area of production studies (Mayer/Banks/Caldwell), genres play a lesser role. The focus on globalisation may emphasise the reification or commodification of film as a product, as it appears in the current debate around «convergence culture» (Jenkins) and the circulation of goods, images and ideas. Steve Neale has observed that «genres [...] exist within the context of a set of economic relations and practices» (Genre 51), they work as signifiers in communication between studios, distributors, critics and audiences (see Altman). Again, following Appadurai, it is of more importance to focus on the ‹disorganised› nature of the global economy with its asynchronous and contrary movements of people, capital, media, technology, and ideas. As the choice of genre is primarily one of many complex aesthetic and therefore highly individual decisions in the artistic process of film making (Neale, Genre 52), genre remains an element of heterogenisation within ‹transnational cinema› (see Higbee/Lim). Transnational cinema studies look at global networks of influence and cooperation, but these networks are primarily intellectual and artistic and less technological or economic. If we assume that Hollywood played a dominating role in the development of a range of film genres within a global art of cinema, the processes of filmmaking and the ways in which the industries and even single directors work (see Grant), remain very much different. So genre is not a commodity that is globally traded or distributed but rather a concept that is adapted locally to national filmmaking tradition. Its ‹glocalisation›, thus, is of central interest here.

The Paradigm of Hybridity Whether ‹genres›, or more precisely, their hybridisation, can be seen as a paradigm of globalisation also depends on the definition of paradigmatic. Nothing less than to change our current set of model problems as well as the structure of the question we are asking, and therefore by Thomas Kuhn’s definition a paradigm shift (viii), is what Bruno Latour had in mind, when he adopted the biological concept of ‹hybridity›. For Latour, ‹hybridity› is a result of another paradigm shift, the much attacked partition, or Great Divide, of seventeenth century origin painstakingly isolating the study of the natural world from the study of the socio-cultural world. The creation of such binary oppositions, nature and culture, intellect and drive, enlightenment and barbarism, etc. became a constituent, yet vigorously critiqued foundation of Modernity. Latour views this partition as a myth: «the modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies» (34). Starting with his analysis of the so-called AIDS-virus, he shows us 178

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that the partition is arbitrary, contradictory to the reality of life and academic discourse and that in this sense we have indeed never been modern. He refers to two sets of practices both employed to enforce as well as bridge or undermine the partition and therefore creating hybrids: purification and translation. In his concept of purification Latour, in my view, follows earlier anthropological research such as Mary Douglas’s fascinating study Purity and Danger from 1966. In her book Douglas traces the rise of concepts of hygiene and purity in Western religions and the growing fear of impurity and disease the West projected onto ‹savage cultures›. Her primary example for a culture that both propelled purity and became an object of frenzied fear of impurity is Jewish culture. Latour’s concept of translation on the other hand very much echoes Walter Benjamin when he argues that «the question of translation consists of combining two hitherto different interests [...] to form a single goal [...]. Even if the balance is equal, neither of the parties will be able to arrive at [their] original goal. There is a drift, a slippage, a displacement which, depending on the case, will be tiny or infinitely large.» (88)

The concepts of translation and purification help to sharpen the term ‹hybridity› which is currently broadly employed across disciplines. Neither in the sense of the biological term of hybridity that refers to a breeding across species, nor in Latour’s metaphorical sense of bridging the Great Divide, the term hybridity makes sense for a blending or a (re)combination of genres, although the idea to combine features across historical genre boundaries is and has been very fruitful in film history (see Jaffe).

Hybrid Films, Not Hybrid Genres Robert Stam’s cunning question whether «genres [are] really ‹out there› in the world or [whether] they [are] really the construction of analysts», summarises the «perennial doubts» plaguing genre theory since the 1970s (14). The question echoes the «empiricist dilemma» described by Andrew Tudor that appears each time we are trying to chart «a varied and flexible structure, a thematically fertile and ambiguous world of historical material shot through with archetypal elements» (Tudor 17). Neale has observed that genre can be approached from three different points of view: of the industry, of the broader socio-cultural environment and of audience understanding and response (Genre and Hollywood 2). For forty years, Hollywood’s studio system created a stable environment which accounted for continuity within this triangle of expectations in the development of genre films. Tracing both a historic destabilisation of genre cinema and the studio system and a paradigm shift in Anglo-American film studies since the 1970s paying less attention to auteurs, Neale supports Staiger’s claim that «the ‹genre purity› thesis is 179

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fallacious both theoretically and historically» («Hybrid or Inbread» 186). He has argued that «the repertoire of generic conventions available at any point in time is always in play rather than simply being re-played» (Neale, Genre and Hollywood 219). Genres therefore exist as mere clusters of aesthetic properties, which are constantly recombined (Stam 14). Every film relates to categories of genre, adapts them, and modifies them and by this way contributes to a typology of genre that is continuously re-written. But to equate this instability to the fashionable notion of ‹hybridity›, as Neale has suggested, is also fallacious. With every film the whole ‹genetic code› is re-written, not just ‹genes› combined across species, and in that broad yet ambiguous form, many films, but not genres, are ‹hybrids›. And, maybe more importantly, Neale, Rick Altman and others argue convincingly that each film adopts a cluster of characteristics from different genres and is therefore antecedently ‹hybrid› in nature. As we group such ‹genetically impure›, i.e. hybrid films into genres, we increase the fragility of the term. Therefore I agree with Staiger who has rejected broad claims like Jim Collin’s attempt to label all of ‹Post-Fordian›, i.e. ‹New› Hollywood as «ironically hybrid», as «a particularly pernicious characterization» (Collins; Staiger, «Hybrid or Inbread» 186). Looking at the melodrama from the industry’s perspective, it will be addressed as a transnational cinematic storytelling tradition shared by a certain number of directors with a cosmopolitan agenda and diverse cultural backgrounds. Audiences expect from melodramas emotional conflicts larger than life, relating to their own cultural background.

Melodrama: The Cinema of Douglas Sirk as Point of Departure As this short introduction has shown, we are travelling on a multi-layered map of film theory as we discuss the melodrama in terms of genre, hybridity, and globalisation. Historically, melodramatic narratives are part of all cultures, we can candidly speak of a «melodramatic tradition» (Mercer/Shingler 78). The Greek term designated a specific tradition of theatrical forms in which ‹melos›, song, and verse were combined and music was played to accentuate and enhance the emotional effect of the performed text. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it covered a whole range of dramatic forms which included operatic elements and orchestral or piano music: «Melodrama exists as a cross-cultural form with a complex, two-hundred-year history. [...] It refers not only to type of aesthetic practice but also to a way of viewing the world. [...] And the phenomena it constructs range beyond art and entertainment to include religious and civic ceremony, politics and informational forms such as broadcast news or the popular press.» (Gledhill 1)

Especially in England and France in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century the term ‹melodrama› then came to designate an excessive mode of expression to articu180

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late moral conflicts as a result of a shift in the concept of sensibility. Making use of lavish decorations and set mostly in bourgeois households, melodramas focus on conflicts between fate, social order and the pursuit of individual happiness (Brook, Melodramatic Imagination). Long before film critics and historians started to use the term ‹melodrama› for a specific corpus of films, quite different films were labelled and sold as melodramas, ranging from romantic dramas to historical costume drama to thrillers to domestic dramas or juvenile delinquency films (Mercer/Shingler 4): nearly all of ‹Fordian› Hollywood genre cinema from the age of the studio system was in part based on principle structural elements of the melodrama (Elsaesser, «Tales of Sound and Fury» 12–15). The corpus of films that has informed the notion of the ‹melodrama› genre is a distinct «set of films with highly charged emotional issues, characterized by an extravagantly dramatic register and overtly emotional form of address» (Mercer/Shingler 114) by directors like George Cukor, Elia Kazan, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophüls, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk or William Wyler. Sirk, whose melodramatic oeuvre has served as a role model for directors and critics alike, stressed the importance of mythology for all cultural production. In a late interview he pointed out that his favoured narrative model for melodramas was an archaic circle of life that even predated Greek culture exemplified by an Assyrian basrelief of Death as a Strider he had seen in a museum as a teenager. The circular narrative structure undermines the traditional dramatic trajectory. At the centre of the melodrama we consistently find female lead characters in distress, caused by a family conflict, the fragility of love against social conventions, loss of a partner or children. To look beyond the narrow boundaries of genre, I will address the conflicting descriptions of the melodrama: «style, mode, rhetoric, aesthetic, sensibility» (Mercer/Shingler 115). The category of ‹style› comprises four central criteria, the characters, the mise-en-scène, gestures and music. As far as the characters are concerned, we see a predominance of bourgeois family settings as the nucleus of the melodramatic conflict (Elsaesser, «Tales of Sound and Fury» 13). But, as Laura Mulvey has shown, there are two different narrative points of view: «One is coloured by a female protagonist’s dominating point of view which acts as a source of identification. The other examines the tensions in the family and between sexes and generations; here, although women play a central part, their point of view is not analysed and does not initiate the drama.» (76)

Women’s demand in melodramas for equality, education, and transformation is a ‹typically American› quest for moral perfectionism, yet they remain isolated and marriage for them is everything but liberation (see Cavell). Since the melodramatic mode does not allow for psychological introspection, the actors focus on gestures, poses and facial expressions:

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«The tellingly impotent gesture, the social gaffe, the hysterical outburst replaces any more directly liberating or self-annihilating action, and the cathartic violence of a shoot-out or a chase becomes an inner violence, often one which the characters turn against themselves.» (Elsaesser «Tales of Sound and Fury» 7)

The mise-en-scène, including camera and lighting as well as decorations and costumes, is of equal importance in expressing emotions; hence the mise-en-scène is often fraught with visual signifiers resulting in pre-modern excess or «Hollywood Baroque» (see Thompson; Schatz 246). Especially Sirk’s melodramas with their sumptuous sets and lustrous Technicolor have been labelled as excessive. This excess, their obvious irony and their ambiguous endings have been viewed as elements of a European infusion for the American tradition of the genre and Sirk’s ability to walk the fine line between the satirical, the soap operatic and the dramatic became his trademark in Hollywood. In the field of film music scores, Hollywood melodrama had benefitted from a constant import of European composers, arrangers and conductors, all well versed in the continental Romantic ‹programme music› to amplify the emotions exhibited on screen (see Kalinak; Flinn). Sirk usually employed classical music, like Brahms and Schubert for All That Haven Allows, but often mixed it with tailor-made scores by studio composers. The question whether melodrama is a ‹sensibility› addresses the emotional engagement of the viewers. A key feature of the reception is its ability to move its predominantly female (but also its male, heterosexual or queer) audiences and in particular to make them cry. Through the ‹rhetoric of film melodrama› (see Elsaesser, «Tales of Sound and Fury»; Gledhill) certain pathos formulas function as tropes for compassion. The audience judges less the moral questions at stake, but rather sympathises with the protagonists, which makes the sensibility of the melodrama akin to that of ‹camp› (Mercer/Shingler 105–107). The crying is a mute, unarticulated response to the visual rhetoric at work, which Neale called «the pleasure of being touched and giving way to tears» (Neale, «Melodrama and Tears» 6). But the fantasy of a happy ending can always be «re-engaged, re-articulated, and perhaps finally fulfilled in the next film, the next melodrama» (6).

Genre Adaptation as Intercultural Translation Hollywood’s and especially Sirk’s melodramas have served globally as a model for directors who aimed to adopt the blueprint of an internationally successful cinematic visual style and combine it with national and local styles and sensibilities as well as individual traits. Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted All That Heaven Allows (1955) for Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats Soul (1974), Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002) pays tribute to elements of Sirk’s style. Yet for 182

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the purpose here, I will focus on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), Todo sobre mi madre (1999) by Pedro Almodóvar, Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head-on (2004) and Wong Kar-wai’s Fa yeung nin wa/In The Mood for Love (2000). To address the individual recombination of generic features in each film, I propose the concept of translation. Not only does it feature in Latour’s concept of hybridity, Linda Hutcheon (16) also refers to the analogy of translation to the process of adaptation with reference to Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin «translation is a mode» (70), a performative production of meaning through appropriation of the pre-text. While Latour values translation as mode of hybridity, Benjamin emphasises difference. For him the term translation refers to both the process and the result, stressing what we now call ‹polyphony›, ‹dialogicity› or ‹intertextuality› within every text. He therefore sees the translation as a sovereign supplement to the ‹original›. The films discussed here translate the style and sensibility of the ‹original› Hollywood melodrama into new contexts, while explicitly addressing cultural tensions and differences.

Transcultural Adaptations: Tradition, Myth, Style and Sensibility – Four Case Studies Our journey across the map of transcultural melodrama will be both transnational and diachronic. All four directors are commonly seen as auteurs, what makes their relation with true genre film somewhat thorny (see Staiger, «Authorship Approaches»). In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, mythology plays a much stronger role than in Sirk’s cinema. Already some of his early films have a strong melodramatic element e.g. Mamma Roma (1962), a great example for mutual stylistic influences between Italian Neorealismo, Hollywood genre film and Pasolini’s own auteur style. Only five years later, he embarked on the creation of five films dealing with ritual violence, a trilogy of Edipo re/Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea and Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana/Notes for an African Oresteia (1975) based on themes and motifs from Greek mythology, while Teorema/ Theorem (1968) and Porcile/Pigsty (1969) focus on Christianity. All five films combine elements of the traditions of anthropological film and melodrama. Pasolini’s «mythical cycle» (Casarino 27) aims to transform «faith, myth and collective mythology» into a larger single narrative (Pasolini qtd. in Greene 70). In an attempt to create a cinematic form that could not be reduced to an easily consumable narrative, Pasolini explored a «language of cinema» that would employ the immediacy of primitive language and an often silent flow of images pushed beyond their narrative function to create visual and emotional excess (Deleuze; Pasolini 167). Pasolini labelled this excess as heretic, in as far as it refused to contribute to any integrated social system, be it religious, economical, or political. Typical 183

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for both this «language of cinema» and the tradition of Hollywood melodrama that employs archaic symbolism in its own way, Pasolini strips the story of Medea bare of all ‹well-tempered decorum›, and even though he claims to go back to the classical sources i.e. to Euripides, he strays from the tradition and resorts to the Italian adaptation of a German version of Luigi Cherubini’s French language melodramatic opera Medee with a libretto by Francois-Benoit Hoffman based again on Euripides’s tragedies – obviously a true generic, linguistic and stylistic hybrid. He sets his version in an archaic time in rough, almost hostile environments. Medea’s homeland of Colchis is placed in Turkey’s Goreme district, a landscape shaped by ashes and lava, eroded by wind and water with extensive cave settlements carved into the mountains. In the Syrian city of Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world, Pasolini shot the outer views of Corinth. The massive geometrical shapes of the colossal walls of the mediaeval citadel contrast with the organic roundness of the Goreme landscape. The static camera, the frequent use of panoramic longshots and the way he traces his characters in them, are reminiscent of the theatrical mise-en-scène in Eisenstein or the anthropological films of Flaherty or a world we see in westerns.

1 Medea

While Pasolini’s prostitute Mamma Roma is very much a ‹national popular› figure in the Gramscian sense (Testa 184), his Medea is a divisive character. In all her ambivalence she shows passion and cruelty, strength and fragility and displays feelings of isolation, loneliness, fear and estrangement. Sacrifice as a leitmotif is tied to the subversion of gender roles. Medea is a priestess, keeper of the Golden Fleece Jason comes to steal, a sophisticated, learned woman and solitary figure by birth and vocation in a male dominated tribal culture with barbaric rites. 184

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Pasolini’s Medea is Maria Callas who had retired as the world’s most celebrated opera singer two years earlier and had reprised the role of Cherubini’s Medee at the peak of her career numerous times between 1957 and 1962. Pasolini creates his female lead as a melodramatic heroine in both the operatic and the cinematic tradition and places her in stark visual contrasts within her surroundings. Her artificially white skin, her luxurious jewellery and lavish, aristocratic garments, tailored after actual designs for her operatic gowns by her favourite stage designer Piero Tosi (Tirelli 9), contrast the brown skin and the sketchy costumes of her people based on a crude mix of folklore from the Balkans, the Middle East and Northern Africa. Confined to her ceremonial role and a lonely life between court and temple in prehistoric cave dwellings, the priestess Medea presides over gruesome cannibalistic human sacrifices Pasolini adopted from anthropological research by Mircea Eliade and the Cambridge Ritualists School. Both the symbolism of the sacrifice bound to a cross-like structure and the practice that the villagers both consume his flesh and blood and uses them to fertilise their crops, shows obvious parallels to the Christian sacrament of communion. For the score of the film Pasolini chose tribal North African music e.g. of the Berber, a rough sound, defying the patterns of Western soundtrack tradition. The same contrast also separates Medea from Jason. While her strong will and determination contrast with his playful inertness, the Herculean body of Giuseppe Gentile, an Italian bronze medallist of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico, contrasts with Callas’s slender, almost fragile features. Playing across this professional performer, Gentile is just one of a majority of lay actors Pasolini regularly cast in his films to achieve the expressive gestures, the pathos formulas of emotional immediacy he pursued. The Greek prince, a stranger in her homeland, seems like a perfect partner and her unconditional love for him prompts her to sacrifice her own brother to escape with him. But neither in Jason’s home country of Iolcos, nor on their journey can Medea’s love alleviate the despair of being a stranger. Eventually the Corinthians welcome the foreign hero as a suitable future king and husband to their princess Glauce, but Medea is seen as a threat, a witch and cast out. The most prominent and one of the most emotional scenes of the film is the destruction of Glauce which Pasolini presents in two versions. The first follows the traditional legend, and focuses on the conflict between Medea and Glauce. Medea sends her rival one of her extravagant priestess gowns poisoned to kill her. As Glauce tries it on, her whole body catches fires. The second sequence shows Glauce putting on the robe and realising that she, just like Medea, has become an object in a patriarchal power play. As she looks in the mirror she cries, acknowledging the parallelism of their fates. She runs to the edge of Corinth’s steep fortifications and leaps to her death. Enraged at Jason’s betrayal Medea kills first her sons and then herself by setting their home on fire.

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At the beginning of Todo sobre mi madre, we see Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse and former amateur actrice, as she prepares dinner in the kitchen, while her son Esteban (Eloy Azorin) watches TV and urges her to hurry, since the film they want to watch together is about to begin. It is Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) starring Bette Davis, a topical melodrama about the struggle between two women. The film is one of many pretexts for Almodóvar to sets his intertextual and intermedial play into motion: the old black and white film is remediated on the TV screen and that screen doubled almost like in a mirror, on the cinema screen. The intense colours of the kitchen’s interior or Manuela’s costumes are reminiscent of Sirk’s bright Technicolor; also the style of the clothes and the hair, the mise-enscène, the camera angles, the artificial lighting reference directly Sirk’s work. Both the serenity and intimacy of a few precious minutes and the air of disaster looming are typical for the management of emotional engagement in a melodrama. Five minutes into the film, Esteban is dead, run over in front of a theatre by a car while chasing his idol, the actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) for an autograph. But Huma is driven off in her courtesy car after her stage performance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, not to look back. The scene is a rendition of the exposition of yet another Hollywood melodrama, Opening Night, John Cassavetes’s 1977 almost cynical take on the melodrama. The typical melodramatic theme of the traumatic death of a child connects this film to Pasolini’s, yet Almodóvar ties this death to the survival of another person, an anonymous man in La Coruna who receives Esteban’s heart as a transplant. Almodóvar combines the circular structure of melodramatic narrative with the teleological structure of the classic road movie, here the circle of life and death with the mother’s journey from Madrid to Barcelona and her quest for consolation and peace. Explaining his stylistic choice and the genre mix typical for his own brand of postmodern film, Almodóvar said in a 2004 interview: «I think that right now it’s difficult to tackle a genre as such. It’s already difficult to believe in a genre, to make it authentic. Inevitably, a distance, which in my opinion is insurmountable, exists between the genre and all of us. When you pick a genre you do it purely as a stylistic choice. I think that what works best now is a mixture of genres, where each moment is panned as a function of the style that is best suited for it. On the other hand, I love melodramas, especially the most outrageous ones. The Mexican Buñuel or those by Douglas Sirk, a marvellous director.» (qtd. in Willoquet-Maricondi 28)

Almodóvar’s films don’t just simply defy generic conventions, the trademark «una película de Pedro Almodóvar» has become a genre in itself and this strategic branding works within different distribution and exhibition circuits (Allison 122; Rodriguez Ortega 45). «The great advantage of melodrama is that it is a very open genre.

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2 Todo sobre mi madre

In which you can put a lot of things and which you can approach in many different ways», Almodóvar continues (28). Like all of Almodóvar’s films, Todo sobre mi madre employs and deconstructs genre by weaving a dense net of references and reminiscences that supplies his main characters with fluid, quasi-factual identities borrowed from the movies (including the director’s own), theatrical and social roles and destabilising the generic conventions. The various cinematic and literary pre-texts constantly reference each other and this mode of reflection is the fundamental principle of the film’s architecture as scenes, settings, voices are mirrored and translated, creating multi-layered narratives and identities which are continuously constructed, destroyed and reconstructed throughout the movie. Costumes, make up, hairstyles work as masquerade and signifiers of new identities. Both Esteban, the transvestite Lola, and Agrado, the transsexual, both create new roles by performance. Especially Lola who fathered both the sons of Manuela and the young nun Rosa (both named Esteban) and also infected her with HIV, learns to accept his role as a father in the face of Rosa’s death and his own demise (Kinder 250–260). While Sirk employed irony and semiotic excess under the auspices of the Hays Code and the studio system to criticise the moral hypocrisy within American society, Almodóvar attacks the ethical and political failing of Spanish society much more robustly and prefers the form of tragicomedy he discovered in the surrealist excess of Buñuel and other South American artists. The complex influence of Latin

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America on the development of Post-Franco Spain, on the new formation of Spanish national identity on Spanish cinema in general and Almodóvar in particular is subject to on-going scrutiny (see Kinder). The eclectic mix of music for the soundtracks of Almodóvar’s films reflects this influence, as they contain not just globally successful composers like Alberto Iglesias, Ennio Morricone or Ryuichi Sakamoto, but a number of Latin American musicians like Caetano Veloso or Chavela Vargas (Rodriguez Ortega 45). He relates the wide social acceptance for the work of the newly founded Organización Nacional de Trasplantes to the state of Spanish identity. Ryan Prout (43– 62) has explored the idea of the patchwork national identity through transplant narratives and its similarity to organ donation as social ritual of gift-exchange. Focusing on the theme of transplantation and the figure of the transvestite/transsexual, Carla Marcantonio has reminded us of what Brook called the «aesthetics of embodiment» (see Brook, «Melodrama, Body, Revolution»): the body is «the place where melodramatic meaning both stakes its battles and from which it emanates» (Marcantonio 159). If Esteban’s death sets emotion into motion, Fatih Akin Gegen die Wand/HeadOn (2003) sets «identity in motion» (Akin in Kilb/Korte). Akin adopted this phrase, coined in the context of 1991 Crown Heights Riots, for a lecture he gave in Istanbul in 2007. The film tells the love story of Sibel (Sibel Kekili) and Cahit (Birol Ünel). To escape like Medea from the strict moral codes at home, the young Turkish woman born and raised in Germany enters a sham marriage with an older countryman who spends his days in a haze of alcohol and drugs. Despite a shared heritage juxtaposed, like the main characters in Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, by differences in age, gender, language ability, social ties, and interests, they both also subvert stereotypes of Turkish immigrants and show the conflicting layers of identity of the second generation. Similar to Pasolini, Akin’s ensemble brings acclaimed actors from both Germany and Turkey like Ünel, Catrin Striebeck, Meltem Cumbul or Hermann Lause, together with amateur actors. While Deniz Göktürk is referencing Sarita Malik’s claim, that the cinema of second generation immigrant filmmakers was moving from the ‹cinema of duty› to the ‹pleasures of hybridity› with Turkish-German film makers having found some «Turkish delight» in the pleasures of cultural hybridity instead of focusing on the social and political problems (see Malik; Göktürk), Akin’s films not fully support that claim. Thirty years after Pasolini’s Medea, the binary oppositions between the ‹Self› and the ‹Other› based on the markers race, class and gender are collapsing; all over Europe migrants have become part of the national self, creating ‹hybrid› or ‹layered› identities and putting identity into motion (see Elsaesser, European Cinema). Yet, what begins in Gegen die Wand as a merely convenient arrangement between complete strangers, with all its comic relief of ‹Turkish delight› gradually turns into a tragedy. The film follows the restless lives of its protagonists, through Hamburg’s Turkish communities in Altona to St. Pauli’s subculture, to Istanbul and beyond to Mersin on the Medi188

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3 Gegen die Wand

terranean coast. Not only Akin’s characters but also the urban spaces they inhabit reveal layered identities, making them places of «double occupancy» (Elsaesser, European Cinema 109). Just as personal identity can be seen as having layers of diverse, conflicting experiences and impressions, creating an inhomogeneous identity in motion, all three sea ports with their multi-ethnic, multilingual neighbourhoods, have always been places of diaspora, of multi-layered passage (Georgiou). Even though Akin retains the classical act structure of the Western film drama, his main interest lays with the excessive amour fou and the dramatically enlarged emotional conflicts typically for transcultural melodrama from Hollywood to Turkish and Indian cinema. His visual style on the other hand is mainly influenced by British and American social dramas like Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) or the early films of Martin Scorsese. Like the early Scorsese, he also prefers a restricted mise-en-scène, almost reminiscent of TV formats, with short takes instead of lavish long shots. Authentic locations with all their limitations mainly replace the omnipotent story worlds of the studio. Instead of elaborate costumes, jewellery and furnishings typical for Hollywood melodrama as well as Mumbai’s Hindi cinema, we see discounter clothes, items from pop cultural merchandise and tattoos. Akin relies less on the camera, but rather on fast cut montage, with stark contrasts between scenes and in reference to video clip aesthetics. In the central scene in which Cahit drives his car head-on into the wall of a tunnel is cut to the rhythm of I feel you by Depeche Mode. Like Almodóvar, Akin combines in both Gegen die Wand and the second part of his «Love, Death, the Devil»-trilogy, Auf der anderen Seite/The 189

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Edge of Heaven (2007), the circular melodramatic structure with the teleology of the road-movie. While nearly all his protagonists eventually succumb to the perils of love, death and the devil to find shelter in rather picayune circumstances, these shelters are never meant to last. The characters are driven forward by unresolved issues within themselves never to get ‹home› (Berghahn). While Gegen die Wand employs raw, drastic gestures of rebellion, like Sibel slashing her wrists, Auf der anderen Seite shows a different, more opulent stylistic register, more refined gestures of pathos; especially when Susanne, played by Hanna Schygulla, one of the iconic faces of Fassbinder’s melodramas, mourns the death of her daughter Lotte. Akin accents these conflicting layers of cultural identity through the use of music: In Gegen die Wand he samples Depeche Mode and the Sisters of Mercy as well as Selim Sesler’s Romani orchestra starring Idil Üner as lead singer which he shows in front of the Bosporus playing Turkish folk songs between the acts of the drama (see Siewert; Kosta). The songs often feature as sound bridges that connect scenes acoustically that are visually arranged in montage conflict. This brings further narrative coherence to the film, but also retains an element of humour and surprise. Especially in relation to the tradition of melodrama, the sound bridges continue to destabilise the traditional juxtaposition of indigenous and diasporic identities of people and places. This became the topic of Akin’s 2005 documentary about Istanbul, Crossing the Bridge, which features among others Sesler’s orchestra again, yet in a completely different setting. In the Mood for Love, a 2000 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, also follows the steps of two protagonists, Chan Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan, played by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. Set in 1962 Hong Kong amongst displaced Shanghainese in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, they are just neighbours by chance until they find out that their respective spouses are having an affair. Out of hurt, curiosity and loneliness, they start to date. But even though their marriages are doomed to fail, they don’t enter into a relationship. They are confronted with infidelity and loss on a personal level and stifling constraints of social conformity and choking moral hypocrisy among the exiled Shanghainese community and the wider Hong Kong society. Wong uses the music and set design to recreate the atmosphere of 1960s Hong Kong. Like Almodóvar, Wong employs US- and Latin American musical traditions to create a multi-layered audiovisual tapestry (Rodriguez Ortega 45; Yeh/Hu 42). The original Chinese title of the film Fa veung nin wa, literally «the age of blossoms» or «the flowery years», a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love, is taken from a song of the same name by Zhou Xuan from 1946. As we watch the paths of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow intertwine ever more closely, we hear the film’s leitmotif, a lamenting violin theme originally composed by Shigeru Umebayashi for Seijun Suzuki’s biopic 190

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Yumeji (1991) played by the Moldavian tzigane violinist Sergei Trofanov. For the Western release, Wong had originally chosen Brian Ferry’s version of the McHugh/ Fields song I’m in the Mood for Love from 1935, which does not appear in the film, but Ferry’s velvet crooning and the song’s Latin rhythm connect well to the Nat King Cole songs Aquellos Ojos Verdes and Quizas, Quizas, Quizas which are both featured very prominently in the film. «I always have to look for some music before we start shooting the film», Wong said in a 2001 interview in Cannes, «We build the whole rhythm of the film so Chris Doyle knows how to dance with the camera. [...] Chris Doyle is like a Jazz musician. [...] For him, he needs to know the rhythm and the color of the film. The color is not actually red or blue, I’s his feeling towards the film. [...] [William Chang] creates the space and then we react to the space. The way William works, he creates all the existing light sources of the film. So when Chris walks into the space, he knows how to play with the lights and how to place his camera. It’s a very organic process.» (Brunette 130f.; see also Doyle, «Don’t Try for Me, Argentina»)

As we watch Chan descend the staircase of the apartment building to go to work or to fetch some soup after a long day at the office, her gait is perfectly synchronised to the rhythm of the violin through the use of slow-motion. This accents a certain artificiality of her character that distances her from her friends, family and also her lover. Working allegedly without a fixed script and based primarily on improvisation and guided by musical leitmotifs, Wong’s films are less structured by the rhythm of premeditated camera movements, but receive their narrative structure and flow in the cutting room. Even though Wong stresses that he aims for a certain naturalism and tried to «recreate the actuality» of the time (Brunette 86), the film performs a quality of synthetic estrangement. Not only do Doyle and Wong choose camera angles that just as often accord to Hollywood conventions, as they offend them. The framing violates harmonious proportions, omits essential parts of the characters, cuts in decorations and creates multiple frames and convoluted compositions. Doyle creates indirect, impersonal or distanced views of the events, by shooting through doors and curtains or reflecting windows and mirrors – exposing the presence of the camera. The combination of natural lighting, cold daylight mixed with the warmth of an abundance of lamps on wall, tables and ceilings, with non-diegetic key lighting adds to this effect (see Blank 197–204). Because most of the interiors burst with an excess of commodities, they mostly remain dead and cold. They appear dissociated from the mundane activities of the protagonists and their plain lines of dialogue as dysfunctional props of a wrong life. Yet, in some shots a disproportionate, beguiling materiality found in the quasi palpable surface characteristics of the noble coolness of jade or porcelain, or the soft resilience of a carpet, the almost lascivious movement of a curtain blowing in the wind, substitutes for the complete absence of touch and physical nearness of the 191

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4 In the Mood for Love

protagonists (Doyle, «Die Farben der Emotion» 57). The frequent use of clocks and watches indicates the rush and hurry of a westernised economy and the fleeting of time, as indicated in the Chinese title, but curiously we never learn of a precise date or season. Like in Medea and in Sirk, Chan’s forty-six rather stylish colourful Qipao or Cheongsam dresses, one for each new scene she appears in, add to the notion of estrangement. These simple, yet luxurious and sumptuous dresses create a contrast to the sober office environment of her workplace, yet the floral patterns on the dresses reappear in curtains, wall coverings, lampshades and carpets and tie the female figure to the household environment, reiterating the notion of the ‹golden cage› so prominent in Sirk’s films. The language of gestures expresses «primary emotions» (Rayns 14), but again they seem rehearsed or borrowed, maybe even from the movies. This shows that Wong translates different cinematic traditions and styles into a film that portrays a specific historical moment; from Paul Fejos’s 1928 Lonesome to Fei Mu’s 1948 Xiăochéng zhī chūn/Spring in a Small City, from Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse/Eclipse (1962) to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo (see Teo). Wong’s use of light and shadow is as much a reference to film noir or early Hollywood melodrama as his colors, «the dark and velvety blacks, the piercing reds and diaphanous blues» (McGavin), and the use of mirrors are a direct reverence to Sirk. Rayns has called the rhythm, in which the themes and motifs elegantly interlace «a gorgeously sensual valse triste that circles the themes of fidelity and sincerity in relationships before resolving itself into a requiem for a lost time in its values» (Rayns 14). Wong’s lovers enjoy a westernised lifestyle of individualism popular in Hong Kong, while in Shanghai and the rest of the mainland China these values are depre192

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ciated. The film on the one hand celebrates the Western concept of fulfilled romantic love promoted by Western cinema. But on the other hand very much in the melancholic tradition of Western Romanticism, just as well as of Eastern ethics of honour and pride, love cannot flourish on betrayal. As much as the young westernised urban professionals detest the old fashioned life around them, they also long for traditional family values and the film laments the disintegration of the traditional extended family as a side effect of the dynamisation of modern times. Like Akin, Wong draws on the pleasures and fallacies of cultural hybridity within a specific generation and connects this visual style with themes and motifs of Chinese cinema, like the celebration of the family – including all the tragedies – expressed in traditional family meals and evenings of mah-jongg. Much of this hybridity is due to the nature of the city. Hong Kong, an old sea port with a long tradition of migration and diasporic existence, is more a character than a mere backdrop in the picture, a place where different cultures, journeys of men and the traffic of goods intersect, where therefore past and present can collapse. While the film allows for viewers to identify with feelings of betrayal and hurt, it makes compassion and sympathy for its characters difficult, because the film maintains a trans-individual stance that is less postmodern but rather analogue to the archaic cyclical logic of melodrama in Sirk.

Conclusion The melodrama is, no doubt, a global phenomenon. Even though individual melodramatic traditions are closely tied to the development of the individual ‹national› cinema, its main constituents appeal to archetypical narratives and resonate with audiences all over the world. The mode of melodramatic narration is therefore a transcultural and transmedial phenomenon. The films and directors I have discussed here are part of a cosmopolitan network of stylistic and structural relations, an intertextual fabric of transnational auteur cinema that spans the globe (Grant 254). There is, of course, a cultural globalisation at work, in which culturally hybrid forms of melodramatic narratives feature prominently. TV soap operas, for example Indian soaps or Latin-American telenovelas, one of the oldest TV-genres, are still reaching mass audiences and therefore rights to adopt the most successful ones locally are sold on a global market (Del Negro; La Pastina/Rego; Straubhaar, «(Re)Asserting National Television»; Kumar). As Joachim Michael has shown, the telenovela is deeply rooted in Latin American modernity and its desire for national emancipation marks a specific culture, which is derived from the peculiar fascination with the gazeregimes of the melodrama (see Michael). According to clever cross- and transmedia strategies, the central features of the melodrama are entered into a remediation that is the maelstrom of the global ‹convergence culture› where TV, internet and, to a lesser degree, cinema collide (see Straubhaar, «(Re)Asserting National Television»). 193

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Works Cited Allison, Mark. A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001. Print. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print. Appadurai, Arjun. «Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.» Public Culture 2:2 (1990): 1–24. Print. Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2000. Print. Benjamin, Walter. «The Task of the Translator.» Trans. by Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 69–82. Print. Berghahn, Daniela. «No Place like Home? Or: Impossible Homecomings in the Films of Fatih Akin.» New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4:3 (2006). 141–157. Print. Blank, Richard. Film & Licht: Die Geschichte des Filmlichts ist die Geschichte des Films. Berlin: Alexander, 2009. Print. Brook, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Print. – «Melodrama, Body, Revolution.» Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. Eds. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 1994. 11–24. Print. Brunette, Peter. Wong Kar-wai. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Print. Casarino, Cesare. «Oedipus Exploded: Pasolini and the Myth of Modernization.» October 59 (1992): 27–47. Print. Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print. Collins, Jim. «Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity.» Film Theory Goes to the Movies Eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins. New York and London: AFI/Routledge, 1993. 242–263. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement Image. Trans. by Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print. 194

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Print. Doyle, Christopher. «Die Farben der Emotion.» Photo Technik International 2 (2005): 52–57. Print. – «Don’t Try for Me, Argentina: A Journal of the Shooting of Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together.» Projections 14 (2006): 277–311. Print. Elsaesser, Thomas. «Tales of Sound and Fury: [Observations on] The Family Melodrama.» Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15. Print. – European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Print. Flinn, Caryl. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Print. Georgiou, Myria. Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2006. Print. Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI, 1987. Print. Göktürk, Deniz. «Turkish Delight – German Fright: Migrant Identities in Transnational Cinema.» Transnational Communities – ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper. Oxford (1999): 1–14. Print. Grant, Catherine. «La función ‹de los autores›: la adaptación cinematográfica transnacional de El lugar sin límites.» Revista Iberoamericana LXVIII: 199 (2002): 253–268. Print. Greene, Naomi. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Print. Held, David et al. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim. «Concepts of Transnational Cinema. Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.» Transnational Cinemas 1:1 (2010): 7–21. Print.

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Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Jaffe, Ira. Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print. Kalinak, Kathryn Marie. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Print. Kilb, Andreas and Peter Korte. «Keine Angst vor Islamismus in der Türkei: Interview mit Fatih Akin.» FAZ, 3 September 2007. Print. Kinder, Marsha. «Reinventing the Motherland: Almodóvar’s Brain-Dead Trilogy.» Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 5:3 (2004): 245–260. Print. Kosta, Barbara. «Transcultural Space and Music: Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005)». Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Eds. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 343–360. Print. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Print. Kumar, Shanti. Gandhi Meets Primetime. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Print. La Pastina, Antonio C., Cacilda M. Rego and Joseph D. Straubhaar. «The Centrality of Telenovelas in Latin America’s Everyday Life: Past Tendencies, Current Knowledge, and Future Research.» Global Media Journal 2:2 (2003): 1–15. Print. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print. Marcantonio, Carla. «The Transvestite Figure and Film Noir: Pedro Almodóvar’s Transnational Imaginary.» Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre. Eds. Jay Beck and Vicente Rodriguez Ortega. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. 157–178. Print.

Malik, Sarita. «Beyond ‹the Cinema of Duty›? The Pleasures of Hybridity: Black British Film of the 1980s and 1990s.» Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema. Ed. Andrew Higson. London: Cassell, 1996. 202–215. Print. Mayer, Vicki, Miranda J. Banks and John T. Caldwell (eds.). Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. McGavin, Patrick Z. «They Live by Night.» Light Sensitive: n. pag. 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 3 Jun. 2013. Mercer, John and Martin Shingler. Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility. London: Wallflower, 2004. Print. Michael, Joachim. Telenovelas und kulturelle Zäsur: Intermediale Gattungspassagen in Lateinamerika. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. Print. Mulvey, Laura. «Notes on Sirk and Melodrama.» Home Is Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI, 1987. 75–82. Print. Neale, Stephen. Genre. London: BFI, 1980. Print. Neale, Steve. «Melodrama and Tears.» Screen 27:6 (1986): 6–22. Print. – Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. Negro, Giovanna P. del «Gender, Class and Suffering in the Argentinean Telenovela Milagros: An Italian Perspective.» Global Media Journal 2:2 (2003): n. pag. web. 3 Jun. 2013. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. «The Cinema of Poetry.» Trans. by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Heretical Empiricism. Ed. Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 167–186. Print. Prout, Ryan. «All about Spain: Transplant and Identity in La flor de mi secreto and Todo sobre mi madre.» Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 1:1 (2004): 43–62. Print. Rayns, Tony. «In the Mood for Edinburgh.» Sight and Sound 10:8 (2000): 14–17. Print. Rodriguez Ortega, Aimee Vicente: «Trailing the Spanish Auteur: Almodóvar’s, 195

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Amenabar’s and de la Iglesia’s Generic Routes in the US Market.» Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre. Eds. Jay Beck and Vicente Rodriguez Ortega. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. 44–64. Print. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Print. Siewert, Senta. «Soundtracks of Double Occupancy: Sampling Sounds and Cultures in Fatih Akin’s Head On.» Mind the Screen: Media Concepts according to Thomas Elsaesser. Eds. Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 198–208. Print. Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. Print. Staiger, Janet. «Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History.» Film Criticism 22 (1997): 185–199. Print. – «Authorship Approaches.» Authorship and Film. Eds. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2002. 27–57. Print. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. Print. Straubhaar, Joseph D. «(Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity against the Global, Regional and Local

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Levels of World Television.» Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Rev. ed. Eds. Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. New York: Wiley, 2005. 681–702. Print. – «Global, Hybrid or Multiple? Cultural Identities in the Age of Satellite TV and the Internet.» Nordicom Review 29:2 (2008): 11–29. Print. Teo, Stephen. Wong Kar-wai. London: BFI, 2005. Print. Testa, Bart. «To Film a Gospel ... and Advent of the Theoretical Stranger.» Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives. Eds. Patrick Allen Rumble and Bart Testa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 180–209. Print. Thompson, Kristin. «The Concept of Cinematic Excess.» Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 5th ed. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press 1999. 513–524. Print. Tirelli, Umberto. Vestire isogni. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981. Print. Tudor, Andrew. Theories of Film. New York: Viking Press, 1974. Print. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula (ed.). Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Print. Yueh-yu Yeh, Emilie and Lake Wong Hu. «Transcultural Sounds: Music, Identity, and the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai.» Asian Cinema 19:1 (2009): 32–46. Print.

Florian Mundhenke

«You Can’t Stop What’s Coming» Hybridisation of the Western Genre Formula as an Intercultural Strategy of Meaning-Making

Numerous publications deal with the origination of the genre system during the emergence of the early Hollywood cinema or try to analyse the development of one specific genre over the times. The following essay tries to take another, more abstract view on one classic genre – the western film. The following elaboration deals with the recent state of the genre and wants to show how hybridisation and genre syncretism work in correlation with the genre elements – characters, motifs, themes and narratives. First of all, the basic genre elements will be introduced before some theories of genre hybridisation and genre development shall be considered. In a second step, this framework will be applied to the western film. This genre seems to be very interesting, since it has a long history and there have been numerous attempts at proving that it is dead or has reached a conclusion (that go as far back as to the 1960s with the emergence of the Spaghetti western). The account of the genre’s situation in the 2000s subsequently moves to a third part in which the example No Country for Old Men (2008, Joel and Ethan Coen) will be evaluated, concerning the elements of hybridisation. A final part will then return to the issue of intercultural exchange within the genre formula. The subject pursued here deals with today’s western attempt at no longer trying to represent only the state of the U.S. American nation. It is suggested, that the western manages to open up a cultural text for many viewers worldwide and thus bridges ideas of globalisation and cultural exchange with its mythological subtext that are new to the genre, but have been discussed extensively within debates about cultural crossover of new, transnational self-definitions. 197

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1. The Levels of Genre Elements and Genre Hybridisation Genre boundaries have mostly been discussed in accordance with the idea that these specifications are used as a communication tool between filmmakers, critics and viewers.1 This debate cannot be pursued here but, generally speaking, genres are used to connect the recipient’s expectations in seeing a film with the economic needs and artistic concerns of the director through a set of conventions (storytelling, characters, symbols, the use of lighting, colours and music etc.). These conventions do not operate on one level alone; they can be found everywhere, from elements of the narrative to formal means of editing and camera usage to more fundamental motifs of a general pattern of myth or history. While all the genres of the fictional film have characters and settings, work with camera strategies and montage techniques and contain a basic mythological core, the weight of the elements is different from one genre to the other. The western heavily relies on certain characters and settings, while the horror film uses formal elements to build up suspense or – more intensely – shock the viewer, while the film musical uses scenes of song and dance that interrupt the basic narrative. The following part proposes a framework to differentiate the various elements. First of all, a distinction can be made between static and dynamic elements. Static elements are part of the general underlying design of the film, while the dynamic features include the principles of meaning-making through film’s gradual distribution of knowledge about characters, situations and conflicts. Thus, the static elements can be the setting of an entire film, or the main characters introduced for the duration of the film. The dynamic elements are techniques of narration, like a set-up for a conflict, the so called background story of the protagonist that still motivates the present, or editing techniques or even camera movement (such as shock zooms within the horror genre). Rick Altman proposed another possibility to understand the features of the film genre. In an article, he called them the syntactic and the semantic elements («A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre»). In part, this idea coincides with the notion of static and dynamic elements: Syntactic elements are mostly dynamic, since they allow combining certain elements into one coherent whole (the establishing shot, followed by a close-up of a detail for example). But if you consider the title design (specifically for a western with a certain typography), this also can be considered as a static, single shot element, alluding to the genre without any deeper meaning. The semantic elements on the other hand traverse the static and dynamic elements. Semantics try to convey the meaning of a story from a set of (often extra-textual) values and connotations. So, the conflict of the protagonist and antagonist has a semantic value for the development, as well as certain elements of narration, such as the importance of a background story in 1

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See for general overviews Neale; Altman, Film/Genre; Grant.

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order to understand the actual conflict or the role of supporting characters as catalysts for the main story’s development. The semantic value of genre elements thus not only connects internal links (such as the syntactic elements), but opens up the individual text to an external understanding of situations and decisions, including various bases of knowledge about our everyday life in civilisation, about how to perform in reality, but also about the typicality of a genre and traditional film narration ending with a conclusion. In 1999 Altman added a third category to his syntactic/semantic elements: the pragmatic elements (Film/Genre 207–215). These elements open up the text even wider and are specifically used by the viewer to gain a certain experience from an individual film. The pragmatic elements – as Bordwell proposed in his theory of narration – can be split into emotive and cognitive elements (29–47). The shock scenes of a horror film or the slapstick part of a film comedy are not needed to follow the story (or to build a fabula, in Bordwell’s words), but they add a value by evoking a physical reaction of emotional response (laughter, fear, tears, suspense) in specific genres (mostly those coined as «body genres» by Linda Williams). The cognitive pragmatic elements on the other hand allow suspending the semantic value of narrative functions to a deeper understanding, not only of the film itself, but also of its cultural basis. Genre films not only speak about their characters and the occurrences of the story but also about the time and context in which they are made. This has been coined as the mythology of genre or its deep core (see French 5–29). The mythology is more apparent in some genres (as the process of the taking of land and the idea of the Frontier in the western film) than in others (as in Biopics, where the mythology very much depends on the person portrayed). Bryan Rommel-Ruiz remarks that the American genre film has two basic principle functions that can help to explain the agency of the inner core in interpreting a genre: «first, the ways films illustrate the problematic relationship Americans have with their history, and second, how movies are living histories that provide insight into the connection between the American past and present.» (105)

Thus, a western can be used as a source of information to understand America’s past. Through principles of dealing with general problems, of strategies to understand social issues and moral conflicts, those historical elements (or futurist elements in a science fiction film) can always be connected to the present situation from which the film originated. The mythology of a film is a window through which it is possible to understand universal issues such as moral conflicts between certain social responsibilities as well as dealing with ideological implications of a time. Thus, the western films made before World War II are completely different from those made after 1968. This extends into the next part, the dynamic process of genre development. The syntactic/semantic/pragmatic elements of a genre are far from fixed, but they 199

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are variable and trans-historical. Rick Altman asks: «What if genre were not the permanent product of a singular origin, but the temporary by-product of an ongoing process?» (Film/Genre 54). Genre is not created by a single example or a cycle of films but comes from a definition of a corpus of films that exist in an ongoing development in which genre is not the outcome, but – as Altman suggest – the side effect. Every single genre film relates back to the formula (or the mentioned set of elements), but also adds new elements that widen and rearrange the formula at the same time. The German film and television theorist Knut Hickethier provided a general theory of how to deal with genre’s constant remodelling by introducing four phases of genre development: emergence – stabilisation – exhaustion – regeneration (71–73). The phase of emergence is characterised by a combination of motifs, ideas and narrative conventions to a scheme, which is then labelled by cultural discourses as a genre (75). Prototypical examples gain a paradigmatic function that designates them as a part of this corpus. Afterwards, images, plots and characters are defined as belonging to a genre. The stabilisation phase is characterised by a variation of certain tropes through time. While some film cycles, such as the film noir or the Vietnam War film, can be attributed to being reactions to single moments in history and their cultural and political themes, genres generally rely on a more general and trans-historic expansion. According to Hickethier, there is a set of variations that is limited and the result of a familiarisation of certain elements used again and again. When the cultural context is altered, the genre can undergo a phase of exhaustion (often announced through an application of the prefix ‹post› or ‹late›). The general function of a genre within the cultural system has lost part of its significance. The last phase of regeneration is characterised by the genre’s ability to gain variability and openness for the integration of new formal features and the incorporation of other themes and issues. Hickethier mentions that a regenerated genre can fulfil new communicative needs for new audiences (77). While Knut Hickethier only mentions the further differentiation in genre films as a form of development, Gerd Hallenberger introduced a very useful model to understand a film genre’s processes of hybridisation. He speaks of two processes of differentiation, vertical and horizontal: «After formation and consolidation, now a third phase of genre development is about to begin – differentiation. Again, there are two basic ways in which this is possible, namely a horizontal and a vertical way. Vertical differentiation means sub-genres, groups of products which are still perceived as belonging to the genre as a whole, but forming a separate entity with specific rules nonetheless. Typical sub-genres are, for example, time-travel and robot stories in science fiction, celebrity and noncelebrity talk shows or police and detective shows on television, […]. Horizontal differentiation means the establishment of genre mixes as an additional offer which incorporates elements of both genres […]. But if a particular mix achieves huge 200

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audience response, it also has the ability to serve as a starting point for an entirely new genre. This happened some years ago with respect to television when the success of The X-Files, initially a combination of science fiction and crime, spawned so many similar productions that the phenomenon acquired a name of its own, ‹mystery›.» (176)

Thus, a genre has the possibility of finding new ways in telling similar stories (like time travel, which can be a travelling from the future to the past, or from the present to the future; or the confrontation of men with alien, this contact can be friendly or hostile etc.). This is a process of differentiating the ways of existing elements within one genre. Otherwise, the elements of two genres can be combined to build up a new quality, sometimes even a new genre. With this, the crime film (with its story revolving around a case and an investigator) was combined with the science fiction film (dealing with fantastical elements like the possibility of meeting alien life forms, or time travel) that resulted in the TV genre of mystery (like The X-Files, 1993–2002, or its many successors, from Supernatural, since 2005, to The Mentalist, since 2008). This is important since it proves that hybridisation not only exists within a confinement of a single genre, but also between various genres. The new quality is not achieved with the simple combination of (syntactic or semantic) elements (as in Jon Favreau’s Cowboys vs. Aliens, 2011), but when the deep structure (the mythological core) is connected and the new form gains a foothold (and name) for itself. Concerning the mystery genre, this can be seen in the cultural function of the category by combining elements of two popular forms that coincide with the broader public interest in esotericism that is mirrored in finding not only rational explanations for phenomena, but to also allow ‹soft› or mysterious explanations. In crime films, where the investigator is mostly working with logical deductions and in science fiction, mostly dealing with issues of future technologies and/or civilisations, occult and obscure elements are not included – it is new to the mystery film, which tries to allude to the supernatural in everyday life, a trend that continued as a mythological function in examples such as the Twilight-films (2008–2012).

2. Development and Mythology of the Western Genre To narrow the perspective further, these general assertions about genre should now be focused on the western film as an example. Comparing histories of the western genre, one finds that there are at least three distinctive phases (depending on the source, there are between three and seven steps of history of the genre; see Williams, Doug; Carter). The first phase of the early cowboy films from the 1900s to the end of the silent film era can be called the phase of the ‹naïve› western. These short and narratively simple films are mostly dealing with action sequences of rob201

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beries, shoot-outs and horse races. With the beginning of the sound era, westerns were produced only rarely and are merely regarded as a pulp genre. This changed with the release of John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939 and the pursuing renaissance of the western as an American epic. In this phase the historic verisimilitude was heightened by using outdoor locations and trying to tell about historical events on one hand. On the other, this epic quality was also enhanced with a new psychological deepness concerning characters, establishing the classical mythological tropes of man vs. civilisation and of the protection of the family vs. regeneration through violence. The last phase (often divided by theoreticians into two or three smaller units) is the era of the late western, including the critical and sceptical films of the late 1950s (beginning with Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, 1952), the international dispersion of the western, from the Spaghetti western in Italy to Osterns in Eastern Europe, and lastly also the revisionist films of the New Hollywood era, giving perspective to the neglected participants of the main conflicts, such as the native inhabitants of the American land (Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, 1970), or trying to paint a more realist picture of issues and concerns of historical episodes (Robert Altman’s Buffallo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, 1976). When monitored this way, it is not difficult to apply Knut Hickethier’s formula of emergence, stabilisation and exhaustion to these phases of the genre. In early days, the label western had not yet been established (the films were called ‹Cowboy films› or ‹Horses and Gunplay›). With the appearance of canonical examples by directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks there is a tendency of establishing paradigmatic examples that give way to a broader variety of different forms, from the trailer and trek films to more classical narratives about historical heroes. New conventions were stabilised with this phase, such as the use of canonical landscape shots, the utilisation of certain styles of music by specific composers (e.g. Dimitri Tiomkin) as well as actors in certain roles (with John Wayne being the most prominent). The phase of exhaustion then can be seen not only with the advent of more cynical (Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, 1969) and nostalgic films (Don Siegel’s The Shootist, 1976) being made in the 1960s and the 1970s, but in a general tendency of changing values and attitudes following new social landmarks of American History like Vietnam and Watergate, and the end of careers of directors and actors such as John Ford and John Wayne. John Lenihan – releasing his western film study Showdown in 1980 – finds that no new western has been released since The Shootist until the printing of the book (see Lenihan 152). He cites the American film critic Pauline Kael who famously announced the death of the western in a 1974 New Yorker article: «A few more Westerns may still straggle in, but the Western is dead.» (Kael in Lenihan 148) The genre has disappeared to make room for either the renaissance of the fantastic with films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) or «two fisted reactionaries like Busford Pusser and Dirty Harry battling modern crime and corruption» (148). This is especially 202

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true since the Hickethier formula of a direct progress from emergence to exhaustion can easily be attributed to the western, but is much harder to formulate, for example, for the science fiction film, where philosophical experiments such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968) were followed by a phase of more youthful or simple films in the wake of the Star Wars-saga (1977, George Lucas) at the end of the 1970s, including revivals of the old superheroes like Superman (1978, Richard Donner) and Flash Gordon (1980, Mike Hodges) as well as new (but rarely ambivalent) figures like the monster in the Alien films (since 1979 ) or with Steven Spielberg’s E.T. – The Extra-terrestrial (1982). The horror film, as a third example, seems never to have died (or been inactive) enjoying a uninterrupted streak from sophisticated productions of the 1960s (Anton Leader’s Children of the Damned, 1964) to the revival of big A list films with The Exorcist and The Omen (1975, Richard Donner) at the beginning of the 1970s through to classic slasher films (Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974, and John Carpenter’s Halloween, 1978) at the end of the century and the endless series of Nightmare (since 1984 ) and Friday, the 13th (since 1980) films in the 1980s to more satirical and mocking examples as part of the Scream (since 1996 ) and And I Know What You Did Last Summer (since 1998 ) series in the 1990s. Something akin to exhaustion is here more difficult to find. But it seems that – at least for the western – the first three phases proposed by Hickethier seem to be applicable. The question arising here is the assumed existence of a fourth phase of regeneration. The 1980s were indeed a quiet period for the western (with only a few prominent examples like Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado, 1985), before the revisionist western (on a more epic scale) found new glory in Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990). Since then, the western slowly rose to a greater prominence with many established American directors reviving the old formula, including Stephen Frears with The Hi-Lo Country (1998), Edward Zwick with Legends of Fall (1994), the actor and director Billy Bob Thornton with All the Pretty Horses (2000), and lastly iconic single examples such as Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven (1992) or James Mangold’s 2007 remake of the 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma. One can easily analyse every single example and find traces of earlier phases in these films, be it the epic tendency in the films of Frears, Zwick and Thornton, revisionist inclinations in the Costner film or more naïve explorations of the classical formula, albeit successfully adapted, in the Mangold film. Even the realistic look at everyday life in the West as in Altman’s 1970s films has been revised by Kelly Reichardt with Meek’s Cutoff (2010). The question remains if there is a new quality emerging from these films. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz discusses Eastwood’s The Unforgiven as an «anti-myth Western» because it is not attempting a new postmodern interpretation of history (like many of the 1970s films), but «questions the epistemology of history at all» (127). Instead of dealing with a general myth including a distinct narrative about the individual and his relation to the nation, the film renounces a generality of the conflict and 203

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places its focus on «individual power and control» (129), where there is no possibility of an identification with the surrounding state/nation/myth/allegory of American self-identification. The question remains: Has the western lost its more general mythical subtext and relevance as a link between past and present of the land? Before this question will be pursued further with a closer examination of No Country for Old Men, we shall attempt to look at the strategies of the mythological core of the classical western film. John Lenihan speaks about the western formula that can be easily identified since it offers «a clearly defined natural order conducive to clear moral choices and the triumph of good over evil.» (11). This stands in notable contrast to the complexity of life in the industrial age and the role of technology and science questioning the courses of action of the individual. The western hero thus fulfils his destiny through a struggle with nature and the troublesome forces from outside, like Indians or bootleggers. He has the duties of a responsible and controlling agent in the conflicts. The heroine, on the other hand, is physically weak, but embodies «the moral fibre of the good community»: «The final union of hero and heroine in many westerns ensured the spiritual strength and physical durability of American society.» (13). This formula can be followed back further to a more general, indeed mythical level of self-understanding of American history: «At the heart of the Western, therefore, was the democratic preoccupation with individual freedom amid social constraint that has engaged so many leading thinkers in America […]. The Western translated a relatively brief segment of American history into an idealization of socially responsible individualism, of a transitional social order both needing and permitting personal freedom and the exercise of individual power. Within the framework of the Western, a man could do what he had to do with an instinctive natural awareness of right and wrong. Fulfilling his personal code of honor also served society’s best interests. Not only was the hero bound by social necessity, but society must embody the hero’s spirit of individualism.» (15)

The other important element of this framework or formula is its universal openness to incorporate many different texts and have them interact with the basic stereotypes, or – as Jim Kitses calls them – archetypes: «The model we must hold before us is of a varied and flexible structure, a thematically fertile and ambiguous world of historical material shot through with archetypical elements which are themselves ever in flux» (19). Philip French strengthens this stance with the notion of the western genre as a container that can hold a variety of different meanings which are made accessible and are being narrated with this formula: «The western is a great grab-bag, a hungry cuckoo of a genre, a voracious bastard of a form, open equally to visionaries and opportunists, ready to seize anything that’s in the air from juvenile delinquency to ecology. Yet despite this, or in some ways

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because of it, one of the things the western is always about is America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past, however honestly or dishonestly it may be done.» (13)

It can be said, that the western is about making stories, events, conflicts communicable within the pattern of this formula (good vs. evil, individual action vs. serving the community). It is a way of (re)writing reality, with Hayden White a specific discourse (of many other discourses available) to lay claim to American history (see White). This framing is influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis that long before the western film emerged, it has dominated American historiography (see Rommel-Ruiz 80). Rommel-Ruiz states about the nature of the concept: «Turner’s influential thesis has been seductive because it celebrates the triumph of American ideals and institutions as well as provides the kind of narrative closure in American history that mythologizes core American values.» (80). Alongside the easy pigeonholing of good and evil forces, it also serves to make possible the important transition from past to present, as mentioned by French: It is «not the story of an imaginary line that bordered civilization and barbarity moving westward over time, but as one of a place that was contested and conquered, where the legacy of the past continues to shape life in the present.» (80). One consequence of this generic framing and making things directly accessible is the matter of setting up a perspective. Rommel-Ruiz remarks: «Rarely does Turner’s thesis account for the presence of Native Americans, let alone other people such as the Spanish and Mexicans.» (80). The story of the American West and the pushing of the Frontier are then told from the vantage point of the people conquering the land, using the myth to make their actions significant also for their descendants. It can be argued that this formula (especially concerning characters and the forces involved in the conflict) is quite simple and could also be applied to the adventure film or the science fiction film in the guise of the Star Trek and Star Wars examples.2 Indeed, Philip French remarks that the two genres of Western and science fiction can be «complementary», but also «antithetical» (23). He explains: «Both are concerned with teaching lessons to the present through a rewriting of the past or by extrapolations of current tendencies projected into the future. Science Fiction, however, is able to create a new consciousness – its realm is that of ideas, of apocalypse – and can treat of [sic] population growth, mutants, time, galactic travel, theology, mental telepathy, etc. The western is earthbound and circumscribed; its province is the simpler traditional concerns of man, where moral problems are con2 The Star Trek world of series and films clearly use the Frontier Hypothesis («Space – The Final Frontier» in the introducing words of the opening sequence) projecting it into the future. It thus justifies the Federation’s expansion into space and the dealing with barbaric civilisations like the martial Klingons, even if these tendencies have been weakened in recent examples of the series.

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sidered by locating them in a pared-down historical framework. The ultimate root of the Western is man and the traditional concerns of character and community; science fiction at best involves the free play of intellect in a self-defining milieu where anything is possible and the terrain infinitely pliable.» (23)

Thus, the traditional western generally refers to the past as a place where individual decisions did matter and where a certain order and perspective was prominent. Science Fiction generally has the possibility to provide solutions to conflicts including new forms of community, consciousness and moral. While the Star Trek design may be classically hierarchic concerning the Federation itself, the alien life forms, like the collectively conscious Borg in the Next Generation series (1988–1996), can be seen as a new form of community influenced by ideas of the internet culture the digital age. This stance of employing traditional and elementary solutions for conflicts in the western was interrupted with the emergence of new values and the growing lack of confidence in the state during the years of the counterculture at the end of the 1960s. This was one reason for the genre’s declining popularity. As the genre has been widely revitalised since the mid-1990s, it is now being analysed whether there is a phase of regeneration to be seen in the example directed by the Coen Brothers and whether this example is not only one of vertical differentiation – according to Hallenberger – but also one of horizontal integration of various mythological subtexts that can provide answers to questions of the recent global cultural world.3

3. No Country for Old Men – The Hybridisation of Myth Elements / The Impact of Fate and Nihilism When analysing film genre hybridisation, the films of the Coen brothers can be seen as a quite interesting example since they almost always rely on genre principles or genre frameworks, but often expand them, building a distinct style of their own with the help of the established formulas. Especially the thriller – or 3

One remark is required about the nature of genre film hybridisation: Films using figures or characters of one genre and transposing them into the setting of another genre lack the distinct feature of hybridisation since they mostly fail to gain a quality of their own. Surely it is an interesting play in confronting diverse genre principles, when shown how Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein (1946, Charles T. Barton), or how the western and action actor Bud Spencer has to deal with a boy from space (Uno sceriffo extraterrestre... poco extra e molto terrestre/Super Sheriff, 1980, Michele Lupo), but this kind of amalgamation does not change the basic principle of these series’s ideas and intentions (here for the Abbott and Costello or the Bud Spencer-Terence Hill films). The same can be said about singular examples such as the film Outland (1981, Peter Hyams), in which the story of High Noon is transposed on a Jupiter moon where Marshal O’Niel, played by Sean Connery, has to deal with the same issues as Gary Cooper in the early Western example. But the mythological (slightly critical) western subtext has not changed much in the 1981 film. It is probably more useful to speak of bastards than hybridisations for these examples.

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film noir (which is more a style than a genre) – has been a starting point for films like Blood Simple (1984), Miller’s Crossing (1991), Fargo (1996), and The Man who wasn’t there (2001); minor films expanded on the (screwball) comedy genre formula, like Ladykillers (2003), or Intolerable Cruelty (2004). All of these films share some common traits, including deadpan humour and certain naïve characters coming of age in one way or another. Richard Gilmore speaks about a «meta-irony» (55) while describing the films of the brothers. The viewer witnesses existential moves, often perilous situations, even moments of brutal force, or the death of people, but the films can rarely be taken seriously on their own, they remain vague and artificial and must be viewed as stories, as films, as generic products. The verisimilitude is more one of generic value (characters, settings, situations of film classics that are often directly quoted) than of a realistic value.

1 No Country for Old Men

The 2008 film No Country for Old Men – the first adaptation of a novel by the directors – is a little different; it has been described as their most mature, fully realised film (see Gilmore 55). The film tells the story of a suitcase of money from a drug-deal gone wrong. This object is found by the hunter Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), living with his daughter in the Midwest wasteland near El Paso, Texas. Moss takes the money and runs – but is followed by the professional killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a black-wearing, non-speaking, brutally violent and morally corrupt man who seems to kill simply everyone coming into his way. This main story is framed and narrated by Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), an elderly sheriff in the Midwest close to retirement. He tries to save Moss – whom he knows personally – from the furious force of Chigurh. With respect to genre, the film includes elements both of the western and the thriller. The Coen brothers renounced the labelling of the film as a western saying in an interview: «[W]hen we think about westerns we think about horses and six-shooters, saloons and hitching posts.» Ethan then says that the film «is sort of 207

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2 No Country for Old Men

a western», before adding «and sort of not.» (Coen Brothers in Hirschberg). William J. Devlin calls the film a «neo-western» (222) – a proposition that will be dealt with below – while Deborah Biancotti sees the film as a «western gothic […], a struggle for and with God, an examination of a humanity haunted by its past and condemned to the horrors of its future.» ( 92). Some of the elements – the good sheriff searching for humanity in his actions, as stated in the long voice-overs he gives vs. the morally corrupt villain dressed in black, the landscape of the American Midwest – seem to clearly refer to the western, while others – the drug-deal, the suitcase with the money, the lonely motel, in which an important scene takes place – more directly point to the thriller (in a classic Hitchcock way) with the money being a McGuffin as there are no signs of its whereabouts at the end. With this in mind, this film should now be discussed as a hybridisation between these two quintessentially American genres, especially in combining the mythology of the (noir) thriller with the mythology of the western to create something with a distinct quality of its own. The characters of the film seem to be classically western figures at first sight. Yet, analysed with more detail, it is clear that they use elements of these archetypes, but the final syncretistic figures are quite different to that of the traditional western. The sheriff is morally good and tries to help – but he is not really helping the main narrative at all, since it revolves around Moss and his follower Chigurh sharing the main actions and confrontations in the film. William Devlin says that Bell is cautious, because he knows he cannot defeat Chigurh, he can only warn Bell – something he ultimately fails to do (235). The villain, Chigurh, on the other hand, is not the classic anti-hero of the genre, since he is absolutely unpredictable in his actions. The figure of Wells (Woody Harrelson), another killer set to hunt down Chigurh, is more of a classic evil force of the western, cool, but talkative, greedy, egoistic and self-assured. As Devlin states with Nietzsche, Chigurh is beyond good and evil, he is a tool running out of control (240–241). There is a moral consistency for this man 208

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since he always fulfils his job to the very end, until this finally takes on the character of absurdity. For example, he kills Carla Jean, the daughter of Moss because he said he would do so if Moss did not tell him where the money is. But when he comes for her, Chigurh already has the money and her father is dead anyway – so there is no further need to execute this plan. There is no motivation to Chigurh, «he is not interested in drugs and money anyway», as Wells tries to characterise the man in one scene of the film. The role of Moss – the third protagonist – cannot be as clearly traced back to western stereotypes as can the characters of the other two men. He is basically good, caring for his daughter, living a decent life, but he develops a greedy side when finding the money. He soon realises that Chigurh is too much for him as a rival, but he never once thinks of giving up the money – probably because he knows that Chigurh will kill him anyway. He seems to be more compatible with the classic thriller hero, the decent man who has to develop superhuman powers when suddenly faced with an extraordinary situation (like in many Hitchcock films). When viewed from this aspect, it is possible that in the situation of the set-up there is a western condition (good sheriff vs. evil villain), while the end of the film (the hero dead, the villain injured but surviving) is more a typical film noir condition. This is the concept followed by Richard Gilmore who writes: It is «a mixing of the two great American movie genres, the western and film noir», which «reflect the two sides of the American psyche. On the one hand, there is a western in which the westerner is faced with overwhelming odds, but between his perseverance and his skill, he overcomes the odds and triumphs […]. In film noir, on the other hand, the hero is smart (more or less) and wily and there are many obstacles to overcome, the odds are against him, and, in fact, he fails to overcome them […]. This genre reflects the pessimism and fatalism of the American psyche. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens combine these two genres into one movie. It is a western with a tragic, existential film noir ending.» (79)

Indeed there is a situation that can be called a vertical differentiation, as expressed by Hallenberger concerning the mystery genre. The question of the western situation with its clear Manichean world view is answered with the morally ambiguous fatal view of the noir thriller. However, two important elements are overlooked in this description of the film: the role of fate on the one hand and the final rejection of classical Hollywood narration on the other. Destiny plays an important role in the film. This begins with Anton Chigurh flipping the coin when killing one of the less important characters coming into his way – like the gas station attendant or the daughter of Moss. Devlin sees this as a delegation of the decision over life and death to chance, so that Chigurh «does not see himself as morally accountable for his actions» (243). Fate also plays an important role concerning the stories Ed Tom Bell talks about. One of them deals with a young man who has killed a 14-year old girl: «Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could 209

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remember», as Bell remarks. It is totally irrelevant whom the man kills, he just wants to kill for the sake of doing it. This basically also applies to the people who are murdering the elderly in order to get to their Social Security checks, another of Bell’s stories, or Chigurh’s often random slayings. Fate gets a much more prominent role in the end of the film, when it eclipses even the classical storytelling. It might be acceptable that Moss is finally not victorious and killed by the ultra-evil villain. But the way this is done in the film is quite extraordinary. It seems that fate and uncontrollable forces not only come into the way of the people’s decisions and enterprises within the diegesis, but it also interferes with the basic narrative itself. When arriving in El Paso, Moss checks into a motel and gets to know a younger woman who just uses the swimming pool. This scene is slowly faded out. In the next scene we see Ed Tom Bell driving to the motel – but arriving too late. The local police are already there, Moss lies slaughtered in one corner of the front porch, the woman’s body floats lifeless in the pool. So the audience does not only have to accept the death of the main character, but also that there is no insight given into how he got killed. The penultimate scene is in accordance with this. After Chigurh visited (and presumably killed) Carla Jean Moss, he drives down the street, reaches a road crossing – as he is suddenly badly hit by another car. While the driver of the other car remains inside, Chigurh manages to leave, but is seriously injured, with «a bone sticking out of the flesh», as a boy remarks who watches the scene occur. This moment doesn’t have any purpose for the main narrative – the main story basically ended with the death of Moss and the retirement of Bell. Since Chigurh is not killed in the road accident, it also not possible to speak of belated justice for his evil deeds. William Devlin says, that it is – as with the flipping of the coin by Chigurh – ultimately unpredictable what will happen, who is hit by a car or who survives. The good is not victorious, but neither is the evil (see Devlin 237–239). Thus, «the question of good versus bad is no longer a significant question since these values can no longer be applied to individuals» (238), Devlin finally 210

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states that «everything lacks meaning» (239). This has a deep kind of nihilism to it, which is not only alien to the western genre, but also the American thriller. Bell’s former colleague Ellis states in the final conversation of the two men that you can do what you want, you can’t change your fate or make things undone: «You can’t stop what’s coming». This speaks for a deeply disappointed world view, assuming that this world is not just crazy but totally irrational: «a country without meaning and inherent value.» (240). With this general mythological trait the film leaves the path of the western as well as the thriller: It ultimately speaks about the world today where it is placed and tries to monitor phenomena of recent cultural and social problems. This is a world of global consequences and unforeseeable actions, as will be outlined in the last part.

4. The Global Interlacing of Consequences – An Intercultural Strategy of Meaning-making Since the early 1990s there is a tendency of a certain kind of ensemble film that tries to make visible indiscernible or hidden connections of people, elements and situations in describing the actions and decisions of a wider group of people. This cycle started with Robert Altmans Short Cuts (1994) – the director made similar films with Nashville (1974) and A Wedding (1978) two decades earlier he then labelled ‹multi character form› – and reached a climax with Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) and Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (2009). These two internationally successful and commercially viable examples extended the idea of interlacing consequences and interlinked story lines to a global level. Babel on the one hand deals with a couple; she gets shot in desert, while this is linked to a Mexican housemaid, attending a marriage in her home country. This is then connected again to a deaf-mute girl living in Japan. Mammoth on the other hand tells about an international business man and his private and occupational links to people. These multi-character and multi-story narratives try to envision how individual decisions or actions are becoming obstacles or possibilities for other people that are primarily not tied to the lifelines of the main protagonists. This can be seen clearly in line with debates of the 1990s and 2000s including the wider discussion of the Actor-Network-Theory (how are people interacting in bigger frames) or the Chaos Theory (with the famous proposition that the flap of a butterfly can cause a tornado in another country as an exponential increase of consequences). What all of these films (also including non-American examples like Michael Hanekes Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages/Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, 2006, about international migration movements culminating in Paris) have in common is a basically fatalist, sometimes even nihilist world view: When made visible by the film’s narrative, one can perceive the 211

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interlinking of stories and actions, but from an individual (and then very limited perspective) of a single character, it is almost impossible to foresee all of the consequences. In adapting this proposition to a western film (with a quite similar scene of a car accident, which is also used as a violent confrontation of people in Alejandro Iñárritu’s earlier two films Amores Perros, 2000, and 21 Grams, 2002, where the accident serves to connect disparate social spheres in the moment of collision), the basic mythology of the genre is challenged, if not corrupted or made absurd. The western and the noir thriller as classical genres dealing with the ‹American Imagination› and the state of the nation (mirroring distinct phases of US history like the civilisation of the West and the era of the Great Depression) are subverted. Their frameworks (Manichean stratification of good and evil, fighting for justice from the point of the individual, self-assertion und self-rescue) are opened up to mirror international relations. This is clearly exemplified in setting part of the narrative in Mexico: Like some classic noir heroes (e.g. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, 1958), Moss tries to flee from Chigurh into the other country, but is soon found not only by the villain, but also by Wells and Ed Tom Bell. The principal openness of borders (at least for US citizens) makes it easier to go from one country to the next and thus internationalise trade avenues, travelling routes as well as causing social problems with the migration of people and enabling illegal activities like drug trafficking. So it is no longer useful for the western to only speak about the state of America, or to be about the contained vision of one nation with its classical ideas of shifting the Frontier. On one hand, there is a new cultural openness for hybridisation and combination, on the other, the consequences of actions are harder to predict for the individual: There is no longer the distinct nation with its singular self-understanding, but there are socially different and ethnically diverse cultures, coming into conflict, but also being fruitfully combined and newly stratified. With this reading, No Country for Old Men takes a basic American location (the West) and set-up (a suitcase with money) with American figures (the westerner, the naïve hero) and confronts it with the (often seemingly nihilist) view of the irrational and unpredictable interweaving of decisions and actions within the diegesis as well as with renouncing the classical model of storytelling in leaving consequences open and in not showing seemingly important details. Thus it is also quite consequent that the film ends in its very last scene with the retirement of sheriff Ed Tom Bell: He is not only member of the police, but he is also a story teller searching for meaning in all things, trying to get everything together and predicting final outcomes. But he has his problems with the new types of the stories («the dismal tide» as it is called by a friend in a conversation) – about the two young men killing the girl, about the slaying of the elderly people, with Anton Chigurh’s bloody path – and thus his retirement is not only one concerning his job, but also about his function of making sense and trying to tell stories. There is not one single American imagination, or the myth of any other single nation; you can only make sense by considering the 212

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totality of things, of mixing cultures (Mexican and American), of things crossing the planned path, of other world views – often the flipping of a coin can be a more rewarding strategy to make sense and survive than planning and relying on traditional mythologies. Finally, it is also quite remarkable that this intercultural exchange is based on the (relatively simple) formula of two traditional American genres. Genres have been internationally accepted transcultural systems of narrating and mapping reality from the very beginning. In a second step, they have been adapted by other cultures for their purposes (like the spaghetti western in Italy, or the cangaceiro films in Brazil; see Frayling resp. Schulze); finally they are now used to tell stories that are trying to observe the problems and issues of globalisation. Barry Keith Grant finds an explanation for this: «Audiences worldwide have been trained by the positioning and protocols of genre and of Hollywood and classic narrative cinema more generally», and with regard to one genre he adds: «Film noir […] has transcended the boundaries of a distinctly American film genre and become a global phenomenon that far exceeds the US and even cinema itself.» (107). With this, genres have become a strategy of framing, illuminating and explaining the global, culturally diverse reality with the means of familiar formulas that are used to understand the complexity of the real by the means of entertainment. Works Cited Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print. – «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.» Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. 216–226. Print. Biancotti, Deborah. «Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: Western Gothic.» 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels since 2000. Ed. Danel Olson. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2010. 465–466. Print. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Print. Carter, David. Western. London: No Exit, 2008. Print. Devlin, William J. «No Country for Old Men: The Decline of Ethics and the West(ern).» Philosophy of the Western. Eds. Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. 221–240. Print. Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to

Sergio Leone. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000. Print. French, Philipp. Westerns. Aspects of a Movie Genre. Manchester: Carcanet, 2005. Print. Gilmore, Richard. «No Country for Old Men: The Coen’s Tragic Western.» The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Ed. Mark T. Conard. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. 55–78. Print. Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower, 2007. Hallenberger, Gerd. «TV Fiction in a Reality Age.» Studies in Communication Sciences 4/1 (2004): 169–181. Print. Hickethier, Knut. «Genretheorie und Genreanalyse.» Moderne Film Theorie. Ed. Jürgen Felix. Mainz: Bender, 2007. 62–105. Print. Hirschberg, Lynn. «Portrait of a Lady Killer.» New York Times September 4, 2008. 18 June 2013:n. pag. 4 Sept. 2008. Web 18 Jun. 2013. Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film. Ur213

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bana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Print. Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood. London: BFI, 2004. Print. Neale, Stephen. Genre. London: BFI, 1992. Print. Rommel-Ruiz, W. Bryan. American History Goes to the Movies. London: Routledge, 2011. Print. Schulze, Peter W. «Beyond Cowboys and Cangaceiros: Transculturations of the Western in Brazilian Cinema.» Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Eds. Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer

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and Peter W. Schulze. Marburg: Schüren, 2012. 163–193. Print. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990. Print. Williams, Doug. «Pilgrims and the Promised Land: A Geneaolgy of the Western.» The Western Reader. Eds. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman. New York: Limelight Press, 1998. 93–114. Print. Williams, Linda. «Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.» The Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 141–159. Print.

Peter W. Schulze

Mexicanidad Meets Americanism The Circulation of National Imaginaries and Generic Regimes Between the Western and the Comedia Ranchera

This paper discusses transregional cinematic flows between Hollywood and the Mexican film industry, using the example of two major genres; the American western and its Mexican counterpart, the comedia ranchera. As a study of cinematic «glocalisation» (see Robertson), the essay traces some of the complex interconnections between the two genres and the «media capital» (Curtin 215) at work, which will be specified according to particular «logics of accumulation», «forces of socio-cultural variation», and «trajectories of creative migration», including not only personnel, as Curtin has it, but in particular genre patterns. Thus, the paper examines the circulation of stars and other film personnel, cross-media synergies among film and music industries, as well as political interventions from governments and economic interrelations between the respective (trans)national culture industries. Specific attention is paid to the negotiations of generic and cultural identities vis-à-vis intertwined globalising and localising processes. Both western and comedia ranchera have shaped national imaginaries to a degree that they appear to be quintessentially U.S.-American or Mexican, respectively. Contrary to these «invented traditions» (Hobsbawm/ Ranger), both the ‹national(ist)› figures of the cowboy and the charro, who play central roles in the western and the ranchera culture, are far from being genuinely U.S.American or Mexican. The paper traces their ‹multiple origins› from early modern globalisation of equestrian culture to mid-20th century genre configurations in cinema, which has been a major catalyst in the globalisation of cultural economy. 215

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1. Foundational Fictions and Colonial Encounters The figure of the cowboy seems to be the epitome of Americanness. Since the late 19th century, «foundational fictions» (see Sommer) in different media such as literature, painting and, subsequently, film, constructed a national myth around the figure of the cowboy ‹going West›. «Nation and narration» coincide (see Bhabha) in many cowboy narratives that – often implicitly – depict the conquest of the American West. Exemplary representations of such a national myth can be found in The Virginian, Owen Wister’s novel published in 1902 (see Wister), as well as in various film adaptations of the same name, most prominently in the first sound film version; Victor Fleming’s The Virginian (1929), in which Gary Cooper programmatically proclaims to «make more United States out of raw prairie land». Associated both with the concepts of frontier and regeneration through violence (see Slotkin), the figure of the cowboy stands at the core of a mythical foundation of the United States of America as a nation, or rather, as an «imagined community», enabled and sustained not only by «print-capitalism» (see Anderson) but also by modern mass media, especially film. Hollywood played a central role in the global dissemination of the imaginary of the cowboy via western productions. As «the richest and most enduring genre of Hollywood’s repertoire», the western evolved coevally with American cinema, marking the beginning of «commercial narrative film in America» and serving as «the prototype for the studio system» (Schatz 45). Furthermore, the genre held a central position in Hollywood cinema up to the 1960s – approximately a fifth of all films produced were actually westerns. The genre was one of the «most coveted American cultural imports» around the world (Bloom 197). Its popularity helped to establish the global predominance of American cinema via a «genre whose visual elements, semantics, and meaning were intimately tied to American history, its landscape, and its ideology» (Moine 186). Undoubtedly, the western ranks high among the cultural productions most readily associated with the U.S. nation and Americanism. Although appearing to be quintessentially U.S.-American, the cowboy as an emblem of the nation is an «invented tradition», in the sense of attempting «to establish continuity with a suitable historic past» (Hobsbawm 1) which actually does not trace back to ‹genuine› American origins.1 Far from being ‹originally› American, nor even stemming from white Anglo-Saxon protestant tradition, as has often been claimed, the cowboy in fact evolved from a Mexican predecessor (Chevalier 150). In his thorough comparative study on Cowboys of the Americas, Richard W. Slatta (44) states that «[m]uch of the dress, language, equipment, and 1

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Of course, there is no such thing as the essence or a single origin of any culture. In this regard, Edward W. Said points out that «all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic» (xxv).

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values of the Mexican and California vaquero passed to the Anglo-American cowboy.» The Mexican origins of the cowboy are already implicit in the etymology of the term. Although the origin of the word ‹cowboy› is a matter of discussion, convincing arguments have been brought forward that «the term cowboy, like its synonym buckaroo, derived from vaquero» (Smead 74). As the linguist Robert N. Smead underlines, «the earliest cowboys were the Mexican herders», and their formation is very similar to that of the vaquero (74). Tellingly, many expressions and terms of the American cowboy were loaned from Mexican Spanish. Far from being of single origin, though, the «vocabulario vaquero» includes numerous loan words from Amerindian languages, deriving mainly from Nahuatl, the Aztec’s language, but also from Arab, which entered Spanish during the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors (xxvi). Thus, the language of both cowboys and precedent vaqueros already indicates diverse cultural matrices and colonial encounters that are also manifest in various other expressions of equestrian cultures both north and south of the Rio Grande, or Río Bravo del Norte, the border river’s name in Mexico. The emergence and dissemination of equestrian cultures in the Americas result from wars, migration, commerce and exertion of colonial power, all of which were deeply intertwined. This congeries of influences is a manifestation of early modern globalisation.2 Livestock was of utmost importance for the conquest and colonisation of the so-called ‹New World›. Columbus introduced cattle and horses on the island of Hispaniola, and livestock quickly spread to the mainland. In 1519 Hernán Cortés took along horses on his invasion of the Aztec Empire, which after the defeat of Tenochtitlan became part of Nueva España (New Spain), which also included much of North America. Societies both in Nueva España and subsequently in independent Mexico were sharply divided by race and class. As a reward for colonial warfare, the Spanish elite received encomiendas, or royal grants of Amerindian labour which was exploited for tending the multiplying cattle herds. Colonial landowners perpetuated the legacy of Spanish caballeros, or gentlemen, in sharp contrast to the status of their employees, the vaqueros, or working class cowboys. As it were, the elite equestrian culture of the charro developed from traditions cultivated by the wealthy landed caballeros and subsequent landowners, evident in the luxuriously adorned black dress and the white shirt worn by the charros, which contrasts strongly with the clothing of the lower class vaqueros. Shortly after the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution around 1920, the charro quickly became a national symbol, not least as a manifestation of the «centralistic aspirations of the nation state» and as «an instrument of unification and homogenisation of the national dispersion and plurality»3, as Tania Carreño King has pointed out in her study on El charro: 2 3

For the definition of «proto-globalization» or «early modern globalization», see Hopkins 5f. «aspiraciones centralistas del Estado nacional»; «instrumento de unificación y homogenización de la dispersión y la pluralidad nacionales».

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la construcción de un esterotipo nacional 1920–1940. The first association of charros was founded in 1921, and in 1932, December 17th was declared the day of the charro and the china poblana, his female counterpart. In the following year, the charrería, i.e. ritualised events involving horses and cattle performed by charros, was declared as the national sport of Mexico via a decree by the President Abelardo L. Rodríguez. Cultural productions like music and especially cinema were of utmost importance for the consolidation and dissemination of the imaginary of the charro as a national symbol. When Carlos Rincón Gallardo published a paradigmatic book called El charro mexicano in 1939, his characterisation of the charro closely corresponded with the figure’s representation in cinema. Rincón Gallardo (6) distinguishes the charro as «noble, loyal and brave»; as a man who is drawn to dangerous exercises, who loves beautiful women, horses and pistols, and has the habit to sing and dance; he concludes: «By tradition he is the genuine national symbol».4 Similar to the figure of the cowboy, who evolved from the Mexican vaquero and became a national symbol of the USA in the late 19th century, the charro with his various origins also turned into a national figure of Mexico in the 1920s.

2. Convergences of the Western and the Comedia Ranchera Although the figures of the charro and the cowboy result from an intercultural mixture which originated in the history of colonialism, both have been traditionalised as ‹essential› epitome of Mexican and U.S.-American cultural identity respectively, cleansed from its traces of otherness. Rather than displaying intercultural connections, differences between Mexican and U.S.-American cultural identities were commonly emphasised – especially in the western, where Mexican culture often served as a backdrop to foreground U.S.-culture, but also in the comedia ranchera. Both genres have aptly been called «the American cinema par excellence» (see Rieupeyrout; Bazin) and «el cine mexicano por excelencia» (Ayala Blanco 69), respectively. As would became prevalent in the classical Hollywood western, early U.S.American films already construct Manichean oppositions between the cowboy as hero and the Mexican villain, stigmatised by the stereotype of the ‹greaser›, a derogatory term commonly used by U.S. soldiers in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) (see León). In this construction of Hispanic alterity, Mexicans are depicted as lazy and thieving, a stereotype that persisted in numerous silent films, already evident in many film titles such as The Greaser’s Gauntlet (D.W. Griffith, 1908), Bronco Billy and the Greaser (Gilbert M. ‹Broncho Billy› Anderson, 1914), The Greaser (Raoul Walsh, 1915) and Guns and Greasers (Larry Semon,

4

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«Por tradición es el símbolo genuino nacional».

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1918), to name but a few examples.5 After Pancho Villa’s ‹Burning of Columbus›, New Mexico in 1916, Mexicans virtually became the «enemigos prototípicos» or «prototypical enemies» in Hollywood cinema (García Riera, Breve Historia 33). Nonetheless, Hollywood eventually changed its overtly discriminating depiction of Mexicans6 to improve film distribution in Mexico and on other Latin American markets. Subsequently, Mexican film productions, which initially were more oriented towards European cinema, began to increasingly take up – and alter – genre patterns of the western. Significantly, one of the first feature films evolving around a charro, El Caporal/ The Caporal (1921), directed by Jesús B. Abitia and Rafael Bermúdez Zatarain, tells the story of this ‹Mexicanist› figure who fights against cattle thieves, drawing from genre patterns of the western, both on the «semantic» and «syntactical» level.7 In a similar fashion, in Arcady Boytler’s Mano a mano/Hand in Hand (1932), the hero is a hacendado (the owner of a hacienda) vested as a charro, whereas the villains are dressed in cowboy garments. As it were, films like Mano a mano invert the stigmatisation of Mexicans in U.S. cinema. Even if the villains are also Mexicans, they correspond with a common depiction of U.S.-Americans in the western genre, while the figure of the charro appears as a hero in a national sense, with the hacienda already tending to appear as a symbol of the Mexican nation. As in the comedia ranchera that emerged as a genre shortly after, the hacienda in Mano a mano already is the central, idealised setting, where the patrón amicably reigns and fiestas demonstrate a communal life abundant with ‹typically Mexican› cultural expressions such as cock fights, the jaripeo or bull riding, and ranchera songs. Arcady Boytler’s film anticipates the evolving comedia ranchera, not only in terms of representing the hacienda as the main setting and the charro as protagonist, but also in the central generic function of ranchera music and folkloric culture, especially from the region of Jalisco – all of which became typical and immediately recognisable elements that were repeated and varied in hundreds of Mexican genre productions. Even if most U.S. westerns emphasise the Americanness of the genre, while Mexican films accentuate the mexicanidad of the comedia ranchera, the Manichean oppositions between the constructions of the respective national identities are sometimes transcended in both genres. While negative stereotyping of Mexicans as greasers still prevailed in the 1920s, Ken Maynard, in contrast to most western 5 6 7

For a detailed account of representations of Mexicans in cinemas outside of Mexico, especially in Hollywood, see García Riera, México visto por el cine extranjero. In a less obvious manner, though, negative stereotyping of Mexicans and Latinos in general still prevailed for many decades (see Ramírez Berg). According to Rick Altman («A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre» 30), the semantic level of a genre consists of «a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets», i.e. the genre’s «building blocks themselves», whereas the syntactic levels comprises «constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders», i.e. «structures into which [the building blocks] are arranged».

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stars, often appeared vested in tight-fitting black outfits that resemble Mexican style clothing, most evidently in ‹south of the border westerns› such as Song of the Caballero (1930), where he even wears a traditional charro outfit, including the typical short jacket adorned with embroidery. Although his most pronouncedly Mexican outfits often were masquerades, they do attain positive, if slightly ironic, connotations and form part of the star persona of Ken Maynard. In Mexican cinema, in turn, the hero Juan Pistolas of the eponymous film very much resembles the figure of a cowboy. Tellingly, Juan Pistolas (1935) was directed by Roberto Curwood, who under the name of Bob Curwood starred in many silent westerns at Universal Pictures in the 1920s. Juan Pistolas is embodied by Raúl de Anda, who also worked as a prolific director and producer of both Mexican westerns and comedias rancheras. Shortly after his role as Juan Pistoles, he became the emblematic actor of a very particular charro, very much unlike the singing charro, impersonated by the major stars of the comedia ranchera, including Tito Guízar, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante and Antonio Aguilar. In the personal union of director and actor, Raúl de Anda played the hero of the charro negro series, a very popular masked charro fighting for justice, much like the U.S. series westerns with masked cowboys as heroes. Rather than displaying intercultural connections, though, differences between Mexican and U.S.-American cultural identities were commonly emphasised – not only in the western, where Mexican culture frequently serves as a backdrop to foreground U.S.-culture, but also in the comedia ranchera that often accentuates its generic identity in distinction to the western, as is evident in the following example. In René Cardona’s La marca del cuervo/The Mark of the Raven (1958), the opening already refers to Hollywood, since the logo trailer of the production company Filmex, beginning with a spinning globe, is highly reminiscent of the logo of Universal Pictures. Subsequently, the title sequence evokes the scene of a western by strongly drawing to syntax and semantics of the genre: a masked horseman with a ‹cowboy hat› gallops through a deserted landscape of hills and rocks under a dramatically clouded sky, accompanied by a highly rhythmic score. What could be the soundtrack for a key scene of a western, suddenly turns into a canción ranchera, a Mexican folk song with characteristic gritos mexicanos, yells at intervals within the song, whose origins date to the years of the Mexican Revolution and later became associated with mariachi groups. Although in a western, the black clothing would often be a cue that the character is a villain, here the song praises him as «el cuervo amado por el pueblo», that is «the raven, loved by the people». Unlike the conventions of the western, black clothing, including the symbolic black hat, has a positive connotation in Mexican genre equivalents, since the traditional garb of the charro is black. And although the horseman does not wear the adorned traditional clothing, he is quickly associated with the ‹national› figure of the charro. Besides his mastery in horse-riding, the song and the credits reveal the actor to be Antonio Aguilar, one of the most popular stars of the comedia ranchera and ranchera music, who was 220

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nicknamed and widely known as ‹el charro de México›. In an ironic, self-reflexive scene ensuing the credit sequence, René Cardona acknowledges both the adaptation of genre structures of the western and the particular resignification of the «American cinema par excellence» when the character played by Antonio Aguilar comes upon children playing cowboys and Indians, with the 1 La marca del cuervo Indians significantly defeating the cowboy. Films about masked revengers of crimes committed against the defenceless were very common in Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 50s, often in form of film series. The earliest Mexican series of this kind began with El charro negro/The Black Charro (1940), followed by four films, all starred, directed, written, and produced by Raúl de Anda.8 2 El Charro Negro en el norte The masked charro series were apparently based on earlier masked cowboy films from Hollywood, especially the successful Republic production The Lone Ranger (1938), directed by William Whitney and John English. However, most of the Mexican serials ostentatiously ‹Mexicanise› U.S. productions, not only by drawing from the generic structures of the comedia ranchera but also by opposing conventions and central traits of the two ‹national› genres. This is particularly evident in a series of nine ranchera films directed by Jaime Salvador for Rosas Films S.A. (1955–1958), which all evolve 8 The first film of the series directed and starring Raúl de Anda was El Charro Negro/The Black Charro (1940), followed by La vuelta del Charro Negro/The Return of the Black Charro (1941), La venganza del Charro Negro/The Vengeance of the Black Charro (1942) and El Charro Negro en el norte/The Black Charro in the North (1949). The series was taken up again in 1960 with Raúl de Anda’s son Rodolfo de Anda playing the son of the charro negro in El hijo del Charro Negro/The Son of the Black Charro (1960) and El Charro Negro contra la banda de los cuervos/The Black Charro Against the Gang of the Ravens (1963), both directed by Arturo Martínez.

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around the hero Mauricio Rosales, played by Antonio Aguilar. A telling example of the ‹generic differentiation› would be the setpiece of the duel in La justicia del Gavilán Vengador/The Justice of the Avenging Hawk (1957), the 7th film of the series. The duel sequence takes place in a cantina, the Mexican equivalent to a bar in a western. Because of a 3 La justicia del Gavilán Vengador beautiful woman dressed in red, a conflict breaks out between the hero, played by Antonio Aguilar, and the villain. Instead of a gun fight, the Mexican machos compete via a ‹duelo de coplas›, a singing duel, accompanied by a ranchera song played by a group of mariachis in charro garb. The film thus draws on one of the most characteristic set-pieces of the ranchera. Having finished their songs, the two opponents confront each other, and a brawl breaks out, in which the character played by Aguilar beats up the henchmen of the villain. Significantly, the duel à la mexicana literally takes place in front of an American background. On the wall, just above the head of the woman in the red dress, the iconic sex photo Marilyn Monroe on Red Velvet (1949), shot by Tom Kelley and published in Playboy magazine, is clearly visible and repeatedly framed in the centre of various shots. Apparently, the naked star seems to symbolise a supposedly depraved, immoral American lifestyle, which the Mexican woman in her sexy dress is associated with. In contrast, the subsequent scene is a fiesta with ceremonial singing and dancing of indigenes, followed by mariachis playing rancheras for traditionally dressed Mexicans. Apart from the ‹American background› of the sex photo, the generic background of the western is equally evident, particularly since Marilyn Monroe famously starred in Otto Preminger’s River of No Return (1954), where she sings lascivious songs, vested in a tight red dress which strongly emphasises a sexualised image of her body. Evidently, the western genre is a strong reference for the duel scene which valorises mexicanidad in binary opposition to stigmatised U.S. culture. Antonio Aguilar, the famous ‹charro de México›, embodies traditional Mexican values and a code of honour by settling the dispute in a ‹duelo de coplas› and by proving his manliness in a brawl. By contrast, the villain draws a gun, as a westerner would, but is deterred by his equally villainous friend, because using a firearm is regarded as dishonourable. His thugs with their habitus and Stetson-like hats visually correspond to characters typical for a western, whereas Aguilar wears a huge Mexican sombrero. Characteristic for the comedia ranchera, mariachis and women wearing proper folkloric 222

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dresses symbolise traditional values, while the ceremony of the indigenes displays the ‹folkloric particularity› of Mexico. Like numerous ranchera productions, La justicia del Gavilán Vengador strongly emphasises the mexicanidad in relation to the genre patterns and national imaginaries of the western. The pronounced ‹Mexicanisation› of the western genre is evident right up to the last shot of Jaime Salvador’s ranchera film. La justicia del Gavilán Vengador closes with the image of a masked hero with his two guns drawn in a dramatic landscape that corresponds to the visual culture of the western, but is superimposed by a text that again emphasises the mexicanidad of the film: «Es una película mexicana en MEXISCOPE», i.e. «This is a Mex4–5 La justicia del Gavilán Vengador ican film in MEXISCOPE». Besides different forms of hybridisation of the western in Mexican films, the U.S. western is also intertwined with Mexico and its cinema. Not only is the figure of the cowboy related to the charro, as part of the common history of the USA and Mexico, but the western genre itself is laden with references to Mexico and its culture, extending much beyond the representation of the ‹greaser› mentioned. Even John Ford’s ‹emblematically› U.S.American westerns are «packed with Hispanic references», as Edward Buscombe and Roberta Pearson have phrased it (6). Among the many Mexican elements of the genre are settings, songs and characters, some of which were enacted by the best known Mexican performers who pursued careers both in Hollywood and in their country of origin, such as Emilio Fernández, Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río. Besides numerous references to Mexican culture, the action of many American westerns partially takes place in Mexico, or, in the so-called ‹south of the border westerns›, is even (almost) entirely set there. Moreover, not least because of the low production costs, a considerable number of Hollywood westerns have partly been shot in the Mexican state of Durango, including seminal films such as Raoul Walsh’s The Tall Men (1955), John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1959), Sam Peck223

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inpah’s Major Dundee (1964) and Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965).9 Apart from pronounced Mexican affiliations in Hollywood westerns, U.S. directors and other film personnel have worked in the Mexican film industry, especially in western productions or genres related to the «American cinema par excellence». Norman Foster, who directed Viva Cisco Kid (1940) for Twentieth Century Fox’s Cisco Kid western series, made five films in Mexico in the 1940s, including the remarkable El ahijado de la muerte/The Godson of Death (1946). This pronouncedly hybrid film could aptly be classified as a mystery noir ranchero western. El ahijado de la muerte is set in the context of the Mexican Revolution and features the 6–7 El ahijado de la muerte famous actor and singer Jorge Negrete, a leading star both of the comedia ranchera and ranchera music. Foster’s hybrid genre film was shot by cinematographer Jack Draper, an American, who in the 1920s photographed a dozen westerns for Robert J. Horner, but since 1935 worked exclusively in Mexico, where he shot over 100 films until the early 1960s. Significantly, El ahijado de la muerte was made in the newly established Estudios Churubusco, one of the largest movie studios in Latin America, which was founded in 1945, and 49% of which was owned by RKO Pictures. Besides ‹Mexican› films, various U.S.-Mexican co-productions were shot at the studio by directors such as John Ford, Robert Wise and Don Siegel, featuring both Mexican and U.S. film stars.

9

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For the history of film production in Durango, see Avitia Hernández.

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3. The Cultural Economy of Singing Cowboys and Charros Cantando Of the multiple interconnections between the cinematic representations of charros and cowboys, the convergences between the genre configurations of the singing cowboy film, or ‹horse opera›, and the comedia ranchera are particularly pronounced. Besides, mutual references and interrelations exist between the singing cowboy film and the comedia ranchera. For example, Frank McDonald’s Rancho Grande (Republic 1940) starring Gene Autry alludes not only to the famous Mexican folk song Allá en el Rancho Grande, which was sung by Autry (among many interpreters), but also refers to the eponymous genre matrix of the comedia ranchera, a box-office hit starring Tito Guízar, in which the Mexican singer-actor star famously sings this song (as will be commented on below). Tito Guízar, in turn, played in two Republic singing cowboy films directed by William Witney and starring Roy Rogers, On the Old Spanish Trail (1947) and The Gay Ranchero (1948), in which the title song not only features Spanish words but also seems to allude to the star per- 8 Under Western Stars sona of Tito Guízar. Although the convergences between the two genres are very distinctive, they also exhibit marked differences. In contrast to the comedia ranchera, which rejects modernity in favour of an idealised pre-revolutionary feudal social order safe from any upheaval, both negotiations of modernity and social critique can be found in the singing cowboy film, particularly pronounced in Joseph Kane’s Under Western Stars (1938), in which Roy Rogers has his first starring role. Furthermore, Gene Autry «functions as a representative of the[se] working-class communities» (Stanfield 103) in films such as Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935) or Guns and Guitars (1936), both directed by Joseph Kane.

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The singing cowboy film and the comedia ranchera evolved around the same time and make substantial use of western and ranchera music, respectively. Not only do they integrate musical numbers into the diegesis as one of the central characteristics of their generic identities, but they also both feature cross-media synergies, including interconnections between the cultural economy of both U.S. American and Mexican music and film productions. When «the figure of the singing cowboy as a distinct film persona» (Stanfield 2) emerged in 1935 with Gene Autry’s starring roles in the Republic production Tumbling Tumbleweeds and the Mascot serial The Phantom Empire, his first film appearance in Old Santa Fe (Mascot 1934) had already capitalised on the previous musical success of the singer and radio star. Significantly, western star Ken Maynard, who plays the protagonist of Old Santa Fe, likewise had recorded songs (with Columbia Records) before appearing on the screen, and was one of the first singing cowboys in the 1930 film Sons of the Saddle. The emerging singing cowboy film was evidently aimed at profiting from economic synergies between film and music productions, a strategy frequently employed in the film musical. Stars of western and country music were contracted to act and perform their songs for the screen, thus drawing on their previous success in concerts, radio shows, and recordings. ‹Horse operas› starring Roy Rogers and especially Gene Autry were among Hollywood’s main box office draws in the late 1930s. Successful films in turn increased the popularity of the respective singer-actor and raised the sales figures and ratings of the music and radio industry. The cultural economy of transmedia connections between film and music productions potentiated the hybrid genre patterns and the eclectic style characteristic for singing cowboy films. A telling example is Mack V. Wright’s The Big Show, a 1936 Republic Pictures production starring Gene Autry. This highly self-reflexive film about a western movie production not only integrates various musical numbers, but also slapstick elements, melodramatic scenes, and a whole subplot pertaining to the genre of the gangster film. Although the comedia ranchera hardly features any self-reflexive dimensions, let alone radio or recording scenes within the diegesis as found in many singing cowboy films, it is also characterised both by genre hybridisation and interconnections with the music industry. In many aspects, what western music is for the singing cowboy film, the ranchera music is for the comedia ranchera. Besides, the música ranchera can be regarded as «the Mexican equivalent of country and western music», as Brenner put it in the title of his study on ranchera music. This holds true especially in terms of nationalist narratives idealising ‹the country as nucleus of the nation›, which are fairly common both in western and ranchera songs and films. Just as the ‹horse opera›, the emerging genre of the comedia ranchera integrates songs into its generic structure and substantially draws on singers that were wellestablished in the music industry and the teatro de revista, or revue. This strategy is already evident in the generic matrix of Fernando de Fuentes’s comedia ranchera 226

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Allá en el Rancho Grande/Out on the Big Ranch (1936), which was the first big international success of Mexican cinema. At the time, the film’s title-giving folkloric song was already very popular and had been getting about in performances and recordings, for example in the 1927 teatro de revista Cruz, which included a version of the song by Emilio Donato Uranga and Juan Díez del Moral,10 as well as in various radio and record versions, including interpretations by Tito Guízar, the protagonist of Allá en el Rancho Grande. Significantly, by the time Guízar starred in Fernando de Fuentes’s paradigmatic comedia ranchera, he was not only an established singer in Mexican teatro de revista, broadcast and recordings. Guízar had also very successfully worked in the U.S.-American music industry and appeared in a few Hollywood productions, and thus promised to attain an audience outside of Mexico. Allá en el Rancho Grande did indeed become an international success; it received the award ‹best cinematography› for Gabriel Figueroa at the Venice Film Festival in 1938 and was released in many countries, including the USA, where the film was screened not only for Hispanic communities but also for an English-speaking audience. The artistic and commercial success of the film helped to establish a Mexican film industry that strongly capitalised on the generic formula of the comedia ranchera, and flourished until the 1950s. Significantly, outside of Mexico, the distribution of Allá en el Rancho Grande was in the hands of United Artists Corporation, which made the majority of the film’s profit (see Pérez Turrent 164). As Vega Alfaro has underlined, the Mexican film industry developed «in a country with a dependant capitalist structure»11 (105), which heavily relied on U.S. economy and politics. Part of the capital for the nascent Mexican studio system was subscribed by U.S. investors; both the big real estate and land owner Harry Wright and Howard Randall from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had been economically involved in the Studios Clasa since 1935, and Randall also partook in the construction of what would become Azteca Studios (see Pérez Turrent 164). In 1943 RKO Pictures made an agreement with the Mexican radio magnate Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta to found Estudios Churubusco, inaugurated in 1945 as one of the largest movie studios in Latin America. The major Hollywood studio held 49% of Estudios Churubusco’s stock (and only the protectionist ‹Mexicanisation› laws impeded RKO from holding a bigger share). Besides the involvement in the production and distribution of Mexican films, U.S. corporations dominated 10 Donato Uranga and Díez del Moral claimed to be the authors of Allá en el Rancho Grande, although they most likely just registered their arrangement of a folkloric song of unknown authorship at the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de México (SACM) in 1927. Shortly after, Silvano R. Ramos and Barley Costello registered an English version of the song at the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in Texas – a version that, significantly, would later be performed and recorded by the ‹singing cowboy› Gene Autry and many other stars of U.S.American folk and western music. 11 «dans un pays à structure capitaliste dépendant».

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much of the screening sector. In 1949, William Jenkin’s group controlled 80% of the film theatres in Mexico (see García Riera, Breve Historia 152). Even at the height of the Mexican film industry in the 1940s and 50s, more than 80% of all films screened were Hollywood productions. U.S. domination on the Mexican market included not only film but also music corporations, which were often vertically and horizontally integrated, profiting from transmedia synergies as in the case of the comedia ranchera and ranchera music. Many of Tito Guízar’s Mexican recordings, which he commenced in 1927, were actually made for Columbia and RCA Victor (but also for Mexican labels such as Peerless). The same holds true for other ‹Mexicanist› music stars, including Jorge Negrete, one of the most famous Mexican singers and actors of all time, who recorded for RCA Victor. In a way, Negrete would in the early 1940s become Guízar’s successor, along with Pedro Infante, the other major actor-singer star of both música ranchera and comedia ranchera (although he recorded for the Mexican label Peerless). Significantly, Negrete starred in the 1948 eponymous remake of Allá en el Rancho Grande, again directed by Fernando de Fuentes. Whereas Jorge Negrete, apart from his first short film Cuban Nights for Warner Bros. (1937), exclusively embodied mexicanidad, or a supposed ‹essence› of Mexican cultural identity in the star persona of ‹el charro cantor›, Tito Guízar, despite being a precursor of this Mexicanist figure in Allá en el Rancho Grande, represented a seemingly broader spectrum of latinidad, though mostly filtered through the prism of Hollywood that depicted highly exoticised imaginaries of Latin American otherness. Indeed, before Guízar was cast as protagonist of Fernando de Fuentes’s comedia ranchera, he already had performed as a singer in Hollywood films and his success as a musician and radio performer included his own radio show in Los Angeles, Tito Guízar y su guitarra.12 Based on his musical success, Guízar’s film persona as a Latino singer was established in his first film appearances in the series Rambling’ Round Radio Row in 1933 and 1934, produced by the Vitaphone division of Warner Bros. Guizar was oriented transnationally both in terms of the film productions he worked for and the roles he played, embodying musicians such as a Spanish singer in the Vitaphone short See, See, Senorita (1935) or a singer in Argentina in Under the Pampas Moon (Fox 1935). Subsequent to the interna12 Jorge Negrete also tried to have a career in the USA and worked in New York City in 1937, but he was not very successful and mainly just sang in night clubs. In El Yumuri, he played with Cuban composer Eliseo Grenet and got the chance to enact the role of a Cuban musician in his first film, the Warner Bros. short Cuban Nights (1937), set to the music of Grenet. In the same year, Negrete starred in his first Mexican film, La Madrina del Diablo/The Devil’s Godmother (1937). Although he soon had a brilliant film career in Mexico, he repeatedly attempted to work in Hollywood. In 1939 he signed a contract with 20th Century Fox to produce Spanish-language films in Hollywood, but they never materialised. His second and last film production in the USA was the medium-length Technicolor film Fiesta (1941), directed by LeRoy Prinz and distributed by United Artists.

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tional success of Allá en el Rancho Grande, Tito Guízar starred in numerous Mexican comedias rancheras such as Amapola del camino/Poppy of the Path (1937), ¡Qué lindo es Michoacán!/Beautiful Michoacan (1943) and ¡Como México no hay dos!/There is Nothing Like Mexico (1944); the latter two’s titles already verbalise the genre-specific patriotic exaltation of (rural, folkloric) Mexico. Furthermore, Guízar starred in Hollywood productions in Spanish and English. Both the Mexican and Hollywood films capitalised on his star persona as a ‹singing Latin lover›, frequently modelled on the charro character of his principal role at the Rancho Grande, but sometimes with a self-reflexive touch, as in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (Mitchell Leisen, Paramount 1938) and El trovador de la radio/Radio Troubador (Richard Harlan, Dario Productions 1938). Congruously, Guízar also starred as a ‹Mexican singing cowboy› in the Hollywood westerns The Llano Kid (Edward D. Venturini, Paramount Pictures 1939) and El rancho del pinar/The Singing Charro (Richard Harlan and Gabriel Navarro, Dario Productions 1939). Characteristic for his international career, Guízar also played a ‹Mexican singing charro› in an Argentinean production, De México llegó el amor/The Love Came From Mexico (Richard Harlan, 1940), featuring Amanda Ledesma, a major star of the popular musical genre cine tanguero, or tango film. Equally characteristic for the transnational interconnections of the Mexican film industry, Amanda Ledesma was invited to star in Mexico, where she made eight films, her first being Cuando quiere un mexicano/When a Mexican Loves (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1944), starring Jorge Negrete. The film is also known as La gauchita y el charro/The Gaucho Girl and the Charro and thus corresponds to the ‹national› figures of Argentina and Mexico as well as to the star personas of both Amanda Ledesma and Jorge Negrete, who were widely known as ‹la rubia diosa del tango› (‹the blond goddess of tango›) and ‹el charro cantor› (‹the singing charro›). Bringing together these singer-actor stars was by no means an exceptional case. Quite on the contrary, ‹importing› stars and other outstanding film personnel apparently was a strategy to boost the Mexican film industry and to facilitate market expansion, capitalising both on stars and successful genres, similar to the common practice in Hollywood, which served as the model for the Mexican studio system. Similar to the comedia ranchera, the cine tanguero was one of the most popular genres both nationally and in Latin America, with the main stars also being singer-actors. Apart from Amanda Ledesma, Libertad Lamarque and Hugo del Carril, the two other main singer-actor stars of the cine tanguero (besides Carlos Gardel, who already died in 1935) were also invited to work in Mexican cinema. Whereas Carril only starred in two Mexican films in the mid-1940s and pursued his career in Argentina (where he also became an outstanding filmmaker), Libertad Lamarque stayed in Mexico and starred in more than 40 films, many of which pertain to the comedia ranchera. In her first Mexican film, Luis Buñuel’s Gran Casino (1947), Lamarque starred together with Jorge Negrete, just like Amanda Ledesma. 229

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Though the film is not a comedia ranchera, it nonetheless contains elements of this genre such as rancheras sung by Negrete, which are complemented with tangos sung by Lamarque. While U.S. companies and government exerted a strong influence on the Mexican film industry, transnational interconnections were not confined to U.S.-Mexican relations. One of the reasons why principal stars of Argentinean cinema began to work in the Mexican film industry was the political intervention of the U.S. government, whose Good Neighbour policy had lasting effects on the development of Latin American film production (see Schnitman 31f.). In 1940, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) was created within the U.S. Department of State, to promote Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour policy. Because Argentina stayed neutral in WW II (until shortly before the end of the war), the CIAA decided to impose a raw film stock quota on the country’s film industry, while allied Mexico received support at all levels, including unlimited supply of raw film as well as loans, technological equipment and technical advice. This policy was one of the main reasons for the decline of Argentinean cinema in the early 1940s, and led to Mexico’s definite ascent to the most important film producing nation in Latin America.

4. Genre Matrices, Hybridisation and Intra-National Exclusions The Mexican film industry advanced to be Latin America’s leading cinema in the 1940s and the comedia ranchera was one of the main genres that helped to bring about this success.13 Allá en el Rancho Grande can be considered as the matrix of the comedia ranchera, a genre evolving around melodramatic conflicts of love and friendship in the folkloric realm of an idyllic hacienda, abundant with musical interludes sung by charros and occasional comical scenes. The comedia ranchera was aptly called «el cine mexicano por exce9 Allá en el Rancho Grande lencia» by Jorge Ayala Blanco (69) – in analogy to the famous definition of the western as «the American cinema par excellence». Indeed, this parallel is quite appropriate, not only because the comedia 13 The generic impact of the comedia ranchera on other Latin American cinemas is not only evident in Argentinean films but also, for example, in the Brazilian filme de cangaceiro, that did not only draw to generic regimes from the western but also to the «cine mexicano por excelencia» (see Schulze).

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ranchera constructs a nationalist imaginary of Mexico and was a prevailing genre in Mexican cinema for two decades, widely distributed in Latin America and Spain. It is also the generic similarities of the «cine mexicano por excelencia» with the western or rather with the subgenre of the singing cowboy film, which is most evident at the level of the syntax, whereas, analogue to the western, semantic elements like characters, locations, sets, etc. are ‹typically› Mexican, stemming from the charro’s culture. Besides the resemblances with the western, the comedia ranchera exhibits other generic matrices, including the rural Mexican melodrama from the silent film era, with films such as En la hacienda/At the Hacienda (1920) by Ernesto Vollrath. A pronounced non-cinematic influence is the género chico of the zarzuela, i.e. the more brief and popular form of the Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken scenes and singing numbers and dance. In the late 19th century the Mexican zarzuela increasingly obtained a nationalist tone, and evolved into a new genre, the revista de música or revista, which made various singers music and film stars, especially of the canción ranchera and the comedia ranchera, for instance Tito Guízar or Lucha Reyes (see Brenner 75f.). Allá en el Rancho Grande also displays similarities with two immensely successful Hispanic films set in the countryside – Nobleza gaucha/Gaucho Nobility (1915), an Argentinean production directed by Humberto Cairo, Ernesto Gunche and Eduardo Martinez de la Pera, which is set in the pampa and idealises ‹national› folklore; and the Spanish film Nobleza baturra/Rustic Chivalry (1935), a remake of Juan Vila Vilamala’s eponymous film from 1925, directed by Florián Rey, that tells the story of an honest girl, whose reputation is tarnished by a rejected suitor. Analogue to the filmic and non-cinematic predecessors, Allá en el Rancho Grande and the comedia ranchera in general draw heavily on the array of Mexican folklore, mainly from the state of Jalisco, including not only the charro and the china poblana, but also canciones rancheras and a jaripeo or bull riding, to name but a few of the ‹national› traditions represented in the film. The pivotal function of the canción ranchera is evident in a central set-piece of the genre, the ‹duelo de coplas›, a singing duel performed in a cantina by the hero, embodied by the film’s star Tito Guízar, and his antagonist. Equally characteristic for the emerging genre, a scene with a cock fight is interrupted by a jarabe tapatío, a ‹Mexicanist› dance performed by charros and chinas poblanas, played by Olga Falcon and Emilio Fernández, who had already embodied Mexicans in Hollywood cinema and westerns more specifically (with many westerns still to come). Rafael Aviña (152) has aptly called the comedia ranchera «un cine exageradamente mexicano», i.e. an «exaggeratedly Mexican cinema». Indeed, the comedia ranchera is characterised by a certain folkloric ‹excess› that symbolises mexicanidad at many levels, especially in the mise-en-scène. For domestic audiences, this representational strategy implies a nation-building function, as elaborated above. However, the folkloric ‹national› traits foregrounded are, in fact, regional, thus implying certain intra-national exclu231

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sions, not only in terms of regional cultural belonging, but also regarding the specific configurations of race, class and gender (a point I will come back to). Although the ‹national› particularities are very pronounced in the comedia ranchera, they do not bring about a cultural particularism that would result in unintelligibility for foreign audiences and thus obstruct the commercialisation of the respective films. ‹Mexicanist› folklore is employed as a representational regime that exhibits what Graham Huggan (vii) has termed «postcolonial exotic», referring to «the global commodification of cultural difference». For non-Mexican audiences, the generic regimes employed exoticise the cultural particularity represented in terms of ultimately relaying the foreign back to the familiar. This is attained especially by drawing from and altering seemingly ‹universal› genre patterns popularised by Hollywood cinema. Besides, the strategy of capitalising both on ‹Latino› folklore and on singer stars in musicals was already proved by Hollywood productions in Spanish, aimed to secure film markets in Latin America and Spain with the advent of sound film. Whereas the greater part of Spanish version films and Spanish-language productions made in Hollywood were unsuccessful (see Jarvinen), the films employing famous singers as actors, notably the musicals of the early 1930s starring the Argentinean Carlos Gardel and the Mexican José Mojica, were big box office attractions and capitalised on exoticised regional music and folklore.14 Thus, the pronounced auto-exoticising representation of cultural difference serves as a marker of product differentiation in a film market strongly dominated by Hollywood productions (for Hollywood’s market leadership in Latin America see Segrave; Usabel). Therefore, the foregrounding of cultural specificity did not exclude but rather attracted foreign audiences, especially in Latin America. In this regard, Ana M. López’s observation that Mexican cinema «produces a continental voice that is, nevertheless, deeply nationalistic» (8) seems to be especially apt for the comedia ranchera. The «continental voice» of the «cine mexicano por excelencia» articulated in Allá en el Rancho Grande and the genre in general, is profoundly conservative, if not reactionary. Clearly, the comedia ranchera can be read as an apology for the social order of a feudal society, and thus rather corresponds to the bygone Porfirian era than to the present government of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, whose leftist politics included the distribution of land to the peasants. In contrast, the comedia ranchera idealises social hierarchies, evident in the attitude of the patrón of the hacienda in Allá en el Rancho Grande, who programmatically explains to 14 Apparently, musical numbers and exoticised folklore only in combination with singer-stars worked as a successful formula. One of the first Spanish language productions from Hollywood with the programmatic title Charros, Gauchos y Manolas (Hollywood Spanish Pictures 1930), directed by the Catalan musician Xavier Cugat, already tried to capitalise on the folkloric sceneries of Mexico, Argentina and Spain (which would all become central backgrounds for film productions in the respective countries), but the film was unsuccessful, arguable in part because of its incoherence, but mainly due to the lack of familiar and popular personnel.

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his son that the owner of a ranch has to take care of «his poor peasants» as a father/ priest, doctor, and sometimes even gravedigger.15 As Raphaëlle Moine has underlined, genre hybridisation outside of Hollywood can reflect the «need to maintain cultural identity while responding to the dominance and influence of American cinema» (152). This holds true particularly for the «cine mexicano por excelencia», which strongly draws from genre patterns of the western and occasionally subverts them with specific «productions of locality» (see Appadurai). On the other hand, the comedia ranchera propagates a very pronounced nationalism and affirms a conservative imaginary of mexicanidad that excludes intra-national alterities. Even though the comedia ranchera ostentatiously hybridises the western which is referred to as a generic point of reference, the «cine mexicano por excelencia» is by no means simply a cinéma mineur vis-à-vis dominant Hollywood cinema. Rather, the comedia ranchera not only evolved within a predominant cinema in Latin America from the late 1930s to the 1950s (coming second after Hollywood), but it exhibits marked discursive exclusion within the representation of the hacienda as ‹nucleus of the nation›. Traditions from one region, mainly Jalisco, are elevated to the ‹national› identity of Mexico, whereas other regional and urban spaces are completely dismissed or devaluated – as in the case of ¡Ay Jalisco... no te rajes!/Jalisco, Don’t Backslide (1941), directed by Joselito Rodríguez, where traditionally vested men from Jalisco, including the hero played by Jorge Negrete, in a ‹duelo de coplas› defeat the antagonists from the city in modern western suits. The comedia ranchera affirms a hierarchical social order with the patrón reigning over peasants; significantly, the figure of the charro is represented as main character and as a national figure. By contrast, the vaquero who belongs to the lower stratum of society, in which indigenous people are much more common, has no voice or central function in the narrative of the «cine mexicano por excelen- 10 La justicia del Gavilán Vengador cia». Significantly, indigenes are reduced to an exoticised imaginary of cultural authenticity without being granted any agency or even given a voice in the narrative, as demonstrated by the example of La justicia del Gavilán Vengador. 15 «como el dueño de un rancho tiene que hacer para sus pobres peones: padre, medico y as veces hasta enterrador».

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11–12 Fanfarrón: ¡aquí llegó el valentón!

Another telling example would be Fanfarrón: ¡aquí llegó el valentón!/The Boaster (shot in 1938, first publicly exhibited in 1943) directed by Fernando A. Rivero, featuring Jorge Negrete and Emilio Fernández. The opening shots affirm mexicanidad in the sense of a ‹Mexicanist› cultural identity. First, a long shot evokes an ‹archetypal› Mexican landscape with maguey plants casting deep shadows, thus creating a strong visual rhythm in front of a vast plain. What follows is a shot of the production company’s logo, a tableau vivant of a stylised Aztec Indian in a martial pose, and a charro on his horse, embodied by Jorge Negrete, known as ‹el charro cantor›. Both figures, the traditional Aztec and the charro, epitomise Mexican culture with the fundamental difference that the indigene is reduces to a symbolic function, whereas the charro is the main hero of film. In the comedia ranchera, indigenes usually have no function in the plot and are represented merely as emblems of mexicanidad in the sense of the nationalist discourses on mestizaje and the Mexican «raza cósmica» (see Vasconcelos) that affirm a hybrid cultural identity with nation-building function based on the mixture of races. The figure of the indigene does not obtain any agency in the narrative of the comedia ranchera. The same holds true for women. Although women are not simply reduced to emblematic images, in the dominant melodramatic mode of the comedia ranchera they are confined to passivity and, frequently, suffering vis-à-vis their unconditional love for the macho charro. What Christine Gledhill has pointedly called the «gendering of genres», which stabilises a «masculinist national imaginary» (Gledhill 350), is arguably most pronounced in the comedia ranchera and its affirmation of Mexico as a macho nation. Rather than a counter-hegemonic cultural practice, hybridisations of the western in the comedia ranchera usually result in a national imaginary characterised by a hierarchical social order and discursive exclusions of women and indigenes.

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Works Cited Altman, Rick. «A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.» Film Genre Reader. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 26–40. Print. – Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. and ext. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Appadurai, Arjun. «The Production of Locality.» Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 178–199. Print. Aviña, Rafael. Una mirada insólita. Temas y géneros del cine mexicano. México, D.F.: Cineteca Nacional and Oceano, 2004. Print. Avitia Hernández, Antonio. La leyenda de ‹Movieland›. Historia del cine en el estado de Durango (1897–2004). México, D.F.: Avitia Hernández, 2004. Print. Ayala Blanco, Jorge. La aventura del cine mexicano (1931–1967). México, D.F.: Posada, 1986. Print. Bazin, André. «Le western, ou le cinéma américain par excellence.» Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Cerf, 1990. 217–227. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. «Introduction: Narrating the Nation.» Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 1–7. Print. Bloom, Peter J. «Beyond the Western Frontier. Reappropriations of the ‹Good Badman› in France, the French Colonies, and Contemporary Algeria.» Westerns. Films Through History. Ed. Janet Walker. New York: Routledge, 2001. 197–216. Print. Brenner, Helmut. Música Ranchera. Das mexikanische Äquivalent zur Country und Western Music aus historischer, musikalischer und kommerzieller Sicht. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996. Print. Buscombe, Edward and Roberta Pearson. «Introduction.» Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western. Eds. Edward Buscombe and Roberta Pearson. London: BFI, 1998. 1–7. Print.

Carreño King, Tania. El charro: la construcción de un esterotipo nacional 1920–1940. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana and Federación Mexicana de Charrería, 2000. Print. Chevalier, François. La formación de los latifundios en México. Tierra y sociedad en los siglos 16 y 17. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976. Print. García Riera, Emilio. Breve Historia del Cine Mexicano. Primer Siglo 1897–1997. México, D.F.: IMCINE and Zapopan, Jalisco: MAPA SA de CV, 1998. Print. – México visto por el cine extranjero, vol. 1: 1894–1940/vol. 2: 1906–1940. Filmografía. México, D.F.: Era and Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara and Centro de Investigaciones y Enseñanzas Cinematográficas, 1987. Print. Gledhill, Christine. «Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera.» Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1997. 337–386. Print. Curtin, Michael. «Spatial Dynamics of Film and Television.» The cultural economy. Eds. Helmut Anheier et al. Los Angeles and London: SAGE, 2008. 215–226. Print. Hernández, Silviano. Ser charro es ser mexicano. Guadalajara: Secretaría de Cultura and Gobierno de Jalisco, 2010. Print. Hobsbawm, Eric. «Introduction: Inventing Traditions.» The Invention of Tradition. Eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 1–14. Print. Hopkins, A. G. «Introduction: Globalization – An Agenda for Historians.» Globalization in World History. Ed. A. G. Hopkins. New York City: Norton, 2002. 1–10. Print. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. Jarvinen, Lisa: «Hollywood and SpanishSpeaking Audiences.» The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film. Volume II 235

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– 1929 to 1945. Eds. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon. Malden: Blackwell, 2012. 156–178. Print. León, Arnoldo de. They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Print. López, Ana M. «A Cinema for the Continent.» The Mexican Cinema Project. Eds. Chon A. Noriega and Steven Ricci. Los Angeles: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 1994. 7–12. Print. Moine, Raphaëlle. Cinema Genre. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Print. Pérez Turrent, Thomas. «Les studios.» Le cinéma mexicain. Ed. Paulo Antonio Paranaguá. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992. 161–173. Print. Ramírez Berg, Charles. Latino Images in Film. Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Print. Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis. Le Western ou le cinéma américain par excellence. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1953. Print. Rincón Gallardo, Carlos. El charro mexicano. México, D.F.: Porrúa, 1939. Print. Robertson, Roland. «Glocalization: TimeSpace and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.» Global Modernities. Eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson. London: Sage, 1995. 25–44. Print. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Print. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Print. Schnitman, Jorge A. Film Industries in Latin America: Dependency and Development. Norwood: Ablex, 1984. Print. Schulze, Peter W. «Beyond Cowboys and Cangaceiros: Transculturations of the Western in Brazilian Cinema.» Crossing Frontiers. Intercultural Perspectives on the Western. Eds. Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze. Marburg: Schüren, 2011. 163–193. Print.

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Segrave, Kerry. American Films Abroad. Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997. Print. Slatta, Richard W. Cowboys of the Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Print. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1974. Print. Smead, Robert N. Vocabulario Vaquero/ Cowboy Talk. A Dictionary of Spanish Terms from the American West. Foreword by Richard W. Slatta. Illustrations by Ronald Kil. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Print. Sommer, Doris. «Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America.» Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 71–98. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print. Stanfield, Peter. Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Print. Usabel, Gaizka de. The High Noon of American Films in Latin America. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. Print. Vasconcelos, José. La Raza Cósmica. Misión de la raza iberoamericana. Notas de viajes a la América del Sur. Madrid: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925. Vega Alfaro, Eduardo de la. «Origines, développement et crise du cinéma parlant (1929–1964).» Le cinéma mexicain. Ed. Paulo Antonio Paranaguá. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992. 95–115. Print. Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. With paintings by Frederic Remington. New York: Macmillian, 1967. Print.

Glocalising Hollywood

Ute Fendler

African Francophone Cineastes Going ‹Genres› Two Examples For (E)Merging Genres

1. African Cinema: Cinema d’auteur versus Genres Rick Altman summarised the complexity of the genre question as follows: «A cinema based on genre films depends not only on the regular production or recognizably similar films, and on the maintenance of a standardized distribution/exhibition system, but also on the constitution and maintenance of a stable, generically trained audience, sufficiently knowledgeable about genre systems to recognize generic cues, sufficiently familiar with genre plots to exhibit generic expectations, and sufficiently committed to generic values to tolerate and even enjoy in genre films capricious, violent, or licentious behaviour which they might disapprove of in ‹real life›.» (279)

The various aspects, such as production, distribution and the public, are crucial to Francophone African cinema that is mainly known as a cinéma d’auteur. Due to economic, cultural and aesthetic developments in its history, elements of cinematographic genres have appeared only occasionally. This is also due to the fact that French cinema, which for decades has been the first point of reference for Francophone African film directors, sees itself as being a «cinéma d’auteur» because of modes of production, the lack of big studios, the close relationship with other arts 239

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like theatre and fine arts especially during the first decades of film production. Or, as some articles claim in «Le cinéma français face aux genres» edited by Raphaëlle Moine, the critiques of French films contribute to the creation of a myth of the nonexistence of genres in order to reinforce the myth of the «génie créateur», the artist, especially in opposition to Hollywood (Journot; Nacache). Approaches to African cinema usually focus on thematic, and more recently on aesthetic aspects of an oeuvre like that of Sembène Ousmane or Djibril Diop Mambéty, or a school like that in Burkina Faso, a phenomenon that allows them to deal with a corpus that is large enough to describe tendencies. As funding is one of the major problems of film production in most Francophone African countries, the work of an artist or of a country is often too limited to allow the development of genres that would demand the repetition of a certain set of features. Another characteristic of the cinema landscapes is the fact that foreign productions, especially blockbusters, genre films such as martial arts, western, thriller, action movies, dominate the cinema halls so that the spectatorship is used to genres and expects either narrations in a similar mode or a certain variation on genres. This explains why African films are very often just festival films: they do not correspond to the – especially economic – criteria of programmes for public cinema halls or video clubs and rarely meet the expectations of a large African public. Although one has to admit that in a country such as Burkina Faso, where there has been a cultural policy for the last 30 years, the spectators also appreciate the films by African film directors as part of a larger «collective film imagery» or «film memory» via regular programming on TV, in cinema halls and of course by the FESPACO. The production in Burkina has been large enough for over 30 years for critics to talk about a recognisable school of Burkina. During the 1980s, a large number of films have concentrated on a rural setting and the problems of the rapid change of life due to the impact of European, «modern» ways in urban areas. The almost famous «lenteur» – slowness – of the narration, the aesthetic of long shots, a lack of shot/counter shot in favour of less cuts to strengthen the importance of the group and not the individual, just to mention a few characteristics, would allow to describe the productions of this period as a genre because a set of thematic and aesthetic features is repeated. But the analysts would rather concentrate on individual directors such as e.g. Idrissa Ouédraogo or Gaston Kaboré. As Dimitris Eleftheriotis has underlined in the European context, it is difficult to talk about national cinemas in the case of co-productions that have to take into account various cultural, political and economic contexts in order to reach a larger spectatorship (32). In the context of Francophone African productions, this is also a crucial aspect as most films have been produced with the financial aid of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Union and in some cases of television channels like ARTE, France 3, WDR and so on. Film directors often complain about the constraints they feel. Trying to get funding, they adjust their script 240

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to the expectations of a European institution and/or potential public. Especially in the case of the Burkinabe school, often also called «cinéma case» because of the concentration on a rural Africa, the critique was very harsh, as spectators as well as critics claim that a rural setting with poor illiterate peasants with a traditional world view would correspond to a European image of Africa that has been propagated since the Sahel crisis in the late 1970s. And it is not seen as at all representative for «modern West Africa». Or, as the Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo puts it via one of the protagonists in his film essay Aristotle’s plot (2001): «African action: the chicken chases the goat. The goat chases the chicken.» Only very recently, mainly due to the high competition with dynamic cinema landscapes in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, younger filmmakers use digital production modes which allow low budget films that mainly aim at entertaining the public with a good story. Boubakar Diallo, also from Burkina Faso, succeeds in producing a film each year that fills the large cinema halls. But critics do not take these films into consideration as they are part of a popular culture and do not correspond with the expectations for a «high culture» cinema production. Dani Kouyaté, a well-known director from Burkina Faso, who has won prizes for his films at international festivals since the 1990s, launched a film dealing with genre elements of western and modern fairy tales comparable to elements we find in a film like Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain/Amelie (2001) for the first time using digital cameras. Being a recognised director of cinema, the critics welcomed his film Ouaga Saga (2007) as a promising experiment. These two examples illustrate that the ongoing categories like popular and high culture, entertainment versus art considerably influence the politics of production and reception. In his book on African Film Manthia Diawara has argued that only a popular cinema will be African cinema, a cinema that finds its spectators in Africa and that draws on popular culture and beliefs: «[...] what makes these films popular, are also the narrative structures, the motifs and the emotional expectations they borrow from African popular culture. The films rely on popular religious beliefs and superstitions, folklore and the common sense of everyday life, unlike the consciousness-raising narratives of Sembène or the metafilmic and intellectualised films of Bekolo and Bakupa-Kanyinda.» (144)

These arguments are just part of the complex interaction in the cinematographic field of African films as we have just seen. African spectatorships claim their own images, themes and structures but they also have expectations built on viewing habits strongly influenced and developed by the dominating film industries. In this complex context of competing concepts of cinema, the still strong influence of French cultural policy, the important and almost exclusive presence of blockbusters on the large screens, finding a way to reach local and at the same time African spectatorships and above all on a larger scale seems to be almost impossible. 241

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However, there are two recent productions that are promising examples for films that respond to the expectations of the African and international public, merging genres, aesthetics and narratives: the short film by the Burkinabe filmmaker Cédric Ido Hasaki ya Suda – The Swords (2011) and the first long feature film by the Congolese filmmaker Djo Tunda Wa Munga Viva Riva (2010).

2. Two Examples for (E)Merging Genres: Hasaki Ya Suda and Viva Riva Cédric Ido is an actor and painter, who grew up in Burkina Faso and France and says that his favourite films have always been martial arts films. The short film Hasaki ya Suda is his first that he produced with a low budget and a group of friends merging his predilection for the martial arts genre with his wish to transmit a political message about the importance of climate change for the future. The film Hasaki ya Suda was first presented at Fespaco in February 2011 during a morning session for short films. Among all these films, Hasaki ya Suda was a real surprise: it opens with Asian writing, «ink-paintings» that remind one of epic narrations in Asian cinema. Using paintings and a dark male voice for the story teller, the film places the spectator in this no-man’s land of an apocalyptic landscape in 2100. The first images merely show us running persons that suggest the flight of an adult and a child, the costumes still matching the genre. When we see the faces for the first time, it is surprising to see an African facing an Asian fighter, though this could still be part of the subgenre of combats between Eastern and Western fighters. This introduction ends with a detail of the African child’s face on which we see the blood drops of his father being killed by the Asian warrior. The next sequence opens with an adult implying that the child has grown up and has been raised by the Asian. The landscape shows dry hills and plains without traces of human settlements, so that the idea of an epoch after a climate catastrophe is raised. The confrontation between warriors and the protagonist provides an opportunity for sword battles. The use of special effects such as glimmering swords and flying warriors take up elements of martial arts films. What is new in the film is the fact that the characters come from different ethnic backgrounds, so that they represent the survivors of the catastrophe and each person confronts another without any respect for race or region; all these distinctions have been wiped out. The main language of the film is Lingala with some Japanese words for specific features linked to the genre. Thus, it is not even one of the languages spoken in Burkina Faso, but the main language of Congo, Central Africa. Ido explains that this is mainly due to the fact that Lingala is the language of some of the actors and thus became predominate in the group. But this coincidence strengthens – even if it is by chance – the transnational character of the film. In its narrative structures it will 242

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1 Hasaki ya Suda

meet the expectations of the public used to martial arts films, which usually would have to be subtitled for an African audience or even be commented by an «improvised» translator for a public that neither understands nor reads French or English. The message is universal, as a climate change affects the world population. In interviews Cedric Ido underlines that he wanted to tell a traditional story from a Southern perspective, contributing to the films and discourses on climate change that are mainly produced in the North and the West. Having opted for a pre-existing genre gives the film a larger international visibility: the recognition of well-known elements combined with new surprising and intriguing ones draws the attention of the spectator to the film and the plot itself. They show that the characteristics of a genre are clearly shaped and recognisable, the new elements being black swordfighters and the apocalyptic landscape. The latter element links the film with other genres like narratives of sceneries of catastrophes and risks. Raphaëlle Moine has spoken of the «communicative function of the genre»: «an authorial regime that proposes and a spectatorial regime that disposes» (92). Ido aptly uses the channel of communication provided to him by the genre of the martial arts film and apocalyptic narratives to reach the expectations of the public and conveying a new message in generic terms. Our second example is the film Viva Riva (2010), a co-production by Belgium, France, Congo and South Africa, which has won various awards at international festivals. The young film director, Djo Munga, returned to Congo with the aim of establishing a cinematographic economy in his home country. His first feature film 243

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2 Viva Riva

has been frenetically welcomed by the critics as being a real surprise first as a film from Congo, a country that has no film culture due to its political history. And also as an African film that dares to break certain unwritten rules, such as showing sequences of physical violence and also of sex that are usually avoided especially in Francophone cinema productions. The story is rapidly told: Kinshasa is out of fuel, so that Riva, coming home with a lorry loaded with barrels of gasoline which he wants to sell on the black market, hopes to get rich. However, he is pursued by a group of Angolan gangsters from which he has stolen the gasoline. And when he falls in love with Nora, the woman of a gang boss in Kinshasa, Riva has difficulties to escape his various persecutors. The film raises curiosity because it is an African film, from a country almost unknown in the world of cinema and a film that artfully uses and hybridises elements of various genres. The thriller sheds new light on an African country that has always been part of the European imaginary as the heart of Africa, if not to mention «heart of darkness». Djo Munga picks up local problems such as power cuts, energy shortage as well as corruption and poverty. Instead of constructing a tale to launch a disturbing story that will raise consciousness as political engaged cinema would, Munga focuses on the cinematographic narration by drawing on generic models that would appeal to the audience used to mafia and gangster films. But in this case, 244

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the African spectators will have the thrill of discovering their own realities on the screen, their being part of a thriller; while European or American spectators could respond mainly to the generic elements they recognise, enjoying the «exotic» setting. If we have a look at the opening sequence, it is evident that Munga uses generic elements of a thriller with the music, the details that suggest linkages between money, shortage of fuel and poverty. These are mixed with sequences that rapidly capture scenes of daily life – streets in shanty towns, poor housing, etc. He establishes the setting and the main conflict while illustrating in an unspectacular manner the daily problems of Kinshasa that rather remind of a documentary but which correspond also to the characteristics of crime thrillers that often capture social conditions. A second example with a rapid parallel montage depicting the night club life and scenes of corruption and killing in a surprisingly open way counting on the mediating force of the genre shows how close Viva Riva is to «gangster films». The success of the film is therefore not surprising. Though the assumed novelty of the film in an African context would have to be relativised because the elements, which have been underlined by critics such as the surprising violence and sex in an African film, have already been used in films such as e.g. Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (Cameroon, 2007) or Mama Keita’s L’Absence (Senegal, 2008). But both films have been limited to festivals. This might be due to the fact that Les Saignantes is also a highly experimental film and L’Absence has still a clear moral message. Viva Riva, in contrast, is entertaining, it is told in a smooth way that draws the spectator into the world of corruption, sex and violence in the same way other thrillers have done before. The moral message is reduced to a short sequence when Riva returns to his father’s house where his parents, instead of helping the wounded son, refuse his money and repudiate him. From my perspective though, the aesthetics are not that close to Fernando Meirelles, but rather to South African thrillers like e.g. Jerusalema (2008) which also uses aesthetic elements of music videos as we would find in Viva Riva – especially in the sequences showing the night-life in Kinshasa. Munga as well as Ido play with generic elements and rules in order to link their local narrations to the universe of cinematographic genres and narrations. While their predecessors mainly focused on the political message presented in a film language that was looking for a new specific African vocabulary, Ido and Munga draw on an imagery that has been built up by decades of film reception also in African countries. They aptly use new technical devices, narrative modes and aesthetic codes to tell their own stories. At the same time they draw on local narratives and imageries. They both use the mediating power of genres that reach out to the public that can enjoy the variations of the genre highlighting the differing aspects. The mediation can also be seen as a social function which takes on the dimension of a kind of myth. Moine – in drawing on Lévi-Strauss – explains one of the dimensions of genres as «a form of collective cultural expression that enables the dramatization of the common values and fundamental cultural oppositions that structure a 245

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society, as well as more coincidental conflicts» (79). From this perspective, Munga manages to bring together elements from various aesthetics in such a way that he tells the story of daily life in Kinshasa responding to the expectations of a spectatorship used for films about mafia groups, confrontations of gangs, an underworld reigned by the greed for money, violence and sex. The smooth rapid pace of the thriller alternates with moments of specific aspects of the local circumstances. His playing with elements sometimes comes close to an intermedial play of references to narrative structures and typical sets of figures and settings that the spectator recognises as variations on a genre, simultaneously presenting daily conflicts between rivalling gangs. At the end of the film they all die, and the last sequence shows the young street boy who followed his brotherly friend Riva, playing in the big car of the gangsters showing no interest in the bundles of money the gangster boss has left there. The sentence «Money will kill you» running through the entire film becomes true in the end, but the disinterest in the «dirty money» by the youngster gives some hope for another future. Cédric Ido opts for the blending of two genres, the martial arts and the apocalyptic film to bring the conflict between North and South to a dramatic climax in the climate catastrophe that individually confronts the survivors in a life-or-deathbattle. The perspective from the South here rather illustrates an opposition between two regions and thus a level that can be assumed by individuals. At the end of the film, the protagonist refuses the death-bringing battles and opens the perspective to an alternative, communicative solution. Both films have mainly been commented on because of the use of genres, though coming from a background where genres – or even a cinema culture – are lacking. At the same time, the two examples show different ways of dealing with genres beyond the globalising impact of market strategies. Munga brings together the local story with a global strategy. Using genres, Ido wants to transmit a globally relevant story from a local perspective. In both cases, genre therefore gives access to the circuits of world cinemas for films that have been limited to festivals or the category of cinémas d’auteur as being hardly accessible to a larger public.

3. Genres between Industry and ‹Creation› Besides this reading on the first level, cinema as an industry that produces genres and spectatorships that enter the circle of supply and demand, the two examples given enter this circle and can therefore become part of the circuit of production, distribution and consumption. The fact that critics mainly focus on the elements that can be classified in a certain way in the pre-existing categories of the history of world cinema reinforces the argument that African films, by using genre elements, become players in the exchange game of production and reception. 246

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In his article «Le cinéma comme expérimentation philosophique», Alain Badiou suggests a philosophical approach to cinema, saying that the parallel between cinema and philosophy is that they deal with questions of «ruptures», «events» («événements»), and both will therefore try to build a synthesis with the material given by life, material that as such seems to be senseless, violent, crude. Cinema, for him, is an «art impur» (369), as it accepts all material given by reality trying to bring it to a reflection, an idea. The fact that cinema uses images that everybody knows makes it an easily accessible medium, a «mass medium», that allows a large spectatorship to recognise a lived reality. We have seen this effect in our examples that allow a global public to make a connection between the representations in the film and a given reality so that the identification process is launched. Relating to genres, Badiou states that cinema also disposes of an ethical dimension: «Les grands genres du cinéma, les genres les plus codés, comme le mélodrame, le western, sont précisément des genres éthiques, c’est-à-dire des genres qui s’adressent à l’humanité pour lui proposer une mythologie morale.» (338f.)

This statement becomes interesting when he develops the idea of the procedures of cinema that work with «real material» delivered by reality and daily life, such as violence, sex, fascination with speed and movement etc. These elements are the basis for a work of simplification that will tell a story using the elements and the imagery everybody knows, trying to turn it into «image-mouvement» and «image-temps» that will allow living the experience that the film creates, bringing out an idea, «une pensée», by the simplification of the chaotic raw material. In the end the new «reality» created by the film allows to experience the abstracted thought, an ethos not only as a representation by types and constellations, but creating a myth by using the complexity of the reality and turning it into an «exemplary story», simplified to the basic idea: «Le cinéma, dans son essence, c’est ce corps à corps avec l’infini, infinité du visible, infinité du sensible, infinité des autres arts, infinité des musiques, infinité des textes disponibles. C’est un art de la simplification, alors que tous les autres arts sont des arts de la complexité. Le cinéma, idéalement, est la création de rien à partir d’une complexité, puisque l’idéal du cinéma est, au fond, la pureté du visible, un visible qui serait transparent, un corps humain qui serait comme un corps essentiel, un horizon qui serait un horizon pur, une histoire, qui serait une histoire exemplaire. Pour atteindre cet idéal, le cinéma doit traverser un matériau impur, se servir de tout ce qui existe, et surtout trouver le chemin de la simplicité.» (365)

The examples Badiou gives are usually great classics of world cinema that succeeded in creating this exemplary moment out of the chaos of a vast imagery. I do not doubt that Ido and Munga will enter the canon of these representative films right 247

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3 Viva Riva

away. Nevertheless, one should ask the question if the success of these films is only based on the use of generic elements that satisfy an aesthetic and economic demand in the worldwide cinematic circles. Both use the contemporary imagery that allows a large audience to share the story. Both films propose, while using the generic elements, a certain kind of moral values as the protagonists turn into heroes who, at a certain point in the story, step out of the vicious cycles of violence and greed to valorise the ideas of love and solidarity that can break the cycle of despair and disillusion. At the same time, the stories use structures that link them back to narrative techniques which can be seen as a part of the creation of myths that allows building categories in order to give meaning to the world. In Ido’s film, the protagonist breaks the continuity of the narration by leaving the land to his persecutors: this unexpected turning point also breaks with the logic of the martial arts narration. He turns into a hero because of the refusal to assume the role of the warrior to the end. At the same time, this refusal is a moment of deep insight into the mechanisms that can only be stopped in order to give back a sense to human activities if the logic of the warrior, who will always claim revenge and force, is stopped. In Munga’s film, Riva is the genre hero while he outwits the Angolan gangsters. But he beats the system when he loses his primary interest in money and power and cares more about social recognition. He steps out of the system and turns it ad absurdum; in spite of his death, he seems to be the winner. These narrative turns seem to correspond to the moments Badiou called the purifying narrative process in film that can crystallise ideas from the broad common imaginary. The two films tell the local version of how to face contemporary challenges for mankind. The imagery used and the way of presenting it apply visual and narrative 248

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codes that are popular and therefore accessible to a global audience. As Raphaëlle Moine – drawing on Lévi-Strauss – said, genres help to organise the world, as the stories put some order to the infinity (to use the words of Badiou) of the phenomenon and the imageries of the world we live in. When opting for cinematographic genres, Ido and Munga enter the global circuit of imageries as well as contribute to the creation of ideas. Works Cited Altman, Rick. «Cinema and Genre.» The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 276–285. Print. Badiou, Alain. «Le Cinéma comme Expérimentation Philosophique.» Cinéma. Paris: Nova, 2010. 323–374. Print. Diawara, Manthia. African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics. New York: Prestel, 2010. Print. Eleftheriotis, Dimitris. Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. New York: Continuum, 2001. Print.

Journot, Marie-Thérèse. «Des Courants et des Genres: du Réalisme Poétique à l’Esthétique Publicitaire.» Le Cinéma Français Face aux Genres. Ed. Raphaëlle Moine. Paris: AFRHC, 2005. 47–56. Print. Nacache, Jacqueline. «Nouvelle Vague et Jeune Cinéma: Des ‹Opérateurs Génériques› à la Genrification du Cinéma Français.» Le Cinéma Français Face aux Genres. Ed. Raphaëlle Moine. Paris: AFRHC, 2005. 57–66. Print.

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Global Horror Meets Local Spirits The Evolution of Tanzania’s Horror Film Genre

Transnational flows of video-horror have reached Tanzania. By the mid-1990s artists from different fields like theatre, dance and drums or martial arts had started to produce video films. The video film not only challenged local popular traditions but also discourses on film aesthetics in the country. Tanzanian culture administrators like the Tanzania Arts Council BASATA (Baraza la Sanaa la Taifa) differentiate between good traditional arts as a tool for the development and education of society and problematic video film and hip-hop as destructive influences from the West. The production of Nsyuka – filamu ya kwanza ya kutisha ya Tanzania, «the first Tanzanian horror movie», in 2004 not only marked the appropriation of the genre but also the development of the Tanzanian video film industry. As is the case elsewhere, in Tanzania movie genres are an important means of framing and categorising art and help viewers relate to and discuss certain types of films. In this paper I want to show how filmmakers build up distinct genre aesthetics through the appropriation of different contents, aesthetic and artistic practices. While the composition of a film is influenced by transnational stylistic currents everywhere, the integration of these sources into local traditions and practices of narrative production is crucial. Tanzanian horror films not only differ from their Western counterparts in their practices of production and reception but also in aesthetics and styles. I will firstly give an overview of the history of video film production in Tanzania. In looking at the filamu ya kutisha I want to discuss how these Tanzanian horror films fit into and/or divert from the Western genre conception and if one can talk of horror films at all. By giving a close-up perspective of Tanzania’s film monsters I want to point to their hybrid nature. In looking at the movies’ narratives, I will explore the elements that give them their specific Tanzanian aesthetics. 250

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1. Video film, Genre and The Development of a Film Industry In the 1980s video films began circulating in Tanzania. Movies from Hollywood, Hong Kong and India were among the most watched. According to Arjun Appadurai, this kind of connection to transnational flows creates a «media scape» as a basis for the emergence of «imagined worlds» (33). African video films are criticised for their crossover aesthetics and as part of the Soap-Operatisation of Africa, a format between TV and cinema which doesn’t fit Western concepts of these genres. Their «problematic» format prevents them from participating at festivals (Haynes: 1ff.). According to Karin Barber they occupy a cultural space which is defined as what it is not (3) – neither art nor film. The content of these movies introduced subjects which were not on the local cultural agenda in Tanzania. Filmic depictions of sex, violence and horror were taboo and seen as cultural misconducts of the class enemy and import of the West. Such topics were seldom seen in popular Swahili theatres because it was used as a tool for Tanzanian socialism, Ujamaa, modernisation projects, was obliged to fight against superstition and promote the idea of modern health care (Lange 225f.). Video films’ changing cultural practices1, values and norms can lead to the questioning of the status quo. No other area of Western film science is so contested as genre film and genre theory. Film critics have blamed producers’ genre movies for serving a predefined audience instead of a special audience, as would be the case with film classics (Braudy 104–5).2 Instead of denying the genre movies the affiliation to «real art» according to Braudy, one should try to analyse what these movies actually accomplish: «The joy in genre is to see what can be dared in the creation of a new form or the creative destruction and complication of an old one. The ongoing genre subject therefore always involves a complex relation between the compulsions of the past and the freedoms of the present, an essential part of the film experience.» (108f.)

According to Johannes Fabian, research of the genre concept in popular culture shows «how genre works when it does work, what it accomplishes, and what it prevents». He sees the meaning of genres especially in the relationship between genre and power as a «power exercised through acts of distinction and imposition, and power suffered through denial of recognition and through submission to criteria of distinction» (41f.). 1 2

Like Indian cinema has led to Indian Style in taarab music (see also Graebner 185; Askew 115; Fair 2009) video films have fostered the coming of Tanzania Martial Arts, sarakasi. This disapproval of genre in the arts is according to Leo Braudy rooted in the aesthetic theories of the Romantic during which the idea of the singular originality of poetic inspiration gained ground (105f.).

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The development of the Tanzanian video film industry is connected to the evolution of certain genres. As with silent movie comedies, where sound was not required for them to succeed, so comedies marked the initial phase of video film production from the mid-1990s to the turn of the century, heavily influenced by the former live popular theatre and the movies of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. King Majuto and Mzee Small, two famous comedians, recorded their sketches onto video in the mid-1990s and sold them to Indian3 businessmen for distribution. In these formative years a couple of directors and their small crew produced no more than one movie a month. Indian-owned companies, which dealt with local music and pirated movies from outside the country, established a distribution network in the market area of Kariakoo.4 In 2003, the industry consisted of only three distribution companies: Wananchi Video Production, GMC and Game 1st Quality – the only «African» distributor, distributing only its own movies. GMC kicked off with the hip-hop video film Girlfriend (2003), which was a huge success. The Tanzanian audiences however, accustomed to seeing foreign films, criticised the poor quality of the movies. Five years later, at least five movies per week were being produced on DVD due to increasing numbers of Tanzanians owning DVD players.5 Two more distribution companies, Kapico and Steps Entertainment Ltd., have since entered the market and the latter has established itself as the most popular in Tanzania.

2. The Evolution of filamu ya kutisha Robin Wood offers a very simple, basic formula for the horror film, namely: «Normality is threatened by the monster» with the three variables, normality, the monster and the relationship between the two. Wood defines normality as «the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them, «the monster as «society’s basic fears», and continues that «[i]t is the third variable, the relationship between normality and the Monster, which constitutes the essential subject of the horror film.» (79). The Tanzanian horror film genre was initiated by Mussa Banzi,6 who founded his own actors group the Tamba Arts Group in 2001 with the big dream of making movies. When his first film Nsyuka was completed in 2003, Wananchi Video Pro3 4 5 6

I will use the terms Indian, Wahindi, and «African» as local categories to distinguish between Tanzanians of Indian and of African origin. Smaller production units can be found also in the cities of Mwanza, Tanga, Arusha, Mbeya and Kigoma. In 2007 the price of DVDs and VCDs was reduced from 8,000 Tsh (USD 5) to 2,500 Tsh (USD 1.60) to combat the street vendors, machinga, who sell pirated copies for a third of the original price. Mussa Idi Kibwana Bwaduke was born in Dar es Salaam in 1978. After working as a cartoonist for several Tanzanian Newspapers, he joined the Kaole Sanaa Group in the mid-1990s, where he trained as a cameraman and director for television serials on ITV (Independent Television).

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duction distributed the movie, marking not only the beginning of the video film industry, but also of the horror film genre in Tanzania. With the genre title filamu ya kutisha «frightening film» Tanzanian horror movies are defined by the element of fear, with fans watching them based on how scary they are. As in other areas, the genre has blurred boundaries. What could be classified as horror is sometimes defined as filamu ya kutisha or filamu ya kusisimua or as filamu ya kichawi, referring to witchcraft films. Filamu ya kutisha are very popular and function as entry tickets for new directors since they almost always guarantee financial success. Mussa Banzi, like Sultan Tamba, by now belongs to the wakongwe (old and wise), who started working together in 2003, though later taking different directions. The newcomers included Haji Dilunga and Shariff Jumbe, who began making films in 2006 and were obviously influenced by their predecessors, yet also developed their own style. Shariff Jumbe, who articulated to be influenced by Hollywood, mixes foreign narrative patterns with local spirit stories such as in his debut Bwawa la Shetani, a vampire remake of Predator (1987). Both filmmakers made use of an underlying narrative of killing off protagonists, the principle of body count in the classic horror film. This newly established subgenre could be called Tanzanian Splatter.

3. The Hybrid Nature of Horror Movies According to Linda Badley, horror is marked in particular by its trans-mediality and can be described by Edgar Allen Poe’s «Philosophy of Composition» with the text functioning as a ‹technological apparatus› to trigger intense reactions by the audience (2ff.). Tanzanian movie-makers draw on ideas and iconographies from Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood and local folklore, literature and theatre to build the narratives. The first horror films to be circulated in Tanzania were shown in local cinemas. With the onset of video film and TV, horror films were more easily available. With the introduction of Nigerian horror films at the beginning of the 2000s the genre’s popularity increased (see also Krings 2007 and 2010).Today foreign horror movies are sold in the markets as Chinese pirated copies in «horrorcollections» with up to 40 movies on one DVD. Due to the easy availability of films which might not even be shown in cinemas abroad, the movies create a wealth of ideas for creating genres, narratives and styles. Like the German «Schauerroman» or the English gothic novel of the 18th and th 19 centuries, which functioned as a basis for Western horror films, horror literature in Tanzania plays the same role; in particular novels with stories of first-hand reports of encounters with witchcraft or supernatural beings. The covers of these leaflets reflect the intertextual character of the novels with a mix of global images of fantasy and horror, such as the mask from the movie Scream (1997) or Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983). 253

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When I asked Mussa Banzi why he used a certain kind of mise-en-scène he would say «Nimeitunga tu!» (I have just created it). Several plastic bags full of notes, scripts, storyboards, comic sketches, newspaper articles serve as inspiration for a story. While the narrative basis is mainly taken from local stories, the monster itself is adapted from global horror figures like vampires or zombies. The soundtrack, sometimes a recomposed soundtrack from Hollywood films, makes the work of art complete. Tobias Wendl compares this process in his description of Ghanaian and Nigerian horror movies, to musical «sampling», which results in «a highly original, hybrid cocktail; and in this respect the current video production can aptly be conceived as a ‹local address› for re-configuring and re-articulating the global flow of images for new local audiences». («Wicked Villagers» 266)

4. The Tanzanisation of Horror – the Making of Filamu ya kutisha No other film genre draws so heavily on myths as horror films, however, unlike their Western counterparts, African filmmakers use local myths in particular from their respective ethnic groups as the basis for a film. In Tanzania this applies to the myth and folklore of the Zaramo people on the coast near Dar es Salaam, to which many horror filmmakers belong. These stories often also revolve around witches and their evil powers, or around the mganga, healer, who appears in most of the movies but is obligatory in filamu ya kutisha. Wendl shows how the healer, witch doctor or jujuman in Nigerian and Ghanaian horror films can be compared to the mad scientist in Western horror films: «What, from a structuralist point of view, makes the jujumen resemble the ‹mad scientist› [...] is that both attempt to transgress normality and manipulate the natural reproductive cycle. The jujuman operates in his shrine, the mad scientist in his laboratory. Generally they both overestimate their powers and their creations (or transformative acts) go out of control. [...] A significant difference between the two is that the mad scientist is largely inspired and motivated by his own mad dreams, whereas the jujuman does not act out his own dreams, but those of his clients». («Wicked Villagers» 275f.)

By using this ethnic folklore, Tanzanian filmmakers achieve what can be called an authentication of horror. This is similar to what Jigal Beez describes with the genre of katuni za miujuza or miracle comics (153), where the movie-makers draw on a cultural repertoire of fear to frighten or shock their audiences. With the following Tanzanian horror film examples I want to show how filmmakers artistically combine different sources of horror aesthetics. To identify their ‹Tanzanianness›, I want to point to the stylistic parallels and differences to horror films from other regions. 254

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4.1 Tanzanian Vampires The idea for Mussa Banzi’s first movie Nsyuka came from his friend Askofu, who told him about the ancestral mythology of the Wanyakyusa, who live in southern Tanzania’s Mbeya Region. They believe that the dead enter the underworld ubusyuka as abasyuka. Sometimes during the night, the abasyuka come up and gather at graves, near fires lit for them. If their descendants stop praying for them, the abasyuka can get angry and punish humans (Busse 8f.), as also shown in the movie. In line with stylistic currents of Western horror movies, in the opening sequence of Nsyuka the camera takes the viewer over a night time cemetery to the soundtrack of Hollywood’s psycho-slasher classic Friday the 13th (1980). After a cut, the viewer gets a first glimpse of the monster Nsyuka, digging his way out of a grave. When he finally emerges, the camera follows his feet as he walks slowly through the cemetery. The story begins with Dorin, who has a nightmare about finding her housemaid and her dog brutally slaughtered by an evil monster (Nsyuka). It leaves her restless and she sees it as a bad omen as she hasn’t been able to fall pregnant. She visits a mganga who tells her that her mother took a forbidden trail near Nsyuka’s homestead while she was pregnant with her. The only way to break this spell would be to have intercourse with him while being possessed by Nsyuka. Dorin decides to visit a female mganga, who brings Nsyuka into her fiancé’s body and the two have sex. Dorin gets pregnant, forgets the trouble, marries, and finally gives birth to a baby boy. But when the mganga’s guiding charm is removed, her pregnancy gets troublesome and the doctor sees a kind of animal in her body. Nsyuka appears and warns her against an abortion. While growing up her son soon shows all the signs of a monster’s son. Emmanuel Kasoga aka Bob Kijiti, a Rasta musician, was cast as the monster, as Rastafarians are commonly viewed as criminal or evil. Nsyuka has long dreadlocks, a dirty gown, long teeth and nails and appears to Dorin with raised arms, laughing loudly before he disappears through the wall. «Nimeongeza» (I have added some things) said Banzi when explaining the outward appearance of Nsyuka.7 The lead actor refers to Nsyuka as Tanzania’s first Dracula movie, with Dracula as one of the most depicted figures in films around the globe. However, unlike the classical vampires, despite his thirst for blood, raised arms and diabolic laughter, Nsyuka is neither out for romantic love nor does he behave like a typical abasyuka. Although Nsyuka was a big success, Mussa Banzi separated from the Tamba Arts Group due to disputes over the distribution of finances. He took half of the actors with him and founded a new group. In Shumileta, his first movie with the group, Banzi used the vampiric element again at the beginning of the film. 7

Interview with Mussa Banzi, Dar es Salaam, 26.09.2006.

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1 Shumileta

According to Petra Flocke, the female vampire can be considered a figure created by men to demonise femininity through her obvious eroticism. The vampiress does not entirely fit the model of femininity attributed to women by their respective societies (7–8). Like other vampiresses, Shumileta embodies a mediation and negotiation of changing conceptions of gender relations in Tanzania. In the film, Shumileta is sent to earth to find a husband by her parents, who reign in an underwater world. After having stilled her blood thirst, killing several men while working as a prostitute, she meets Mack, a young man who gives her a ride home at night. But as Shumileta has left her visible traces, Mack’s fiancée, Monte, gets jealous. Together with Mack, she goes to visit her but they find only her sister who tells them that Shumileta had died many years previously. The spirit of Shumileta follows Mack until Monte considers consulting a mganga. But Shumileta turns her into a chicken, kidnaps Mack and flies with him to the underwater world. At the beginning of the film, to the repetitive sound of a section of Predator’s soundtrack, the viewer sees an object flying towards the Earth. After the opening sequence where Shumileta comes to earth to find a fiancé, we next see her walking along Tunisia Road in Dar es Salaam in a glittering short dress waiting for customers with her fellow prostitutes. After she managed to attract the first man, she leads him to the nearby cemetery where the viewer witnesses a dispute about money and safe sex, which finally results in the man paying more for unsafe sex and a bite from Shumileta. Like many vampire narratives whose stories are linked to the fear of epidemic plagues, as Nosferatu to the plague, Shumileta is a discourse about HIV/ AIDS and Banzi wanted to educate his viewers about the dangers of the disease. 256

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The violence of the final «kiss of death» in the neck is not usually attributed to local spirits, who force their victims to love them. Like Nsyuka, Shumileta has turned into an evil vampiric monster, raising her arms and laughing diabolically after a torturing and killing feast before vanishing. As the belief in spirits is common in Tanzania, these stories are more easily connected to people’s own experiences. While watching Shumileta, a friend’s mother remembered a neighbour who was haunted by a love spirit and consulted a mganga to get rid of the unwanted lover. In the movie, Mack’s mother-in-law does exactly the same: while Mack is living under water with his fiancée Monte having disappeared, Monte’s mother visits the powerful Mganga Ndele, who uses an «African television»8 to show the mother how her daughter was transformed into a chicken and where her son-in-law can be found. The idea of using Predator’s soundtrack in Shumileta came from Shariff Jumbe, a fan of Banzi’s horror movies, who started his Tsunami Arts Group in 2007 with Bwawa la Shetani/Swamps of the Devil. The story, which was about a mysterious well in Msanga Kisarawe, comes from his grandfather, a Mzaramo. An ancestor spirit named Mwingila causes people who go to the well to fall ill or even die. The curse originated from a deadly attack on a young couple who were raped and beaten on their way to the well. The other source of inspiration for the movie was Predator, one of Jumbe’s favourite Hollywood action movies. Due to production constraints, the action movie Predator became a low budget horror movie: «So I have made it like the mixing of ideas. I mixed the true story of that place [Msanga, Kisarawe] with Predator, because if people start thinking about the true part of the story the movie gets more interesting for them. But like in Predator they [the characters] are strangers in this forest. So somebody transforms and afterwards swallows one after the other.»9

Bwawa la Shetani starts like many other horror movies: a group of fourteen young people travel happily to a national park where their car breaks down when the engine overheats. After one of the group dives into water at a nearby swamp, blue lightning appears, he is transformed and has long teeth and nails and blood dripping from his mouth. He starts hunting his friends until only three of them remain. They manage to reach a nearby village, where an old woman tells them the story of the swamps.10 8

A pan-African phenomenon whereby new media forms are combined with older divination techniques which would traditionally have projected pictures onto the surface of water (Behrend 195). In Tanzania, healers used a kibuyu; a prepared calabash, a mirror, or a clay pot in which the client sees his enemies on the water’s surface. 9 Interview with Shariff Jumbe, Dar es Salaam, 26 Mar. 2008. 10 See also Kilian (302ff.) for the Nigerian remake of Predator, i.e. Tarzomar Shahada (2002).

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As in the second part of Predator 2 (1990), in Bwawa la Shetani No. 2, the monster (here the infected young man), comes to the city (Dar es Salaam) and continues his killing. An American style is created with inserted pictures from the New York skyline and the presentation of the dead body of a girl with the song Gangsta’s Paradise. The group of young people who survived, together with two policemen, finally return to the village near the swamps and perform a ritual with a mganga, to release the bewitched and the dead from the curse. «We added a little bit of teeth and fingernails» said Banzi about the creation of Shumileta and continued: «Since we don’t know what the spirits or their bodies look like, we added a little bit, so what we did, we created something which could be enjoyable for the viewers, but we are not sure if spirits have long teeth like that.»11 Discourses on vampirism were first reported in early 20th century colonialist Kenya and Tanganyika by Luise White following rumours of blood-sucking fire fighters called wazimamoto («Cars Out of Place» 31). The Dar es Salaam fire fighters were said to suck the blood of innocent men, leaving them impotent and lazy. In women’s housing settlements in Nairobi in the 1920s and 1930s, single women and prostitutes were not only victims but also hired by the wazimamoto to get access to more male victims (White, Speaking with Vampires 151ff.). A more recent discourse can be found in the Swahili term unyonyaji, exploitation, derived from the verb kunyonya (to suck(le)). As James Brennan shows in national political discourse, the Marxist picture of the blood-sucking capitalist has been projected onto Indian, Arab and European as well as African businessmen as the main enemies of the socialist project Ujamaa in Tanzania (398). This discourse can also be applied to the video industry when directors and actors accuse the Wahindi producers of exploiting «African» artists.

4.2 Tanzanian Spirits and Discourses on Sexuality In 2008 Haji Dilunga started shooting a movie called Popobawa/Bat Wing – the story of an evil sex spirit who rapes his victims anally – and invited me to visit the shooting. It was the subject of diverse newspaper, internet and blog articles and also became part of diverse pop cultural products. In 2007, John P. Oscar, a young cartoonist from Dar es Salaam, published the gothic novel Usiku wa machungu – Mikononi mwa Popobawa (Night of Bitterness – In the Hands of Popobawa).12 Haji Dilunga told me he wanted to make a film based on a real story (as the opening credits would later on state) as most of the audience had heard rumours of Popobawa in 11 Interview with Mussa Banzi, Dar es Salaam, 26 Sept. 2006. 12 The cover of the book presents Popobawa as Star Wars’ Master Yoda with batwings, one yellow eye, vampire teeth and claws, flying, with a beautiful woman and an American skyline in the background. On the back cover some Yoda-Popobawas together with a dragon are flying around a medieval castle.

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their neighbourhoods.13 Stories initially surfaced in 1965 on Pemba Island (Parkin 114) where an angry sheikh is said to have called the spirit to life to take revenge on his neighbours in a dispute over a love affair. In the varying descriptions the spirit is sometimes described as a black, bat-like creature with big wings, one eye, pointy ears and long claws. Most importantly and as a recurring theme of the rumour, the victims have to report the attack in public to prevent Popobawa’s return. While local discussions of Popobawa mainly revolve around whether he exists, the myth has troubled social scientists. Explanations reach from being one of the incubus legends resulting from sleep paralysis (Walsh 14), reflections of the horrors of slavery (Parkin 115) or political transformative eras, as the first rumours came up one year after Zanzibar’s 1964 revolution and reappeared close to elections in 1995 (Walsh 19). As Zanzibar hosted Africa’s first colour television station and was one of the main centres of cinema business in East Africa, we might think of Popobawa as a reflection of creatures like Dracula (Walsh 16) or Batman. In Dilunga’s adaptation of Popobawa it is not a male sheikh but the female witch Mamakibibi who calls Popobawa to punish her relatives. Popobawa not only rapes his victims but, as in a splatter movie, kills his enemies one by one, including the witch who originally called him into existence. Popobawa’s sodomising character, shown in several scenes, shows its connection to discourses on hetero- and homosexuality (see also Thompson 11ff.; Walsh 16f.). As Katrina Daly Thompson has shown in her analysis of collected Popobawa stories from Zanzibar, these discourses are a means to talk about sex and sexuality (13ff.). In a side narrative of the story, a lesbian woman tries to seduce a much younger girl, the first depiction of homosexuality in Tanzanian movies. This holds also true for discourses on HIV/AIDS, when the worried victims of Popobawa ask a traditional healer if the spirit can transmit the disease, which he confirms. Not only does the film in this way counter Western biomedical explanations of HIV/AIDS but also the denial of supernatural beings such as Popobawa. In a scene set in a small HIV-testing dispensary, I (cast as the doctor) read the results of a medical examination to Popobawa’s victims. As I tell them, the results neither show that they have been raped nor infected with HIV. But, as a Western medic doesn’t believe in spirits, in improvising my role I advise them to consult a psychiatrist. The idea was highly approved by the director and led to an extra scene in which Popobawa would haunt me while sleeping to shatter my rational explanation of the case. When waking up the next morning with the feeling of having been raped, the rational European doctor comes to the conclusion that Popobawa could actually exist.

13 Personal communication with Bashir Rajabu, owner of the Titanic video library in Magomeni Mapipa, Dar es Salaam.

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In the second part of Shumileta, the initial vampire theme is left aside and the story revolves around Shumileta as a jini ya bahari (sea spirit) or jini ya mahaba (love spirit). These stories are often depicted in local newspapers and are discussed in great detail.14 The first movie which prominently represents water spirits is July Tax’s Saladin – Samaki Mtu trilogy. The film was produced in Mwanza15, on the shores of Lake Victoria in Northern Tanzania, featuring mermaids swimming in the lake. As in West Africa, the mermaids are played by Indian actresses with Indian-style costumes and jewellery (see also Meyer 29). July Tax uses Sukuma oral literature as told to him by his grandmother, and creatively combines them with aesthetics and styles from different sources. At the start of the film we learn the history of the main character Sarah and her twin sister Subira, attacked by gangsters who kill their father and tear out their mother’s eyes. Sarah, who flees to the seashore, is taken care of by a couple of mermaids, whilst her sister Subira is left in the bushes and raised by a mganga. Later Sarah is sent by her mermaid mother to punish the gangsters who were involved in her father’s death. As in a splatter film, she brutally transforms, kills, tears out body parts and eats her victim’s bowels throughout the three parts of the film. Between these rather brutal splatter scenes the director provides the viewers respite with karate fight scenes, comic intermissions in which two comedians comment on events, and when the director himself appears as the lover of Sarah we see them dancing and singing in a Bollywood-style manner.

4.3 Tanzanian Zombies Another popular horror figure which makes up a rather smaller Tanzanian subgenre is the zombie. According to Peter Geschiere who has been working in Cameroon, African zombie-narratives appear as a new form of witchcraft where witches no longer eat their victims but transform them into zombie workers. The zombie-theme as a reflection of new forms of wealth which have or have not been incorporated into society, is related to the arrival of Europeans and the introduction of new luxury items (Geschiere 139). Filmic zombies came to Africa via VHS from the US in the 1980s as vengeful ghosts of those who have been sacrificed for money (Wendl, «Zombies» 287f.). As Lange mentions, one of the theatre plays of the Muungano 14 Like the serialised story Nilvyopendwa na jini (How I was Loved by a Spirit) in the newspaper amani published in 2006/2007 by Kulwa Mwaibale, about a young man in Dar es Salaam who was caught by a spirit woman and brought to the underworld. The TV soap opera Jumba la Dhahabu/ House of Gold, which ran on TBC in 2007/2008, revolved around the water/love spirit Kabula. 15 The film production started in 2004 with Thamani ya Damu/The Value of Blood, an action movie. The most popular filmmaker is July Tax with his Art Group Tunda Sanaa who became famous with the two part Mtemi (2007/08) and the Saladin – Samaki Mtu Trilogy (2007/8).

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Theatre Group in Tanzania, The Chameleon16, is a variation of the zombie narrative. In the play, the main character’s aunt transforms him into a zombie, making him work on her and other sorcerers’ fields until his father rescues him (Lange 224). It was again Mussa Banzi who took up the topic in his movie Kihongwe-Nguvu za Giza/The Pack Donkey-Powers of Darkness (2005). In the movie Rolita bewitches her lover Desmond, who is married to another woman, using a zombie to satisfy her material desires. Banzi also used the zombie theme as a metaphor for the exploitation of artists in the video film industry.17 Another depiction of zombies can be found in the theatre play Ngoma wa Ng’wanamalundi (The Dance of the Ng’wanamalundi), which was made into a video film in 2006 by Ben Mtobwa. The story portrays the classic White Zombie (1932) in displaying the powerful healer Mganga Chidama, who transforms people into vizuu18 (zombies) to work on his fields. As in White Zombie, he turns a young woman, Nyamiti, whom he wants to marry into a zombie. In 2007, the zombie theme was revived, this time as ndondocha (zombies) appearing in two movies by Haji Dilunga and Salum Karanda. In Uwanja wa Dhambi 1&2/Place of Sin (2007) and Mama Mwenye Nyumba/The House Owner (2007), annoying relatives who are involved in inheritance disputes are transformed into ndondocha by evil witches and used as slaves. In Usiku wa balaa/ The Crazy Night (2008), a zombie kills an entire family with the exception of the father, who is absent from the house due to a love affair and doesn’t want to come home. The film ends with the whole zombie family attacking the youngest daughter, who remains as the «final girl».19

5. Conclusion The globalisation of the horror film can be viewed as part of a travelling aesthetics, starting in Germany with early horror film classics, via America with the establishment of Hollywood horror movies and finally to the African video industries which, like in Tanzania, appropriated the genre. As I have shown with the examples above, these stories, as part of a rich storytelling tradition in Tanzania, are remediated in film. When looking at the construction of these monsters, the remediation in the new medium has severely changed them. 16 Zombies are related to chameleons, because in changing their colour they can adjust to their environment. The Nigerian movie Haunted House (2000) begins with a house owner who lets a chameleon out of a juju-coffin (see Wendl, «Wicked Villagers» 284f.). 17 Interview with Mussa Banzi, Dar es Salaam, 26 Sept. 2006. 18 «a kind of evil spirit, said to be capable of being employed by witches and wizards to enter the houses in the form of a rat and kill people by devouring their livers. They are said to be the spirits of people thought to be dead but who were in reality spirited away by magic» (Johnson 214). 19 Last female survivor in a horror film (see also Creed 1993).

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While the creatures of folklore have been rather ambiguous in their character, neither solely good nor bad, they have turned into evil and bloodthirsty monsters in the films. The transformation into monsters is itself the subject of horror film, as the classic example Frankenstein shows. And if the mganga is the equivalent of the mad scientist in Western horror films, as Wendl proposes, the video filmmakers themselves are like mad scientists in bringing the monsters to life. While Tanzanian horror films stand for a hybridisation of different aesthetics through which sources of global and local horror are brought together, the examples have shown that filmmakers have developed their own type of horror film aesthetics. Although Tanzanian filmmakers use Western horror elements in their films, these movies do not completely fit into the Western genre category. Not only do the directors mostly believe in supernatural beings, they also consider their movies as highly educational. When I asked the filmmakers about their reasons for making horror movies, they postulated a rather cathartic approach as movies are supposed to force their viewers to look at a distorted mirror of society which should lead to self-reflection and change. In showing witchcraft, for example, they are trying to persuade their audiences to give up sorcery practices and concentrate on their faith, be it Muslim or Christian. With the cemetery setting in Shumileta, which could be classified as a typical element of the western horror genre, Banzi wanted to show people that prostitutes actually do take their suitors to cemeteries. The horror film is also used to discuss former taboos like gender relations and sexuality. In Nsyuka the social order is disrupted by Dorin’s barrenness, an often articulated theme in Tanzanian movies. In Shumileta, a monster threatens to disrupt the relationship between Mack and Monte. But while Monte’s mother repeatedly implores her to forget about Mack, Monte stands by him and fights for her marriage. When Shumileta is banished, the couple is reunited. Through reciprocal interference and intertextuality the filmmakers have built up a Tanzanian horror film genre with its own aesthetics and language. In the tradition of Tanzanian oral and written literature, filmmakers tell their own stories and are able to prompt public debates on issues in Tanzanian society. While often accused of merely imitating foreign film styles, these films are in fact the products of a very complex and creative artistic process.

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Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Askew, Kelly. Performing the Nation: Swahili Musical Performance and the Production of Tanzanian National Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Print. Badley, Linda. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. Print. Beez, Jigal. «Großstadtfieber und Hexenmeister: Horror- und Fantasycomics aus Tansania.» Africa Screams: Das Böse in Kino, Kunst und Kult. Ed. Tobias Wendl. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 2004. 153–163. Print. Behrend, Heike. «Call and Kill: Zur Verzauberung und Entzauberung westlicher technischer Medien in Afrika.» Signale der Störung. Eds. Erhard Schüttpelz and Albert Kümmel. Munich: Fink, 2003. 287–300. Print. Brennan, James. «Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958–75.» Journal of African History 47.3 (2006): 389–413. Print. Braudy, Leo. The World in a Frame: What We See in Films. Garden City: Anchor, 1976. Print. Busse, Joseph. Die Nyakyusa: Religion und Magie. Bonn: Holos, 1998. Print. Barber, Karin. The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Print. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Fabian, Johannes. Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Print. Fair, Laura. «Making Love in the Indian Ocean: Hindi Films, Zanzibari Audiences, and the Construction of Romance in the 1950s and 1960s.» Love in Africa. Eds.

Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 58–82. Print. Flocke, Petra. Vampirinnen: ‹Ich schaue in den Spiegel und sehe nichts.› Die kulturellen Inszenierungen der Vampirin. Tübingen: Konkurs, 1999. Print. Geschiere, Peter. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Print. Haynes, Jonathan. Introduction. Nigerian Video Films. Ed. Jonathan Haynes. Rev. and exp. ed. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. 1–36. Print. Johnson, Frederick. A Standard SwahiliEnglish Dictionary. 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Kilian, Cassis: Schwarz Besetzt: Postkoloniale Planspiele im Afrikanischen Film. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Print. Krings, Matthias. «Afrikanische VideoVampire-Wiedergänger zwischen den Kulturen.» All About Evil. Das Böse. Ed. Silke Seybold. Mainz: Zabern, 2007. 120– 127. Print. – «Nollywood Goes East. The Localization of Nigerian Video Films in Tanzania.« Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Art Films and the ‹Nollywood› Video Revolution. Ed. Ralph Austen and Mahir Saul. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. 74–91. Print. Lange, Siri. «Managing Modernity: Gender, State, and Nation in the Popular Drama of Dar es Salaam.» Diss. University of Bergen, 2002. Print. Meyer, Birgit. «Visions of Blood, Sex and Money: Fantasy Spaces in Popular Ghanaian Cinema.» Visual Anthropology 16.1 (2003): 15–41. Print. Parkin, David. «In the Nature of the Human Landscape: Provenances in the Making of Zanzibar Politics.» Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations. Eds. J. R. Clammer, Sylvie Poirier and Eric Schwimmer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 113–131. Print.

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Seeßlen, Georg and Fernand Jung. Horror: Geschichte und Mythologie des Horrorfilms. Marburg: Schüren, 2006. Print. Thompson, Katrina Daly. «Zanzibari Women’s Discursive and Sexual Agency: Violating Gendered Speech Prohibitions through Talk about Supernatural Sex.» Discourse & Society 22.1 (2011): 3–20. Print. Walsh, Martin T. «Diabolical Delusions and Hysterical Narratives in a Postmodern State.» Seminar Paper. University of Cambridge, 2005. Print. Wendl, Tobias. «Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction: An Exploration of Horror Movies from Ghana and Nigeria.» African Media Cultures – Cultures de Médias en Afrique. Topics in Interdisciplinary African Studies, Vol. 2. Eds. Frank Wittmann and Rose Marie Beck. Köln: Köppe, 2004. 263–285. Print.

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– «Zombies: Zu Motivik und Ikonografie der Lebenden Toten in Haiti, Hollywood und Nigeria.» Totenkulte: Kulturelle und literarische Grenzgänge zwischen Leben und Tod. Eds. Patrick Eiden et al. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2006. 275–289. Print. White, Luise. «Cars Out of Place. Vampires, Technology and Labor in East and Central Africa.» Representations 43 (Summer 1993): 27–50. Print. – Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkely: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Print.

Andreas Rauscher

Strange Hybrids from a Hong Kong Studio Wuxia and Hollywood Fantasy in A Chinese Ghost Story

In many aspects Hong Kong genre films from the 1980s and 1990s can be described as a cinema of continuous movement. The mise-en-scène consisted of transient spaces with shifting symbolic meanings from exalted comedy to traces of the sublime. Wirework stunts defeated gravity and well-known genre dynamics were accelerated up to a point that even the most obvious standard situation seemed to be fresh and innovative because of elusive editing and spiraling camera angles. Cultural philosopher Ackbar Abbas characterises these transient spaces as a culture of disappearance, «that responds to a specific and unprecedented historical situation, […] where ‹imperialism› and ‹globalism› are imbricated with each other.» (72). As an alternative to regarding the Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s as pure spectacle and strictly commercial Abbas in reference to Paul Virilio defines the specific historical situation of Hong Kong before the handover to China in 1997 as déjà disparu, «its main task is to find means of outflanking, or simply keeping pace with, a subject always on the point of disappearing – in other words, its task is to construct images out of clichés.» (80). This position contradicts the international reception of Hong Kong films from this era as universally appealing because of their rediscovery of a certain kind of cinematic naiveté. Abbas rejects the reduction to formalist aspects as well as film scholar Tan See Kam, who considers the Hong Kong cinema as being «produced by, and productive of, the interplay between internal and external forces, filmic, cultural or otherwise.» (15). The following article will consider these cultural approaches but rather than taking sides in the ongoing power play between cultural and formalist analyses it tries to create a dialogue between both tendencies. Focusing on the paradigmatic exam265

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ple of A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) franchise created by movie brat producer and action-auteur Tsui Hark and directed by Ching Siu-Tung the article will first discuss the film series based upon a famous tale by Chinese author Pu Songling (1640–1715) in the cultural context of 1980s Hong Kong cinema and in regard to the adaptation process of updating a story well-known to the Asian audience as a template for an internationally competitive fantasy special effects epic. The second part will deal with formalist questions of style and artistic appropriation that have become part of a cultural flow process enabling originally specific Asian genre concepts to travel not only across continents but into the realm of video games. But in order to understand this development let us take a look back at the late 1980s when Hong Kong cinema became an international trademark for action and auteurism. The films of action-auteurs like John Woo and Tsui Hark as well as the work of stylistically innovative choreographers like Ching Siu-Tung constantly crossed boundaries – between martial arts stunt work and immaterial state-of-the-art visual effects, between the semantics of Hollywood gangster drama and the syntax of Hong Kong crime films, between Hollywood fantasy spectacles and Chinese traditions of supernatural tales. Film scholar Andrew Schroeder characterised Tsui Hark’s mixture of Hollywood visual effects and Chinese folklore in the fantasy spectacle Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1982) as an localised but at the same time hybrid approach: «Localism shows up in Zu Warriors in the very conception of the film’s production, its importation of US culture labor to Hong Kong rather than the more common movement in later years from Hong Kong to the West.» (32)

In his analysis of Zu Warriors Schroeder observes a tendency that became a defining characteristic of Hong Kong genre films of the 1980s and 1990s in general. They belong to a cinema of transgression, not in regard to a process of exhaustion characteristic of American and European genre revisions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in creating explosive chemical reactions beyond the tongue-in-cheek double coding of postmodern cinema while tearing down the borders between genres. Especially the discussion on postmodernism and postclassical cinema stresses the combination of different genres in order to create new genre patterns. In some ways this process is not new and has been present throughout film history as film scholar Eleftheria Thanouli explains in her study on post-classical cinema building upon genre theoretician Steven Neale: «The fluid character of the generic qualities and the open-ended development of diverse genres have always had as a corollary the hybridity of many Hollywood films which could be related in various ways to more than one genre.» (54)

A similar tendency can be observed in Hong Kong cinema, exhilarated comedy can be combined with melodramatic tragedy like in several films by John Woo and 266

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in A Chinese Ghost Story horror is combined with romantic comedy. Thanouli addresses two tendencies in international postclassical cinema, on the one hand an «attempt to revive […] most celebrated conventions across time» and on the other «films that consciously privilege hybridity and build their generic identity with formulas and plots across genres» (55). In A Chinese Ghost Story both patterns can be found, together with Stanley Kwans Rouge (1988) the film initiated a revival of the supernatural in Hong Kong building upon predecessors like The Enchanting Shadow (1960). At the same time it works across different genres, from an US point-of-view even more than in the cultural context of Hong Kong. In order to get a better understanding of the basic genre template used in the franchise it is useful to consider the genre tradition of wuxia1.

1. Storytelling Synergies: The Enchanting Shadows of Wuxia A good starting point in approaching A Chinese Ghost Story which was directed by Ching Siu-Tung and produced as well as conceived by Tsui Hark in 1987 is provided by the genre context of wuxia. According to Andrew Schroeder this type of Chinese adventure story which has been popular for several centuries can be defined as «literally a story of the martial, chivalrous knight». The wuxia stories are set in a medieval China closer to fairy-tale and folklore than any acknowledged historical background. Schroeder mentions that «the hero of the wuxia tales was usually an unattached warrior, caught in between conflicting factions and warlords.» (15). Wuxia tales can involve demons, magical objects, and spirits. The wuxia setting embellishes all kinds of supernatural beings and provides fantastic challenges comparable. The stories can move from the uncanny haunted places and mean spirits of gothic horror fiction to marvelous fantasy worlds providing the topographical intersection for melodramatic romance and absurd encounters between the living and the dead (Teo 2009). In Chinese cinema wuxia films can be traced back to the 1928 film The Burning of Red Lotus Monastery, starting a first wave of wuxia productions which came to a halt in 1936 when the Chinese government banned them for being too amoral and decadent. In 1941 many Mandarin speaking filmmakers fled to Hong Kong after Japanese forces occupied Shanghai. The wuxia film became popular again by the creative efforts of Hong Kong director King Hu. His film Dragon Inn (1967) revitalised the genre and defined its modern form with complex protagonists and elaborate staging. King Hu also directed A Touch Of Zen (1971) which became a worldwide success among cinéphiles. But the international breakthrough of Hong Kong cinema was brought about by the grindhouse success of kung fu films often 1

For an in-depth study of wuxia in cinema see Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema.

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produced by the Shaw Brothers. Film historian David Bordwell writes about the impact of martial arts films in the West: «Until the 1970s Hong Kong movies found distribution only in Asia and in émigré communities. Most westerners learned of this cinema through the kung-fu film, with its revenge-driven plots and flamboyant martial arts.» (3)

By the international recognition of the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s both trends merged, even if rather by incident than intentionally. Zu Warriors and A Chinese Ghost Story were received by an international audience because of the festival and arthouse prestige gained from Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986). Comparable to the first Star Wars saga (1977–1983) and the Indiana Jones films (1981– 2008) getting recognition because of Steven Spielberg’s and George Lucas’ roots in the auteur-orientated New Hollywood the wuxia extravaganzas were also appreciated by an open-minded arthouse audience. In tune with the fantasy setting the physical performances of traditional martial arts cinema became enhanced by wirework and visual effects resulting in an aesthetic concept that seems to be more reminiscent of today’s super hero movies than the down-to-earth physical hard work of Bruce Lee and even the comedic Buster Keaton-inspired performances of Jackie Chan. Literary scholar Luo Hui (2009) articulates the warning, that «trying to decipher a coherent political allegory out of this sensationalist blockbuster has become an engrossing academic exercise for many film critics.» Instead one should take into account the affective elements that lay the foundation for A Chinese Ghost Story’s international crossover success. Even though the narrative is specific for Asian cultural contexts there are universal aspects to it offering an interesting inversion that in Hollywood horror stories can rather be found in playful postmodern variations than in the classics constituting the genre of supernatural horror. In a very well-informed dissertation on The Ghost of Liaozhai: Pu Songling’s Ghostlore and Its History of Reception Luo Hui notes that, «The minor discourse of the ghost, as exemplified by Pu Songling’s tales, does not only tap into the critical, allegorical capabilities of the non-ancestral ghost; it draws its creative potential from human identification with the ghost, whereby the ghost’s quest for her identity moves beyond the allegorical and enters the social and the ontological […] The audience’s subjectivity is anchored and aligned with that of the female ghost.»

In A Chinese Ghost Story the romance between clumsy tax collector Ling Choi Sin (Leslie Cheung) and beautiful ghost Tsu-hsien (Joey Wang), who is kept prisoner by an evil tree demon, is based upon a tale from the collection Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio which was assembled in the 17th century by author Pu Songling. The volume which gathers 491 tales is comparable to the work of the Brothers Grimm in Europe. 268

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This frontier work between the realms of horror and fantasy is only hinted at in The Enchanting Shadow a 1960 adaptation of the story The Magic Sword which also inspired A Chinese Ghost Story. The film which was directed by Li Hanxiang and produced by the Shaw Brothers only features very limited special effects. Instead its use of expressive colours and its suggestive play with light and shadows is reminiscent of the colourful symbolism found in British Hammer productions. The erotic and sensual elements essential to A Chinese Ghost Story appear to be rather marginal. The demon and her female minions behave like very strict, uptight neighbors you would expect in a 1950s melodrama. The momentous misunderstanding that tax collector Ling Choi Sin does not notice that his new-found love Tsu-hsien is a ghost is missing from The Enchanting Shadow. A dialogue like, «I’m a spirit.» – «In this case we have indeed nothing to talk about.» - seems to be characteristic for the not too passionate encounter of the supernatural kind. The Daoist monk, whom Ling Choi Sin meets at the old temple right next door to the spirits’ hide-out simply enjoys the life of a hermit who does not want to interfere with humans or ghosts. In contrast to his later incarnation played by actor-director Wu Ma he does not suffer from world-weariness and does not show the slightest trace of any eccentric habits. The status of liminality central to many protagonists of Tsui Hark’s films cannot be found in The Enchanting Shadow. Instead the narrative is reminiscent of what philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll calls a discovery plot in his Philosophy of Horror: «The horrific being, that is, may be identified for the audience immediately in the early or an opening scene […], or its presence and/or identity may be only gradually revealed.» (99). The murders at the deserted temple are presented like in a traditional mystery case that is solved gradually. In contrast A Chinese Ghost Story’s opening creates a much more intensive atmosphere using multiple genre registers that will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. The plot in Tsui Hark’s and Ching Siu-Tung’s take on The Magic Sword could be regarded as the inversion of what Carroll calls the complex discovery plot. This narrative construction usually builds upon the conflict between the protagonist who discovers the supernatural danger and the community which ignores his warnings. In a plot movement called confirmation he or she finally manages to convince somebody to believe him or her (101). Leslie Cheung’s naïve tax collector does not even want to know that he has fallen in love with a ghost even as the spirit herself tries to convince him. Instead he comforts her that she should not be so hard on herself. The premonition about the lurking horror is only for the audience but not for the film’s protagonist who turns out to be a hopeless romantic by accident. In its mixture of horror, comedy, action and exotic settings A Chinese Ghost Story provided the perfect material for an incredibly strange movie to be discovered at late night showings in arthouse cinemas.

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2. Synthesis of Style: Auteurist Appropriations and A New Wave Ghost Story Producer, writer and director Tsui Hark, born in 1950, can be called what Ivo Ritzer has termed a «genre auteur» (114). He is often compared to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. He created a new style of internationally appreciated and at the same time locally grounded Asian fantasy cinema in a similar way his American colleagues elevated B-picture patterns from the science-fiction and adventure serials of Hollywood’s Golden Age to the level of A-pictures and added a sophisticated cinephile subtext. The visual style of Spielberg and Lucas as well as Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung updates the immediacy of what film historian Tom Gunning called the «cinema of attractions», a concept which dominated early silent film programs presented in the 1890s and 1910s at amusement parks preferring spectacle, stunts, slapstick and sensations over narrative and psychological round characters. This association becomes quite obvious in regard to Zu Warriors and its sequel Legends of Zu (2001). The spectacular set pieces and extravagant characters fighting for magical swords in a mystical medieval realm located between heaven and earth stay in your memory much longer than the rudimentary plot which could very well serve as the basic level structure for a beat’em-up-video game. The fate of the whole cosmos depends on the duel of flying swordsmen but at the same time you do not really get to know their background even though the topic of liminality which will become important in A Chinese Ghost Story can already be found in Zu Warriors with two human warriors entering incidentally the world of the gods and in Legends of Zu a female fighter becomes the successor of a fallen goddess. At the age of seventeen the future auteur and industrial entrepreneur who put Hong Kong continually on the map of international cinema left his hometown and moved to Texas to study film. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. Three years later Tsui Hark returned to Hong Kong via New York directing his debut film The Butterfly Murders in 1979 (on hybridity in early Tsui see Tan 2011). In 1983 the wuxia fantasy spectacle Zu Warriors marked a turning point comparable to the success of Star Wars IV – A New Hope for George Lucas in 1977. Both filmmakers established industry facilities to produce their special effects in-house and expanded the aesthetics of their genres by integrating elements from other international genre concepts, like Lucas being influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s epics and Tsui Hark vice versa being inspired by Spielberg and Lucas. In a similar way they combined special and visual effects traditions from different cinematographies. Andrew Schroeder names three distinct approaches towards effects in Zu Warriors: «The assemblage of special effects designs […] consisted of three distinct but interrelated networks: 1. Wire-work choreography, 2. conventional miniatures, make-up, 270

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pyrotechnics, and set design, and 3. optical compositing, rotoscoping, and matte painting, inspired largely by Hollywood’s special effects films from 1977 to 1983. Together, these factors produced a new type of hybrid cinematic space within Hong Kong action cinema, veering into the imminent creation of Hong Kong action as a new transnational popular style and a symptom of a new global spatial imagination.» (44f.)

The tendency towards a new visual style that can be interpreted as a hybrid aesthetic is especially relevant in relation to these three special effects traditions: Wire-work is associated with Hong Kong cinema and the wuxia genre lifting the martial arts fights of the 1970s off the ground 1 Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and into the realm of the fantastic. Choreographers like Yuen Woo-Ping contributed their trademark wirework to Hollywood productions like The Matrix (1999–2003) by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003). Miniatures, make-up and pyrotechnics can be regarded as the established international visual semantics of fantasy, horror and science-fiction cinema. There can be found a few interesting nuances in the presentation of the set design in Tsui Hark’s productions. His films reduce space to a few preeminent points of orientation, in some sequences the spatial structure almost seems to vanish in the dynamics of the wire-work fights. In contrast to those innovative concepts of space Spielberg and especially Lucas stick to the grammar of Classical Hollywood. Even when shooting in digital sets every set-up is presented in a long shot for orientation. The third tradition mentioned by Schroeder optical compositing and rotoscoping provides a significant intersection with animation films and it also hints at the digital shifts of stylistic emphasis yet to come. Instead of creating a completely new digital world most visual effects rely on remediation, extension and more efficient handling of traditional effects like painted backgrounds that turn into three-dimensional animations or the motion capture process recording an actor’s performance instead of redrawing it frame-by-frame as it would have been done in traditional rotoscoping, which was already used in the 1910s by Max Fleischer. Taken as a whole the special effects in Zu Warriors can be regarded as a hybridisation of Asian martial arts aesthetics, common international techniques of genre cinema and latest trends in visual effects initiated by I.L.M. in the first Star Wars trilogy 271

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on the threshold to digital cinema which would dominate the Star Wars prequels of the 2000s as well as Tsui Hark’s sequel Legends of Zu. For the production of Zu Warriors several effects specialists from Hollywood and I.L.M. like Peter Kuran, Chris Casady and Robert Blalack who worked on Star Wars IV and Star Wars V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Wolfen (1981), Altered States (1980) and Tron (1982) were hired to advise Tsui Hark in training his own visual effects artists and help him to build his own company for visual effects. In contrast to Lucas who focused on running his company and only directed six films, among them four entries in the Star Wars franchise, Tsui Hark’s international reputation can be compared to the artistic versatility of Steven Spielberg. He sets creative trends in commercial Asian cinema and at the same time he is respected as an auteur regularly courted by magazines like Cahiers du Cinéma. Lisa Morton writes in her study about his impressive oeuvre: «Tsui Hark is unique in world cinema, a prolific filmmaker […] who is also a master stylist; a political auteur and a populist; an artist with an obsessive private vision who is also commercially successful.» (6). Stephen Teo comments on the director’s remarkable career: «Tsui has developed into a special-effects whiz kid, but as a true artist. Tsui turns his obsessions into the tools of his craft to heighten the intensity of his work.» (162). Although Tsui Hark uses the Chinese folklore of wuxia tales and Hong Kong films like The Enchanting Shadow as a base for his films he appropriates the narrative and character types in a unique way by updating them aesthetically. The magic swordsmen in Zu Warriors no longer resemble the trained artists of 1970s Shaw Brothers cinema in which the camera records the talent of the kung fu fighters in almost documentary fashion. Supported by the versatile special effects the look of the film demonstrates an elaborated level of artistic skill. The fight scenes are not only choreographed for, but together with the camera which is in permanent motion. Fast editing adds an extra dimension to the already highly kinetic martial arts sequences. For Andrew Schroeder the space created in Zu Warriors serves as a staging for constant transformation: «This new cinematic space was defined by corporeal fluidity, excessive speed, widely mobile and often 360-degree camera-work, virtual three-dimensionality, and constant visual mutation. The optical space produced by zu’s visual effects design was a space for the incessant transformation of substances, of the morphing of one form into another.» (45)

In his poignant analysis of Zu Warriors Schroeder argues that the constant processes of transformation can be read «as an alternative escape route by reframing the postmodern pastiche as an anticipatory tactic of cultural transnationalization.» (40). Under the conditions of transnational genre cinema the postmodern technique of pastiche and cultural references can develop into a new form of cultural communication and individual artistic expression beyond the surfaces of main272

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stream postmodernism. The processes discussed by Andrew Schroeder from an economic and cultural perspective can be extended to the diegetic structure and its genre iconography. The process of genre hybridisation beginning with Zu Warriors came full circle in supernatural fantasy films like A Chinese Ghost Story and its sequels which refer to Asian ghost romances and to modern Hollywood horror cinema within the same diegetic space and the same aesthetic concept. In technical terms of current You Tube-analysis it would be tempting to discuss A Chinese Ghost Story as a kind of mash-up. Long before it became fashionable to mix together two songs Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung put together standard situations and complete camera movements from US horror cinema and combined them with a romantic supernatural love story which also featured several exalted slapstick scenes typical for Hong Kong comedy. It would be tempting to use this category, but at the same time it would be too superficial to reduce the vivid imaginative transformation of genre tropes in A Chinese Ghost Story to a simple mash-up. Rather the work of Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung should be compared to the innovative work of DJ teams who mix beats and sound fragments, which refer to certain cultural connotations, in order to create something complex and individual from samples and scratch. Cinematic approaches focusing on rearranging and appropriation as pop-cultural translation can be found in the films of Quentin Tarantino as well as Tsui Hark. In his history of Hong Kong cinema Stephen Teo comes to the conclusion that A Chinese Ghost Story is «a costumed adventure, a Hollywood-style special-effects extravaganza, a Chinese ghost story with the requisite ghosts and demons kitted out in traditional fashion – these depictions all apply. Special effects wizardry conveys the modern Hollywood idiom of Hong Kong’s cinematic storytelling, while the fragmented cutting style within sequences recalls a manga kind of comic strip narration. The period setting and costumes convey an updated ghost story-adventure rather than the rarefied world of a historical epic.» (Hong Kong Cinema 210)

The different references mentioned by Teo do not dilute the experience of A Chinese Ghost Story, on the contrary they intensify it. The romance becomes even more tragic in regard to Ling Choi Sin’s naïve efforts, because of Tsu-hsien’s honest ambivalent feelings the ghost world seems to be more human than the corrupt town of men and the Daoist swordfighter not only provides moments of comic relief, he also fulfills the traditional role of the wise companion, but in contrast to Joseph Campbell’s hero journey he does not care at all about being a mentor. Like in Zu Warriors the special effects provide a modernised visual style while at the same time resurrecting the tropes of wuxia in the same way as Star Wars took serial space opera more serious than the originals ever did. The rapid editing which, as David Bordwell points out (165), features 170 shots within five minutes in the scene when Tsu-hsien hides Ling Choi Sin in her water 273

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bath is exemplary of the changed perception of cinematic space in Hong Kong cinema. Bordwell observes, that «we are constantly readjusting to a new slice of space […] The filmmakers give the scene a firm flow by letting gestures echo one another […] I do not believe any Hollywood filmmaker, in 1987 or today, could mount movement with this degree of rhythmic exactness.» (165)

The impression of harmonious visual flow results from this arrangement of movements as well as from the framing’s reminiscence of comic panels mentioned by Stephen Teo. Because of the iconographic character of the visuals presented and the narrative conventions of comic books the reader can complement the information necessary to understand the story. Comic theoretician Scott McCloud defines this effect as closure: «Comic panels fracture both time and space offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.» (67)

A sequence that relies on the same fragmented structure like a graphic novel can be found at the end of the film’s exposition, when Ling Choi Sin enters the forest around the deserted temple. Playing with the visual repertoire of gothic, Ching SiuTung shows an atmospheric sunset immediately followed by howling wolves and the blue-lit woods around Lan Yeuk temple. Even if the audience is not familiar with Asian ghost stories at all the images are very accessible and prepare for the surprises and reversals about to come. The seemingly familiar ground becomes unfamiliar and unheimlich as soon as the boundaries between the world of the ghosts and the living, which are quite clearly drawn in gothic horror, get blurred. Vice versa Asian audiences familiar with fox spirits and Pu Songling’s tales are suddenly confronted by vampirish ghouls and the unleashed camera from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981). The experience of A Chinese Ghost Story depends on the knowledge of genre motives and their cultural contexts resulting in a polyphonic discourse with several layers of genre syntax and not only in a simple mash-up of Evil Dead-meets-Pu Songling. Film scholar Barry Keith Grant regards repetition and variation as two essential key concepts of genre cinema: «Stated simply genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.» (1). A Chinese Ghost Story repeats visual and narrative tropes from Hong Kong and Hollywood genre cinema only to give them an unexpected turn and create a surprising variation. The opening sequence provides a significant example for the hybrid approach taken by Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung. A short establishing shot shows two statues at the entrance to Lan Yeuk temple. The contrast between the warm yellow 274

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2 A Chinese Ghost Story

light inside and the dark blue night on the outside associated with the world of the spirits establishes one of the central oppositions of the film. The following seduction of a young scholar by an attractive female ghost uses the Asian typology of the erotic and mean fox spirit as well as established motives from gothic horror. Those motives can be understood internationally, as a continuation of a specific Asian character type or as the ghostly appearance bound to a lonesome place from traditional romanticism. But before there is time to think about postmodern doublecoding, another unexpected movement begins. An unleashed camera approaches the temple at high speed, obviously inspired by the famous opening sequence from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, in which the camera shows the point-of-view of a highly dynamic threatening presence in the woods. Later in the film this perspective will turn out to be the murderous gaze of the evil tree demon which devours the souls of the victims its spirits seduce for it. The hybrid horror of the sequence can be considered paradigmatic for the elegant artistic appropriation practiced by Tsui Hark and his team. It starts out by referencing well-known tropes of horror only to present the familiar outcome of the fatal encounter between victim and seductive ghost in an unexpected way by adding a visceral motive from early 1980s splatter film. In a certain way the dramaturgy of A Chinese Ghost Story follows Noël Carroll’s model of a discovery plot, but it is transposed to the visual level. That there is something wicked in the woods behind Lan Yeuk Temple is quite obvious from the first shot on. The question is not so much if there are supernatural forces at work but what the set piece of the tree demon will look like and how it will affect the main characters. The following sequences featuring Leslie Cheung’s imperturbable tax collector provide comic relief exactly because of the incongruence between the 275

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danger of the situation that has been obvious to the swordsman as well as almost everyone in the audience, and Ling’s stoic polite behavior. The additional depth of the film results from the developing relationship between Tsu-Hsien and Ling Choi Sin echoing tropes of traditional melodrama, especially with her being destined to marry a demon from the underworld standing in for the mean-spirited wealthy lover in non-supernatural romances. In contrast to Hollywood’s version of postmodern cinema, A Chinese Ghost Story does not suddenly change its tonality, instead the different layers of genre syntax are interwoven. A sequence of physical body horror in which a long-time adversary of the swordsman is killed by the tongue of the tree demon, again presented in Evil Dead-subjective point-of-view, this time even penetrating the victim’s throat providing a field-day for psychoanalytic film theory, is contrasted with the tax collector being threatened by ghouls which he does not even notice. The victory against the dried-out bloodsuckers lurking under the temple’s stairs references vampire movies by killing the ghouls through the arrival of sunrise. In contrast to the body horror taking place right in front of his door at the same time Ling Choi San’s encounter with the ghouls recalls the absurd humor of classic cartoons. He does not even notice the creatures from under the stairs and unknowingly triumphs over them by letting the sunshine in. In regard to his heavy-handedness the first encounter between the beautiful ghost Tsu-hsien and the tax collector also taking place that night seems to be much closer to romantic comedy than dark romanticism. Unlike in gothic horror the arrival of day does not bring relief, the night has been funny enough and during the day the darker themes of the story are introduced. Ling Choi Sin visits the neighboring town to pick up a picture of a woman similar to Tsuhsien he had discovered at a local store the day before. It has mysteriously disappeared and in front of the shop a procedure for the dead passes by in which Ling sees Tsuhsien. The lyrical use of slow motion in this sequence creates an interesting counterpoint to the accelerated camera movement during the sequences from the tree demon’s point-of-view. In comparison to genre-crossovers in Hollywood blockbusters Hong Kong cinema works with a whole register of rhythms, in A Chinese Ghost Story these enable the mixture of horror, fantasy and romance in a coherent way. For example the showdown in which Ling and the Daoist swordsman save Tsu-hsien’s soul from the evil forces of the underworld offers a pointed inversion of the traditional gothic scenario toyed with during Ling’s first night at the temple. Sunrise which brought relief from the ghouls under the stairs at the beginning of the film now has turned into a threat since Tsu-hsien cannot face sunlight. In order to go with the melancholic atmosphere Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung changed the ending of Pu Songling’s story. Instead of the lovers staying together Tsu-hsien is offered the chance to be reborn. Although the narrative patterns in Hong Kong genre cinema from the 1980s and early 1990s could be broken down to concepts like the hero’s journey to do so would miss central aspects of its attractions on an aesthetic level. Its hybrid style 276

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rediscovered an immediate emotional impact at the same time sophisticated in its approach to genre syntax and nevertheless providing a sense of wonder created by its perfect sense for rhythm and innovative iconography. David Bordwell considers emotional experiences to be a key factor in the international success of Hong Kong genre cinema: «In the art of popular cinema, vivid visuals are shot through with emotion. In order to attract a mass audience, popular art deals in emotions like anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and indignation. Since these feelings evidently operate in all cultures, a film that appeals to them travels well.» (8)

This universal approach resulted in a type of cinema that appealed to international genre devotees and also to the local market to which it can provide further contextual meanings that are the topic of cultural studies like the experience of disappearing space in Hong Kong discussed by Abbas. The process of hybridisation works in A Chinese Ghost Story on the level of storytelling as well as on the level of style, in contrast to several Hollywood franchises it is not reduced to creating a fixed formula. Instead the resurrection of the wuxia genre became not a simple form of adaptation but an ongoing transformation resulting in a storyworld no longer restricted to Hong Kong cinema.

3. Global Storyworlds: Wuxia Worldwide Genre theorist and film scholar Rick Altman differentiates between the semantic and syntactic structure of genres: «While there is anything but general agreement on the exact frontier separating semantic from syntactic views, we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions that depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, set, and the like – thus stressing the semantic elements that make up the genre – and definitions that play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable place-holders – relationships that might be called the genre’s fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged.» (219)

The wuxia films of the 1980s and 1990s created a semantic repertoire of standard situations that resulted in a syntax of the genre which was no longer restricted to the narrative of the original material by Pu Songling. A Chinese Ghost Story turned into a franchise that was rooted in Asian genre cinema and at the same time accessible on a global level. In an addition to his original model of syntax and semantic Altman acknowledged the «discursive nature of genres» (208) and «patterns of generic 277

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change» (219) as a component of pragmatic analyses. This dynamic element of genre discourses explains how the building blocks of wuxia could be transferred as samples and loops in such different popcultural contexts like the records by New York hip hop collective Wu Tang Clan and video games by the Canadian studio Bioware. The interplay of repetition and variation proved to be once again an essential component to the innovative side of genre cinema in contrast to culture-industrial calculation. A Chinese Ghost Story has been followed by two sequels again directed by Ching Siu-Tung and produced by Tsui Hark in 1990 and 1991. A Chinese Ghost Story 2 (1990) delivers a continuation of the adventures of Ling and the swordsman during a time of political upheaval. Concepts of worldbuilding which are essential to current transmedia franchises can already be found in this sequel. Film scholar Kristin Thompson writes about the explorative possibilities of serial storytelling: «Franchises lend themselves to worldmaking, since the length of the storytelling and the breadth of the ancillaries offer the possibility of exploring the created world in a more leisurely fashion than its ordinary possible.» (84). Since the tragic romance between Ling and Tsu-hsien already found closure in the first film the second Chinese Ghost Story focuses on creating a new storyline and further exploring the storyworld comparable to a comic book or a role-playing-campaign following another adventure that was closed in itself. Joey Wang returns as a lookalike of the lost love, but this time she does not turn out to be a ghost, although the actress was typecast as the seductive spirit many times after the success of the first film. She portrays a political activist and resistance fighter who tries to uncover intrigues at the Emperor’s court. The supernatural elements serve as an allegory on the corruption of power and the fatal influence of false prophets underscored in one scene by the appearance of a fake Buddha that has been conjured up by an evil sorcerer. After the self-contained second film in 1991 A Chinese Ghost Story 3 returned to the setting and character types of the first film. The tree demon which had been beaten in A Chinese Ghost Story comes back to life after a hundred years and threatens two traveling monks. Of course the younger one begins to fall for Tsu-hsien’s charming successors with a strong emphasis on slapstick situations. In 1997 Tsui Hark produced an animated version that was loosely based upon the first film. Further supporting hybrid working structures he cooperated with animators from Japanese studio Triangle Staff turning the film into the first huge animation production at Hong Kong. The help from Japanese anime specialist fulfilled the same function the visual effects experts from Lucasfilm provided fifteen years ago. In 2011 a remake of A Chinese Ghost Story was directed by Wilson Yip. In spite of some remarkable production values it failed to achieve the emotional impact and directorial creativity of the predecessor. The additional melodramatic background of a love affair between the fox spirit Xiaoqian and the Daoist swordsman does not really deepen their characters or improve on the original material. A more creative approach to (post)modernised wuxia tales can be found in The Man 278

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With The Iron Fists (2011) directed by Wu Tang Clan mastermind RZA and produced by Quentin Tarantino. It presents an imaginary version of wuxia settings which can be considered to be the visual equivalent to the complex sample work created by the New York rap collective from Hong Kong film soundbytes. Like the video games Enslaved – Odyssey to the West (2010) and Jade Empire (2005) RZA’s transmedia work demonstrates that the genre is not restricted to a certain cultural surrounding. Jade Empire takes the aspect of world-building one step further by creating a setting not based upon a single story but rather on the storyworld and standard situations of wuxia mythology. It combines the gameplay of Role-Playing Games with the aesthetics and moves of Asian martial arts. The plot about a treacherous kung fu master who disturbed the balance between the realm of the living and the dead by interrupting the passage of souls from one world to the other could very well provide the groundwork for another Zu Warriors installment. Within the larger frame of the fantasy genre which became a major international cinematic force in the 2000s wuxia provides an option that has local roots in Chinese popular culture but can be extended as a global playground. Thus the transformations started by Tsui Hark’s and Ching-Siu Tung’s synthesis of semantics and syntax can be regarded as a productive model of dynamic two-way hybridisation which goes beyond superficial commercial calculations appreciating the multitude and versatility of genre cinema. In this way as an alternative to considering genre concepts to be stagnant forms they open up the rules and motives of wuxia according to Rick Altman’s pragmatic understanding, offering an inspiring playground for formalist experimentation as well as a seismograph for cultural developments even beyond the disappearing space of the Hong Kong of previous decades. Its effigy can be found in the virtual realms of transnational video game culture and its echoes can be found in the samples of globalised hip hop culture.

Works Cited Abbas, Ackbar. «The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Déjà Disparu.» Asian Cinema: A Reader and Guide. Ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 72–99. Print. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print. Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror or, Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower, 2007. Print. Gunning, Tom. «The Cinema of Attractions: Early Films, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde.» Wide Angle 8.3 (1986): 63–70. Print. Hui, Luo. «The Ghost of Liaozhai: Pu Songling’s Ghostlore and Its History of Reception.» Diss. University of Toronto, 2009. T-Space. University of Toronto Research Repository. University of Toronto. Web. 01 Mar. 2013. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1993. Print. 279

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Morton, Lisa. The Cinema of Tsui Hark. 2001. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. Print. Ritzer, Ivo. Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. Schroeder, Andrew. Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. Print. Tan, See Kam. «From South Pacific to Shanghai Blues. No Film is an Island.» Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and New Global Cinema. No Film is an Island. Eds. Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam. London: Routledge, 2007. 13–34. Print. – «Surfing with the Surreal in Tsui Hark’s Wave: Collage Practice, Diasporic Hybrid Texts, and Flexible Citizenship.» Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New

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Wave to the Digital Frontier. Ed. Esther M.K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. 33–49. Print. Teo, Stephen. Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Print. – Hong Kong Cinema – The Extra Dimension. London: BFI, 1997. Print. Thanouli, Eleftheria. Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration. London: Wallflower, 2009. Print. Thompson, Kristin. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Print.

Irina Gradinari

From Hollywood to Russia: New Russian Action Cinema Masculinity, Politics and National Identity in the Films of Aleksey Balabanov

This paper discusses the influence of Hollywood Cinema, more specifically of American action films of the 1980s, on the development of its post-Soviet counterpart. In the 1990s, Russian film makers adapted and transformed Hollywood muscular cinema in order to formulate a new Russian national identity. They employ formulas, taken from action films from the Reagan Era, whose plots were usually based on the opposition between the USA and the Soviet Union, usually implying a chauvinistic dehumanisation of the «enemies» (i.e. the Vietnamese or the Soviets). In this context, the question arises how in this type of action cinema anti-Soviet ideas could have been turned into its opposite and how it could be functionalised for the so-called New Russian Idea? How was Hollywood muscular cinema transformed? The definition of the genre, its potential to unitize contradictory discourses and Aleksey Balabanov’s various attempts to adapt Hollywood genres make up the first part of this paper. «Genre» here denotes not only a set of identifiable elements and narrative strategies, but also a medium that condenses and thus recognizes and reflects the cultural processes involved in the constitution of meaning and at the same time self-reflects its own system of articulation. Hence, a successful adaptation of genres depends above all on the possibility of the genre system adequately to represent social context and on the expectations of the audience, their knowledge of the genre system and their ability to recognise its elements. 281

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The main focus of this paper is on the adaption of the dramatic mechanism of self-empowerment used in muscular cinema, which will be discussed in the second part of this paper through the analysis of the cult film Brat/Brother (1997) by Aleksey Balabanov, Russian cinema’s most important «genre auteur» (Ritzer 114). This hybrid film realises a self-empowerment mechanism of the muscular cinema, using modes of typification known from Soviet traditions of representation as well as character configurations typical of Russian folk tales. The result of their fusion is the so-called hero of our time. The main character, Danila Bagrov (Sergey Bodrov), who is set up by the Russian reception in reference to the canonical novel with the same name by Russian writer Jury Lermontov from 1840.

1. Adaptation Attempt of Hollywood Genre Cinema in Russia Genre cinema generates meaning through the recombination of well-known «core» elements in response to a specific social climate, searching for an adequate form of articulation and trying out its own potential to express socially relevant issues. The vastness of Hollywood output in the 1980s lead to a heterogeneous mix of styles, subjects and ideological appeals. Yvonne Tasker, in her study of the action cinema of the 1980s, defined this heterogeneity of the genre as generic hybridity (55), which describes a fruitful interaction of repetition and difference as a constitutive basis of a genre, and a bricolage principle of the postmodern film leading to a fragmentation of aesthetic boundaries (54). Both features were caused by an interaction of production, distribution and consumption of the films during the last century in Hollywood and have since been radicalised by New Hollywood. They compose the genre as a dynamic and open system that allows a complex interplay of traditional elements and the absorption of new motifs, thereby enabling it to negotiate the current discourses/the processes of the constitution of meaning (55). At the same time, according to Tasker, Hollywood varies the representational forms of very similar narrative schemes that constantly shift the terms of popular narratives and therefore demonstrated the flexibility and the genre openness to new narratives (54). In summary, the repetition of familiar visual symbols or narrative elements with their simultaneously dynamic variability and modification has made the genre attractive for adaptation in other cultures. What are genre elements and how can they be transferred to another representation system, if Hollywood Cinema did develop a setting for the negotiation of specifically American discourses? Besides the global presence of Hollywood Cinema, the interest in American action cinema and thus the possibility of its transfer to Russian Cinema were caused by the situation of post-Soviet Russian society: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the borders allowed Hollywood productions to enter the Russian market. Above all, the collapse of the Soviet Union 282

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brought forth a crisis in all social structures: the crash of the political and economical system, of executive, legislative and judiciary powers, all which caused a crisis of cultural representation. Michail Epshtein, a specialist in Russian culture, speaks of the eschatological character of the aesthetical representation in the 1990s (224). Another specialist, Mark Lipovetzky, diagnoses the inertia of styles caused by the ideological emptying of socialist symbolic forms and by the use of these «empty» forms for the articulation of the changed social reality («Sovok-Bljuz» 233). Thus, the end of the Soviet ideology meant the loss of a universal Soviet identity (cf. Groys 1988; Groys 1995) and hence required a reformulation of subject constructions and systems of articulation. Due to the incapacity of habitual forms of representation to adequately articulate actual social meanings, the adoption of existent Hollywood genres was triggered. Hollywood mainstream films were very popular with Soviet audiences, as they were considered a symbol of freedom from the totalitarian regime. Since the Perestroika, the mid-1980s, Soviet audiences learned to understand Hollywood genre conventions. In this period, many approaches were made to adapt popular action cinema for the representation of a new, post-Soviet reality and its specific issues, for example, the war films Gruz 300/The Cargo 300 (1989) and Černaja Akula/The Black Shark (1993), the martial arts film Bolevoj Prijem/ Armlock (1993) and a short TV series about Russian mafia Russkij Transit/Russian Transit (1994). They all tried out modes of adaptation and paved the way for the success of Balabanov’s films. Regarding Hollywood cinema, Balabanov’s Brat develops a deconstructive narration playing with motifs and genre elements, a conception of a «cool» solitary hero and a soundtrack composed by alternative Russian rock bands. Because of the film’s huge success Balabanov directed a sequel Brat 2 in 2000, which is set one year after the events that occurred in the first film. This film no longer uses the narrative scheme of the first part and relies in a strong opposition of Russian and American identities, associating the first with «genuine» and powerful masculinity, «coolness», «truth», «justice» and the second with femininity or «weak» masculinity, «mendacity» and «cowardice» articulated through racial and anti-Semitic stereotypes. Such mechanisms of exclusion serve to exteriorise the internal problems and use the other as a screen for the stabilisation of the self, while the other embodies the features that provoke the desire and anger of the self and at the same time separates and holds them at distance from the self. In this way, Brat 2 eliminates the ambiguity of meaning that characterises the first film. The success of Brat therefore appears symptomatic, as the film articulates as one of the first of its kind Soviet nostalgia and uses Soviet forms of representation, which are then recoded in a hybridised manner. The increasing restitution of Soviet forms of representation to articulate the cultural situation during the last ten years is known as «discourse aphasia», a concept the Russian sociologist Sergey Ushakin borrows from Roman Jacobson’s studies on speech disruption – inadequacy of the 283

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forms of representation to the represented (social) context through the reconstruction of the Soviet aesthetics. Mark Lipovetzky describes the aesthetical strategy of the Brat as «post-soc» – «postmodernism plus Socialist Realism», brought to full fruition in Brat 2 (Paralogiji 497f.). Using Lipovetzky’s theory, Danila, the protagonist in films, can be understood as the embodiment of a new nationalist mythology characterised by irrational ideology. The films revive Soviet anti-Western stereotypes and the Soviet positive hero, all of which are represented at an ironical distance. According to Lipovetsky, they achieve a new «aesthetic energy» but not a new meaning. The audience cannot identify with the protagonist but at the same time it enjoys the film as a ritual event through the play with recognisable Soviet elements. The success of the Brat 2 lies, following Lipovetzky, in the ritual repetition of these stereotypes which seem to be de-ideologised. The focus of Brat lies however on the internal structures and discourses of modern Russia and thereby constitutes an ambiguity of meanings. In the first film, Balabanov negotiates a new social order in Russia in confrontation with old Soviet law, a new criminal form of anomy, an underground art as a new possible social order and a Western culture as alternative order. Although the hero opts for an underground art way of life, the solution the film tries to develop remains open. Balabanov’s film doesn’t lose until its end the hybridity of the genre elements and the bricolage principle for their mixture. Furthermore the films demonstrate successfully the mechanism of recycling and updating Soviet aesthetics decontextualising and providing them with new (Hollywood) frames, narratives and elements. The film War (2002) was the last film with actor Sergey Bodrov, who, in 2002, tragically died together with the whole film crew while directing a new film because of an avalanche in the mountains of North Ossetia. Due to Sergey Bodrov as their «cool» hero in all these films are viewed as a trilogy (e.g. Anemone 127). In War, Bodrov plays a Russian captain who is not only injured and paralysed but also becomes the hostage of Chechen bandits during the Second Chechen War. Again Balabanov adopts Hollywood action cinema, now concentrating on movies dealing with the Vietnam War such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). In analogy to Rambo, who liberates forgotten US-war prisoners in Vietnam, the main character Ivan Yermakov (Aleksey Chadov) is hired by British actor John Boyle (Ian Kelly) and asked to free his fiancée Margaret (Ingeborga Dapkunayte). They were both kidnapped by Chechen terrorists during their tour through Georgia but John has been released to raise the ransom money. In this film there is a doubling and splitting of the Russian self trough the protagonists, the soldier Ivan and the prisoner captain. Anemone interprets this as a representation of a politically correct and «more traditionally Russian version of heroism» that is rooted in «Martyr Saints of the Orthodox Church» (132). That’s why the captain suggests, according to Anemone, «an authentically Russian, and ethically unassailable form of heroism» (132). With the figure Ivan, Balabanov critiques a society that «can neither ensure nor 284

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recognize its true heroes» and at the same time reflects the ambivalence of vigilante violence (Anemone 131). My thesis is that the ambiguity of the political situation in Chechnya generates a schizophrenic self: On the one hand, Ivan has a typical Russian name, thus representing the winning side of the Chechen war – he frees the Russian captain along with the other hostages and kills the Chechen fighters. He embodies the chauvinistic and imperial Russian fantasies about military dominance. On the other hand, his victory cannot be legitimated and finally brings him to prison. The film betrays the impossibility of such triumph. In a similar way, the captain, yet famous as a cool hero and Chechen War veteran of the brother-films, appears powerless and indomitable at the same time. Ultimately both figures, the captain and Ivan, the latter resembling Danila from the Brat films, represent one contradictory Russian identity that even by quoting American genre formulas is unable to legitimise the Chechen war. Chechnya is a part of Russia and a Chechen War is a civil war, whose trauma cannot be cured through the stigmatisation of the Chechen as other and his distinction from a hegemonic Russian self. Although the film won several Russian film prizes, the insolubility of political and aesthetical conflicts and the inappropriate imitation of the Vietnam genre made the film fail at the box office. In Žmurki/Dead Man’s Bluff (2005), Balabanov finally deconstructs the romanticism of his own concept of criminal self-empowerment. Plot and actors are known from the first two Brat films: Once again, the national identity is at stake here, again the story revolves around a brutal gang war, and again vigilantism is represented as the only possible way of self-assertion. At the end of the film, the criminals of the 1990s become members of the new Russian parliament. 285

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This time however Balabanov shows the criminals as negative and the gang war as a frightening excess of bloody violence. Apparently inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s influential reinvention of genre cinema (cf. Shtefanova), Žmurki is not only a strikingly self-reflexive film that contains a lot of quotations of and allusions to Balabanov’s own oeuvre. It also spoofs the crime and action genre by showing the contingency and meaninglessness of violence. Precisely on account of this brutality, the film failed to impress the Russian audience and became one of the biggest flops in Balabanov’s career. Particularly the narrative scheme and narrative strategy (for instance, the strategy of the self-referentiality) of the film had to appear strange to Russian spectators1: Apart from Balabanov’s own films, Russian cinema has no traditions of violence and crime films quoting Tarantino, consequently the strategy of parody the film follows remained without recognisable references.

2. Brat: U.S. American Self-Empowerment, Soviet Aesthetics and Russian Folk Tales Anthony Anemone describes the film of Aleksey Balabanov as follows: «Born as a low-budget take-off on the gangster movie, Balabanov’s Brat became the surprise hit of 1997: the movie’s gross from theatrical release was higher than that of any other Russian movie, and it led all movies, domestic and foreign, in video rental receipts for the year.» (127). At first glance, the film’s plot is simple and reminiscent of a post-Soviet fairy tale: The film’s young hero, the recently demobilised Danila Bagrov, wanders into a lawless and violent post-Soviet St. Petersburg in search of his older brother Viktor, a professional hitman with the criminal nickname Tatarin (Viktor Suchorukov). Within a few days, Danila manages to eliminate a good share of the local mobsters who had threatened his brother and friends. He kills a Chechen mafia boss for money and then the Russian mafia group and their boss Krugly. Danila saves his brother, although Viktor betrays and exploits him. If genre is a medium in which the negotiation of cultural meaning takes place, Balabanov’s film salvages from muscular cinema the compensative management mechanism of the power crisis through a self-empowerment with an omnipotent figure using the bricolage principle. In reference to a quote by Sylvester Stallone, Tasker defined action cinema as a juxtaposition of muscular power (Rambo) versus the impotence of state power (White House). Thus, Stallone was quoted in The Guardian, saying he «won in the cinema the war the United States lost on the ground.» (93) For the realisation of this compensatory mechanism, action cinema invented the definite narrative scheme and a recognisable iconography, which Tasker described as a spectacle of the white male body in an explosive and excessive cinematic con1

See the review by Fer’je.

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text with the «visual pyrotechnics, the military array of weaponry and hardware, the arch-villains and the staggering obstacles», as well as «the overblown budgets, the expansive landscapes against which the drama is acted out and the equally expansive soundtracks» (76). Peter Sloterdijk emphasises a global context of the violent conflicts in action cinema that negotiates the conditions of survival for the whole collective by reenacting the «Primal Scene» constituting this collective (2). All this, we find slightly modified in Balabanov’s film. His film remedies the collapse of the Soviet Union and corrects, cinematically, the national humiliation of a defeat in the Chechen war. He realises this with the help of recognisable narrative and the visual symbols of action cinema, emphasising the triumph of the hero. Danila is a war veteran just as Rambo or John Matrix in Commando (1985) and he equally embodies an omnipotent militaristic male fantasy. Furthermore, the two sequels of Balabanov’s film make ample reference to the Hollywood tradition, too. The realistic narrative also focuses on the killing of villains, the preparation for battles and the victories of the hero. The hero Danila speaks only very little, just as Rambo or John Matrix, and he is a little slow and naïve like Rambo. He is a man of action which is most often made manifest in acts of vigilantism. Danila is displaced in society, strictly speaking placeless just like Rambo. The references to Hollywood action films serve to expose the idea of freedom, which was associated with action cinema in the Soviet and post-Soviet period – the reason why the Hollywood subtext is made so explicit. With this citation of the Hollywood genre, the Russian film rewrites its precursor. While the muscular cinema problematises the relation between the existing order and lawless violence, it renegotiates the borders of law and anomy and restores order. Even then, if these processes are presented in an ambiguous fashion, there is no structure or scale in Russian cinema that can be recognised as an ordering principle. The police or other government institutions play no role in this film at all. Danila moves freely through social hierarchy, he has no father figure like Rambo. Danila’s father also was a criminal and at the time the movie begins he is already dead. The hero establishes his superiority over his brother by violence, who at first appears to be a role model and can be seen as a law «coordinate system» which poses the new criminality in Russia as norm, since he is also criminal and violent. My thesis is that the film shows a diversity of discourses in the post-Soviet political and representational crises in their competition for the constitution of meaning. It reflects this process and in its main character offers a solution. The film’s self-reflexivity uncovers the representation of media like Hollywood action cinema on TV, porn and music video clips and media representatives like TV sets, records, CDs and video players. Therefore, the film focuses on its own representation system, which forms the post-Soviet discourses. The hero’s preparations for the elimination of the mobsters and therefore for the unification of the actual contradictory discourses was accompanied by Russian rock music coming from an old record player, as rejection 287

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of Western influence and technology. The film starts with Danila interrupting the shooting of a music video. He cannot be situated in the existing representation system that literally deforms him. The director beats him up. Violence is an instrument to overcome the dominant discourses, whose regime of the constitution of meaning is also based on violence. The Russian version of the genre is called «Boyevik», which is derived from a Russian word meaning «battle/fight». The emphasis of the film lies on fighting, not on spectacular action and well-shaped bodies. What solution does the film offer, given that the new power discourses are extremely violent and criminal? Is Russia suffering its first disappointment with Western culture and the Soviet ideology discredited by itself? The answer can be found in the context of the arising nationalistic tendencies in the Russian tales tradition. It leads back to the idea of a Russian mentality and the national tradition of representation prior to their contamination by Soviet ideology and Western influence. Here lies the principle of hybridisation in the film, while it joins different aesthetic traditions: Hollywood action cinema with Russian folk tales and Soviet aesthetics. The mixture of them transformed them. Bearing in mind popular characters from Russian folk tales, Danila can be seen to embody Ivan Durachok (Ivan, the fool), who is by rule the youngest and least intelligent son in a family but nevertheless always manages to triumph (Anemone 139; Lipovetzky, Paralogiji 493). This may explain why Danila, who bears an old Russian name, is not a muscle man like Rambo or John Matrix. He is at the same time an ironic reference to the epic Russian heroes who are shown on the old Soviet carpet in the background with three famous heroes on the wall by his lover Svetlana: Il’ja Muromec, Dobrynja Nikitič and Aleša Popovič. This reference on the Russian and Soviet tradition is parodistic and the same time nostalgic. The nostalgia for the Soviet period is also indicated by the colour of the film produced through a special filter that imitates the Soviet celluloid Shostka – an art of postSoviet cinematographic fetish. The name derives from the Ukrainian city where the factory Svema producing celluloid was situated. Since the cinema industry in Russia was established and developed in the Soviet period, Balabanov’s film also reproduces some Soviet modes of representation. This is done e.g. through the elimination/recycling of Soviet traditions, such as teleological narration, the significance of the collective, the myth of a big family, friendship between Soviet peoples, linguistic unification and work ethics. Danila, for example, is a professional killer, not a worker (Clark). Nevertheless, Danila is a typical Soviet hero as an average man of the people. One scene shows how Danila, towards the end of the film, merges with the masses. He is one among many. He cannot be distinguished from them. His favourite music is also the music of the masses, although he only listens to underground music (if he wants to buy CDs, they are always sold out). In another scene, Danila is shown during a concert of his favourite Rock band, once again as one of the masses. 288

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2 Brat

The character constellation of Balabanov also adapts the narrative structure of Russian tales, as it has been described by the Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp. Characters are presented in congruence with the typification tradition of Soviet cinema, whose heroes have no psychological or individual features and only provide representations of social classes.2 In analogy to the socialist-realism tradition Balabanov’s film dramatises class antagonisms and allows a man of the people to win. The term «brother» is in this case suited to recode the Soviet traditions. It is used either in the criminal crises for the definition of criminal groups like brotherhood (bratva) or in Soviet ideology to underline the cohesion of the various Soviet republics, which also relies on the metaphors of brotherhood (bratstvo, bratskie respubliki). Propp distinguishes eight character roles or spheres of action that can be presented by different protagonists. Furthermore, the character roles have thirty-one functions which condition the story development, often in a highly predictable fashion. For example, the punishment or annihilation of the villain always happens at the end of the story like in Babalbanov’s film. The character roles also structure his film: the first character to be mentioned is the villain, who is presented through mafia boss Krugly, his hitmen, Chechens and Caucasians. Although they represent different phenomena of the social reality in the 1990s, in the film they move in the same semantic sphere that encodes the richness and ethnicity as otherness through the xenophobic attributions excluding and pathologising them as a cause and symbol of 2

The similarities between Russian folk tales and the Soviet literature of the Stalin period is also pointed out by Katerina Clark, researcher of Socialist Realism.

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prevailing social disorder. The Caucasians are also very negatively presented as rich, impudent and cowardly, thus signifying the loss of masculinity. For example, two Caucasians do not want to pay the penalty in a tram for the missing tickets, though they have much money and the tickets as well as the penalty are low. The Caucasians make fun about the conductor who looks very poor. Danila forces them with a gun to pay a penalty accompanied by hate statements addressed the Caucasians, who called him «brother». Of course, Danila denies any brotherhood with them – a rejection of the Soviet tradition of friendship between ethnic minorities and Russians. Krugly embodies a nouveau riche Russian, signalled by his red jacket and a new discourse regime. Krugly pretends to quote «old» Russian proverbs, which, in fact, are made up by him. He produces a new symbolic order which turns out as a simulation and parasitic exploitation of Russian traditions. He will be annihilated by the positive hero who presents the second character according to Propp’s classification. The positive hero Danila is looking for his brother in St. Petersburg, motivated by an initial lack of money due to unemployment, although a friend of his dead father offers him to work for the police, which back then was still called militia. Danila represents a new social type: an anti-Soviet one associated with anti-Soviet underground art, which was legalised in the mid-1980s. Danila listen to music of the very popular rock group Nautilus Pompilius, the name of the submarine of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). Danila appears as a free, powerful subject who can protect himself. He must position himself in a new order or even influence it trough the violent restoration the justice. The legitimization of violence is based on the «true» values which can stabilise the society. The first Brat film negotiates honesty, justice and loyalty to the state power and between the people/classes. The «truth» itself appears in the second film, articulating the vigilantism against capitalism and corruption. Though all these positive features, the position of the positive hero remains ambivalent and instable because of his aimless moving and social decentredness. The film ends with the flight of the hero. The next character is the donor. He provides the hero with an object that has some magic feature. The role of the donor is played by Danila’s elder brother Viktor. He gives Danila money, provides orientation in the big city and offers him a «job». He pays him for the killing of mob bosses. With the Soviet Union (their father – also a criminal) disbanded, the power is split between small, competing criminal groups. The donor represents the leftovers of the Soviet system, insofar as he has power. His nickname Tatarin (literally: tatar) marks his otherness through ethnical attribution and demonstrates his ambiguous position in the film. It is a symbol of a new post-Soviet age in his criminal power and at the same time it shows his foreignness in a new social context represented as an alienation from his youngest brother, whom he exploited and betrayed. The helper as a minor character supports the hero. In the film the helper is the figure Nemec (literally: German). He takes care of Danila when he is wounded and 290

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even disposes of dead bodies for him. He and his friends also represent the new class of the homeless who are also a product of the system’s collapse. This character furthermore marks a shift in comparison to the enemy system of Soviet war cinema, which was developed by Soviet war films. The German, Nemec, is Danila’s only friend. The enemies are the ex-republics and the Soviet system itself. The princess, reward for the hero and often object of the villain’s schemes, is Danila’s lover – Svetlana. She saves Danila when he is chased and is raped by Krugly’s hitmen searching for Danila. Svetlana, as a worker, represents the Soviet people who do not want to be free and which tolerate the rest of the old power system (her husband) and the new criminal power (Krugly). Through her name, that refers to the word light (svet), Svetlana also represents the positive moments in the life of the hero. The light metaphors were also popular in the aesthetics of Socialist Realism as a description of a happy communist future. Svetlana refuses to leave the city with Danila, who loves her as Rambo did love his country. Instead, she stays with her husband and thereby demonstrates the impossibility of change. The next character role in the Propp’s classification is the father of the princess, who represents the order, gives tasks the hero and rewards him after completion. Svetlana’s husband, as a father figure, embodies the patriarchal Soviet order to which she belongs as well. The Soviet order is fallen, because her husband is an violent alcoholic. He disturbs the relations between Svetlana und Danila, but plays only a minor part in the plot. He presents the debris of Soviet patriarchal power, which is characterised as impotent and useless. Another character according to Propp is the dispatcher, who sends the hero on his way. This role is played by the underground singer Vyacheslav Butusov, whose music was not only very popular in the 1990s, but is also associated with the freedom and changes in the Soviet Union. His music, which follows the plot intraand extradiegetically, accompanies all the doings of the hero and inspires to do the «right» thing. For example, after the meeting with the underground artists, Danila kills two criminals in order to save a radio director. Yet another role is taken up by the false hero. Besides the main character Danila there is also another hero: the antagonist Cat. Like Danila, she also represents a new class, but one influenced by the West – the film shows a culture focused on consumption and prostitution for the gratification of low needs – food, drugs, dance etc. She cannot love, can have no relation, unless Danila pays her. As a false hero, she is marked out by a false music that embodies Western pop music that remains meaningless, since the characters do not understand English anyway. This class, focussing on consumer behaviour has neither future perspective. When Danila asks Cat, towards the end of the film, what she wants to do, aiming at the future of her life, she answers that she does not know yet (due to a lack of money) which night club she may visit tonight. The best option for her this evening is a gay singer. Similar to the action film of the 1980s with its right-wing agenda the film is also 291

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misogynistic and homophobic, including anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. The social disorder is stigmatised as a woman that marks the fall, criminality and anomy. In this film however they are ironically broken. The stereotypes are ambivalent. Danila appears more positive in comparison to Cat, although he tries to build up a relationship with Cat and feels lonely, when the relationship fails. In one scene Danila, as another example, confesses to Nemec that he does not like Jews, whereupon Nemec asks, what the difference is between German and Jews. Danila has no answer, so the film discloses its own stereotypes as an effect of cultural attributions that have no references in the social context.

3. Conclusion Hollywood action films provide Russian cinema with a successful compensation mechanism for self-empowerment and genre structures like generic hybridity and bricolage. On the one hand, they allow for immediate pleasure through identification with the omnipotence of the main character in a period of social crisis. On the other hand, they allow to renegotiate the current discourses of post-Soviet society and to update Soviet and Russian aesthetics. Balabanov demonstrates a mode of using obsolete elements. Of course, the nationalist politics of this film must be reflected critically. The national reformulation of Russian identity here entails a clear stigmatisation of otherness. It is based on mechanisms of exclusions, which the film presents due to its postmodern play with motifs not only ironically, exposed as an endless process and a utopian project. Danila embodies the idea of freedom as money without work, free love without duties and power without punishment. At the end of the film, however he is homeless – he has to leave St. Petersburg. Another deconstructive moment of this nationalistic concept is the adaption of the Hollywood narratives for the compilation and reformulation of a Russian identity. Even though the film Brat pathologises the influence of Western culture, and Brat 2 radicalises the exclusion of American style of live and above all American capital, it still adapts Hollywood motifs and forms of representation. The Hollywood cinema developed open, maybe universalistic schemes to negotiate current social discourses. That is why the success of this film is not only based on its right-wing agenda nor on its idea of absolute freedom. Its success is based on the dissolution of the disorientation caused by failed discourses in the production of meaning and identity. The film realises this dissolution through articulation forms which are immediately understandable and acceptable for a post-Soviet audience. Moreover, the film postulates the superiority of Soviet and Russian aesthetics over Hollywood cinema, thus enabling the audience’s satisfaction through the cinematic compensation of failed social utopias. The adaptation of narrative frames and dramatic mechanisms taken from Hollywood cinema counterpart at the same time 292

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the nationalistic idea of the film, which contains the strangeness in its structure and thus demonstrates a dependence on the other, the nationalistic narrative and ideological constitution of the self. Works Cited Anemone, Anthony. «About Killers, Freaks, and Real Men. The Vigilante Hero of Aleksei Balabanov’s Films.» Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema. Eds. Stephen M. Norris and Zara M. Torlone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 127–141. Print. Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915. New York: Scribner, 1990. Print. Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. 1981. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Print. Epshtein, Michail. «Posle buduščego. O novom soznanii v literature.» Znamya 1 (1991): 217–230. Print. Fer’je, Artem. «Rezensija na kinofilm Žmurki.» Proza.ru (2006): n. pag. Web. 30. Jan. 2012. Groys, Boris. Die Erfindung Rußlands. München: Hanser, 1995. Print. – Das Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion. München: Hanser, 1988. Print.

Lipovetzky, Mark. «Sovok-Bljuz. Šestidesjatniki segodnja.» Znamya 9 (1991): 226–236. Print. – Paralogiji: Transformazii (Post)Modernistskogo Diskursa v Kul’ture 1920–2000 ch godov. Moskow: novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008. Print. Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folk Tales. Austin: Texas University Press, 1975. Print. Ritzer, Ivo. Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2009. Print. Shtefanova, Irina. «A ne Zamachnut’sja li nam na Kventina Našego, Tarantino?» Ruskino.ru – Internet Journal for Russian Cinema (2005): n. pag. Web. 30. Jan. 2012. Sloterdijk, Peter: «Sendboten der Gewalt.» Zeit Online 30 Apr. 1993. Web. 30. Jan. 2012. Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993. Ushakin, Sergey. «Byvšeje v upotrebleniji: Postsovetskoje sostojanie kak forma afazii.» NLO 100 (2009). n. pag. Web. 10. Apr. 2010.

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Undoing Genre

Robert Stam

Documentary Variations On a Hybrid Theme Although documentary and fiction as film genres are often assumed to be polar opposites, in fact the two are theoretically and practically intermeshed. On a more general and abstract level, history and fiction have been seen as opposite, yet they too have long been symbiotically connected, incestuously invaginated as it were, across a spectrum of representations. Many cultures do not apply the concept of «fiction» to traditional narratives, so what some call «myths» are from another point-of-view accounts of historical events. Within the Western tradition, Homeric epic was for the Greeks both «history» and «fiction». Modernist literature has cast doubt on the veracity of history; for the historian-protagonist-narrator of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, history is a fabrication of the imagination, since human beings in general fictionalise their own histories. Scholar Hayden White, following in the steps of Nietzschean skepticism, has argued in his book Metahistory that the myth/ history distinction was arbitrary and of recent invention. For White, and his words apply to film as well as to writing, it matters little whether the world that is conveyed to the reader/spectator is conceived to be real or imagined; the manner of making discursive sense of it through tropes and emplotment is identical (see White). What Derrida said of genre generally in «The Law of Genre» applies equally to documentary and fiction: «The trait which marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes forth, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless.» (206)

Documentary and fiction, moreover, are not genres but rather trans-genres harboring an infinity of crossings and variations. The hybridisation of the two trans297

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genres, furthermore, is not a matter of fixed proportion, as if a given film could be clearly be classified as 60% documentary and 40% fiction. Depending on the theoretical/critical grid adopted, the same film, or even the same sequence, could be seen, at least in terms of its formal procedures, as 100% fiction and 100% documentary. It is more useful, in this sense, to speak not of documentary as generic essence but rather of documentary operations as opposed to fictive operations. The proliferation of syncretising coinages such as «documenteur» (the title of a 1981 Agnès Varda film), «fiction documentaire» (Rancière 201), «reality fictions» (Frederick Wiseman), and mockumentary testify to this hybridisation. Nor does the distinction apply to the other arts, since critics do not claim that Cezanne is fiction while Picasso is documentary, or Bartok is fiction, and Debussy documentary. Christian Metz has famously argued that all films are fiction films, since they involve arrangement, sequencing, and mediation. From the theoretical grid of spectatorship and poststructuralist ideology-critique, Marc Vernet, in a similar vein, proclaims that «the spectator at a scientific documentary does not behave any differently than the spectator at a fiction film […] since the film is not reality […] the documentary spectator is also attending a spectacle.» (Vernet in Aumont et al. 77)

Yet the converse is also true; all films are arguably documentaries in that they all document something, even if only to register the state of technology, performance, and production methods at a given point in time. All films, in this sense, are what David James calls «allegories of cinema» – filmic registers of their own modes of production and their shaping social relations. If the two modes have so much in common, what, then, constitutes the documentary difference? For Jean-Louis Comolli, documentaries, even scripted documentaries, are made under the «risk of the real», i.e. that are shadowed and inspired by the vicissitudes of production and the unpredictabilities of actuality that perturbs and potentially enriches, the partially constructed world of the film. This unpredictability has a human dimension: in a more intensified way, documentary filmmaking is the place where the anxiety of the filmmaker at the moment of filming meets the anxiety of the filmed subject at the moment of being filmed, and where each can become other, in Deleuzian language, to themselves. For other analysts, it is documentary’s higher coefficient of ethical responsibility that distinguishes it from the fiction film, the fact that its representations, existing on a continuum with real life, often have consequences for the ‹characters›. The hybridisation of documentary and fiction is not new. Even a cursory look at film history and the documentary field reveals a wide spectrum of practices, with gradations rather than fixed lines. Citizen Kane (1941) was based on a historical prototype (Hearst) and begins with a semi-parodic fake newsreel («News on the March»). Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) was based on journalistic reportage 298

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and filmed in a black-and-white documentary style. The various New Waves – Neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague, Cinema Novo, New German Cinema – injected documentary elements into fiction films: interviews in Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) and À bout de souffle/Breathless (JeanLuc Godard, 1960), a mini-documentary on nuclear destruction in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), the weaving of stock footage and archival materials from World War I into Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), where the ‹fiction› is also partially based on the actual lives of the characters’ prototypes (Franz and Helen Hessel, Henri-Pierre Roche). The French ethnographer/filmmaker Jean Rouch – a major influence on New Wave fiction films – follows the opposite procedure of inserting fictive elements into documentary. For him, «there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction» (quoted in Aufderheide 112). La pyramide humaine/The Human Pyramid (Jean Rouch, 1961), for example, stages a fictive psychodrama about race relations in a French lycée in Abidjan, but the fiction generates real feelings and consequences such as quarrels, friendships, and love affairs. Also in the early 1960s, the characters of the absurdist satirical fiction Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) were partially based on real prototypes like Curtis LeMay and Edward Teller, while the film is replete with documentary-effects, i.e. stylistic mimicry of the documentary manner through hand-held camera, blurred footage and so forth. Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), meanwhile, develops a different mélange of the two modes by placing its actors within real situations such as the protest demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The Brazilian film Iracema, uma transa amazônica/Iracema (Jorge Bodanzky/ Orlando Senna, 1975), set in the Amazon region, meanwhile, has an actor (Paulo César Pereio) interact with strangers who are unaware of his celebrity, as a resource for triggering more spontaneous reactions. The melding of fiction and documentary can generate non-fiction films every bit as exciting and suspenseful as the best fiction films. Among myriad examples, the José Padilha documentary Onibûs 174/Bus 174 (2002; subsequently remade as an infinitely less interesting staged fiction called Última Parada 174/Last Stop 174, 2008) treats the real-life sequestering of a bus by a homeless street person named Sandro. At the time, the TV audience was riveted by the drama as millions worried especially about the fate of the passengers in the bus. Since all Brazilians knew the outcome of the story – police mistakenly killed one of the passengers from the bus, and later killed Sandro in the police car – Padilha is not terribly concerned with that kind of suspense. Rather, the film changes the question from ‹what will happen?› and ‹who did it?› to ‹why did he do it?›. Unlike the media, interested only in exploiting the sensationalism of the incident, Padilha was fascinated by the human beings involved. It was not enough to call Sandro a ‹marginal› – as the media tended to do 299

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1 Onibûs 174

– and leave it at that. Why would a person named Sandro sequester a bus? Deploying a kind of media jiujitsu, Padilha researched Globo outtakes to tell the story, reinvoicing the materials through commentary and supplementing it with interviews with hostages, relatives of the hijackers, sociologists and so forth. The film also develops a kind of social allegory, whereby Sandro becomes the demented yet spokesperson for those abused by the police and by the prison system. Sandro, directly addressing the police, says «Look at my face! Take a good look!» and proceeds to denounce police violence. Sandro, it turns out, had been an eye-witness not only to the murder of his own mother but also to the police murder of street children in the notorious 1995 Candelaria massacre. Thus Onibûs 174 goes beyond merely registering events to furnishing a critique of media sensationalism and of the ideological blinders through which the media usually relay such incidents. But what is most germane to our interests here is the fact that the structure of this documentary strongly resembles that of certain Hitchcock films (most notably Spellbound, 1945, and Marnie, 1964, and in some ways Vertigo, 1958) which proceed via a double temporal movement, at once forward – in terms of the unfolding events involving the sequestered bus – and backward, toward the origin of a trauma, not unlike Hitchcock’s tracing the origins of Gregory Peck’s amnesia, or Marnie’s kleptomania. We find convergences between documentary and fiction even at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Animated cartoons might seem to fall into the category of pure fiction – in that they work without a profilmic model and construct twodimensional animal characters who speak and defy gravity and come back from the 300

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dead – yet animated films can also be based on scientific studies of animal motion. Andy Warhol created pure and unalloyed documents – e.g. the real-time image of the Empire State Building, for example – but where the resulting film was exceedingly strange and somehow unreal. In recent years, a proliferation of essay films, mock-documentaries, and art films have traversed the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, working out what was implicit in the work and manifestos of an earlier generation of documentary filmmakers. Nor is the idea of documentary/fiction hybridisation alien to film practitioners themselves. Godard famously called À bout de souffle a «documentary on JeanPaul Belmondo», and Une femme est une femme (1961) a «cinéma vérité musical». Jean Rouch, associated alongside Edgar Morin with the term cinéma vérité – a translation of Vertov’s Kino Pravda («cinema-truth», but in the Russian context also «cinema-newspaper»), i.e. a documentary process that includes the making of the film – constantly emphasised the convergences between the fictional and documentary modes. Rouch saw his advance-plotted psychodramas like La pyramide humaine as a way of «lying to tell the truth» by using fiction to penetrate and open up reality to the risk of the real. Contrived psychodramatic situations, in his view, could become filmic therapy by actually triggering positive changes in the lives of the participants in the form of more equal and convivial social relations. Even Richard Leacock, while defending his practice of direct cinema (also known as observational cinema), i.e. documentary «fly-on-the-wall» filmmaking taking advantage of light-weight cameras and synchronous sound, acknowledged that many non-fiction strategies were narrative-based while dismissing claims that his generation of documentarians strived for «objective truth». Similarly, Frederick Wiseman, the practitioner of institutional dissection – observational critiques of major social institutions like asylums, prisons, police headquartes and so forth – has long labeled his films reality fictions, where documentary is «just another form of fiction. It is arbitrary […] made up. It doesn’t follow the natural order. Its major sequences are shorter than they are in real time. They acquire meaning they wouldn’t have in isolation.» (Wiseman quoted in Stewart). Both documentaries and fiction films engage similar questions about character, identification, and point-of-view. Spectators of both documentary and fiction films engage in primary cinematic identification – the spectators’ identification, via the camera, with their own act of looking and perception as condition of possibility of the perceived – and secondary cinematic identification – identification with the pro-filmic characters and milieux and situations offered by the film. The questions that film theory and analysis asks about point of view are relevant to both fiction and documentary, questions about: who tells? (narration); who sees? (point-of-view or ocularisation); who hears? (Chion’s «point of hearing»); through whose perception and comprehension is information filtered (focalisation), in ethical terms who carries what Boris Uspensky (29) calls the «norms of the text» or the 301

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implied ethics of the film and finally, who solicits our alignment or moral affiliation (see Smith). Most of the analytical questions – whose stories are being told? By whom? How are the stories manufactured, disseminated, received? Who dominates the image? Who is representing whom and within what power arrangements? Who is speaking through a film? Who is addressed, imagined as listening? What social desires and discourses are mobilised by the text in question? – are relevant to both documentary and fiction. One can see the overall trajectory of documentary over the past half-century was a case of the democratisation of authorship. Although filmmaking historically has usually been in the hands of middle-class directors equipped with «cultural capital» (Pierre Bourdieu) and access to funding sources, there have also been many countervailing attempts to place the camera in the hands of the disempowered. Although this usually very partial transfer of power was extremely difficult when filmmaking equipment was cumbersome and expensive, it has become much easier with the various technological changes – from lightweight cameras and sound recording equipment in the 1960s to video in the 1980s up through the various digital revolutions – that have rendered cameras and recording equipment lighter, cheaper, and more user friendly. Jean Rouch was a key figure in this mutation toward more egalitarian film production. While Rouch-style collaboration now seems somewhat limited in the light of subsequent developments, it still constituted a major change in method. Rouch spoke, for example, of shared anthropology, i.e. dialogic collaboration between ethnographer and ethnographic subject (a sharing both reciprocated and reversed in Manthia Diawara’s Rouch in Reverse, 1995). With Rouch, democratisation took many concrete forms, beginning with improvisation by the filmed subjects, for example Oumarou Gando as «Edward G. Robinson» improvising his commentary for Moi un noir/I, a Negro (1958), a scene that reportedly inspired Belmondo’s nonchalant improvisations in Godard’s À bout de souffle. Another major change consisted in participant feedback, including in the form of open screenings where the subjects offered their commentary and critiques of the film. These commentaries were sometimes included in the film itself, for example in Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (1961), a film that Brian Winston calls the «totemic ancestor» of Reality TV shows such as Wife Swap (see Winston). Rouch wielded the camera as a catalyst capable of provoking personal transformations through the filmic experience. Many of the ‹rules› articulated in Rouch’s 1973 book The Camera and Man arguably have a democratising effect. For example, the goal of cohabitation – living with the subjects prior to filmmaking – allows for more intimacy and less distance. The production ideals of minimal crew and hand-held equipment, meanwhile, make film productions less intimidating and distracting for the filmed subjects by minimising intrusion into the their everyday lives. The option for minimal voice-over lessened the temptation for omniscient commentary 302

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2 Chronique d’un été

in favor of the words of the participants, while the rejection of the zoom-lens was designed to avoid ethnographic voyeurism. More radical attempts at democratisation go back to the many leftist collectives of the late 1960s, whether Cine-Liberation in Argentina or Third World Newsreel in the US, or SLON in France. We find a precursor in the form of the cine-tracts, or militant short 16mm black-and-white films by anonymous collectives treating the ‹events of May› in France. The cine-tracts orchestrated still photos of demonstrations, the recorded sounds evoking militancy, commentary, and the slogans of the day. One of the most famous cine-tracts – dubbed «imagetexts» by W. J. T. Mitchell (quoted in Habib/Paci 76) featured the photo of a Parisian graffito equating the CRS (de Gaulle’s militia) with the Nazi SS. Chris Marker was a key figure in the largely student-fueled cine-tract movement, as well as a key figure in the move to ‹put cameras in the hands of the workers›, through his efforts with SLON (Society for the Creation of New Works) in collaboration with French factory workers. A shift in attention from texts to their authorship and collaborative production triggers a theoretical transformation. The question of the mimetic real gets displaced onto the very different register of who is empowered to represent the real. Rather than being a matter of a verisimilar style, the issue becomes who is producing the film and actually holding the camera. At the same time, the act of ‹giving voice› is very complicated. The phrase itself implies that one person or group has it and then offers it to another person or group, when in fact the latter might have 303

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voice but it has not been listened to. It is rooted in a charitable conception: the haves ‹give› to the representational ‹have nots›, while the haves maintain their economic dominance, cultural capital, and paternalistic superiority. In the cinema, it is not simply a question of handing over the camera to representatives of the disempowered group. In the 1970s, different directors took different positions on the question of voice. For Chris Marker, putting cameras in the hands of workers would lead to a more accurate representation that would reveal a kind of truth, if only the provisional truth of a working class perspective. For the more sceptical Godard, putting cameras in the hands of workers would result in a kind of pathetic mimicry rooted in false consciousness; workers, in a circular process, would simply imitate those actors, such as Jean Gabin, who had incarnated workers in the cinema, and thus produce a mimetic redundancy, an imitation of an imitation. It is perhaps the history of Brazilian cinema, from the Cinema Novo of the 1960s up to the present, that most dramatically exemplifies the shift from representation to self-representation. While the Cinema Novo directors were almost invariably white middle-class heterosexual male urban intellectuals ‹speaking for› the marginalised masses – whether the mestizo peasants of Vidas secas/Barren Lives (1963) or the black favelados of Rio – Brazilian directors are now also women, gays, lesbians, blacks, and indigenous. This paradigm shift is reflected not only in the trajectories of individual directors such as Eduardo Coutinho, but also through a comparison of two versions of the same film project, one from 1962 and the other from 2010. The initial project, called Cinco vezes favela/Five Times Favela, was a five-episode film about the Rio favelas by Cinema Novo directors like Leon Hirszman and Carlos Diegues. The 2010 remake, in contrast, was produced by Diegues but filmed by directors from the favelas (Manaira Carneiro, Wagner Novais, Rodrigo Felha, Cacau Amaral, Cadu Barcelos, and Luciana Bezerra). The revelatory new title: Cinco vezes favela: Agora por nós mesmo/Five Times Favela: This Time by Ourselves. Many zig-zags marked the progress toward self-representation. First came a theoretical critique of documentary itself. In 1972 Arthur Omar published a manifesto defending what he called the anti-documentary which problematised the paternalism of the leftist documentaries of the time. Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (translated as Twenty Years After, 1984), registers this paradigmatic shift as it stood at the time of the political ‹opening› of the mid-1980s. Coutinho’s initial plan, conceived in the optimistic left-populist years before the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil, was a kind of cine-rescate or recovery of history, which would dramatically reconstruct the real-life political assassination, in 1962, of the peasant leader João Pedro Teixeira. In a gesture of actantial self-representation, the actors were to be the actual participants (João Pedro’s comrades in struggle), the locale was to be the actual site of the crime, and one of the ‹actors› would be the deceased leader’s widow Elizabete, playing herself. (One finds a precedent for this 304

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3 Cabra marcado para morrer

kind of actantial self-representation in Orson Welles never-released documentary It’s All True – filmed in 1942 – where four fishermen-jangadeiros (raftsmen), who journeyed over a thousand miles to Rio to protest their working conditions, were to play themselves, using their leader’s maritime diary as the source of the voice-over narration). But while the filming of It’s All True was interrupted by a studio coup at RKO, Cabra marcado para morrer was interrupted by the literal 1964 coup d’état. As a result, the filmmakers and the peasant participants were dispersed, and the material already shot was hidden from the dictatorship. Almost 20 years later, with political liberalisation, Coutinho sought out the footage and the participants. Thanks to the film, Elizabete emerges from underground, encounters her family, and recomposes her identity as person and activist. What interests us here, however, is the film’s charting of a stylistic mutation that reflects a certain democratisation of voice. Between Cabra in 1964 and Cabra 1984, we find a radical change in filmic treatment. The 1960s meeting with the widow is rendered in the highly didactic manner of the period – a mélange of Salt of the Earth-style realism, over-explicit dialogue, and the heroicised image of the ‹people› promoted by the leftist Centres for Popular Culture, the sponsor of the film. The 1980s meeting, in contrast, takes place in the era of network TV and the evolving style of the Brazilian documentary. Coutinho again shows photographs to his subjects, where their own image provokes recollections and emotions. In a kind 305

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of historical version of «photogenie» – Jean Epstein’s phrase for the fascination of the filmed face – we witness the play of painful emotions of experiential loss and hope across Elizabeth’s face. The filmic language is more dialogical, less inclined to discourse omnisciently about the social-racial other, more inclined to listen and learn in a filmic grammar of listening. In the wake of Cabra marcado para morrer, Coutinho continued his unending search for more open and democratic forms of documentary filmmaking. Consistent with his refusal of paternalism, miserabilism, and moralism, Coutinho distinguishes between the interview – the classical approach premised on formal distance and social hierarchy – and the conversation, premised on greater intimacy, equality, and openness to digression. Rather than make films about others, Coutinho makes films with others. His constantly developing capacity for listening intensifies the desire of the filmed subject to speak. While ‹talking heads› is usually deployed as a dismissive term, Coutinho’s work shows just how rich and suggestive a cinema composed largely of talking heads can be. Bakhtin’s and Medvedev’s notion of «speech tact» in this sense, can help illuminate the social dynamics of conversations in Coutinho’s films. The Russian authors define speech tact as the «ensemble of codes governing discursive interaction», determined by «the aggregate of all the social relationships of the speakers, their ideological horizons, and, finally, the concrete situation of the conversation.» (Bakhtin/Medvedev 95). Coutinho’s work, in this sense, explores the various dimensions of speech tact. Within what Carlos Alberto Mattos calls the dramaturgy of speech, the goal becomes, as Coutinho himself puts it, «an experience of a provisional and utopian equality» (see Lins 107), a filmic realisation of what Jürgen Habermas, in a more theoretical context calls, an «ideal speech situation». For Consuelo Lins (8), Coutinho’s films constitute embodied theory, or theory incarnate where theorisations are consubstantial with and tested by filmic praxis. Coutinho’s procedures help us sidestep the domination of the neo-Aristotelian schema in documentary – the idea that documentaries are essentially about looking for ‹stories› and ‹characters›. The problem, again, is not the model itself – thousands of exquisite documentaries have been made on that basis – but rather its domineering exclusivity. Coutinho offers alternative strategies where the search is less for story and character than for a premise or a concept. In this sense, Coutinho follows certain general principles while developing specific premises for specific films. These general principles include: 1) spatial concentration, an option to explore a single locale (the favela in Babilônia 2000, 2000) or even a single apartment building (Edifício Master, 2002) on a bare stage (Jogo de Cena/Playing, 2007); 2) the on-screen display of the apparatus and the filmmaking team; 3) aesthetic minimalism (no non-diegetic music, sparing use of montage and voice-over); 4) leisurely duration, sufficient for the subject to be at ease and espouse his or her hidden transcripts (James Scott’s suggestive term for non-official and proscribed thoughts 306

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and feelings and the power of the social actor to appropriate the performance for her own ends, see Scott 34); 5) the refusal of prior scripting to avoid a priori-agendas and constrictions that preclude the salutary unpredictabilities of filmmaking and allow for what the surrealists called «the definitive by chance»; 6) the choice of having a single encounter with the filmed subject, to preserve the freshness of a new acquaintance, with no opportunity for ‹rewriting›; 7) the option for listening as opposed to combative assertions of a priori positions on the part of the director; and 8) the refusal of totalisation, an emphasis on singularity where the filmed subject is no longer a scientific specimen of a pre-existing sociological or ideological category (the peasantry) but a singular subject. Coutinho has been extremely fecund in innovative conceptual trampolines for his films. His method is often one of what might be called structured aleatory, a common avant-garde technique which combines highly structured patterns – for example the day-in-the-life structure of Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle/Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) – with the psychicdetritus of Marina Vlady’s random stream of mental associations. As with James Joyce’s Ulysses, certain severe spatio-temporal restrictions combine with an extreme openness to chance and the risky vicissitudes of the real. Some of the trampolineconcepts include: 1) searching for a backlands village to be chosen only according to one criteria – a willingness to be filmed (O fim e o princípio/The End and the Beginning, 2005); 2) exploring the inner lives and desires of the residents of a more or less arbitrarily chosen apartment building (Edifício Master); 3) having chosen individuals sing and discuss their favourite songs (As canções/Songs, 2011); 4) having ‹real women› and professional actresses tell exactly the same stories in the very same words (Jogo de cena), unsettling the spectator’s assumptions about the status of the representation; 5) examining the Afro-Brazilian religion umbanda not by explaining its ritual practices but rather by conversing with the practitioners about the ways that orixas such as Exú and the pomba-gira intervene directly in their daily lives (Santo Forte/The Mighty Spirit, 1999). In a prolongation of the old surrealist ideal of universal artistry, the notion that all people, as is evidenced by the creativity of their dreams, are potentially artists, Coutinho’s films demonstrate that most people have complex histories and a rich interior life, if filmmakers would only bother to pay attention. The documentaries of Brazilian filmmaker Sérgio Bianchi practice what João Luiz Vieira calls the «cinema knife» where the cinema becomes both an instrument of aggression and a social scalpel performing audio-visual surgery on the body politics (see Vieira). Bianchi’s documentary Mato Eles?/Should I Kill Them? (1983), for example, constitutes a deconstructive documentary that critiques the usual sentimental approach to the Brazilian Indians, beginning with the title, where the shifter pronoun «I» could refer either to the director or to the Indians. Instead of the customary depiction of the local habitat, interspersed with talking-head inter307

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4 Mato Eles ?

views and disembodied voice-over expressing the enlightened humanism of the middle-class white filmmakers, Bianchi mocks both the official discourse concerning the Indian and the bourgeois bonne conscience of the denunciation documentary. As a form of parodic pedagogy, Mato Eles? is structured around a series of apparently whimsical multiple-choice quizzes addressed to the spectator. The Brechtian call for the active spectator who «renders a verdict» is tinged here with bitter irony. One question reads: «Very few Indians remain from the once numerous Xeta tribe. What happened to the others? Choose one of the following: 1) They all intermarried with the white population and are living in the cities; 2) They all died due to infection diseases and litigation concerning land rights; 3) They are all on vacation in Europe; 4) The Xeta never existed, this documentary is false; 5) All of the above are correct.» Another quiz poses three unpalatable but hardly impossible outcomes: «The extermination of the Indians should be a) immediate; b) slow; c) gradual.» Leaving little space for spectatorial self-satisfaction or false optimism, the quiz confronts the audience with the reality of extermination in a manner that initially provokes laughter yet subsequently elicits reflection and self-doubt. Mato Eles? mocks the traditional romantic-indianist exaltation of the ‹disappearing› Indian by revealing that the ‹brave warriors› of the romantic poets are now trapped in a dreary cycle of poverty and powerlessness. At one point, Bianchi gives us a satiric trailer announcing an Indianist epic entitled, in homage to James 308

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Fenimore Cooper, «The Last of the Xeta». The lush strains of the Indianist opera O Guarani, by the ‹Brazilian Verdi› Carlos Gomes, swell our expectations for an epicromantic spectacle. Instead, Bianchi shows us a series of photographs of the sole surviving member of the tribe. The brave warrior of romanticism has become the object of police-style mug shots coldly registering the human remains of genocide. Nor does Bianchi exempt himself from criticism. In a case of financial reflexivity, a venerable Guarani irreverently asks how much money the filmmaker will make on the film, an unflattering question that would normally have found its way to the editing-room trash can. An authorial voice-over then cynically speculates about other ways of financially benefitting from the Indian – anthropological scholarships, exotic coffee table photo-albums, indigenous arts and crafts shops, European tours for the films. Against conventional practice, voice-of-God commentary mocks the filmmaker-God, in an act of self-deconstruction directed at the power structure, at the canonical documentary, and at the cineaste himself. Academic writing on what Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe (2002) in Faking It call the «mock-documentary», and what Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner in F is for Phony call the «fake documentary» and what others call the mockumentary (and rockumentaries like Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, 1984) suggests that a host of sub-genres with marked family resemblances – docudramas, parodic non-fiction, reality TV – implicitly undermine the indexicality of the photographic image. Mockumentaries, after all, are just another version of the very respectable tradition of reenactment and restaging, as when Emile de Antonio restages a trial of anti-war protestors in his In the King of Prussia (1982), ‹starring› actual protestors like the Berrigan Brothers with Martin Sheen as the judge. As Peter Hughes argues in a review of Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight’s Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, «indexicality can be faked» (see Hughes). In fact, fake documentaries have been an integral part of film going back to filmmakers like Thomas Edison and J. Stuart Blackton ‹documenting› the sinking of the Maine in New York bathtubs and the war in the Philippines in the fields of New Jersey. Although many faux-documentaries are little more than innocuous stunts, films that selfconsciously undermine documentary’s apparent transparency and verisimilitude perform a critical function. For Juhasz and Lerner (10–11), fake documentaries challenged three interconnected documentary norms: 1) the technologies of truth telling; 2) the authority granted to or stolen by those who make such truth claims; and 3) the need to assert untold truths that have fallen outside the register of these norms. Fake documentaries foster an anti-hermeneutics of suspicion. Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1974), to cite a pioneering example of the genre, for example, is a playful mock-documentary made by a director known for being ‹innovative› that nevertheless subverts the traditional enshrinement of artistic originality. The careers of notorious forgers and con men – Elmyr de Hory and Clif309

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4 F for Fake

ford Irving – are treated without a smidgen of moralism and are impishly feted as creative artists in their own right; their inspired duplicitousness recalls Nabokov’s definition of a novelist as a «sublime liar». We find contemporary situationism in the films by sonic outlaws like Craig Baldwin who in Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992) superimposes an absurdist narration about actual CIA interventions on very diverse found footage materials. His O No Coronado (1992) is framed as a historical flashback within the mind of the conquistador Coronado as he falls off his horse – an apt metaphor for the carnivalesque dethroning that the film performs. To relate the calamitous epic of one of the more inept and deluded of the conquistadors, the one whose desperate search for the chimerical Seven Cities of Cibola led him into a fruitless, murderous journey across what is now the American southwest, Baldwin deploys not only costumed dramatisations but also the detritus of the filmic archive: swashbucklers, pedagogical films, industrial documentaries. Found footage from diverse costume epics takes us back to the Old World origins of New World conquest in the Crusades and the reconquista. Educational footage of an atomic test site – found in the same region that Coronado exploited – is accompanied by a female voiceover pronouncing the prophecies of Native American seers: «Earthquakes shook the world […] fear was everywhere.» Through the ‹prior textualisations› of tacky costume dramas and sci-fi films – Vincent Price (incarnating the Inquisition), the Lone Ranger, Charles Bronson – Coronado is portrayed as a Eurotrash exemplar 310

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5 The Watermelon Woman

of colonialism. The film ends with images of nuclear explosions, the apotheoses of instrumental reason, which Baldwin contrasts with a lone Indian using a reflecting mirror as a weapon – an evocation of their minimal means of resistance. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1995), meanwhile, constitutes a more politicised Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983) in its use of intertextual mimicry. In Archive Fever, Derrida points out that «There is no political power without control of the archive.» (4). In the film, an African-American lesbian filmmaker (Cheryl, played by Cheryl Dunye) exercises her archival fever – by ‹discovering›, i.e. creating documentary evidence of the existence of a silent-era lesbian actress named Fae Richard, or the Watermelon Woman, who we see in pseudo-archival footage showing her as everything from an extra to a key actress as mammy, mobster, and as Watermelon Woman in Plantation Memories. Explicitly ‹signifying› – Henry Louis Gates’ term for the interactively critical dialogism within the African-American literary tradition – on Melvin van Peebles’ Watermelon Man (1970), the film offers a queer-feminist response to that film. Yet here too the imaginary neighbours with the real, as pseudo-archival footage mingles with real archival footage, faked photos with real photos. As a case of Do-It-Yourself historiography, the film gives a sense that if Fae Richard did not exist, she would have to be invented. The film, in this sense, is an accurate representation of what might have been. While some mocumentaries, such as Bontoc Eulogy (1995), themselves perpetrate hoaxes, other films simply reveal the story of a hoax, without trying to trick 311

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the spectator. The ‹Corporate Yes Men› films, for example, accompany the Yes Men as they perform their hoaxes such as passing themselves off as CEOs on BBC News, thus enabling them to call attention to the Union Carbide crimes in Bhopal, India. The Couple in the Cage (1993), by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez Peña, constitutes performance hoax as ideological Rorschach. Made as part of the antiquincentennial protests against Columbus and his legacy, the film tells the story of a satirical performance by the two authors, a satire of the tradition of colonial expositions – going back to Columbus’s exhibition of Tainos in the Spanish court – where the pair posed as ‹recently discovered natives› from a Caribbean island who watched TV, dressed in Gilligans Island skirts, and spoke a bizarre Esperanto which mixed Spanglish, pseudo-native languages, and Japanese brand names. But the film reveals to the spectator the mechanisms of the hoax – which was not really a hoax since a plaque on the cage explained what they were doing. In the end, the film is less about the performance than about the varied reactions to a performance. To summarise crudely, some understood the joke (and the critique) whereas others took the spoof at face value, with liberals protesting that the natives should not have been put in cages, and conservatives finding proof of the savagery of people of colour.

Works Cited Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. Aumont, Jacques et al. Aesthetics of Film. Trans. and rev. by Richard Neupert. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. and Pavel N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. by Albert J. Wehrle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Print. Comolli, Jean-Louis. Corps et Cadres: Cinema, Ethique, Politique. Paris: Verdier, 2012. Print. Derrida, Jacques. «The Law of Genre.» Glyph: Textual Studies 7 (1980): 202–232. Print. – Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Print. Habib, André and Viva Paci. Chris Marker et l’imprimerie du regard. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Print. Hight, Craig and Jane Roscoe. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion 312

of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Print. Hughes, Peter. «Review of Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight. Faking it: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality.» Screening in the past 16 (2004): n. pag. Web. 16 Jun. 2013. James, David. Allegories of Cinema. American Film in the Sixties. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Print. Juhasz, Alexandra and Jesse Lerner. F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Print. Lins, Consuelo. O documentário de Eduardo Coutinho: cinema, televisão e vídeo. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004. Print. Rancière, Jacques. La fable cinématographique. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Print. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Print.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trans. by Lloyd Alexander. Introduction Richard Howard. New York: New Directions, 2007. Print. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Print. Stewart, David. «Fred Wiseman’s novelistic samplings of reality.» Current 2 Feb. 1998. n. pag. Web. 16 Jun. 2013. Uspensky, Boris. A Poetics of Composition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Print. Vieira, João Luiz. Câmera-faca: o cinema de Sérgio Bianchi. Santa Maria da Feira: Cineclube da Feira, 2004. Print.

Winston, Brian. «Rouch’s ‹Second Legacy›: Chronique d’un été as Reality TV’s Totemic Ancestor.» Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Ed. Joram ten Brink. London: Wallflower, 2007. 297–311. Print. Xavier, Ismail. «Indagações em torno de Eduardo Coutinho e seu diálogo com a tradição moderna.» Ensaios no real. O documentário brasileiro hoje. Ed. Cezar Migliorin. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2010. 27–42. Print.

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Hybridising Documentary Between Fiction and Non-Fiction

1. A Golden Age of Blurred Boundaries In recent years, a proliferation of essay films, mock-documentaries, and art films that traverse the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have explicitly illuminated the porousness of barriers constructed to separate apparently distinct genres – an often salutary blurriness that remained more or less implicit in the work and manifestos of an earlier generation of documentary filmmakers. For documentary theorist Bill Nichols, the term «blurred boundaries» allows him to argue that the legal controversies that ensued from examination of the Rodney King tape, as well as new developments in reflexive and avant-garde documentary, call into question any received ideas concerning the monolithic «nature of reality» (see Nichols). Oddly enough, Nichols does not invoke Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances, a term that suggests an exit of sorts from the kind of taxonomic culde-sac that sometimes plagues scholars attempting to distinguish between closely aligned documentary subgenres. The term family resemblances derives from Wittgenstein’s formulation of the notion of language games – an important component of his opposition to a metaphysical conception of language that tethers it to a rigid conception of reality. Instead, the more provisional category of language game emphasises the disparate ways language is used and its relationship to the «flux of life». Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism makes it possible for him to highlight how language games overlap and intersect, an approach well-suited to the intricacies of 314

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1 Sweetgrass

film genre – especially the loosening of the boundaries between fictional narrative and non-fiction that surfaces in both experimental documentary and the fiction/ documentary hybrids of art cinema directors such as Jia Zhangke, Pedro Costa, and Abbas Kiarostami. The critic Robert Koehler labels the early years of the twenty-first century a golden age of cinematic «in-betweeness» – films that concertedly slip through the cracks between fiction and non-fiction and represent a «byproduct of our collective hyperconsciousness regarding cinema and is effects, so that the filmmaker knows that the audience knows the tricks the filmmaker is playing, and that intention is written in high relief.»

For Koehler, a quintessential example is Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Illisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass (2009), a nearly uncategorisable ‹ethnographic› film made by specialists in anthropological cinema. What is truly intriguing about Sweetgrass is its uncanny ability to evoke affinities with disparate genres – the ethnographic film, the nature documentary, avant-garde installation work, and the Hollywood western. The essential thrust of Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s film is dryly summed up in a final title card: «In 2003, over three months and one hundred and fifty miles, the last band of sheep trailed through Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains.» Yet this chronicle of several ‹penultimate› sheep drives – shot over three years and edited from 200 hours of footage – is, despite the filmmakers’ status as ‹visual anthropologists› ensconced in academia, far from clinical or austere. Bleat315

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ing furiously, while careening up hills and down valleys with abandon, the sheep are unquestionably the stars of Sweetgrass. Quite remarkably, the film functions as both fieldwork and a spectacular visual and aural experience that engages the viewer’s sensoria in a truly immersive fashion. Although Sweetgrass has been termed «experimental ethnography», an implied narrative emerges over the course of the film that corresponds to Barbash’s claim that the sheep drive elucidates both «ritual» and «history». While it is true that the film’s rigorous brand of ‹observational› cinema mitigates against the inclusion of talking heads or voice-over narration that might fully explain the economic or historical factors that has made the annual trek of thousands of sheep to pasture a relic of the past, Castaing-Taylor and Barbash, despite their adherence to a somewhat purist aesthetic, provide a wealth of opportunities for historical and sociological inquiry. Sweetgrass opens with a precredits sequence that comes off as a parodic version of an Albert Bierstadt landscape painting: a picturesque swath of ‹Big Sky› country – pristine snowcapped mountains – segues to a forlorn, snow-encrusted pickup truck. Exemplifying the film’s clever facility for evoking the past in the midst of modernity (later in the film, a bravura long take reinforces this theme of fusing the epic residue of the past with the humdrum present by highlighting a procession of thousands of sheep past a Radio Shack franchise), the opening tableaux sets the stage for ingeniously edited sequences that offer glimpses of both animal and human privation. For much of its duration, Sweetgrass keeps its distance from mere humans, while toying with anthropomorphism that never degenerates into whimsy. In a shot that is now almost legendary, the precredits sequence discussed above concludes with a passive, cud-chewing sheep staring into the camera. The effect is both hilarious and endearing; it’s almost tempting to imagine the beast winking at us and seeking our tacit approval. In a subsequent sequence, the casual brutality of nature comes to the fore as a mama sheep casually tosses away one of her lessfavoured newborn lambs. Without sentimentalising the animal world, the sheep are depicted, their stupidity notwithstanding, as a surprisingly volatile mixture of innocence, venality, and irascibility. When the sheepherders themselves achieve more prominence towards the end of the film, their emotional range proves incongruously similar to the animals they tend with affection and occasional exasperation. The grizzled, taciturn John is ostensibly more comfortable with animals than men or women. And, as the journey nears its end, the younger, garrulous Pat unleashes a scatological tirade that is one of the film’s highlights. Whining about «ornery» sheep on the phone to his mom (we’re far removed from the macho terrain of fictional cowboys played by Clark Gable and John Wayne), he excoriates the stubborn creatures as «mother fuckers» determined to make his life miserable. Unlike earlier examples of direct cinema, Sweetgrass’s aesthetic is intransigently impure and unapologetically interventionist (Koehler points to the filmmak316

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ers’ decision to mike animals in an effort to enhance the film’s aural texture). While it was left to a generation of muckraking scholars to unmask Robert Flaherty’s deceptions, many contemporary documentarians unashamedly admit that a certain amount of manipulation is an integral part of their aesthetic modus operandi. Michael Glawogger, for example, freely admits that he paid prostitutes and pimps for their participation in Whores’ Glory (2011) – a cinematic triptych that examines the sex trade in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. Glawogger also concedes that a session between a Mexican john and a sex worker is staged and suggests that the level of verisimilitude achieved replicates the dynamics of a prototypical sexual encounter of this sort. Given that Whores’ Glory is shot in an observational style but flirts with poetic and fictional modes (the triptych form explicitly references religious altarpieces; the Mexican sequence has affinities with telenovelas), the usual cinematic reality effect – Barthes’s assertion that realism is less than the sum of its signifieds than a style derived from its investment in the concept of «realism itself» – is tempered by a reflexive awareness that most documentaries are covertly opaque and devious in their techniques. Nikolaus Geyrhalter is another non-fiction filmmaker whose political impetus, unlike an early generation of direct cinema adherents, is linked to a self-consciously aestheticised approach (the absence of commentary and non-diegetic music coexists with ostentatious camera movements and meticulous camera set ups). One of Geyrhalter’s most celebrated films, Our Daily Bread (2005), depicts the antiseptic world of factory farming and functions as a critique of what Henri Lefebvre termed everyday life: defined, according to his translator as «dull routine, the ongoing goto-work, pay-the-bills, homeward trudge of daily existence» (Lefebvre vii). Geyrhalter’s deadpan film on the food industry can be viewed as a straightforward depiction of what Lefebvre (168–189) termed the «bureaucratic society of controlled consumption». Unlike other novels, exposés, or films that deal with the food industry (e.g. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Deborah Koons Garcia’s anti-genetic modification documentary, The Future of Food, 2005), Our Daily Bread eschews muckraking for a meditative consideration of food processing – an emblem of modernity in all its splendour and banality. In some respects, Geyrhalter’s film inverts Martin Heidegger’s notoriously insensitive observation that «agriculture is now a motorized food industry – in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps» (Zimmerman 43). Instead of emulating the philosopher’s crude equation of mechanised food production and the Holocaust, Our Daily Bread foregoes heavy-handed metaphors for a more concrete assessment of a little-known corporate nexus that is nevertheless vital to the sustenance of millions. Our Daily Bread’s analysis is both less Manichean, and perhaps even more pessimistic, than Heidegger’s post-war pronouncement. Heidegger looked back to an idealised pre-industrial past and found the technological present ‹inauthentic›. 317

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Geyrhalter speaks from a less Olympian plateau: he doesn’t imply a schism between ‹us and them› since it is impossible for any of us to exempt ourselves from the tentacular reach of globalisation and ‹soulless› technology. Difficult as it may be to admit, Alice Waters’s dream of a greenmarket on every block, providing opportunities to savour local produce for every individual on the planet, is probably an upper middle-class exercise in self-deception. As Geyrhalter himself observes in an interview included in the press kit, «[t]here’s nothing wrong with saying, ‹Buy organic products! Eat less meat!› But at the same time it’s a kind of excuse, because we all enjoy the fruits of automation and industrialization and globalization every day, which affect much more than just food.»

Geyrhalter’s intricately choreographed tableaux illustrate the peculiarly ingenious practices endemic to the behemoth of agribusiness. Termed ‹surreal› by certain critics, hyper-real is probably a more apt adjective; the lengthy takes and graceful tracking shots used by Geyrhalter (who shot the film himself) almost possess the florid intensity of a Ralph Goings photorealist painting. Yet while photorealism reimagined familiar objects such as gas stations and billboards, Our Daily Bread is preoccupied with Rube Goldberg-like contraptions for slaughtering animals, as well as massive operations involved in harvesting fruit and flowers, that are only familiar to selected workers and the corporate cognoscenti. There are scores of implied narratives, both comic and poignant, embedded in the seemingly banal views of everyday life on the factory floor. Platforms transporting cattle to their sad fates are high-tech elevators to the gallows. The previously unsuspecting animals appear pained, bored, or vaguely shocked. Numerous scenes highlight the chasm between humans in the developed world and the source of their ‹daily bread›. To wit, the birth of a calf in a huge food processing factory reminds us that family farms where such births were once commonplace are rarely glimpsed by most of us – except in old Hollywood movies. Flowers sorted in huge lanes resembling Olympic swimming pools certainly strip these Valentine’s Day keepsakes of any residual sentimentality. There is something disquietingly mesmerising about a bizarre machine used for sorting baby chicks. A crop-duster spraying insecticide on flowers could almost be taken as an ironic gloss on Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Our Daily Bread is also part of an ongoing documentary tradition – Frederick Wiseman’s Meat (1976) comes to mind – that explores routinised work in all its minute particulars. Of course, in addition to exploring the twenty-first century version of what Marxist theorist Harry Braverman once termed «the degradation of work in the twentieth century» (the «de-skilling of work» and the replacement of local «craftsmanship» with homogenised mass production), Geyrhalter’s documentary can also be easily aligned to recent documentaries and features such as 318

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Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (2003), Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) that explore how workers have become expendable fodder in the age of globalisation. Unlike Wang, Baichwal or Jia’s films, however, Geyrhalter’s emphasis is less on the scourge of environmental devastation than the complicity between our everyday lives – specifically the need for fast, consumable food – and corporate efficiency. For better or worse, changing our personal habits cannot alleviate this malaise; even vegetarians and vegans are complicit with banalisation of the Western diet that is graphically delineated in Our Daily Bread. Not being a mealy-mouthed reformer, Geyrhalter refuses, à la Al Gore in Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), to suggest panaceas or stopgap solutions. We can only admire the nearly Martian-like gaze focused on industrial food production and conclude, with great resignation, that, for the foreseeable future at least, there is no way out. If the ‹bureaucratic society of controlled consumption› provides reasons to despair for many filmmakers, others endeavour to defuse the debilitating effects of everyday life. The alternation between empathy and detachment in contemporary documentary is embodied by the thorny ambiguities of Jean-Luc Godard, JeanPierre Gorin, and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Ici et ailleurs/Here and Elsewhere (1976). Appropriating footage of a PLO training camp from a previous project entitled Jusqu’à la victoire/Until Victory, the filmmakers oscillate between pondering militancy and the uneventful routine of a working-class French family captivated by television broadcasts and consumerism – i.e. the chasm between here and elsewhere that leads to ideological obfuscation. Godard et al. attempt to bridge the gap between disparate political and national perspectives by employing video technology to unite an associative chain of images in one shot. The technological sleight of hand reinforces the affinities between the French working-class and the Palestinians while paralleling the «creative activity» Bakhtin calls exotopy – according to Todorov (99), a process that «distingu[ishes] between two stages in every creative act: first the stage of empathy or identification (the novelist puts himself in the place of his character), than a reverse movement whereby the novelist reverts to his own position.»

In a reflexive documentary such as Ici et ailleurs, a similarly double movement consists of filmmakers empathising with ‹the oppressed› while also conceding that their stance is circumscribed by an empathetic provincialism determined by the limitations of their own subjectivity. In Blurred Boundaries, Nichols codifies increasingly popular deviations from standard non-fiction formulas as «performative», «poetic» or avant-garde works that «deflect our attention from the referential quality of documentary altogether» – films which in fact exemplify «a deflection of documentary from what has been its most commonsensical purpose – the development of strategies for persuasive argu319

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mentation about the historical world.» (93–106). Within recent years, however, it’s become clear that a preoccupation with «blurred boundaries» has moved beyond academia and is now a main bone of contention among – for lack of a better moniker – ‹public intellectuals›. Exhibit A remains essayist David Shields’s 2010 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Despite the fact that Shields’s book assails what he considers the anemic state of literary fiction, much of his line of attack, encapsulated in aphoristic injunctions (many of which are culled from other sources to form a collagestyle exhortation), is applicable to recent ferment within film criticism and theory. Early in his book, in one of the few passages not appropriated from another source, Shields (3) hails what he terms an «artistic movement» marked by «a deliberate unartiness: ‹raw› material. [R]andomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity, artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, criticism as autobiography, a self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography […] a blurring of (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and non-fiction: the lure and blur of the real.»

To cite a characteristically genre-bending example of ‹in-betweeness› in documentary cinema, Le quattro volte/Four Times (2010), Michelangelo Frammartino’s playful gloss on Calabrian village life, has been described by James Quandt (81–82) as the «the first Calabrian animist-Neorealist process film inspired by Pythagoras’s conception of metempsychosis», a mouthful that perfectly sums up the film’s delight in the grittiness of village life, comparable to the loving verisimilitude of Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli/The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), as well as its efforts to convey a variety of transcendence with deep roots in the material world. Marie Losier’s debut documentary feature, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), features protagonists whose joie de vivre both sums up the garden-variety definition of ‹performativity›, as well as illuminating Judith Butler’s more specialised elucidation of the «instability of gender» masked by the «false coherence» of normative sexual roles (see Butler). Losier gently subverts stale documentary platitudes by invoking a playful avant-garde tradition – not for sure the minimalist avant-garde of Stan Brakhage or Nathaniel Dorsky but the ribald, playful strain of experimentalism associated with figures such as the Kuchar Brothers and Guy Maddin. Losier’s obliviousness to the standard reflexes of documentary portraiture is her greatest strength as a filmmaker. Like Losier’s short films on Richard Foreman and Tony Conrad, Ballad is literally a participatory documentary since the filmmaker does not feign detachment but instead constantly demonstrates her affection for her subjects by creating amusing dreamscapes that enhance the homemade mise-en-scène. In Tony Conrad, DreaMinimalist (2008), for example, the diminutive filmmaker, dressed in an inflatable pumpkin suit, bounces around on a bed with Tony Conrad, courageously decked out in a demure pink negligée. In the new film, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge explains her musical process while dressed in a fanciful bird costume. 320

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2 The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Instead of using talking head experts to illuminate the life of Genesis and her paramour Lady Jaye, a collage aesthetic gradually unravels the complex saga of a transgender rock star and performance artist whose penchant for constant reinvention is perfectly suited to the filmmaker’s fondness for whimsical improvisation. Born Neil Andrew Megson, P-Orridge is probably best known as the driving force in two bands – Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV – that, as the press kit puts it, bridged «punk and post-punk», as well as the founder of COUM Transmissions, a performance art group whose sexually explicit interventions scandalised the British tabloid press during the Seventies – a Tory MP unwittingly immortalised the collective by denouncing them as «wreckers of civilisation». Although these career highlights are duly noted in Ballad, the love affair between P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, the former nurse and dominatrix she met in New York’s East Village, takes precedence over mundane biographical bullet points in Losier’s non-linear chronicle. A panoply of styles evoke P-Orridge and the late Lady Jaye’s romantic union – a word that takes on literal, as well as the usual figurative, associations as the film progresses: Felliniesque sequences featuring Genesis wearing fashions that seem culled from a surrealist thrift shop, stop-motion interludes in which her musical and biographical high points are captured through rapid glimpses at album covers and photographs, artfully integrated archival footage, and stream-of-consciousness voice-over. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin are two of P-Orridge’s cultural heroes. Since she venerates Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-up method, a fictional technique indebted to 321

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collage and the vicissitudes of chance, it’s not accidental that the film’s impish artisanal aesthetic wryly corresponds to her mentors’ infatuation with artistic foraging. Of course, the cut-up method has a very personal resonance for P-Orridge since, before Lady Jaye’s death, the couple devised an ‹art project› anointed «Creating the Pandrogyne» in which they were surgically reconstructed – through breast implants, skin grafts, etc. – to resemble each other. On one level, an affection for startling juxtapositions was thereby literally written on their bodies. On another, their adventures in plastic surgery became emblematic of a transcendent love that no doubt will seem bizarre to many – but nevertheless draws on the sensibility of the Romantic poets who yearned, however futilely, for an erotic frisson that would defy mortality and the limitations of reason. This sort of heterodox passion is indubitably tied up with performance, in both the everyday sense of the word and the postmodern conviction that gender fluidity is primarily performative. A belief in biography as performance is also embedded in key passages from Losier’s director’s statement: «fiction and fantasy have become integral parts of what I do. As a filmmaking practice, it is a form of psychodrama allowing my subjects to step outside of themselves and fixed habits of mind.» Occasionally, a ‹talking heads› documentary can be as revelatory as Losier’s avantgardist approach to non-fiction. Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), one of the most famous talking head movies of the late 1960s, depicts one representative of the era’s underground gay subculture with startling vividness and captures this man’s response to a filmmaker’s disturbing provocations. A hustler who christens himself Jason Holliday because he hates the connotations of his real name – Aaron Payne – Clarke’s dapper protagonist overwhelms the viewer with a cascade of words describing his sexual exploits and antipathy toward the straight world. Increasingly inebriated as the film reaches its conclusion, and bombarded with scathing questions by off-screen interviewer Carl Lee, the initially self-assured Holliday is transformed into a self-pitying wreck. Still, Holliday, despite his dissolute persona, retains his charm and fragile integrity. As a sterling example of minority self-representation, Portrait of Jason exemplifies what Thomas Waugh terms «the right to play oneself». Waugh is perturbed that (207) «the interview has long been shunned by the purist inheritors of the noninterventionist American school of vérité, macho fetishists of untempered visual surfaces; it has been denounced by critics muttering about ‹talking heads› as if they had never seen The Sorrow and the Pity or Portrait of Jason.»

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2. An International Art House Style: The Documentary/Fiction Hybrid In recent years, the international art house style (e.g. temps mort, long static takes, lack of narrative closure) as employed by such disparate directors as, among others, Lisandro Alonso, Jia Zhangke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami, Nicolas Pareda, Miguel Gomes, and Pedro Costa has become virtually synonymous with documentary/fictional hybrids. How can we explain the world-wide vogue for a synthesis of the documentary mode and fictional strategies? What accounts for this marriage, in Bazinian terms, of the immediacy of «the aesthetic of discovery» proffered by both documentary and neorealism and the tradition of découpage, described by Dudley Andrew (33) – paraphrasing Malraux – as «a product of filmmakers deciding in advance how to parse the continuity of a fiction for its dramatic (logical) effectiveness and spatio-temporal design?» One response is to identify this tendency as the convergence of modernist realism, a style that infuses Bazin’s desire to reproduce the illusion of reality with Brechtian detachment and global neorealism, a loosely-defined movement of filmmakers who fuse neorealism’s devotion to the contours, if not the literal replication, of reality with a nuanced sense of political commitment. Yet what is the impetus for these filmmakers decision to abjure straightforward documentary and embrace documentary/fiction hybridism? Take one seminal example – Abbas Kiarostami’s Nema-ye Nazdik/Close-Up (1990), one of the most prominent examples of the international predilection for conflating fiction and non-fiction. The film focuses on the case of Hossein Sabzian, a working-class man and passionate cinephile who successfully impersonates the well-known director Moshen Makhmalbaf. Even though he is ultimately condemned by the Iranian authorities as a con man, Kiarostami casts Sabzian himself in the lead role and the plight of a man who dupes a middle-class family into using their home as a location for his bogus film is heart-wrenching – primarily because the protagonist’s ruse is not a cruel form of deception but an earnest cinephilic wish-fulfilment fantasy. The extant critical literature on Close-Up offers both aesthetic and ideological rationales for Kiarostami’s fictionalising of what many considered an unremarkable incident. Jonathan Rosenbaum (Saaed-Vafa/Rosenbaum 15), for example, argues that Kiarostami films such as Close-Up and Mashgh-e Shab/Homework (1989) «deconstruct» and «unpack the documentary form». Godfrey Cheshire concludes that although «the comparison shouldn’t be stretched too far […] Citizen Kane and Close-Up both adapt the techniques of documentary to fiction, suggest multiple paths to ‹the truth,› and focus on men whose final quality is their unknowability.»

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After explicating how Sabzian’s real life humiliation is transformed into triumph through Kiarostami’s fictional embellishments, Ivone Margulies (38) hails the director’s methodology as a form of «pedagogic humanism» contingent upon a process of «redemptive reenactment». Restaging and manipulating events reinforces this humanistic and redemptive agenda. Re-scripting the trial allows a more empathetic perspective on Sabzian’s hoax than the harsh tone that prevailed at the original proceedings and filming the protagonist’s benign transgressions from both his vantage point and that of his nominal ‹victims› demarcates crucial class distinctions as well as the aspiring director’s touching devotion to a craft he is unable to practice. Taking the plunge into fiction also enables Kiarostami to fashion a touching meeting between Sabzian and his idol Makhmalbaf, something that would have been impossible if a Gradgrindian adherence to ‹the facts› was observed. When documentaries are traditionally associated with the dictates of the state, as is true in both Kiarostami’s Iran and Jia Zhangke’s China – a fiction/non-fiction hybrid allows for a more multi-layered investigation of multiple ‹truths› than is usually possible in undiluted non-fiction. Both Jia and Kiarostami, moreover, appear to believe that the tradition of storytelling takes precedence over mere information. As Walter Benjamin concludes in The Storyteller, his essay on Nikolai Leskov, the storyteller is associated with teachers, sages, and ‹righteousness›, a claim that has great resonance in both the Iranian and Chinese contexts. By aligning himself with storytelling instead of journalism or even the documentary tradition, Jia can recount the history of contemporary China in a fashion that unravels innumerable historical lacunae and contradictions. Jia’s Er shi si cheng ji/24 City (2008), for example, masterfully interweaves interviews with 3 Er shi si cheng ji

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actual workers at Factory 420 in Chengdu, a munitions factory scheduled for demolition to make way for luxury condominiums, and actors portraying workers. The eradication of historical memory is one of the film’s primary motifs, even though the state capitalist veneer of the current regime made it necessary for Jia to ask the condominium developers for funding to sponsor his critique of modern blight. In addition, the testimonies included in the film by ex-workers and their impersonators do not speak of an idealised proletarian past but instead of shocking hardships endured by the displacements wrought by Mao’s disastrous and repressive hyper-industrialisation and forced collectivisation of the late 1950s – the Great Leap Forward. As the critic Zhang Xudong explains, Jia’s films enact a «cognitive mapping» of xiancheng , the «county-level» cities that, unlike huge metropolises such as Shanghai and Beijing, become an «in-between area» where the daily reality of contemporary China is laid bare», a terrain without «clear-cut boundaries or sharp distinctions between rural and urban, between industrial or agricultural». By inverting the usual hierarchies, making ordinary workers heroic (although not in the clichéd style of socialist realism) and shooting film stars like Joan Chen prosaically (Jia slyly has Chen play a character who her workmates maintain looks like Joan Chen), the mundane becomes both epic and strangely opaque; the unpalatable past, the devastation wreaked by the Great Leap Forward, and the unsavoury present, intent on suppressing the residue of those hardships, are conjoined and placed in a tenuous state of suspension. Even though he is sometimes accused of idealising poverty, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa is also concerned with imbuing the poor and neglected protagonists of his films with new-found dignity. His Cartas da Fontainhas/Letters From Fontainhas trilogy, which focuses on a community of Cape Verdean immigrants in a poor neighbourhood of Lisbon that is slowly being destroyed by bulldozers as the inhabitants are transferred to a sterile housing development, subtly transforms the raw material of documentary into open-ended, poetic narratives. Instructing the drug addict Vanda (star of No quarto da Vanda/In Vanda’s Room, 2000) and the despondent Ventura (the focus of Juventude em marcha/ Colossal Youth, 2006) to re-enact scenes from their own lives while the visual style evokes John Ford and Jacques Tourneur as much as the documentary legacy, Thom Andersen (2007) exults in the filmmaker’s preference for meticulously naturalistic artifice. His riposte to sceptical critics is that aestheticising poverty is Costa’s «greatest virtue» since the poor are no more bereft of beauty than the rich. Costa’s close collaboration with his real-life actors supposedly negates any accusations of a skewed power dynamic or exploitation. Jacques Rancière (72–82) goes even further by hailing Costa’s work as a key catalyst for the ideal of the emancipated spectator, a theoretical construct that posits the effacement of any binary distinctions between performer and spectator. Even if it’s possible to be sceptical about claims that Costa’s methodology, which synthesises 325

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tropes of the classical cinema and Brechtian manoeuvres, eschews any residue of the usual hierarchical stance that traditionally, and perhaps inevitably, elevates the auteur above his subjects, the films include many startling attempts to efface these circumscribed limitations. One of the most noteworthy examples is a letter that Ventura reads several times that combines a statement from an immigrant with excerpts from a poem by the surrealist writer Robert Desnos. Whether this sort of gesture actually constitutes a salutary blurring of high culture and the poetry of the dispossessed is of course an open question. Andersen («A Band of Outsiders» 27) celebrates Costa for being a master of «what Gilles Deleuze has called ‹affective framing,› a manner of forming images usually associated with contemplative close-ups but that can be applied to large spaces by rendering them as if they were faces […] affective framing somehow brings the feeling intrinsic to an action out of the action itself.»

Affective framing’s ability to evoke what Lefebvre labelled the production of space makes it more than a formalist rubric. Lefebvre (The Production of Space 167) maintains that «an existing space may outlive its original purpose and the raison d’etre which determines its forms; it may thus in a sense become vacant and susceptible of being diverted, reappropriated, and put to a use quite different use from its initial 326

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one.» Although Lefebvre cites utopian examples of this kind of transformation of public spaces – i.e. the brief metamorphosis of the Halles Centrales, Paris’s former public market, from a place of work into an on-going festival from 1969 to 1971 – the dystopian erosion of formerly viable, if problematic, communities, in 24 City and Letters from Fontainhas are also intimately linked to the manner in which the urban landscape become a topos for the politicisation of space. Kiarostami, Jia, and Costa’s documentary/fiction hybrids implicitly interrogate the platitudes of a naïve realist aesthetic and provide fodder for what has almost become a received modernist truth – realism is a highly stylised construction that developed gradually from the writings of the ancients to «the work of art in the age of its reproducibility». The nausea Barthes felt when confronted with mimesis’s «conservative reproduction of already existing signs»1 was an implicitly Left-libertarian response to the aesthetic conservatism of leftists, of whom Lukács remains the most sophisticated representative. Yet it’s also instructive to recall Theodor Adorno’s observation (228) that «Dickens and Balzac […] are not so realistic after all [and] the whole Comédie Humaine proves to be an imaginative construction of an alienated reality.» Walter Benjamin’s concept of the mimetic faculty proposes a far different definition of the impulse to imitate or re-present delineated in the work of writers and theorists from Plato to Erich Auerbach. As Miriam Hansen (147) elucidates, for Benjamin, «the mimetic is not a category of representation, pertaining to a particular relationship with a referent, but a relational practice – a process, comportment, or activity of ‹producing similarities› (such as astrology, dance and play); a noncoercive engagement with the other that resists dualistic conceptions of subject and object» (Adorno saw far darker reservoirs within the mimetic faculty and brooded over the pitfalls of controlled mimesis, which more or less describes fascist efforts to achieve a ‹totally administered society›). The most successful fusions of fiction and documentary strive for the ‹noncoercive engagement with the other› embedded in the highly idiosyncratic interstices of the mimetic faculty. It’s also unsurprising that Sylvain George, one of the most adventurous experimental documentarians working today, alludes to Benjamin’s «Critique of Violence» (237) at the outset of Qu’ils reposent en révolte (Des figures de guerre)/ May They Rest in Revolt (2011). George evokes Benjamin’s messianic materialism before launching a grim account of impoverished immigrant workers’ lives in unwelcoming France – giving voice to a provisional hope that Benjamin’s radical eschatology can stave off despair.

1

This is Martin Jay’s paraphrase of Barthes’s position. See Jay, Cultural Semantics 120.

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3. Aporias of the Essay Film In an introductory chapter in The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, Timothy Corrigan (17) argues that essays from the Enlightenment era to the present «complicate[s] the […] very notion of expressivity and its relation to experience, the second cornerstone of the essayistic.» For Corrigan (17), «[e]ssayistic expression (as writing, as film, or as any other representational mode) thus demands both loss of self and the rethinking and remaking of the self.» Of course, linking the essay to both the evacuation of selfhood and its reformulation reiterates the genre’s affinities with both the public and private realms. One of the salient characteristics of the classical essay from Montaigne to Adorno is a freedom to indulge in what might be termed a digressive aesthetic – preoccupations superficially peripheral to the topic on hand often become foregrounded. A dialogic fondness for digressiveness often entails a qualified approval of what Montaigne’s biographer Sarah Bakewell (124f.) identifies as Pyrrhonian Scepticism – which goes beyond «ordinary dogmatic Scepticism […] summed up in Socrates’s remark: ‹All I know is that I know nothing› […] by adding […] ‹I’m not even sure about that› […]». Pyrrhonians, according to Bakewell «accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word that acts as a short hand for this maneuver […] in Greek, epekho or ‹I suspend judgment› […] or a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens or ‹I hold back›.»

Essay films often generate a digressive aesthetic and contrarian scepticism by juxtaposing ostensibly dissimilar preoccupations. Paradoxically intersecting thematic tributaries are, for example, signalled at the beginning of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Routine Pleasures (1986) – a film dedicated to both Chuck Jones and Gustave Flaubert, the former a pop culture hero and the latter a mandarin proponent of le mot juste. The film itself celebrates both Manny Farber, the iconoclastic painter and film critic whose modernism includes a respect for old-fashioned craftsmanship, and model train specialists, whose obsessive devotion to (a seemingly nonutilitarian) craftsmanship reminds Gorin of the solidarity of the pilots in Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939). Despite Angels being a favourite film of Farber’s, the curmudgeonly critic remains unconvinced by Gorin’s analogy between Hawks’s code of professionalism and a gaggle of American eccentrics and suggests American pop culture might not be the Frenchman’s terrain. Oscillating from topic to topic without becoming frivolous or losing focus is one of the essay film’s dexterous balancing acts. Formulating interconnected elective affinities recalls Benjamin’s nuanced embrace of ‹the flaneur›. Commentators such as David Frisby emphasise the ambiguous status of the flaneur, at once an ‹idler› displaying, in Benjamin’s words, «the gaze of the alienated person» on the periphery of the metropolitan crowd as well as, in other contexts, the artist who decides to «bota328

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nize on the asphalt» and construct «dialectical images» (Frisby 228–229). Shifting through the archive to create a kind of dialectical frisson can simulate the more fecund varieties of flanerie. Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) begins with an evisceration of Ayn Rand’s enshrinement of selfishness – ‹objectivism› – and its influence on Alan Greenspan’s brand of libertarian economics and proceeds to ponder superficially unrelated topics such as now-outmoded conception of stable «ecosystems», «the selfish gene» theory, and Belgian imperialists’ insidious, if apparently inadvertent, creation of tribal strife in Rwanda. For some critics, Curtis’s near-manic urge to weave a ‹web of connectedness› proved unforgivably ‹glib›. An alternative approach might view Curtis’s historicised, if playful, associational chain as an example of what Bakhtin (in Morson/ Emerson 36–49) termed «unfinalizability» – an «openness» delineated as «immanent in – and essential to – quotidian existence». It’s arguable, though, that a certain depoliticised version of «unfinalizability» surfaces in various forms of postmodern theory – ‹openness› becomes diluted as vapid pluralism. Both the appeal, and limitations, of a certain kind of interpretive delirium become tangible in Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2012), an engaging documentary that surveys the disparate ‹theories› (some need quotation marks more than others) inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The Shining’s capacity to pinpoint the polysemic nature of film analysis is evident in the speculations of ‹Mstmnd›, the online Kubrick expert whose preoccupation with this seminal horror film verges on the obsessive. A vociferous fan boy, he is convinced that «The Shining might be the most complex film ever made. The Shining isn’t a film about any one theme. Isolating any of them dilutes Kubrick’s intent.» In any case, the strands explored by Ascher include an analysis of the narrative as an allegory of the genocide of Native Americans (not particularly far-fetched since the Overlook Hotel is built over an Indian burial ground), the Holocaust – particularly since the number «42, the year of the Wannsee Conference» is featured prominently in the film, and most preposterously, a coy effort to demonstrate Kubrick’s attempt to fabricate the Apollo moon landings on a sound stage. From one vantage point, Ascher’s project in Room 237 echoes Roland Barthes’s assertion in S/Z (3) that «to interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it […]. Let us first posit the image of a triumphant plural […] In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass; we gain accesses to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one».

While not everyone would nominate The Shining as this «ideal text», Ascher has found a film that inspires a populist appreciation of Barthes’s «plural and offers multiple entry points» for devoted fans. There is perhaps a concurrent danger that 329

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an uncritical celebration of these Internet pundits might just be the latest manifestation of the active audience paradigm once popular in communication studies in which individual viewers are indiscriminately hailed for constructing interpretations, no matter how vacuous, and critical nuance goes out the window. Even though Adorno would certainly not endorse the antic indecisiveness of Pyrrhonian Scepticism, he asserts that the essay has often been considered disreputable within academic circles and (1) «arouse[d] resistance because it evokes intellectual freedom […]. [I]t is not so much that the essay neglects indubitable certainty as that it abrogates it as an ideal.» Adorno’s claim that «the essay […] does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill it out; it tries to render the transient eternal.» (11) This abhorrence of «enduring truths» and bogus universalism, leads us back to its etymological origins of ‹essay› as ‹a try› or ‹an attempt› and suggests affinities with literary and cinematic essays that set out to subvert the political status quo. Certain directors opt for synecdochic strategies to fuse a personal voice with a political critique. In Noël Burch and Allan Sekula’s The Forgotten Space (2010), to cite a notable political essay film, the cargo ships that carry 90 per cent of the world’s goods, represent «globalisation and the sea […] the forgotten space of our modernity». Alternately, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, which unites consumerism and the veneration of modernity in an old port city, is said to encapsulate a parodic «neo-maritime baroque» ambiance. In Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (2009), Eyal Sivan chronicles how Jaffa, once known as a Palestinian city, metamorphosed into a brand of orange and how this process of ‹branding› became emblematic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many political essay films foreground the subjective factor (in leftist parlance, a concern with not merely seizing power but transforming consciousness) traditionally favoured by anarchists and anti-authoritarian Marxists; although Leninists often referred to the subjective dimension of political praxis, they tended to honour it more in the breach than the observance. Adorno believed that one word expressed the strength of the essay’s opposition to facile positivism: heresy. From this vantage point, Chris Marker’s A Grin without a Cat (1977; originally released in France as Le fond de l’air est rouge; a ‹reactualised Englishlanguage version› was released in 1993), is noteworthy for hewing to a left perspective without deliquescing into rigid dogmatism or sloganeering. Marker pulls off the remarkable feat of achieving a first person identity that is neither confessional nor stolidly didactic. Compiled primarily from fount footage, the film draws from a huge reservoir of sequences (and occasionally discarded excerpts from little known films). Paradoxically enough, although Marker’s film is a virtuosic montage exercise, the final result bears little resemblance to either Eisenstein’s «intellectual montage» or Vertov’s «kino fist». The film in fact begins with snippets from Bronenosets Potyomkin/Battleship Potemkin’s (1925) Odessa Steps sequence, but the voice-over (read by, among others, Cyril Cusack and Robert Kramer in 330

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the English version), as lyrical and meditative as it is militant, tempers Eisenstein’s revolutionary brio without diluting it. The decision to intercut the famous climactic shots of Battleship Potemkin with moments of insurrectionary fervour from the 1960s infuses new life into Eisenstein, demonstrating that this revered classic is not merely a hoary film school chestnut but a living document. Revolutionary nostalgia notwithstanding, a sometimes inchoate, often barely submerged vision of anti-authoritarian socialism is the spectre haunting A Grin Without A Cat. This vision, quite incongruously, often surfaces in the film’s evocation of authoritarian figures like Mao, who nevertheless helped place a wedge between the Manichean, Cold War opposition of capitalism and state socialism. This sort of accretion of political incongruities cements Marker’s unveiling of what might be termed intra-left heteroglossia. Bakhtin (288) refers to «bounded verbalideological belief systems» and Marker orchestrates a collision of these circumscribed systems by focusing on intra-left conflicts. For example, even though Mao’s ‹cultural revolution› was a reshuffling of power from above, rather than a spontaneous surge of power from below, Marker’s cinematic scavenging unearths footage of French Maoist cadres as well as U.S. Black Panthers brandishing the Red Book. In both instances, the iconography of the Cultural Revolution involves strategic displacements encompassing, respectively, the European sensitivity to class struggle and the North American focus on racial strife. French Maoism, often described as anarchism with an ultra-Leninist veneer, rejected the staid French Communist Party while embracing a Third Worldist perspective. Similarly, the Black Panthers refashioned the imperious Mao to fit their ideal of a pugnacious street fighter who spurned the accomodationist rhetoric favoured by moderate Civil Rights leaders. With seamless dialectical finesse, the elusive dream of a left tethered to neither Washington nor Moscow reaches critical mass in a wistful homage to May ’68, a fleeting historical moment when France – convulsed by wildcat strikes and student unrest – seemed on the verge of revolution. Famous ‹gauchiste› student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, more influenced by Bakunin than Marx or Lenin, emerges as a media star imbued with the requisite charisma – the Che of the Left Bank. ‹Man in the Street› interviews that point to the fact that many French men and women regarded Cohn-Bendit as a dangerous anarchist – «worse than the Nazis» – alternate with a C.G.T. bureaucrat’s dismissal of the ultra-left’s recklessness. A national conflagration that orchestrated themes from both the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune emerges as both exhilarating and melancholy. Marker’s voice-over notes ruefully that May laid bare the «State’s repressive side, which is more or less diluted in daily life». In recent years, personal, even confessional preoccupations rub shoulders with pressing political concerns that permeate many bravura essay films. Some year ago, in his essay «Jargons of Authenticity: Three American Moments», Paul Arthur identified a new strain in contemporary documentary, which he christened «the 331

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aesthetics of failure». Exemplified by the self-reflexive films of Nick Broomfield, Ross McElwee, and Michael Moore, among others, these documentaries usually take the form of staged confessions highlighting the inability of earnest but clumsy directors to fulfil a particular journalistic or personal goal. Less nonchalantly sardonic than Broomfield and oblivious to the minutiae of intimacy that fuels McElwee’s projects, Israeli documentarian Avi Mograbi ended up, more or less inadvertently, fashioning his own idiosyncratic «aesthetics of failure». Determined at the outset of his career to make straightforward, committed films, he soon encountered practical and bureaucratic frustrations, and mock-autobiographical elements eventually surfaced. Mograbi’s films, however, sometimes referred to by critics as ‹semidocumentaries›, are not postmodern pranks or fabulist conceits; they are anchored in the gritty here and now of Middle Eastern politics. The extent of Mograbi’s assault on both conservative and ‹liberal› (i.e. Labour) Zionist shibboleths is apparent in his 2006 film, Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay/ Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. Like many documentary essays, Avenge stages a dialogue between antagonistic political perspectives, a manoeuvre that is not intended to promote spurious ‹balance› but to demystify some of his homeland’s most cherished national myths. To wit, Avenge intersperses footage of students being ushered around the ruins of Masada under the aegis of the Labour Zionist youth group ‹Birthright›; classroom scenes (filmed at the A.D. Gordon School for Labour Values) featuring a lesson on the significance of the Biblical story of Samson; an extended telephone conversation between Mograbi and an actor impersonating an anguished Palestinian friend; and sequences focusing on ordinary Palestinian citizens being harassed by the Israeli military. 332

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The result is an unusually low-key polemic. A frequently self-lacerating form of historical critique provides the film’s guiding structural principle, inasmuch as the legacy of Masada and the Samson story are clearly two of the Israeli state’s foundational myths. Both Masada, the first century siege in a settlement near the Dead Sea which resulted in the mass suicides of Jewish Zealots, and Samson’s calculated act of self-destruction (in which he took his own life along with scores of Philistine enemies) function as ironic counterpoints to the ongoing stereotyping of Palestinians as suicide bombers and crazed zealots. The ideological stranglehold that envelops most Israelis prevents them from making connections between the ancient Jewish Zealots and contemporary advocates of mass suicide. Michael Moore’s hugely successful Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) is distinctive for its ability to subsume several documentary genres into one film. The most famous, if not the first, practitioner of the «aesthetic of failure», (e.g. Roger and Me, 1989), Moore’s fondness for failed confrontations with a pedagogical thrust is downplayed in Fahrenheit 9/11. Much of the film engages in an effective variant of media jujitsu by administering strategic jabs at the blunders and crimes of George W. Bush while featuring a barrage of rock tunes on the sound track that evokes the wall-towall use of pop tunes employed on now-forgotten TV reality shows such as Punk’d, Pop Up Video, and Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica. Yet the plangent tone of the film’s opening sequence recalls, paradoxically enough, Chris Marker’s much more leisurely, introspective style of narration. Recapitulating the 2000 election debacle, Moore’s voice-over – intoning «Was it Just a Dream?» as Ben Affleck, Robert De Niro, and Stevie Wonder celebrate a chimerical Gore victory – succinctly sums up the equally illusory chasm between a far from Edenic but apparently more ‹normal› pre-9/11 phase and a politically and a morally hellish postlapsarian America. In the wake of Moore’s influence, various imitators have emulated his successful paradigm – with varying degrees of success. The Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger actually refers to himself as a «performative» documentarian. Unfortunately, the narcissism that Moore is often accused of by leftist and conservative critics alike is much more evident in Brügger’s work. Det røde kapel/The Red Chapel (2009), perhaps his most celebrated performative stunt, is a courageous, if ultimately superficial, piece of guerrilla filmmaking. Posing as a rabid cheerleader for North Korea, Brügger entered the country with a comedy team composed of two Danish-Korean men. Particular attention is lavished on Jacob, a self-identified ‹spastic›; a disabled man is a rare sight indeed on the streets of Pyongyang, where only healthy specimens of Korean manhood are allowed. This gimmick allows the mischievous trio to mouth pro-regime platitudes to their clueless minders while performing an absurdist comedy act to baffled, but polite, audiences. Muttering sardonic asides in Danish might come off as liberating chutzpah although The Red Chapel ultimately has more to do with the vicissitudes of the performing self than the demands of political critique. 333

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Less ‹committed› documentary essays often reveal political ramifications through a complex intertextual layering that clarifies the relationship between self and the other – as well as the individual and the collective – by employing a hybrid genre that corresponds to Bakhtin’s category of «polemically colored autobiography» (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 199). Originally inspired by Dostoevsky, this trope also frequently surfaces in confessional literature and films. A case in point is Chris Petit’s Unrequited Love (2006), which tackles the contemporary quandary of ‹stalking› with empathetic detachment. Petit ingeniously synthesises a fictionalised version of Gregory Dart’s account of being stalked by a woman in his essayistic memoir of the same name with discursive musings on the relationship between modern romantic entanglements and technological innovations such as email and mobile phones. Both Dart’s source material and Petit’s film coolly historicise a subject that usually inspires sweaty hyperventilation in the mass media. Dart inserts digressions from his rather tame chronicle of being stalked to make pointedly paradoxical analogies to stalking and the ascetic rites of courtly love (e.g. Dante obsessively pining for Beatrice in La Vita Nuova). Petit, conversely, chooses cinematic analogies and argues that Psycho (1960) demonstrates that Hitchcock possesses the «soul of a stalker» and intimates that Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) anticipates our contemporary culture of mutual surveillance. Pathological, obsessive infatuation becomes linked to cinephilia and technophilia, as well as, of course, scopophilia. Petit’s claim that twenty-first century surveillance proves conducive to stalking, in both its actual and virtual forms, recalls Martin Jay’s attempt to demonstrate that the critique of surveillance in modern societies by critics as unalike as Michel Foucault and Guy Debord is tied to a phenomenon known as anti-ocularcentrism – the «denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought». For Jay (Downcast Eyes 384), «With their work, the ocularcentrism of those who praised the ‹nobility of sight› was not so much rejected as reversed in value. Vision was still the privileged sense, but what that privilege produced in the modern world was damned as almost entirely pernicious.» In more general terms, almost all of the films discussed in this essay attempt to come to terms with the ambiguous consequences of modernity. For Adorno and Horkheimer, modernity, emanating from the Enlightenment, «has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.»2 The other side of the coin is Benjamin’s assurance that «[i]n every true work of art, there is a particular point at which someone who is able to put himself in that position can feel a cool wind blowing, as if from a coming dawn. From this it can be seen that art, which has often been thought to obscure 2

This passage from Dialectic of Enlightenment is quoted in Wiggershaus 327.

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any relation to progress, can in fact help to define progress genuinely. Progress does not lie in the continuity of the course of time, but in interferences with it, at home, or wherever something truly new makes itself felt for the first time with the soberness of the dawn.»3

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. «Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time.» Notes to Literature, vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 216–240. Print. Andersen, Thom. «Paintings in the Shadows.» Film Comment 43:2 (2007): 55–61. Print. – «A Band of Outsiders.» Booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection’s edition of Letters from Fontainhas, 2010. 26–29. Print. Andrew, Dudley. What Cinema Is. London: Blackwell, 2011. Print. Arthur, Paul. «Jargons of Authenticity.» Theorizing Documentary. Ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993. 108–134. Print. Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne. New York: Other Press, 2011. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogical Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print. – Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Print. Benjamin, Walter. «Critique of Violence.» Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Print. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Print. 3

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Cheshire, Godfrey. «Godfrey Cheshire on Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990.)» Slant Magazine: n. pag. 29 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Jun. 2013. Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print. Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1986. Print. Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Print. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Print. – Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Print. Koehler, Robert. «Agrarian Utopias/Dystopias: The New Nonfiction.» Cinema Scope 40: n. pag. Web. 28 Jun. 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Trans. by Sacha Rabinovitch. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984. Print. – The Production of Space. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print. Margulies, Ivone. «Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close-Up.» Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Ed. Ivone Margulies. Durham:

From Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, quoted in Wiggershaus 327.

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Duke University Press, 2003. 217–244. Print. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print. Quandt, James. «Ashes to Ashes.» Artforum 49:8 (2011): 81–2. Print. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Print. Saaed-Vafa, Mehrnaz and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Abbas Kiarostami. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Print. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. Print.

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Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print. Xudong, Zhang. «Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke.» New Left Review 63 (2010): 71–88. Print. Waugh, Thomas. The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Signficance. Trans. Michael Robertson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Print. Zimmerman, Michael E. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Print.

Oksana Bulgakowa

The Socialist Hybrids Genre films were absent for a long time from the Soviet film production. Between 1934 and 1954 we hardly find melodramas, romantic comedies, science fiction or musicals (only some rare examples) but you can find totally different descriptions of film types and categories that you cannot detect among the Western typologies of the classical age. During this period, Soviet cinema developed outgrowths such as the ‹revolutionary film›, the ‹labour (‹production›) film›, and the ‹kolkhoz film›. These categories seem out of place in a system of established cinematic genres: detective stories, melodramas, comedy, slapstick – all of which were acknowledged to be cinematic because of their well-developed and clearly defined patterns to represent motion (the chase scene in detective stories; the gags and stunts in slapstick; the dramatic tension of a last-minute rescue in melodrama). The nebulous definitions of revolutionary, labour, and kolkhoz resulted in some peculiar hybrids of established genres. Revolutionary films borrowed from the old monumental pictures, with their mass scenes and apotheoses (for example, Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis?, 1913, or D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, 1916), which also made effective use of teeming masses, battle scenes and staged catastrophes (floods, fire, volcanic eruption). But, instead of the burning Rome or the Babylonian siege, the Soviet version tackled a single, eternally unchanging, national commemorative mass action: the Revolution. The most historical films produced in the 1920s still used the typical alternation of a love romance and the battles scenes. Victor Shklovsky noted: «Our cinema here has a pre-war atmosphere. I’m talking about the big picture, so to speak. Right now the story of the prodigal son is a popular theme: a man strays away from the straight and narrow, but finally returns to his own. Along the way, 337

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he sees corruption and decay among the bourgeoisie. At the moment in our film studios the bourgeoisie is corrupting every set [...] The Revolution comes, and is stretched to fit the frame of a romance without the slightest trace of irony! Society collapses, while on the screen we see the intertitle ‹Meanwhile, poor Pauline...› We know that Eisenstein works differently, but he doesn’t count. He is a national park, a state-protected area.» (163)

In 1930, a new Party worker came to the head of the film industry; Boris Shumyatsky gained control of the restructuring process which initiated the incredible mass expansion of Soviet cinema (see Taylor). He dreamt up grandiose plans to increase production to 800 films a year, envisioned wild expenditures on the creation of a kino-city in the Crimea, styled after Hollywood (which he had visited in 1936) and a development of Soviet genuine genre films. But a prototype for Soviet monumental films of the 1930s became My iz Kronshtadta/We are from Kronstadt (1936) by Efim Dzigan and Vsevolod Vishnevsky (writer). It got rid of the nominal romance of struggling lovers set against the background of grand historical spectacle, and retained only the kinetics of the mass scenes. In the other films – about labour and life in the country, in the kolkhoz film – the love story is but an insignificant detour from the main plot of the socialist competition. Since the socialist competition was often represented as a gender struggle, the script writer could integrate the love story in this plot – but in small portions. Comedies, which revolved entirely around romantic intrigue, were harshly criticised or even banned outright, as was the case with Konstantin Iudin’s belatedly released Serdtsa chetyryokh/ Four Hearts (1941, released in 1945 as a present for our victorious soldiers). Even the weakest romantic subplots, such as the love story between Anka and Petka in Chapaev (1934) by the Vasilyev brothers was viewed as a relic of «the faceless international stew pot of storylines, with its lazy dependence on genres and pseudo-reality», «a rude tribute to Americanism» (Shneider 28). The film minister, Boris Shumyatsky, was shot in 1938, accused of trying to install the system of the standardised Hollywood production – including Hollywood genres in Soviet cinematography. As opposed to the films of the 1920s, which brought to the fore the chaotic movement of the collective body (Bronenosets Potyomkin/The Battleship Potemkin, 1925), the monumental films of the 1930s have the organised moving masses revolving around their director – Stalin. Soviet film could only achieve total expression when it ceased to be a medium not for standard situations, standard characters or standardised plots known from other art forms (the traditional, hence unworthy path), but became a medium for another reality and most importantly, for its own version of Soviet history. The Soviet monumental films were peculiar not only in their rejection of tried-and-true narrative structures. The cinema took on the role of a chronicler and staged over and over again the fictional history of Socialist Revolution with Lenin, Stalin and others. 338

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Cinema managed to develop and elaborate this subject with sophisticated refinement. The same plot was thought out, planned out, peppered with new details in various films which, when taken together, formed some sort of fictional place and time which nonetheless came into sharper focus with each new production. Almost every leading Soviet film director shot the history of the October uprising. In 1937 and 1938 the first group of these pictures was produced: Mikhail Romm’s Lenin v oktyabre/Lenin in October (1937), Mikhail Chiaureli’s Velikoe zarevo/The Great Dawn (1938), Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s Vyborgskaya storona/The Vyborg Side (1938), and Sergei Yutkevich’s Chelovek s ruzhyom/The Man with the Gun (1938). Since these films presented exactly the same historical events, an episode from one screenplay could easily be transferred to another, as it happened when Stalin ordered the scene of dispersing the Constitutive Council to migrate from Yutkevich’s screenplay to Kozintsev and Trauberg’s film. In Romm’s Lenin v oktyabre, Lenin gives the worker Vasily an article for Pravda to pass along to Stalin; in Chiaureli’s Velikoe zarevo Stalin reads over Lenin’s article in Pravda’s editorial offices; and in Chelovek s ruzhyom soldiers in the trenches read Lenin’s article published in Pravda. In Romm’s film Lenin writes something indiscernible to the viewer in a notebook, while the camera in Chiaureli’s zooms in on the notebook so that the words may be read. Stalin, who stands silently before a map in Romm’s film, gives audible orders to seize the Central Post Office in Chiaureli’s. Romm shows the actual storming of the post office. When the soldiers write a letter to Lenin in Yutkevich’s film, it is read in Chiaureli’s. The question of agrarian reform which is raised in Yutkevich’s film is answered in Romm’s. Vyborgskaya storona opens with the final shot and closing lines of Lenin v oktyabre. They are overheard by the film’s protagonist, who is returning to the Bolsheviks’ military headquarters in Smolny after the arrest of the Provisional Government, which had been shown by Chiuareli and Romm. Several shots become canonical, to be reproduced again and again. This main genre of the Soviet cinema was accompanied by production and kolkhoz films. The name refers to the milieu and the subject (the representation of labour) and does not define its transformation into a filmic narration or the generic structures. In the 1930s, the production film was shaped after the models of a spy film. The villain was mostly a secret agent, a terrorist from abroad who tried to destroy the factory, to cause a catastrophe; but he is exposed and the catastrophe prevented (Ivan Pyryev’s Partiyny bilet/The Party Membership Card, 1934; Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Aerograd, 1936; Sergei Gerasimov’s Komsomolsk/ City of Youth, 1938). The master plot was based on the conflict between nature opposed to human projects (to build a city or a bridge, a rail way or water craft station in the wilderness of the taiga, a desert or a Polar area). The action was inscribed into a plot of civilising nature with some adventurous elements. The kolkhoz film was based on the completion between two production units. However, as the production units were mostly gendered – as male and female – the films, often directed 339

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1 Bezhin lug

by Ivan Pyryev, include some elements of romantic comedies with the reconciliation of gender and marriage at the end. In 1935 Sergei Eisenstein tried to develop a slightly different kolkhoz film that should portray Stalinist collectivisation as an archaic drama: a fourteen-year old boy denounces his father to the GPU and is murdered by him. Eisenstein conceptualised this ‹kolkhoz film› as the oedipal revolt of the son and ritual revenge of the father, who tried to take the ties of blood and kinship away from the claims of the state and thus save his tribe. Eisenstein believed that through his art and a superior visual culture he could ennoble this sordid and bloody tale of Bezhin lug/Bezhin Meadow (1937), which was based on a real event (the fate of a young pioneer Pavlik Morozov). The layers of this culture (impressionism, Japanese graphic art, Spanish and Dutch painting) would take the story out of contemporary discourse and current affairs and project it into a mythological dimension. But the Central Committee stepped in and stopped this «pathological production». It denounced the project as «anti-artistic» and «politically misguided». Critics saw the roots of Eisenstein’s error in his theory, in his questionable preoccupation with myths. Allegedly, this led Eisenstein to anthropomorphise nature and to interpret a clear case of class struggle as an ancient Greek tragedy in the spirit of Nietzsche, as a mystery play with chorus and mythological characters, who bow to irrational destiny: «Nietzsche, LévyBruhl, and Joyce are no help to a Soviet artist.» (Oshibki Bezhina Luga 50). 340

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In the 1970s, with the return of genres into the Soviet film, the kolkhoz and production films were transformed mostly into a melodrama. At the beginning of the 1930s, the melodrama was substituted by the private drama, along the lines of Alexander Rzheshevsky’s «emotional screenplays». But if the genre of the monumental film minus the romantic subplot was approved, then a film based on an emotional screenplay, however weak the narrative, was rejected. Most of the films based on Rzheshevsky’s scripts were banned or never finished (Okean/The Ocean, Shtorm/ The Storm, Put’entuziastov/The Enthusiast’s Way, Eisenstein’s Bezhin lug, all written between 1935 and 1937). The emotional screenplay interspersed the normal plot (generally a melodramatic plot) with various, seemingly meaningless associations, frequently nostalgic flashbacks (as in Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Prostoy sluchay/A Simple Case, 1930/1932) or wistful dreams (as in Boris Barnet’s U samogo sinego morya/By the Bluest of Seas, 1935, which was based on a script written by Konstantin Mints, who had been involved with the group of Russian Absurdist Poet, the Oberiu). This type of interjection, permissible in a quasi-historical chronicle, was considered unacceptable in any other genre and characterised as «illiterate pulp ravings», «paeans to the elements of chaos and crude naturalism» (Otten 33). With some stretch one could view the rejection of this model as the rejection of the audience’s subjective identification with the story on the screen and especially with the seemingly out-of-plot images (dreams, memories, moods). More generally, it could be seen as objectivity forcing out subjectivity, to the point of removing the subjective perspective and every means of directing the individual’s view codified in the 1920s: the unchained camera, images out of focus, smooth transitions, the emphasis on foreshortening etc. The camera must be firmly affixed to its stand, the height of which is determined by the height of the eyes. Horizon lines set too high or too low are avoided, and panned shots are almost entirely absent. Real space is replaced ever more frequently with the space of utopian reality; thus filmmakers abandon the streets and move into the studio, where a backdrop replaces the horizon, canvas replaces stone, buildings become false fronts, where space is entirely subject to the whims of the set designer and the light man. The stylistics of this prefect illusion was however not bound to a genre model as is the case in Hollywood classical system, but meant the eradication of generic structures.

The Biography of an Object We can explain this anti-genre strategy of the Soviet cinema from two perspectives: the structural organisation on one side and the control over the public affects released by films on the other. Let me start with the first. I would like to explore this tradition by analysing a peculiar production film from the late 1920s that shaped a meta-narrative of the Stalinist plots of modernisation staged as the strug341

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2 Jim Shvante / Sol’ Svanetii

gle between nature and human nature that was subjugated to the human will at the end: Mikhail Kalatozov’s Jim Shvante/Sol’ Svanetii/Salt for Svanetia (1930). The film was rooted in the concept of an avant-garde group that rejected the genre structures in favour of literature of fact. I mean the theory of Russian Constructivists and Production Artists that formed the Left Front. Its leading writers and theoreticians Sergei Tretyakov, Viktor Shklovsky and Osip Brik were also very active as film authors. Sergei Tretyakov was playwright for Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold; he introduced Brecht to Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarisation and wrote many scripts for Georgian film directors Mikhail Chiaureli and Mikhail Kalatozov. His new theory of literature of fact emerged after Tretyakov’s return from a lengthy visit to China in 1925. At that time he created a new genre – the «bio-interview», a documentary portrait of an individual, recounted by him, which had to replace the traditional novel and liberate both literature and film from the clichés of plots and genre structures. Tretyakov’s starting point could be described as follows: Under socialism, art becomes part of an every-day social experiment in modelling the new language (the task of the literature), the new way of seeing (the task of visual arts), the new way of association (the task of film), the new body language (the task of the theatre). Literature and film, the narrative arts, can develop new models of behaviour. These models should be tested experimentally on stage or screen and then carried over into everyday life. The genre film is seen as a drug that disorients the population, inducing the old and – in this sense – false models. Now the film 342

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makers and other artists take the new material but always adapt it to the old clichés, situations and genre settings. This method produces such things as rot soldiers represented as Saint George, new songs where love is replaced through revolution or depiction of the Civil War in the matrix of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Film «pickfordised the new life» (Tretyakov, «S novym godom, s novym LEFom» 1). The material is transformed into a western, a romance or a melodrama. The genre structures are understood as a kind of grinder. Processed through the mill of storytelling, every new fact was transformed into a social drug, an aesthetic product to be consumed. Therefore, the filmmaker had to abandon the standard situations or dramatic devices of storytelling (Tretyakov, «Proizvodstvenny stsenary» 30–35). At the end of the 1920s, Tretyakov suggested to abandon the individual plots and concentrate instead on the biography of the objects that can disclose the social significance of emotions attributed to them. The filmmaker should just gather facts from reality and find a new way to connect them. Vertov’s method of a non-fictional associative film is one possibility. The other form, according to Tretyakov, would be a production script where the material asserts its dominance. The filmmakers go to the new milieu (factory, military detachment, kolkhoz), observe life, find the typical situations and conflicts. This is the method of an ethnographer and an anthropologist (like Flaherty or Cavalcanti). The fiction films made according to this method could include some education parts. Friedrich Ermler introduced in his fiction film Oblomok imperii/A Fragment of an Empire (1929) a sequence showing different industrial processes. Eisenstein’s Oktyabr/October (1928) included an educational sequence on how to use a rifle. The hybrid forms between fictional, educational and documentary films emerged. Oleg Frelikh’s Prostitutka/The Prostitute (1927) told the story of a fallen girl and presented the prophylaxes of syphilis. Lilli Brik produced a collage Steklyanny glaz/Glass Eye (an answer to Vertov’s Kinoglaz/Kino-Eye) combining ethnographical materials set against the staged (and mocked) love romance. Tretyakov’s, Shklovsky’s and Osip Brik’s scripts were based on facts but opened the abyss between the theory and the outputs. Shklovsky took a situation in a glass factory near Moscow where the change of the production line just occurred. The factory stopped to produce kitchen ware and switched to the industrial glass. But he inscribed this transformation into an erotic triangle. The spectators of the film Ukhaby/Road Holes (1926), directed by Abram Room (1926), followed rather the melodramatic collision and the material, the biography of the objects, remained an exoticism. But the factory workers enjoyed the film and followed the suggestion made in the plot: they opened a kindergarten in the factory. The script of Osip Brik Potomok Chingis-Khana/Storm Over Asia (filmed by Vsevolod Pudovkin in 1927) was based on a fact from a newspaper: The British military found in Mongolia a descendant of Chingis Khan. Brik adapted this fact to a very powerful matrix: a search for an heir, a story of an unknown father like in a French post-revolutionary melodrama. The script of Tretyakov about China based 343

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3 Potomok Chingis-Khana

on his bio-interview was adapted to an adventure film Goluboy ekspress/The Blue Express (1930) directed by Ilya Trauberg. Kalatozov’s Jim Shvante was also based on Tretyakov’s bio-interview, the real story of a blind woman from a Svanetian village who regains her sight. In the film, the actual storyline and its literal meaning (the woman cannot see anything) were to be extended to include a figurative significance (she ‹sees through›, becomes aware). The inspiration of an illiterate woman, the notion of mystical elucidation and rationalistic enlightenment went along with the programmatic ‹new way of seeing›. The powerful metaphoric aspect of the story was to be illustrated by a filmic equivalent. The screenplay not only outlined the successful surgery (and emancipation), but also recorded many visual effects. Tretyakov and Kalatozov sought cinematographic effects that would correspond to the transition from blindness to sight, from darkness and blurred outlines to a world of radiant, piercing light, sharp contrasts and distinct forms. This world was to reflect the idea of perfect vision, as embodied by Dziga Vertov’s Kinoglaz/Kino-Eye. The Blind Woman (so the first title of the film) not only gained the physical ability to see, she also experienced the epiphany of the liberated, futuristic vision of a film camera, which was far superior to the imperfect human eye. Vertov had published a manifesto outlining this concept of liberated vision in the journal of the Left Front. 344

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Kalatozov filmed in the mountain region inhabited by the Svans, a South Caucasian people who lived virtually cut off from civilisation. Using filters he had developed specifically for this purpose, he created expressive images of ice, water and snow. It could have become a mountain film à la Arnold Fanck, however Kalatozov’s feature film, with ethnographical observations on the Svans’ way of life and staging of some of their rituals following Robert Flaherty’s method was shown in Moscow to viewers in Left Front circles – and flopped. Together with Viktor Shklovsky, an expert as far as such reconfigurations were concerned, Kalatozov then used his filmed footage to compile the documentary film Jim Shvante, which dispensed with the blind protagonist and turned the drama of individual enlightenment into a semi-documentary account of the clash between modernisation and archaism organised about the transport of salt through the mountain path. (The idea may have come from Shklovsky, who was studying the story of the salt trade in Russia and wrote a script about Ivan the Terrible based on this production plot, Krylya kholopa/The Wings of a Serf, 1926, directed by Yuri Tarich). As director and cameraman in one, Kalatozov thus used film – a medium associated with fragmentation, simultaneity, dynamism, movement and technology – to portray an archaic lifestyle. The ethnographic gesture in Jim Shvante is deceptive, however. Kalatozov employed devices such as the fragmentation of bodies, low camera shots and diagonal compositions – similar to those used by Aleksandr Rodchenko in his photographs or Dziga Vertov in his ‹city films› to capture urban landscapes, give structure to the body of the masses and convey the fragmentation of fleeting perception when forced into a new situation by the imperative of speed – for a very different kind of subject matter. In the world inhabited by the Svans there was no acceleration, no modern constructions with such extensive height and length that they did not ‹fit inside the frame›. Instead of skyscrapers, bridges and urban canyons, Kalatozov used triangular mountains, vertical towers built by the Svans, water currents and avalanches. A sense of speed was conveyed by footage of moving clouds and avalanches that had been manipulated using filmic means, and a horse galloping (where to? why?) was edited at an equally rapid speed as the car race. Kalatozov reduced the life of the Svans to a small number of activities: working the earth, breeding and slaughtering animals, bearing children and burying the dead. The result is a film about the fragility of human existence that is defined by hunger, cold, thirst and deprivation, a way of life dictated by ice, stone, snow, sun, floods and drought. The natural elements appear to exert a force that man is barely able to withstand. The beginning of the film goes beyond the modernist idea of conquering or subjugating nature, the fundamental concept that also underlies Stalinist modernisation. Man appears as part of nature, and a weak part at that. Women weave, men harvest in the snow, cows stare into the camera lens. Abstract images that seem to have been taken from a different film – about gaining 345

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sight – are intercut with those showing archaic working tools as surrealist artefacts (like from André Breton’s ethnographical collection). People appear as ornamental black figures amid the snow and clouds, moving rhythmically in a diagonal line according to the director’s instructions. Kim Ki-duk would have liked this film, with water, snow, smoke, winter, spring and summer followed by winter again. White stone, white towers, white snow, white houses, white mountains, white water, white clothes, white mules carrying the white salt to women dressed in black – all of which is charged no less symbolically than Tretyakov’s bio-interview. The expressive face of a woman screaming is juxtaposed with the image of a dead man’s legs, an open mouth with the flow of an avalanche. The montage does not follow any narrative logic; it simply accompanies the rhythm of the images. Male choirs, female choirs, sacrificial offerings, human blood, bull’s blood, the ritual of burial and the pain of childbirth, Christianity and grotesque pagan traditions: the montage assembles the fragments of this world in decline and transforms death into the conclusion of the dramatically suggested motion of a horseman (very much in the spirit of Muybridge). White on white is used to beautiful effect, rhythmic highlights are set and storylines take on a mythical and mystical character. Kalatozov, however, trusts neither the incomprehensible and mysterious ornamental archaism of the rituals nor the tragedy of the kind found in Andrei Platonov’s tales of hunger, drought, disembodied (or anti-corporeal?) utopia and existential abysses. Into this primitive age, when everything – houses, instruments, crucifixes – is carved out of stone, he brings a drama of deprivation that can be resolved. A man who was supposed to bring the salt gets caught in and buried beneath an avalanche; a pregnant woman goes into labour and is banished; the staged rituals of the burial and the birth are juxtaposed; a dog licks the blood from the new-born baby’s body; the milk from the woman’s breast drips onto the earth; the man is buried, the ox is slaughtered; the baby dies; the woman screams. And here a new story begins, one where modernisation eliminates deprivation and does away with the old way of life in the process. Nature is conquered; technology takes over and is more violent than any avalanche. The process of modernisation is carried out by men (women having vanished from the scene), their naked muscular torsos recalling the heroic age of antiquity – such figures appear in every Soviet film about industrialisation, where physical labour is staged like an athletic ballet. The men’s work is finished off by explosions, the word ‹Bolsheviks› appears in an intertitle, and Stalin’s tractor (actually a steamroller) brings not only salt, but also Socialism with its new myths and rituals to Svanetia. A road is built through the mountains; a split screen transforms the leisurely white into trembling black, and eternity into imperceptible futuristic speed. An archaic culture was adapted to the style of European urban constructivism, and instead of a long continuous ethnographic observation of the rituals, Kalatozov used the Russian montage of very short fragments. The devices from different ori346

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gins transform the production film and the bio-interview not into a hybrid melodrama but into an avant-garde picture of an auteur.1

Genre and Affects Genres could be defined not only as the set of situations, characters and motifs but as the method of organising these elements in order to achieve a specific affect. The same standard situation – a first encounter – could be staged in a comedy, thriller, melodrama or detective story within the frame of specific stylistic devices that give the situation another emotional hallow every time and convey to the spectator the immediate understanding whether he is dealing with a comedy or a thriller. Soviet society – and the Soviet cinema – exercised a precocious control about affects that movie images could release in the public and the effects connected to them. I would like to explore this with one example – an effect of fear within the generic frame of a science fiction thriller produced during the Cold War. Fear was the main affect during this period. It was no longer a tool of power, but a state of the masses as Robin Corey’s recent analysis shows (see Corey). The Cold War promoted new objects of horror as a renewal of the old fears. When this happened, the Hollywood films shifted away from vampires, witches and Gothic dark old houses to the nuclear catastrophe, nature and bodies gyrating out of control. The new affect and the politics of fear were supported by the new media, the Cinerama and the 3-D technology. However fear, the most basic of human reactions, seemed to be absent in the Socialist world. Fear as an affect was approached with a greatest caution. The images of Hiroshima, the effects of an A-Bomb were discussed only in small groups (during the lessons of the Civil Defence) that could be controlled. The films convey a clear message that the outer world beyond the Iron Curtain is full of murderous passions, deadly perils, mad scientists and the impending nuclear dooms day. But the Iron Curtain seems to provide the best shelter, the secure asylum which, like a magic circle, protects everybody from the demons, vampires and A-bombs. There is no film about ‹the day after› or the danger of an A-Bomb. Fear was screened-out and excluded on different levels and stayed far away from the development of the Soviet film industry of the early 1950s. 3-D films were used for science fiction stories, but not in the genre of the horror film. In 1948, Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay about this new dimension in film, praising the effect of 3-D as a possibility to increase the involvement of the spectators into the action and in this sense into a propagandistic effect (see Eisenstein). The first Soviet film in 3-D directed by Aleksandr Andrievsky in 1947 adapted the story of Robinson Crusoe 1

The Left Front criticised sharply Vertov’s exotic symbolism in documentary films but was tolerant toward Kalatozov (see Bulgakowa).

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and praised the civilisation; the next, Schastlivy reys/Happy Journey (1949) by Vasily Nemolyaev was a story of a fascinating space travel. While the Western films explored new objects of fear produced in the scientific labs of Los Alamos, Soviet films welcomed the scientific progress with unbroken optimism. The fears connected to modernisation and uncanny technologies along with existential anxiety seemed to be unknown. This scientific optimism was also rooted in the early art experiments of Russian Futurists and Constructivist who liberated the modernisation from this demonic perception. Machines triumph as a sterile, eternal force without negative human side effects such as death or a frightening sexuality. This euphoria also tinted the fantasies about aliens coming from outer space. They are always affable and the schema of the envisioned relationship moves from friendship to a love romance as suggested in the novel Aelita by Alexei Tolstoy (1923, adapted for the screen in 1924) and Aleksandr Bogdanov’s The Red Star (1908/1918). While the Hollywood films represent the invasion of aliens from the Red planet Mars, the first Soviet science fiction produced in 3-D brings the cosmonauts not to the red aggressive planet of war, but to the planet of love – Venus (!) and the relationships between the Soviets and the aliens are structured through the romantic plot (Planeta bur/The Planet of Storm, 1962, by Pavel Klushantsev). Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris/Solaris (1972) was the first film to convey an uneasy feeling; but before this, the other, the unknown had never spread a fear for modernisation, scientific and technological progress.2 We can compare what happened to a Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a monster between a man and a fish, resurrected by the Atomic experiments in Jack Arnold’s 3-D film. In a Soviet science fiction film Chelovek-Amfibiya/An Amphibian-Man (1961, 65 Million spectators in the first year of release) this artificial creature is a product of a scientific experiment. This noble Frankenstein is a dazzling, handsome man who loves a beautiful girl (and is loved by her – differently to the American version). He acts like a Robin Hood, helping the poor pearl divers. He lives in the pure nature like a hero of Rousseau and does not know of the deformations of social order coming with greed and aggression nourished by a capitalist society. The performer of the Soviet creature from the blue Lagoon was loved by women, children and men. For decades, the actor Vladimir Korenev became an icon for the Soviet gay community. The Soviet film industry was built as a system but without genres. Nevertheless, the Soviet experience can contribute to genre studies. The hybrid forms developed in the Stalinist cinema include elements of the film genres (romantic comedy in 2

The only force capable to disturb this feeling and the ‹natural› historic development transforming the high civilisation into the destructive aggressive force is the private property. It releases aggression, destruction and danger as pictured by Aleksandr Belyaev in the novel The Struggle in the Ether (1925–1929) or Aleksei Tolstoy in The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1927).

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4 Chelovek-Amfibiya

kolkhoz films; conquest of the nature, the basic situation of the western and elements of the spy film in the production film etc.). But the stylistic peculiarities and the politics of the affects of the hybrids prevent their inclusion into a genre system.

Works Cited Bulgakowa, Oksana. «Vertov oder von der Erfindung des Films zum zweiten Mal.» Apparatur und Rhapsodie: Zu den Filmen des Dziga Vertov. Eds. Jurij Murasov and Natascha Drubek-Meier. Frankfurt/ Main: Lang, 2000. 103–118. Print. Corey, Robin. Fear: the History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print. Eisenstein, Sergej. «Über den Raumfilm, 1947.» Das dynamische Quadrat: Schriften zum Film. Eds. and transl. Oksana Bulgakova and Dietmar Hochmuth. Leipzig: Reclam, 1988. 223–255. Print. Oshibki Bezhina Luga. Protiv formalizma v kino. Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1937. Print.

Otten, Nikolai. «Esche raz ob emotsional’nom stsenarii.» Iskusstvo Kino 5 (1937): 28–36. Print. Shneider, Mikhail. «Izobrazitelnyi Stil Bratiev Vasilievykh.» Iskusstvo Kino 2 (1938): 26–38. Print. Shklovsky, Viktor. «The Temperature of Film.» The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939. Eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988. 162–164. Print. Taylor, Richard. «Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s.» Inside the Film Factory. Eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. New York: Routledge, 1994. 193–216. Print. 349

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Tretyakov, Sergei. «Proizvodstvenny stsenary.» Novyi LEF 5 (1927): 30–5. Print.

350

Tretyakov, Sergei. «S novym godom, s novym LEFom.» Novyi LEF 1 (1928): 1–2. Print.

Lúcia Nagib

The Classical-Modern Hybrid and the Politics of Intermediality1 In our day, it has become redundant to champion the breaking of boundaries of territory, race, genre, gender and the like in the arts and media. This is a fait accompli widely acknowledged and even celebrated by concepts such as ‹transnationalism›, ‹multiculturalism›, and ‹hybridisation›. Cinema, whose nature as a meeting point of all other arts is universally recognised, is particularly prone to the celebration of hybridity. However, rather than celebrating hybridity for its own sake, I propose to investigate how and to what purposes the politics of hybridisation and mixed media has evolved in film studies. I will start by retracing the history of Bazin’s pioneering take on intermediality, which he famously defined as «impure cinema». This will include an enquiry into its possible relations with his peculiar understanding of «modern» cinema, hinging on «realism» and «ambiguity» as elicited by time and space uncut. I will proceed by expanding the concept of «impurity» to the politics of «dissensus», as formulated by Jacques Rancière, which I will apply, by means of conclusion, to the analysis of an intermedial film extract, drawn from the Japanese canon. Latent behind my approach is the issue of the hybrid genre – the theme of this book – which I will address by calling into question the classical-modern divide in cinema. Let us first consider Bazin’s provocative use of the expression «impure cinema» to signify a medium contaminated by other art forms, notably literature and theatre. It is not by chance that Bazin’s American translator, Hugh Gray, chose to render the title of his famous article «Pour un cinéma impur: Défense de l’adaptation», 1

See also Nagib, «The Politics of Impurity».

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fist published in 1950, simply as «In Defense of Mixed Cinema». In so doing, Gray probably intended to avoid any uncomfortable sexual or racial connotations inherent in the word «impure». Even if questions of gender and race are entirely absent from Bazin’s text, the article’s tone of «defence», as stated in its very title, hints at a politics in favour of certain films and against others, and in favour of a certain criticism and against others. What was that politics? As is common knowledge, Bazin always kept his distance from direct political engagement, despite the solid social grounding of his realist project. As Andrew points out in his Bazin biography (133–135), he never hesitated to embrace heresy against his own catholic and socialist beliefs when it came to preserving his independence and freedom of thought – as well as those of his film-loving readers. If this attitude was entirely in tune with the liberating spirit of the immediate postwar period, it caused him incessant trouble thereafter, with the rise of Stalinist communism within the French press. Bazin remained unshaken in his conviction until his death, as testified by one of his last articles, «Cinéma et Engagement» (1957), a swansong to a humanist aesthetics that overrides all political impositions. All realisms, he stated in this article, are only valid insofar as they are «aesthetic catalysts in a synthesis lying more deeply than the social plane». And he concluded: «Whether it is a film or a totally different form of expression, the artist must teach us something about himself that is worthwhile. But this discovery does not necessarily pass through social actuality or history.» (Bazin, «Cinéma et engagement» 684)

This is not to say that the Bazinian thought was in anyway apolitical, and indeed, as Jean Ungaro reminds us, he was profoundly interested in the political thinkers of his time, such as Malraux and Sartre (Ungaro 59). Published at the apex of the existentialist debate, the article «Pour un cinéma impur» had been influenced by and was even the result of this debate. Evidence of this is the assertion that «we must say of the cinema that its existence precedes its essence» («In Defense of Mixed Cinema» 71), a phrase all the more astonishing, coming from a catholic critic, when we know that it stemmed directly from Sartre’s atheistic existentialism as expressed in this passage: «Atheistic existentialism, which I represent […] states that, if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man or, as Heidegger puts it, human reality.» (15)

Carefully circumventing all religious implications of such a position, Bazin’s adherence to Sartre, here as elsewhere in his writings, had the aim of indicating his disagreement with essentialist ideas of film as a self-sufficient medium, as formulated by theorists such as Arnheim, Balázs and Epstein, and cherished by the modernist avant-gardes of the 1920s. Bazin’s very use of the term «cinéma impur» was a direct 352

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response to the «cinéma pur» project, first launched by Henri Chomette and very much in vogue during the 1920s and 30s among avant-garde and Dada artists and filmmakers, such as René Clair, Man Ray and Fernand Léger. As far as politics is concerned, Bazin’s view of «pure cinema» as «elitist» gives the cue to the political aim of his impure thesis, drawing on cinema’s popular and massmedium character. Indeed, the Impure Cinema article is based on the quasi-utopian hope that screen adaptations of theatre and literature would recover a dimension «that the arts had gradually lost from the time of the Renaissance onwards: namely the public» («In Defense of Mixed Cinema» 75). However, Bazin’s populist commitment was marred by contradictions, for he never hesitated to blame this same public when some of his favourite films, such as La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939), The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) or Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne/The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (Robert Bresson, 1945), resulted in commercial flops. For him, «if the public is cinema’s supreme judge to whose verdict we must surrender, it can also be entirely mistaken in the immediate present, just like an experienced critic» (226). This he writes in an article ironically named «Découverte du cinema: défense de l’avantgarde», a manifesto celebrating the launch of the Biarritz Film Festival in which he takes the opportunity, not to defend, but to lash out at the formalist avant-gardes for their «intellectualist and idealist conception of art» (226). The same political drive in support of a popular and impure cinema led Bazin to reject, at least partially, the politique des auteurs as formulated in the mid-1950s by the young critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma, under the leadership of his own adopted son, François Truffaut. For him, it was as mistaken to believe in the specificity of the film medium as it was to defend the existence of a single man (women were never in question in those days) behind a film. In his famous article «On the politique des auteurs», he insists that «the work transcends the director» and reminds us that «the anonymous works that have come down to us» were «the products not of an artist, but of an art, not of a man, but of society» (249f.). The possible dissonance this would present with his humanist stance, that placed «man» above «actuality and history», was one that Bazin himself seemed aware of, as he goes on to explain that «the individual transcends society, but society is also and above all within him» (251). There is no need to rehearse here the suspicions aroused by Bazin’s ideas in the politicised 1960s and 70s, which entailed his eclipse from film studies for nearly three decades. However, in retrospect, it is impossible to overlook the fact that Bazin’s ideas not only did not clash against, but directly informed the politics of the likes of Barthes and Foucault. Suffice it to recall that Barthes’s groundbreaking 1968 article, «The Death of the Author», retraces the genealogy of the figure of the artistic author since the Renaissance in the very same way that Bazin had done in «On the politique des auteurs», in order to conclude that the modern emphasis on the individual author is «the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology». In 353

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its place, Barthes proposed the «scriptor», who bears «no passions, humours or feelings of their own», but only «the immense dictionary of life» that «can know no halt» (143ff.). In the same vein, Foucault, a year later, in «Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?», reinforced the notion of a disembodied author, devoid of an essence, who is nothing but the filter of society, that is to say, a mere function. Germane as it is to Bazin’s antiauteurism, the «author function» is also akin to his impure project. The proof is that the politique des auteurs was first formulated by Truffaut, in 1954, in terms of medium specificity and a direct attack on theatrical and literary adaptations to the screen as observed in French cinema’s «Tradition of Quality» (9ff.). The logic here is obvious, for the more a film is contaminated by other media the weaker becomes the trace of individual creation. As a consequence, if the demise of the author, along with the medium’s specificity, is political, the politique des auteurs is not. Barthes and Foucault were certainly not alone in dismissing authorship, and indeed, as Robert Stam notes, this was widely subscribed to by structuralists and poststructuralists, who replaced ideas of purity, essence and origin with those of intertextuality and dialogism, as represented respectively by Kristeva and Bakhtin, the latter a defender, as much as Foucault, of the author as «orchestrator of preexisting discourses» (Stam 4). Given that Barthes, Foucault and the poststructuralist thought in general provided the main theoretical underpinnings to Cultural Studies, we can now summarise the parameters governing the politics of the aesthetics of cinema, from Bazin to our day, as a) the dissolution of the work in a mixture of media, and b) the dissolution of the individual author – both seen as democratising, popular procedures, hence endowed with progressive potential. With regard to cinema and audiovisual media in general, however, these processes, posited as political objectives, sound modest, if not irrelevant. Modes of spectatorship have significantly shifted in our day from the public film theatre to the individual browsing the web, where mixed media and collective authorship are the rule. Web environments, such as blogs and social networks, are entirely based on cross-media communication, where everybody is at once an artist and a critic. Hence, my intention here is to suggest an alternative route which posits intermediality, not as a political objective projected into the future, but as an ever-present dialectical crisis, the site of a profound dilemma between the depurative drive inherent in all artistic forms and the awareness of its insufficiency. This dilemma, I suggest, is by its own nature political.

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1. The Political Object As we have seen, while intermedial approaches often derive from a political stance, impurity alone is insufficient to establish a film’s political agenda starting with the fact that all films are multimedial by definition, let alone the ever-growing mixture of media currently taking place in the virtual space. Suffice it to remember that the modernist «pure-cinema» filmmakers themselves stemmed from, and worked on, a cross-media platform, including music, painting, theatre, opera and dance. Additional elements are thus required to characterise the political in cinema’s impurity. These Bazin defined as «realism» and «modernity», on the basis of which he formed his pantheon, topped by Renoir and followed by Welles, Rossellini, Stroheim, Ophüls, Bresson and a few others. What these filmmakers had in common, and what Bazin defined as simultaneously realist and modern about them, was their ability to render space and time uncut, primarily through the use of depth of field. As to whether their films were «impure» – or at least more impure than, say, the «classical» Hollywood films placed in opposition to them – requires further elaboration. As is well known, the sin of Hollywood as well as Soviet cinema, in the eyes of Bazin, was montage, which «rules out ambiguity of expression» proper to depth of field and the sequence-shot («The Evolution of the Language of Cinema» 36). It is also known that this ambiguity is part and parcel of Bazin’s realist conception, customarily understood as the contingent, unpredictable real as captured by the likes of Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti in their neorealist phase, through the use of location shooting and non-professional acting. Again depth of field is essential to allow this spontaneous authenticity to emerge. However, the complexity of depthof-field realism accrues when applied to an utterly constructed film such as Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), in which, according to Bazin, ambiguity results from the «temporal realism» («The Evolution of the Language of Cinema» 36f.) of the recurrent deep-focus shots interspersed amidst heavily edited stock. The unravelling of what Bazin actually understood by «temporal realism» within the depth of field has recently been the object of an illuminating essay by Diane Arnaud. Retranslating a passage of Bazin’s article «Théâtre et cinéma» on Cocteau’s Les parents terribles/The Storm Within (1948), Arnaud, via Deleuze, restores the Bazinian idea of an «excess of theatricality» allowed to intrude into the cinematic space of depth of field which establishes a direct link between realism and impure cinema (85). This she gleans from Bazin’s analysis of a passage of Cocteau’s film in which the camera position is identified with an exterior point-of-view replicating that of the theatre spectator. As a result of the fact that the shooting style here is a tracking shot in depth of field, that never overlaps with the subjective point-of-view of the film’s character, Cocteau’s film viewer, in Arnaud’s exegesis, is given «a free choice among several possible découpages, with the feeling – in the

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background, so to speak – of being totally present at the event» (88). Realism is thus translated, in this case, as a surplus of space and time which enables the development of spectatorial agency. Interestingly, such an effect derives, not from the prevalence of phenomenological reality, but from a fidelity to the theatrical origin of the film, which, in turn, testifies to the reflexive awareness of the possibilities of the film medium – or «cinematographic intelligence», in Bazin’s words («In Defense of Mixed Cinema» 69) – on the part of the filmmaker, triggering that of the viewer. Once again reminiscent of Sartre and his thesis on existential freedom of choice, «excess of theatricality» chimes even more with notions of «cinematic excess», as would be developed decades later by Stephen Heath and Kristin Thompson on the basis of the Barthesian concept of «third meaning». At stake here is an excessive materiality of the image whose significance reaches beyond its narrative function (Thompson 130ff.). But still, this tells us little about politics, unless we stretch Bazin’s deep-focus theory beyond its intermedial potential to encompass a self-reflexive reality of the film medium intended to arouse Brechtian-style critical spectatorship. Bazin’s writings give us scant elements to back such a hypothesis, despite their multiple references to medium realism, a typical case being the documentary reality of the actors that overflows their characters, such as Stroheim in La Grande illusion/ Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937), Michel Simon in Boudu sauvé des eaux/ Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932) and Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). But this is also where the combination of deep-focus realism and mixed media translates into a will to abolish the schism between art and life which has been at the core of the politics of intermedial proposals of all time. This fusion of art and life has been likened to the Marxist idea which saw the division of labour as an «alienation» to be abolished (Schröter 115), an obvious example being the removal of the theatre’s fourth wall as proposed by Brecht, an intermedial artist par excellence who was also acutely aware of border-crossing between media and genres, as well as art and life, as a powerful metaphor for a classless society. This glimpse of politics behind the deep-focus device would however be insufficient to justify Bazin’s anti-modernist defence of what he described as «modern» cinema produced after WW II, an awkward equation that obscures his otherwise crystalline and uncompromising aesthetic politics. Such an anachronistic view of the modern, that excludes modernism itself, continues nevertheless to be widely adopted in film scholarship, granting political sanction to his pantheon and perpetuating a confusing notion of the «modern» (and its «classical» counterpart) in the cinema. Fortunately, since Miriam Hansen’s groundbreaking article, «The mass production of the senses: classical cinema as vernacular modernism» (2000), more complex organisations of film history have started to emerge. Among other compelling arguments, Hansen highlights the self-reflexive potential of old Hollywood classics – for example, the excessive physicality of the slapstick comedy 356

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(342f.) – to explain how such films could have sparked vernacular modernisms elsewhere in the world, a point that interestingly chimes with the Bazinian «theatrical excess» that fuses art and real life within the depth of field. More recently, Laura Mulvey formulated a similar argument, drawing on the self-reflexive potential of the rear-projection device, which «smuggles something of modernism» into the «classical» narrative (208). These examples demonstrate how unproductive it has become to stick to a rigid classical-modern divide, hence to search for progressive politics exclusively within the Bazinian modern pantheon and its heirs. Nonetheless, «impurity» viewed as a metaphorical surplus to fill in the gap of a medium insufficiency remains, in my view, a useful tool, one which allows us to identify political materials capable of advancing film theory in new and exciting directions.

2. Intermediality as Dissensus In order to test intermediality as the location of the political in filmmaking I will now experiment with Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of art and cinema as a possible alternative to the modern-classical debate. Rancière has repeatedly questioned the political efficacy of reflexive art that proposes to fuse with life by removing the separation between subject and object, stage and audience, in the following terms: «We do not have to transform spectators into actors, and ignoramuses into scholars. We have to recognize the knowledge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story.» (The Emancipated Spectator 17)

For him, the intention «to produce an effect of strangeness in order to engender an awareness of the underlying reasons of that strangeness […] is tantamount to suppressing it» (143). Rancière is certainly not the first to challenge Brechtian-style anti-illusionistic reflexivity for its authoritarian pedagogy, even if democratic in origin, but he is no less scathing of representational art of political intention, which resorts to the mimetic device in order to reveal, in his words, «the power of the commodity, the reign of the spectacle or the pornography of power». He says: «[…] since it is very difficult to find anybody who is actually ignorant of such things, the mechanism ends up spinning around itself», that is, reproducing consensus (144). Such a statement encapsulates not only a criticism of didactic representational art, but also a tongue-in-cheek reference to Cultural Studies’ customary method of decoding, for an audience of peers, ideological structures buried within art pieces which elicit misrepresentations of minorities of race, gender and sexuality. Instead of this innocuous exercise, Rancière proposes the investigation of dissensus, which he explains as follows: 357

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«If there exists a connection between art and politics, it should be cast in terms of dissensus, the very kernel of the aesthetic regime: artworks can produce effects of dissensus precisely because they neither give lessons nor have any destination.» (Dissensus 140)

Dissensus is moreover, for Rancière, the element that separates the aesthetic from the representative regimes in art, a division which he seems to understand as an advantageous substitute to Bazin’s diachronic classical-modern model, though he does so via Deleuze’s revision of Bazin, that is, the opposition between movementimage and time-image. These he also contests by arguing, among other things, that «cinema is the art that realises the original identity of thought and non-thought», a dialectic that jeopardises «any attempt to distinguish two images by means of specific traits, and so to fix a border separating a classical from a modern cinema» (Rancière, Film Fables 122). In the aesthetic regime, according to Rancière, the function of fiction is not to oppose the imagined to the real, but to re-frame the real, that is, to frame a dissensus. Fiction, in this regime, «is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective» (Rancière, Dissensus 141). In the consensual representative mode, sensory reality is given as univocal, whereas «political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus by hollowing out that ‹real› and multiplying it in a polemical way» (149). The advantages of Rancière’s regimes, in my view, are that, by avoiding a diachronic division of history, they allow, in tune with Hansen and Mulvey, to locate a combination of both classical and modern in a single film, sometimes even in a single scene, as in the extract I will analyse below. Rancière does not refer to intermediality or intertextuality in his description of dissensus as the location of the political in art. Nevertheless, I will take the liberty of looking at intermedial cinema as a fertile ground for the investigation of the political according to Rancière’s model, in particular if placed in historical perspective going back to Bazin’s pioneering idea of impure cinema, running through poststructuralism’s defence of hybridisation, and arriving in our day with Cultural Studies’ defence of othered, oppressed minorities. My chosen excerpt to illustrate this is drawn from Yama no oto/The Sound of the Mountain, directed by Mikio Naruse in 1954, a film that could be easily qualified as «classic» in the Bazinian sense, due to its full reliance on montage, but whose qualities derive from a combination of representative and aesthetic regimes. Yama no oto is an intermedial dialogue from its origin, for it is an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s famous novel that gained him the Nobel prize in literature. The novel is narrated in the first person by the protagonist, the sexagenarian Shingo, who is enthralled by the physical and spiritual purity he seems to recognise in his daughter-in-law Kikuko, endowed with immaculate beauty and impeccable demeanour. 358

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However, his mind is haunted by real and imaginary enigmas around him, starting with the «sound of the mountain», which only he can hear and which seems to presage his own death. Shingo is also worried by the inexplicable behaviour of his son, Shuichi, who has kept a mistress since the beginning of his marriage, despite having, in the eyes of his father, a perfect wife. The specific scene I will focus on concerns a noh mask. As is well known, noh theatre has been an elite art from its origin in the fourteenth century. Sponsored by the shogunate, it remained an exclusive property of the aristocracy and forbidden to the rest of the population until the end of the Edo period, in 1868. Noh thus became the site par excellence for the exercise of gesture depuration and an obstinate quest for perfection in the manner of other Buddhist arts, such as the tea ceremony. Interestingly, however, noh’s highest aspiration is not any clear message, but mystery and ambiguity. In the words of a noh actor, himself a mask maker, noh’s main aesthetic principle is the pursuit of beauty as encapsulated by the concept of yugen, which «refers […] to a sort of mysterious, unfathomable aesthetic quality […] a complex sensation, impossible to describe exactly» (Udaka 7). In tune with yugen’s ineffable meaning, all noh masks are ambiguous by definition, representing characters at once dead and alive, cheerful and sombre, malicious and childish, mean and innocent, feminine and masculine, according to the actor’s head and body movements, as well as the incidental lighting. In the

1–2 The Doji mask represents the face of a boy whose features are not yet defined into those of a male adult 359

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novel, but even more so in the film, the noh mask was utilised to give expression to the way in which Shingo’s pursuit of purity, similar in all respects to the quest for the elusive yugen, is frustrated by the revelation of his own impure feelings. It is also the moment in which the representative regime, in Rancière’s terms, or classical in Bazin’s, dissolves into an «impure» or «modern» aesthetics, in which noh’s expressive symbolism is used to fill in a gap in cinema’s narrative properties. Here is the scene. An old school acquaintance of Shingo’s has just died and a common friend comes to pay him a visit in his office. The friend presents him with a noh mask that the deceased’s widow had asked him to sell. He tells Shingo that their old colleague had died while in the company of a young girl at a spa, thus providing a suggestive sexual backdrop to the appreciation of the mask. This is then unveiled and placed on the face of Shingo’s secretary. As the friend explains, the mask represents the face of a boy, a typical Doji mask, whose features are not yet entirely defined and fixed into those of an adult; the plump freshness of its cheeks and the loose locks around it give it an androgynous appearance. Shingo’s friend asks the secretary to slightly raise and lower her face, which gives the impression that the mask is effectively changing its expression, as if parting and closing its lips and eyelids. The shot-reverse-shot montage shows us Shingo’s shock 3–6 Yama no oto: The secretary slightly raises and lowers her face, giving the impression that the mask is effectively changing its expression

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7–8 Yama no oto: Kikuko displays the same enigmatic half-smile of the noh mask

at the sight of this, as his feelings seem suddenly revealed by the ambiguous mask. All of a sudden, he discovers, by looking at it, that he feels himself sexually attracted to his daughter-in-law, whose suffering, disguised under her face frozen into a living mask, is then offered to us by an inset of Setsuko Hara, in the role of Kikuko, displaying the same enigmatic half-smile of the noh mask . In this brief moment, Kikuko reveals her flesh-and-bone «impure» being behind her virginal mask, as it becomes clear in retrospect that she reciprocates her fatherin-law’s attraction to her. Shingo’s feelings are all the more troubling as they carry a mixture of adultery (betrayal of his wife), homosexuality (attraction to a male mask), incest (attraction to a member of kin) and paedophilia (attraction to the mask of a boy) which are unconfessed, unconfessable and above all, until then unknown to the character himself. The conversation with the secretary that follows – and which sends the spectator back to the representative regime – reinforces this discomfort, for she confirms to Shingo that his son, Shuichi, resents Kikuko’s childishness and would have preferred her to behave like a prostitute in bed, that is, like the mature mistress he has kept since he got married. Dissolution of frontiers thus takes place here at all levels: between different art media, modern and classical genres, and between genders and sexualities, all of which remain as elusive and non-pedagogical as yugen. One could conclude, following Bazin’s reasoning, that this extract of Yama no oto fulfils cinema’s political function of bringing to the masses a slice of this elite, coded and difficult theatre which is noh, albeit in a diluted and simplified fashion. One could also understand that the film addresses, in a courageous manner, despite its rather conservative narrative structure, some key political questions at the core of Cultural Studies, such as the oppression of women and sexual minorities. But it is on the level of representation that these approaches search for the political, a realm in which the film has very little to offer. What seems to me truly political here is the recourse to intermediality that ushers in the aesthetic regime, evidencing a moment of crisis of the medium which requires another for its completion. This is 361

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where questions of gender and female oppression become entirely explicit and all the more political as their signification in the film form, rather than the content, refuses, in Rancière’s expression, to anticipate its effects or to give any lessons. The way in which the noh mask is utilised thus introduces dissensus, which establishes new relations between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective, multiplying the possibilities of the film medium in a polemical way, while challenging its own limits and the power of representation.

Works Cited French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939. Abel, Richard, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Print. Anderson, J. L. «Spoken Silents in the Japanese Cinema; or, Talking to Pictures: Essaying the Katsuben, Contextualizing the Texts.» Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History. Eds. Arthur Nolletti, Jr. and David Desser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 259–310. Print. Andrew, Dudley. André Bazin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print. Arnaud, Diane. «From Bazin to Deleuze: A Matter of Depth.» Opening Bazin. Eds. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 85–94. Print. Barthes, Roland. «The Death of the Author.» Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. 142–154. Print. Bazin, André. «Cinéma et engagement.» Esprit (April 1957): 681–684. Print. – «In Defense of Mixed Cinema.» What Is Cinema? Volume I. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 53–75. Print. – «The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.» What Is Cinema? Volume I. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 23–40. Print. – «Theatre and Cinema.» What Is Cinema? Volume I. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 76– 94. Print. – «Découverte du cinéma: Défense de l’avant-garde.» André Bazin. Le Cinéma 362

français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945–1958). Ed. Jean Narboni. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1983. 225– 227. Print. – «On the politique des auteurs.» Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s – Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. 248–259. Print. – «The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema.» Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties. Trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed. Bert Cardullo. New York: Routledge, 1997. 23–40. Print. – «Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.» Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties. Trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, ed. Bert Cardullo. New York: Routledge, 1997. 41–52. Print. Foucault, Michel. «Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?» Dits et écrits 1954–1988. Ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 789–821. Print. Hansen, Miriam. «The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.» Reinventing Film Studies. Eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. 332–351. Print. Mulvey, Laura. «Rear-Projection and the Paradoxes of Hollywood Realism.» Theorizing World Cinema. Eds. Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. 207–220. Print. Nagib, Lúcia. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.

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– «The Politics of Impurity.» Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film. Eds. Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslerv. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. 21–40. Print. Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Print. – The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009. Print. – Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Citadel, 2000. Print. Schröter, Jens. «The Politics of Intermediality.» Film and Media Studies 2 (2010): 107–124. Print.

Thompson, Kristin. «The Concept of Cinematic Excess.» Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 130–142. Print. Truffaut, François. «A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.» Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. 9–18. Print. Stam, Robert. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Udaka, Michishige. The Secrets of Noh Masks. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2010. Print. Ungaro, Jean. André Bazin: généalogies d’une théorie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Print.

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Picture Credits Tim Bergfelder 1 Der Frosch mit der Maske (Tobis/Universum) 2 OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions (Koch Media) Harald Steinwender 1 Ercole al centro della terra (Kinowelt) 2 Maciste all’Inferno (Something Weird) 3 Il colosso di Rodi (e-m-s) Marcus Stiglegger 1 Mannaja (Marketing Film) 2 Joko, invoca Dio…e muori! (X-Rated) 3 E Dio disse a Caino (e-m-s) Fernando Ramos Arenas 1 L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (Blue Underground) 2 Passi di danza su una lama di rasoio (X-Rated) Dimitris Eleftheriotis 1 Dassin: an honorary Greek (http://www.greeceinbritain.org.uk/past_events.php) 2 The Naked City (Image Entertainment) 3 Young Ideas (Warner Bros.) 4, 5 The Naked City (Image Entertainment) 6 Rififi (Arrow Films) 7 Rififi (Image Entertainment) 8, 9 Never on Sunday (MGM) Ivo Ritzer 1, 2 The Day of the Trumpet/Cavalry Command (People’s Pictures/Parade Pictures) 3 Manila, Open City (Nepomuceno Productions) 4 Beast of Blood (Beast of Blood Company) 5 The Woman Hunt (New World Pictures) 6 Beyond Atlantis (Dimension Pictures) 7 Savage Sisters (American International Pictures) 8 Kamakalawa (Hemisphere Pictures) 9, 12 Sudden Death (Topar Films) 364

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10, 13, 14, 18–22 Sudden Death (Inception Media Group) 11 The Wild Wild West (Paramount) 15 The Final Comedown (New World Pictures) 16 Black Belt Jones (Warner Bros.) 17 Black Mama, White Mama (American International Pictures) Ella Shohat 1 Beyond the Walls (Warner Bros.) 2 Devine Intervention (All Media/Trigon Film) 3 Sacred Language, Spoken Language (Les Films d’Ici/Velvet Films) 4 Forget Baghdad (good!movies/KOOL/Indigo) 5 Wedding in Galilee (Kino Video) Barry Keith Grant 1 Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Transit Film) 2 Nosferatu – Phantom der Nacht (Arthaus/Kinowelt) Andreas Stuhlmann 1 Medea (Arthaus/Kinowelt) 2 Todo sobre mi madre (Kinowelt) 3 Gegen die Wand (Universal) 4 In the Mood for Love (Universal) Florian Mundhenke 1–3 No Country for Old Men (Paramount) Peter W. Schulze 1 La marca del cuervo (Cinematográfica Filmex S.A.) 2 El Charro Negro en el norte (Producciones Raúl de Anda/Películas Mexicanas S.A.) 3–5, 10 La justicia del Gavilán Vengador (Rosas Films S.A.) 6–7 El ahijado de la muerte (Películas Anahuac S.A./Clasa-Mohme) 8 Under Western Stars (Republic Pictures) 9 Allá en el Rancho Grande (Bustamente y Fuentes) 11–12 Fanfarrón: ¡aquí llegó el valentón! (Cinematográfica Indo Latina/ Cinematográfica Plus Ultra) Ute Fendler 1 Hasaki ya Suda (DACP) 2–3 Viva Riva (Summiteer Home) Claudia Böhme 1 Shumileta (Mussa Banzi Film) 365

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Andreas Rauscher 1 Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (HK Video) 2 A Chinese Ghost Story (New KSM) Irina Gradinari 1–2 Brat (Tartan) Robert Stam 1 Onibûs 174 (LK-TEL Vídeo) 2 Chronique d’un été (Éditions Montparnasse) 3 Cabra marcado para morrer (Globo Vídeo) 4 Mato Eles? (Versatil Home Video) 4 F for Fake (Kinowelt/Arthaus) 5 The Watermelon Woman (Pecadillo Pictures) Richard Porton 1 Sweetgrass (Cinema Guild) 2 The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (GoDigital Media Group) 3 Er shi si cheng ji (MK2 Diffusion) 4 Juventude em marcha (The Criterion Collection) 5 Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay (Second Run) Oksana Bulgakowa 1 Bezhin lug (The Criterion Collection) 2 Jim Shvante / Sol’ Svanetii (Sakhkinmretsvi) 3 Potomok Chingis-Khana (absolut MEDIEN) 4 Chelovek-Amfibiya (Image Entertainment) Lúcia Nagib 1–2 Doji mask (Fair Use) 3–8 Yama no oto (Eureka Entertainment)

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About the Authors Tim Bergfelder is Professor and Head of the Film Studies department at the University of Southampton. He is one of the editors of Screen magazine, and curates (with Sabine Hake and Hans-Michael Bock) the series «Film Europa» for Berghahn Books. Among his own books are International Adventures: German Popular Film and European Co-productions (2005), Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination (2007), and Destination London: German-speaking Emigres and British Cinema 1925–1950 (2008). Claudia Böhme is Lecturer at the Department of African Studies at the University of Leipzig. Her research and teaching interests include African Cinema and Media Cultures. She is one of the editors of the online journal Swahili Forum. She has received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Mainz with a doctoral thesis on The Negotiation of Culture in the Tanzanian Video Film Industry. She has published articles in the edited volumes Listening to Africa: Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (2012), Global Nollywood (2013), and Trance Media and New Media (2013). Oksana Bulgakowa is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She has published several books on Russian and German cinema (including Sergei Eisenstein: Three Utopias: Architectural drafts for a Film Theory, 1996; FEKS: The Factory of Eccentric Actors, 1997; Sergej Eisenstein: A Biography, German edition 1998; English edition 2003; Factory of Gestures, 2005; The Soviet Hearing Eye: Film and its Senses, 2010; ed. Resonanz-Räume, 2012), directed films (Stalin – a Mosfilmproduction, 1993; The Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein, 1998), curated exhibitions and developed multimedia projects (the website The Visual Universe of Sergei Eisenstein, Daniel Langlois-Foundation, Montreal, 2005 and an interactive film Factory of Gestures. On Body Language in Film, Stanford Humanities Lab, 2008). Dimitris Eleftheriotis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Glasgow and an editor of Screen. His publications include Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks (2001), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (2006) and Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement (2010). He has published extensively on various aspects of film theory and history. Ute Fendler is Chair of Romance cultural, i.e. literature, film and comparative studies at the University of Bayreuth (since 2006), director of the Institute of African Studies (since 2011), specialist in African cinema, Francophone literatures and film/ 367

About the Authors

TV, intermedial and intercultural phenomena. Edited books: with M. Gilzmer and R. Bienbeck: Transformations. Changements et renouveaux dans la littérature et le cinéma au Maghreb depuis 1990 (2013); with M. Wehrheim: Entdeckung, Eroberung, Inszenierung: Filmische Versionen der Kolonialgeschichte Afrikas und Lateinamerikas (2007); DVD-Edition: with INAC (Instituto Nacional de Audiovisual e Cinema) and ICMA (Instituto Cultural Moçambicano-Alemão): Imagens do mundo. DVD-Edition 2012. Material from the Archives of the INAC (English and German subtitles). Irina Gradinari studied German and Russian Studies, and is a Research Associate in German Literature at the University of Trier. She edited Genre, Gender und Lustmord (2011) and does research on the memory of World War II in German and Soviet Cinema. Barry Keith Grant is a Professor of Film Studies and Popular Culture at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, and an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published more than twenty books on film, including The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (1996), Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (2011), The Hollywood Film Musical (2012) and four editions of Film Genre Reader. His most recent book is 100 Science Fiction Films for the British Film Institute (2013). Florian Mundhenke is Associate Professor of Media Hybridity at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and speaker of the DFG-research network Cinema as an Experience Space. He published his dissertation on the phenomenon of chance in film in 2008. He is currently researching on hybrid documentary filmmaking. His other fields of research include cultural and social questions of media, contemporary media theories, narration and aesthetics of contemporary world cinema, and media art. Lúcia Nagib is Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Her research has focused, among other subjects, on polycentric approaches to world cinema, new waves and new cinemas, cinematic realism and intermediality. Her single-authored books include: World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011), Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007), The Brazilian Film Revival: Interviews with 90 Filmmakers of the 90s (2002), Born of the Ashes: The Auteur and the Individual in Oshima’s Films (1995), Around the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (1993) and Werner Herzog: Film as Reality (1991). She is the editor of Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (with Anne Jerslev, 2013), Theorizing World Cinema (with Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah, 2011), Realism and the Audiovisual Media (with Cecília Mello, 2009), The New Brazilian Cinema (2003), Master Mizoguchi (1990) and Ozu (1990).

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About the Authors

Richard Porton is the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999) and editor of Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (2008). He is one of the editors of Cineaste and has published widely on film in such publications as Cinema Scope, Moving Image Source, The Daily Beast, and De Filmkrant. Fernando Ramos Arenas is Assistant Professor for Media Studies at the University of Leipzig where he earned his Ph.D. in 2010 with a thesis on the history of authorship discourses in cinema. He has published a book and several articles on film theory, film history and aesthetics of the documentary. He is currently working on a project on practices and discourses of European cinephilian cultures of the 1950s and 60s. Andreas Rauscher works as a Research Assistant in the Film Department at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has published several articles on film history, cultural studies, genre concepts and game studies, and edited books on the Simpsons, super hero movies, and the James Bond series. His dissertation, which deals with the cultural and cinematic implications of the Star Trek phenomenon, was published in 2003. His post-doctoral lecturing qualification Ludic Fictions: Genre Concepts in Video Games was published in 2012. Ivo Ritzer is Assistant Professor in the Media and Film Department at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has widely published on film, media and cultural theory. His work includes monographs, edited and co-edited books on representations of the body in the media (2012), French crime cinema (2012), intercultural perspectives on the western (2012), transgression in TV series (2011), the gangster film (2011), and on the dialectics of genre theory and auteurism (2009). Current research projects focus on performativity of film and TV, inter- and crossmediality, as well as on new approaches to mise-en-scene criticism. Peter W. Schulze is Assistant Professor in the Media and Film Department at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. His recent publications include a monograph on Brazilian Modernism and Tropicalismo (in print), as well as (co)edited books on contemporary Brazilian literature (2013), intercultural perspectives on the western (2012), Glauber Rocha (2011), contemporary Latin American cinema (2010), and literature of persecuted authors (2010). Ella Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University. Her books include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices; Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation; Talking Visions; Dangerous Liaisons; and with Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism; Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media; Flagging Patriotism; and Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial

369

About the Authors

Atlantic. Shohat’s co-edited (with Evelyn Alsultany) Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora is just out from Univ. of Michigan Press. Her writing has been translated into diverse languages, including: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Polish, and Romanian. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text; Critique; Meridians; Interventions; and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is a recipient of such fellowships as Rockefeller, Fulbright research/ lectureship, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she also taught at The School of Criticism and Theory. Robert Stam is Professor at New York University, with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from U.C. Berkeley. Among his publications are Francois Truffaut and Friends (2006); Literature through Film (2005); Film Theory: An Introduction (2000); Tropical Multiculturalism (1997); Subversive Pleasures (1989); Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985), and (with Ella Shohat) Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994), and most recently Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (2012). His work has been translated into 17 languages, and he has received Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Grants, and fellowship-residencies at Bellagio and the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He has taught in France, Brazil, Germany, and Tunisia as well as Abu Dhabi. Harald Steinwender works for the film department of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation in Munich and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Sergio Leone (2009, 2nd ed. 2012). Recent publications: «West German Sexploitation Film» (with Alexander Zahlten), in Ginsberg/Mensch (eds.): A Companion to German Cinema, 2012; «Western all’inferno», in Roschlau (ed.): Europa im Sattel, 2012; «The German Western beyond Karl May», in Klein/Ritzer/Schulze (eds.): Crossing Frontiers, 2012; «The Big Knife», in Grob/Bronfen (eds.): Classical Hollywood, 2013. Marcus Stiglegger is lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany, and was visiting professor at Clemson University, SC, USA. In 1999 he published his doctoral thesis on the subject of politics and sexuality in cinema (Sadiconazista, 2nd ed. 2000) and has edited several books on film history and film aesthetics. His publications include books on the seduction theory of film (2006), western (2003), war films (2006), pop and cinema (2004), modern horror film (2010), David Cronenberg (2011), Dario Argento (2013). He regularly contributes to international conferences and magazines like Kinoeye (USA), Paradoxa (USA) and Eyeball (UK). Currently he is writing a book on Akira Kurosawa (forthcoming 2014).

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About the Authors

Andreas Stuhlmann teaches Media Studies and Modern German Literature at the University of Hamburg, where he is Academic Coordinator of the Research Centre for Media and Communication. In his research he deals with concepts of polemics and plagiarism, intermediality and intertextuality in literature and fine arts, as well as radio, films (documentary) and comics.

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